I sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. “Do you need… a loan, Mr Hulne?” I spoke very slowly, to keep my rising anger out of my voice. Had I been summoned after twenty-seven years to serve as a walking bank to a man who wouldn’t even acknowledge me his heir?
“The Depression…” he grunted. “The war… the new government, the land, the times… Constance is dead, Victoria dead, Alexandra has to work in a shop–a shop of all things. Clement will inherit the title, but he’s drinking it all–all of it, all gone. We sold half the land to pay the debt on the mortgage, not even the mortgage itself! They’ll take the house and fill it with union men,” he spat the words, “with middle-class bankers and their spawn, with lawyers or accountants. They’ll auction it all off, all of it, and there’ll be nothing left. All gone. All for nothing.”
I had to force my body into stillness, felt the twitch in my knee, wanted to fold my arms, cross my legs, as if the very muscles in my being had to express their rising hostility.
“Is there something you want to say to me, Mr Hulne?”
“You always liked Alexandra, didn’t you?” he said. “She was nice to you when you were a child, yes?”
“She was kind,” I admitted. “In more ways than I suspect I saw.”
“Clement is a disgusting little creature,” he added bitterly. “Do you know he’s had three wives? He wants to sell it all and move to California.”
“Mr Hulne,” I repeated, harder now, “I don’t see what it is you expect me to do about this.”
His eyes flickered upwards, and there was liquid brimming on the bottom of the gummy eyelids. As so often is the case with men who refuse to cry, the awareness of his own tears seemed to cause them to rise even faster, shame mixing with grief, and even as they began to dribble down his face he clung to the side of the chair, refusing to acknowledge their presence on his skin. “You can’t let it die,” he whimpered. “It’s your past too, Harry–the house, the lands. You understand, don’t you? You want to keep them alive too.”
“As the poet says–the times they are a-changing,” I replied firmly. “Or perhaps he hasn’t said it yet, but time will cure that absence. I am sorry for your situation, Mr Hulne. I regret that Alexandra is in difficulty; she was always kind. But Clement was a bully, even as a child, and the house was a monster of stone-praised vanity and quiet tragedy. Constance was a tyrant, more focused on perceptions than truth; Victoria was a drug addict; Lydia was an innocent who you tormented beyond—”
“How dare you!” His body jerked as if he would rise from the chair and hit me, but he didn’t have the strength to do it, so stayed put, shaking all over, the tears fading now against the rising flush in his cheeks. “How dare you? How dare you speak of them like… like you knew, like you…? You were a child, you left us! You left us and never looked back. How dare—”
“Tell me,” I cut in. His voice was angrier, but mine was more powerful. “When you raped my mother, did she scream?”
He could have gone either way. The rage was there in him, ready to plough straight through my words, but instead, it seems, they ploughed through him, knocking him back against his seat and pinning him there like a butterfly. I made sure he stayed put, adding, “I met a woman called Prudence Crannich once, who delivered a baby in the women’s washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on New Year’s Day. The mother died, but I tracked down her family and listened to her mother–my grandmother–tell the story of Lisa Leadmill, who went down south to find her fortune and who met her death in the arms of strangers. Cold is an enemy in trauma care–it slows down clotting, making it easier for patients to bleed out. Perhaps, if I’d been born in summer, my mother would have lived. Of course no one but you and Lisa will ever know if you truly raped her, but she was a young lonely woman in the house of an angry, potentially violent master who believed that his wife had betrayed him and was himself quite probably psychologically damaged from his time at the front. I imagine you caught her by the arm and kissed her, loud and rough, so that your wife would know you had done it. I imagine she was terrified, not understanding her role as a pawn in your marriage. You tell her that her position is becoming untenable; she begs you not to do it. You say that it’ll make things easier for everyone, that if she screams the household will know and she’ll be sent out without pay or references, branded a whore–better to be docile, better to be quiet… I suppose you could tell yourself that it wasn’t rape, if she didn’t scream. Did she scream when you pushed her down? Did she scream?”