They had, basically, kidnapped him and now they were holding him prisoner against his will. “Do you fancy a little holiday with your dad?” Grandpa Ted had asked him. It was the summer holidays. It seemed a lifetime since they had left Devon and the commune at Adam’s Acre. Devon had grown into a golden memory, undoubtedly fed by his sister’s infant utopian fantasies of geese and red cows and cake. Sunny had hoped they might all live with Grandpa Ted when they moved to York but his mother said, “Not likely,” and after a couple of weeks she had rented a dingy little terraced house and put him in “the Steiner school,” which he hadn’t liked but would willingly go back to now.
“You can get to know your other grandparents,” Grandpa Ted said, with what was clearly a hearty, false kind of enthusiasm. “They live in a big house in the country, dogs and horses and so on. It might be nice to visit them for a couple of weeks, what do you say?” The horses had been got rid of a long time ago and the dogs would eat him if they got the chance. “They’ve a maze as well,” Teddy said. Sunny thought he said that these previously unknown grandparents were “amazed,” which didn’t surprise him. He was pretty amazed too, to find himself being packed off to stay with them. He had no free will, he knew that. Viola had inculcated that into him—“You don’t get to say what you want to do,” “You’ll do what I say, not what you want,” “Because I say so!”
“Not my idea,” Sunny overheard his grandfather say on the phone to some invisible caller, “but his mother’s very keen on it.” This was after his mother had abandoned them, of course, “to stand up for her beliefs,” she said. What did that mean? Weren’t her children as important as her beliefs? Weren’t they the same thing? She had gone to Greenham Common. Bertie said it sounded like a fairy-tale place (until Bertie went there herself). Bertie thought everything sounded like a fairy-tale place. Viola was “embracing the base” there, whatever that meant. “She could try embracing her children,” Sunny heard Teddy grumble.
His grandmother and Dominic had arrived in a big old car and as they climbed out Grandpa Ted whispered in Sunny’s ear, “That’s your grandmother, Sunny,” although he hadn’t met her before either. His grandmother was wearing a shabby fur coat that looked as if it were made from rat skins and her teeth were as yellow as the daffodils in his grandfather’s garden. She seemed ancient, but looking back later Sunny reckoned she couldn’t have been much more than seventy. (“People were older in the past,” Bertie said.)
“Daddy!” Bertie shouted, barrelling past Sunny and throwing herself into their father’s arms, surprising Sunny, not to mention Dominic, with her puppy-like eagerness. “Hey,” their father said, taking a step backward as if his daughter might be attacking him.
“Hi, Ted,” Dominic said to Teddy once he’d identified Bertie for who she was. “How’s it going?”
Teddy invited them in for a cup of tea. “And I’ve made a cake, a Victoria sandwich,” he said, and their new grandmother frowned at the idea not only of cake but of a man making it.
And then that was it. Tea drunk, cake eaten—or not—and Sunny was bundled into the back of the car with three very resentful dogs and the next thing he knew he was in Norfolk and his supposed grandmother was telling him that he needed to start growing up. He was only seven! He didn’t need to grow up for years yet! It was so unfair.
He gave a final miserable sniffle into his pillow. He had trouble getting to sleep every night and when he did sleep he would wake with a sudden start and find himself surrounded by all kinds of sinister objects that loomed out of the dark at him. In the safer light of day he could see them for what they were—the junk, piled up over the years, that a resentful Thomas had left behind when he was ordered to clear out the room for “the boy”—a frayed basketwork cradle, a broken cot, a partnerless ski, a huge lampshade and, worst of all, a wooden tailor’s dummy that Sunny could swear edged closer, inch by terrifying inch, as the night wore on, as if it were playing a malevolent game of statues. “Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”
“You do have kids,” his kid said.
“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.”
Not really, Sunny thought.
It was always cold in the nursery, even though it was summer. There were water stains on the walls and a piece of the wallpaper had peeled off and was hanging like flayed skin. The single window, speckled with black mould, was jammed shut or Sunny might have tried to climb out and escape down a drainpipe—the kind of thing that Augustus did in books.