In the Crypt with a Candlestick Page 16

  India didn’t go down to greet them. She had spied on them from her bathroom window, which overlooked the Great North Door, and decided they looked even worse than expected.

  ‘They look awful, Eggie.’

  It wasn’t the only reason she didn’t go down to greet them. But it was the one she gave to Egbert, when he asked.

  They were upstairs changing into their finery. He’d only just joined her but he could tell at once she was in a strange mood. He said:

  ‘Munch, what’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied.

  It wasn’t true. To distract her husband from examining her mood more closely, she changed the conversation: ‘By the way, did Mellors find you? He was looking for you earlier.’

  ‘Munch,’ Egbert said, undiverted. ‘Darling, you look miserable! Are you getting cold feet about this bloody weekend? I don’t blame you if you are. I know I am.’

  ‘Of course I’m not, Eggie. Did you meet up with Mellors? He seemed a bit frantic.’

  ‘I didn’t, no. But I tell you, I met that little actor chap in the hall just now. With the skinny girlfriend. God they were rude! I don’t think they realised who I was, but even so…’

  ‘Oh?’ said India, distracted from her troubles, briefly. ‘You mean… What’s his name again? I can never remember his name… I thought he might be the best of them. He was actually at prep school with my cousin Archie. What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing! That’s the point. They were sort of dry-humping against the sofa in the Great Hall—’

  ‘No! That’s disgusting!’

  ‘Well, I agree with you. So I sort of went up to them to introduce myself… I thought Mrs Carfizzi might see them… Or, you know, Kveta… I sort of said, “Hello, I’m Egbert.” And they looked at me, India. Literally – they looked directly at me, and carried on! They just carried on humping!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Also,’ he added, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but there’s something wrong with the girl. She’s so thin… and she had this ludicrous hat on… the most massive hat…’

  ‘Oh. She’s a style icon,’ India explained. ‘She’s a Guggenheim or Rockefeller… or a – one or the other. Super rich.’

  ‘Well I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘She looked like she was about to die…’ Egbert paused. An idea had occurred to him. The most wonderful idea. He looked hopefully at his wife. ‘… I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘we could just pull a sickie… just sort of send our apologies and stay up here and leave them to get on with it?’

  ‘Just skive the whole thing?… Oh, Eggie,’ India cried; and gasped and breathed and whimpered and murmured. ‘That’s an amazing idea!’ She was reminded, briefly, of how sexy he could be – sometimes, very occasionally. ‘Shall we? We could just sidle out the East door, and Egg – we could spend the weekend in Venice!’ she said. ‘We could! We absolutely could! Kveta can take care of the children. Shall we?’

  But in the end, of course, the ever-dutiful Egbert’s nerve abandoned him. He straightened his black tie, combed his hair, told his wife she looked lovely, which she did. And together, they headed down the stairs to greet their horrible guests.

  CHAPTER 38

  Nobody had bothered with fancy dress. Except, possibly, the style icon, Poppy Rockefeller, who was wearing a gauze sack with holes cut out at crotch and nipples, and no underwear. Compared to India – her usual slinky, understated self in an expensive grey wool dress – the guests looked uncomfortable in their finery: gussied up and over dressed. Everyone drank a lot.

  Dinner rolled along. Mrs Carfizzi, having already dined with her husband on some delicious melanzane parmigiana, served up the usual Tode Hall banquet fare: individual prawn cocktails with Thousand Island dressing, leathery beef stew with long-boiled brussels sprouts and boiled potatoes, cheddar cheese and dried biscuits, and stewed apple with custard. The guests, used to the finest London restaurants, hardly knew what had hit them. Even so, they finished their plates and gushed to Mr Carfizzi as he cleared them, lauding – as James O’Shea, the bearded talkshow host put it – ‘the amazing retro scrumminess of everything’.

  Meanwhile, in the West Wing’s Lady Laverty bedroom, Oliver Mellors, holding a letter he’d been trying to deliver to his employer all day, settled onto the bed in a corpse-like pose and fell asleep.

  … And at the dining table an oblivious Dominic, not realising the plans had been changed, tapped his foot and awaited India’s nod. Once the coffee was served, he was supposed to get the murder mystery game started by making a short comic speech (much rehearsed) and then suddenly collapsing into a terrible coughing fit and pretending to be dead.

  The brassy crowd grew brassier. They yelled at one another across the glittering 250-year-old dining table, gossip about people their hosts did not know, and commentaries on spa hotels they’d visited in the Maldives.

  Mr Carfizzi cleared the pudding, and listened in, and despised every one of them. He despised India for inviting them into the house. He despised Egbert Tode for marrying her, and Emma Tode for inviting her to become mistress of the house. He despised Hamish for the attention he was giving to Dominic Rathbone, and he despised Dominic Rathbone for tolerating it. Inside his butler suit, he was burning with misery and rage. But there was one thing that kept him smiling.

  Earlier that evening, before India had gone upstairs to change, Carfizzi had let it drop: the piece of gossip that almost everyone at Tode Hall knew, except her; that her new fuck-buddy Dominic Rathbone, and her nemesis, Emma Tode had been involved in a love affair for almost thirty years. He had watched with sly relish as the news sank in. Almost thirty years, he said again… Until that moment he had only suspected there was something going on between India and Dominic. But India’s reaction to his news confirmed everything.

  She said nothing to him (of course) and he had continued to potter this way and that, fussing with the overnight safe, rearranging bits of silver for the table. But he could feel her anger. She was livid.

  Carfizzi hated India; he hated her golden hair and her happy-go-lucky laugh, her lack of formality, her openness, her selfishness. He hated that she was mistress of Tode Hall, and mistress of Dominic. He hated her more than he had ever hated anyone.

  Later that night, he noticed an open box of chocolates lying on a side table beneath where his butler’s coat hung. How typically careless of her, he thought. But how delicious!

  CHAPTER 39

  India’s and Mr Carfizzi’s were not the only undercurrents festering in the Long Gallery that night. Far from it. Egbert was also out of sorts. Nobody was talking to him. This was a good thing, on the whole, because even if his guests had been polite enough to try, he wouldn’t have known what to say back. On occasions like these he became acutely aware of his own dullness. He longed to be anywhere else.

  Which minor social discomfort troubled him a good deal less than the fact that his beautiful wife was flirting madly with Hamish Tomlinson. It was, of course, part of the price of being married to someone so beautiful and charming. Egbert understood this well and had learned, on the whole, to tolerate it. But this evening, she was flirting more brazenly than normal. He would go so far as to say that his darling Munchkin was teetering on the edge of making a grand old fool of herself. And the more she seemed to throw herself at Hamish, the more Hamish seemed to direct himself to Dominic, and the more miserable Dominic seemed to look. Dominic, like Egbert, had barely opened his mouth all night.

  Alice, sitting beside Egbert and noticing his sadness, said something bland about how nice it was to see the room by candlelight.

  ‘Yes, doesn’t it look fabulous?’ he replied, glumly. ‘Mr and Mrs Carfizzi have done an absolutely terrific job.’ But then he sighed. ‘It’s all a bit much for me to be honest with you, Alice.’

  ‘Me too!’ Alice said, laughing. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll soon be over!’ She looked around the table. Egbert was right. More than ‘a bit much’, it was appalling. India’s celebrity guests, sealed ins
ide their members-only bubble, were throwing bits of bread at one another across the table. The Long Gallery echoed to their double entendres, brazen namedrops, their louche laughter. India, meanwhile, was obviously very drunk. What Egbert couldn’t see from his seat but Alice could from hers, was India’s hand beneath the table, groping blindly at Hamish’s crotch. Alice wondered whether Dominic was aware of it – and decided, from the look on his face, that he probably was.

  All this, for Alice, was far less distracting than the presence, at the furthest end of the Long Gallery dining table, of Geraldine, Lady Tode. She was sitting bolt upright, in an Yves Saint Laurent scarlet flowerprint pantsuit, the ubiquitous cup of cold tea in front of her and a look of majestic disdain on her face. She’d been sitting like that, occasionally barking unintelligible comments down the table, ever since the prawn cocktails had been cleared. It was the first time Alice had seen her outside of the Gardener’s House, in public, and she found it very disconcerting.

  ‘Is this gorgeous, amazing mansion actually haunted?’ Pinkie Simpleton asked Egbert suddenly. Pinkie was probably the most well-known person at the table. She was the presenter of a popular Saturday night talent show, and her face was smooth and orange. She shouted the question across the table, over the stewed apple and custard, just as Geraldine Tode was reminding Alice of the nymphomania tendencies of the Leybert-Sorringtons of Derby, also related to India (albeit by marriage).

  ‘Oh my goodness, I wouldn’t think so!’ Egbert said, blushing, because he hadn’t expected to be spoken to. He recognised her from the newspapers, vaguely. He’d never actually seen the show. He thought she looked much smaller and thinner and older and more orange than she did in the pictures. A bit like she was made of plastic. ‘No, no,’ he reassured her. ‘No ghosts at Tode Hall! Or not that I’ve come across!’

  ‘Yes there are Eggie!’ India corrected him. ‘Famously. And by the way – Hamish, I bet you know this. Hamish, tell everyone what Tode means in German!’

  ‘Tode… tor-der, as it’s pronounced, means death,’ he said.

  ‘Bing Bing Bing! Correct! Dix points to Hamish. Tode-pronounced-tor-der means death in German. How spooky is that? So welcome to Death Hall, everyone! And yes, of course Death Hall has a ghost! Crikey. We’ve got loads of them. There’s the ghost of the fourth Baronet. Remember Egg? He went crazy and murdered his wife with a cutlass. Or something. And now he roams the East Wing, banging on doors and calling her name. It’s very romantic. He’s usually in the Pineapple Room. Who’s sleeping in the Pineapple Room?’

  ‘Ooooohhhh!’ went the cry. ‘That’ll be you then, Pinkie. Watch out, he’ll probably be wanting to hump you in your sleep!’

  ‘HA HA HA HA’

  ‘He should be so lucky!’ Pinkie said. She winked at her husband. ‘Right Andy?’

  ‘HA HA HA HA’

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ exclaimed Geraldine. And with that, she disappeared in the usual explosion of noxious green smoke, which nobody seemed to notice but Alice.

  India, meanwhile, was on her feet, pinging her glass with a fork. Her eyes gleamed with a wild kind of mischief that her parents might have recognised, also her old housemistress, also her oldest, closest friends; and which Egbert noted, with a sickly dread. She was very drunk.

  ‘Ladies and gents!’ she said. ‘Now that I have your attention… I just want to welcome you all to Tode Hall… or Death Hall, as we like to call it!’

  ‘Yay!’

  ‘Whoopeee!’

  ‘Spooky!’

  ‘Thank you guys,’ said India. ‘Thank you all so much for coming. And now…’ She cleared her throat. Swayed a little. Gave a dazzling smile to the room. ‘… I want to introduce you to Tode Hall’s resident celeb, drum roll please! Everybody say hello to… the world famous DOMINIC RATHBONE!’

  Dominic hadn’t been listening. He’d been muttering to the rat-like Hamish Tomlinson. On hearing his name, he looked up, a little bewildered. This wasn’t what they’d rehearsed.

  But the guests didn’t know that. They were, obligingly enough, whooping and cheering and banging the table. India was smirking at him. She’d been ignoring him all evening and the smirk looked far from friendly. He had no idea what was going on.

  But he dug deep, felt his breathing. There was no hint from his manner of anything but good nature, amusement and diffident delight as he chuckled and bowed to acknowledge the drunken cheering. Eventually, India raised a hand for hush.

  ‘Well, that was unexpected!’ Dominic said. ‘Not at all sure what I did to deserve it. But – as you know – applause is every actor’s life-blood! I am greatly obliged to you all!’

  ‘Wait a bit!’ Pinkie said. ‘I’ve seen you before. Aren’t you the guy from—’

  ‘That’s exactly right, Pinkie!’ India interrupted her. ‘He is the one and only Dominic Rathbone, star of the 1990s TV adaptation of Prance to the Music in Time, which was of course filmed here in this house and which, don’t laugh, I still haven’t got round to watching! But we must Egg. We must. It’s too ridiculous!’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ said Pinkie. ‘I’ve never seen that show either. I’m too young!’

  ‘Ah, but you can get it on DVD,’ Egbert interjected. ‘So that’s no excuse!’

  ‘OMG I don’t even know what a DVD player is Eggie!’ Pinkie replied. ‘Do they even exist in this day and age?’ She turned back to Dominic. ‘Seriously though, where have I seen you before?’

  ‘He’s also in the coffee ad,’ India said, slightly irritably. ‘But that’s not why I’m standing here making a speech, right?’

  ‘Of course!’ cried Pinkie. ‘You’re the guy in the coffee ad! Hello Mr “shake-the-coffee, makes-the-coffee” Guy in the coffee ad! Nice to meet you!’

  India sent Pinkie a frosty look. ‘Dominic, aside from being the guy-in-the-coffee-ad is our resident superstar, here at Death Hall. As everyone knows, he played the character of Tintin and, as such, is probably the face of Death Hall, in most people’s minds. Don’t you think, Dominic?’

  ‘No, not really…’

  ‘Of course you are, Dominic! Don’t be modest!’

  ‘Well, I would’ve thought…’

  ‘Anyway,’ India continued, ‘it’s such a treat to have the house full of all you lovely, super-successful media-types, and it was so sweet of you to have schlepped all the way North to visit us, here on the outer edges of civilisation…’

  ‘Yay! Woo! Outer Hebrides, darling! Not on yours! HA HA HA’ (They weren’t making sense but, as the professional communicators among them knew well, it was the ambient sound that counted.)

  India grinned and waited. ‘I invited you here – we invited you here,’ she corrected herself, ‘Egbert and I invited you here because we miss all you clever London folk, don’t we, Egg?’

  Yay, Clever?! London, Woah.

  ‘… And ALSO… because you lovely people all – in case you hadn’t noticed – almost all of you work in MEDIA! And for that reason I believe you can help us! I want you all to get a real sense of this fantastic house, which is so full of history and romance and so TIED UP in people’s minds with the fab TV series/book/film/whatever…

  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

  ‘I want you all to look at Tode Hall and let its romance and beauty really sink into your hearts, and then with a bit of luck, you’ll take such fabulous memories home with you that when you go back to all your amazingly important jobs and all your fabulous, showbiz friends—’

  Woo Wozzat? Oop, Important?!

  ‘You will realise that no film, no pop video, no porn movie, no cooking show – will be worth anything unless you set it here at Tode Hall! And – let me just stress this: there is nothing – no project – we won’t consider! Literally nothing!’

  ‘Porn show might be a bit much,’ muttered Egbert. Everyone ignored him.

  India said: ‘We want to make TODE HALL the backdrop to every “Screen Experience” literally on… people’s screens, whatsoever screens they may be… OK?’


  YAY! Super screens! Tode Hall! Wowza!

  ‘We want to share this beautiful house with the world! We don’t want to keep it to ourselves, do we Egg?’

  ‘Sort of,’ muttered Egg.

  ‘We want everyone in the world to benefit from the amazing beauty of this amazing house!’ cried India.

  ‘And of course double your take at the ticket office in the process,’ said Hamish, with a ratty smile.

  India turned to him, sitting beside her. She bent down so that their eyes were level, laid a soft, sparkling finger onto the centre of his ratty lips, and muttered, with a little smile: ‘Cheeky!’

  For a moment it looked very much as if she might replace her soft sparkling finger with her soft, smiling lips which, even in this boisterous atmosphere, didn’t feel quite right.

  Alice said, loudly: ‘The gardens already sell a quarter of a million tickets every year. I think what Egbert and India would like is to offer the house as a location so they can reduce the number of tourists and get a little privacy.’

  ‘Thank you, Alice,’ Egbert said. ‘Hamish, I think you’re being a teeny bit unfair…’

  India straightened up. ‘Where was I?’ she asked. ‘Before I was so rudely interrupted?’ Another secret smile for Hamish. ‘So… what I’ve planned – and this is a surprise for Dominic too, so bear with him. However, seeing as he is employed by us here at Death Hall I don’t think he’s likely to complain, are you Dominic?’

  Dominic made his face look light and cheerful, though he was seething inside. With a chuckle, he said: ‘Well it rather depends, young India! What are you going to ask me to do?’

  CHAPTER 40

  India had slipped out during the prawn cocktails to fetch the props. She had an iPhone under her seat, and a small attachable speaker. She’d snatched a Dogmatix teddy bear from the basement gift shop, and from the back of Egbert’s cupboard, a straw boater with old, dried flowers pinned to its brim. The boater had sentimental value. But not to India, and not tonight.