As I got to the top of my staircase in Lightfoot, I saw that Esme Dawson was sitting in the window seat.
The leaded diamond panes threw shadows that criss-crossed her as if she was in a net. She gazed prettily out at the grounds, looking self-consciously posed, as if she was modelling for a photo shoot in some posh magazine. She’d arranged herself, I was sure, so I’d find her like that.
She uncurled herself gracefully when I approached my door. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘We haven’t formally met. I’m Esme.’
‘Greer,’ I said guardedly.
She actually shook my hand. I noticed she wore a gold signet ring, just like Henry. ‘How d’you do?’ she said.
Now, I have literally never been asked this question before. I know it’s how people used to greet each other in Ealing Comedies and stuff. But I’d never heard it In Real Life. I suppose this was how the Medievals rolled. How do you do? A number of answers popped into my head. To be honest, Esme, I’m not really sure how I do. One minute you and your fellow sirens are sniggering at me and making jokes about me sounding like I’m from Coronation Street, and the next, you’re nice as pie … But of course I didn’t say any of this. I was just happy that someone was talking to me. ‘Fine, thanks.’
‘Ready for the weekend?’
‘Not remotely.’
She smiled, segueing neatly from Country Life spread to toothpaste ad. ‘Henry asked me to come and help you pack, and also answer any questions you may have.’
‘Well, I have a whole bunch of those.’
She gestured to the heavy oak door, with my name and Jesus’s (real) name on it, and a message board with lots of scrawled messages, all for Jesus. ‘Shall we?’
I opened the door. Jesus was already there, lolling on her bed – she must have made a quicker getaway than I from chapel. At the sight of Esme she got up at once and stood to attention. ‘Would you excuse us?’ Esme asked sweetly.
Jesus went bright red, shot me a jealous look and scuttled from the room.
I unhooked my chapel cape from my shoulders and threw it across my chair. My wheelie suitcase gaped empty on the bed, and my clothes were all over the place. Esme eyed the mess, and me.
I was busted. I like to think of myself as a Strong Feminist Girl, but since Henry had invited me to Longcross, I’d been letting the sisterhood down a bit by obsessing about what I would wear. I’d ignored the Friars in every lesson, while having mini-daydreams about walking in Longcross’s grounds in elegant tweeds, or boating on a lake in a white tea dress. In each scenario I was accompanied by Henry de Warlencourt, chatting and laughing at my side. Thing is, I didn’t have tweeds, or a white tea dress. And even though Henry’s grounds probably didn’t, like my daydreams, come straight out of some Merchant Ivory film from the eighties, they probably weren’t far off. My skinny jeans and beanie hats and the ironic film T-shirts that my dad liked to buy me certainly wouldn’t fit in.
‘The first thing to say is, don’t worry about clothes,’ said Esme, reassuringly. ‘Anything you don’t have, they’ll provide at Longcross. Just take the basics – underwear, lots of socks, nightclothes. As for the rest, keep it classic.’
She rifled through my wardrobe, and my ‘floordrobe’. ‘Here we go. White shirt. Jeans. A couple of warm jumpers.’ She flung them in the case. ‘T-shirts … hmmm.’ She picked one up. It had a picture of Nosferatu on it, saying, ‘Mornings Suck’. ‘No …’ she said, as if I wasn’t there, and selected a plain white one. ‘Yes.’ She went on picking through my stuff, rejecting the Savage, putting anything she found vaguely Medieval in the case. There seemed frighteningly few things in there. At last she turned to me. ‘Have you got a formal dress?’
That was another for the list of questions I’d never been asked, but I actually had an answer to this one. A posh dress was the one thing I did have. My mum, who is a costume designer for movies, made me one before she left. And here’s the weird thing. She didn’t leave recently. She left my dad and me when I was sixteen months old.
I’ve seen the last pictures of me with Mum (they didn’t make it onto my wall at STAGS); I was just a little toddling thing with a swirl of black hair and big grey eyes. I’ve looked at those pictures a lot, trying to see what was so bad about me that she had to go. I look pretty cute. I certainly wasn’t a monster. But apparently, after getting through the worst bits of shitty nappies and night feeds and teething, she decided she wasn’t the mothering type. My dad – and this tells you what a good guy he is – has never, ever said a bad word about her to me. He says dads leave their kids all the time and no one makes a fuss about it, so why should it be any different for a mum? I see his point. But, somehow, it is different.
The one thing Mum ever gave me (OK, OK, except for life) was The Dress. Mum and Dad met when they were both working on this film at Elstree Studios. Before you go thinking it was some kind of classic, it wasn’t. It was like The Princess Diaries but even worse, if that’s possible. I try not to remember the name of it. It was about some girl who doesn’t know she’s a princess till the end, and my mum had to make all the clothes for the princess actress, this horrible Disney brat. Anyway there was a bunch of nice material and beads left over and by the end of the shoot Mum was pregnant with me, and she knew I was going to be a girl, so she made this dress for the adult me. Sweet, right? Well, it would have been, except for the fact that she barely stuck around for sixteen months, never mind sixteen years. Now you know why my dad turned down all the foreign jobs for sixteen years, and only went away this year because I got into STAGS. When she left, Mum said that Dad should keep The Dress safe and I should wear it for my prom. And he did. And I did. And guess what? It fitted me perfectly.
Spooky.
I’m not usually vain (well, not very), but I have to say I looked pretty nice in that dress on my prom night. Dad sent Mum a picture of me wearing it, to Russia or wherever the hell she was filming. That was back in the summer, and still no reply. I’m not holding my breath.
That same photo was on my wall in Lightfoot, and I looked at it now. It was the only photo on my wall that wasn’t of me and Dad. It was of me and my class at Year 11 prom at Bewley, just before I left the school. There were about ten of us, arms around each other, eyes wide and mouths smiling, all jumping in the air at the same time. I always got a pang when I looked at it. I missed, so much, not just those friends in particular, but friends in general.
I turned back to Esme – she was the nearest thing I had. I held up The Dress over my Tudor coat. It was beautiful. This, I knew, would be suitable, even for the Medievals, even for Longcross. You see, I didn’t wear it to the prom out of loyalty, or yearning for my mum or any of that sentimental horseshit. I don’t actually care about my mum. I wore it because it is a gorgeous dress. And you can tell it was made for me; it is a silvery grey which picks out the silver in my eyes, and there are tiny black beads, sewn in a kind of swirl on the front, the kind of swirl you see flocks of starlings doing at dusk on an autumn night. Well, you do at STAGS anyway.
Esme looked at The Dress as if she smelled something bad. ‘God, no,’ she said. ‘That won’t do.’ My face must have fallen, cos she said hurriedly, ‘Don’t worry. They’ll have something for you at Longcross.’
I laid The Dress tenderly on the bed. ‘Even dresses?’
‘Oh yes.’
I felt I needed to make a joke. ‘Are they Henry’s?’
She laughed. Not the bitchy laugh I’d heard so many times behind my back, but a nice, open sound. ‘So,’ she said, arranging herself cosily on the bed, one long leg under her, the other dangling to the floor. ‘That’s clothes sorted. What d’you want to ask?’
I sat on the other side of the rejected clothes mountain and spread my hands wide. ‘What happens? What happens at the weekend?’
‘It’s such a larf,’ she said, just as Henry had. ‘The gamekeepers pick us up at five sharp from the entrance. It’s not a long drive; Longcross is in the Lake District, about an hour south. Good hunting country, you see. You’ll have time to wash and dress when we get there and then there’s a formal dinner in the Great Hall. Then on Saturday it’s the stag hunt, Sunday is the pheasant shoot, and on the holiday Monday it’s trout fishing on the lake.’
Jeee-sus. For the first time it was occurring to me that as well as all the fancy-pants country-house weekend stuff, I was actually going to be required to shoot things, and I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about that. I know this makes me a total hypocrite, as I’ll happily eat meat and wear leather, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to end the life of a beautiful creature just for fun. A stag, I mean; fish are pretty ugly, so I wouldn’t exactly cry if I caught one of them. ‘Do I have to … you know … kill stuff?’
Her perfect eyebrows shot up. ‘Well, of course you should try. No point hunting if there’s no kill.’ She laid a hand on my arm. ‘But in point of fact, novices rarely make a kill on their first weekend. So don’t worry too much.’
‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘I’ve never even held a gun, or even a fishing rod. I won’t know what to do.’ If I was honest, the one thing worse than killing a beautiful animal would be looking like a total fool.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There are dozens of gamekeepers on the estate, not to mention loaders and beaters and pickers-up. Masses of people to tell you what to do.’
I had no idea what most of those were, but I listened politely. ‘At every step there will be someone experienced on hand to help you. And if blood sports aren’t your thing, well –’ she smiled again – ‘there’s the social side, isn’t there? There’s a formal dinner every night, and marvellous shooting lunches, and cocktails and tea. It’s enormous fun.’
My stomach back-flipped again, but I nodded readily.
Esme’s eyebrows knitted with concern and she leaned forward. Her hand was, somehow, still on my arm. ‘Has that been helpful?’
It had been actually. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘The cars come at five. The headkeeper’s driving you. He’s a perfect poppet.’ She got up from my bed in one fluid movement and flipped her hair from one parting to another. It fell perfectly. ‘See you tonight. Dinner’s at eight. Travel safe.’ At my door she did this neat little wave, flapping just the finger part of her hand.
‘You too,’ I said.
Of course, I look back now and think exactly what you are thinking. What a sap I was to let that witch paw through my clothes and tell me what to wear. But you have to remember that those few moments in my room with Esme was the most conversation I’d had all term. I was starved of friendship. And, back then, it seemed as if that was what Esme was offering.
Still, I did have a little seed of rebellion within me, even then. When the door shut behind her I put The Dress in my case.