He was breathless in his chatter. Charming, as ever, but underneath there was an accent of nervousness. It was unlike Ben to be nervous. Probably anxious about the guests arriving, I thought.
‘This place is spectacular, Ben,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Lucy added. ‘Really …’
Ben paused for a second and raised his head, as though sniffing the air.
‘It is, isn’t it? We got super lucky. It’s going to take months to do up properly though. Months. We haven’t even started on the chapel. I’ll show it to you, LS. I know you love your architectural history.’ He clutched Lucy’s arm conspiratorially. ‘Such an old fuddy-duddy, isn’t he, Luce? That’s why we love him.’
It was a source of amusement to Ben that whenever the two of us went anywhere together, I would seek out the local church and find a point of interest: an unexpected fresco of St Peter holding the keys to heaven; a war memorial erected to an only son called Arthur; and once a pew cushion embroidered with ‘This Too Shall Pass’.
We followed Ben to the end of a wide corridor, the walls adorned with black and white family photographs in uniform clear perspex frames. This led into the kitchen, where Serena stood, surrounded by half-unwrapped bouquets of flowers, the stems a tangle of bloom and pollen. Around her stood a group of waiters and one man wearing a floppy khaki hat and a safari jacket with countless pockets.
‘Serena,’ Ben purred. ‘LS and Lucy have arrived.’
She looked up, her face vague. It took a moment for her gaze to click into place.
‘Of course! Of course! Sorry, sweeties, totally slipped my mind. Hang on a sec.’
She turned to the man in the jacket. ‘Tom, these are great, thanks. Much better than the other flowers.’
‘We’ll have to re-plant,’ he said gruffly.
‘Mm-mm. I know, darling. We will.’
Tom exited the kitchen, his boots leaving a speckled trail of mud as he went.
All at once, Serena was a flurry of insincere compliments.
‘So gorgeous to see you! Martin’ – she had a way of saying my name which stretched all the vowels to the point of snapping – ‘you look very smart. Oh, and Lucy, what a … what a …’ She gave a tiny pause. ‘Pretty dress. Where’s it from? Is it Donna Karan?’
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘Monsoon.’
‘So sorry we couldn’t have you to stay. Just. You know how it is. Family. Extended family. Friends flying in from abroad.’
‘Of course we do,’ I said. ‘It’s no problem. We’re just delighted to be here. And to see this, this …’ I made a great show of looking around in an awestruck manner, ‘palace. Truly, Serena, you do have the most impeccable taste.’
She didn’t reply but gave another dazzling smile. Serena hadn’t yet dressed for the party and still managed to look more glamorous than any of us. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a loose white blouse that somehow managed to be both shapeless and sexy. Around her neck, a silver chain, the heart pendant fitting snugly in the gap between her clavicles. Her hair was in rollers and her eye make-up heavily done – black-brown smudges the colour of a bruised nail – but she wore no lipstick and, as a result, her face had an untethered quality, like one of those children’s picture books with different panels to flick through for amusing variations on face, torso and legs.
‘I said I’d show LS the chapel,’ Ben said. ‘You girls will be able to make your own fun for a bit, won’t you?’
I glanced at Lucy, who was standing in the corner next to an enormous Smeg fridge, holding her pashmina tightly, her mouth set in a mutinous line.
‘Of course, sweetie,’ Serena said. ‘But at least get them a drink first!’ She laughed – a tinkling sound like teaspoon against saucer – and poured us all a glass of Veuve Clicquot that was already chilling in an ice bucket by the industrial-sized sink.
Ben took our glasses and led me back the way we’d come.
‘We’re still waiting for some of the furniture,’ he said as we came to a halt in front of a stone fireplace. The mantelpiece was the same height as our heads. The central recess had been filled by dozens of altar candles, waxen wicks pulled straight and ready to be lit. ‘Stuff Serena picked up in France. Some bigger pieces from a friend she has in Bali.’
‘Not tempted to light a real fire?’ I asked.
‘Ha! No. Serena wanted it all to be candlelit tonight. Adds to the—’ He broke off, lowered his voice and assumed a cod French accent, ‘ambience. So I’m told.’
He put his arm round my shoulders and drew me to him. He was still grinning. Still determined to show what a jolly time he was having and how relaxed this all was and wasn’t it all just good clean fun between friends. Perhaps he forgot how well I knew him. I had, after all, made a lifetime’s study of the planes of his face. Tonight, there was a twitching light to his eyes, a kind of fevered alacrity that meant his gaze kept shifting over surfaces and people, never once steadying to meet my own.
He dropped his arm, took a gulp of his champagne and waved me into a narrow corridor, darker than the others, which led off from the main aspect of the house.
‘I think you’ll like this,’ Ben said. He pushed open a door, the hinges blackened and creaking. There was a lingering smell of incense. In the half-gloom, I could make out the hulking form of an altar and a font.
‘Sorry guys, don’t mind us,’ Ben said, stepping across a cable. Two men in black T-shirts bearing the words ‘Sono-Vision Inc.’ above a logo of three interlinked circles were applying miniature screwdrivers to a series of speakers.
‘Quite a production,’ I said.
‘Ha!’
The chapel looked almost entirely as it must have been when the monks had left. There were open hymn books on the shelves, the pages fluttering in the draught of a closing door. It was as if the former residents had been forced to leave halfway through a service, abandoning all their possessions in their rush to escape.
It reminded me of Victor Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges in Paris: untouched since his death, everything still in its rightful place. But then you saw Hugo’s death-mask, placed casually in a box on top of the desk, and you realised how macabre it all was, how strange the human impulse to keep everything stagnant, frozen in aspic. When my mother died, I couldn’t wait to be rid of her. I arranged for a swift cremation and when the notice came from the funeral directors that her ashes were ready for collection, I ignored it. What do they do with uncollected ashes? I never found out.
‘Spooky,’ I said.
‘You have no idea, LS. No idea. There’s a ghost, you know.’
He went on to say that the ghost was said to hang about the medieval graveyard, just by the ornamental maze they had planted to entertain their four children – Cosima, Cressida, Hector and Wilf (known to the family as Bear). The ghost was referred to locally as ‘The Brown Monk’. He was believed to walk through the walls of the house making a soft, low, moaning sound.
‘You don’t believe in all that though, do you?’ I asked.
Ben shook his head. ‘No, but … Serena. You know how she is …’
Yes. Yes, I did.
The first time I met her, at a restaurant situated at the top of one of London’s newest skyscrapers, Serena had leaned across the table and clasped my forearm. She did it so quickly, I had no chance to remove my cuff from her grasp and so we sat there, uncomfortably, while she looked at me earnestly with those chlorine-blue eyes and said ‘Ben’s told me so much about you. I already know we’re going to be kindred spirits.’