Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe

Author:Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446418895
Publisher: Random House

SIX

They took the train to Basingstoke, where Graham picked them up in the Humber. Graham was a mystery: some thought he was from the Isle of Wight, others (encouraged by Graham himself) from Arizona. He was aged anywhere from thirty-five to sixty, with a wispy ponytail and lined cheeks and a perpetual smell of leathery, slightly manury things overlaid with patchouli. He had a mournful voice and his nickname was Eeyore. Marjorie had found him in a drug-rehab unit, apparently. Without him, it was generally acknowledged that life at Wadhampton Hall would disintegrate.

Daddy du Crane collected vintage cars, apart from the Bentley, and liked to give them an airing; the 1935 Humber had become something of a runabout, despite Milly’s complaints about its fuel consumption. There were no seat belts. The leather seats were scuffed and sagging from seventy years of use and the very heavy doors opened the wrong way.

‘Train OK?’

‘Fine, thanks, Graham. How’s everybody?’

‘I think everybody’s cool, as far as I can figure.’

‘Great. And you?’

‘I’m still trying to figure that one out, yeah.’

Wadhampton Hall was set on a slight rise in the middle of a beech wood, with lawns and paddocks and a large meadow immediately around the house, keeping the trees at bay on three sides. It would normally take five minutes to get from the main gate to the front door by the rather ill-kempt driveway; today it took them fifteen, as the Humber coughed into silence halfway along. They left Graham buried in the engine.

‘We’re coming,’ said Milly, into her mobile. Marjorie was already worried. Jack and Milly loved the walk to the house: the sun was vaguely out and the air was astonishingly fresh, wholesome, and full of foliage.

‘The Heath never smells like this,’ said Jack.

After a while they were too hot, walking, even though it was mid-September. Jack was always inspired by this first contact with the real countryside. The infinite beech wood either side looked as if it had been waiting for them, but it was like a hotel with jammed revolving doors: London took hours to wear off. He’d been playing in his head with an idea that had probably emerged on the train, a semitonal oscillation crossing into something fugue-like in D minor. The trill of the mobile had interrupted it.

‘Squirrel,’ said Milly, pointing. ‘Horrid grey one.’

The Humber purred past as they were about to hit the gravel sweep, the size of three football pitches, in front of the house. They waved, but Graham ignored them. Drum and Bass, the two young slobbery golden retrievers (named by Jack one weekend a couple of years ago), lolloped out to greet them.

‘How odd,’ called out Marjorie, blinking furiously on the top of the steps. ‘Why were you not in the car?’

‘I told you on the mobile, Mummy,’ said Milly.

‘If you think I listen to mobiles,’ Marjorie replied.

But it was worrying, her lapse.

Dinner was just them. Jack was relieved. Even when, instead of the usual clutch of fat-arsed local dignitaries banging on about

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