Tell Me I'm Worthless(36)

“You are too wilful, far too wilful,” said her mother. “I fear no man will ever want you.” But that was just how the girl liked it, so she smiled to herself.

The second girl, the one who was not a virgin, was called Emily. She was a little older than her sister, which Edmund disliked. However, she enjoyed Edmund’s presence and he found that he enjoyed her presence in turn, despite her lack of honour. After meeting him, she told her mother that yes, she would be happy to marry him. Her mother was overjoyed. Edmund’s father was, too, thinking of those piles of capital that would soon exchange hands. But Edmund and his bride-to-be would need a place to live, and Edmund asked, might they take a place away from the city. He had been at war, and he tired of the noise of London, the curling filth of the smogs. His father grumbled at the idea, but agreed to help him buy a place, and this was how Edmund came into possession of the House.

Edmund was insulted when he first actually set eyes on the House. Was this what his father thought of him?

“They call it Albion,” said the man he had hired to head the desperately-needed building work.

“Albion?” asked Edmund. It was a queer name for a house, but he liked how it felt in his mouth. Not Albion Hall, or Albion House. Just Albion. The Giant, the mythical founder of Britain, who lived and died in its luscious green hills. His body was buried off the southern coast of England, in a circle of trees, a colossal corpse on the top of which sprouted a fertile forest.

The name was kept. The building work took a year, a year in which Edmund stayed in London and wedded Emily.

“Oh,” he said, whilst fucking her in their marital bed, “when I take you to Albion it shall be like a second wedding night.”

She lay beneath him, her legs spread. His sweat dripped from his face down into her open mouth. While they lived in London, Albion took shape. Its walls remained the same, but the insides were pulped and moulded to fit the current fashions. And, when it was done, a small fleet of meek servants were hired to staff the place. At this point, Edmund and Emily left their London lodgings and travelled down south, eagerly awaiting the first sight of the House.

And it was impressive. Edmund had only ever lived in London, and, however nice those city houses, they were nothing compared to a true, traditional country house. Not quite as big as the old ones, of course. They sprawled over acres of land, whereas Albion was really just one building, a dark cube of stone. But the servants put on such a show of a welcome, with all the lights burning on, and they stood out in front of the door to bring the married couple into their new home. Emily was surprised at how big it all was. Like Edmund, she had always been a city girl, but the moment she stepped through those front doors she was nearly shocked out of her skin at the entrance hall, which stretched upwards from the floor all the way to the very top of the house, a great mouth covered in varnished wood. And the staircase, a tongue, which Edmund carried her up two steps at a time. She was terrified he would drop her.

There was a great dining room, and kitchens, and everything she could have ever wanted. And so many rooms… more rooms than she would ever need.

As the two of them ran from room to room, laughing at this newfound space, one of the servants turned to the other.

“I wonder if they know,” she said, under her breath, “what happened to the last man to own this house?”

“Or,” murmured the other, “what happened to his wife. Wonder if they’d be laughin’ like that if they did.”

They were happy, the married couple. That first night in Albion really was like a second wedding night. For Emily it felt like losing her virginity all over again, but she did not vocalise this thought. The sheets on the bed were softer than they had been in London. The curtains that hung all around it allowed them to play sensual games with one another, looking at the others’ silhouette through the fabric. The whole place was stunning. The surrounding countryside was beautiful and Edmund, who owned an automobile, would drive as fast as he could around the hairpin bends, his wife holding onto anything she could out of panic.

It did not take long for Edmund to find out the true nature of Albion’s origins, which his father had kept from him. Sometimes men would make comments at him, saying that he lived in a house built for a deviant, to which he often became very angry, throwing glasses at the wall and shouting at whoever had said it that he was the one who fucking made this house, he had built it, not some other man. This wasn’t true. He hadn’t ever built anything in his life. He wouldn’t know how. These violent moments scared Emily. They were a side of her husband she did not know how to deal with. When he was like this, she thought that maybe she had made some deep, terrible mistake.

But she loved him anyway.

As their marriage grew in love and complexity, so Albion grew around them. The servants grew to dislike the House, but they could never articulate why. If somebody asked if it was haunted, which they did, because it had been an abandoned house in which a death had occurred, they couldn’t exactly say that it was. Nobody ever experienced any sort of ghostly comings and goings. But they felt that the House looked down on them, disliking their presence. It was a spiteful place. It still is. It always will be.

Edmund’s name grew in stature as he started to invite guests to the house, often with very little notice, which could be taxing for both the staff and for Emily. He cultivated friendships, as best he could, using his father’s name well, with politicians and scientists, criminologists, psychologists. After a year or two, he began to read, voraciously, writings about race and racial difference, about sex. About, more than anything else, eugenics. This started as a simple academic interest, but Emily watched, with helpless curiosity, as it grew and grew in intensity. After two years it had gone from perusing books and inviting authors for dinners (which Emily would have to sit through, ignored), to a very real passion. He began talking about wishing to investigate the matter practically despite the fact that he had no background in the sciences at all. Emily did not know what he meant by practically, not at first. Not until that day.