The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(57)

“You always liked Alexandra, didn’t you?” he said. “She was nice to you when you were a child, yes?”

“She was kind,” I admitted. “In more ways than I suspect I saw.”

“Clement is a disgusting little creature,” he added bitterly. “Do you know he’s had three wives? He wants to sell it all and move to California.”

“Mr Hulne,” I repeated, harder now, “I don’t see what it is you expect me to do about this.”

His eyes flickered upwards, and there was liquid brimming on the bottom of the gummy eyelids. As so often is the case with men who refuse to cry, the awareness of his own tears seemed to cause them to rise even faster, shame mixing with grief, and even as they began to dribble down his face he clung to the side of the chair, refusing to acknowledge their presence on his skin. “You can’t let it die,” he whimpered. “It’s your past too, Harry–the house, the lands. You understand, don’t you? You want to keep them alive too.”

“As the poet says–the times they are a-changing,” I replied firmly. “Or perhaps he hasn’t said it yet, but time will cure that absence. I am sorry for your situation, Mr Hulne. I regret that Alexandra is in difficulty; she was always kind. But Clement was a bully, even as a child, and the house was a monster of stone-praised vanity and quiet tragedy. Constance was a tyrant, more focused on perceptions than truth; Victoria was a drug addict; Lydia was an innocent who you tormented beyond—”

“How dare you!” His body jerked as if he would rise from the chair and hit me, but he didn’t have the strength to do it, so stayed put, shaking all over, the tears fading now against the rising flush in his cheeks. “How dare you? How dare you speak of them like… like you knew, like you…? You were a child, you left us! You left us and never looked back. How dare—”

“Tell me,” I cut in. His voice was angrier, but mine was more powerful. “When you raped my mother, did she scream?”

He could have gone either way. The rage was there in him, ready to plough straight through my words, but instead, it seems, they ploughed through him, knocking him back against his seat and pinning him there like a butterfly. I made sure he stayed put, adding, “I met a woman called Prudence Crannich once, who delivered a baby in the women’s washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on New Year’s Day. The mother died, but I tracked down her family and listened to her mother–my grandmother–tell the story of Lisa Leadmill, who went down south to find her fortune and who met her death in the arms of strangers. Cold is an enemy in trauma care–it slows down clotting, making it easier for patients to bleed out. Perhaps, if I’d been born in summer, my mother would have lived. Of course no one but you and Lisa will ever know if you truly raped her, but she was a young lonely woman in the house of an angry, potentially violent master who believed that his wife had betrayed him and was himself quite probably psychologically damaged from his time at the front. I imagine you caught her by the arm and kissed her, loud and rough, so that your wife would know you had done it. I imagine she was terrified, not understanding her role as a pawn in your marriage. You tell her that her position is becoming untenable; she begs you not to do it. You say that it’ll make things easier for everyone, that if she screams the household will know and she’ll be sent out without pay or references, branded a whore–better to be docile, better to be quiet… I suppose you could tell yourself that it wasn’t rape, if she didn’t scream. Did she scream when you pushed her down? Did she scream?”

His knuckles were yellow-white where they gripped the chair, his body still shaking now but not, I felt, with rage.

“There was a time,” I went on, calmer now, “when I wanted to know you. I wrote you a letter once, telling you about the horrors I’d seen, the sins I’d committed, the pain I was in. I needed a stranger who cared, someone who was obliged by the bond of blood between us to understand but not judge. I thought perhaps you could still be my father. You replied as one soldier to another, but I realise now I’ve never really been a son to you. An heir, perhaps, a bastard heir, a sign of shame, a reminder of your failings, a retribution in human form, but never really a son. I don’t think you’ve ever really had it in you to be what a father should.”

I picked up my bag, getting to my feet and turning to the door. “I thought for a moment,” I continued, “that you might be about to propose that I, as your blood, inherited Hulne House. I wondered if you believed that I might feel a fondness for the place, a desire to preserve it, that Clement lacks. Or if, with my humble origins, I might be so awed by the gift that I would somehow turn it into a monument to you and your name. As it is, I feel I should tell you that, were you to give me the house now and all its lands, and the home where I grew up under Patrick and Harriet’s care, I would raze it all to the ground, to the very lowest foundation stone, and transform it into… a pleasure centre for bankers and their children, or a casino for the quirky, or maybe I’d just leave the land barren, and let the earth reclaim its own.”

I turned to leave him.

As I got to the door he called after me, “Harry! You can’t… It’s your past, Harry. It’s your past.”

I walked away and didn’t look back.


Two lives later I did come into possession of Hulne House. The catalyst was, aged twenty-one, attending my grandmother Constance’s funeral. I had never been to her funeral before, never wanted to. Aunt Alexandra, who all those years ago had saved my life and insisted I was taken in, and who would always, in every life, save me, fell to talking to me by the graveside and we grew, in our way, close. She was the strongest of the family, saw the way the wind was blowing and let it carry her in its path. I never found out what she said to my father, but three months before his death he changed the will, and I inherited the estate. I kept it exactly as it was, not a brick changed, and turned it into a charitable trust for the treatment of mental illness. At my next death it was of course restored to its usual state beneath the watchful eye of Constance, but I liked to think that somewhere, in a world lost to my sight, Hulne House had finally made a difference.