The Key to Flambards Read online

  My leg, she thought, my leg! It seemed the most precious part of her. It’d be sports day soon – she’d need her leg back by then. How would she run the 200 metres, the 4x100 metres relay? How could they take part of her body away? What had they done with it?

  One moment the truth of her situation thudded into her; next instant it skittered away, impossible to grasp.

  Days followed days of hospital, rehabilitation, physiotherapy. Marie-Louise came to visit, often; so, once, did some of her other friends from school, Carrie and Jenna and Luke. She didn’t know what she wanted from them. Not sympathy: ‘Oh, how awful,’ Carrie kept saying, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like.’ (I know, Grace wanted to say, but perhaps you could try?) Jenna talked only about herself, as if the whole subject of Grace’s accident were best avoided; and Luke kept saying how cool it was, how Grace could be a blade runner and win medals in the Paralympics. ‘Tokyo, twenty-twenty. You’ll have three years to train.’ And, ‘What happened to your leg, after they cut it off? Did it have its own funeral?’ which struck Grace as just sick.

  Marie-Louise was the only one she really wanted to see. Marie-Louise, who wanted to be a doctor, seemed to understand that Grace didn’t want tears, or sorrow, or constant questions, and they had the kind of special friendship that meant they didn’t need to talk all the time. She brought books and magazines, and chocolate truffles her mother had made. She talked about prosthetic limbs and how people got used to them, as if all this were quite normal. As if there were a huge but perfectly manageable job to do, and she’d be there to help, all the way.

  There were times when Grace hated her body, wished she could slip out of it. It was spoiled for ever, broken, incomplete. Instead of a right shin and foot, her leg – swollen, multi-coloured with bruising – ended in a smooth stump below the knee. She could hardly bear to look, though the stump received constant attention to check that it was healing well, and had its own special shrinker sock to bring down the swelling.

  Stored on her phone was a photo she couldn’t help looking at, though it felt like being kicked in the stomach. It had been taken by Marie-Louise at the start of term, on the running track in the school field. There stood Grace – the old Grace, as she couldn’t help thinking of herself now – lined up with three others, eager, smiling into the sun. She wore a vest and Lycra shorts; her legs were long and slim.

  Legs. Both of them. Two; a pair. Ready to run. How fantastic it had been to have two fully functioning legs. She thought now that she should have been grateful for that, every single one of those days when she’d never given it a thought.

  When she remembered running, lived it, felt it with all her senses – she wanted to wail and howl. How could that have been taken away from her? The very worst thing she could have lost. Running was more than just running. It was who she was.

  This is me. Running.

  Now? That was me. That was the real me, not this wreck of a person. How can I get the old me back?

  Looking at the photograph through a mist of tears, she poised her thumb to delete it, but couldn’t. To do that would be to lose herself, her self. Fit, athletic Grace. Where was she now?

  I can’t let go of her. Can’t give in. That would make it real.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right to cry,’ said Nurse Liz, Grace’s favourite, with her corkscrew curls that sprang out from a tight ponytail and her big smile that could quickly turn to seriousness. When Grace sobbed, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair!’ Nurse Liz agreed that no, it wasn’t fair at all.

  There were greater unfairnesses in the world, Grace knew; no one had any special right to go through life untroubled, undamaged. But that knowledge couldn’t cut through her grief.

  ‘You were just unlucky. In the wrong place at the wrong time.’ She lost count of the number of people who told her that. It was the just that got her, that sneaky little word that crept in everywhere. Too bad, it meant. Put up with it. There’s no choice.

  In her dreams she had two legs again; she could run, swim, dance. She was anchor in the relay team, sprinting across the line with energy to spare while her team-mates yelled from the trackside. Reality and dream must have switched places; she would wake up, laugh off her disturbing nightmare and go for a run. Her mind was a betrayer, a cruel tease.

  At home the mantelpiece and windowsill were lined with the cards people had sent. Get well soon, some of them said, as if she could grow a new leg, or had nothing more lasting than measles. Looking at them from the sofa, Grace felt that she’d died, that these sympathy cards had been sent to the girl she used to be.

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Now the idea of being graceful was a sick joke.

  She progressed from a wheelchair to crutches, and consultations about a prosthetic limb once the shrinker sock had done its work – a temporary one at first, then endless fittings and tweakings and learning how to walk on her own new leg. It was weird that she had to learn that, how to step forward, how to balance on her new foot like a toddler finding its feet.

  Finding your feet. That was one of those sayings she’d never taken notice of before, but now kept hearing in everyday conversation. Stand on your own two feet. Put your best foot forward.

  It had taken a year for the case to reach court, the trial coinciding with the first anniversary of the accident. Grace’s parents attended each day, and Grace herself was interviewed via a video link to the courtroom. It was a new ordeal for all of them, and now it was over: Gavin Haynes, aged twenty-eight, had been found guilty of dangerous driving and given a ten-year prison sentence.

  ‘Ten years!’ Grace’s mother had raged. ‘Ten years, and I bet he’ll be out in five!’

  Sometimes Grace thought of him, in prison. He had wept in court and said that he was sorry, over and over again. ‘Sorry! A lot of use that is!’ Mum kept muttering.

  In a corner of her mind Grace thought that both of them, Gavin Haynes and herself, were serving a sentence. She was surprised to feel a flicker of sympathy because he’d done something awful that he could never change, or put right, and he’d have to live with that for ever.

  ‘Huh! Don’t waste your pity,’ Marie-Louise said, when Grace explained this. ‘He pleaded Not Guilty, didn’t he? Otherwise there’d have been no court case and you and your parents wouldn’t have had to go through all that.’

  Now the house in Rignell Road, Grace’s home all her life, was up for sale because of the divorce. The proceeds would be split between Mum and Dad when eventually the sale went through, and Dad was buying a brand new house with Chloe, who had money of her own. It seemed to Grace that he’d moved on far too quickly, making this whole other life for himself, while she and her mother scraped together the leftover bits of their old one. She had thought, in her post-operative daze, that the shock of the accident had jolted her parents back together, but no. It was too late for that, and the divorce had gone through soon after.

  Now she and Mum needed to find a flat for themselves, and soon. There was no way they could afford a whole house without Dad’s salary. Although Mum got plenty of work doing marketing and publicity, it was freelance, so she didn’t get regular earnings or holidays or sick pay. They’d need to stay in Hackney, near enough for Grace to continue at Westfields High, but – ideally – far enough from the fateful road junction for her not to pass it every time she went out, whether walking or on a bus. Mum said she felt sick whenever she saw the place – the rebuilt wall with its clean new bricks, the bollards, the traffic lights. What Grace felt was a thrill of revulsion that set her heart pounding and all those stupid what ifs clamouring again, pointless but insistent.

  Grace’s mother had only just started flat-hunting when she received a message from Roger Clark, who till then she’d never heard of. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, staring at her phone, and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Well!’ It was a few moments before Grace could get any sense out of her.

  Roger was the new manager at Flambards. Researching the Russell family
for a First World War project, he’d found Mum’s name – Polly Russell – at first on an ancestry website and then on LinkedIn. ‘This is probably a long shot,’ he had written, ‘but I wonder if you might be related to the Russells who lived at Flambards in Essex in the 1900s?’

  Yes, Mum was.

  They had talked, agreed to meet; Mum had liked Roger, visited Flambards – ‘Oh, Gracey, it’s just as I’ve always imagined!’ – and learned that it was now a centre for residential courses. Roger had plenty of good ideas, Mum said after her visit, but they were struggling to get enough bookings to keep going, and needed an urgent boost in publicity.

  One thing soon led to another. The Trustees, who made all the decisions, had a meeting – Roger was one of them – and they agreed to take Grace’s mother on until the beginning of September, to see if she could make a difference.

  Grace was at first intrigued, then doubtful. ‘You mean stay there? But how can we find a flat if we’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘It’s not that far from London,’ her mother said, and showed Grace on Google Maps. ‘I might even get myself a car.’

  So here they were: Mum with a job to do, and Grace with little idea of how she’d spend six long weeks.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Just Christina

  ‘Welcome to Flambards! Though it doesn’t seem the right way round, me welcoming you two Russells.’

  Roger was tall and slim, about the age of Grace’s dad or perhaps a little older, with a ready smile, and longish hair streaked with grey. He asked about their journey, then said, ‘I’ll take you straight round to the stable yard, so you can see where you’ll be living. The tour can wait till after lunch. Here, let me take one of those cases.’

  There was a moment’s pause. He looked at Grace; she made a point of grasping the handle of her own wheeled case, to show that she could manage by herself. Instead Roger took Mum’s case, as she had a hefty bag as well, and they turned past the house frontage along a drive that curved round to the left. The wheels of the cases jolted and scraped on gravel.

  ‘We’ve got a group in, till Friday morning,’ Roger explained. ‘Landscape painting – you’ll see them at lunch. Then another lot arriving that same evening.’

  Grace felt his hesitation as he glanced sidelong to check that she could keep up; yes, she could. It had taken hours of physiotherapy and exercises at home to walk without lurching, so that when she wore jeans and trainers no one would notice anything unusual, unless they looked more closely than most people did.

  The drive passed underneath a brick arch, and now they were in a square yard flanked by buildings on three sides. A clock above the archway chimed the half-hour with a slightly mournful sound.

  ‘The stable yard!’ Mum said, looking around. ‘Just imagine, Grace – Granny Izz learned to ride a pony here, almost before she could walk.’

  Imagine this being home, Grace thought. Living in a huge house that stood all alone. Walking round to a yard full of horses to ride. It must have seemed quite normal to Granny Izz, as if everyone lived like that.

  ‘No horses here now,’ Roger said. ‘The old stables have all been turned into guest rooms. When your Russell relations lived here there’d have been eight or more horses, grooms to look after them, a coach house.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Mum said. ‘Granny Izz used to say that the horses were looked after better than the people. They got the best food, hours of grooming, warm rugs in winter – they lived in complete luxury.’

  The guest rooms had doors that opened in two halves, like stables, and there was a large stone block in the middle of one row, topped by a pot of scarlet flowers. Grace imagined horse heads looking over their half-doors, and a stable boy wheeling a barrow of hay, whistling as he worked.

  ‘At one time, before your grandmother, Isobel, was born, this used to be the local hunt kennels,’ Roger was saying. ‘The William Russell who owned Flambards before the First World War – now, how was he related to you? – your grandmother’s grandfather, so however many greats that is. Anyway, he lived for hunting, it seems, till he was crippled in a riding accident.’

  The word crippled reverberated into an abrupt embarrassed silence. Grace stood numbly. Mum shuffled her feet on the gravel and Roger looked stricken, as if only now realizing what had come out of his mouth, but with no way of snatching it back.

  Crippled. No one said that any more, but Grace knew what it meant. She felt a flash of sympathy for this William Russell, then withdrew it as she thought of the fox-hunting. Crippled. It suggested someone hunched up small, moving about with difficulty on gnarled, painful limbs, like an illustration in a Victorian novel. For an excruciating moment she thought Roger was going to apologize, which would only make things worse.

  ‘Think of Granny Izz’s mother coming here from London, Gracey, when she was only twelve!’ Mum put on an air of determined cheeriness, to cover the awkward moment. ‘Christina. All on her own, having to learn how to fit in.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Roger sounded relieved.

  ‘Christina was my great-grandmother. Grace’s great-great-grandmother,’ Mum explained.

  Roger nodded; clearly he knew that. ‘Yes, orphaned when she was only five. And she certainly did fit in. Ended up owning the place.’

  ‘I can just about remember her from when I was small,’ said Mum. ‘But Flambards had been sold by then – she moved away for her last few years, when it all got too much.’

  ‘She seems to have been quite a wealthy lady,’ Roger said. ‘I gather she inherited her parents’ money when she was twenty-one, and that gave her enough to take on Flambards.’

  ‘Mm. I’ve no idea where all that money went,’ said Grace’s mother. ‘The house must have swallowed it up, I suppose. Or the horses did. Imagine owning a house the size of Flambards, Gracey, and all the land that goes with it! It sounds like you know more about the Russells than we do,’ she added to Roger.

  ‘Hardly! But I am a bit obsessed, because of the First World War stuff. We’re having a special weekend here in November, for the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, and an exhibition. So Christina and the other Russells will be part of that. And I’ve got a family connection of my own, but I’ll save that for later. So, come and see your flat. It’s upstairs – the converted hayloft. This way, next to what used to be the harness room.’

  A separate door, labelled The Hayloft, opened to a narrow flight of stairs that led to another door at the top. Roger and Grace heaved the cases up; he produced a key with a flourish, and opened up.

  ‘Here we are. All yours for the summer.’

  Mum and Grace followed him in, and Mum exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is lovely!’

  They were in a light, airy main room. One wall was the kitchen – sink, fridge, cooker – and there was a round dining table, a sofa, armchair and flat-screen TV. Roger put down Mum’s case in the middle of the floor, and Grace lugged hers across to join it.

  ‘Bedroom, bedroom, bathroom,’ said Roger, opening doors to show them. ‘Airing cupboard here – towels etcetera. I think you’ve got everything you need, but let me know if not. I’ll leave you to settle in, shall I? Lunch is at one – see you over at the house.’

  He clumped down the stairs, and Grace and her mother looked at each other.

  ‘We’ll be happy here, won’t we?’ Mum said, and there was a kind of pleading in her look, as if it were up to Grace, as if you could decide to be happy.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Roger’s nice, isn’t he? I told you.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘He’s all right.’

  But she did feel inclined to like him, in spite of his blunder. Possibly even because of it – he’d obviously felt awful the moment he heard what he’d said.

  ‘Which bedroom would you like, Gracey? I don’t mind. They’re both gorgeous, aren’t they?’

  Grace chose the smaller of the two, which had a sloping ceiling and a dormer window. Her mother had at first been disappointed that they wouldn’t be li
ving in the main house, but Grace thought this was better, with its wood floors and rag rugs and print curtains, everything clean and new. The big house would be full of people; over here she could get away from everyone when she wanted to.

  Her window, like the ones in the main room, looked out to another yard, behind the stables, where a number of cars were parked, among them the white van that had arrived in such haste. On one side was a brick cottage with its own fenced garden, next to a greenhouse and vegetable beds; on the other, a huge barn. Beyond all that she could see fields and trees, and a distant mauvey-blue horizon.

  ‘The shower’s a walk-in one,’ Mum said, coming out of the bathroom, ‘so it’s fine for you – I did check. We’ve got plenty of wardrobe space. And our own kitchen, so we can cook for ourselves here if we want.’

  ‘Where’s the wifi code?’

  Grace ignored what Mum had said about the shower. She thought of Mum asking Roger about it, explaining that she had a disabled daughter. Disabled. Grace still had trouble accepting that word in relation to herself. Disabled had always meant other people, not her. It meant wheelchairs and handrails and ramps for people who couldn’t do the simple, ordinary things everyone else did without even thinking.

  Mum picked up a folder that lay on the table. ‘Look, there’s the hub, and here’s the code. Let’s make a start on unpacking before lunch.’

  Grace took three photos and sent them to Marie-Louise: It’s going to be really boring here. What are you doing?

  Unpacking could wait. She looked at Instagram, followed a couple of links, but her attention wandered to what Mum had said about Christina. Grace knew from Granny Izz how Christina had come from London at the age of twelve, all by herself, knowing nothing about her relations here or about horses or the countryside. And she was staying for much longer than six weeks – she’d come to live here, whether she wanted to or not. That must have been just like this, only worse.