Black Rabbit Hall Read Online Free

I see a whole world waiting for you, Amber. Look, there’s a young woman in a neat little skirt suit walking to work.’ Note: Momma doesn’t work but she wears a navy skirt suit from Paris for church on Sundays. I guess that’s work too. ‘I see a couple on a bench kissing …’ she raises one eyebrow ‘… rather passionately, I must say.’
    I look away from the embracing couple quickly – obviously I wouldn’t if Momma wasn’t sitting next to me – and wonderhow it would feel to kiss someone like that on a public bench, so lost in the kiss I didn’t care who saw.
    ‘I guess what I’m
trying
to say is that you’re going to have lots of fun before you get married.’
    School. Finishing school. A job at Christie’s, maybe. It’s hard to see that there’s much room left for the fun bit before it stops.
    ‘So you’re not going to worry about missing one party?’ Momma fixes the dress flat over her thighs where my head has rumpled it.
    ‘Suppose.’
    ‘Not a very convincing answer.’
    I try to hide my smile beneath grumpiness, enjoying the pretence that Momma needs my approval, the pretence that I might not give it, that it matters at all. I know I am lucky like this. My school friends all get bossed about by their mothers, polite, faintly irritated Englishwomen in stiff dresses who never seem to throw back their heads and laugh so that you can see the wiggly bit in their throat. My mother can ride bareback. She wears denim jeans when we’re in the country. And she’s by far the prettiest mother at the school gate.
    ‘Never forget how privileged we are still to have Black Rabbit Hall. So many of Daddy’s friends have had to demolish their country houses and sell off the land, or open their homes to the public, awful things like that. We must never take it for granted.’
    ‘It takes ages to get there.’
    ‘We’ll all drive down together. It’ll be fun.’ She nudges me. ‘Hey, maybe one day they’ll open an airport on the Roseland.’
    ‘That’s never going to happen.’
    ‘Well …
good
.’ She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘We don’t want to make it too easy, do we?’
    ‘Then it wouldn’t be our special place.’ I say this shamelessly to please her. And it does.
    ‘Exactly!’ She grins and her eyes glint from green to yellow, a leaf and its underside. Filled with light again, distance gone. ‘I always say to Daddy that Black Rabbit Hall is the one still sane point in this mad, changing world. It’s our safe, happy place, isn’t it, Amber?’
    I hesitate. For some reason it feels as though everything rests on my answer.



Three
    The storm will barrel up the creek around six o’clock, Daddy says, standing on the terrace in his crumpled cream suit, tilting back his fedora with one finger and sniffing the air, like a hunting hound. It’s actually pretty obvious a storm is about to hit – the air is sticky, dark clouds are jamming the sky above a mirror-black sea – but it’s not our place to point it out. We all know how much Daddy loves standing on the terrace, one hand gripping the balustrade, chest puffed, muttering about the weather and the fallow deer, complaining about the rabbits and the leaking roof. Not that anyone does anything about it.
    Our house in London doesn’t leak. Or drip. Or rattle in the night. Your hair doesn’t get blown about as you cross the bedroom landing. Bits of the roof don’t fly off in a high wind, like laundry from a line. And if it did my parents would get someone in to fix it. But at Black Rabbit Hall, none of that stuff bothers them. In fact, I’m beginning to think that, secretly, they may quite like it.
    At the moment there’s a bowl in the corner of my bedroom that Toby calls a potty. (‘Oh, you’ve filled the potty again, Amber!’ he hoots, and I whack him around the head with
Jane Eyre
.) There’s at least six buckets in the old ballroom, which is so leaky only the little ones use it, whizzing up and down on their