The Peacock E-Book

Isabel Bogdan

• Herausgeber: V&Q Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 278

Beschreibung

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what's going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan's book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it's coming home to roost.

Leseprobe

Isabel Bogdan was born in Cologne and studied English and Japanese. She is an enthusiastic Hamburg-dweller, reader, writer and translator into German (including Jane Gardam, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde). Her first book Sachen Machen came out in 2012, followed in 2016 by The Peacock, and in 2019 by Laufen. She has won prizes for her translating, her writing and the online interview project “Was machen die da?”

Annie Rutherford champions poetry and translated literature in all its guises. She works as Programme Co-ordinator for StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival, and as a writer and translator. Her published translations include German/Swiss poet Nora Gomringer’s Hydra’s Heads (Burning Eye Books, 2018) and Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva’s In My Garden of Mutants (Arc, 2021). She co-founded the literary magazine Far Off Places and Göttingen’s Poetree festival.

The Peacock

Isabel Bogdan

Translated from the German by Annie Rutherford

Co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union

V&Q Books, Berlin 2021

An imprint of Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH

First published in the German language as Der Pfau by Isabel Bogdan

© 2016 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne/Germany

All rights reserved

Translation copyright © Annie Rutherford

Editing: Katy Derbyshire

Copy editing: Angela Hirons

Cover photo © Dorit Guenter

Cover design: Pingundpong*Gestaltungsbüro

Typesetting: Fred Uhde

ISBN: 978-3-86391-293-2eISBN 978-3-86391-308-3

www.vq-books.eu

For Jeannie and Hector Maclean

Inhalt

Über den Autor

The Peacock

Translator’s Note

One of the peacocks had gone mad. Or maybe he just couldn’t see very well. At any rate, he suddenly regarded anything blue and shiny as competition on the marriage market.

Luckily, there were very few blue and shiny things in the little glen at the foot of the Highlands. There were fields and meadows and trees and altogether a great deal of green, and there was the heather. And any number of sheep. The only shiny blue things which occasionally strayed there were the holidaymakers’ cars. Lord and Lady McIntosh had converted the former farm buildings, barns and anything else vaguely suitable which belonged to their estate into holiday cottages, so that the old place recovered at least some of the money it gobbled up. The oldest parts of the castle presumably dated back to the seventeenth century, when the castle had been built, and there had been various annexes and extensions over the following centuries. There hadn’t always been enough money for ongoing modernisations, and this remained the case today. The house cost money. The plaster would flake off the facade and need replacing, and then a water pipe would burst, or the roof would need repairing. Lady Fiona mainly repaired the electrics herself, because hardly any electricians nowadays can still cope with 110 volts or deal with the old fuses. The heating costs regularly brought the McIntoshes out in a sweat, which is more than could be said of the temperatures in the house. The ground floor was paved with flagstones, so it was never particularly warm, even in hot summers, and hot summers were rare. In winter it was even colder. There was a central heating system which didn’t deserve the name, and so most rooms were simply cold. Only the kitchen was always pleasant, with a fire burning constantly in the old Aga. Almost all year round, the Laird and Lady spent their evenings by the fireplace in the library, where they read, worked or watched DVDs. In winter they sometimes wore woolly hats to bed. They didn’t mind, they were used to it. When they were frozen through, they took a bath or got into the hot tub outside on the great lawn.

Lord McIntosh sometimes joked that he might as well go ahead and try to insulate the house with banknotes. The Laird was a classics scholar and didn’t understand much about buildings. The Lady was an engineer and understood rather more, despite working for a wind turbine company. They’d both mastered the basics of addition and subtraction. They weren’t poor, they had more than enough to live on but not enough for a thorough renovation of the old property.

The cottages had only slightly more modern facilities – they were somewhat better insulated and had carpets and low ceilings, so they were considerably easier to heat. And of course, every bed had an electric blanket. It was really quite cosy in the former gatehouse a mile and a half away by the entrance to the drive, in the gardener’s house on the other side of the wee river, in the washhouse half a mile up the glen, in the former stables beyond the woods, and in the other cottages dotted around further away in the glen, next to gravel roads or at the ends of muddy tracks. You visited your next-door neighbours by car here, and if you were drunk on the way home, it didn’t matter too much because you were unlikely to meet another car or get pulled over. If you landed in a ditch, there were enough tractors which could pull you out again. The so-called village was made up of a handful of houses, a tiny church, and a telephone box nobody had used for years.

Renting out the cottages was going quite well, people loved the peace and quiet and the nature. Getting away from everything, no phone signal, no TV, just the murmur of the stream. They mostly came in the summer, often middle-aged couples who worked long hours back home and would mainly go for walks here, or families with children. Life was less hurried here than in the city. The nearest town was twelve miles away.

In a fit of exuberance one day, Lord McIntosh had purchased five peacocks, three females and two males; he had imagined how pretty it would be when the males strutted around the great lawn in front of the house, fanning out their trains. The less attractive females were to stay quietly in the background, discreetly giving the males a reason to compete and fan their tail feathers in the first place. That’s how he’d pictured it. Lord McIntosh was very keen on animals in general, but he didn’t understand very much about them. He hadn’t counted on the peacocks widening their radius of activity so much that they generally weren’t to be seen at all. He also hadn’t counted on the fact that, instead, they could be heard very well indeed, their cries echoing through the glen, so that it sounded a bit like a jungle. But the McIntoshes got used to that, and on the whole the peacocks were left to themselves and did as they pleased. And they only fanned their trains during mating season in the spring; after that, they shed the long tail feathers. These only grew back the following spring, which impressed Lady Fiona all over again each year. Nature really was full of marvels! Once a year the peacocks bred somewhere in the wood and had young, most of which didn’t survive. Each year one or two made it, and by now there were at least four males and six females, although no one knew the exact number. The Laird only fed the animals occasionally, mainly in the winter when they couldn’t find much to eat. Occasionally one of them froze to death somewhere in the woods, and the McIntoshes didn’t really understand why, because the peacocks normally gathered in the shed behind the house where they were fed and where it was considerably warmer. The peacocks came to accept the two dogs, Albert and Victoria, or rather the other way round: Albert realised at some point, firstly, that the peacocks fought back and, secondly, that he wasn’t allowed to treat them as toys anyway, and Victoria was too small and too old to even think of such a thing. At some point the peacocks even settled on the division of feed and on social niceties with the cantankerous old goose, and after a while, all of the animals got on and basically left one another alone. They lived peacefully alongside each other and the holidaymakers were delighted no matter what.

Until one of the peacocks went mad. Or couldn’t see very well. Afterwards, of course, it was impossible to find out what the problem was and when it had begun. At any rate, when Mr and Mrs Bakshi arrived at the end of August, nobody could have suspected a thing. The Bakshis had rented one of the cottages for three weeks. They were in the former washhouse and were enchanted and enraptured, saying quite often how good they had it and how delightful everything was and how lucky they were to have ended up here. In all honesty, the cottage wasn’t exactly luxurious. There was no shower, just a badly insulated bathtub in which the water always went cold immediately. In the kitchen, the floor sloped so much that the Bakshis felt like they were on a ship the first few days, for the ground was never quite where they expected it to be. But it didn’t take long before they got used to the fact that the water never fully ran out of the sink, because the plughole wasn’t at the lowest point. Mrs Bakshi could cope with the fact that the oil always ended up on one side of the pan – she found this charming and enchanting too. At some point, they even thought it handy that every grape they dropped rolled into the same corner.

Once a day, Mr Bakshi hosed down the paving slabs in front of the cottage to wash away the goose muck. For reasons no one understood, the goose’s favourite place to be was right in front of their door. Mr Bakshi was impressed each day by how much mess a single goose could produce. Lady Fiona McIntosh was a wee bit embarrassed that the goose had to choose the area by the washhouse door, of all places, as her new favourite spot, but the Bakshis assured her it didn’t bother them at all. Really, the Lady said, a goose like that wasn’t meant to be alone, it wasn’t good for the creature. But she didn’t want to keep acquiring new geese ad infinitum, just to make sure no one goose was ever alone. So perhaps the goose was just looking for a bit of company.

The Bakshis spent their three weeks mainly doing nothing. They went on a lot of walks – down the drive, past the little gatehouse and through the village, along the side of a field (home, surprisingly enough, to two alpacas), over the small footbridge across the river, back along the riverbank to the next bridge but one, and then back to the house. Or they went up to the left behind the house, passed the ruined chapel, which was hidden somewhat behind a dense thicket of trees, crossed a field of cows, and then arced up to the driveway and made their way back from there. On the way, they picked blackberries or stopped to enjoy the views of the hilly landscape and the Highlands up to the north. They opened gates and stepped in cowpats, climbed over fences and stepped in sheep droppings; they rinsed their shoes in the stream which ran through the valley and washed their hands in it. They marvelled at the sheer number of rabbits, went birdwatching and once even saw a magnificent stag. On a particularly warm day, Lady Fiona showed them a place hidden by trees behind a field of cows where the stream was wider, forming a natural pool which they could swim in. It was cold but beautiful – by swimming gently against the current, you could stay in the same place. The Bakshis laughed with pleasure, dried themselves off swiftly afterwards and got dressed.

Otherwise they read and they watched the goose and the peacocks strutting across the lawn. Mr Bakshi crept persistently after the peacocks trying to photograph them, which turned out to be bafflingly tricky, and Mrs Bakshi crocheted a blanket for the grandchild they were expecting soon, their first.

They were so delighted by everything that on their final evening they invited the McIntoshes to a farewell dinner in the washhouse, at which Mrs Bakshi served the Laird and Lady a spectacular chicken korma. It wasn’t really the done thing to visit the cottages of paying guests, but since the death of the old Laird a few years ago, Hamish and Fiona McIntosh no longer stood on ceremony.

Nonetheless, Lord McIntosh wanted to first of all deal with some formalities that evening. The tourist board was carrying out a statistical survey and all holidaymakers were meant to fill in a questionnaire: how long they’d been in the area, how often they’d been before, how old they were, what sort of accommodation they’d stayed in and so on. A never-ending questionnaire, which Lady Fiona – as the Laird told the Bakshis – sometimes filled in herself, instead of bothering visitors with it. If needs be, she simply made something up. He didn’t think much of this approach, he admitted, but his wife could be almost unstoppable sometimes and was very creative.

Well then, give it here, said Mr Bakshi, and took the questionnaire off the Laird. Mrs Bakshi said people wouldn’t fill it in any more honestly than Lady Fiona anyway, so he needn’t worry about it. She herself basically ticked whatever she found funniest in this sort of thing or wrote down some kind of nonsense. Lady Fiona McIntosh considered this sensible. The ladies felt they understood each other.

Mr Bakshi read out the questions and asked his wife why they had come here and what they had done during their stay. She asked what the options were; there, she said, wildlife watching – that sounded super, that’s what they were here for! They really had seen an owl the other night, she said. Yes, the Laird said, you saw them quite often here. And this, said Mrs Bakshi, action and adventure, another good one! He should tick that too. Indeed, Mr Bakshi told the McIntoshes, they had experienced both of these things that morning – plenty of action and adventure with wildlife, right here in the cottage.

That morning, they explained, they had been woken by a strange noise. Mrs Bakshi had thought it must be birds frolicking about outside on the windowsill, perhaps beating the glass with their wings while they, well, made little baby birds. She had got up and carefully drawn the curtains aside and indeed, there was a blue tit there – not outside the window though, but rather on the inside. It was fluttering against the windowpane in a desperate attempt to get out. The Bakshis asked themselves how the blue tit could have got in, all the windows had been closed overnight. Less for fear of birds than of midges. Lord McIntosh said that sometimes birds actually fell down the chimney and made quite a mess with all the soot they brought in with them. The blue tit looked quite clean though, the Bakshis said. Oh well, at any rate it had been inside, in their bedroom. Mrs Bakshi had pushed open the window, and the blue tit had understood pretty quickly, had fluttered onto the windowsill and then out into the woods. Mrs Bakshi had gone back to bed and left the window open to let in a bit of fresh air.

Not a particularly exciting story in itself, but an hour later they awoke to the same sound again. Stupid creature, flying right back in here, Mr Bakshi had grunted into his pillow. But this time it was a swallow, he told the McIntoshes, and tragically it had got stuck between the two panes of the opened window. It took quite a bit of effort to manoeuvre it out, for the creature had panicked, and when they moved the window, it just got its wings stuck even more. In the end, they used the handle of a wooden spoon to somehow push the bird – by now totally distressed – up between the windowpanes. Mr Bakshi was finally able to catch it and put it on the windowsill, where it flew away out into the air – luckily it wasn’t injured. But it really was peculiar, the Bakshis said, that two birds had behaved so strangely on one and the same morning, just flying into a human dwelling like that. They didn’t normally do that.

Lord McIntosh told them that for a while now a pair of eagles had been nesting somewhere further up in the mountains and that occasionally you could see the eagles from here, mainly far away, high up in the sky. But it did sometimes happen that they came closer and then the birds in the glen always went quite mad. Perhaps that had been the case that morning. First a blue tit mysteriously getting into the house and then a swallow getting stuck between the windowpanes – birds didn’t normally act that oddly.

And so the conversation rippled along and they talked about birds while eating Mrs Bakshi’s delicious chicken korma. Mr and Mrs Bakshi found it all unbelievably interesting and wonderful to be so close to nature, and Hamish and Fiona were pleased their holidaymakers were so happy.

It was at the end of that evening that the peacock went crazy for the first time. Mr and Mrs Bakshi accompanied the McIntoshes to the door, and when they opened it, the light from the hallway fell on the Bakshis’ car. It was metallic blue, glinted in the light and was, to put it mildly, not exactly a luxury vehicle. The four of them were standing by the door and exchanging courtesies when suddenly, as if out of nowhere, one of the peacocks lunged at the car and attacked the vehicle, crying loudly and beating its wings, hammering with a terrible clatter at the hood with its beak, and baffling and startling the McIntoshes just as much as the Bakshis. No one wants to mess with an angry peacock and this one was clearly quite furious. The ladies fled into the cottage and the men had them pass out a blanket, which they shook, yelling at the peacock. This apparently impressed him sufficiently and he flapped away.

The Bakshis and the McIntoshes first of all drank a whisky for the fright. And then another. And then they stopped, because Lady Fiona was, after all, a Lady. Before the McIntoshes left, they turned off the light in the cottage so as not to illuminate the blue car and tempt the angry peacock back again.

The damage to the car, it turned out the next morning, was considerable. The peacock had achieved quite a lot in the short space of time; the car bonnet had dents in it, and the paint was chipped in several places. Mr Bakshi said it wasn’t so bad, his workshop would be able to fix it, and anyway his wife had been saying for years that he really ought to buy a new car. But, well, Mr Bakshi said, he was somehow rather fond of the old thing.

There you go then, said the Laird, for that very reason he’d simply run it through his own insurance. He wanted to cover the damages, of course – and on top of that, the Bakshis were welcome to stay for free in the former washhouse for two weeks next year – that’s if they dared to come back after this attack. He was sure the peacock would have calmed down by then. Who knew, maybe he had been disturbed by the eagle’s presence too? Why this would cause him to attack a car, the Laird wasn’t sure, but who knew what kind of displacement activities a peacock was capable of?

And so the two couples said goodbye with all kinds of assurances that it really wasn’t that bad – the insurance would sort it out, and they’d certainly come to an agreement, and Mr Bakshi should definitely send them the bill, and they’d be delighted to see each other next year.

All of this happened in mid-September. In October, the peacock tore a blue rubbish bag to shreds and spread its contents spaciously across the lawn; took a visiting child’s blue toy away and carried it off into the woods where it couldn’t be found, so that Hamish had to pacify the distraught child with a somewhat larger present in red; and smashed, with considerable noise, the decorative blue ceramic sphere which Fiona had placed next to the pond, hacking it into a thousand little shards.

At the start of November, the little old dog, Victoria, died and was buried in the woods. Albert and the McIntoshes were grieving and had other things on their minds than dealing with the crazy peacock. One day the blue plastic water butt had holes and tears in it and started leaking, while a friend of the McIntoshes was only just able to park his car in the garage in time. Ryszard rescued the blue plastic sheet covering the springs of the trampoline, which stood in a corner of the great lawn, by concealing it under a green sheet. Ryszard, a young Pole, was responsible for everything that went on outdoors. Innumerable acres of land belonged to the estate, almost half the glen, and this land had to be looked after. Ryszard took care of the heather, the woods and the fields; he patched fences, serviced the electrical lines to the cottages, dug ditches with the digger, used machinery to remove fallen trees, and chopped them up to be used as firewood. He also cared for the great lawn in front of the house and dealt with anything technical which Lady Fiona couldn’t manage herself. Ryszard was a great help to Lord and Lady McIntosh and even something of a relief after a few unpleasant experiences with his predecessors. Ryszard could see for himself what needed to be done, he enjoyed working and he worked hard. He didn’t talk much, for even after a few years in Scotland, his English wasn’t particularly good. He was reserved but always friendly and reliable.

By now it was clear that it wasn’t the eagle which so enraged the peacock, but the colour blue. The peacock was still young and had clearly reached the onset of puberty – he had only recently grown his blue plumage and his train still wasn’t particularly long – and the McIntoshes assumed that this was all some kind of adolescent hormonal confusion. The only blue thing the bird didn’t attack was the other peacocks. They were also the only things which fought back. The mating season was over, but they hadn’t noticed the peacock acting strangely then. Nobody knew whether he had mated successfully, and something must have gone wrong. The McIntoshes decided to wait and see whether the problem would clear up on its own over the winter and, if they had the chance, to ask for the vet’s advice. At the moment they just didn’t have time to deal with it – they were expecting important guests.

The management of the investment department of a London private bank had rented the entire west wing for a long weekend at the end of November. The head of the department was travelling with four colleagues, a cook and a psychologist, for Creative Time-Out and Teambuilding Activities – as it was called. Creative, complained Hamish McIntosh, why do bankers need to be creative, thank you very much, perhaps to doctor balance sheets? The McIntoshes sensed from the very first telephone calls with the department secretary (who wouldn’t be coming herself) that the head of the investment department could be somewhat difficult. But she was bringing money. And so they were busy doing up the west wing, for it might have been pretty luxurious a hundred years ago, but that was a hundred years ago. And it was about that long since anyone had come here with their own cook too.

Aileen was doing overtime. Aileen was the housekeeper and cleaner for the big house and the cottages. She did the family’s laundry and changed the sheets in the holiday homes, she put out tea and biscuits when new guests arrived, and she had pretty clear ideas about what was necessary, what needed to be done and what was entirely superfluous. In short, Aileen kept the show on the road. One day she would be an excellent homemaker, but after a few short catastrophic relationships, just now she was happy on her own. She still had plenty of time to have weans, and she wasn’t worried about finding the right man to start a family. He just needed to be peaceable, not drink too much and have a job – her requirements weren’t all that exacting. She would continue to work too, of course – she enjoyed being the mistress of several cottages and all that belonged to them.

Aileen informed Hamish that a new shower unit for the bathroom in the west wing was essential. They really couldn’t subject guests to the trickle of that old lukewarm shower any more, certainly not such important guests. Hamish generally did what Aileen said, for she was considerably more practically minded than he was and so he had a new shower unit installed, one which produced unlimited amounts of really hot water. Not much could be done about the water pressure unfortunately – the old pipes simply didn’t allow for more pressure. But a hot trickle of a shower was still better than a lukewarm one.

Over time, quite a lot of junk had accumulated in the west wing. It was quite big and only rarely rented out, so the McIntoshes stored all sorts of things there when they couldn’t otherwise decide what to do with them. Boxes of books and the grownup children’s discarded toys, pieces of furniture they no longer used but which were either too nice to throw away or simply hadn’t been disposed of yet, crockery, vases, Christmas decorations, worn-out rugs, antlers, paintings and all the other things found in old houses which have been passed down from generation to generation and which nobody ever moves out of. Aileen sorted through some stuff, took this or that bit of broken furniture to the dump, and put everything else in the garage for now. It would be kept dry and out of the way there – and the garage door could simply be shut. Which of course didn’t solve the actual problem but merely relocated it. Some of the old things ought to be taken to the charity shop, and Aileen knew perfectly well that each time everything was sorted through and moved, it would prompt the Laird to part with a few more things. In that sense, this was at least a step in the right direction. And above all, the west wing could now be rented out again.

Aileen took down the long, dark red velvet curtains and took them to the dry-cleaners because they wouldn’t fit in any washing machine. She shampooed the carpets in the entire west wing, cleaned the windows, and checked inside all of the wardrobes and dresser drawers to make sure nothing had been left behind by a previous visitor, or in case the odd moth had died in any of them. She even cleaned the glass of the old framed prints. In some of them, colonies of tiny insects had settled between the picture and the glass. The print The Weighing of the Birds was particularly bad. She took it down and carried it to the laundry room so as to clean it in peace later. There were advantages to these important people coming, she thought. She could finally clean as thoroughly as she’d been wanting to do for ages. Really, she should have taken all the pictures down and out of their frames and removed the insects, but she didn’t have the time. At least the picture with the worst infestation ought to look alright, particularly given that it hung so prominently, right next to the front door. What even were these creatures which lived in the picture frames? she asked herself. What did they live off? Such infinitesimally wee bits of paper that you couldn’t even spot the damage when you looked? Dust? All that could be seen were tiny spots, which presumably came from the animals’ excretions. And where did the beasties come from anyway, how did they get into the frames? Aileen removed the tiny minibeasts with a paintbrush. The print showed a shooting party which was weighing the pheasants and grouse they had shot, on a large set of scales.

Two days before the bankers were due to arrive, the picture was hanging in its place again. The glass was now considerably cleaner than that of the other pictures, making the dirt on the rest of them even more conspicuous, but Aileen couldn’t take all the other pictures out of their frames to clean the inside of the glass now. Simply removing all the pictures wasn’t an option either, because there were large pale marks on the wallpaper behind them.

Aileen made the beds and laid out sufficient towels. When, last of all, she tried to blow and shake the dust off some old dried flowers, the posy disintegrated completely. The dried petals fluttered to the floor and Aileen had to fetch Henry again. Henry was the hoover, a small, round, red appliance with a painted smiling face. The hoover tube was attached to Henry’s nose, like a trunk. All the cottages had Henrys too, and the friendly vacuum cleaners always made Aileen smile. She was on the whole a cheerful soul and was generally good-humoured. She was in a particularly good mood today. She had taken a radio with her into the west wing and was singing along to it at the top of her voice. She and Henry cut a mean figure as they danced across the carpet to Abba – You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your… And then she got an awful shock because suddenly Lady Fiona was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching her with amusement. Aileen turned Henry and the radio off and stammered, gosh, that had startled her! How long had the Lady been standing there? Lady Fiona grinned, said, Och, and told her that the driver from the dry-cleaners had been and had delivered the curtains, and could Aileen come and help her carry them?

The two women lugged the metres of thick velvet into the west wing and hung up the curtains. Aileen stood at the top of the stepladder, the Lady passed her the heavy curtains and both of them were pleased but a little ashamed at how magnificent the curtains now looked and how necessary it had clearly been.

The postie tooted his horn at the front of the house. Lady Fiona left to see to him, and Aileen turned the radio on again. It might be a while before the Lady returned, but she couldn’t hang up the next curtain on her own, it was too heavy. She inspected the bathroom once more to see if there was anything left to do there, and she tested the new shower. She sang along to the radio somewhat less loudly this time, worried Lady Fiona might overhear her again. The water was at least nice and warm now, but it trickled out of the showerhead as meekly as it ever had. Ach well, she decided. That wasn’t her problem. If the bankers had an issue with it, then that was their bad luck. Maybe a wee bit less luxury would even do them some good. Aileen didn’t have a particularly high opinion of bankers.

The next curtains to hang up were the ones in the living room. Aileen took the stepladder through, and then Come on Eileen came on the radio. Her song! Aileen began singing at the top of her voice again, chose the ladder as her dance partner this time, and reeled with it through the living room, where her previous partner, Henry, presented an unfortunate trip hazard. Maybe he was jealous. A leg of the stepladder got caught in the hoover tube, and Aileen stumbled and fell, along with the ladder, on top of Henry. She heard a crack in her right arm. The pain was overwhelming. Dazed, she remained on the ground until Lady Fiona came back; freed her from the tangle of the grinning Henry, his cable, the hoover tube and the stepladder; turned off the – in Aileen’s words – goddamn bloody radio; and called an ambulance. It didn’t take a doctor to recognise that Aileen’s arm was broken.