Northanger Abbey

21

As is so often the case, reality fell short of Cat’s expectations. When they rounded the curve, what caught her eye was not a stately pile but a pair of Victorian lodges built without architectural distinction in the local red sandstone. Each had a security camera mounted on it. A modern steel gate slid to one side to allow the General’s car to pass and they followed down a well-maintained tarmac drive. All that could be seen of the abbey itself were the tops of two lines of ornamental chimney pots.

Parkland stretched to either side, dotted with dense copses of mature trees and shrubs, so that wherever one looked it was impossible to see an uninterrupted horizon. Then a sudden scud of heavy rain sprang out of nowhere, reducing visibility and making Cat grateful that the sun roof had not been opened.

Her first view of the abbey was obscured by the rain sluicing across the windscreen. Henry pulled up outside an ancient portico with crumbling pillars and ran round the car to open the door for her. ‘Hurry,’ he urged her. ‘It’s lashing down.’

Cat ran into the shelter and waited for him to unload the boot and join her. Now she had a moment to drink in her surroundings, she was reassured by a generic familiarity with church porches and vestibules she had known all her life. Although Northanger was built from a dark red sandstone that reminded her of blood oranges, in style and scale the portico was very similar to that of the parish church in Piddle Dummer, where her father held evening services every other Sunday. The only things missing were the parish noticeboard and the Oxfam posters.

She heard the boot slam, then Henry appeared through the pelting rain with a couple of suit bags and her own suitcase. ‘There’s a couple of boxes of food, but I’ll leave that for Calman to sort out when he takes the car round the back,’ he said. He dropped his burdens and turned to look back at the cascading rain.

‘So much for the forecast of sunny weather,’ Cat said.

Henry shrugged. ‘It’s probably tropical in Edinburgh now. We seem to get more than our fair share of rain here. Sometimes it’s a lovely day just down the road in Kelso but it’s cloudy and drizzly at Northanger. We’re used to it, but it can be a bit of a shocker for guests.’

‘Funnily enough, you didn’t say anything about rubbish weather till you’d got me here.’

He gave her an evil leer. ‘But you are my prisoner now.’

She laughed. ‘Spare me, sir, I beg of you.’

Henry grabbed the bags again and gestured at the door. ‘We should go in. Do you mind?’

Cat turned a large black iron ring set in the studded door and it swung open silently. They stepped into an ancient hall with a vast stone fireplace, dominated by the wide sweep of a stone staircase that split halfway up and led to either side of a gallery that surrounded the hall. Faded rugs were scattered on the stone flags and the walls were hung with gloomy landscapes dominated by dark crags and ominously tumbling water. Her heart soared. This was what she had dreamed of, this was what she had craved. This was no genteel converted church, it was a fortified house, a castle almost, steeped in history.

‘I’ll just run these bags upstairs,’ Henry said. He nodded towards double doors on the left of the hallway. ‘That’s the drawing room. Father and Ellie will be in there. Just go on in.’ He set off up the stairs at a brisk trot, leaving Cat feeling that she ought to knock. But this wasn’t some Sunday-evening period drama, she reminded herself. This was the twenty-first century and this was her friends’ home. So, cautiously, she opened the door and stuck her head round.

‘Come in, come in,’ the General called. Although he had arrived only moments before them, he looked as if he hadn’t budged since breakfast, sitting in a stylish leather chair with the Telegraph open on his lap.

Cat slipped inside, letting her gaze move out from the General to encompass the room as a whole. After the grandeur of the hall, it was a massive disappointment. Not the scale; that was grand and well-proportioned, dominated by a circular turret that consisted of tall windows supported by a delicate tracery of sandstone beams. It was the décor that astonished and dismayed her. Instead of a massive carved fireplace, rough stone walls and a flagged floor, the room looked like an illustration from a Scandinavian lifestyle magazine. Blond wooden floors with bright modern rugs, plastered walls adorned not with stags’ heads and salmon in display cases but with tapestries and hangings in contemporary style. The furniture flew in the face of tradition also; everything had been designed to within an inch of its life with comfort, beauty and function carrying equal weight. Treacherously, Cat remembered James talking about the family home of an Oxford friend – ‘So cool it wanted to snog itself.’ Given that she’d been expecting atmosphere and cobwebs, Cat felt almost distraught. It reminded her of nothing so much as the ultra-modern home of the vampires in the first Twilight film.

Seeing her look but perceiving nothing of what lay behind it, the General gave an expansive wave. ‘As you see, Cat, we live simply. Nothing for show, everything for daily use. This used to be like a museum, but we took it in hand, didn’t we, Eleanor? No more draughts, no more gloomy corners. Now it’s all about comfort. We’ve not quite finished the project, as you’ll see in your own room, but we’re getting there.’

‘It’s lovely,’ Cat said, thinking a little wistfully of the kitchen in the vicarage with all its draughts and unmatched chairs with their surprise cargoes of cats. Nobody had ever given it a design makeover; it would have reduced a TV presenter to tears. But it was welcoming and warm, not sterile with all the elegance money could buy.

The General glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t imagine anyone wants lunch after our visit to Lachie’s? An early dinner it is, then. I’ll tell Mrs Calman, service at six. Eleanor, why don’t you show Catherine to her room? I’m sure you girls have plenty to occupy yourselves till then.’

No dismissal short of grasping the scruff of her neck could have been clearer. Cat followed Ellie out of the room and they made for the stairs. ‘The drawing room’s amazing,’ Cat said.

‘After my mother died, Father went through the ground floor like a whirlwind. He didn’t want anything that reminded him of her taste, of how she liked things. The entrance hall was the only bit that escaped – Historic Scotland dug their heels in and he couldn’t get listed building consent to strip it out.’ Ellie gave Cat a conspiratorial look. ‘Even Father thought twice about defying Historic Scotland.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Cat as they began to climb the wide, shallow steps with their indentations made by hundreds of years of ascending and descending feet. ‘There’s so much atmosphere here.’

‘I think you’ll find your bedroom’s pretty atmospheric,’ Ellie said. ‘Once he’d sorted out all the rooms he goes into routinely, Father more or less ran out of steam. It’s not quite medieval in the guest wing, but it’s not that modern either, apart from the plumbing. When Father came back from the Falklands, he had a real bee in his bonnet about efficient plumbing, so you will at least have a bathroom that works!’

Once they reached the gallery, Ellie pointed to a corridor on the right. ‘That’s the family corridor. Where Henry and Freddie and I have our bedrooms, and our sitting room. The middle corridor is Father’s domain. And here –’ she led the way into a long corridor that snaked away from the staircase ‘– is the guest wing. I had Mrs Calman put you right at the end because that’s got the best views.’ The stone flags echoed as the two girls continued through a dog-leg that cut off the view back to the main stairs. They reached the end of the passage and Ellie turned to a door on the right. ‘Here we are.’ Ellie lingered on the threshold, as if she was reluctant to enter. ‘The door opposite leads to the back stairs, which brings you out opposite the dining room. I brought you this way so you’d know how to find our sitting room. It’s at the end of the corridor I showed you at the top of the stairs. Why don’t you join us there when you’ve got yourself settled in?’ And she was off, walking briskly back in the direction she’d come from.

Feeling a little mystified, Cat let herself into the room. It was a generous, unremarkable cube. The walls were plastered and painted the pale lemon of weak sunlight. A large painting of a seascape hung on one wall. It reminded Cat of the McTaggarts she had seen at the Kirkcaldy gallery where she’d gone with the Allens to the Vettriano exhibition. It felt like light years ago now. The floor was covered in sisal matting, and the king-sized pine bed was set against a wall so that from it the occupant had a view through two windows across treetops to distant hills. A heavily ornate Victorian wardrobe and matching chest of drawers stood in the far corner, and in the shallow bay of one window there was a black japanned chest about four feet in height.

It was the only object in the room that excited Cat’s interest, but this wasn’t the time to explore it. A look wouldn’t hurt, though. ‘Oh, but you are so tempting,’ she said, running a hand over its smoothly lacquered top. She took a moment to examine it, seeing that the front was split in two, as if it were two doors. But they were doors without a lock and without handles. Puzzled, she looked more closely and realised the lid over-lapped the doors and acted as a means of closure. Satisfied that she’d be able to return to it in her own time, she turned away and took out her phone, snapping several shots of her bedroom and the marble-lined bathroom beyond, with its roll-top bath and smoked-glass shower cubicle.

But when she went to send the photos to Bella and her sisters, she was dismayed to see there was no phone signal. Nor was there any indication that there was an available wifi connection. Surely that couldn’t be right? The Tilneys couldn’t exist in this isolated place without digital connections, could they? She knew there were a handful of people in the village who didn’t have email or mobile phones, but they were either old or weird. The General might be eccentric but she didn’t think he was weird. There had to be a reason for this lack of connection, and the creepy little voice she didn’t want to listen to had one or two ideas what that might be.

Giving herself a mental shake, Cat realised Ellie and Henry might be wondering what was taking her so long. She opened her bag and thrust her clothes randomly into the chest of drawers, then ran back down to the junction at the top of the stairs. She gave a curious glance down General Tilney’s corridor, but she could see nothing but blank walls and closed doors. She scuttled on down past more closed doors until she arrived at one that was ajar. Through the door floated the sound of a guitar played with no little skill.

Cat pushed the door open and Henry looked up from a somewhat battered old guitar. He gave her a welcoming smile. ‘You found us. Ellie was afraid she hadn’t given you clear enough directions. Come in and join us. We like to think of this as the Slytherin common room.’

‘Hardly,’ Ellie said, rising from the comfy chintz sofa where she was sprawled. ‘When you’re around, it’s more like Hufflepuff. Typical lawyer, all hot air and bluster.’

There was certainly a feel of boarding school common room about the place. Shelves groaned with books that ranged from children’s classics to current bestsellers. Towers of board games and jigsaws leaned drunkenly in one corner. An electric keyboard, a drum machine and an expensive-looking sound system filled another. A TV, DVD and games console completed the possibilities. The furniture was battered and scruffy but everything looked comfortable. It was, Cat thought, almost like home.

She lowered herself into an armchair piled with cushions and luxuriated in the comfort. ‘What a great room,’ she said.

‘It’s always been the place we could escape from order and orders,’ Henry said. ‘Your room OK?’

Cat nodded. ‘Better than OK. It’s lovely. Great views.’

‘Mother always said it had the best light in the house. When she was piecing a quilt she used to take her fabrics down there to see how the colours truly looked together,’ Ellie said.

‘There’s no phone signal, though,’ Cat said, taking out her phone and checking. Still nothing.

‘Father refuses point-blank to have a tower on our land, so we’re in a black hole here,’ Henry said. ‘Sometimes you can pick up one or two bars up by the lodge, but if you want anything decent, you have to go a couple of miles down the Kelso road. Sorry about that. If you need to phone home, there’s not a problem, we’ve got a perfectly functional landline.’

‘What about wifi? I’ve got nothing coming up in my phone menu.’

Ellie groaned. ‘I know. I’m sorry. We do have wireless, but Father is completely paranoid about it. He’s convinced that if he leaves the router switched on, all sorts of hackers and spies will crawl inside our computers to spy on us and empty our bank accounts.’

‘They’re welcome to mine,’ Henry muttered. ‘If they can find anything in it.’

‘So he only switches it on when he wants to use it, which is almost never.’

‘You mean, you don’t get to use your own wifi?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie said.

‘But how do you do Facebook and Twitter and stuff?’

Ellie and Henry exchanged a look. ‘When I’m here, we go into Kelso. There’s a coffee shop with free wifi,’ Henry said.

‘And when he’s not here ...’ Ellie looked embarrassed, ‘the Calmans have their own wifi and I know the password. When they’re both busy, I sneak up to the lodge and sit on their windowsill.’

What was it she’d read in that Scott Fitzgerald short story, that the rich were different, that getting things early made them soft? It looked like there was some truth in that. Cat couldn’t imagine herself or any of her siblings giving in so meekly to such a ridiculous interdiction.

Unless of course the Tilneys had other reasons, deeper reasons for wanting to keep their privacy intact.