Thick and Fast

when talking to his son, ‘one day Ambrose all this will be yours.’ The clipped and harnessed gardens, the curtsying and bowing trees, the wide sweep of the ocean. He realised his mouth was open, and quickly closed it. Best get round the back before he called attention to himself.

  Finally Stein had returned and led them through some double doors to the main hall of the house, and from there into an exquisite, lemon yellow room they later learned was called the morning room. Mrs. Haute in person had received them. They had been overawed, as they had in no way expected to actually meet the lady of the house, let alone have to talk to her. They stood to attention while Mr. Stein explained in a few brief sentences who they were and what their lives up to that moment amounted to. It had been a nerve racking and embarrassing experience, especially when she had motioned for them to sit down on a doll's house settee that looked as though it would break under Petunia's ample folds, and Ambrose's sturdy frame. But she had been gracious and witty, doing her best to come across as modern, down to earth and not at all out of touch with the real world and its problems. Hence the loose fitting blouse and designer jeans, the bobbed hair and subtle make-up. She had been friendly in a distant, posh way, as she had been back then, and after a very awkward moment when orange refreshment had been offered, she let them know that they had been conditionally accepted. Stein would later inform them of the details in his office. Salary, accommodation, holidays – a job, two jobs, starting next Monday.

  The burglar alarm would be on, but he knew how to fix that, with or without official diplomas. After all, he had installed it. He walked past the conservatory and round the back to the garages.

  That first day had been so intense, so fast, that they had not really taken it all in. They had been in a daze, as if a fairy godmother had turned their shabby clothes into gowns of golden thread. If they had met Señora Luz at the market they would have walked straight past her, swearing they had never seen her before in their lives. Stein had stuck in their minds only as a negative sensation, and Mrs. Haute had appeared before them as if through the haze of a movie camera, slightly unreal and ephemeral, as if about to suddenly wave her wand and vanish.

  ‘That day changed our lives, Bro’

  Petunia was fond of repeating, though whether she meant for better or for worse Ambrose could not say. Better for her, maybe.

  Under the privet hedge that ran down the far side of the garages was the control box, the original one, the one he had been ordered to put in by Harvey, with all the fuses neatly laid out in rows. From here he could do what he liked with the electricity in the mansion. Like turn off the burglar alarm, unqualified as he was. Time and weather had all but erased the writing on the labels, but he knew which fuses to remove. He looked over the gardens just in case, though he was sure he was alone and unobserved, because in Langley it was not done to spy on one's neighbours, this was not the barbecue belt. He knew that if he tampered with the burglar alarm fuse, the whole house would jump up and start screaming and shaking with deafening bells, and the security firm, maybe even the local police, would see a little red light flashing on their control panel. But if he blacked out the general fuse first, the one without a label that he had added under his own initiative, just as his father had so painstakingly and patiently shown him, then replaced the alarm fuse with a dud, then switched it all back on....... That should work. Not bad for an amateur. Unless he had overlooked something, Haute House was his for the taking.

  He wanted to jump up and down and do a little jig. The plan was being followed to the letter. To the fucking letter, Spotty! Who's the thicky now, eh? Of course, there was still a chance that when he tried to break in the alarm would go off anyway, that he had made some kind of mistake, or that they'd had some new-fangled system installed in his absence, but for now...

  It would have been perfect if his parents could have seen him then, triumphant, cunning, a man with a plan orderly carrying it out point by point. He thought back to his Mother, she would have been so proud of him.

  Peggy Wilson had become Mrs. Ork at the age of twenty, leading her lover, four years her elder, to believe that he had been the first man who had ever possessed her, for although she usually condemned deceit, in this case she felt herself fully justified. She had made the foolish mistake once of admitting her previous experiences, and Lars, a normally cool, even aloof Adonis, had been transformed in a moment. She had gone from making love to fucking, then to being fucked. She had caught sight of him reflected in the car window, and he had seemed to be trying to break her in two, ramming her with sadistic disgust as if it were a substitute for beating her to the ground with his fists. And enjoying every minute of it. So she had lied to George, trustworthy and trusting George, because she knew that if she chose the right occasion, the right amount of drink and sleeplessness, he would never be able to doubt her word. She also suspected that if he believed he had deflowered her, had been the first man to enter her, it would make him love her even more, respect her for longer, would help to keep him faithful. Her intuition had not been wrong, and apart from wandering eyes and torrid fantasies, George Ork had remained loyal.

  To her at least. But George Ork had not shared his wife's unconditional love of their children. He had been bitterly disappointed both by Petunia's looks and Ambrose's intelligence. His daughter was not ugly, not in the classic, repugnant sense some poor creatures have to suffer, but she was definitely not very attractive, either. Her teeth were far too large for her mouth, and when she smiled the cheery effect was ruined by the tombstone aspect of her incisors. Later in life she would become a passionate smoker, and those terrible teeth would turn yellow, her gums would retreat in horror, and even more expanse of unhealthy enamel would be exposed. Her hair grew limp and lacklustre, her eyes were small and round. She had grown fat right from the start, and nothing on earth seemed to be able to reverse that trend. Ungraceful, common, not too bright, easily led... Her father used to shake his head at the thought of her. Which was unfair, because although there was indeed an element of truth in all of his observations and criticisms, he ignorantly glossed over any number of endearing traits that made Petunia much more than a lost opportunity or a failed project.

  Ambrose he had appeared to accept as a cross to bear, a punishment for some past sin he had not remembered committing. As the truth had slowly settled, as the exam results had shuffled in, as the learning curve had taken so long to get off the ground, so his father had stoically lowered his head and accepted that the dream of fabulous wealth would have to wait. Inadvertently he had begun to speak to Ambrose in clearly separated monosyllables, patiently at first, later developing that gently mocking tone that he had used until his death.

  Only now Ambrose had the fuse box under control, which meant he had the house under control, which meant he had the whole plan under control. He felt sure his father would have approved.

  That first Monday had brought them back to earth. They may have been given a job, they may have been offered lodgings, food, some cash at the end of the month, but they would earn every last cent.

  Cleanliness is next to godliness, but cleaning is for the low born or the braindead, as Petunia had known all her life. She had scrubbed and dusted and mopped her way through hundreds of underpaid jobs over the years, just like her mother before her. That was what awaited unskilled labourers, men and women with no qualifications or aptitudes, no exceptional skills, no contacts. Still, no point complaining. She counted her blessings and got on with the tasks in hand under Señora Luz's suspicious vigilance. Ambrose was to be in charge of every menial chore that Stein considered he was capable of completing without making matters worse, especially if it involved getting dirty or lugging things about from place to place. But the Orks were used to hard labour, it was their birthmark. They toiled silently and efficiently from dawn to dusk, and once their trial period was up, they were welcomed into the household as full time staff.

  Haute House. Most people had trouble pronouncing it at first, and were unsur
e whether it was said by dropping the ‘h’ to rhyme with Oat, as in haute cuisine, which was the officially correct form, or if it was the more common but more logical Hout. That was not how it was pronounced in those parts, as the locals were happy and proud to point out. Neither was it, as one of Mrs. Haute's closest rivals had so wittily put it, Haugh-ty, as in whore with a tea. The surname Haute had been simplified through the years and the local accent to ‘Out’, so the place was consequently referred to as Out House, probably with the idea in mind of bringing the self important family down a peg or two.

  The mansion was one of a number of others that had been built over a century ago, all on the same grassy slopes, all overlooking the bay on the right side of town, because birds of a feather flock together and the rich need wealthy neighbours like a model needs a full length mirror. It boasted a golf club whose membership fees were set to make it unassailable by mere mortals, and a chapel, complete with spire and graveyard, to date sparsely populated. As Ambrose made his way towards the service entrance, he couldn't help but notice how the place seemed so