Alice let out a long breath when she saw me. ‘You’ll have all the boys queuing up to dance with you.’

  I smiled into a grubby mirror leaning next to a pile of boxes. There was only one boy whose attention I wanted. And it occurred to me, as I stared dreamily at my reflection, trying to imagine what it would be like to finally kiss Jude, my first real grown-up kiss, that Daddy would approve of the match. Jude’s family were rich and Catholic, and Jude was handsome and polite. I remembered what Alice had said before, that he was from new money, but really, I sucked the inside of my lip, even Daddy had to understand that you couldn’t have everything.

  It was three o’clock before the Volvo’s boot was eventually packed, and Mummy and Daddy climbed into the front seats with Dilly. The Labs had been left behind. The ancient car spluttered down the drive, Mummy waving one hand from the driver’s window, Daddy staring straight ahead. Dilly would be on Mummy’s lap, her sharp little muzzle resting on the steering wheel. Daddy refused to touch the dachshund – saying she wasn’t a real dog, but really it was because she was prone to nipping anyone who wasn’t Mummy.

  We watched from the front steps. ‘At last,’ Alice said out of the corner of her mouth, waving and smiling. ‘Thought they’d never leave.’

  The car disappeared inside a smoke screen of fumes, and as it turned the corner by the weeping willow, Jude and Henry whooped and high-fived each other.

  ‘Quick,’ Alice said. ‘Let’s get started.’

  The three of them sprinted towards the sheds and coach house to retrieve the hidden supplies, shouting instructions to each other. The Labs barked at their heels surprised by the change of atmosphere. I stayed on the steps, leaning against the cold grain of a lion’s back. This was to be the evening that would change everything. I knew I would never forget it, the moment before my real life began. Mist lapped the base of trees, floating like the hem of a wedding dress over the spangled lawn. A flight of rooks left the far thicket of beeches in a startled rush, paper cut-outs whirling from an opened hand. I listened to the racket they made as they spiralled up in a vortex of confusion above the tarn, not paper, but raucous living creatures with wings of white bone, feathers shot through with petrol gleam. I tilted my head to watch them disappear into the darkening air and shivered. All around me, the light was turning purple, dense with the coming night.

  It was eight o’clock and the house was ready. The long gallery was hung with loops of flashing lights, inviting baubles of jewel colours, guiding guests towards the ballroom. We’d sellotaped paper chains to the walls as high as we could reach. The mahogany table had been covered with a spider-encrusted oil cloth found in the cellar, wiped clean and set out with crates of beer and red wine. Alice had arranged stacks of paper cups in white towers and tipped salt and vinegar crisps onto paper plates. Flickering nightlights in empty jam jars threw shadows across the cavernous room. It looked romantic, but would enough people turn up to fill it? It seemed vast and cold as a Russian wasteland. (I was reading Doctor Zhivago.) But hopefully the icy temperature would get people dancing.

  I’d put No Entry signs across the staircase leading to the upper and lower floors to keep the party to the ballroom and entrance hall and contain the mess. The Labs had been fed and locked in the boot room.

  I changed into the silver dress in my bedroom, which was as freezing as Yuri and Lara’s ice palace. My teeth chattered and I shivered convulsively with cold and anticipation. My numb fingers fumbled with the zip behind me, tugging but failing to reach past my shoulder blades.

  ‘Here. Let me.’ Alice had put her head around the door. She zipped. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You look like you should be on Top of the Pops. Want me to do your hair?’

  I sat on the floor between her legs, a blanket from the bed wrapped around my shoulders. She brushed as if her life depended on it, making my scalp smart and my hair snap with static. ‘Very Debbie Harry,’ she said approvingly as she backcombed it into a wild mane, spritzing with Mummy’s Elnett spray. Alice’s own hair was slicked back into a ponytail; she was wearing velvet flares and the yellow blouse with bell sleeves she’d brought in Oxfam. She looked stylish, I thought, but I was glad I was the one in the silver dress, even if my skin had turned into something resembling chicken flesh. I’d warm up soon. Slipping my feet into the only pair of heels I possessed, I sprayed both of us generously with my Rive Gauche cologne. I was usually circumspect with it, wanting to make it last, but this was a special occasion. Sneezing in the descending mist, Alice waved her hands in front of her face and wrinkled her nose. ‘Are you trying to kill us before the party’s started?’

  ‘Alice,’ I said, clutching my sister’s hand. ‘Do you think Jude likes me?’

  She hesitated. ‘I expect so.’ Then she grinned. ‘He’ll definitely fancy you in that dress.’ She pulled her hand away. ‘Come on,’ she said over her shoulder as she moved towards the landing, ‘let’s see if anyone’s arrived.’

  We went down the winding back stairs together, with me tottering around the steep corners on unstable heels. ‘I’ll just check that the front door is open,’ Alice said as she went off towards the entrance hall. I thought of the balloons I’d tied around the neck of one of the lions earlier. It was hard to imagine now that we were really going to have a party. Perhaps nobody would come.

  I paused before I went into the ballroom, straightening my shoulder straps, patting the candyfloss of my hair. I’d hoped to make an entrance, but as I crossed the threshold, nonchalantly as possible, both boys were occupied; Henry leaning over the record player and Jude fiddling with some wires leading out of one of the speakers. I stood, disappointed and shivering. Then with a crackling roar, a blast of sound erupted, and the boys cheered. Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ filled the space. Jude began to gyrate, head bobbing to the beat, as he dance-walked his way across the expanse of floor, a cigarette dangling from one hand. He’d put dark glasses on, which I thought was a bit affected, but if anyone could get away with it, he could. I waited anxiously near the door.

  He stopped with an appreciative whistle. ‘Cecily,’ he called over the music. ‘Looking hot tonight.’ He gave me a thumbs-up. ‘Damn hot.’

  I flushed with pleasure. I couldn’t see his eyes through the beetle-like lenses. But I imagined them gleaming with admiration. I was trying to think of something witty to say, when he switched direction and danced towards the table on the other side of the room. Across the floor, I watched him lift a beer bottle to his mouth, his hips swaying, feet as sure and nonchalant as a cat’s. His body knew what to do to the music. He was different tonight – more offhand, elusive.

  But he’d noticed me. ‘Looking hot,’ I repeated under my breath, biting back a smile, and running a hand over my waist. ‘Damn hot.’

  Four young men came in, and greeted Jude and Henry with awkward handshakes, proffering bottles of beer. School friends, I guessed, gawky and polite, one of them in spectacles, one of them with a disastrous rash of spots. I wandered over and was introduced by Henry who bellowed everyone’s names above the music. The four stared at me, and the sensation of their gazes licking me was akin to a dog’s beseeching tongue on my naked skin – shockingly physical and needy. It made me uncomfortable, and then tremulously excited. I tried biting my bottom lip, jutting one hip to the side, and watched their reactions. Perhaps I could make Jude jealous. The seven of us stood in a group, gulping our drinks, breath making white puffs, unable to hear each other over the noise from the speakers.

  I was just about to wander over to Jude, try to start up a conversation about music perhaps, when Alice entered at a jog, arms windmilling, gesturing behind her. ‘More people are arriving,’ she shouted. ‘Carloads. And people on bikes and walking! Loads of them!’

  We turned towards a shuffling march of footsteps approaching from the corridor, a mutter of drunken voices coming closer. I had almost forgotten that we were expecting other people, and had a sudden instinct to bolt, but a flood of strangers had already burst into the room. People pushed past me, laughing, gesticulating and talking. A man pinched my bottom as he sidled past. I smelt the sickly stink of weed. I couldn’t see Jude any more, or Henry, or Alice.

  I had no idea what time it was. I was stuck in a corner of the room, unable to move. Even more people had arrived, and the ballroom was packed. I had no idea who any of them were. They must be gate-crashers. Jude and Henry couldn’t possibly know all these people. The party was raging out of control, the room heated to a roaring blaze by a crush of bodies and beery breath. Someone changed the music from the Bee Gees’ ‘Night Fever’ to a heavy metal track, turned it up as loud as the speakers would go. A drumbeat juddered through the soles of my feet into my bones. It hurt my ears, got inside my heart, making it race. I felt hunted. I couldn’t think. I tried dancing for a while, but with elbows jabbing at my ribs and shoulders jostling me, it wasn’t any fun. Something cold splashed my legs, liquid dribbling down my thighs and calves into my shoes. I retreated, pushing through whirling bodies. It was like drowning, the lack of air, the current of energy trying to tug me under.

  To my horror, there were people perched all the way up the main stairs from the entrance hall, huddled in groups and couples, chatting and smoking, and I could hear movement and laughter further up the house. Jesus hung his head in anguish; metal thorns pierced his skull for eternity, nails through his precious feet. Someone leant over the balcony and dropped a bottle down to another person in the hall, I winced at the thought of it catching Christ’s shoulder in the fall. It missed Jesus but smashed onto the flagstones. Someone laughed. My No Entry sign had been crumpled and tossed aside. My chest tightened with fury. I had to climb over trespassers to get to the first landing. I glared at them as I went. ‘Do you mind?’ I said sarcastically. But they ignored me or looked irritated.

  It was like a kind of Hell, or Sodom and Gomorrah. What if something valuable got broken and Daddy found out? He would always find out. I forced the terror away, sliding a hand over my dress for courage. Sequins bristled and crackled under my fingers as if they were alive. It was too late to worry about the house now. It had stood through hundreds of years and a Civil War. A party couldn’t destroy it. The purpose of the evening was Jude. I caught a waft of romantic music floating out of the ballroom, Minnie Ripperton’s high pitched voice. At last, a song we could dance to together.

  I flung open Henry’s bedroom door, peering in, and found a couple making out on his bed. I didn’t recognise them, and they didn’t pause in their exploration of each other’s mouths. There were people everywhere in the house: boys in studded leather jackets sat slumped on the landing floor, shoulders propped against the walls as they rolled cigarettes, dropping ash on the antique rugs. A girl was passed out in the blue bathroom, a mess of tangled hair over her face, one shoe missing. I crouched down, my hand hovering over the girl’s back, the creased red top ridden up to expose a slice of pale skin. There was an imperceptible rising of ribs, the slightest movement in the strands of hair caught around the girl’s mouth. She was alive at least. I left the room. There was a splatter of sick at the bottom of the second flight of stairs. I’d never get the house clean in time for Mummy and Daddy’s return. I wasn’t even sure if we’d be able to eject all the partygoers before our parents got back. The only thing that would save the evening from complete disaster would be if I found Jude. Having his arms around me would be worth the punishment that was bound to follow. We’d broken our promises to Mummy and Daddy and told lies, but worst of all, we’d invited strangers, let them get drunk and have sex in a place where people had suffered and died for their faith.

  I escaped to the top of the house, into the narrow corridors that ran like a maze for anyone unfamiliar with Hawksmoor. Here the proportions were different, the ceilings low, the carpet thin; narrow doors shielded cell-like rooms, where housemaids and footmen had once slept. Even the windows were smaller and set higher in the walls. I went quickly past the hidden priest hole, careful not to brush against the big beam that operated the secret entrance point. I navigated by the faint milky glow of the moon seeping through glass. There were no intruders this far up, and tension slipped from my shoulders. I paused to examine my legs where liquid had splashed, licking my finger, and rubbing it over my sticky shins. Red wine. My shoes were soggy with it. ‘Idiots,’ I muttered under my breath, wishing I had a way of making them leave – or better still, disappear in a puff of smoke, with all evidence of the party gone with them.

  The music from the ballroom was reduced to a quiet hum up here, a shiver in the frigid air of the old servants’ quarters, a place where the ghost of a monk wandered, lost and afraid, trapped between this world and the next. But I wasn’t frightened of him. His bony frame kept me company in the hole, his prayers becoming my own. I ached for Jude. Where could he be? The one person I wanted to see. The thought of him was the only thing stopping me from locking myself in my room and stuffing cotton wool in my ears. I looked at my watch. Midnight. Not too late to turn the evening around. I’d have to go downstairs if I was going to find him or the others. Where was Alice? I’d glimpsed her a couple of times at the beginning of the evening, had briefly danced with her. We’d had a short, shouted conversation after she’d checked on the Labs and reported back. But I hadn’t seen her for hours.

  As I turned to go down, I heard an indistinct murmur of voices, and a low, rumbling laugh. I stopped, confused, head cocked. It was coming from above, from the roof. My chest swelled with indignation. How dare people invade this part of the house. Were there no limits? Bloody gate-crashers. I hoped they’d slip and fall, splatter themselves onto the gravel below. Except that would mean a scandal for Daddy, and he’d never forgive me for being part of it.

  The hidden valley roof was the best place to sunbathe, or just read and relax. Alice and I climbed up there sometimes. It was a secret sanctuary raised above ordinary life and its problems. The laugh came again, soft and deep. The way to get onto the roof was up a short ladder into a section of dusty attic and then clamber through another hatch which led directly outside.

  I climbed into the attic and then wriggled my head and shoulders through the next hatch that had been left propped open, looking out at the valley space and sloping slates either side. At the end, between chimney stacks, something was outlined against the cloudy sky. A creature with two backs, which became two people standing close, arms around each other, faces almost touching. The way they held each other made my mouth dry. I understood that I was an intruder, a voyeur at something private and intimate. The desire between them was palpable. They seemed to disappear inside each other, and in the stillness of the night I heard mouths working, skin sliding across skin, heavy breathing. My body flashed with violent heat, need twisting in my belly. A tingling rushed between my legs, the same feeling that came when I was alone in bed with thoughts of Jude.

  The clouds moved, revealing a rash of stars, unveiling the moon: a heavenly spotlight casting a search beam. I saw a splay of tender fingers caressing the back of a neck. Inside the new transparency the couple’s features glowed, unmistakable, unforgettable.

  I stifled a gasp and stumbled back, skinning my knees on planks of rough wood as I shrank through the second hatch, half-falling down the ladder onto the corridor. I crouched on the floor, cowering from the sight lasered onto my eyes. My heart reared inside my chest and fell flat. I couldn’t breathe. It was as if I was dead. What I’d seen was impossible. Jude and Henry, together, kissing with their mouths, not like brothers or friends, but lovers.

  I watched the police car arrive from the landing window, its flashing lights striping the mist with blue. I felt weak with relief that the party would end at last. Our parents’ Volvo arrived almost at the same time, drawing up behind the squad car, Daddy’s long legs stretching out of the passenger side. It turned out that there was a drug dealer on the premises, but none of us was taken away in handcuffs, although I almost hoped for it.

  I was numb when Daddy questioned me, still raging about the house being full of Lefties and drop-outs. ‘You did the right thing to phone. Now tell me who planned it? Who were the ringleaders? Did you know about the drugs?’ I could hardly answer. ‘I don’t know,’ I said over and over. ‘I don’t know.’ And I didn’t. Everything was blank except for a reel that played on repeat in my mind: Jude and Henry, their bodies pressed against each other.

  I’d once heard Daddy talking to Father Michael about a man in the village who’d left his wife for another man. I’d been sitting quietly on the floor behind a chair with a puzzle, and they’d forgotten I was in the room. I wasn’t sure exactly what they’d been talking about, except it was to do with the sin of lust. Father Michael had called the two men sodomites, and Daddy had said it was a perversion against God, and both had gone very quiet and drunk more from the decanter, and I’d understood how serious this crime was, the crime of a man choosing another man for a wife. Henry and Jude would burn in hell. But inside my skull, my brain was screaming as if it was me falling into the scorching furnace, my head being pierced with devilish pitchforks.

  The next morning, sunlight exposed the William Morris wallpaper, clawed as if a lion had gone berserk, and I remembered the men in leather jackets stuck with metal studs. There were burns in Persian rugs and ancient tapestries. A shameful mess of spilt alcohol, crushed crisps, cigarette butts, puddles of vomit, shards of broken ornaments and shattered bottles littered floors and stairs. Someone had stuck a trilby hat on the suit of armour, a fag dangling from the mouth gap; worse was the moustache drawn with pen onto the portrait of a seventeen century Deveraux Baroness.