The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

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  PENELOPE LIVELY was born in Cairo, Egypt, and spent her childhood there. When she was twelve she came to England and went to boarding school in Sussex, and then to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read Modern History. Penelope writes for adults and children, and in 1973 she won the Carnegie Medal for her children’s book The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and the Whitbread Award in 1976 for A Stitch in Time. Penelope is regarded as one of the most talented British authors and was awarded the OBE in 1989 and the CBE in 2002 for her outstanding services to literature.

  Penelope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in London.

  To my mother

  I know not how it may be with others

  Who sit amid relics of householdry

  That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers,

  But well I know how it is with me

  Continually.

  I see the hands of the generations

  That owned each shiny familiar thing

  In play on its knobs and indentations,

  And with its ancient fashioning

  Still dallying:

  Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,

  As in a mirror a candle-flame

  Shows images of itself, each frailer

  As it recedes, though the eye may frame

  Its shape the same.

  ‘Old Furniture’ – Thomas Hardy

  CHAPTER ONE

  There is an island. At the heart of the island there is a valley. In the valley, among blue mountains, a man kneels before a piece of wood. He paints on it – sometimes with a fibre brush, sometimes with his finger. The man himself is painted: bright dyes – red, yellow, black – on brown skin. He wears pearshell, green beetles in his hair, and a bunch of tangket leaves. The year is 1900: in England Victoria is queen. The man is remote from England in distance by half the circumference of the world: in understanding, by five thousand years.

  Belbroughton Road. Linton Road. Bardwell Road. The houses there are quite normal. They are ordinary sizes and have ordinary chimneys and roofs and gardens with laburnum and flowering cherry. Park Town. As you go south they are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. They are three stories high and disguise themselves as churches. They have ecclesiastical porches instead of front doors and round Norman windows or pointed Gothic ones, neatly grouped in threes with flaring brick to set them off. They reek of hymns and the Empire, Mafeking and the Khyber Pass, Mr Gladstone and Our Dear Queen. They have nineteen rooms and half a dozen chimneys and iron fire escapes. A bomb couldn’t blow them up, and the privet in their gardens has survived two World Wars.

  People live in these houses. Clare Mayfield, aged fourteen, raised by aunts in North Oxford.

  Clare came round the corner out of Banbury Road and the history books and maths things and Jane Eyre in her bicycle basket lurched over to one side with the string bag of shopping, and unbalanced her. She got off and straightened them and then pedalled fast, standing up, past the ranks of parked cars and the flurry of students coming out of the language school on the corner. She swung into the half-moon of weedy gravel that was the front drive of number forty Norham Gardens, and put the bike into the shed at the side of the house. Wind, cold January wind, funnelled up the chasm between number forty and the house next door, clutching her bare legs and rattling the dustbin lid. Clare stuffed the books on top of the shopping in the string bag and went up the front steps, quickly.

  The front door was not locked. Old ladies lose front door keys. Clare went across the hall and through the green baize swing door into the kitchen. The house was silent. Silence reached away up to the top of the house, up the well of the staircase past the first floor and up to the attic rooms, spiced only by the ticking of clocks: the kitchen one, loudly insensitive, the grandfather clock on the stairs, discreetly chiming since before the Boer War, Maureen’s Smith Alarm-o-matic, marking time by itself up there under the roof. Maureen would not be back for another hour or so. And the aunts – the aunts would be in the library, dozing quietly beside a fire that they would have forgotten to keep stoked. They were always in the library at half-past four. They migrated slowly through the house during the day: from their bedrooms to the breakfast room to the study to the dining room. I am the only person I know, Clare thought, who has a special room for having breakfast in. And a pantry and a flower room and a silver cupboard and a scullery and three lavatories. She put the kettle on and had a conversation in her head with a person from outer space who was ignorant of these things. A flower room, she said severely, is for arranging flowers in. A long time ago ladies who hadn’t got anything much to do did that in the mornings. My great-grandmother, for instance. My aunts, on the other hand, never arranged flowers. They were a different kind of person. They always had things to do. They wrote articles and translated Anglo-Saxon and sat on committees. They are not ordinary aunts.

  The kettle began to mutter to itself. Clare unpacked the string bag and saw that there was a note from Mrs Hedges. ‘I put a steak and kidney in the oven for your supper, and I want it eaten, mind. See your Aunt Anne remembers her pills. The coal came and I paid him but it’s gone up again. We owe the milkman one fifty.’

  Three cups on a tray. Crown Derby. Very valuable. One cracked, one with an odd saucer. Would the milkman like one cracked Crown Derby cup instead of one pound fifty pence. Probably not. A situation when milkmen and coal men and electricity men are asking you for more money than you have got to give them is called a financial problem, in posh language. In simpler terms it is a gap on a piece of paper between what you have got and what people want you to pay them. Most people of fourteen are not bothered about that kind of thing. If, however, you live with your aunts and your aunts are around eighty years old and not very good at working things out or knowing how much things cost, though very good indeed in all sorts of other ways, then you have to be bothered. You have to fill the gap somehow.

  The gap, in this instance, had been filled with Maureen.

  ‘A lodger!’ Mrs Hedges had said. ‘They’d never hear of a lodger!’ That had been a month ago now, when she and Mrs Hedges had sat one each side of the kitchen table and considered things. The Outgoings and the Assets, and the cracked guttering that must be repaired and the leaking kitchen sink that would have to be replaced.

  ‘I’d mention it to them,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘But you don’t want to fuss them, at their age, and they’ve not really got the hang of decimals, have they?’

  And so it had all been laid on the table, as it were.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Sure there’s nothing else? Just their pensions and your little bit from when your mum and dad – from this legacy?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘No Securities? They’d have Securities, people like your aunts. Shares and that.’

  ‘No. Not now. There were some, but the Bank Manager wrote last year and said he was sorry but they’d got smaller and smaller until they’d kind of disappeared. There was three pounds fifty pence left.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Were they upset – the old ladies?’

  ‘No. They’ve never been particularly interested in money.’

  ‘They’v
e not had to be. And they’re a bit vague, now they’re getting on, so it’s up to us, not that I’d want anyone to be thinking me sticking my nose into what’s not my business.’

  ‘Anyone isn’t thinking anything like that,’ said Clare.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Let’s look at these Outgoings and see what we can cut down on.’

  ‘Food. I could keep a cow in the garden. Grow vegetables.’

  Mrs Hedges glared. ‘I’m not laughing. You don’t eat properly, as it is, any of you. All those tins.’

  ‘They don’t notice what they eat.’

  ‘But you’re a growing girl. Food’s got to stay as it is. Clothes?’

  ‘Jumble sales.’

  ‘Another year or two and you’re going to want stuff like the other girls have, from boutiques and that. Fashionable stuff.’

  ‘There’s trunks of their old things upstairs,’ said Clare. ‘Long velvet skirts and floppy hats. Dead smart nowadays. I’ll be terribly grand.’

  ‘Get away with you. Holidays?’

  ‘My cousins in Norfolk. That’s free.’

  ‘I’m an outgoing,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘But you can’t keep this place clean on your own, that’s for sure.’

  ‘So we can’t cut down on you. Good.’

  ‘Rates. That we can’t do anything about. It’s a mercy there’s no rent to think of. They do own this house, don’t they?’

  ‘It’s something called a Lease.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Them. How long’s it got to go?’

  ‘Fifteen years, then it isn’t their house any more.’

  ‘Well, we won’t worry beyond that.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Clare coldly. Aunt Anne is seventy-eight and Aunt Susan is eighty. She had looked away from Mrs Hedges and out of the steamy window to the coalshed and the dank brick wall and the cat prowling in the privet and the kitchen clock had ticked, loud and stupid. And Mrs Hedges had got all busy totting up the figures again and talking about Assets.

  ‘Assets?’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘A house with nineteen rooms.’

  The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible. You had to be a fat busy Victorian family to expand enough to fill up basements and passages and conservatories and attics. You had to have an army of bootboys and nurses and parlourmaids. You had to have a complicated, greedy system of living that used up plenty of space and people just in the daily business of eating and sleeping and keeping clean. You had to multiply your requirements and your possessions, activate that panel of bells in the kitchen – Drawing Room and Master Bedroom and Library – keep going a spiral of needs and people to satisfy the needs. If you did not, if you contracted into three people without such needs, then a house like this became a dinosaur, occupying too much air and ground and demanding to be fed new sinks and drainpipes and a sea of electricity. Such a house became a fossil, stranded among neighbours long since chopped up into flats and bed-sitting-rooms, or sleek modern houses that had a suitable number of rooms for correct living in the late twentieth century. It, and its kind, stood awkwardly on the fringes of a city renowned for old and beautiful buildings: they were old, and unbeautiful.

  Perhaps, Clare thought, you should knock down places like this when they are no longer useful. Reduce them to the brick and dust from which they came?

  Or should you, just because they are old, not beautiful, but old, keep them? Houses like this have stood and watched the processes of change. People swept by the current, go with it: they grow, learn, forget, laugh and cry, replace their skin every seven years, lose teeth, form opinions, become bald, love, hate, argue and reflect. Bricks, roofs, windows and doors are immutable. Before them have passed carriages, and the carriages have given way to bicycles and the bicycles to the cars that line up now, bumper to shining bumper, along the pavement. In front of them have paraded ankle-length dresses and boaters and frock coats and plus-fours and duffle coats and mini skirts. Through their doors have passed heads, shingled, bobbed, permed and unkempt. Within their walls language has changed, and assumptions, and the furniture of people’s minds. Possibly, just possibly, you must keep the shells inside which such things happen, in case you forget about the things themselves.

  ‘That’s twelve rooms more than you need,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘One way and another.’

  And at that point had flowered in Clare’s mind the notion that if you had more rooms than you in fact needed there were, by the same token, and according to the convenient arrangement of supply and demand, people who needed rooms.

  ‘They’d never hear of a lodger!’ Mrs Hedges had declared. ‘Not in a month of Sundays.’ And she had been entirely wrong. She had not reckoned with the aunts’ ability to review a situation. They, unlike the house, had not set hard in 1890. They had evolved with the century, taking on the protective colouring of different years, but without sacrificing personalities more forceful than the ebb and flow of opinion. All their lives they had examined the times, decided what was sound, and discarded what was not. Fashion they ignored: the fascination of change sustained them. And it was perfectly sound, they at once declared, that there should be a lodger at Norham Gardens if circumstances required it.

  And from that decision, to the arrival of Maureen with two tartan suitcases and some brown paper parcels, had been a short route by way of a postcard in the window of the shop in North Parade.

  Clare added digestive biscuits to the Crown Derby cups on the tray, the teapot, bread and peanut butter for herself, and Aunt Anne’s pills. Then she went through into the hall, bumping backwards through the swing door and balancing the tray against her arm while she opened the library door.

  It was twilight in the library, partly because the January afternoon light had almost all leaked away by now, and partly because it was always half dark in there. The windows were curtained floor to ceiling in toffee-brown velvet: beyond them the garden stretched away bleakly to the wall at the end, the long grass flattened and ribbed with snow that had melted and then frozen again. Clare drew the curtains and turned on the light. Now it was almost cosy. There were books instead of walls – in bookcases as long as the bookcases lasted and then overflowing into piles and toppling columns. There were stacks of box files, too, labelled long ago with dusty labels on which the ink had faded into obscurity, like invisible writing that refuses to be reanimated. And there were great mountains of paper, yellowing articles with titles like ‘Kinship Structure among the Baganda’. And spears. Clare, putting the tray down on the table by the sofa, thought: I am also the only person I know who has spears on their walls instead of pictures. Arranged in a nice pattern.

  A further thought struck her. ‘Can I borrow some of the spears for Macbeth?’

  The aunts were sitting on either side of the fire, in the leather armchairs that leaked tufts of some strange stuffing on to the carpet. They had been dozing, probably, and sat up now with a start, as though guilty.

  Aunt Susan said, ‘By all means. But they would not be at all authentic, you know. They come from Basutoland, not Scotland.’

  ‘We’re not that fussy. Thanks.’

  Aunt Anne said, ‘I hope they are not the ones with poisoned tips.’ They studied the fan of spears for a moment, anxiously.

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Those went to the Pitt Rivers in 1939. I remember now.’

  Clare picked up the shovel and put some more coal on the fire. She poked it and sparks showered away into the dark chimney. She kissed Aunt Susan and then Aunt Anne. Their faces felt soft and papery, like tissues. Their hair, seen in close-up, was thin and fine like a young child’s, Aunt Susan’s white and wavy, Aunt Anne’s brown peppered with grey, pulled back into a knot behind her head. They had on their brown tweed suits, made by the tailor in Walton Street before the last war, and fur-lined boots. It was never really warm in the library, just a localized warmth around the fire.

  ‘Had a good day, dear?’

  ‘It was
all right. We’ve got to decide about O levels. German, or Physics and Chem.’

  The aunts looked at each other, and then at Clare, their faces puckered with incomprehension.

  ‘Exams,’ said Clare. ‘I think I’ll do Physics and Chem.’

  The aunts brightened. They knew all about exams.

  ‘Very sensible,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘A good grounding in the Sciences is right for a girl. Nowadays. Tea, dear?’

  Aunt Susan’s hand was oddly small now. It shook a little; the cup jigged in the saucer. They had shrunk, the aunts. People do that when they get old. In photographs of fifteen, twenty years ago they were taller by nine inches or a foot.

  ‘But Clare will be on the arts side,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘Surely. History or English.’

  ‘Nevertheless. For the mental discipline.’

  ‘You may be right. But I see her as History. Or the Social Sciences.’

  They looked at Clare with love and pride. Much was expected.

  ‘Somerville, I think. Or Lady Margaret Hall.’

  ‘The new Universities are well thought of now, I understand.’

  Clare said, ‘I don’t expect they’ll want me.’ She put three lumps of sugar in her tea, and spread the peanut butter thick. You need sustaining, in January in the South Midlands when you’ve biked back from school with the wind against you and cars spraying slush up your bare legs.

  The aunts smiled, disbelievingly.

  ‘Or I might leave school at fifteen and work in a boutique.’

  ‘A boutique?’

  ‘A kind of shop with pop songs coming out of the walls. Don’t worry. Joke.’

  ‘She is teasing us,’ said Aunt Susan.

  ‘Taking advantage of our infirmities.’

  They beamed.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Clare. ‘Seriously, though, I think I’ll be a pop star. Then I can buy us all fur coats.’

  ‘She means,’ said Aunt Anne, ‘a popular singer.’

  Aunt Susan said, ‘I am well aware of that. No doubt she would be surprised to learn that we’ve heard of pop art, too. Pictures of film actresses, repeated many times.’