The House in Norham Gardens Page 10

  ‘Like family portraits,’ said Clare.

  John laughed. ‘In a way. The same idea, certainly. Continuity. Preserving the life of the tribe. They are symbolic, of course, like I thought, but no one seems very clear about what the patterns mean. The article I read said “From several considerations, especially from their anthropomorphic nature, it appears possible that they were originally images of ancestors”. Anthropomorphic means …’

  ‘I know,’ said Clare, ‘like people.’ Circles for eyes, a kind of mouth …

  ‘Sorry. I’m sounding like a schoolmaster.’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve been reading a book about New Guinea, and that word came in, but it didn’t really say anything about the shields – the tamburans – but it did have a picture of some rather the same.’

  ‘So now you know what it is you have upstairs,’ said John. ‘Quite interesting. You should take good care of it – there aren’t many around, this article said, except the ones in the Pitt Rivers and a few in museums in Australia and New Guinea. They used to set a lot of value on them, the tribes, because of what they represent, and they weren’t keen on letting anyone have them.’

  ‘My great-grandfather got this one. From a tribe who’d never seen European people before.’

  ‘Clever gentleman. How did he persuade them to give it to him?’

  ‘I’m not sure really. I think they didn’t quite understand who he was. Him and Sanderson and Hemmings.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take the one upstairs along to the Pitt Rivers. It’s obviously important, from an ethnological point of view.’

  ‘I think they want it back,’ said Clare.

  ‘I thought you’d always had it here. Upstairs.’

  ‘Not them meaning the Pitt Rivers. Them. The people who made it.’

  John looked bewildered.

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Do you know – in this book I’ve been reading it says they’ve still been finding new tribes right up till a few years ago, in remote valleys where nobody’d ever been. Tens of thousands of people nobody’d known existed, just living there sort of in the Stone Age still, not knowing anything about the rest of the world.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s very nice when they find out.’

  ‘No. They get diseases they hadn’t had before and want things they didn’t know they wanted and some of them go kind of mad. It’s very sad, reading about it.’

  ‘Cultural disintegration,’ said John.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something that happens to people if you suddenly destroy their traditional way of life. They can’t cope.’

  ‘The trouble was,’ said Clare, ‘the old way was awful too. They were all killing each other all the time. You can see they couldn’t let that go on, the people who found them.’

  ‘Exactly. Very difficult. There was an article about that problem, too, in the library. About them expecting the ancestors to come back to them in aeroplanes, bringing riches. They stop making tamburans, by the way, as soon as they’ve jumped into the twentieth century like this. They seem to forget how, or why they did it.’

  The kitchen clock whirred and clicked and struck six. ‘Excuse me,’ said John, ‘I must go. I’m room hunting. I’ve missed two today already and I’ve heard of one in Park Town. If I don’t hurry someone will take it before I get there.’

  ‘I thought you lived beyond the roundabout?’

  ‘I did. My landlady gave me notice. I have to go next week. Well, goodbye.’

  ‘Hang on …’ said Clare.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just hang on one minute. I have to ask the aunts something.’

  ‘All right – but I must go. Give my regards to your aunts.’

  She went out into the hall, the baize doors swinging behind her, and into the library before she could give herself time to think of should I? or what would they say? or shall I?

  ‘Aunt Susan?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Do you remember John who came to tea the other day?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Could he come and live here?’

  Aunt Susan let her glasses slide an inch or two down her nose, and laid down the newspaper she was reading. ‘Has he nowhere to live?’

  ‘Not from next week. His landlady gave him notice. And we’ve got nineteen rooms.’

  ‘Have we really?’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Yes, I suppose we have. Another lodger? Mother would have been appalled. Absolutely appalled.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I would have liked to see what Anne thought, but she is having a nap, and in any case I don’t want to worry her with things at the moment.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be any bother. I know he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘all things considered, I don’t think we can do otherwise. But tell him the room is free.’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t come if we did that.’

  Aunt Susan looked at her. ‘Possibly you’re right. Ten shillings a week, then, do you think that would be too much?’

  ‘No. Thanks, Aunt Susan. See you in a minute.’

  ‘Well!’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘It’s getting to be a proper guest house, isn’t it? How much are you asking him?’

  ‘Three-fifty, same as Maureen. It couldn’t be less, or she’d have minded if she found out.’

  Mrs Hedges nodded. ‘That’ll take care of the builder’s bill, in a week or two.’

  ‘He’s not really part of the gap,’ said Clare. ‘He’s a friend, more.’

  ‘Still, it all comes in handy. That little room at the back, on the second floor, would be best, I should think.’

  Great-grandmother’s writing room, it had been once, and the function had survived thereafter, in the name. ‘Mother’s writing room’, the aunts had always called it, though it had for far longer housed junk, relations, refugees from Germany before the war, and now, old newspapers. Clare pulled a pile of them out of a cupboard and read headlines about Korea and Malaya and a general election. There was a picture of Churchill, and George the Fifth. And a photograph of a street in some bombed city, with one-dimensional houses beyond whose glassless windows lay a moonscape of rubble and destruction. She tidied them all on to one shelf, to make some space for John’s books, and considered the rest of the room. What had she written in here, Great-grandmother? Thank-you letters, invitations, replies to invitations? In the back of a bureau with spindly legs that wavered under pressure, unlike the aunts’ sturdy, masculine desks in the study, Clare found yellowing cards, printed with flowing italic script. Professor and Mrs Mayfield had been At Home to their friends on November 15th 1911, at eight o’clock in the evening. A Buffet Supper had been served, and there had been Music. Poor Great-grandfather – he would have been more at home on the Fly River, battling with the mosquitoes. And here was a bundle of Great-grandmother’s housekeeping bills, meticulously checked and annotated (how cheap everything had been – a whole month’s groceries, for goodness knows how many people, only ten pounds odd). And a long list of names, Dr and Mrs This, Professor That, the Miss Thoses – what did Great-grandmother have in mind for them? Christmas cards, tea, supper, lunch? And here were more yellow cards, on which – goodness! – Mrs Mayfield requested the pleasure of the company of Blank on June 9th 1912 at a Dance in honour of her daughters Susan and Anne. The aunts! Dancing! Had they enjoyed themselves? What had they worn? Clare made a mental note to find out about that, and tidied the contents of the desk away. The desk itself, with silent apologies to Great-grandmother, she removed to another room. It was far too flimsy for John, who could have the nice solid table from the sewing-room. The wallpaper was unsuitable – an elaborate affair of tiny blue roses intertwined with other flowers and miles of realistic blue satin ribbon – but nothing could be done about that, nor the curtains, which were of the same inclination. John, used to migrating from room to room, probably wouldn’t notice. But how would he get on with Great-grandmother – with her remote presence, almost extinguished by time
, but surely still faintly clinging to this room, her thoughts, her feelings, her opinions, flickering out from 1911? There could hardly be two people further removed from one another. How odd, how very odd, that the same room should, eventually, have held them both: Great-grandmother, in silk and whalebone, her mind furnished in the nineteenth century; John, in jeans and sweater, born thousands of miles away, speaking another language.

  Maureen said, ‘I don’t mind sharing the toilet with him. I mean, I just wanted to make that plain, in case you were thinking I was that type. It doesn’t bother me. Not at all.’

  Clare saved the matter of the Dance until the weekend, when Aunt Anne, whose cold had been improving steadily all week, got dressed and came downstairs. Mrs Hedges had made a cake in celebration, and Clare, in a fit of ambition, had iced it and adorned it with glacé cherries. The icing, too thin, had lurched down the sides, carrying most of the cherries with it, but the aunts were much impressed. They had never known how to do things like that.

  ‘How clever,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘Does it take long to cook?’

  ‘You don’t cook it. You mix it up and slosh it on. Most of that sloshed off again.’

  The aunts peered. ‘The cherries remind me of that hat of Mother’s,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘I remember sitting behind it in church, with my mouth watering unbearably. It was like a still-life of fruit salad.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘But it had roses, too. You couldn’t have eaten the roses.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. After all, violets are eaten, when crystallized. I should think certain roses would be delicious. The old-fashioned, scented ones.’

  ‘Not “Peace”, or “Queen Elizabeth” – they would be hideously tough.’

  ‘You may be right. Fit only for soup, perhaps.’

  Really, the aunts were getting quite out of hand. Clare calmed them down with cups of tea and then said casually, ‘Did you enjoy yourselves on June 9th? June 9th 1912?’

  They were satisfactorily astonished. And bewildered.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘What were we doing?’

  ‘Dancing.’

  ‘Dancing! Surely not!’

  ‘I know!’ said Aunt Anne. ‘The dance Mother gave for us. You were nineteen and I was seventeen. But how could she know about that!’

  ‘I get these vibrations,’ said Clare. ‘I close my eyes and think myself backwards. Back and back into the past. It’s like drowning only nicer. And then I know anything I want to. You have to be frightfully sensitive, of course.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Only a mind of the greatest refinement …’

  ‘She has been at that bureau of Mother’s. There are old invitations in there.’

  ‘What a pity,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘I was enjoying the stream-of-consciousness idea.’

  Clare gave Aunt Anne a look of reproach. ‘Anyway, did you?’

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘To be frank. My dress was too tight, I remember, and I had to dance with the college Chaplain, who was immensely fat, and the Bursar, who trod on my feet and talked endlessly of his mother-in-law.’

  Clare said, ‘Bother.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought it would have been like women’s magazines. You whirling round and round in the moonlight in his strong arms, his breath warm on your cheek.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘It was in the college dining hall, which is rather harshly lit.’

  ‘I quite enjoyed it,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘I had my hair up for the first time, and felt extremely mature.’

  ‘Of course it was Mother’s first attempt to marry us off. Suitable young men had been summoned.’

  ‘Poor Mother.’

  ‘It was her one defeat.’

  The aunts chuckled. There was a whiff of ancient rebellion in the sober atmosphere of the library.

  ‘Did they propose?’ said Clare. ‘The suitable young men?’

  ‘Have you no sense of delicacy?’ said Aunt Susan severely.

  ‘Sorry. I say, are you going to give a dance for me? When I’m mature?’

  ‘I hadn’t realized the tradition persisted. But of course we will.’

  ‘Outside the back door, I think,’ said Clare. ‘We can move the dustbins. People can overflow into the garden. We’ll floodlight it from the kitchen window. The gramophone with the loudspeaker from the attic will do for music. Do you think it would be all right if I wore Great-grandmother’s red silk dress?’

  ‘I can think of no better use for it,’ said Aunt Anne.

  ‘And my hair up. If we can get it there.’

  ‘We will persevere until we do.’

  We won’t really, Clare thought. But it’s a nice joke. I like jokes with the aunts. She lay close to the fire, her face burning, and stared into it: incandescent interiors, gushing flame, logs grey-plated with ash, roaming shadows. I like fires. I like being here, just now, just at this moment. This is one of the times I wouldn’t mind stopping at, forever, or for longer, anyway, if you could kind of freeze yourself. But you can’t. It’s like being on a train, and seeing a lovely quiet country station with flowers and cows in long grass, and not being able to get off at it.

  Thinking of this, she was seized with a feeling of panic, as though everything were slipping from her – the fire, the room, the aunts – and there was no way she could hold any of it. She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling, overwhelmed with sudden desolation.

  Aunt Susan looked down over the top of The Times and said, ‘I think we should tell Anne what we have done.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes, we should.’

  Aunt Anne said, ‘Let me guess. There has been a domestic disaster. You have broken Mother’s Crown Derby tea set.’

  ‘No. On the contrary, we have done something constructive. We have asked a young African student to come and live here. You will like him. He has the most interesting things to say about the problems of emergent societies.’

  Aunt Anne’s surprise and faint misgivings turned, with only a little persuasion, to interest and anticipation.

  ‘We shall be quite a household,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘I hope he will get on with – what is she called? – Maureen.’

  Sunday came, and John with it, his possessions slung around a bicycle in paper bags and parcels tied with string. The bicycle joined Clare’s in the shed at the side, and the house absorbed him, as it had absorbed so many other people. Another set of thoughts, and experiences, and attitudes had joined all the others whose misty imprint surely still lingered somehow behind the yellow brick and Gothic windows. Yearnings of late Victorian housemaids, boredom of the aunts, cloistered in the schoolroom, the despondency of governesses … Great-grandmother’s busy pursuit of an appropriate and well-ordered life, the heady breeze of the aunts’ resolution to determine their own futures … Friends, relations, students … And, faintest of all, the alien flavour of remote, half-understood things known only to Great-grandmother. The shadows of another world and another time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The ancestors do not come again to the village. Time passes: much time. The old men of the tribe die. Babies are born, and grow up. The boys become men, and the girls women. The tribe are alone, with the yams and the sugar cane and the pigs, and the cockatoos in the forest trees, and the blue and scarlet birds of paradise.

  ‘I suppose he’d be well thought of, in his own country?’ said Maureen.

  ‘I s’pose so.’

  ‘I mean, when he goes back, he’ll be one of the high-ups?’

  ‘He’ll be a professor, one day, Aunt Susan says.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Maureen. Her face was set in a hard scowl, as though she was working out an impossibly difficult sum in her head, and getting it wrong. She banged out her cigarette, and lit another. ‘Well, I’d better be off. Time and tide wait for no man. Be seeing you.’

  Something had happened to Maureen. She was dislodged, as it were, from certainty, like a person who has moved sudd
enly from bright sunshine into twilight, and has to grope a little. Her face had a shrouded look, as though on top of her real expression she had tacked another: a faint, fixed smile. If she and Clare were alone together, everything was as it had been, but when John was present, which he often was, since he was a prodigious eater and found his way frequently to the kitchen, she changed. Her voice pitched itself a tone lower, with the words carefully pronounced and separated, as though prepared in advance. She was like someone ordering things from a shop, over the telephone. She called Clare ‘dear’, and established traditions, small definitions of how things were done here. Breakfast was at eight-fifteen, the bread (everybody’s) was in the bin, the marmalade (hers) was on the dresser, we prefer China tea, the chair with arms is Maureen’s. ‘Do sit here, John,’ she would say, ‘this side,’ pulling up the other one. Her bosom was hitched just a fraction higher under the new blue sweater, her face more closely powdered. The candlewick dressing gown no longer came down to breakfast, nor the hair curlers. Talking to John, her voice took on an edge, a hint, a whisper of graciousness, and then faltered with unease. ‘I expect you’re in a hurry to get off to your classes. Lectures, I mean to say, that is. Let me pour you some tea – milk and sugar?’ Lighting a cigarette, she would check the glowing tip, blow out the match with a delicate puff, turn her head away to exude smoke, and hold the white stick between first and second fingers, the hand drooping a little, finger-nails newly painted. When she left the room, there were ponds of fragrance in the air where she had been – ‘Tweed’ and Boots bath oil.

  John said sadly, ‘I’m afraid Miss Cooper doesn’t like me.’

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘It’s that she doesn’t know how to arrange you in her mind. You know how librarians put books under History or Poetry or Gardening? She doesn’t know where to put you, so she’s in a fuss.’ Having said that, she was amazed. How do I know that? Maureen’s nearly thirty. But it’s true.

  ‘You may be right,’ said John. ‘I’ve interfered with her social perspectives.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t use words like that.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve upset her cataloguing system.’