The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  ‘Perfectly. I don’t think I’ll go to school, though.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘You take it easy. They put too much on you these days, if you ask me, at your age.’

  She walked down into the town. The pavements were crunchy with ice, the sky high and white all over, the trees skeletal, mere outlines of themselves. It was as though nature and growth – the world of blue skies and unfurling leaves – had retreated forever, leaving things to brick, stone and concrete. She wandered through the streets, her cold hands stuck in her pockets, and stared into shop windows. In one, plaster dummies leaped and postured and an artificial sun beamed upon artificial daisies: Get the Young Look for Spring, ordered a banner, draped between the sun and the daisies. In another, strings of paper snowflakes danced above the heads of a smiling, symmetrical family – father, mother, boy and girl – ‘Beat the Freeze’ said the father, ‘Go electric!’ Advice and instruction battered her from windows and hoardings. Compare our Prices: Go Electric: Shop at the Co-op. A bus stood throbbing at the traffic lights: orange letters at its rear urged her to Hop on a Bus.

  Unwind. Take a day off. Hop on a bus.

  The bus station was Siberia, swept by freezing winds funnelled from the north. Cigarette cartons spun in the gutters: newspapers flapped like desolate birds. But the destinations on the buses held out a promise of other things – of some distant, indestructible rural summer. Birds, grass, flowers. Chipping Norton, Burford, Stow-on-the-Wold. Clare selected Burford, because she remembered hearing the aunts speak of it, and climbed on to a bus occupied by women with shopping baskets, and a few small children. Presently a driver came, the bus quivered into life, moved out of Oxford along grey streets.

  It snows more heavily outside cities. Beyond the houses the fields were ranged one beyond another in pure, receding squares of white. Snow was piled against the dark hedges, too, untrodden and unfouled. From the top of the bus Clare looked down upon small grey villages huddled around church spires. Landscape curved around her in a huge circle, hillsides delicately crested with trees, rivers looping between the blunt winter shapes of willows, white fields furrowed with brown where snow had melted on the plough. The horizons seemed huge, reaching away into unseen white distances, as though England were some great continent, the bus and its passengers moving ant-like through it. And then the scale would be reversed as they came into a village and the bus towered above cottages and Clare, through a shield of steamy glass, looked down into windows that presented the blank wooden backs of dressing tables. They followed the rim of a shallow valley where a river wound through flat fields, shining, and small golden stone buildings shouldered out from hedges and hillsides. They swung round a corner, the bunchy women gathered themselves and stood rocking as the bus came to a stop. Everyone got off.

  The shops in Burford gave neither instruction or advice. They had discreet and neutral windows beyond which lurked single, old, expensive pieces of furniture. Although people walked the pavements, there was a feeling of desertion as though this were a place from which, a long time ago, everyone had gone. The rows of parked cars glittered strangely in the wide street that seemed to descend straight into a bowl of fields and hills, neatly punctuated by the church spire at the bottom. Every building was old, many were beautiful: they seemed to be there together in sad abandonment like textbook illustrations of the past. Clare bought a bun from a warm stuffy shop that consoled with its notices about Typhoo Tea and Green Shield stamps. She walked down towards the church, eating.

  The names began in the churchyard, cut deep into tombstones and elaborately carven memorials behind rusting iron railings. She wandered among them, reading of Eliza Matthews, of This Parish, Dearly Loved, who Departed this Life on July 7th, 1786, of Thomas James Hammond, Husband and Father, and Jane Parsloe, Infant Daughter. She went into the church and names clustered on every wall, a precise, enduring, stone record of the people who had lived in this place. Here were insistent memories, the determination of people that they should not be forgotten, and the determination of others not to forget, the whole matter carefully reduced to the scoring of elaborate script upon stone, marble, lead and brass.

  Clare, her hands in the pockets of her school coat, her face stinging from the cold, moved slowly round the church, staring at one inscription after another, giving her attention to the whole chronicle of wood merchants, burghers and benefactors of the poor, of husbands and fathers, wives, mothers and children. She felt an obligation to listen. It would be nice, she thought, to be a person living in this place and sit every Sunday beside these names, especially if maybe they were the same as your own name, or people you knew. You would feel settled, if you were a person who did that. She stood in front of a marble slab shaped like a shield that told her of Susan Mary Partredge, A Loving and Dutiful Daughter, Devoted Mother and Beloved Wife, and thought it curious that two different lots of people so very far removed from each other should wish to preserve their feelings about what had gone before in such a similar way. Only here they put it into words, not shapes and patterns and colours.

  She went out into the churchyard, through the silence and into the street again. She stood by herself at the bus stop, and waited to go home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In other parts of the island, the motor car has arrived, and the tractor. Houses are built, and roads constructed. A war is fought, with aeroplanes and guns. There are new things on the island now: money and Coca-Cola, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, and paraffin and rifles and penicillin. The tribe know nothing of this. Sometimes they see and hear things that are strange, but they have always known the world to be an uneasy and unpredictable place, so they placate the spirits and plant their yams at the proper time.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ said Clare. ‘Leaving you at the school like that.’

  John was in his room – Great-grandmother’s writing-room – sitting at the desk. Books were ranged around him in untidy heaps. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. What did you think of the play?’

  ‘It was interesting,’ said John politely. ‘I liked the ghost.’

  ‘She’s my best friend. Liz.’

  ‘Please give her my congratulations.’

  Clare sat on the bed. There was a photograph of John’s parents, framed, on the bedside table, and another of a whole row of brothers and sisters, diminishing in size from a tall schoolboy in shorts with long legs and bony knees to a plump and broadly smiling baby. She said, ‘Do you miss them?’

  ‘Yes. Very much.’

  ‘Your clock’s wrong.’

  ‘No. It is set the same as Kampala time.’

  ‘So that it doesn’t feel so far away?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said John. ‘What have you been doing today? I hear you had a day off from school.’

  ‘First I went to see the doctor and he looked inside me and said I was all in order. And then I took a bus into the country and read the names on the walls of a church.’

  ‘I visited Westminster Abbey last year. There are a great many names there. Famous names.’

  ‘These weren’t famous,’ said Clare. ‘Just names. I’d better go and get the supper with Aunt Susan.’

  ‘So …’ said Aunt Susan. ‘How did the play go? I quite forgot to ask.’

  ‘All right. They were rather cross with me. I started talking in the banquet scene.’

  ‘Surely you were supposed to? As a guest.’

  ‘I said I could see Banquo’s ghost. You aren’t supposed to do that.’

  Aunt Susan let her glasses slide to the end of her nose and looked over the top of them: a sharp, querying look. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know really. I was feeling a bit peculiar. I expect it’s the weather.’

  ‘Nonsense. Only the very weak in spirit allow themselves to be directed by weather. Is there something on your mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you need a change. Why don’t y
ou do something interesting at the weekend? Go somewhere with a friend.’

  ‘Liz has got her grandmother coming to stay.’

  ‘Someone else, then. Go to London for the day.’

  ‘London?’ Trains, traffic, shops, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, all that …

  ‘Why not? See if your friend John would like to escort you. Show him the sights.’

  During the day, working mechanically through the things that had to be done – go to school, go here, go there, do maths, Latin, history, eat, run about – the idea bloomed a little in her mind and became attractive. An outing. An occasion. She hoped John would like the idea, not have engagements, or, even, not wish to do something with her. She wrote in her otherwise empty diary (a Christmas present from Norfolk, labelled ‘From the children, with love’, in cousin Margaret’s writing) – ‘To London’, and underlined it neatly. The day rolled on, and away: she felt lethargic, glad to have the dictation of the school day around her which removed any obligation to make decisions, think what to do next. It was a relief to obey bells, and the clock. Nobody mentioned her misdemeanour at the play: like the play itself, it had vanished into the past and no longer mattered particularly. Mrs Cramp asked if she was feeling better, and hoped she had rested at home yesterday. ‘Yes,’ said Clare, ‘I rested at home yesterday, and I am quite all right now.’

  Once, the chronology of the day failed altogether. Sitting at her desk, waiting for whatever came next, she could not remember whereabouts they might be. She said to Liz, ‘Is it morning or afternoon?’

  ‘Morning, silly. Half past eleven.’

  She had, for a moment, felt suspended in time. Untethered. Everything had been as usual – the formroom, the blackboard, the games pitch framed in the window – but she herself had seemed to be unrelated to everything else. To know that it was half past eleven was to lurch, with relief, into place again.

  ‘Have you ever done that? Not known what time of day it was?’

  Liz considered. ‘Not lately. I used to when I was small. I remember rushing to my mother to find out if it was before lunch or after.’

  ‘Why do you think it matters so much?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just unsettling, somehow. You don’t know where you are.’

  With some diffidence – was she being impertinent, perhaps? – she put the suggestion about London to John that evening. To her relief, he thought it a good idea.

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clare. ‘What have you seen in London?’

  ‘The Houses of Parliament. Oxford Street. Paddington Station. Big Ben. Trafalgar Square. The Ugandan High Commissioner’s office.’

  ‘And Westminster Abbey.’

  ‘Yes. Westminster Abbey.’

  ‘We could go to the Zoo,’ said Clare. ‘If it’s cold they have nice stuffy places there. The Lion House, and that kind of thing.’

  ‘Are you trying to make me feel at home?’ said John gravely. They both laughed.

  It did not snow again that week, but it became no warmer. The old snow lay around in dirty heaps, tinged grey or brown. In the garden it had flattened into a skin of ice over the grass, and the grass pricked through it here and there, looking artificial. Clare, listening to weather forecasts with an interest beyond the immediate present, heard that milder weather was expected over the weekend, and was pleased. They would not have to spend all their time in the Lion House.

  There were white skies on Saturday, but no wind, and no snow. They had an early breakfast, supervised by Maureen, who was faintly disapproving. Clare, filled suddenly with compunction, thought perhaps she should have been asked to come as well, and asked if she would like to. But Maureen was going to help her friend look at material for wedding dresses. Only the under-occupied, she implied, could be involved in such frivolities as day trips to London.

  The station was bleak, an unpromising starting point. Bleak with newness, rather than the expected squalor of stations. Tickets were bought from a man so quarantined behind glass that even money and tickets were swivelled on a metal plate rather than passed from hand to hand. It would be dreadful, Clare thought, to start some huge, important journey from here. Travel could never seem momentous under such circumstances – it reduced everything to the stature of a day trip. As they stood waiting she thought of trains in old films, oozing steam, lumbering slowly away, so that the heroine’s face could vanish gradually, irrevocably, into white clouds. You couldn’t have a tragic farewell with brisk, matter-of-fact trains of today, whisking commuters and day trippers through tidy landscapes. She thought of John, leaving home for three years.

  ‘How did you come here?’

  ‘By ’plane.’

  Undramatic, too, surely? ‘Did all your family come to see you off?’

  ‘Thirty-seven people.’

  ‘Heavens! Was there a lot of crying?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said John, with pride.

  The Thames Valley unrolled on each side of them, trim with whitened fields and black hedges. The back gardens of houses ran down to the railway, offering the traveller a view, that seemed intrusive, of other people’s domesticity – washing on lines, children’s toys, plaster gnomes, greenhouses. The houses became closer together, the gardens diminished, and were no longer there. The train arrived at Paddington.

  ‘I think,’ said John, as though he had given the matter much serious consideration, ‘you should show me something very old. Something to do with English history.’

  Clare thought, and suggested the Tower. They studied the map of the underground, argued about routes, and found that Clare was more efficient in this area than John. This, for some reason, entertained John vastly. They travelled to the Tower laughing, so that people stared at them, and looked away in embarrassment.

  They walked by the river, in a grey pearly light, with a cold wind coming at them from the water, channelled up from Southend, Foulness, the open sea. The city blinked and snapped around them, light answering light, window to window, car to car. The flat slabs of new office blocks, factories, flats, rose among spires and domes. Clare tried to remember fragments of text book history for John – the Romans, Wat Tyler, the Great Fire – confused herself and him and started them off laughing again. They leaned over a wall and watched the river run brown below them, lining its shore with a scum of oil and rubbish. John found the Tower smaller than he had expected. Inside, he bought a guide book and insisted on establishing their precise whereabouts at every step.

  ‘Wait. We have to go next to the Bloody Tower, or I shall lose my way on the map.’

  Clare, preferring to wander undirected, found herself alone from time to time, and would come upon him as though upon a stranger, a long, gawky figure in a leather jacket, studying suits of armour with the intensity of someone who might be required to answer questions on the subject.

  They finished the Tower, and emerged at the other end. ‘Now where?’ said John. ‘The lions?’

  They made their way to the Zoo deviously, with many changes of route, swaying on the tops of buses, plunging into the hot gale of the Underground, walking. They ate hamburgers in a warm steamy café, and talked. About John’s brothers and sisters, about the moon, currently being revisited by the Americans, about the aunts, about hamburgers, and whether they are best fat or thin, with or without onion. Fed, and warmed, they found themselves another bus, and travelled to the Zoo, to what seemed an elegant fringe of the City, green with grass and trees, the houses huge, trim and withdrawn.

  The Zoo, at first, appeared to have been abandoned, by animals, at any rate. People drifted across wastes of grey tarmac, staring hopefully into empty cages, or at inert heaps of fur or feathers bundled away under straw. Pigeons and sparrows gobbled the offerings of small children. From time to time jungly shrieks rang out across the flower beds and wire netting.

  ‘Do all animals hibernate over here?’ said John.

  The monkey house, warm and stinking, was more active. They moved slo
wly past the cages, reading names and countries of origin. The monkeys swarmed, screamed, stared with sharp, unfathomable eyes. A group of middle-aged women stood in front of the orangutans and shrieked with laughter. They became almost hysterical, tears rolling down their cheeks. The orang, hunched against the bars, looked immeasurably ancient, a pile of wrinkles from which glittered black, watching eyes.

  Clare said, ‘Why do animals make people laugh?’

  ‘Perhaps they aren’t really laughing. In Uganda people sometimes laugh at road accidents.’

  ‘Do wild animals look different?’

  ‘Smaller,’ said John.

  They left the monkeys and went to look down into a concrete pit. A brown bear, like a shambling mat edged with claws, wandered up and down, sniffing at empty crisp packets and iced lolly sticks. Clare said suddenly, ‘I’ve seen that before.’

  ‘That bear, particularly?’

  ‘One like it, anyway. Seeing it made me remember – I must have been here with my parents, when I was very young. I can remember not being high enough to see over the railings, and someone lifting me.’

  ‘Was that long before they died?’

  The bear sat down on its haunches, licking its paws. ‘You’re one of the first people I’ve heard say that. Just like that. Usually they said, “When your mum and dad – er, … ” ’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like pretences.’

  ‘I don’t. But people mostly do, and I don’t know how you stop them. You end up pretending yourself.’

  ‘Do you remember them well?’ said John.

  ‘Oh, yes. My mother was rather like Aunt Susan, only much younger, of course. She had the same kind of pointed nose. She used to wear a pink dress I liked very much. My father was very tall – or perhaps it was just me being small then, but I remember always turning upwards to look at him. It’s funny, but the part of him I remember best is his trousers. Hairy ones, or grey flannel.’

  ‘Did you go straight away to live with your aunts?’

  ‘No. I was six and I lived for about three years with my mother’s sister – Aunt Mary – because she had children too. But then they went away to America and the aunts had been asking for me to come to Norham Gardens for a long time, and I wanted to, so I did. I always liked the aunts best, really.’