The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  ‘You had a nasty fall off your bike, dear. One broken arm and some bruises and a bang on the head.’

  ‘Am I going to stay here long?’

  ‘Just till we’re sure your head’s all right.’

  ‘I feel sick.’

  Hours later, she woke from another, different, sleep, and things began to fall into place. It was the next day. The aunts would be coming along to see her soon. No, there was nothing at all the matter with them: what had made her think there might be? Her arm would be in plaster for some time. She could go home in a day or two, when the doctor had seen her again. There would be fish for lunch. The weather had improved.

  People in hospitals are like refugees. Detached from their own lives, they establish new relationships, create a new world for themselves, fence themselves in with new concerns. By the afternoon Clare’s closest friend was the lady in the next bed who had fallen off the stepladder in the kitchen and damaged herself in various ways. She had four grandchildren and before the lunch came round on clanking trolleys Clare knew a great deal about them all, and a great many other things besides. Her view of the outside world was limited to six squares of sky let into the opposite wall of the ward, and the most immediate and interesting thing was the glass door at the end through which came and went everything that was worth watching. It was something of a shock when, eventually, it opened to admit the aunts, looking bewildered and concerned.

  Explanations. A note. On the hall table. Old friend, who had called, with car, and insisted on taking aunts out to expensive dinner. ‘Against our better judgement,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘I am so sorry …’

  A piece of white paper, getting under the feet, while one was dashing around, not being sensible …

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘I was stupid. Absolutely daft. Mad.’

  ‘We didn’t even enjoy the dinner particularly,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘Much too rich. My poor girl … How are you?’

  ‘It’s a funny thing, but in fact I feel better than I have for ages. Kind of clear in the head. Has it stopped snowing?’

  ‘Yes. Indeed, there seems to be a thaw on the way. But had you been unclear? You should have told us.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything you could explain to anyone, really. Just a feeling. When am I coming home?’

  ‘Soon. They want to observe you for a day or two.’

  More visitors came. Mrs Cramp. Liz. Mrs Hedges. Maureen and John, together, John’s face staring gravely over the top of pink chrysanthemums that bulged like ice cream from a cone of white paper. They sat on either side of the bed and contemplated her. Clare felt priest-like, as though she had only to reach out and take them both by the hand, to unite them forever. ‘Wilt thou take this woman …’ A weak giggle escaped her and Maureen said sternly, ‘You shouldn’t get yourself excited. Rest, you need.’ In a lower voice, but not low enough, as though accidents impaired people’s hearing, she said to John, ‘We shouldn’t stay too long. Better be off in a minute.’ John nodded.

  She went home, sitting up in an ambulance like a little bus, her plastered arm in a sling. Something had happened to the outside world while she had been away. It had turned green and brown. The snow had all gone, except for islands of white that lingered here and there on lawns or paths, and grey humps in gutters or beside lamp posts. The roads were wet and black, the trees dripping, the sky pale blue, arching high and wide above the city. Everything seemed brightly coloured – the red brick houses, green grass, the shiny brown buds tipping the chestnut branches that overhung a wall. Going up the steps at Norham Gardens, she noticed the blunt tips of crocuses poking up through the grass at the side of the house, purple and yellow. They must have been there all the time, underneath the snow, and one hadn’t known about them. Forgotten they were there.

  Home, she toured the house, as though she had been away for a long time and needed to make sure that everything was all right and in its proper place. Drawing room, library, study, dining room, spare rooms. She tidied her own room, excavating drawers and cupboards, filling cardboard boxes with rubbish, laboriously, with one hand, arranging books according to subject and author. She threw out the chair she had always used at her desk and asked John to help her bring up the one from the study, a heavy, dark brown thing with a leather seat that swivelled on its base. Great-grandfather had used it.

  ‘Why all these changes, suddenly?’

  ‘I’m spring-cleaning,’ said Clare.

  Mrs Hedges, emptying the cardboard boxes into the dustbin, said, ‘Trust you to wait till you’ve got a broken arm, and then decide to turn the place upside down.’

  Liz came round after school, and was swept up to the attic, to help with a clearing-out process. Clare had emptied all the things out of the trunks on to the floor, and was sorting them out, folding them, and wrapping the more elaborate dresses in paper, putting them carefully away again. Liz trundled to and fro obediently.

  ‘Those can be thrown away,’ said Clare. ‘Those old shoes. I’m only keeping the most important things.’

  ‘What about this? Kind of hairy jacket thing? For a man.’

  ‘No. That’s to be kept.’

  ‘You couldn’t possibly want it for anything.’

  ‘It was useful once,’ said Clare briskly. ‘Put it in there, with the dresses. There, that’s much better.’ She looked round the room with satisfaction. ‘Now you know where everything is.’

  ‘What about that nasty shield thing?’

  ‘It isn’t nasty, it’s very interesting. I’ll be seeing about that in a day or two. Let’s go down and have tea.’

  ‘Does your arm hurt?’

  ‘Not now. It tickles inside the plaster, though. I hope I can have it off before the holidays, if we’re going on this cycling trip.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested.’

  ‘I am now,’ said Clare.

  There was something else to be done, also. On Saturday it would be Aunt Susan’s birthday. I am going, Clare thought, to buy her a very special present. Not anything she needs, but something she didn’t at all know that she wanted. But something that, as soon as she sees it, she will know she couldn’t possibly do without. It was a large ambition: going out of the front door, she had no idea how she would set about fulfilling it.

  First, though, she had to see the doctor. The hospital had said that she must, and Mrs Hedges had rung the surgery.

  Clare walked up Banbury Road with her coat hugged round her, one arm flapping loose. In the surgery, she attracted sympathetic glances. A woman chivvied her small boy off his seat to give her somewhere to sit down. The receptionist had a cold: her nose was fringed with pink and her voice, snapping orders at the patients, was thick and resentful. Clare smiled cosily at her and she looked away, uncomfortable.

  The doctor was reading a letter from the hospital.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘skidded on the ice, I hear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not too much damage, though. Arm going on all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Head not aching at all? No sickness?’

  ‘No. I’m feeling very well.’

  ‘Bruises?’

  ‘They’re going.’

  ‘Splendid.’ The doctor looked down at the paper in front of him. ‘How’s this sleeping business? Any better?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said the doctor. ‘Jolly good. Well, come along and see me in a week or two, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

  Outside again, she hesitated. A bus, headed for the town, was just drawing up at the stop and for a moment she thought of taking it, and then changed her mind. One thing was certain, and that was that an appropriate present for Aunt Susan would not be found in the bright and all-providing shops of the town. She wandered along the pavement uncertainly for a while, and then remembered the cluster of antique and junk shops in the back streets beyond the hospital. Maybe she could look around there and find somethi
ng.

  There were several shops, all identically murky as though someone felt a deliberate gloom appropriate to the display of old or beautiful objects. The first one only had furniture in it, and in the second the vases and pieces of silver on show were arranged with a care that made them likely to be much too expensive. The third, in which things were stacked, rather than arranged, was more promising.

  She went in. The shop was full of tables, each one covered with objects. More objects filled bookcases and shelves: pictures and mirrors covered the walls. She had been standing there for several minutes, looking around, when a movement at the back of the shop became a woman, who must have been there all the time, like some creature with protective colouring, inert among the shadows. ‘Is there anything you’re interested in, particularly?’

  Clare had opened a leather-covered box. There were initials on the lid, engraved in silver: V. M. B. Inside, a silver toilet set. It was worn. Someone had used this, once, day after day.

  ‘Fifty pounds,’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes.’ Clare shut the box.

  ‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘A present …’

  There were old flat-irons, polished up, with white price tickets on the handles. At Norham Gardens, on the larder shelf, there was one like that, without a price ticket. The price tickets said one pound fifty pence. For one pound fifty you can remember what it was like before people had electric irons. Beyond the irons, miscellaneous objects filled a dark corner. A sewing machine for six pounds. A gramophone for eight. Knife boxes, stone crocks, boxes of faded postcards, one of those white hats for tropical wear, the lining stained with sweat.

  The woman said, ‘That’s not antiques there, of course. Just old things. There’s a big demand for that kind of thing, now.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Clare. She picked up a beaded purse, and put it down again. Seventy pence.

  ‘Have a look round.’

  Oil lamps. For three pounds fifty pence you could dispense with electric light. For two seventy-five you could remember the war with a gas mask. Neat round labels priced each object of survival: the older they were, the more expensive. Candlesticks, pieces of embroidery, pictures. A dark landscape was labelled ‘Nineteenth century. £45.’ For forty-five pounds you could buy your own two square feet of the nineteenth century. Clare began to move towards the door. ‘There’s some cheaper things in the other room. Quite nice for presents.’

  ‘Thank you. Actually – well, I’m not sure this person really needs anything like that.’

  ‘Most people like something old, these days. It’s fashionable, having old things.’

  ‘Thank you for letting me look,’ said Clare. She edged out of the door.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Clare closed the door behind her and walked away. Crossing the road, she saw someone else go into the shop. Perhaps the woman would be able to sell him something old, for ninety pence, or three pounds fifty, or forty-five pounds. Old things were fashionable.

  All of a sudden she knew what Aunt Susan wanted for her birthday.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Houses are built for the tribe, and roads. They learn how to drive cars, use telephones, tin openers, matches and screwdrivers. They are given laws which they must obey: they are not to kill one another and they must pay their taxes. They listen to the radio and they make no more tamburans, but their nights are rich with dreams. The children of the tribe learn how to read and write: they sit at wooden desks with their heads bent low over sheets of paper, and make marks on the paper. One day, they will discover again the need for tamburans, and they will make a new kind of tamburan for themselves, and for their children, and their children’s children.

  She carried it back sloped over her shoulder, the roots tidily shrouded in black plastic. It seemed dry and lifeless but there were, she could see, very small dark swellings at the end of its thin branches. Maureen, coming downstairs on her way out, was amazed.

  ‘But that’s going to take years to grow. Years and years.’

  ‘I know. About fifty, the man in the shop said. And then it’ll last another two or three hundred, if people don’t interfere with it.’

  ‘A rose bush she’d get more out of,’ said Maureen doubtfully. ‘A nice standard rose.’

  Clare said, ‘No. A tree is what she’d like. A copper beech, this is. In summer it has those dark red leaves and you can lie underneath and look up through them and it’s as though the sky was on fire.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maureen, ‘it’s an original present – I’ll say that.’

  They planted the tree on Aunt Susan’s birthday, ceremoniously, at the end of a bright and sunny afternoon that had brought the crocuses out. They were still glowing now, though the sun had gone down and twilight seemed to seep up, somehow, from the ground itself, like the mists that sometimes crept off the river and up the streets. John dug a hole, at the far end of the garden, and Aunt Susan lowered the clutch of roots into it. She had been delighted with her present. It reminded her, apparently, of a tree she had liked long ago, in the garden of some house in Somerset where the aunts had stayed. The aunts argued, amiably, about the name of the people who had owned the house, and the year in which they had visited them.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘it’s the tree I remember best, anyway. How nice that I am giving birth to one like it, as it were.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said John, staring down at the tree, ‘it does not look to me very well.’

  ‘Why?’ Clare and the aunts looked at him, and back at the tree.

  ‘It is like a stick. No leaves.’

  They laughed. Clare explained about English trees losing their leaves in winter which African ones, it seemed, did not. John, impressed, examined the leaf buds, and seemed to find the whole process remarkable.

  ‘Whatever had you thought?’ said Aunt Anne. ‘You must have imagined the whole landscape dying around you.’

  ‘I am a most unobservant person,’ said John. ‘I hadn’t even thought about it.’

  Mrs Hedges had made a birthday cake. It had a single candle in the middle. ‘Is this tact?’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Or an insufficiency of candles? What a very kind thought, though.’

  ‘People are kind,’ said Clare. ‘The people I know, anyway. Mrs Hedges, and Maureen, and John, and Mrs Cramp at school. Cousin Margaret, even.’

  ‘What a benevolent girl you are. Do be careful – stoking the fire with one arm like that.’

  ‘I am being. It’s funny what a lot of things you don’t need two arms for. Why am I benevolent?’

  ‘Finding people kind.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘Individually, yes,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Collectively, seldom. Have a slice of my cake.’

  They ate cake in front of the fire, and the fire wheezed and shifted and sighed and outside the wall at the end of the garden turned black and the sky a hard midnight blue.

  ‘Draw the curtains,’ said Aunt Anne, ‘there’s a dear. Or does that need two arms?’

  ‘No. One does fine.’ Clare stood at the window for a moment and looked down the long tunnel of the garden. She could just see the tree, looking young and forlorn with the earth roughed up round its feet, and beyond it the bed where the Christmas roses grew. Not long ago she had picked them and stood looking back at the house and everything had seemed unreal. There had been people where now there were only the dark stiff branches of the chestnut in Mrs Rider’s garden, and voices where now the black strands of the telephone wires swooped across the wall. And in dreams she’d walked straight through that wall and into another country. The dreams, though, had been interesting. She couldn’t really remember them, except that the same people had kept coming into them, and they had seemed in some curious way to be telling a story. And the story seemed to be finished now. She came and sat down by the fire again.

  ‘Any more cake?’

  Cousin Margaret wrote to say what frightfully bad luck about the arm and she hoped
Aunt Anne’s cold was better. Sal, she said, was not going to the family in France any more because actually she and Edwin thought perhaps she needed to stand on her own feet a bit so she was going to do a secretarial course in Ipswich instead. Bumpy had lost more teeth. They were looking forward to seeing Clare in August.

  The sun shone. A sun with more brilliance than warmth but that nevertheless disposed of the last snow patches and the grey clumps of ice on street corners, and opened out the crocuses and brought the daffodils up in the school flower beds. It was nearly March, Clare was surprised to find, looking at the calendar over the kitchen sink.

  ‘Spring,’ said Maureen, staring out of the window. ‘I never know about spring, whether I like it or not.’

  ‘I do. It’s the beginning of something. Anything might happen.’

  ‘Mmn. When you’ve seen a few of them, though, it never seems long since the last one. And nothing much ever has happened.’ She tightened the belt of her dressing gown and went away upstairs. The dressing gown came downstairs again now, regardless of John, and she had stopped bothering to put lipstick on at breakfast. She talked to John in an ordinary voice, too. Clare remembered her thoughts when Maureen and John had visited her in hospital, and told him about them.

  ‘When I was in hospital I imagined you and Maureen getting married.’

  ‘Do you think that would be a good idea?’ said John politely.

  ‘Not really, I suppose.’

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘Anyway I don’t think she would want to marry me. Though she is a very nice person,’ he added.

  Clare, feeling that she had brought order into the house, at least in so far as this was possible, turned her attention from her bedroom and the attic to the garden. She found a rusting trowel and fork in the shed and went out. Everything was very wet and she felt there was a great deal that ought to be done, without exactly knowing what. She cut some dead wood out of a climbing rose, and pulled up some obvious weeds, leaving other, more doubtful things that she did not feel competent to classify. Gardening with one arm was not easy: it required a certain inventiveness. There were noises from the other side of the wall and Mrs Rider’s head appeared.