The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  Mrs Rider said, ‘The old ladies keeping well, are they? I’ve not seen them about lately.’

  ‘They’re all right. Aunt Anne’s got a bad chest so she’s not going out much.’

  ‘They’ll be feeling their age,’ said Mrs Rider. ‘I know how it is. I lost my mother in the spring. Eighty-four she was – wonderful for her age.’

  Believe it or not, the fronts of late-Victorian Gothic houses have no fewer than twenty-one windows, counting each panel of the attic ones as a single window. To number them correctly takes at least a quarter of a minute, demanding considerable concentration and quite banishing other thoughts from the mind.

  ‘You’re looking peaky, dear,’ said Mrs Rider. ‘Tired. Working you hard at school, are they?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t with me. There, you get along into the warm. You must be perished, with those bare legs.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare, ‘they are cold. Goodnight.’

  She put the bike away and went in at the back door. There wasn’t much warm to get on into – inside felt much the same as out, though not quite so draughty.

  Tea took longer than usual. The aunts were feeling spry and talkative. They sat on either side of the library fire, swathed in plaid travelling rugs used for family holidays in the Highlands half a century and a World War ago, and wanted to be told about things outside, beyond the library and the house and Norham Gardens. They wanted to know what Clare was doing in history now, and what the new French teacher was like, and how the school production of Macbeth was getting along.

  ‘I took the spears. Mrs Cramp thought they were lovely, but she was a bit fussed about the points.’

  ‘An interesting play,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘What are you doing about the ghosts?’

  ‘Doing about them?’

  ‘Well, are you presenting them in the flesh, or keeping them as a manifestation of Macbeth’s state of mind?’

  ‘We’re having them real. Banquo, anyway. He’s Liz wrapped up in white cheesecloth with splashes of red paint for blood.’

  ‘That sounds most effective,’ said Aunt Anne. Wisps of hair had escaped from her knot, as they always did when she became excited in conversation, and fluttered around her face in the draught from the chimney.

  Aunt Susan didn’t agree. ‘They are psychological ghosts. You shouldn’t see them. They are an indication of Macbeth’s private guilt and anguish.’

  ‘Surely you are being too modern?’ said Aunt Anne, retrieving hair. ‘To the seventeenth-century mind ghosts were perfectly acceptable. Portents, maybe, expressions of guilt, if you like, but quite real and visible.’

  The aunts argued, gently. The library clock whirred, clicked, struck five.

  ‘What do people have now, then?’ said Clare. ‘Instead of ghosts?’

  ‘Have?’

  ‘Have in their minds, instead of ghosts. If they’re in a state about something, like Macbeth?’

  ‘I suppose obsessions would be the modern substitute,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Neuroses of one kind and another. Burying anxiety in some kind of obsessive fancy.’

  ‘Imagining something was going on that wasn’t?’

  ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Aunt Anne, ‘that poor friend of father’s who thought people were in the habit of coming into his rooms at night to steal his papers? He built barricades to keep them out. It was all to do with some problem over his work. A mathematician, he was.’

  ‘Surely he was a theologian. A man called Robinson.’

  ‘No, no. You are confusing him with the chaplain.’

  The aunts had retreated, as they sometimes did, to some time around 1930. To bring them back, Clare said, ‘What happened in the end?’

  ‘He recovered, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘I s’pose he solved the problem. But what if you had one that couldn’t be solved? That was so enormous it didn’t have an answer.’

  ‘Then,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘it would be part of the process of living. One’s life tends to be littered with insoluble problems of one kind or another.’

  ‘The lady who came to school to talk to us about Growing Up said everything is a matter of coming to terms and adjusting yourself. She was talking about sex, mostly.’

  ‘If I may say so,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘she was entirely wrong. People are seldom adjustable. They endure. Or not, as the case may be.’

  ‘I see,’ said Clare. She got up. ‘I’ll have to go now. I’ve got homework.’

  The aunts, by the fire, bargained with one another for pieces of the newspaper. The crossword puzzle was traded for the leading article. Clare closed the door and went upstairs to her room.

  There was no paper in the drawer of her desk. She crossed the landing to the big drawing room and went to get some from the desk by the window. It was bitterly cold in there, but she stood for a minute looking round at the stiff chairs and sofas standing against the wall or drawn up face to face as though locked in argument. This room had been little used for a long time now. It had been furnished and decorated for Great-grandmother, who had given tea parties here, and been At Home to her friends, and since then it had decayed quietly and privately. The curtains were faded in stripes, and the William Morris wallpaper had brown marks on it, and damp patches. The silk cushions had holes in them. The aunts’ lives had not been spent in a drawing room. They were people who lived in libraries or studies. All the same, it was full of their presence. They were here, like ghosts of themselves, preserved at various points in their lives. On the piano, with Great-grandmother, in a silver-framed photograph, Aunt Anne a plump baby in white muslin, Aunt Susan a small girl leaning against her mother’s knee, staring solemnly at the camera. On the mantelpiece they stood together in the preserved sunshine of some long-distant summer, young and pretty, hair piled on their heads like a cottage loaf, skirts brushing the grass. And there they were again on the desk, in separate frames, looking appropriately resolute in academic caps and gowns. And here again, on the piano, older, at a halfway point, perhaps, between the children in the picture alongside and the two people sitting at this moment in the chairs on either side of the library fire downstairs: halfway, the shape of their faces a little different, some lines now around the eyes, standing in a row of people, dark-suited men and other ladies in sober, unsmart dresses. Beneath was a small silver inscription that said ‘Members of the Hope-Robertson Commission, 1939’.

  Clare rummaged in the bureau for paper. Here, too, the past survived time and change, petrified in letters, notes, diaries. The aunts, travelling in Italy in 1921, had written weekly to their parents, and here were the letters, bundled up and tied with white tape. Here was Great-grandmother’s recipe book – favourite meals recalled in a firm, sloping script. Here were letters from Grandfather, killed as a young man in the First World War, and here were school reports on the small son who had never known him, who was Clare’s own father. She had read all these, many times, and merely tidied them into a pile before closing the drawer. No paper in there.

  Other drawers yielded more letters and notebooks and, in one instance, a fat brown envelope that burst and spilled out ancient photographs of unfamiliar landscapes and dark people with painted faces and elaborate headdresses. Clare stowed them away again and found, at last, a nice fat wad of unused sheets of paper. She took them out and went back to her room.

  The next day was Saturday. Clare, waking late, came down to find Aunt Susan alone in the kitchen, putting things on a tray.

  ‘I am defeated,’ she said, ‘by an apparent dearth of marmalade.’

  ‘I expect we’ve run out. Where’s Aunt Anne?’

  ‘Her chest has been playing her up in the night. She thought she would stay in bed today. Dear me, I haven’t put the kettle on. Somehow a methodical approach has always escaped me when it comes to domestic things. I put it down to a pampered youth.’

  Clare filled the kettle. ‘I’ll take the tray up. Look, it’s been snowing agai
n.’ The garden seemed diminished by the snow, a red brick box packed with white, lined up in a row of red brick boxes. ‘I don’t like snow.’

  ‘Why ever not? It is usually exhilarating to the young. I remember praying for snow, quite literally, and then being consumed with guilt for bothering the Almighty over inessentials.’

  ‘Did it work,’ said Clare, ‘praying?’

  ‘Did it snow, do you mean? Presumably, in the fullness of time.’

  ‘So you’d never have known if it was God or just the climate?’

  ‘Exactly so. That always struck me as one of the ambiguities of prayer. We experienced religious doubts very early, Anne and I. I remember that we tried to test the matter scientifically when we were around nine or so.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, in small ways. We were much too scared to try tampering with anything really important. Meals, I remember – we would request a certain course of menus and wait anxiously to see what percentage of our demand was met. Above a certain proportion we felt must imply some kind of divine interference.’

  ‘Chocolate pudding every day.’

  ‘That kind of thing. Where do we keep butter knives?’

  ‘In the drawer,’ said Clare. ‘But Great-grandfather wasn’t very religious, was he?’

  ‘Dear me, no. He was interested in religion, of course, as an anthropologist. But Mother was a firm believer in the proprieties, and a regular attendance at church was proper in those days, for one and all. There, I think that is all Anne will need.’

  After breakfast Clare cycled into the town – along by the Parks, bleak today, dotted with prancing dogs and children skidding on the icy grass, past the University Museum and Keble with a cold hard wind gusting at her back, and then round into Broad Street and the Saturday shoppers swarming the pavements in the Corn market. Women with children in pushchairs, and bikes, and shiny new cars, and pop music oozing from the open doors of the new boutique, and alongside all that the black tower of St Michael’s which is one thousand years old. Places are very odd, when you stop to think about it – the way they manage to be both now, and then, both at once. Much the same, if you think about it, as people.

  In Boots she met Liz, from school.

  ‘What are you doing, Clare? You’ve been staring at that tin of talc for about five minutes.’

  ‘Thinking.’

  ‘About talc?’

  ‘No, people. Come to the library with me.’

  In the Public Library Clare interpreted to a bewildered librarian the aunts’ long, illegible list of books they thought they would like to read. Liz, too, needed books. She wandered disconsolately along the shelves, complaining.

  ‘How can I know which one I want to read?’

  ‘You couldn’t ever know that till you’ve read it. Shut your eyes and take the seventh book from the left.’

  ‘Woodwork for Beginners. Great. Just what I wanted.’

  And outside it was snowing again, the dun-coloured sky whirling over the Town Hall and the traffic and the towers and spires.

  ‘Hurray!’ said Liz.

  Clare said again, ‘I hate snow.’

  ‘Why on earth? It’s super.’

  ‘It makes me feel shut in. I get all anxious.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Come to Port Meadow this afternoon.’

  ‘I might.’

  There was ice on Port Meadow, where the river had flooded over into the fields and then frozen. It was too thin to skate on, and choppy with hummocks of grass, but there were gulls careering high above in a vast pale sky and boats on the hidden river that seemed mysteriously to glide through the grass. Pakistani boys played cricket on a spread of concrete, the ball cracking down into icy puddles, shouting to each other with Oxfordshire accents. Clare cycled with Liz and others, riding fast with scarves flying, through the small back streets beyond Walton Street. She came home on fire, her face aching against the cold, her throat sore from shrieking and laughing, and wanted suddenly to give the aunts a present because they had not been there too, but the shops were shut and anyway she had no money.

  Back at Norham Gardens, making tea, she remembered the Christmas roses. At the far end of the garden, under the wall, there was a place where Christmas roses grew, left over from years ago when the garden had been cherished and cared for. They must be very persistent, Christmas roses. She put on wellingtons and went out into the dusk to find them. There they were, flowering under a coating of snow, pale green ones and mauve. She picked them all, the stems dripping down her sleeve.

  It was a very grey dusk, quite colourless, like a photograph – white snow and grey houses and blue-grey sky and black trees. Here and there an uncurtained window made an orange square within the dark and solid outline of the houses. Next door, someone came for a moment and stood within one of the orange squares, looking out, a stark head-and-shoulder shape, like the shape of the piece of wood from the trunk in the attic. Clare thought of it, staring from where she had put it in her own attic, over the roofs and trees. You wouldn’t be able to see that, though, from outside. Just the black of the window pane. The windows of the house all glittered blackly, or sometimes white when they reflected the snow. Clare, going back across the lawn, could see herself in the kitchen window, a black figure advancing out of a blank white square.

  Except that the square wasn’t quite blank. Somewhere at the back of it, behind her, there were these spiny things sticking straight up, massed together, quivering slightly, like a forest of spears, or bows and arrows, and behind them, hidden among them, shapes, forms?

  She looked back. Branches, of course, branches of trees, twigs, trunks. They’d gone from the reflection now, anyway, and there was only her, holding the Christmas roses, and the telephone wires singing in the wind, like voices, far away, shouting. She shook the water off the Christmas roses and went into the house. The aunts would be pleased. They would have forgotten all about the Christmas roses. She would arrange them in one of the Lalique vases and put them on the tea tray, for a surprise.

  Aunt Anne was feeling a bit better. She had come down.

  ‘Christmas roses! Susan, she has brought Christmas roses from the garden!’

  ‘An inspiration! Clever child.’

  The roses, pale and unreal, like imaginary flowers, flopped over the edge of the vase and made blurred reflections of themselves on the surface of the library table.

  ‘They must have been planted before the war.’

  ‘During Munich. I remember perfectly. One kept coming in from the garden to listen to the news.’

  When you are old you remember things quite well if they happened years and years ago: it is yesterday that becomes unclear, or last week. The aunts drank tea, and looked at the Christmas roses. Clocks ticked, the fire sighed and shifted. If there was a world beyond Norham Gardens, where urgent and consuming things went on, it seemed very far away. Clare thought: I am like the aunts, we are both at a time when nothing much is happening to us. They have finished having things happen to them, and I haven’t started yet. We just wait. The aunts think backwards mostly, because that suits them best. Perhaps I should think forwards, but I can’t because there is nothing to be seen for certain except O levels and August in Norfolk. I don’t know what I will be, any more than I am sure what I am now. I am like a chrysalis, turning into something: not knowing what is frightening, sometimes.

  ‘More tea, dear?’

  I might be someone awful. A Hitler. So that it would be better to stop now. Or I might be someone very wise and good. A great poet. Probably neither, in the end, but somewhere in between, like most people.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Waiting to find out what will happen is like being one of the stuffed birds in the thing on the mantelpiece, sitting inside a glass dome in the middle of a Sunday afternoon that is going on for ever and ever, having peculiar thoughts that you couldn’t possibly tell anyone.

  ‘Clare! You’re in a dream, child!’

  ‘A penny for them?’ said Aunt Sus
an.

  Clare poked the fire, and created chaos, in miniature: volcanoes were born, and died, landscapes disintegrated.

  ‘Decimal or old?’

  ‘A penny.’

  Decimal coinage the aunts ignored. They were too old, they said, to be expected to come to terms with it. Like royalty, they no longer handled money: all necessary transactions were dealt with by Mrs Hedges or Clare.

  ‘I’ve forgotten now, anyway.’

  Clare read, the words moving in front of her eyes, their meaning pushed aside by thoughts. It was good this afternoon, on Port Meadow. Now I feel shut in again, somehow. As though everything had stood still and I couldn’t make it move. I wish it wasn’t winter. Now seems to go on for ever and ever, but it isn’t, you know that really – it’s rushing, in fact, rushing and rushing and you can’t do anything about that either.

  She stared at the aunts, tranquil in the firelight, and tried again to read. Presently the thoughts lost their insistence and the words won: a strange and distant world moved into the library at Norham Gardens, a world of forests and birds of paradise and inscrutable beliefs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The people live and die in the valley. They are locked away from the world by mountains: by the green moss forests and the high blue peaks. Time has stopped here. Isolated, they have known no influences, learned no skills. They know only the cycle of a man’s life: birth, and maturity, and death. Their lives are both simple and deeply mysterious: they have never learned to bake clay, but they have sought explanations for their own existence. They celebrate the mystery of life with ritual. The tamburan is a part of this ritual: it is no longer an object, but a symbol.