The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  ‘Quite unnecessary.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  ‘We’ll see. I’ll come down later.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am being bullied,’ said Aunt Anne. She sounded tired.

  Clare wandered around the room, touching the brushes on the dressing table, picking up a photograph, drawing the curtains. There was nothing in the room less than twenty years old: only the view out of the window admitted intrusions where cranes and scaffolding broke the skyline of house, tree and lamp post. A few streets away, a new college was being built. Bulldozers and cement mixers rumbled in the muddy landscape that had once been houses and gardens. Cycling past, a day or so before, she had noticed the solitary old tree allowed to survive beside the new building outlined in girders and concrete.

  Aunt Anne said, ‘What have you done today?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing! An entire day with nothing done at all!’

  ‘Well, I’ve done things – geography and maths and eating meals and coming home – but without really knowing about it, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Aunt Anne.

  ‘Quite a lot of days are like that.’

  ‘It’s one of the trials of being young, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be having a good time every minute,’ said Clare. ‘Like people in advertisements – you know, floating through fields eating chocolate, or rushing about drinking coke on enormous beaches.’ She examined the photograph by the bed: sometime long ago a person in a skirt to her ankles – Aunt Susan? – threw a stick for a dog, beside the sea. ‘Actually it’s not like that at all. At least I don’t think it is.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘Only very unperceptive people could suppose otherwise.’

  ‘Mostly you’re just waiting for something to happen. Or wondering what it’ll be like when it does.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Would you like to be fourteen?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Aunt Anne cheerfully. ‘I wonder if you could very kindly give me that unpleasant medicine by the washbasin?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m specially bad at it?’

  ‘Bad at what?’

  ‘Being fourteen.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. There is a rather regrettable tendency nowadays to fence people off according to age. The “young” – as though they were some particular breed. A misleading idea, on the whole. Perhaps you are just not good at being fenced off.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘The same is done to us, of course. The old. This medicine is quite remarkably nasty.’

  ‘Have a cup of tea, quick. Do you feel fenced off?’

  ‘Only by the tiresome business of one’s joints going stiff, and one’s teeth falling out, and not hearing so well. Otherwise one is much the same person as one has always been, and the world is no less interesting a place, I promise you.’ Aunt Anne heaved herself further up on the pillows, and drank tea. Her bun, never entirely secure, had come loose and long strands of brown hair streaked with grey lay around her shoulders. She coughed. ‘Would you remind Susan, when you go down, that according to my reckoning it is about my turn for the newspaper?’

  Going downstairs, Clare thought, talking to the aunts is as easy as talking to people at school, in a different way. Liz, or someone. That’s what Aunt Anne means by not being fenced off. They’re terribly old, the aunts, but somehow I never think about that, except when other people go on about it. Funny, when you think how different the insides of their heads must be, so much fuller than mine, not just knowing more things, like which Prime Minister came after Lloyd George, but all the things they’ve seen and done and said. All that stays in people’s heads, it must do, that’s the difference between being old and young, in the end.

  Lying in bed that night, in the hinterland between being awake and asleep, when things slide agreeably from what is real to what is not, it seemed to her that the house itself, silent around her, was a huge head, packed with events and experiences and conversations. And she was part of them, something the house was storing up, like people store each other up. Drifting into sleep, she imagined words lying around the place like bricks, all the things people had said to each other here, piled up in the rooms like the columns of books and papers in the library, and she wandered around among them, pushing through them, jostled by them.

  And later still, she returned to the place where the brown people had been. She found herself back there with a feeling that there was something she had left uncompleted, and hurried down the path towards the clearing with a determination that this time she must speak to them. They could not, after all, harm her in any way. It was a dream, and nothing in a dream is real.

  Knowing this, she was interested to find that at the same time she could feel the heat of the sun on her arm, and smell the strong, slightly rotten smell that came from some orchid-like flowers that trailed from a branch. She thought, with amusement, that she must be one of the few people to have walked through a jungle in their nightdress. Something rustling in the undergrowth made her stop for a moment, and when it exploded on to the path in the form of one of the pig-like animals, she jumped. It stared at her for a moment, bristling, with little red eyes, and she was glad when it turned and trotted away into the bamboo again.

  Coming suddenly into the clearing she was surprised to find it empty, the fires dead and the people nowhere to be seen. All the same, she felt certain that they were near. She went up to one of the huts and peered inside. Eyes met hers from the darkness, and as she became used to the gloom she could see them sitting there, watching her. She saw too that their faces were most elaborately painted, in reds, blacks and yellows, which she had not noticed before, though now it seemed the most important thing about them, and that their expressions beneath the paint were both frightened and sad.

  And then a very curious thing happened. She spoke to them, and they replied, but no language passed between them. No language passed, but she was perfectly clear that they were asking her for something. They were saying that she had something to give them, and they needed it. This embarrassed and disturbed her, and the embarrassment turned to fear as they got up, one by one, and began to move towards her. But as her fear swelled to panic she realized that to escape the situation she had only to wake up, and did so, though a little less easily than before, with the feeling that she was extracting herself with difficulty from something, dragging herself upwards rather than simply floating free. In the morning she remembered nothing at all, except again, that she had dreamed, and that the dream produced a nagging sense of some obligation unfulfilled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The man who made the tamburan sits before his fire in the dawn. Pigs and children move around him. In the trees birds of paradise are calling, and cockatoos. The sun is not yet up and mist lies along the floor of the valley. He eats yam, and stares into the fire. He lives in a world of total insecurity: he may die in the next five minutes, or tomorrow, or before the next moon. He has no protection against the spears of his enemies, except his own spear and arrows, nor any against the sorcery that is a daily threat, except the protection of the ancestors. The man, knowing that sorcery has caused his yam plants to wither, consults the tamburan: accepting death, and yet denying it, he is not separated from his grandfather or his great-grandfather. They live on, protective and influential, represented by objects.

  ‘There’s this fight,’ said Maureen, ‘in the caff. Only you don’t see all of it, not the blood and that. You see them get their knives out, and their faces – the expressions. And there’s loud music. You don’t see what they do, exactly. You’re kind of left to guess.’

  ‘I see,’ said Clare.

  ‘It’s not a good film if you’re the imaginative type. It was all right in a way, but I don’t know if I’d want to see it round again.’

  ‘I’ve been to Romeo and Juliet at the Playhouse. You see all the sword fight in that. I suppose there c
ould be blood, if they made a mistake.’

  ‘They’d be trained,’ said Maureen. ‘You couldn’t have a mess, not with all the audience sitting there.’

  ‘It was super.’

  Maureen said, ‘He’s good, Shakespeare.’ She began to collect the plates and run water in the sink. They had taken to breakfasting together in the kitchen every day now. The milkman came round the side of the house, clinking bottles, and Maureen watched through the side of the curtain, still running water into the sink and putting plates under the tap. She was interested in the milkman. She could fancy him, she said. The male world was divided, as far as Maureen was concerned, into those you couldn’t fancy at any price, and those you could, given certain circumstances that were never quite specified. Maureen never went so far as to do any positive fancying.

  The milkman went away and Maureen said, ‘There were these two fellows came up to us after – me and my friend, that is. They said would we like a drink. They’d got a nerve, I’ll say that.’

  ‘Did you fancy them?’ said Clare with interest.

  Maureen snorted. ‘No, thank you very much. I’m not the type that lets herself get picked up.’

  ‘Suppose the milkman said would you like a drink? Other than milk, I mean.’

  ‘I’d be making myself cheap.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Clare, disappointed. A romance between Maureen and the milkman would have been fun. One could have stood around at the edges, as it were, feeling involved at one remove.

  ‘My friend’s good-looking,’ said Maureen. ‘Twenty-three, she is.’ The plates were being slapped down on the draining-board now, a bit too sharply. ‘She’s got a boyfriend. But he’s in Leeds this week. That’s why she came to the pictures.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘They’ll be getting married at Easter. A white wedding, she’s going to have.’ One of the plates, slapped too hard, cracked in half. ‘I’m sorry about that. I’ll pay for it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Clare. ‘We’ve got masses more.’ She watched Maureen tidy her hair and put on lipstick, ready to go to work. ‘I like your jersey. You look nice in blue.’

  Maureen did not answer, pursing her mouth at the mirror, armouring herself against the morning. She put the lipstick in her bag, picked up her coat and said, ‘They’re a new line at Marks.’ She inspected her reflection again. ‘Oh well, hope springs eternal. See you later.’

  Clare drank tea, slowly, reluctant to go outside and start the day. She flicked over the pages of a magazine Maureen had left on the table, reading here and there. Maureen’s magazine offered solutions to everything: acne, period pains, split ends, depression. From every page girls smiled or frowned – despondent on Monday with greasy hair, radiant on Friday with a new boyfriend, all uncertainties resolved by change of shampoo. They trooped from one bright picture to another, uniformly young and pretty, in a world where everything was clear and new. They whooped through misty landscapes in their underclothes, rose like Venus from the sea, hair streaming in the wind. On one page a girl sat sleekly on a bar stool, sipping from a tall glass, watched admiringly by spruce young men, having fun. ‘One day,’ the caption warned, ‘you’ll be too old for it’: behind, a size smaller, the barman watched unsmiling, too old.

  The kitchen clock whirred and clicked for a quarter to nine. Clare put the magazine on the dresser and collected her coat, scarf, satchel of books.

  She could hear Aunt Susan coming downstairs, slowly, one step at a time. She’d be holding on to the banisters, looking out for the loose stair rod. ‘Broken limbs are a perfect nuisance at our age. One must just be that much more careful.’

  They met in the hall.

  ‘How’s Aunt Anne?’

  ‘I don’t like this cold. We must have the doctor, Clare, and never mind the expense. I’ve told her to stop being silly.’

  ‘You don’t pay any more,’ said Clare. ‘Not for years. We explained, Mrs Hedges and me. It’s all free.’

  Aunt Susan said ‘Yes, dear,’ in the voice that meant she wasn’t taking something in.

  ‘I’ll go to the surgery on the way to school. It’s always engaged if you telephone.’

  ‘We like a lady doctor,’ said Aunt Susan.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve got one. I’ll ask, though.’

  The surgery was crowded. Every chair was filled. People eyed each other with suspicion, guarding the order of precedence, jumping as the doctor’s bell rang. A baby wailed. Small children stared and fidgeted. A man in a donkey jacket and mud-stained boots tucked a cigarette stub into the corner of his mouth and read Good Housekeeping, turning the pages with huge fingers. There was a smell of people: sweat and clothes and soap and tobacco.

  The receptionist said, ‘Surgery’s full for this morning. Are you an emergency?’

  Am I? Not in any obvious way.

  ‘I don’t want to see the doctor. My aunt’s ill. Miss Mayfield. Forty Norham Gardens.’

  ‘No home calls,’ said the receptionist, ‘except for emergencies and the elderly without transport.’ She allowed herself a faint, triumphant smile.

  ‘She’s that,’ said Clare, ‘the elderly without transport.’ Game, set and match.

  The triumphant smile went away and became a thin, resentful look. The receptionist wrote down the address, with a sigh. She had smeary glasses and a large spot on her chin that had been carefully powdered over but still showed. Perhaps, Clare thought, she was in love with the doctor and thought she must protect him from hordes of hysterical, demanding patients. Or perhaps she was just nasty.

  ‘It’ll be afternoon. His list’s overloaded already.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Or evening. I couldn’t say.’

  Clare went. People, bundled into coats and scarves, were coming up the doctor’s gravelled drive, bringing him coughs and septic fingers and sleeplessness and indeterminate pains. That receptionist would keep the numbers down, though: you’d have to be pretty fit just to get past her. The really frail patients she presumably finished off, just by looking at them.

  The north wind was driving straight down Banbury Road, bleak and untamed, all the way from Yorkshire and Scotland and beyond that still. The sky was white, the trees black and spiny against it, the branches dazzling to look at, like an optical illusion. It was nine o’clock. Wednesday. The third week in January.

  At four o’clock Banbury Road was precisely the same, except that the ice on the pavements had slackened once again into slush. The sky was as white, the trees as black. The cars whipped back and forth, and in the greengrocer’s people told each other what a shocking winter it was, and how there’d be more before it was over. Clare bought oranges, and a steamed pudding in a tin.

  Back at Norham Gardens, Mrs Hedges was in the kitchen, surprisingly, drinking tea. ‘I thought I’d just stop in for the doctor, till you got back. Your Aunt Susan doesn’t always hear the bell.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Clare. ‘The receptionist person didn’t want to let him come, but I said she was the elderly without transport.’

  Mrs Hedges poured a cup of tea. ‘Here, you look perished. They think they’re God Almighty, that type. You’ve just got to take no notice.’

  ‘Won’t your husband be wanting his tea? And Linda.’

  ‘They’ll have to wait, won’t they?’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Do them no harm. Maybe Linda’ll have thought to light the fire, for once. You don’t look well to me, you know. Washed out. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bags under your eyes. Been going to bed at all hours, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘Not really. I have these dreams.’

  ‘What dreams?’

  ‘Dreams, just.’

  ‘I’m bringing you that tonic Linda had last winter,’ said Mrs Hedges firmly. ‘Run down, you must be.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clare. ‘Do tonics stop you dreaming?’

  Mrs Hedges put her coat on, and woolly gloves. ‘That I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Wh
at I really need is a tonic that makes you better at Latin.’

  ‘Miracles, you’re asking for. How’s your Miss Cooper getting on, by the way?’

  ‘Maureen, you mean. She washes her hair on Fridays and her best friend’s getting married at Easter. In white.’

  ‘Well, you’re hitting it off together, that’s obvious. It’s the old ladies that have surprised me. You’d never think they’d take that easily to a lodger. Not living the way they’ve been used to.’

  ‘They’re not fenced off,’ said Clare.

  ‘They’re not what? Oh, never mind – I know you, I’m not getting involved in one of your conversations where everything sounds back to front, or I’ll be here all night.’ Mrs Hedges rinsed out the cups under the tap and went to the door. ‘Goodnight. And you get an early night, mind.’

  ‘Goodnight. Thanks for staying.’

  The front door banged. Mrs Hedges went away to Headington, her husband, and Linda who worked in Boots and would marry her boyfriend of two years’ standing on March the eighteenth. Clare spread homework over the kitchen table. Five minutes later the front door bell rang.

  The doctor was in the hall as soon as the door opened. ‘Which room?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Clare, confused. He set off up the stairs at a gallop and she had to take two steps at a time to keep up with him. He was on the landing, looking round impatiently, before she reached the top. ‘This one?’

  He went in, closing the door behind him, and Clare, going downstairs again, realized that she had hardly even seen him, would not recognize him again. Doctors are busy people. Do not waste your doctor’s time. If that receptionist was having a love affair with him it must be conducted at breakneck speed. Like trains whisking past each other in a tunnel.

  Aunt Susan, in the library, had heard the bell. ‘Was that the doctor?’

  ‘Yes. I took him up.’

  ‘I think I’ll have a little chat when he comes down. Will you bring him in here, Clare?’

  Clare said, ‘Yes,’ doubtfully, and went out into the hall again. Three minutes later the doctor came down, pushing a stethoscope into his bag and rummaging for a prescription pad. He came to rest at the hall table, writing feverishly.