The House in Norham Gardens Read online

  ‘Here, get this along to a chemist in the morning. Two teaspoonfuls before meals. And here are some tablets.’

  Clare said, ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘What? Oh, nothing to worry about. Better stay indoors while this weather lasts.’

  ‘She’s rather old.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the doctor. ‘Splendid old lady. Quite a few years to go yet.’ He ripped the prescription off the pad and handed it to Clare, moving steadily towards the front door. ‘All right, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Splendid. Your grandmother, is she?’

  ‘Her name’s Miss Mayfield,’ said Clare.

  ‘Quite,’ said the doctor. He was ticking off addresses on a typewritten list in his hand. ‘Tell me, is Crick Road the one off to the left? I’m new to this practice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Splendid. Goodnight then.’

  He was already halfway out of the door. You cannot suggest to someone moving at that speed that it would be nice if they came in for a little chat. Clare said, ‘Goodnight,’ to the back of his overcoat going down the steps, and closed the door. She went back into the library.

  ‘I’m afraid he was in rather a hurry.’

  ‘What a pity,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘It would have been nice to get to know him. What did he say?’

  ‘He said there was nothing to worry about. And he left a prescription. I’ll get it tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s a relief, then. I don’t like these colds Anne gets. Did he seem a competent man?’

  ‘You couldn’t really tell,’ said Clare.

  ‘Is something bothering you, dear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ said Aunt Susan. She unfolded The Times and began to read the leading article, holding the small print close to her face. Once she said, ‘This business in Ireland is horribly distressing.’ Her handbag slipped off her lap on to the hearthrug, but she did not notice. She breathed in little puffs, like someone who has run up a flight of stairs: there was just the sound of her breathing in the room, and the fire whistling, very quiet, and the clock ticking. Ticking and ticking. Clare got up and Aunt Susan said, still reading, ‘We might have our supper in here, don’t you think?’ Her reading glasses had slipped down her nose and rested on the bony tip. In old photographs, the aunts had plump faces. Now, the plumpness had splintered into wrinkles. Their faces were hatched all over with lines, like old china, and underneath you could see the shape of the bones. If you touched their skin, it was very soft, like fur, and thin.

  Clare said, ‘Yes, it’ll be warmer.’ She went into the kitchen and wrote about the causes of the Civil War, for forty minutes precisely by the clock.

  There was a note at the bottom of her English essay, a terse B, and then Mrs Cramp’s neat red words marching across the page, saying, ‘Not one of your best pieces of work, Clare. Some careless mistakes. See me after lunch.’

  Mrs Cramp had four children in a village somewhere outside Oxford, and had strong feelings. She had been known to weep over Romeo and Juliet even on a wet Friday afternoon among the desks and blackboards of formroom D. She also voted Labour and became heated about South Africa and Enoch Powell and Rhodesia and could with great ease be diverted into long discussions about almost anything except clothes which she said were boring. She had untidy brown hair that forever escaped from a roll at the back, and somehow knew a great deal about everyone she taught. For this, and other things, she was liked. Clare liked her. If one had had a mother, someone like Mrs Cramp would have done.

  Mrs Cramp was sitting behind the formroom desk with a pile of exercise books in front of her.

  ‘Oh, Clare, yes – I wanted a word about your essay. I liked it, you know, but it was rather puzzling – so many careless mistakes, not like you at all, really. You usually write so carefully. This seemed to have been tossed off in a high passion. Had you enjoyed writing it?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Clare.

  ‘Mmn … Let’s see, now … Yes, here – “I stood in front of the house which loomed above me like a sort of memorial”. Good word, memorial, but “sort of” is shocking English. Either it was a memorial or it wasn’t.’

  ‘It was,’ said Clare.

  ‘Then say so. And I don’t like this bit much either: “The bulldozers flung themselves upon the walls and gnawed at them and I saw them collapse in a cloud of dust and with them all the things that were mine and as I rushed forward it seemed to me that my own foundations were giving way too and I wouldn’t any longer know who I was or what I had been.” A disorganized sentence, that. You should have broken it up into two, perhaps. And here … “I stood in the rubble where the house had been and found that I didn’t know what time it was or anything or even my own name” – not “or anything”, that’s messy – and here, “I rushed hither and thither trying to find things that were familiar and would help me to remember what had gone before – pictures, letters, anything”. “Hither and thither” is too literary, I felt. “Here and there” would have been better.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Clare. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But don’t go away with the idea that I didn’t like the essay, because I did. In many ways it was the best. Most people wrote very straightforward things about getting married or having their first baby.’

  ‘You just said “Imagine a day in your own future and describe it, as though you are looking back”.’

  ‘Yes. Nobody else wrote about their house being knocked down, though. It did convey the idea of memory being something that people can’t do without. And the house was well described. Were you thinking of your aunts’ house?’

  ‘I’m not sure really.’

  ‘How are your aunts, by the way? That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. I keep meaning to look in and see them – and have a chat about you.’

  ‘Is something wrong with me?’ said Clare.

  Mrs Cramp laughed. ‘Not that I know of. Just to talk about O levels and that kind of thing. Is everything going all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Clare.

  Mrs Cramp looked down at the essay again. ‘So what I really wanted to say was that you must remember that language is an instrument, Clare. An instrument to be used precisely. Nobody can say what they mean until they use words with precision. But you know that really, I think.’ Suddenly she picked up a red biro and put two crosses after the B at the bottom of the essay. ‘There, I was being too hard on you, I think. It was really rather good – carelessness aside. It had a sense of time in it, and of what it’s like to get older, which most of the others didn’t have. Is it something you’ve thought about lately?’

  Chalk dust swirled in the light from the window. Hairpins jutted dangerously from the back of Mrs Cramp’s head. Clare said, ‘It’s what nobody ever talks about. We have lessons on sex and the reproductive system about once a term. People go on about that till you get a bit bored with it, actually. What they don’t tell you is how you keep changing all the time, but while you’re doing it you don’t really know. Only later.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Mrs Cramp, stabbing hairpins back into her hair. Outside, people were shouting in the playing-fields, their voices very loud and high. ‘The trouble is it’s very difficult to explain. To put into words. I’m not sure I’d know how to, for one. It’s much easier to draw diagrams of people’s insides.’

  A bell rang. People clattered in the passage. Mrs Cramp stacked the exercise books and said, ‘Bother – you’ll have to go.’ As Clare moved to the door she said, ‘You look tired. What time do you get to bed?’

  ‘Quite early,’ said Clare. ‘We haven’t got a telly.’

  ‘I see. There isn’t anything wrong, is there?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You must say, you know. To me. Or someone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Language,’ said Clare to Liz, ‘is an instrument. You have to use it precisely. Like a screwdriver
or something. Not just bash around vaguely?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘But the trouble is that people don’t. They say things like “quite” and “rather” and “ever so many” and “by and large” and “much of a muchness” and “quite a few”. Now what do you suppose a person means when he says “quite a few”?’

  Liz said, ‘It would depend what he meant quite a few of. Bananas, or miles, or people living in Manchester.’

  ‘Years.’

  ‘Then it could mean anything.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Clare.

  Mrs Hedges’ note, propped against the teapot, said, ‘See your Aunt Anne takes her medicine before dinner and last thing. Tonic for you by the sink. Apple pie in the larder.’

  The tonic tasted of old hay. One felt much the same after it, moreover, neither healthier nor more intelligent, or in any other way altered. Never mind: Linda, after a winter of it, had been promoted to Senior Sales Assistant and got engaged to her boyfriend. Clare put the cork back in and arranged the bottle carefully on the kitchen shelf. Doing so, she caught sight of her own face in the brown-framed mirror that had certainly hung there since 1920-something. What a pity mirrors couldn’t remember faces they had reflected before. There should be some way of peeling back layers – finding the aunts, years ago, Great-grandmother, parlour maids, cooks … The shadow of the lampshade, falling down one cheek, gave her a striped face, half light and half dark, and all of a sudden there came back to her something that had been lurking at the back of her mind all day, irritating her like the forgotten second line of a poem.

  She’d dreamed in the night, again, she remembered now – dreamed she was standing at the top of the stairs when the doorbell had rung, and she’d gone on standing there for a moment, and the house had been absolutely still and silent around her. It had been like a shell, quite without life, and she’d realized that this was because the clocks had stopped, all of them. And then the bell had rung again and she’d gone down to answer it. She had opened the front door and there’d been a man there, one of the small brown men, and she had had the impression that there were more of them beyond him, somewhere outside. His face had been a painted mask, the eyes and forehead white, the cheeks yellow, the mouth red-circled, and stripes running down from hairline to jaw. Bold, bright stripes. He had said nothing, but had stared at her, and all of a sudden she had been afraid. She’d been afraid, and at the same time she had realized she was dreaming, and had fought the dream, in panic, struggling against something that seemed, strongly this time, to hold her back. There had been a moment of drowning, and then of surging upwards, and she had woken, remembering the dream, but forgetting it again until now.

  She stood looking at her own face, not seeing it, thinking about other things. This house. That painted shield in the attic. The aunts. Then and now. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Outside, the snow thawed a little and dripped from the gutters. Mrs Rider’s randy tom yowled along the garden walls.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The brown children play in the morning sun: they quarrel, chase lizards, throw stones. One day, in a few years, they will become adult. Their childhood will end abruptly, with ritual and ceremonial, and they will be men and women. Their world is a precise one: they know what they are, there is no confusion. In the same way, nothing is hidden from them: they see birth, and death. They find a rat in the bamboo, and kill it. The ghosts of rats have caused pigs to die in the village: the children hang the body of the rat on a tree to warn the rat ghosts that the tribe knows what they are up to. They attend to the rat ghosts, and chew sugar cane, and quarrel, and sing.

  On Saturday morning the sun came out. It was as though a white lid were tipped aside, and behind it was this pale blue sky and wintry sun, shining benignly on the snow and the brick and black trees and Gothic windows. ‘Ever so pretty,’ said Maureen, ‘like Switzerland.’ She hitched the belt of her candlewick dressing gown and stared into the garden. ‘I’ve sometimes thought I’d fancy a winter sports holiday.’

  ‘The Lower Fifth went,’ said Clare, ‘and the Sixth. They all brought back photographs of the ski instructors. They looked like men in knitting patterns – square faces and very white teeth. All exactly the same.’

  ‘I know that type,’ said Maureen. ‘Very matey and out for what they can get. No thank you very much.’

  ‘There’d be the skiing too.’

  Maureen shot a suspicious glance across the table. ‘I daresay. All the same, I think I’ll stick to my two weeks on the Costa Brava. You know where you are with Spain. There’s the front door.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Clare. The front door was still bolted with the chain up. It was Mrs Hedges who had insisted on the chain. ‘It’s not as though you’ve got a man in the house,’ she’d said. ‘And there’s a lot of break-ins nowadays in North Oxford.’

  ‘But we’ve got the spears,’ said Clare, ‘and the assegais in the drawing room. I could hurl them from the upstairs windows, or over the banisters.’ Mrs Hedges hadn’t been amused. And now Maureen had discovered the chain, and endorsed Mrs Hedges’ back-to-the-wall outlook. They retreated at night as though into a fortress.

  Clare fought her way through the defences, and got the door open.

  He was standing on the top step, looking straight in front of him, so that their eyes met as soon as the door was opened. They were brown eyes, expressionless. And the stripes ran down his face, thick and black, down his cheeks, from somewhere on his forehead to his jaw.

  She said, ‘No,’ out loud. ‘No, no,’ but she couldn’t move or shut the door. The man moved his head, and the stripes didn’t move with it but dropped down on to the step and lay there in the sunshine. ‘Kleenezee brushes,’ he said, and stooped down to open the brown suitcase at his feet, and the bare branches of the clematis over the front door put their black shadows on his hand instead. ‘Best quality brushes and brooms. I’d like you to see our new line. Scrubbing brushes.’

  He had a moustache. No paint. No stripes. Just a moustache.

  ‘Twenty-two pence. The small ones are fourteen.’

  ‘I’d like one of the small ones.’

  ‘Yes, madam. Thank you. No brooms today? Mops?’

  ‘No, thank you. Not today.’

  She went back into the kitchen.

  ‘Post?’ said Maureen.

  ‘No, just a man.’

  ‘What sort of a man?’

  ‘A man with a striped face.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Never mind. Look, I’ve bought a scrubbing brush.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Maureen.

  There was something that had to be done. It was just a question of looking something up. Checking. Clare was well trained in looking things up. The aunts were great checkers. Dictionaries at Norham Gardens always lay open on tables, having just been used. Books had well-thumbed indexes. Always check your references, back your arguments with facts. Very well, then.

  The picture was towards the end of the New Guinea book. She had marked it with a match. It was a black and white photograph, so there was no colour to help, and the line of shield-things that the men were holding was rather distant, but even so the pattern looked very like the pattern on that thing upstairs. And then there’d been something very similar in one of those old photos in the drawer of the desk in the drawing room, she felt sure. To check properly, you needed to see all three together.

  She spilled the photos out on to the desk. They were brown and yellow instead of black and white, and rather blurred. Evidently Great-grandfather had not been an entirely successful photographer. Clare had looked at them before, but without great attention. Now she studied them carefully, one by one. They had writing on the back, she noticed for the first time. ‘Cooke-Daniels exped. 1905’ it said, on each, and then went on, more specifically, ‘Sanderson, Hemmings, self, and porters’ or ‘Fly River Valley, Br. New Guinea’. Sanderson, Hemmings and self were all whiskery, stern-looking figures, dressed as though for a day on the grous
e moors: the porters were naked except for a grass apron and half-moons of shell hung around their necks. The Fly River Valley was a smudgy brown pool in a darker brown bowl. She made a pile of the ones she had looked at: ‘Tribesmen from Port Moresby area, Aug. 14th 1905’ lined up as though for the end-of-year school photograph, but staring at the camera with eyes ringed in black dye, set in faces striped and etched, below elaborate, towering headdresses: a single man with black eyebrows and a sad, wise face, feathers tucked in his hair – ‘Man from Quaipo tribe, useful informant on cannibal practices’: children with pot bellies and spindly legs – ‘Kamale boys immediately before initiation ceremony, men’s house in background’: a bearded man in plus-fours and tweed jacket between two dumpy, naked ladies with high mounds of black curly hair – ‘Self with women from Manumanu tribe’. And there at last was the one she had thought she remembered. A man, the usual aproned, shell-necklaced figure, stood by a blurry forest that she presently identified as bamboo: beyond him, half-hidden by one of his legs, was the shield thing. On the back, Great-grandfather had written, ‘Tribesman from interior with completed tamburan’, and below that he had added, ‘Specimen obtained for collection, Sept. 1905, excellent condition.’

  Clare put the rest of the photographs back in the envelope. Then, with the book and the remaining photograph, she went up to the junk room.

  The first thing you noticed, going in there, always, was the smell. It was not unpleasant, not really a musty or stale smell, but somehow the smell of some other time, as though the air in the room, like the other things, was of 1890, or 1911, or 1926. Going into the room, it was you who became displaced in time: the room was quite at home. Clare picked up the slab of wood and carried it to the window to look at it carefully. The colours seemed to have got brighter since she had taken it out of the trunk – perhaps it was something to do with exposing it to the light. The reds were quite scarlet now, and the black very sharp, and the yellow very clear. Who had made it? Why? What would they feel about it being here, now, in an attic somewhere in the middle of England? She looked from the shield to the picture in the book and saw that the ones the men carried in that were not, after all, the same: similar, but not the same. She held the photograph to the light, and saw that in this case the pattern was identical – the circled eyes and swooping lines that made a thing that was both a pattern and the suggestion of human form. This was the one in the photograph, or, if not, another exactly the same. Once, a long time ago, this thing had stood by a plantation of bamboo, beyond the legs of a man wearing a half-moon of shell around his neck. He must be dead now, like Great-grandfather.