The House in Norham Gardens Page 8

  John’s large hand swamped the thin, cracked Crown Derby. He sat in front of the fire, his long legs folded like the limbs of a deckchair.

  ‘Tell me, how do you think things are in Tanzania under this man Nyerere?’ Aunt Susan was enjoying herself. She had become brisk, like she was five years ago. Tea had gone on for ages. John ate peanut butter sandwiches and two packets of digestive biscuits and talked about Africa, and Aunt Susan asked questions and made comments and poured tea. It was just like Aunt Susan, Clare thought, to be hopelessly muddled about money and forget what year it was and lose things all the time and yet to turn out to know all about what happened in Kenya last month or what the Prime Minister of Uganda was called. That was the aunts all over.

  At last John said he must go. In the hall, putting on his coat, he said, ‘Your aunt is a very well-informed lady.’

  ‘Yes. It’s just everyday things she’s a bit vague about. Gutters, and things like that.’

  ‘Gutters?’

  ‘You know – the things round the top of a house to catch the rain. They’re very expensive to get mended.’

  ‘Most schoolgirls wouldn’t know about that kind of thing.’

  ‘I’m a detribalized schoolgirl.’

  John’s laughter brought Maureen out of her room, peering down the well of the staircase.

  ‘Would you like me to look at this New Guinea shield of yours before I go?’ he said. ‘Then I could perhaps look it up in the anthropology library and let you know about it.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Up in the attic, he was astonished. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A linen press. You put sheets and things in it and screw it up and it squashes them flat.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘A gramophone. With a loudspeaker. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘It is certainly of historic interest,’ said John politely. ‘This is your shield?’

  ‘Yes. Only it’s not a shield.’

  He studied it. ‘I can remember the design. I am trained for remembering that kind of thing. I’ll look it up.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They went downstairs again. Maureen’s door opened, and closed.

  ‘Goodbye. Thank you for inviting me to tea.’

  ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t very posh.’

  ‘It was very nice. I liked meeting your aunt.’

  Outside the snow still came down in wild confusion, picked out by the street lamps. It defied gravity, snowing from right to left in front of the house, and ten yards back from left to right. Beyond the garden well it spouted upwards, snowing in reverse.

  ‘Christ!’ said John. ‘Excuse me.’ He swamped his head and shoulders in a huge striped scarf, and got on to the bike. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Clare. She watched him go into the darkness, heading north, his raincoat flapping over the back wheel of the bicycle, and closed the front door.

  ‘I saw your friend,’ said Maureen. ‘The foreign one.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s interesting,’ said Maureen, ‘getting to know foreign people. We had a German girl in the office once. Mind, that’s not quite the same. Known him a long time, have you?’

  ‘About half an hour, when you saw him. We picked each other up, I think.’

  ‘Well!’ said Maureen. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d do that. Did you go to the pictures on your own, then?’

  ‘It wasn’t the pictures. It was in a museum.’

  Maureen reflected. ‘I suppose you’d get a different type in a museum. All the same, I wouldn’t think your aunts would fancy that kind of thing.’ Severely.

  ‘Oh, they did. Aunt Susan gave him three cups of tea and talked to him for nearly three hours.’

  ‘Well!’ said Maureen again.

  The blizzard roared all that night. The Norham Gardens houses stood four-square against it like battleships and it screamed against the brick and threw tiles down on to cars and tarmac and snapped branches from the trees. And then it raged away south, leaving one side of each building furred over with driven snow. Tongues of snow licked up the sides of fences: each sill and gutter was laden. The postman posted snow through the front door with the letters. The wireless dwelt on traffic chaos, stranded snowploughs and helicopters raining hay upon Exmoor to hungry sheep.

  The letters, damp and blotched, were a brochure from a travel firm and a postcard from cousin Margaret in Norfolk. The travel firm wanted the aunts to enjoy a fun-packed fortnight on the fabulous Costa del Sol: cousin Margaret, on the other side of a photograph of Norwich cathedral, hoped they were all surviving this foul weather and would like to pop down to see them on Monday night, between the dentist and a school play. Uncle Edwin sent his love and would they forgive the scrawl, everything being a mad rush as usual. Tonight that was. Oh, dear. Clare put the Costa del Sol in the wastepaper basket, and propped cousin Margaret’s card on the kitchen mantelpiece. Doing so reminded her of Mrs Hedges’ tonic. She took an extra large spoonful. It felt like the kind of day on which one might need hidden resources. She’d slept badly, too. Blizzards, disintegrating bedclothes, and other things.

  The spare room would need to be tidied out for cousin Margaret. She’d have to leave a note for Mrs Hedges. It was unlike cousin Margaret to make a sortie from Norfolk in mid-winter. In fact, come to think of it, one couldn’t remember ever having seen cousin Margaret out of summer. August, windy beach picnics, jam-making, wasps, thunderstorms: that was cousin Margaret’s rightful background. It seemed inappropriate that she should turn out to have a mobile, winter existence as well. In between summer visits to Norfolk, Clare realized guiltily, she hardly ever thought of cousin Margaret and cousin Edwin and all the little cousins, and their large scruffy house and weedy tennis court and their cosy, faintly excluding family life. They were a family in which everyone had nicknames, and in which conversations took place in a private jargon that had to be decoded, with amiable condescension, for visitors. One was forever tripping over one’s own mistakes – not knowing the code word for areas of house or garden, or ignorant of some custom or ritual, being put right by kindly six-year-olds, amazed at the ignorance of outsiders. How did they manage, the little cousins, beyond the confines of the family? Or did they colonize, so to speak – establish extensions in the outside world, make conversions, baptize into the faith? Converts, though, like visitors, would always be kept conscious of their position as temporary, courtesy members of the family – not of the blood. And how did cousin Margaret manage, on expeditions like this, adrift from her anchorage? It was impossible to imagine: cousin Margaret seemed an undetachable part of her own house, as integral as the smell of cooking, children and dogs.

  Clare left a note for Mrs Hedges explaining about cousin Margaret. The aunts were not up yet, so she explained to Aunt Susan, who seemed pleased at the idea of a visitor, through the bedroom door. Then she went out into cold, storm-battered streets, and to school.

  On the way home it occurred to her that cousin Margaret should perhaps be treated to something more elaborate than soup and scrambled egg. Much eating was done in Norfolk: huge stews, joints, puddings. Well, Norham Gardens couldn’t rise to that, but chops would not be unmanageable.

  She had to wait in the butcher’s, standing in a line of muffled ladies, hunched against the cold, staring at bright lights and meat. The shop glowed with meat: dark drums of beef, rosy pork, skeins of pink sausages that delicately brushed the butcher’s head as he reached into the window. Somebody here had an eye for style. The window display was ready to be painted, a mortuary still-life, cutlets fanned out seductively, edged with plastic parsley, spare ribs flaring in a circle, steaks lined up with military precision. The butcher was a huge man, his self-confidence as hard as a rock. He brandished cleavers and juggled with knives, at the other end of the counter his assistant clubbed unresisting steak: jokes flew between them over the heads of the customers. The customers were sheep, only one rung up from the meat. The butcher patronized them. ‘Next young lady?
’ he roared, and the middle-aged housewives shuffled forward, obediently amused. ‘Now then, what’s for you today, and how’s your old man?’ Behind him the pig carcases hung from hooks, as docile as the customers.

  ‘Next, please? Yes, my love?’

  Clare pointed to the pink and white fan of chops. ‘Four, please.’

  ‘Two for you and two for him. Dinner for the boyfriend, is it?’ A mammoth wink.

  Clare shrank into her coat. Snails must feel like that, pinned down by the blackbird’s steely eye.

  Everybody was staring at her. The neat pig-halves and divided sheep swivelled on their hooks to get a better look.

  ‘What’s his name then? Who’s the lucky fellow?’ Stab! went the blackbird’s yellow beak. Thump! the butcher’s cleaver, splitting bone.

  ‘How much is that, please?’

  ‘Forty-four to you. And give him my compliments.’ The snail, wincing, glowing pink, crawled out, forgot her purse, had to go back, spotlit by eight pairs of eyes, fell over someone’s foot, got stabbed again, escaped.

  Outside, Liz was stowing library books into a bike basket. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve just become a vegetarian.’

  ‘Oh. Why? Listen – come down into the town with me.’

  ‘No. I can’t. I’ve got cousin Margaret.’

  ‘You make her sound like a disease.’

  ‘She might be,’ said Clare. Liz went away into the dusk, swallowed up among the cars.

  Back at Norham Gardens the aunts, of course, had forgotten all about cousin Margaret. Aunt Anne had been feeling poorly again and had gone back to bed. Aunt Susan, in front of a waning fire, was sitting surrounded by brown cardboard boxes from which spilled pamphlets and yellowing papers.

  ‘Is that you, dear? I am having a tidy-up. Do you know that in 1932 Anne and I went to nineteen committee meetings and lobbied our MP four times? He was a tedious man, I remember. And we marched from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square, about unemployment. Here is a photograph in The Times.’

  ‘Which is you?’

  ‘The second blur from the left, I rather think.’

  ‘It doesn’t do you justice,’ said Clare. ‘Cousin Margaret will be here tonight.’

  ‘So she will. How nice. We had better eat in the dining room. I wonder if you would mind fetching my thick tweed coat from upstairs.’

  ‘I’ve got some chops. Why are butchers such noisy men?’

  ‘I suppose it’s a job that blunts the sensibilities.’

  ‘Bossy too.’

  ‘A legacy from the war. They wielded enormous power. People would suffer any humiliation for a pound of offal or a sausage.’

  Clare banked up the fire, and cleared bundles of letters and papers from one of the chairs, in anticipation of cousin Margaret. The tidy-up was having the effect of slowly engulfing the room in paper and newsprint. Aunt Susan was having a lovely time: she drifted from her chair to the bookshelves and back, disembowelling files and boxes.

  ‘Dear me, here are all my old lecture notes. And Anne’s correspondence with the Webbs. How interesting.’

  Cousin Margaret arrived by taxi off the London train at half past six. Her travelling, and winter, persona differed from the static summer one only in being embellished with a hat, uncomfortable shoes and dabs of powder and lipstick.

  ‘Lovely to see you, Clare, dear. How are the aunts? Goodness, I’d forgotten what a morgue this place is. What a pity they can’t move into something smaller.’

  They went upstairs. ‘How’s school? Everything going all right? Bumpy and Sue-Sue sent their love – the big ones are all back at school, of course. I’ve just been down for the play, you know, that’s why I’m here, really. And of course I wanted to see you and the aunts.’ Cousin Margaret stripped herself of hat and coat and vanished into the bathroom. Above vigorous sounds of washing came more news of cousin Edwin, children, the school play, the Christmas holidays.

  ‘… so with Dodie and the Sprockets we were fourteen for dinner, and then we all played charades in the dark. You must come, another Christmas, Clare – I don’t like to think of you being dull here with the aunts. What? Oh well, that’s fine, then. I just thought it might be all a bit elderly for you. They’re a bit out of touch now, aren’t they, poor dears.’

  They visited Aunt Anne, in bed. More news, more names. Visits to pantomimes in Norwich, school prize-givings, village concerts. Aunt Anne smiled, bewildered. ‘Tell me,’ said cousin Margaret, going downstairs, ‘how is she? I thought she was rather quiet.’

  ‘The doctor came. He said it wasn’t anything to worry about.’

  ‘Of course she is seventy-seven. Or is it seventy-eight?’

  In the library, Aunt Susan had recaptured the other chair. She beamed happily from a sea of old envelopes.

  ‘Goodness!’ said cousin Margaret. ‘You could do with a proper spring-clean in here. You must let me give you a hand. I love throwing things away. How are you, Aunt Susan?’

  They kissed. Cousin Margaret sat down. ‘Lovely to see you all looking so well. Well, you’ll be wanting to hear all our news. Oh, Clare, I meant to tell you – poor Wooffy did die. We were afraid she was going to.’

  Wooffy? Dog? Cat? Or the old nurse?

  ‘So we got a new little bitch right away. I didn’t want the children to get morbid about it.’

  Must be the dog. Hope so, anyway. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Clare. ‘How sad.’

  ‘Do you know, Margaret,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘I have just come across a whole lot of old letters from Beatrice and Sydney Webb. We served on a committee with them once, you know. Do you remember meeting them here when you were a small girl?’

  Cousin Margaret spread plump legs to the fire.

  ‘I can’t say I do, Aunt Susan. There were always such a lot of odd bods around in the old days, weren’t there? Oh – and we had another tragedy. Mr Patcham got into a fight in the village and we had to have him put to sleep.’

  Aunt Susan looked startled.

  ‘He was dreadfully bitten. It must have been that horrid tom from the pub. One does go through such anguish with animals. Sue-Sue cried for days.’

  ‘Would you like a glass of sherry, cousin Margaret?’ said Clare.

  ‘My dear, I should love one.’

  The sherry, sandwiched between copies of Hansard, had not been opened, to Clare’s certain knowledge, for over five years, but cousin Margaret drank it with gusto. Maybe it was stuff that improved with age.

  Aunt Susan said, ‘Clare is a pillar of support these days. I don’t know what we should do without her.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said cousin Margaret. ‘Splendid. I had wondered, if perhaps … Never mind. I say, I wish you could see Bumpy – he’s lost both his front teeth. He looks a perfect scream.’

  Aunt Susan nodded and smiled. She was beginning to look quenched by all this information. The papers and envelopes made drifts around her feet, stirring sometimes in response to draughts from the chimney. Cousin Margaret gulped sherry and handed out news: cousin Edwin had a filthy cold, poor darling, council houses were to be built on the church field, Sue-Sue was growing plaits, there had been a coup d’état in the Women’s Institute.

  ‘And what about you, Clare, dear? I want to hear everything you’ve been doing. By the way, we’re expecting you in August – you will be coming, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Clare. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘They are very pleased with Clare at school,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘We hear very good reports.’

  ‘Oh well, I expect she’s got the family brains. Lucky girl. But you mustn’t just swot, Clare, dear – people get so narrow-minded like that, don’t they? Oh – did I tell you Sal’s going to France for a year when she leaves school? It would sort of open her out, we thought. To a family.’

  ‘A family?’ said Clare.

  ‘Yes. In the country. Six children, and lots of animals and things. It sounds lovely.’

  ‘I expect she’ll love it
. Being opened out in a family.’

  Something slipped off Aunt Susan’s lap. Clare picked it up.

  ‘What’s this, Aunt Susan?’

  ‘Oh, I was going to show you. It’s part of the diary father kept in New Guinea. On the expedition, you know. The other volumes seem to have got lost, but I came across this one, and I thought it might interest you.’

  Brown, loopy handwriting. Crossings-out. A squashed insect between two of the pages. ‘Yes. Yes, I’d like to read it very much. In fact I’d love to.’

  ‘Clare was looking at things Father gave to the Pitt Rivers,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘She brought back a most interesting young man. An African. We had such a pleasant talk.’

  ‘Sue-Sue loves museums,’ said cousin Margaret. ‘We took her to the V. and A. you know, last holidays, and she was so funny. Do you know what she said? She was looking at the costumes and …’

  Clare got up, stealthily, and backed out of the room. The flow did not abate. It seemed mean, leaving Aunt Susan defenceless like that, but then she did have a capacity for just shutting herself off if the turn of events was unpromising, and would no doubt do so now. She went into the kitchen, where the chops lay inert upon the table. Right, then, let’s be having you. Next young lady please, and how’s your father?

  They ate in the dining room. Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother presided, remote behind the glass of their portraits. Great-grandmother, in red silk to the floor, most elegantly curved fore and aft, leaned against a marble pillar and contemplated an ostrich feather fan. Great-grandfather, stern and whiskered, sat with open book (no, volume) upon his knee, deep in thought (back in the Fly River Valley, perhaps, with Sanderson and Hemmings?).

  ‘Wasn’t she gorgeous?’ said cousin Margaret. ‘Aunt Violet. It’s Sargent, isn’t it, that portrait? Jolly good chops, I must say.’

  Aunt Susan looked over the top of her spectacles at the portrait: the positions seemed reversed, juggled about by time, she the mother, the young woman in the red dress the daughter. ‘Yes. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy, I remember. Poor Father was made to go to the opening view. Not the kind of occasion he cared for at all.’