House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  With time, she learned how to print and overprint and create layers of colour bringing depth and life to the studies. The simple images evolved into complicated, dense designs, reflecting her mood and waning sense of optimism. As she became more proficient in technique and style, she graduated from linocuts to woodblocks, and then to etching. For the first few years, she hung the finished prints to dry on a makeshift washing line strung along the wall before stacking them in neat piles beside the old suffragette posters in the cupboards. Soon, unable to express her ideas on single pieces of paper, she graduated to rolls of wallpaper, printing her phantasmagorical landscapes onto strips measuring fifteen feet by four. She bought wallpaper paste and plastered her creations around the walls until they covered most of the rooms in the attic corridor. When a room was fully papered, from the skirting board and often over the ceilings too, she locked the door and hid the key.

  Anastasia’s letter, though discarded, had triggered an overwhelming urge to make a new print. So it was on that Tuesday afternoon in July that Jane took a box of old photographs to her studio and, looking through the images of her erstwhile friend, wondered how to depict her.

  “Mum, Mum, are you up there?” Toby’s voice rang out from a distant corridor. Jane was tempted not to reply. He’d want food or the answer to a question.

  “Mum!” The voice was insistent now and she heard footsteps.

  “Here,” Jane called.

  “Why didn’t you answer?” Toby said, stopping to brush dust off his grey school trousers. “What are you doing?” He looked around the room and at his mother sitting on the floor.

  “Going through some old things. Are you OK?” She looked up at her son, already freckled by the weak summer sun, too tall for his trousers, which flapped around his ankles. Like his siblings and father, Toby had the Trelawney auburn hair and hazel eyes.

  “I want to go out tonight. Is that OK?” he asked.

  “A date?” Jane said, teasing, never imagining that her sixteen-year-old son had any interest in the opposite sex. To her, he was unformed physically and emotionally.

  Toby went bright red but said nothing. He sat down heavily on the floor, sending eddies of dust into the air. Jane laughed.

  “Toby Scott, have you got something to tell me?”

  Toby traced a smiley face in the dust.

  “I hope she’s good enough for you,” Jane said fondly. There was something deeply sympathetic and touching about her middle child. Unlike the other two, he noticed people’s feelings.

  “She’s nice.” His tone of voice closed the conversation down.

  Jane smiled at her son. “If you ever want to talk about it…”

  Toby shrugged and shook his head. “There is something I want to ask.”

  “Anything, darling.” Jane looked forward to dispensing maternal advice.

  “Why don’t we have any hot water?”

  This was the question Jane dreaded: how to explain their dire circumstances to the children? The unexpected appearance of Kitto’s Aunt Tuffy yesterday morning had staved off, temporarily at least, total penury. Jane hadn’t recognised the fluffy-haired woman with eyebrows like white animated caterpillars who was wearing a moth-eaten sweater and pulling two suitcases. Trelawney, Jane thought, was a long way for a tramp to come. It was only when Tuffy spoke in a deep voice and held out three plastic Lidl bags of £50 notes that Jane took the visit seriously. The old lady’s cottage had become infested and she wanted to move into rooms in the castle. Rent would be paid on the first Monday of the month and the only stipulation was that no one would, under any circumstances, invade her private space. In return she would pay the family £400 a month in cash. Jane would have offered her the whole castle but Tuffy chose the former butler’s apartment which had its own entrance. Jane celebrated the windfall with a bar of her favourite Floris Rose Geranium bath essence, a luxury given up many years earlier. She also bought small bunches of red and green grapes and stopped off at the butcher for an organic chicken. On her way home she had dropped by and paid her cleaning lady, Glenda Sparrow, four weeks’ back wages and another three in advance.

  Determined to reassure her son if not herself, Jane said in a bright voice, “Things are going to change. Your father’s been very clever and got us into a special kind of investment. Over the last eighteen months our money has grown by 18 per cent. We’re going to hang on to the thingy until Christmas and then sell up.”

  “What makes him so sure?”

  Jane didn’t tell her son that she had asked Kitto the same question.

  “I thought we didn’t have any money.” Toby was confused.

  “We have a second mortgage.” Jane tried to stifle her sense of foreboding.

  “Who’s going to pay the first one? Isn’t that robbing Peter to pay Paul?”

  “Your father says debt is an asset class.” Jane repeated Kitto’s maxim with confidence if not conviction.

  “Might we go on holiday?”

  “Once we’ve filled the oil tanks and done a few other things, of course.”

  Toby didn’t look convinced but was distracted by something on the floor.

  “Who’s this? She’s well fit,” he said, picking up a faded photograph. Even at fifteen, in a grey, shapeless school uniform, one sock up, the other down, Anastasia’s beauty had the power to shock. She was standing on the back of Blaze’s horse, holding an imaginary telescope. She wore white breeches and a green felt jacket and matching hat with a large pheasant feather at a jaunty angle. Her long blonde hair hung in two thick plaits. Jane held the pony’s bridle and tried to look insouciant (she had been frightened of horses in those days). Blaze had taken the photograph and her elongated shadow made a stripe across the bottom right-hand corner of the frame.

  “That is Anastasia Kabakov. Her beauty could stop traffic.” Jane remembered her former friend, dressed in a flimsy white sundress, golden hair on bronzed shoulders, crossing King’s Road on a July evening. Two men jumped out of their cars and tried to persuade her to go for dinner. Anastasia had laughed prettily and refused.

  “We were close friends for over ten years,” Jane told her son. “We spent holidays together, here, and called ourselves the Three Musketeers: Anastasia, your Aunt Blaze and me. From the ages of eleven to twenty-one we were inseparable. It was inconceivable that anything or anyone would dent our friendship.”

  “So what happened?”

  Jane picked up a photograph showing the three young women lying in the sun, their legs and arms entwined, laughing and squinting. It had been Blaze’s birthday, a hot summer’s day, and they’d spent hours swimming in the estuary. Jane remembered the tightness of her sunburned shoulders and the lightness of spirit.

  “She lives in India.” Jane was unable to explain how events had unfolded.

  “That’s only a nine-hour flight,” Toby said.

  “We lost touch,” Jane replied.

  “Why?”

  “These things happen,” Jane said with finality.

  From outside came the mournful cry of the rooks returning to their roost. The light was fading. Jane switched on the lamp, which cast a flickering, half-hearted pool of yellow light on the floor. “Shouldn’t you be going to see the girl?”

  Toby looked at his watch and scrambled to his feet. Giving his mother a quick peck on the cheek, he took off along the corridor at great speed.

  “Bye,” Jane whispered after him.

  She picked up a photograph of Anastasia, wondering what kind of plant or animal her childhood friend should become. A rare rose? An exotic orchid? Taking her sketchbook, Jane started to draw and play with different images, but only one depiction seemed to vivify on the page; Anastasia would be the kind of ivy whose tendrils threatened to choke all in its path.

  A few hours later, Jane tore herself away from her work and went downstairs to make supper for her in
-laws and Arabella. She felt constantly guilty about her fifteen-year-old daughter, who needed far more time and maternal support than Jane was able to give. Opening the fridge, she hoped that there was something to reheat but only found the remains of yesterday’s mince, the meat greying in its package. She decided to hide it under a tomato sauce and a topping of stale breadcrumbs, minced carrots and chopped nuts. Pooter nudged her leg: she’d forgotten to feed him; worse still, she’d forgotten to buy any more dog biscuits. She gave him the mince and made the others a Spanish omelette. Arabella came into the kitchen and sat down at the table to eat her supper.

  “Where’s Toby?”

  “He’s gone to see a girl.”

  “Celia.”

  “Oh, you knew.”

  Arabella snorted. “Everyone knows.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You don’t notice anything.”

  Jane felt stricken. Was there something her daughter was hiding? “Darling Bells, you can tell me anything you know.”

  Arabella looked up in surprise. “Like what?”

  Jane sat down next to her and took her hand. “Is there something you’re worried about?”

  Arabella snatched her hand away. “I’m worried that I might have to eat mince again.”

  Jane laughed. Her daughter didn’t.

  “Or eggs,” Arabella added.

  Jane hesitated. “Arabella, could I talk to you, seriously, just for a few minutes?”

  Most of the time a cloud of curly auburn hair covered Arabella’s pretty freckled face. Now, pushing her hair out of the way and cupping her chin in her hands, she looked at her mother suspiciously.

  “You’ve got cancer!” Arabella said.

  “No,” Jane laughed.

  “You and Dad are getting a divorce. Like we all saw that coming.”

  “We are not! We’re very happy, actually.” Jane gave a defensive cough.

  “So what is it?”

  “I thought we ought to have a little chat about—” Jane struggled to find the right words “—about contraception.”

  Arabella recoiled. “That is so gross.”

  “It’s natural. Nothing to worry about.”

  Arabella pushed her chair away and stood up. “We learned about all that three years ago in PD.”

  “PD?”

  “Personal development. Silly, as Helena Diggs and Sabine O’Grady had been having sex for years.”

  “Aged twelve? Isn’t that a bit young?” Jane felt the blood rush out of her face. How could she be so out of touch with her daughter and her friends? She knew Sabine and Helena: sweet, pint-sized girls who seemed to like horses and dolls.

  “It’s 2008, not the Middle Ages.” Arabella went towards the door.

  “Arabella, come back here,” Jane said. Flashing her mother a broad grin, Arabella left the room.

  Later, Jane wiped the kitchen surfaces for the last time, turned off the lights and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Sixteen generations of Trelawneys had slept in the huge Elizabethan four-poster. Jane and Kitto had invested in a new mattress as a wedding present to themselves but, two decades on, the springs poked through and, when her husband was at home, Jane had trained herself to lie in a “S” shape to avoid them. With no hot water, Jane washed herself with a flannel and brushed her teeth. Though she had bought her children duvets, she preferred the weight of blankets and even in July she needed two. Their room was one of many without heating and, in the depths of winter, husband and wife would close the heavy tapestry curtains around their bed to try, vainly for the most part, to keep out the icy Cornish winds that worked their way under lintels, down the old chimneys, under the doors and through cracks in the windowpanes. For eight months of the year, Jane undressed in bed under the covers to conserve heat. From November to March she wore socks and in January and February flannel pyjamas and a jumper to sleep in.

  At least they had electricity, she thought, undressing and putting on a white cotton nightdress. She got into bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin. It had been a long day; she was tired. Flicking the light switch off, Jane lay in the dark for a while with her eyes closed but then, unable to sleep, she got up and looked out into the garden below, at her tiny patch of tended roses and beyond to the muddle of misshapen topiary, remembering how, nearly thirty years earlier, the three friends were still schoolchildren playing jumping competitions, each on an imaginary pony, each vying to win a national event, and being chased out by the head gardener. Looking over to the far right, she saw the falling-down Temple of Dawn where she, Blaze and Anastasia had carved their initials framed by a heart into the remaining column. As she rested her forehead against the cold pane, a lump of emotion hardened in Jane’s throat. Anastasia’s letter had made her realise something: Jane didn’t miss wealth, or youth; what she missed desperately was friendship.

  6

  Fleas and Sparrows

  TUESDAY 12TH AUGUST 2008

  When the gangly young woman put her head around the door, Aunt Tuffy sat as still as a rock, pretending to be asleep. The girl had to be one of Kitto’s children and, for Tuffy, the only good relation was a dead relation.

  “I know you’re not asleep or dead,” Arabella said.

  “How?” Tuffy opened one eye.

  “Because I listened to you shuffling about.” Arabella crossed over and looked at her great-aunt’s work table, which was, in contrast to the rest of the room, extremely neat. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it bloody well look like?” Tuffy answered.

  “Can I see?” Arabella advanced without an invitation. With nothing to do, and her family preoccupied with other business, she’d taken to shadowing her great-aunt’s early-morning rambles and longed to know why Tuffy spent so many hours pootling through birds’ nests and rotting carcasses, putting finds into plastic bags and specimen boxes. During one of the old woman’s rare trips into town the previous week, Arabella had crept into her room and poked around her possessions. There were neat stacks of notes and carefully labelled bags of insects, dead and alive. Arabella skimmed through the names, her heart quickening with excitement; she didn’t know the difference between an Archaeopsylla erinacei or a Ceratophyllus fringillae but knew that it mattered. At school, elementary biology lessons were restricted to photosynthesis and the life cycle of a tapeworm. Some innate inner sense told Arabella that within this room, inside these plastic bags and through the large microscope on the desk, lay a form of salvation.

  “Was it you who moved my things around last Saturday?” Tuffy had returned from St. Austell to find bags of agitated fleas.

  “I didn’t touch anything.”

  It was pointless lying to this woman. “Don’t do it again.” (Or I might commit my first murder.)

  “I’m sorry. I was interested.”

  Arabella looked so dejected that Tuffy decided to lessen her sentence from murder to grievous bodily harm.

  “I looked up Spilopsyllus cuniculi and found out that it’s one of sixty different types of flea in this country.” Arabella’s eyes shone with excitement. “I thought there was just one kind and it bit you.”

  “There are over two thousand varieties in the world,” Tuffy said airily. “I have discovered four new species in my lifetime—if you look them up, you’ll find them under the sub-classification of Trelawnii.”

  “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.” Arabella meant it.

  Tuffy softened and gestured to her microscope. “Would you like to see a flea close-up?” Arabella nodded vigorously. Tuffy made space for the girl at her table. It took Arabella a moment or two to see through the lens; her long eyelashes kept getting in the way and she moved to the left and right trying to find anything at all in the white circles, but, shifting her gaze, she eventually managed to bring the highly magnified insect into focus.

  “I thought they
were just made up of shiny little tubes with long legs attached to the sides,” she said.

  “A common mistake,” Tuffy said. “Its back isn’t smooth, it’s made up of thousands of tiny serrated hairs, acting like Velcro anchors against anything trying to dislodge them.”

  “Sick!”

  “Now look at its mouth. Do you see all those spines? Together they create a fierce and highly effective biting machine. There are two saw-like laciniae for cutting the skin as well as a saliva channel. The longer, thinner one is the epipharynx which, along with the labial palps, creates a kind of needle for puncturing.”

  “Why doesn’t the army adapt this as a weapon?”

  “Our weapons are frightfully naive and unsophisticated.” Tuffy sniffed. “Humans have only been killing each other for tens of thousands of years; nature’s been at it for three billion.”

  “I read that a flea can jump up to thirteen inches—the equivalent of a human jumping over the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Only if they were twenty-five foot tall. Most fleas jump one hundred times their own height.”

  Arabella hesitated. “If I had their legs, I could leap over the roof of Trelawney with room to spare.”