The House in Norham Gardens

by Penelope Lively

  ‘And tins of soup, perfectly reproduced.’

  You never knew with the aunts. ‘B double plus,’ said Clare. ‘Good, conscientious work. A maxi coat?’

  ‘A garment to the ankles. That could be deduced semantically.’

  ‘B plus. A discotheque?’

  ‘An establishment selling gramophone records?’

  ‘B minus. Write out corrections three times. A milk bar?’

  ‘A brand of confectionery.’

  ‘C minus. See me in break.’

  ‘Our turn,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Who succeeded Lloyd George as Prime Minister?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten just at the moment.’

  ‘Gamma plus. The terms of the Munich Agreement?’

  ‘I think I’ll clear the tea and get on with my French homework,’ said Clare. ‘Match drawn.’

  ‘Grimbly Hughes sent the wrong digestives,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘I’ll pop down there tomorrow and have a word with Mr Fisher.’

  Clare said, ‘No, you won’t. I’ll do it. The roads are all icy.’ Old ladies can slip on icy roads, and fall down. Anyway, it isn’t Grimbly Hughes, it’s the supermarket in Summertown. Grimbly Hughes hasn’t existed for fifteen years, Mrs Hedges says.

  ‘We put too much on her,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘She’s too young to be bothered about grocers.’

  They were concerned now: concerned, and cross with themselves.

  ‘One is so incompetent, at our age.’

  ‘Such a nuisance. Useless. I could take my stick, Clare, and go very slowly.’

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Anyway, think what good practice it is. For when I get married. If I get married. I’ll know all about buying biscuits and ordering coal and having gutters mended. There is one thing, though. Could you help me with my Latin translation later, Aunt Anne?’

  Aunt Anne glowed, useful again.

  If I get married. P’raps I won’t. P’raps I’ll be busy instead, like the aunts. Except I’m not as bright as the aunts were. Are.

  The aunts had not married. They had gone to university in the days when girls stayed at home to help their mothers or made a suitable match. There were pictures of them upstairs in the drawing room, pretty and plump and determined in long black skirts and tight waists and leg-of-mutton sleeves and black caps and gowns. They’d got degrees and then more degrees and then they’d settled down in Norham Gardens and taught undergraduates from their old college and sallied forth to London every now and then to sit on Committees or take part in Enquiries. They wrote indignant letters to The Times and joined in protest marches and when the war came they fire-watched and took in evacuees. There had never been time for marriage.

  Clare left the aunts in the library. They would sit there till suppertime now, reading and dozing, according to the pattern of their day. Now that they were old their lives had contracted. The house, which had always been their base, had become also their shell. It held everything they needed and they seldom went beyond it. The outside world came to them through newspapers and the windows and Clare and Mrs Hedges and they received it with interest but no longer tried to influence it. ‘We have been useful in our time,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Now it’s our turn to sit and watch.’

  In the kitchen, Clare put the tea things away and got her books out. It was slightly warmer than usual because the oven was on with Mrs Hedges’ pie in it, so she pulled a chair up and sat with her feet against the oven door, learning French verbs. The kitchen clock ticked and the pipes made the asthmatic wheezes and gurgles they always made, and water dripped from the crack in the sink into the bucket you had to remember to keep standing underneath. Outside, the evening thickened and darkened and became night. Down in the middle of Oxford bells rang. Cars came and went in Crick Road and Norham Gardens and their headlights sent yellow patches up the kitchen wall and across the ceiling and down the other wall.

  The front door clicked open and slammed shut again. Then Maureen’s head came round the baize door.

  ‘Hello. It’s perishing out, let me tell you. By the way, I could do with another blanket.’

  Clare said, ‘I’ll get one. There’s some in the chest in the junk room, I think.’

  They went upstairs together, Maureen talking loudly of her day. She worked in an estate agent’s office. Clare knew all about the life of the office, Maureen’s views of the boss and the junior partner and the new young fellow who’d come last week and the girls all thought he was dishy but Maureen didn’t fancy him, personally. Maureen was twenty-eight. She trailed an atmosphere of vague dissatisfaction, of undefined emotions which sometimes homed on such personal failures as her hair, which she thought too wavy, and her weight, which was apparently seven pounds above what was correct for her age and height. She was extremely kind.

  ‘Which is the junk room, then?’ said Maureen. ‘Honestly, it’s a proper rabbit warren, this place.’

  ‘It’s the attic room next to yours,’ said Clare. They climbed the last flight. ‘Third floor, Ladies’ Outfitting and Restaurant,’ said Maureen. ‘One thing, I’ll lose a pound or two going up and down here every day.’

  Before Maureen’s inspection visit, Mrs Hedges and Clare had been worried about her possible reaction to Norham Gardens. As Mrs Hedges said, things were not exactly up-to-date. They need not have bothered. She had tried everything out in a methodical way, bouncing on the bed and poking the pillow and sitting down in the armchair. She pulled a face at the gas fire, which had been there since about 1940 and was that kind with crumbling columns of stuff like grey icing-sugar. The gas ring wasn’t much better, but the electric kettle was newish.

  ‘Bathroom?’

  ‘It’s on the floor underneath,’ Clare had said. ‘But there’s a lavatory next door.’

  They inspected the lavatory. Maureen giggled. Then she said, ‘Sorry, dear, but it is a bit of a museum piece, isn’t it?’

  Some of us prefer our lavatories in brown mahogany with the bowl encircled in purple flowers and a cistern called ‘The Great Niagara’.

  But the lavatory had not proved a serious obstacle. After looking round the room once more Maureen had said delicately, ‘Are there any other – guests?’

  ‘No. You’d be the only one.’

  ‘Three fifty, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Front door key?’

  ‘Yes. If I can find one.’

  ‘I’ll take it. I don’t mind telling you, I thought there’d be a snag. I said to myself, if it’s only three fifty then that means the toilet’s outside or there’s foreign girl students two to a room in the rest of the house and wirelesses blaring till all hours. I’ve seen some funny places, I can tell you, room hunting.’

  And Clare had said, ‘Oh, have you?’, relieved.

  They went into the junk room together, Clare groping for the light. These rooms on the top floor were the ones with the most ecclesiastical windows of all, bunched together in triplicate like those high above the central aisle of a church. The ones at the front squinted right over to the University Parks and the Clarendon Laboratory and University Museum. Maureen thought the outlook distinguished: it made you think, she said, looking at all that and knowing there’s all those characters inside there getting on with whatever it is they get on with.

  Clare found the light and the room came to life, trunks piled on top of one another, the shape of chairs looming under tattered dust sheets, the ancient sewing-machine with its wheels and treadles looking like a blueprint for the Industrial Revolution, the huge tulip mouth of the gramophone’s loudspeaker, flowered china jugs and matching basins, a dressmaker’s dummy, trouser presses, hat boxes …

  ‘Good grief!’ said Maureen. ‘They don’t believe in throwing things away, the old ladies, do they?’

  ‘If you keep things you can go on being sure about what’s happened to you.’

  Maureen said doubtfully, ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

  Clare began opening trunks. Most of them were full of old clothes. Great-grand
mother’s for the most part, elaborate constructions of silk, lace and whalebone. Maureen stared in amazement. ‘Well! I wouldn’t have thought they’d have been that dressy, your aunts.’

  ‘These aren’t their things – they belonged to Great-grandmother. Their mother.’

  ‘They’re your great-aunts really, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stands to reason, of course. I hadn’t been thinking.’

  Clare heaved the top trunk down and tried the next. Maureen, fiddling with the handle of the gramophone, said, ‘Have you always lived with them?’

  ‘Since I was eight.’

  There was a pause. Wrong trunk, again: this one was full of hats. Maureen said, ‘What happened to, er …?’

  ‘There was this accident. They had to go in aeroplanes a lot, because of my father’s job.’

  ‘I see,’ said Maureen, looking hard at the loudspeaker. Then she added, ‘Shame.’

  ‘I think the blankets are in this one. Could you help me lift off the one on top?’

  It was a vast leather-buckled trunk with tattered labels on it that said ‘P & O Line. Not Wanted on Voyage’. Across the lid of the trunk was scrawled, in white chalk ‘Sydney to London’. They took one end each, to lift it down, and the hinges promptly burst off, bringing the lid with them. In no other house, thought Clare, in absolutely no other house, could you open an old trunk and be confronted with a large bundle of bows and arrows. And what looked like a set of very moth-eaten feather dusters and a lot of old coconut matting and a weird-looking slab of wood with some kind of a picture on it. ‘Good grief!’ said Maureen again.

  Clare shook out one of the feather dusters and it became a headdress, the colours all faded. A bit smelly. She picked one of the bows up, twanged it, and aimed an arrow towards the window.

  ‘Do you think I could get the next-door cat, if I aimed very carefully?’

  ‘Put it down, for goodness’ sake,’ said Maureen. ‘You don’t know where it’s been. What are they, anyway?’

  ‘They’ll be something to do with my great-grandfather,’ said Clare. ‘He was an anthropologist. He went to queer places and brought things back.’

  Maureen peered into the trunk with distaste. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘He gave tons of things to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Have you ever been there? I expect these things were meant for there and got forgotten.’

  ‘Well, fancy … You mean they’d wear those things on their heads, the natives?’

  ‘Mmn. There’s photos somewhere, that he took. In the drawing-room desk.’

  ‘And what would they have on otherwise?’

  ‘Just paint. In stripes.’

  ‘Well!’ said Maureen. ‘Rather you than me! Here, put the lid back on, I should think there’d be no end of germs and things in with that lot.’

  Clare said, ‘Hang on a moment …’ She picked up the slab of wood, and stared at it. It was about three feet long, and roughly oval, but wider at the top than the bottom. And painted; black, red and yellow, but the colours were dimmed now with dirt, and faded. One had the feeling that once they had been sharp and bright. It had a head, this thing, and a body, but so stylized that perhaps it was just a pattern, a pattern of swooping lines and jagged decoration like fish hooks or zig-zag edging, loops and swirls. But on the other hand perhaps it was not a pattern, and if it was not then the head had eyes, huge and blank, and a gaping mouth.

  ‘That gives me the creeps,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s nasty. Put it back, do.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ It was a painting, but it was also a carving, because the lines had been gouged into the wood before they were painted. It seemed to say something: if you understood its language, if this kind of thing, this picture, this pattern, was a language, then it must have been a shout, once, to someone. Now, up here in the attic, to them, it was a whisper, a whisper you couldn’t even understand.

  They closed the trunk up again, and found the blankets in the one underneath, and Clare left the slab of wood, the shield or whatever it was, standing upright against the old sewing machine because for some obscure reason it seemed wrong to bury it in the trunk again. And it stood there staring with those round owl eyes out into the night where sleet was spearing down from a purple sky, glinting in the flares of light from the street lamps.

  Maureen went to her room to make cocoa on the gas ring and write to her mother in Weybridge. Clare sat with the aunts in the library, where Aunt Susan read The Times and Aunt Anne wrote letters, to an old friend, to the cousins in Norfolk, and to someone she taught, once, a long time ago. Clare stared at the fire for a bit, enjoying the red caverns and grottoes, and then got tired of that and looked round for a book. That was something you could never run short of in this house. Mrs Hedges must have been doing some tidying – some stray columns of books had been re-arranged on to a window shelf, revealing a small bookcase Clare couldn’t remember having seen before. It was presumably Great-grandfather’s, for the books were old, with that distinctive, by no means unpleasant smell peculiar to books published before about 1930. They had titles like Travels in Uzbekhistan, Headhunters of Brazil, and The Watutsi of the Sudan: A Study. She picked out one called New Guinea: the Unknown Island, partly because it had some pictures, and took it over to the fire to read.

  Outside, snow fell on North Oxford: on the Parks and the river and the old, dark laurel in the gardens and the brick and iron of the big houses. It drove people off the streets, and later a wind got up and rattled the bare trees. A cat yowled among the dustbins in Bradmore Road.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The tamburan is finished. It stands now in the men’s house, its meaning secret and complex, its circled eyes of red dye staring past the bamboo and the casuarina trees towards the mountains. The valley is quiet now, at midday. The women are working in the gardens, using digging sticks. The men rest. They talk, and sleep, and sharpen stone adzes on a rock. They have no past: no history. The future is tomorrow, and perhaps the next day. There is no word for love in their language, but they mourn their dead and remember their ancestors. Their world is peopled with the ghosts of their tribe, and they live with spirits as easily as with tree and mountain and river. Their world is two-faced: what seems to be and what lies beyond appearance. A stone is a stone and a tree is a tree – but they are also the qualities of stones and trees and must be approached in a certain way. Objects, too, have spirits.

  Clare stood at her window and saw that the snow had all gone. Indeed, it was hot and sunny outside and the grass, intensely green, had grown until it was two or three feet high. There was a clamour of birds: twitterings, song and occasional harsh shrieks that recalled the aviary at London Zoo. There was a path down the centre of the garden, a parting in the grass, and the brick wall at the end had disappeared. At the same moment as she noticed this, she found herself down there, in the garden, with the sensation of having either jumped or flown, and knew also that she was dreaming. Both house and garden had gone now, and the other houses. Instead, there was a complex green landscape of trees and undergrowth above which lifted, some way away, mountainous horizons, blue peaks soaring to heights lost among thick clouds.

  It was beautiful, with the impersonal, unreal beauty of a poster in a travel agent’s. There were large iridescent butterflies feeding among flowers at the edge of the path, and other insects. Stooping, she found herself staring at an immense spider hunched among stalks of grass. It was dark brown, both hairy and glistening at the same time. Repelled, she walked on. There was a feeling of detachment about the landscape, as though it were suspended in some way. It was impossible to know what time of day it might be – early or late – and it did not occur to her to look for the sun though she felt its warmth on her arms and face. She had a vague feeling of obligation, as if she were here for a purpose, and this kept her moving steadily along the path.

  Presently a new sound interrupted the bird noises, and there was a smell of bonfires. She realized that there were people ahead, concealed
by the tall plants with long flat leaves that grew at either side of the path. Rounding a corner, she came upon them quite suddenly, in a clearing where there were low round huts, thatched, and open fires. Small, dark people they were, and there were children, squatting in the dust, and pig-like animals, and dogs. She felt uneasy now, but interested at the same time, and remembered that all she had to do, if anything unpleasant seemed about to happen, was to wake herself up.

  She walked towards the people. They looked up and saw her, and began to chatter among themselves, watching her. Two or three of the men, who had been sitting by their fires, eating, stood up. She stopped, and one of the men moved towards her, gesturing. It was hard to know if he was threatening her or not, but something about his face alarmed her, now, and so, by a deliberate effort of will, she woke herself. There was a sensation of surging upward, through fathomless seas, which lasted for no time at all, and she was in her own bed, awake, and the clock said twenty past two. She turned over and slept till morning, by which time the dream had lost any precision. She remembered only that she had had a dream in which she had known she was dreaming.

  The snow that had fallen in the night melted a little and then froze again during an afternoon that ended even before the last lesson at school, with darkness clamping down at four. Clare cycled home through grey twilight spiked with car headlights. Somewhere outside, beyond the houses and streets, there would be a Christmas card world of white fields and woods lying dapper in a still night, but in North Oxford the snow had turned to brown and grey and people hurried past with their heads down against the cold. The big houses brooded behind curtained windows, facing each other in stolid ranks.

  Clare stopped in North Parade for tins of soup, and bread. When she got back to the house Mrs Rider from next door was banging snow and slush into the gutter with a broom.

  ‘Hallo. I did your bit too, while I was about it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Clare.

  Mrs Rider was a landlady. Her house swarmed with students. There were bicycle racks outside and typed notices in the hall about Rules and Wirelesses in Bedrooms and Use of Bathrooms. The house was a twin of number forty, but disembowelled. It had lost its panels of bells, its scullery and flower room and silver cupboard. Instead there were bed-sitting-rooms with built-in cupboards, central heating, bathrooms on every floor. Only its outside remembered. A posse of students came down the steps, chattering and be-scarved, American, French, Chinese.