The House in Norham Gardens

by Penelope Lively

  Sunday. The snow had melted around the house, but it lay cleanly in the garden, drifted against walls and shrubs. Mrs Rider’s cat picked its way across it, distasteful, leaving a trail of blue prints. The streets were quiet, the houses withdrawn, seemingly empty, in their packing of dark trees. Only the Parks exploded with sound: children squealing, dogs, snowballs, people running.

  Maureen came downstairs in a candlewick dressing gown and said her gas-ring was playing up. ‘All right if I do myself an egg down here?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Clare.

  ‘Fancy some bacon while I’m about it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  They ate, each side of the kitchen table. Maureen was good at bacon and eggs. Aunt Susan pottered in, looking for her glasses, and had a conversation with Maureen about how cold it was and about a winter Aunt Susan remembered when there had been skating on Port Meadow for three weeks on end. Maureen’s relationship with the aunts was gingerly: she treated them with a combination of respect, amusement and bewilderment. ‘I never came across anyone quite like them before,’ she confided to Clare. ‘You don’t know how to take them, quite. But they’re a couple of old dears, really, I’d say.’ The aunts, on the other hand, had perhaps not come across too many people like Maureen, but that affected them not at all: they always remained themselves under all circumstances. Aunt Susan went away again, having found her glasses in the larder. Aunt Anne had stayed in bed again.

  ‘Is she poorly?’ said Maureen.

  ‘Not specially. She gets colds in winter.’

  ‘My gran did that. Shocking. Ever so fond of her we were.’

  Maureen smoked. Clare read.

  ‘Novel, is it?’

  ‘No. It’s a book about New Guinea.’

  ‘Where’s that when it’s at home? No, don’t tell me – it’s near Australia.’

  ‘Mmn.’

  ‘I’m not that keen on travel books, personally.’

  ‘It’s about the people, really, more than the place. They’re still living in the Stone Age, you see. They were only discovered – oh, at the end of the nineteenth century, I think. Lots of different tribes. Hundreds of thousands of people – they’re still discovering new lots.’

  ‘Fancy.’

  ‘They don’t know about time, or history, or anything. They just kind of go on, living and dying, over and over again, without knowing anything about themselves. But they think their ancestors are terribly important. They worship them, really.’

  ‘I like a nice romance,’ said Maureen, ‘personally.’

  ‘My great-grandfather went there. He went on something called the Cooke-Daniels expedition, in 1905. He was one of the first Europeans to visit some of the tribes.’

  ‘Now, historical I quite like. So long as it’s got love in it.’

  ‘He brought all these things back for the Pitt Rivers museum here. Things these people made and wore,’ said Clare.

  ‘Explorer, was he? That sort of thing I quite like – jungles and crocodiles – good and steamy.’

  ‘Anthropologist.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Maureen, yawning. ‘You ought to try Jean Plaidy. She does a lovely romance. And the Nurse Duncan books. I like a nice hospital story.’

  Liz came for tea in the afternoon. People liked coming to tea at Norham Gardens. They found the house extraordinary and entertaining, the aunts lovable, and they envied Clare for being allowed to do what she liked in the kitchen. They had mothers who resisted cookery experiments. Clare, of course, had Mrs Hedges, who had been known to react strongly, but her anger had to be confined to notes left on the kitchen table, which carried less force. Clare and Liz had baked beans and hot chocolate in the kitchen. Then they did their homework, one on each side of the table, cosy, with the wireless chattering to itself in the background.

  ‘I’ve never seen a radio like that before,’ said Liz. ‘It’s like in old films about the war.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. There aren’t any others. The British Museum are always on at us, asking for it.’

  ‘Idiot. Can I wind the lift up?’

  Visitors were always fascinated by the lift. It sat in the corner of the kitchen, a mobile cupboard that, when you wound the handle at its side, lumbered up through the house, vanishing through a trap door in the kitchen ceiling and continuing on a rumbling progress through the house until it reached the top floor. It was a legacy of the days of cooks and parlourmaids and chambermaids.

  The lift creaked up, laboriously, and down. ‘Great!’ said Liz.

  ‘Step back into the past,’ said Clare. ‘In this house we preserve an older, finer way of life. Welcome to nineteen thirty-six.’

  ‘What were the bells for?’

  ‘If you were in the drawing room and you wanted someone to bring you more coal for the fire you rang the bell and one of those round things flipped over and someone down here saw and rushed up to see what was wrong.’

  ‘Gosh. You are lucky. Living in a weird house like this. Ours is the same as the one next door and the one opposite and about half a million others.’

  ‘So’s this,’ said Clare. ‘The same as the one next door.’

  ‘At least they’re both weird.’

  ‘Ssh. I’ve got yards and yards of Latin to do. What’s the future of moriar?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They will die.’

  ‘Moriarunt. It’s passive. Daft – typical stupid Latin. It’s something you do, not something you have done to you.’

  Clare said, ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Which sentence are you on? Wake up!’

  ‘Sorry. The general. Fearing the arrival of reinforcements from Gaul. Have you got my dictionary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I must have left it upstairs. Come up with me.’

  Clare’s room was on the second floor, opposite the aunt’s room, between two empty ones.

  ‘How on earth,’ said Liz, ‘do you decide which rooms to live in? With so many.’

  ‘We move around with the seasons. Follow the sun. Face south in winter.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Joke. The aunts have always had the back ones and I like this one because it looks out over the Parks.’

  ‘It’s even untidier than mine,’ said Liz. ‘And that’s saying something.’

  ‘Mrs Hedges calls it The Slump. She says it sends her into a depression just thinking about coming in here. So she mostly doesn’t.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  The dictionary was under a pile of jerseys and underclothes.

  ‘Look at the Parks,’ said Liz. ‘The snow …’

  The Parks were a wilderness, not tamed any more with cricket and football pitches, but bleak and pathless. The trees stood out, evergreens crouching black and the stripped winter outlines of beech and chestnut rattling and shifting in the wind. There was hardly anyone about – just here and there a hurrying pin figure. The laboratories on the far side must have people in them, looking through microscopes, reading, writing, but they looked abandoned, left empty in the aftermath of some terrible disaster.

  ‘You can’t remember what it’s like in summer,’ said Clare.

  ‘No. Willows, and long grass.’

  ‘Punts.’

  ‘People playing cricket. Ice cream.’

  ‘You feel as though it was stuck at now, for ever and ever.’ Clare stared out; there was so little moving, out there, that it could have been a painting or a stage set. A background to some enacted drama.

  ‘I read a short story about that once. The world gets stuck at winter, somehow, and it never gets any warmer and nothing grows and everyone dies.’

  ‘I don’t feel as though the world was stuck. Just me.’

  ‘Can I see the hats?’ said Liz.

  Clare’s visitors always wanted to see the hats, along with the lift and the china collection in the drawing room and the old photograph albums in the study desk. ‘It’s super coming here,’ they said happily. ‘Like a museum where you�
��re allowed to take everything out and mess about with it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Clare. ‘Come on.’

  Clare’s great-grandmother, unlike her daughters, Aunt Anne and Aunt Susan, had been a lady of fashion. While her husband roamed the world in search of primitive peoples, and, back in Oxford, shut himself away with his books to puzzle out the relevance of their mysterious lives, Great-grandmother attended garden parties and theatres and entertained her friends to luncheon and afternoon tea and dinner in the evening. The equipment that had been necessary for all these activities, the dresses and capes and gloves and boots, and, above all, the battery of elaborate hats, feathered, ribboned and flowered, lay still in trunks in the attic. The aunts had never needed such things, but it did not occur to them to get rid of them, and in any case when Aunt Anne and Aunt Susan had needed something more ornate than the baggy tweed suits they had worn all their lives, they raided the trunks, and sallied forth to a wedding or a lunch inappropriately but, they felt, correctly dressed.

  They had to move some bundles of old curtains and a heap of cushions to get at the hat trunk. Mrs Hedges must have been tidying again.

  Liz rummaged, enthralled. ‘Oh! I’ve never seen this one before, with the long velvet ribbons. Gorgeous …’ They propped a long mirror up against the wall and examined themselves.

  ‘You need piled-up hair for this kind. Ours is all wrong.’

  ‘Hang on – there are some comb things up here.’

  ‘That’s better. Gosh … I wish I wasn’t so spotty. I bet your great-grandmother wasn’t spotty.’

  ‘That one has a dress to go with it. Wait a minute.’

  The dress was pale lilac, encrusted with lace, cunningly engineered over substructures of canvas and whalebone. Liz struggled into it.

  ‘It’s no good. I can’t fill it out at the top and it won’t go round me in the middle.’

  ‘You’re the wrong shape. They squeezed themselves in at the waist, then, so that they bulged out either side.’

  ‘I wish I looked like that. All majestic.’ Liz peered disconsolately downwards, at the coffee lace bosom of the dress caving in on her white cotton vest and bony chest.

  ‘You never know. You might later on.’

  ‘Some hope. Can I have that feather thing? How does it go? Just round and round you?’

  Clare opened another trunk. Somewhere, she knew, there was an evening dress all decorated with sequins, and an ostrich feather affair for the head, that matched it. Liz would like that. Funny, really, Great-grandmother accumulating all this stuff and Great-grandfather going all the way to Australia to get things not so very different for the Pitt Rivers museum. Great-grandmother, though, from what one heard of her, wouldn’t fancy the comparison with primitive tribesmen.

  Liz shrieked.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘What’s that ghastly thing?’

  ‘This? I’m not sure, really. Maureen and I found it the other day.’

  ‘I saw it looking at me in the mirror. Like a face.’

  It had slipped slightly: someone must have knocked against it. Clare put it straight again. It did not look quite as dingy as she remembered. The reds and blacks of the outlining seemed a little sharper, perhaps because she had switched an extra light on.

  ‘Why on earth do you have it there? It gives me the shivers.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clare. ‘I just felt I should. I don’t know why, at all.’

  ‘Help me get this off – I don’t want to tear the lace.’

  The door opened.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Maureen, ‘I thought someone had forgotten the light.’

  Clare said, ‘This is Liz.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Liz.

  ‘Hello. What’s this, then? Fancy dress parade?’

  ‘They’re my great-grandmother’s things.’

  Maureen fingered the material. ‘Must have cost a bomb, that. You don’t get cloth like that, nowadays. And those hats. You should try some of this stuff on a museum, or theatrical people – you’d get quite a bit for it, I should think.’

  ‘No,’ said Clare, ‘that wouldn’t be a very good idea.’

  ‘Help!’ said Liz, floundering in lilac silk.

  ‘Your friend seems to be having a spot of bother,’ said Maureen. ‘Well, I’d better make tracks. I’m going to the pictures. With a girl from the office, in case you’re thinking otherwise. Bye for now.’

  They put the dresses away and went downstairs to finish their homework. Aunt Susan came into the kitchen and helped with the Latin translation. For people who could not (or would not) cope with decimals, the aunts were amazingly competent when it came to Latin. Aunt Susan unravelled six sentences of the most perverse construction, and glowed a little with self-satisfaction.

  ‘One is not entirely useless yet.’

  She could also, it turned out, help explain the complexities of Elizabeth I’s foreign policy. Then she went away to do The Times crossword in the library.

  ‘I love your aunts,’ said Liz.

  ‘They’re all right.’

  Liz was fetched by her father, in a car, and went away into the night. Maureen came down in a red coat with a fur collar, to meet her friend and spend the evening watching stylized violence at the Super. Clare and Aunt Susan sat by the fire, sharing a rug across their knees. It was very cold. Upstairs, Aunt Anne slept in the big front bedroom which had been hers for the last forty years. Outside, the temperature fell. Frost clutched the trees and bushes, and the slush on the roads hardened into ice. The cars in Norham Gardens passed with a hard, cracking sound.

  There was a fresh fall of snow. It distorted the familiar landscape of houses and streets in a way that Clare found unsettling. She felt trapped by the leaden sky and the cold. The houses, picked out with snow along ledges and gables, seemed different – diminished, less secure. The trees, the chestnuts and flowering cherries and copper beeches of suburban streets, had become wilder: they hinted at Siberian forests and vast primeval woodlands. They no longer existed by courtesy, restrained by fence and wall and pavement, but dominated the place, as though they might expand and grow, splitting concrete, toppling brick. Looking out of the kitchen window, she saw Mrs Rider’s cat transformed into a panther, crouched on the garden wall, waiting for the birds that hopped despondent in the snow. The wireless talked with gloomy satisfaction of freeze-ups and traffic chaos: somewhere out there, in the rest of England, lorry drivers were marooned on Shap Fell and angry commuters waited in trainless stations.

  Maureen said it was silly to ride that bike to school, you could come a cropper on the ice, and Clare, not disposed to argue, went to and fro on the bus, huddled companionably against people buried deep in winter coats, trailing scarves and shopping baskets and school satchels. The conductor was West Indian, but when he spoke it was with the voice of Midland England, underpinned somewhere far beneath with an alien rhythm, a memory of sun and sea and bananas. He was possessed with cheerfulness, joking, smiling, nipping back and forth and up and down the stairs with the agility of a sailor riding unsteady seas. Doesn’t he mind the snow? Clare wondered, the cold? or has he been here so long he doesn’t remember being hot in the winter? And sitting there, squashed up against a woman, so close you could feel the warmth of her, hear her breathe, she thought, how odd you can be so close to someone and not know anything about them, nothing at all. She might be a murderer, or famous, and I wouldn’t know. I only know about the conductor because I can see he’s West Indian, and hear it. That’s why people have to talk to each other, all the time. If you couldn’t talk to people, tell them about yourself, you’d go mad.

  School was all talk, of course, but in a different way. Being told, not telling. Mostly, it was a part of the long Sunday afternoon. You were listening, but a part of you was just sleeping through it, waiting. Not entirely, of course, because it was not without drama: you could, within the compass of a single day, go the whole way from despair to exaltation. But it was like th
e landscapes in the fireplace at Norham Gardens: worlds could disintegrate, but tomorrow, or next week, everything would be the same again.

  You sat at your desk by the window, and heard about anguish and guilt, passion and grief, Macbeth, Heathcliff, Cathy. And beyond the door the dinner bell rang and people clattered down the stairs to play hockey in North Oxford. Wars were chalked up on the blackboard, and the death of kings, and disposed of in a shower of chalk dust, whole populations wiped out to make way for the declension of a Latin verb. Somewhere, there was a place where these things happened, a place of decision and disaster, but it could be contained between the pages of books and tidied away to make room for the real world of piano lessons and dinner tickets and home at ten to four.

  The products of Australia, says Miss Hammond, are meat, and fruit and grain. The climate is arid, the deserts waterless. Sydney exports tinned peaches. The Aborigines eat frogs and lizards, believe that men can be killed by means of magic. ‘In New Guinea,’ says Clare, ‘people think their ancestors are spirits. They talk to them, just like they talk to each other.’

  Miss Hammond smiles. She likes people to show an interest. Yes, she says, the customs of primitive tribes are interesting. How did you know that, she says? ‘I read a book.’ And there’s this thing in my attic, I don’t quite know what it is, what it means, something my great-grandfather brought here. Liz and Maureen think it’s creepy. I don’t really. Beautiful, in a funny way. Sad, somehow, but I don’t know why.

  Outside, the white skies press down on the city. It snows.

  There was a note from Mrs Hedges on the kitchen table: ‘Your Aunt Anne doesn’t look too good to me. I wanted to have the doctor in but she wasn’t having it. Do they understand you don’t pay any more? Be a good girl and see she stays in the warm this evening.’

  Clare took tea up to Aunt Anne, in bed. The gas fire was burning low, a sulky blue: she turned it up. Aunt Anne looked small in the middle of the large bed, swathed in very old cardigans.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Perfectly all right. Just a stupid cough. Susan is fussing.’

  Clare said severely, ‘You should have let Mrs Hedges get the doctor.’