The House in Norham Gardens

by Penelope Lively

  ‘That’s rather effective. Couldn’t you develop the pattern a little more at the top?’

  ‘No,’ said Clare.

  ‘But it’s a bit unbalanced, my dear. Look …’ A hand swooped round Clare’s back and came down on to the paper, making swift black lines with marker pencil. ‘This is just a suggestion … It’s only a sketch so far, isn’t it? You can start again.’

  ‘Stop it!’ said Clare violently, jerking the paper. The marker pen clattered to the floor. Mrs Elliott made a startled and indignant noise.

  ‘It has to be like this. That’s how it is. This is how they made it.’

  Liz, leaning over the table, said, ‘It’s that thing from your attic, isn’t it?’

  ‘What thing?’ said Mrs Elliott.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Clare sullenly. She reached for a clean sheet of paper and began again, filling in the outline. Mrs Elliott said, ‘Well, there’s no need to be rude,’ and went away, smoking energetically. People’s heads crouched an inch or two lower over the tables and the brushes clicked in the jars. Outside, the games field was a blinding, uninterrupted white.

  Later, during a lesson, English or History or something, she stared out of the window again and was astonished at the tumultuous noise of rooks, circling above the chestnut trees beyond the tennis court. She could not remember ever having noticed them before. Now, they filled the sky, rising and falling, twisting, swirling away all together, returning … And the noise they made, the persistent harsh crying, was louder than anything else. A sad, timeless noise, drowning everything. The teacher’s voice could hardly be heard. Surely she would have to stop? But everyone else was listening to the lesson, leaning back in their chairs, or propped with elbows on the desk. Someone put a hand up: ‘Please …’ Clare blinked, and tried to hear above the clamour of the birds.

  At dinner time, people went out into the snow. The games pitch and tennis courts were covered with flying black figures. Everything was black and white: white ground, white sky, black hedges and fences and dark, stripped trees. Sounds were distorted: unnaturally loud, girls’ voices, the small aeroplane creeping just above the horizon, or hushed, like the cars that moved slowly up and down the whitened street. Liz talked of plans for a cycling tour in the spring holidays. Youth Hostels in the Cotswolds. Clare could find nothing to say. Spring? This year, next year, sometime, never.

  ‘Don’t you want to come?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clare dully.

  Liz said, ‘Well, suit yourself,’ and walked away, offended.

  Coming home, she could see no light in any of the front windows. The house presented a blank and empty face. She ran up the steps and in at the front door, calling, and came face to face with John at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

  ‘I thought there was no one here. No lights …’

  ‘Your aunts are upstairs, I think. Calm down – everything is as usual. How is the snow? More?’

  Clare said, ‘Yes, I think so – I’m not sure.’ John looked at her, puzzled, and went away into the twilight with his head buried in a vast scarf.

  She was walking down Norham Gardens but it had become much longer, and wider, more of an avenue than a street, like some continental city – Paris, maybe, or Vienna – and it wasn’t level any more, but quite steeply sloping, so that she climbed as she walked. There were trees set in the pavements at either side, each one tidily circled by a low iron railing, neat trees with oblong leaves and smooth grey trunks. There was no traffic, and no people. No one in sight at all: she was entirely alone in this urban landscape. The houses reached up the hill ahead of her, and the problem was to find her own, because the numbers had disappeared, and they all looked exactly the same.

  Or nearly the same – several times she stopped to stare uncertainly at a house which would then betray itself by an unfamiliar fire escape, or glass conservatory tacked on to one side, or the wrong combination of Gothic windows. She moved on, hurrying. Somewhere, the aunts were waiting for her. They would be worried: she was late already. The place was absolutely silent, and the houses seemed lifeless – no curtains at the windows, no lights. She crossed from one pavement to the other, searching. Examining each house, rejecting it, moving on. And at last she reached the right one, nearly at the top of the long hill. It was right, she knew, because of the blistered black paint on the front door and the brass knocker shaped like a dolphin that the aunts brought back from a holiday, a long time ago.

  She ran up the steps, and saw suddenly that there was no glass in the windows. No glass, and weeds clawing up through cracks in the steps. She opened the front door, and there was nothing beyond but daylight and a huge expanse of rubble linking all these houses. They were facades, with nothing beyond – the shadow of houses, homes, sheltering nothing but broken bricks and dust.

  All week, the snow lay, and fell again, and lay. The newspapers relegated politicians, crime and the economy to inner pages and allowed the weather first place. Statistics were produced: more roads were blocked than ever before, more trains idle, it was the worst winter since 1963, and, before that, 1947.

  ‘Nineteen forty-seven I shall not forget,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘We got the old pram down from the attic and wheeled it to the coal depot beyond the station.’

  ‘So we did. And one ate the most unlikely food. Whalemeat, and powdered egg.’

  ‘I wasn’t born,’ said Clare.

  ‘No, indeed, you were a treat to come.’

  ‘A Post War Credit,’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Butter, please.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I was being facetious. Post War Credits were a kind of postponed financial bonus to compensate people for the deprivations of the war. Shouldn’t you be off to school?’

  ‘I s’pose so.’

  She had this reluctance, nowadays, to leave the house. Ordinarily, you went out in the morning and, one way and another, you didn’t really think about it all the time you were somewhere else. The aunts, maybe, from time to time, in snatches: you knew they were there, and they’d be there in the evening when you got back, and that was all there was to it. Now, she had to drag herself away in the mornings, and during the day, looking out of a window, going up and down stairs, eating in the clatter of the dining hall, her thoughts would home on Norham Gardens, as though, unless she did so, it had no substance. She had to create it in her mind, the rooms, the things in the rooms. There was somebody the aunts had talked about once, a philosopher or something like that, who said things weren’t there unless you could see them. Or, at least, how could you prove they were there … It was like that with Norham Gardens.

  She took to telephoning during the day, for the reassurance of hearing the aunts’ voices, or Mrs Hedges. She invented fragile reasons: was there any shopping they wanted done? She just wanted to say she might be a bit late back this afternoon. As soon as she put the receiver down the feeling of uncertainty would come back and she would stand looking at the telephone, wanting to pick it up again. Sitting at her desk, she drew diagrams of the house over and over again on pieces of blotting paper, or in exercise books – front elevation, rear elevation, cross-sections with the front removed, like a dolls’ house, plans of each room, like an architect’s blueprint. She spent long minutes on the exact arrangement of pieces of furniture and pictures, angry and frustrated when she could not remember exactly how everything went. She could not pay attention to other things, and did not do her work properly. Exercise books came back to her with long comments in red ink – irritated or puzzled. She pushed them into her desk without reading them.

  Once, telephoning at midday, she found herself speaking to Maureen, returned during her lunch-hour to cook herself baked beans in the kitchen. Confused, Clare asked if everything was all right. Maureen’s voice, somehow at the same moment both down at the other end of North Oxford and here, in the voice piece of the telephone, an inch or two from Clare’s chin, said that of course everything was all right and what’s
up with you. ‘Nothing,’ said Clare. ‘Nothing, really.’ Later, that evening, or the next, Maureen remembered.

  ‘What were you on about – telephoning to say was everything all right?’

  Embarrassed, Clare said she got this feeling, sometimes.

  ‘What feeling?’

  ‘Just this feeling that if I’m somewhere else the house can’t be there any more.’

  ‘I know,’ said Maureen, surprisingly.

  ‘Do you? You mean you’ve felt like that?’

  ‘When I was a kid. Younger than you, mind, much. I ran all the way home from school, once, to see if my mum was still there. I got this idea all of a sudden she couldn’t be, if I couldn’t see her. Ever such a fuss there was – the teachers were in a proper state.’

  ‘I thought it was just me,’ said Clare.

  ‘Nothing’s ever just you. Take it from me. Nothing at all.’

  The snow had been lying for days now, immobilized by frost. It was cleared from the roads and, here and there, from the pavements. Rigid grey heaps of it stood around at street corners and outside shops and front doors. Paths and uncleared pavements were furrowed with a thick, glassy skin: only where the city widened out into parks and playing fields and gardens did it lie white and clean. At Norham Gardens the back garden was dark with birds, small, huddled shapes scavenging around the privet and among the clumps of dead stalks that pushed up from what had been flower beds. Clare threw bread out to them and stood at the open window, listening to the rush of their wings: the noise seemed unaccountably loud, like the calling of the rooks above the playing fields. The city seemed to have contracted, to be cramped into a smaller space than usual. Purple clouds, heaped up around the horizon, were like distant mountains encircling it.

  Maureen had a ’phone call from Weybridge, to say that her father was ill. She took a couple of days off and went home to see him.

  Mrs Hedges caught ’flu from Linda. There was another telephone message to say she would not be in for a day or two. At school, Clare kept thinking of her. She rang the aunts to say she would go up to Headington on the bus, from school.

  ‘That’s a nice idea. You could take some flowers.’

  ‘Yes …’

  The flower shop in Summertown was showy with cinerarias, hyacinths, daffodils, chrysanthemums, all seasonally displaced and somehow inappropriate. Clare, staring at the banks of pots and trying to remember Mrs Hedges’ favourite colour, and whether she preferred tulips or narcissi, felt as though someone had been interfering with the natural order of things, here, persuading plants that it was spring when it was not. It seemed profoundly unwise, to tamper with time itself. Reluctantly, she bought a pot of daffodils, green buds edged with yellow, and went out into the cold to wait at the bus stop, sheltering the flowers against her coat.

  She got off the bus at the top of Headington Hill and walked through gathering darkness, down side streets, to where Mrs Hedges lived. This was an estate of semi-detached houses with neat gardens and low, clipped hedges separating them from street and pavement. Norham Gardens was a grander, larger, more ornate ancestor to this kind of place. The houses blossomed in the twilight, their uncurtained windows orange and sometimes blue where television sets flickered in front rooms. They seemed, with the evening, to have taken on a magnetic quality – everywhere, people were homing on them: children scurrying in the shelter of walls and hedges, women pushing prams or carrying shopping bags, cars sweeping quietly round corners. Clare threaded her way through turnings to right and left, surprised by how easily she could find her way, in the dark, to a place she had only been to before by daylight.

  Mrs Hedges came to the door in a dressing gown, and at once began to scold.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come. All this way, and in filthy weather like this. And don’t you get near me or you’ll be having it next.’

  Clare proffered the daffodils.

  ‘Thanks. I love daffs. We’ll put them in the warm and they’ll be right out in a day or two. Nice to see them so early. Come on in and have some tea. It’s Linda’s half-day so she’s home.’

  Mrs Hedges was better, it seemed. She was watching television from the sofa. Linda made tea in the kitchen and shouted instructions at her mother through the hatch about keeping warm and not lifting a finger. Clare fed the goldfish and the bird and sat on a rug that Mrs Hedges had made last winter and felt – for the first time in many days – relaxed and comfortable. Linda came in with a tray of tea and scones she had just taken from the oven, and told Clare she had grown since the summer.

  ‘I haven’t, I’m sure, my clothes from last year still fit.’

  ‘Then you’ve thinned out,’ said Linda. ‘That’s it. Lost your puppy fat. Growing up, isn’t she, Mum?’ They looked benevolently at Clare. ‘Dad should be home.’

  ‘Late shift,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘The old ladies all right, are they? I don’t like the thought of them on their own all day. Still, I’ll be back, end of the week. Linda, bring the wedding dress down to show Clare.’

  The dress, shrouded in tissue paper, was fetched and lay across the armchair like an object in a museum display. Dress, veil, shoes, sparkly arrangement for pinning veil to hair.

  ‘What a commotion,’ said Linda. ‘All for one day. All that food and drink and a dress I won’t ever wear again and I bet I’ll be in such a state I’ll never remember anything about it afterwards.’

  ‘ ’Course you will. It’s something you look back on all your life. I remember every moment of mine.’ Clare, following Mrs Hedges’ glance, saw the framed photograph on the low table behind the sofa: Mr Hedges, young, in army uniform with three stripes on one sleeve and cap under the arm that was not threaded through that of the Linda/Mrs Hedges bride at his side, in a stiff square-shouldered jacket and skirt. No white tulle or sparkly headdress.

  ‘Wartime,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘Forty-eight hour leave, cider cup in the Village Hall, and a utility costume from the co-op that my mum gave me all her coupons for. And still I remember every minute.’

  ‘You looked like Linda,’ said Clare.

  ‘Now then – who came first, may I ask? Linda looks like me, you mean.’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Linda. ‘You’re a stone heavier than I am.’

  ‘That’s middle age. Once upon a time I could have knocked spots off you, my girl. You ask your dad. Clare, if you don’t eat that last scone no one else will.’

  Linda drew the curtains. It was very warm, very companionable, with the smell of something meaty cooking in the kitchen and the budgerigar tapping at its reflection in a plastic mirror and Mrs Hedges talking on while she drank her tea. Clare sat listening and watching the ebb and flow of colours in the coke fire.

  ‘… It seems a wretched time, when you think back, the war, and it was but we had our moments, all the same. Always waiting for something you seemed to be – weekend leaves, and letters, and a bit extra on the rations, or Christmas. And for when it would all be over, most of all. Always looking ahead, promising yourself things one day. They don’t know they’re born, nowadays, most of them. Shops crammed full of everything you could want, money to burn …’

  ‘I’ve been saving since I was seventeen,’ said Linda indignantly.

  ‘Oh, you’re all right – you’ve been properly brought up, haven’t you. And none of that winking at Clare – I can see you. All the same, there was something about things then that you don’t get now – I couldn’t put my finger on it, quite. Something about the way people would put themselves out for each other.’

  ‘Spirit of the Blitz,’ said Linda, yawning. ‘I’ve seen old war films, too.’

  Mrs Hedges told Linda off for being cheeky about things she didn’t understand and Linda teased her mother for being nostalgic and the budgerigar clicked and tapped and sprayed bird seed on to the carpet. Mrs Hedges put her feet up on the sofa and talked about Saturday night dances at the NAAFI and working in a munitions factory and being a landgirl and about D-day and VE night, and Clare listened and doz
ed and sat up with a start when the clock on the mantelpiece struck seven.

  ‘Is it really as late as that? I’ve been gone hours – I should go back.’

  ‘That was Mrs Enid Hedges’ short course in Twentieth Century History,’ said Linda. ‘Six easy lessons.’

  ‘Take no notice,’ said Mrs Hedges. ‘It’s gone to her head, all this getting married. Thank you for coming over, dear – it’s cheered me up. Tell the old ladies I’ll see them Friday, probably.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks for the scones. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight. Take care how you go. Get the bus at the traffic lights.’

  It was freezing hard. Clare, turning the corner into the main road, slipped on the icy pavement and nearly fell. The black roads glinted where car headlights raked down them. Riding through the city on the bus was like being carried in a warm, steamy tank. You rubbed the window and the grey mist turned to water, running down the glass, and beyond were shops and people and lights, all slightly elongated, blurring into each other like images in trick mirrors at a fairground. It made you want to travel along like this forever, passive, not bothering about anything, making no decisions. Clare sat, lethargic, thinking of nothing, and went past her stop. She had to walk back, down Banbury Road, getting cold again.

  She opened the front door into darkness. So unexpected was this that she jumped as though the black hall were something solid, a wall that you could knock yourself out against. Her first, confused thought, then, was that there was an electricity cut. She shouted, and no one answered. The house, now that she had shut the door, swallowed her, empty, apparently, and pitch dark. She felt, for an instant, quite panic-stricken, and then groped for the light switches, and the hall light came on, and the one on the landing above. She called again, ‘Aunt Susan! Here I am – I’m back!’ and threw the library door open, and it was dark in there, now, with the curtains not drawn and the fire not lit, never having been lit, the ashes quite cold. She stood there for a moment, and the most awful feeling came in her stomach, and her heart began to thump, and she went out again and ran past the hall table, knocking some letters off it and a sheet of white paper that fluttered to the floor and got under her foot and made her skid as she rushed up the stairs, calling. John’s room was empty – it would be, of course, he was going to a late class, she remembered now – and Maureen was still away. And there was no one anywhere. Every room was empty. The bedrooms, the drawing room, the dining room, the study. Empty, quite empty. No one there at all.