The House in Norham Gardens

by Penelope Lively

  She came down the stairs again talking in her head, or, quite possibly, out loud. ‘They never go out. They haven’t been out for weeks. They wouldn’t go out when it’s snowy like this.’ She went into the kitchen and everything was tidy and put away – no cups or plates on the table or anything left about. The tap dripping. The clock ticking too loud.

  ‘Aunt Susan! Aunt Anne!’ Back into the hall. Standing there, crying, almost. Something’s happened. There’s been an accident. Things were unreeling in her mind – pictures, not words, flashed images that she didn’t want to see. The aunts hurt, ill … She went back into the kitchen, to shut the pictures out, and then into the library, and back into the hall again. She picked the telephone up, held it for a moment, put it down again. Stood for a moment, again, with a cold, drained feeling going all through her and then ran out of the house, leaving the front door open, and down the steps and out of the drive and up the steps of Mrs Rider’s house. The door was open and she went straight in – into the hall that was a twin to her own but entirely different, with plastic-tiled floor and racks of pigeonholes for letters and a green baize noticeboard. A girl student came out of one of the rooms and Clare said, ‘Please – is Mrs Rider here?’ and the girl went through to the kitchen and then came back and said, ‘No, sorry,’ and went upstairs.

  Clare went back to the house. She ran up the steps and through the open door and up the stairs and into each room, again, praying in her head to open a door and find them sitting there and everything all right, a mistake, a bad dream … But the house was empty; still. They weren’t there, and this was happening, it was perfectly real.

  She couldn’t, she knew, be by herself like this any more. She had to find someone to help. Mrs Hedges. I need Mrs Hedges. But she hasn’t got a telephone – I’ll have to go up there. The bus takes too long. Bike. I’ll go by bike. Mrs Hedges and Linda will help. They’ll know what to do.

  She rode too fast, standing up on the pedals, and the wheels kept swerving about in a funny way as though perhaps there was something wrong with the tyres and going round into Banbury Road she slid into the pavement and saved herself from falling with one foot. She went straight down Banbury Road and then when she got to the corner of Keble Road she remembered that it would be much quicker not to go through the town, but round by South Parks Road, that way, to Longwall, so she swerved quickly to get round the corner.

  And the bike floated away, somehow, sideways, and she went with it, not able to stop it, and there was an awful noise just behind, a car’s brakes squealing, and she was lying on her back on the road, and the bike or something was on top of her. Everything was quite clear now, and calm, not all anxious and spinning like a few minutes ago. She was lying on her back on the road, and a man was getting out of a car and there were some people running towards her and for some reason she just went on lying there. And another part of her seemed to be watching, as though this had happened to someone else, not her.

  The people were looking down at her now and someone said, ‘It’s all right – don’t move,’ and a man put a coat over her and she thought she should say thank you but for some odd reason she wasn’t able to. And she ought to get up, not just lie there on the road, but she couldn’t do that either, because the part of her that was outside, watching, was the only part that could decide things. The person lying on the road could only hear cars going past and people’s voices, and the sound their feet made moving around her on the road. A man said, ‘The ambulance should be here in a moment,’ and a woman’s voice, very close, right over her said, ‘I wonder who she is.’

  The other Clare, the watcher, wanted to tell them, but somehow she was going further and further away now, up and up, above the road and the trees, and after a while she wasn’t in the same place at all. She was in some kind of spaceship, a bubble of plastic which turned over and over, floating aimlessly in a sky without a horizon. The bubble had no up and no down, no top and no bottom: it revolved aimlessly and sickeningly, tumbling in space, and she, the person inside it, scrabbled at the transparent walls and tumbled with it, now on her stomach, now on her back, sliding over the smooth surface that offered no hold of any kind, no handle or ledge or rope. She spun, and the bubble spun and the featureless sky spun around it, and she could not get out, and it would not stop.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One day, visitors come again to the tribe. This time, they weigh them, and measure their height, and count their teeth, and peer into their eyes. They are asked their age (which they do not know) and their names, and the names of their husband and their wife and their father and mother. Their throats are examined, and their fingernails, and the soles of their feet. They are injected and vaccinated and dosed with medicines. The tribe have arrived in the twentieth century. They have no ritual for the celebration of such an event, because it has never happened before, so they remain silent.

  Clare was lying on her back on a bed that someone was wheeling along. Her head hurt. She hurt all over. The bed stopped moving and a man was looking down at her. He smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘soon have you all fixed up. You’re just going off to sleep for a bit now.’

  She did not feel sleepy, and was about to tell him so, and then, strangely, a kind of blackness began to come up from behind her eyes, and she fought against it, but it was huge, swallowing her, taking her away, and there was nothing she could do. She gave in, and went with it, into darkness.

  She was in Burford church, walking among those high, light cliffs of stone. The names were scored deeply into the stone: In Memory of …, In Fond Remembrance …, Pray for the Soul of … She walked slowly, reading, because you must not leave this place until you have done so, though there was, she knew, something else, perhaps more important, that she had to do. The tamburan was under her arm, wrapped in an old tweed jacket that came also from the attic. It had been Great-grandfather’s and smelled comfortingly of tobacco, though there were moth holes in it and the lining was almost in shreds. It was not an ideal covering as the arms kept unwrapping and she would have to stop to rearrange it around the tamburan. It was remarkable how the colours had come up lately: it was quite brilliant now, dazzling, almost, as though it had been made yesterday. It reminded her of the paintings in a medieval church she had once seen restored to their original brilliance – blazing and, in some obscure way, quite inappropriate as though to do such a thing were to tamper not with the painting but with time itself. The tamburan was rather like that now: its brightness was quite disturbing which was one reason why she had to wrap it in the old jacket.

  The church door was open and outside, as she had known, lay dense green jungle and, quite close, the abrupt slope of the mountainside, reaching up, blue and billowing with treetops, to a sky packed with white cloud. She was going to have to climb, this time, before she could reach the people, and it looked as though it would take some time, and probably be hard work. She hitched the tamburan up under her arm and looked for a way through the trees that began where the bamboo ended, small, scrubby trees first but becoming higher and taller and denser, she could see, further up the mountain.

  There was a track, quite well worn, as though others had been this way, and she started up it, following its twists and curves as it avoided fallen trees, wet places, and the steepest gradients of the mountainside. Ahead of her, and invisible, there were sudden manic bird noises, shrieks and screams: sound would explode far away up in the treetops, the flap of wings, leaves and branches moving. The path was quite wide and definite, and not yet very steep, and she fancied that she could see the prints of other feet in the dirt and leaf mould. There was no one about, though, and neither did she expect there to be: this, she had always known, was a journey to be taken alone. There were flowers in the shadowy places at the edge of the path – the kind of greenish and whitish flowers that grow in places without much light, larger and more emphatic versions of the spurges and anemones of English woods. Once or twice she stopped to look at them, and saw butterflies, too, like
dappled, moving shadows. So far, the climb was not unpleasant.

  But it was beginning to get steeper. Steeper and darker and wetter. There was a faint, clammy mist so that in places where the trunks of the trees thinned out and she could see a few yards into the forest the light was dim and blue. And the tree trunks themselves were furred over with green moss, so that they soared up on all sides of her as great emerald columns, reaching up and up to a vaulting of leaves from which moisture pattered down on to her head and on to the path. It was like walking, climbing, through some huge damp cathedral.

  The path had got narrower, and seemed to have been less frequented here: several times she had to stop to push aside hanging curtains of a parasitic plant that slung itself round the trunks and branches of the trees, or to climb over a huge, decaying log that lay right across the path. There were no butterflies now: the insect life upon the path or on the branches level with her head was all of the creeping, crawling or writhing variety so that she preferred not to look too closely, and kept her arms pinned close to her sides and her head down. The flowers, where they occurred, were orchids. Greenhouse orchids in pale, luminous colours, hanging from branches and boles like serpents, waxen and gently swaying. She thought them unattractive and wondered why people went to such pains to grow them, in botanical gardens and hothouses.

  There were no birds now. Nothing lived here, it seemed, except creeping things. Once, looking down, she saw something black and slug-like sticking to her leg, and brushed it away with the back of her hand, shuddering uncontrollably. The leeches of which Great-grandfather had spoken … She tried to hurry, still shuddering, but the path was very steep now, rising almost sheer through the squelching leaf mould, and she was out of breath, her heart racing and ears pounding. She kept slipping, too, on the wet track, coming down on to her knees and scrambling up again in a panic, with a horrid fear of what might rise up from the path with her. Leeches, nastiness … There was so much water coming down from the trees now that it could more fairly be called rain than mist, and the air itself was so dense with moisture that she could hardly see two yards ahead of her. It was as though she climbed up the very course of a waterfall.

  And it got colder and colder. She unwrapped the tamburan from Great-grandfather’s coat and put the coat on – it did not seem any longer important to suppress the brilliance of the colours and she had no fear that the water would spoil the wood. The coat, of course, was too big for her: the sleeves flapped to her fingertips and the hem of it reached to her thighs, but it felt reassuring and she was able to get along faster for a while, though the going seemed to become harder and harder. And there was no way of telling how near or how far she might be from the summit. That was the worst of it. On an ordinary, unclothed mountain that at least would be clear, but in this twilit forest she might be nowhere near the top, or a few yards away, and be none the wiser. There was nothing for it but to struggle on.

  On and up. She must have climbed very high now, she thought. Thousands of feet? Maybe the pounding in her ears had something to do with that, as well as the physical effort of the climb. Maybe she was so high above sea level that the oxygen was thin. With this thought came a little rush of panic – a feeling that she would never make it, might as well give up … Several times she hesitated and half turned back, but each time something drove her on. You’ve got so far, she told herself, you’ve put up with leeches and got wet through and out of breath, you can’t give up now. And they’re waiting … And then, quite suddenly, the blue curtain of mist ahead of her became opaque, with something lying beyond that was not trees nor mountainside but something altogether light and bright and different. Sunshine. There was a rainbow of colour all around her, and the incessant patter of the drops from the trees had stopped, and in a moment the trees themselves, and the ground, no longer went upwards in front of her but had levelled off and fell away steeply down.

  Down into the valley. She was on a ridge, with the trees behind and in front the wide and placid valley, neatly chequered with their fields and dotted with the little squat thatched buttons of their huts, clustered about thin blue whiskers of smoke from their cooking-fires. The valley was a great green bowl, floored with the delicate patchwork patterning of their fields, safely cradled between the blue swell of the mountains all around – the mountains up which she had struggled for what, now, seemed hours. Up here, they were no longer so daunting: the mist had gone and there were only harmless puffs of white cloud lying along the skyline, and a clear turquoise sky. She began to go down into the valley, noticing as she did so that there was some curious brown scarring among the fields of the valley that she could not for the moment identify. Thick brown lines that, here and there, cut a swathe right through the patchwork of the fields.

  The descent did not take long, through light scrub and, lower down, springy turf dotted about with big grey boulders. There were butterflies again, and birds singing, and the distant noise of dogs barking and once or twice men shouting. There was another noise, too, as she got lower and into the valley itself – a rhythmic throbbing that seemed somehow to have no place here. She tightened her grip on the tamburan and hurried. She was still wearing the coat and though it was warm down here – hot, even – she thought that it would be better to keep it on.

  Down in the valley, she was soon in among bamboo and pandanus, head-high, hurrying along the kind of twisting, much-used path that now seemed familiar. She could still hear that throbbing noise, somewhere quite near now, and thought, disbelievingly, that it sounded like an engine of some kind. Leaving the bamboo and coming to a more open stretch, with fields and gardens, she found herself right on top of the brown scarring she had seen from above. It was as though a giant claw had reached down into the valley and scraped a wide track right across it. It was, she recognized with amazement, the basic construction of a road.

  She crossed the dry, rutted channel – it had the broad herring-boning of tyre marks on it, she now saw – and went into another bamboo plantation. She thought she must be very near the village now and began to run. She felt certain also that she had been far too long in coming. Far, far too long.

  She came out of the bamboo and into the clearing where the village had been. But the huts had gone. In their place were neat ranks of small concrete bungalows, facing each other across a dusty road. One of them was a shop, with tattered advertisements for Coca-Cola and washing powder and various brands of cigarettes plastered across its verandah, and another sprouted an arrangement of wires and poles that must have to do with radio transmission. There was a battered and dusty lorry standing at the far end of the bungalow, and a couple of bicycles leaning against the wall of the shop.

  They were there, squatted down in the wedges of shadow at the foot of the bungalow walls, or leaning on windowsills, or walking down the road. The men wore shirts and khaki shorts, and most of them had cigarette stubs in the corners of their mouths, or tucked behind an ear. The women had cotton dresses on. Only one or two of the very small children went naked. Nobody took any notice at all of Clare. She could walk up to them and their eyes would rove across her, and the jacket, and the tamburan, and rove away again, impassive. They all seemed apathetic, and as though they either had nothing to do or no inclination to do what should be done. In front of the shop a group of the men were clustered around something, huddled over it in silence. Going up to them, and leaning over them, she saw that it was a transistor radio. They stared intently at it and one of them fiddled with the knobs. It howled and whistled and then an English voice came out, with an accent she could not place, reading a news bulletin.

  It was moments before she could attract their attention, force them to look up from the radio which seemed to mesmerize them, as though if they did not look at it they would not be able to hear it. ‘Look,’ she kept saying, ‘please look,’ and she held the tamburan out, face towards them, with all its colours bright and sharp, and still they would not look, hunched there over the radio.

  But in the end they d
id, turning towards her and looking first at her, without interest and then, at last, at the tamburan. One of them reached out an arm in a tattered cotton sleeve and held it and stared at it and then he shook his head, to and fro, blankly, and handed it back to her. ‘The time is six p.m. Western Australia time,’ said the voice on the radio. ‘Time for Music Roundup,’ and music crackled out into the sunshine and the valley and the high clear sky and the men turned away from her and crouched down over the radio again and left her standing there, holding out the tamburan, not knowing what she should do next.

  She came up through a great many layers of white fog saying, ‘They don’t want it any more.’

  She was in bed. There were screens around the bed and someone’s arm, all wrapped up in white but with bare fingers most oddly protruding at the end, was lying in front of her face, and a woman in a white cap was standing beside the bed. The woman smiled and said, ‘There you are, then. Back with us again. How do you feel now, dear?’

  A nurse. This is a hospital. That’s my arm.

  ‘What’s happened to my arm?’ said Clare.