by Various
Lady Gregory tried to smile casually as she came to the end of the story. She was pleased that her listener had guessed nothing. It was a story that had elements both French and English, something that James would understand as being rather particularly part of his realm. He thanked her and said that he would note the story once he reached his study that evening and he would perhaps, he hoped, do justice to it in the future. It was always impossible to know, he added, why one small spark caused a large fire and why another was destined to extinguish itself before it had even flared.
She realised as the guests around her stood up from the table that she had said as much as she could say, which was, on reflection, hardly anything at all. She almost wished she had added more detail, had told James that the letter came from a poet perhaps, or that it contained a set of sonnets whose subject was unmistakable, or that the wife of the clergyman was more than thirty years his junior, or that he was not a clergyman at all, but a former member of parliament and someone who had once held high office. Or that the events in question had happened in Egypt and not on the way to Paris. Or that the woman had never, in fact, been caught, she had been careful and had outlived the husband to whom she had been unfaithful. That she had merely dreamed of and feared being sent home by him or kept apart, never touched.
The next time, she thought, if she found herself seated beside the novelist she would slip in one of these details. She understood perfectly why the idea excited her so much. As Henry James stood up from the table, it gave her a strange sense of satisfaction that she had lodged her secret with him, a secret over-wrapped perhaps, but at least the rudiments of its shape apparent, if not to him then to her, for whom these matters were pressing, urgent and gave meaning to her life. That she had kept the secret and told a small bit of it all at the same time made her feel light as she went to join the ladies for some conversation. It had been, on the whole, she thought, an unexpectedly interesting evening.
ROSE TREMAIN
IS ANYBODY THERE?
1
SHE WAS A widow, like me. Or so she wanted me to believe. She once showed me a faded photograph of a soldier in the uniform of the Irish Guards. ‘That was him,’ she said, ‘my man.’
I asked her a few questions about him, but she didn’t care to answer them. All she said was, ‘Well he was Irish, like yours truly. You can tell, can’t yer? Something in the set of the eyes. And see how pale he was. Pale as water. But that’s all I can say.’
Her name was Nell Greenwood. She was ten years older than me. She and I were neighbours on a lonely stretch of Norfolk road. Our two cottages were joined to each other, like they should have been one house, but she said, ‘No, no, they were never one house; they were always two. Farm workers’ cottages. Two for the price of one, see? Meant for families. Babies and toddlers crying both sides of the wall. No insulation. Everybody awake till dawn.’
Now, just two elderly women, with our lives trailing behind us, like half-remembered dreams we kept tugging along. We each had a garden at the back, with an old picket fence between the two. On my plot, I grew beans in summer and potatoes and rhubarb. I had a bed of bright flowers, hollyhocks, gladioli and marigolds. I kept a few chickens in a wire pen. And a man from East Dereham had come and laid a brick patio for me, where I sometimes sat in a folding canvas chair and listened to the hens and the pigeons calling from the woods.
On Nell’s plot, there were nettles and tall grasses and wild weeds which she said had been ‘sown by God’. I privately thought of Nell’s garden as a bit of an Irish kind of disgrace, but she didn’t see it like that. She liked it. She said it was ‘Nature obeying itself, not being pushed and pulled about’. I would sometimes see her walking there, not minding the nettles, stroking the feathery grasses with her fingers, clearly pleased with it all, gathering stems of Ragged Robin to put in a jar for her kitchen table. At the end of her garden, there was a child’s swing hanging from a metal frame once painted red but now rusted to the colour of the earth. I noticed that Nell would never go right up to the swing, but stand a little way off – stand very still, seemingly held by the sight of it.
One day, I said to her, ‘Was the swing there when you came to live in your cottage?’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking sideways, away from me. ‘I can’t remember, but I think it was. I have the feeling it was there of its own accord.’
We were standing each on our own side of the picket fence. It was a hot August morning and by the bright light falling on us I could see that Nell appeared sickly, with tired eyes and a greyish colour to her skin. I was about to ask her something more about the swing, but instead I said, ‘Are you all right, Nell?’
She stared at me angrily, as though I’d said something unkind. ‘All right?’ she said. ‘At my time of life? At the age of almost ninety? All right, are you askin’? At the age of eighty-nine and three quarters? For Jesus’ sake. You should save your breath, Mrs.’
She’d been like that a few times before: suddenly rude, suddenly agitated. I thought that perhaps if you lived in solitude, as we both did, you stopped censoring your thoughts and feelings when you were with other people and just blurted out whatever words came first to your mind. I knew that I could sometimes act like a person in need of the Social Services; I talked back to people on the TV, or threw cushions at them. I treated my chickens as though they were my children. ‘Lovebirds, you are,’ I’d say. ‘You’re my lovely poppets.’ All old people are at least thirty or forty per cent crazy, in their own particular way. Life does this to you: it drives everybody insane. But that August night, the night after the moment by the picket fence, something particularly crazy happened.
I was woken at three o’clock by a ringing of my doorbell.
It was still dark. I went to my wardrobe and got out the shotgun that I always keep cleaned and ready in case a fox threatens my precious birds. I crept down my stairs, holding the gun. When I got to the door, I called out, ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’
For a pace, there was silence. The night was hot and I could feel sweat creeping down between my shoulder blades. Then Nell’s voice called out: ‘Let me in, Mrs. I’ve come to help you.’
I put the safety catch on the gun and propped it up by the umbrella stand and opened the door. There was Nell, with her grey hair in a tangle and wearing a nightdress that was half in rags. She stared at me. ‘I thought I might have to break in,’ she said.
‘Break in?’
‘I thought you might be trapped in your room.’
‘Why trapped in my room?’
‘That knocking you were doing. It woke me with such a start. I couldn’t think what it was at first. Then I thought, oh Jesus-Mary-Joseph, that’s herself next door and she must be callin’ for help, so let me come in and make sure you’re not bleedin’ from the brain.’
I put on a light. Nell pushed my door open wide and came and stood in my little hallway, which is identical to hers and neither is really a hallway at all, but just a small rectangle of space, leading directly to the stairs. She reached out to me and put her arm round my shoulder and said, ‘Now then, Mrs. You tell me what.’
I gaped at Nell.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You mean, you don’t know? You woke me all for nothing? All that knocking and knocking for a pinch of snuff?’
I moved away from Nell and sat down on the stairs.
‘I was asleep when you rang the bell,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do any knocking.’
‘Eh?’ said Nell.
‘I didn’t knock on your wall, Nell.’
‘Well now,’ she said. ‘I know exactly how these houses are arranged and your bedroom is to the right of the stairs and mine is to the left of mine, so all that separates our rooms is that bit of lath and plaster they call a wall. I can hear you snoring sometimes. I’m not fibbin’. So when the knocking came, I knew it was you. Don’t you pretend otherwise. And I’m here now, see: the Good Samaritan.’
I rubbed my eyes. The sweat on my back was dryin
g and making me shiver.
‘It was kind of you to come round,’ I said. ‘But I promise you I never knocked on your wall.’
‘Then you did it in yer sleep, then. Knock-knock-knock, three times. Then a pause and then another three. And so loud, my head bounced clean off the feckin’ pillow.’
I didn’t know what more to say.
That was how it began.
There were calm nights, when my sleep was undisturbed, but time after time I was woken, sometimes at three, sometimes nearer dawn, with Nell either ringing my bell or just beating on my bedroom wall with some instrument that sounded as though it was a hammer, and Nell shouting ‘Stop! Stop it, Mrs! You stop this or I’ll have you done for Public Nuisance!’
It was still summer. The grasses and nettles in Nell’s garden grew so high, they almost obscured the swing. And after she accused me of knocking on her bedroom wall she never walked there any more. When I was in the garden, I always looked over to Nell’s patch, which was now seeding itself with thistles, hoping that she’d be there, so that we could talk sanely, rationally, in the sunshine, but she stayed locked up in her house.
I decided to take her the gift of some eggs. Alone as we both were, we’d always been thoughtful neighbours to each other. For why not?
For some reason, people who don’t know hens prefer brown eggs to white, as though they imagine (wrongly) there may be more flavour to them, so I selected six brown eggs and put them in a blue china bowl. I thought they looked beautiful, arranged like that: the pale brown colour and the blue.
Nell had no doorbell, so I had to knock on her front door. When she opened it, she said, ‘I knew it was you. You, with your knocking! What is it this time?’
I held out the bowl of eggs. ‘These,’ I said. ‘Laid yesterday.’
Nell was wearing a threadbare cotton scarf round her neck, and she pulled this up over her mouth. ‘I can’t eat much at the moment,’ she said. ‘I might not get round to cooking them.’
She looked thin and very tired. Behind her, I could see that her stairs were now strewn with her possessions – clothes, shoes, magazines, medicine bottles, bundles of letters – as though she’d decided to empty out all her chests of drawers and hurl everything away down the waterfall of her green stair carpet. She saw me staring at these things and she turned to face them. ‘I’ve been searching,’ she said. ‘Searching everywhere for something. But I can’t find it.’
‘What are you searching for?’ I said. ‘Perhaps I can help you?’
‘Well now,’ she said, ‘that’s a daft thing to say, Mrs. If I knew what I was searching for, I’d find it, wouldn’t I?’
She smiled a wan smile. ‘Let me come in and boil you one of these eggs,’ I said. ‘You can tell me how long you’d like it done.’
‘Four and a half minutes!’ she snapped. ‘I can’t abide anything but the exact four and a half minutes.’
We walked through into her small kitchen, a mirror replica of mine, except that here, every surface was crammed with utensils and pans Nell had taken out of the cupboards.
‘So you were searching in here, too?’ I said.
‘Of course I was,’ said Nell. ‘I’ve searched every room in the house.’
I made a pot of tea and boiled two eggs. I thought if I ate one of them, this might encourage Nell to eat hers.
She cleared a space at the little Formica table and we sat opposite each other, drinking the tea. Nell took the top off her egg and stared at it. ‘In Ireland, we kept birds,’ she said, ‘when I was a girl. And we had a cockerel with blue-black tail feathers strutting about in the yard. He thought he was King of County Cork, he did, and I used to think, I’d like to be that – King of Somewhere, or even Queen of Something-or-Other, I wasn’t fussy about the gender. But it didn’t turn out like that.’
‘It never does,’ I said.
‘Well that’s right enough. It never does.’
She took a tiny mouthful of egg, sucking on it like a baby. I sipped my tea. And it was then that Nell went very still, her head tilted on one side, listening.
‘There it is!’ she said. ‘There it is again! Can you hear it?’
‘Hear what?’
‘The knocking.’
My hearing, in recent years, had diminished. If I sat silent on my patio, I could hear the hens and the pigeons and the wind in the trees. But I had to turn the TV volume high sometimes, to catch the words. I held my breath now, and then I heard it, a tap-tap-tap on Nell’s door.
‘It’s your front door, Nell,’ I said. ‘It could be the postman.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Oh …’
She got up, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. She went to the front door and opened it a crack. I followed her into the little hall. I waited to hear the cheerful voice of our postman whose name was Reg – a person who seemed to take the greatest care with his work, so that nothing would ever be forgotten or lost. But there was nobody at the door. Nell opened it wide and we both went out into the tiny front garden and looked left and right down the road.
‘No one,’ said Nell. ‘But you heard the knocking.’
‘I did.’
‘I wasn’t making that up.’
‘No.’
‘But this time it was on the door and not on the wall. What does that mean?’
I took Nell’s bony arm in my hand. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But one thing is certain, Nell. It wasn’t me knocking at your door. Was it? I was eating my egg.’
Nell stared at me. ‘So you were,’ she said. ‘So you were.’
‘And I tell you now, I swear on what’s left of my life, it isn’t me knocking on your bedroom wall in the night.’
It was now the end of September and sudden cold winds visited our lonely road and set the Norfolk pines sighing on their tortured stems. One such gust of wind arrived and tugged at our clothes and we could hear the chain of the rusted swing squeaking on its hooks.
‘Oh,’ said Nell. ‘There’s the swing, talking to me now. The swing, Mrs! And I never thought about that in all my searches. It was the one place I never went to look.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shall we finish our eggs, and then go out to the swing?’
‘No, no, we must go now. Not a minute to lose.’
We walked round the outside of Nell’s house to the back garden where God had sown all His fragrant weeds. Behind us, I heard Nell’s front door slam, and I imagined us locked out now, with the boiled eggs going cold in their cups, but Nell gave this no mind.
We pushed our way through the tall grasses and the stems of dock. The sky seemed to darken above us. The swing was hurtling back and forth, as though some invisible, fearless child were pushing it higher and higher.
‘Will yer look at that, now?’ said Nell. ‘It’s going manic-berserk, like I’ve never seen.’
Nell reached the swing and she put out an arm to steady it, but it came at her with the full rush of the wind and knocked her smack on the temple and she fell backwards into the tangled grass. I heard myself cry out. The swing screeched on its chain. Nell lay on the ground and stared up at the sky, like a dead woman. I steadied the flying swing, then went behind her and bent down to ease her body backwards. Then I kneeled over her and took her hand, which was icy in mine, like a stone from a winter field.
‘Nell,’ I said, ‘can you hear me?’
Her mouth moved a bit, trying to make words.
‘Nell,’ I said again, ‘can you say something to me?’
She was still staring up at the sky and now fat drops of rain began to splash down on us. I lifted her shoulders and rested her head on my lap. I watched the rain slathering Nell’s wounded forehead, as if with baptismal oil. I stroked her face, to get the oil away.
‘Who is it?’ she said.
So thin, she was, she weighed less than a child. I carried her through the weeds and over the low picket fence and in through my back door. I heard the hens come rushing to their wire when they saw me, like the woman in my arms was a bag of
grain. ‘Not now, pets,’ I said.
I rested awhile in my kitchen, laying Nell on the floor and fetching a cushion for her head and a blanket to cover her. I put iodine on her wound and bandaged her head. Her eyes kept moving, wondering and wondering what had happened to her.
I was about to dial 999, to get an ambulance to come, but something stopped me doing this. The ‘something’ was that I had never dialled the emergency number in my whole life, so it was as if I feared it was just a mythical number, a construct of the human mind, with nobody on the end of it. It would ring and ring, but no voice would answer.
Instead, I went up to my room and turned on the gas fire and straightened up the bed. Then I went back to Nell, who now looked as though she was sleeping, and when I lifted her, this was how she felt – heavy with sleep, or else with death.
I struggled up the stairs. My heart began aching and my legs felt weak, but I kept on, for this is the kind of person I have attempted to be, like Reg the postman, trying always to keep going, however arduous the task or whatever the weather.
I put Nell into my bed. The ceiling above it is low – as it would be in her cottage – and after a moment, Nell reached up, as if to try to touch it.
‘At least, now, I know you’re not dead,’ I said with a relieved smile on my face.
Nell stared at me. Her hand moved down and touched the wall and pressed very hard against it.
I sat on the end of the bed. I looked at Nell and thought, I’ve taken her into my house now. Her door slammed and the eggs are cold in their cups. She is my burden.
2
There was a secret in Nell’s life, a thing so buried by time that she could only unearth it piece by piece, struggling with memories like an archaeologist struggles to make sense of found bones.
She occupied my bed and I sat by her side, listening. Sometimes, I asked her a question – if I thought she was capable of answering it. Mostly, I kept silent. In these silences, she sometimes went to sleep and I would tiptoe to the kitchen and make soup for her, or now and then an Irish stew with lamb neck and vegetables and pearl barley. In Cork, she said, they had eaten Irish stew every Sunday. ‘That one cheap meal kept us alive,’ she said. ‘My heart was confected from scrag end and carrots.’