by Rosie Alison
Turning back to the overfowing cupboard, he allowed himself a mental sigh. For days he had put off clearing out all these pointless old accounts books. He locked his chair brakes and settled his feet on the ground, and began to make a rubbish pile.
When Thomas reached the second cupboard, a leatherbound christening album fell at his feet. “Thomas Arthur Ashton, March 1900” said the gold lettering on the spine. He picked it up, unclasped the brass lock and abruptly opened a door onto his past.
There was his family, staring up at him. The photographs showed a formal group assembled outside the chapel, but even within the stillness of a photograph Thomas could sense their hidden lives. At the centre stood his father Robert, bracing his shoulders and staring into the camera defiantly, as if proud to be marking this new century with a third son. Beside him, his mother Miriam looked so poised, her luminous pale face enhanced by an oyster-silk dress. Cradled in his mother’s arms, the infant Thomas had an attentive gaze and a thin, rather adult face, he thought. At their side hovered William and Edward, his older brothers, clearly fidgeting for a chance to run wild in the early spring weather.
Thomas could remember his mother telling him all about the elaborate pomp of his christening party, the crowded reception spilling out into the gardens, where his father had planted his christening tree – a copper beech sapling – to much applause from family and friends. Afterwards, in the crimson dining room, the guests had sat down to a banquet entirely sourced from the estate: meat, fish, tender vegetables, fresh bread, even the cheese, with a steady flow of vintage wines from the cellars.
The sound of cheering roused Thomas, and his eyes flicked back outside to the boys running their races on the south lawn. He watched them for a moment, enjoying their reckless speed. One boy tumbled on the grass, then picked himself up as if nothing had happened. Thomas could still remember those easy boyhood falls – and rolling down the grassy banks of the rose garden with his sister Claudia.
Turning back to the album, he noticed with regret that there were no pictures of his sister there: she was born two years later. Yet all his earliest memories were shared with her. Playing in the blue nursery, with its looming rocking horse and scattering of tin soldiers. Or hiding behind the leafy palms in the saloon, listening to their mother playing Schubert on the piano.
Every morning they would visit their mother in her dressing room. She had a view to the lawns, and a small writing table crowded with letters and exotic bijouterie. Sometimes they watched her brushing her long chestnut hair, and then there was the familiar clink of rings and bracelets as she took the jewels from her ring dish and put them on. She never wore her wedding ring at night, “because it makes my finger go stiff,” she told them.
“When I grow up, can I have your rings?” Claudia asked one day.
“Of course you can, my darling,” their mother replied, “and Thomas can have this bracelet for his wife,” she added, to be fair.
Thomas had felt instantly possessive about her white-gold bracelet – so elegant, so delicate, already part of his future. He watched his mother slip it on her wrist and snap shut the clasp.
Those were the Edwardian years of plenty, Thomas now recognized, when the rooms overflowed with rich trailing draperies and potted palms, and his mother’s exquisitely coloured figurines were scattered on tables covered with ornate cloths.
There had been many reassuring family traditions, which he still liked to retrace in his mind. He could picture the long light of summer evenings, when the Ashtons and their guests would sit out on the garden steps, under the colonnade, with drinks and stories. Sometimes, he would accompany the butler on his clock-winding rounds. There were grandfather clocks, carriage clocks, hanging clocks – some that chimed, some with swinging pendulums, all requiring regular winding with their own key. Stillwell, the butler, held all the clock keys together on one ring, and he occasionally let Thomas do the winding.
“Gently does it – gently, gently,” he would mutter, stooping his back awkwardly to check on the boy. “Be careful not to force the mechanism.”
Thomas never looked up to notice Stillwell’s face, though now he fancied he could imagine the butler’s anxious expression, as if reliving the scene outside himself.
Every spring, a man would climb up on a high ladder to polish the great crystal chandelier suspended in the Marble Hall. When he was finished, the crystal drops glistened like the purest water. Or if Thomas stood below it and looked upwards, the chandelier shone like the sun against the painted azure sky of the high-domed ceiling, where a halfnaked man played his lyre amongst the clouds.
“hat’s Apollo,” his father explained to him one day, “Greek god of the sun, and music too. Decent of him to join us here in Yorkshire – very decent.”
Thomas’s parents were frequently away at their Regent’s Park house in London, but whenever they returned to A shton,a mood of relaxed gaiety would flow once more through the house as their trunks and suitcases were carried upstairs. Twice a year, they held dances in the gilded-oak saloon – a long, many-windowed room which glowed in the late afternoon sun. Sometimes, Thomas was allowed to stay up for the occasion. Guests would assemble in the Marble Hall, and he would shake their hands without ever quite recognizing their faces. He retained an impression of the men throwing back their shoulders to carry their bellies, while the women seemed always to be tilting their heads to one side, as if to balance precious objects on their noses.
At the centre of any room stood his parents. He would never forget his mother in blue-shadowed silk, sweeping into the dining room on his father’s arm, truly beautiful.
“You’re an Ashton,” his father would fondly tell him, to the mild annoyance of the others. For Thomas had inherited his father’s arresting blue gaze, which Robert, in his vainer moments, believed was the gift and guiding spirit of the Ashton family. When Robert looked into his youngest son’s face, he saw a pleasing mirror of his own soul.
History, too, pervaded Thomas’s childhood. Family portraits looked down at him from the walls, and he ran his fingers across the calf-backed books accumulated over generations in the library.
In one corner of the library was a secret door, subtly encased in dummy books, which revealed the gallery steps at the flick of a catch. Thomas knew that this device had been installed by his grandfather, and he felt a rush of complicity with him whenever he clicked open the door. He would spend hours walking along the brass rail of the library’s gallery, touching all the old books, histories, Greek poetry, atlases, editions of old dramatists.
All over the house, Thomas sensed the presence of earlier Ashtons – in the air, in the smoke rising from the great carved fireplaces, always watching. He could walk through every room secure in the continuity of generations, with ancestors whose names were known and remembered.
But minor intimations of an imperfect world had still intruded upon his early years. When he was eight, his Aunt Mary came to visit, and walked with him to the statue of Father Time on the south lawn.
“I used to swing round him as a child,” she said fondly, scraping away a little moss from his pedestal. “He looks so much smaller than I remember.”
As she turned to face the house, Thomas was startled to recognize that Aunt Mary used to live here, and that he, too, would one day be a stranger at Ashton like her. His elder brother William would inherit the house, and install his wife and children. He would be only partly welcome, no more than an uncle to the new heirs. For some weeks, he wandered round the house staring at favourite pictures and clocks with a puzzled sense of incipient loss.
There was, too, the eerie warning of the local monasteries, which they visited every summer. Laden with baskets of food and drink, cars would carry them to the picturesque ruins of Rievaulx and Byland, perfect spots for a picnic. He and his brothers would race about on the broken walls, jumping over the stumps of old pillars. Until a stray breeze would make Thomas stop, and look round at the mighty walls reduced to piles of tumbled rock.
Here was Rievaulx, once one of the greatest abbeys in the land, where now the grass grew right up to the altar. Where soaring broken arches framed sheep grazing on the far hill.
Thomas could recall sitting quietly with Claudia on an open staircase, and rubbing his hand over the sheer stone steps. The tricks of time were all about them, stones worn smooth by wind and rain, but this was the oblivion of somebody else’s past.
“This stream runs into the river in our park,” his whiskered father once explained to him, as they walked along the small beck at Rievaulx. “They named the abbey after the river here – Rie-vaulx, valley of the Rye. It’s a broader river through our land, but it’s the same source.”
Thomas had looked into the rocky shallows of the water, and blithely speculated that all the life and spirit of this ruined abbey had simply drifted downstream a few miles and settled with them instead, in the seemingly imperishable splendour of Ashton Park.
Outside, the cry of children grew suddenly more insistent. Thomas wheeled himself to the window, and realized that it was the break before lunch.
Girls and boys were thronging the lawn in scattered groups, and queuing for the swing. For a while, he watched the random formations of children, just checking that none of them looked excluded.
His wife wandered onto the lawn. He felt faintly guilty about spying on her unobserved, but kept watching. Jock Stewart followed just behind her, and began to swing the lunch bell high and low, drawing the children towards the dining room.
He watched his wife standing on the crest of the lawn steps, as dozens of children raced past her. Until a girl stopped there, Anna Sands, and reached up her hand to Elizabeth. Thomas felt his heart lurch.
But his wife would not accept the gesture. She patted the girl on the shoulder a little awkwardly, and sent her on her way.
Thomas winced, and pushed himself off to lunch. Her pain was his pain. What were they, he asked himself, but a childless couple in a vast house, surrounded by other people’s children?
10
Every morning, a housemaid brought a tray of tea to the Ashtons’ bedroom. Sometimes the maid would open the door to find Elizabeth in triptych, reflected in all three of her dressing table mirrors as she brushed her long hair. And if Elizabeth turned to thank the maid, her reflection would glance round three times too.
Elizabeth persisted in keeping her hair long at a time when most women cut theirs. She had long dark hair tinged with copper, which she groomed with a set of silver hairbrushes. Thomas would watch her at her dressing table, with her hair falling down her back, brushing and brushing. When white strands began to appear, she first plucked them out, then discreetly dyed her hair until she could no longer remember its true colour. a woman in her thirties should not have any white hairs, she was clear about that.
Once she had completed her dressing-room rituals, Elizabeth would emerge into the school. Crisply dressed, with her distinctive clipped walk echoing through the Marble Hall.
Anna could recognize her footsteps at once. From a distance, half-afraid and half-intrigued, she would often watch Mrs Ashton in her silken blouse, with her skirt barely shifting as she walked. Her shoulders and long neck appeared still and poised, even though she moved briskly. Her face, too, was unflinching. She did not smile much, and always seemed to be setting off somewhere else. Probably because she didn’t teach any lessons like her husband. She was usually busy organizing everyone else – the matrons, the kitchen staff, the housemaids.
Ashton Park was more like a proper school now, with rotas and rules, and Anna always did what she could to stay out of trouble. At first she had been afraid of dormitory life, where nothing could be secret and she had to undress in front of other children. Yet she had got used to that, as well as the thin blankets at night, and the cold days when they all took turns to sit on the old tepid radiators. But she was often hungry.
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” muttered the cook, if she saw the children’s disappointed faces.
Yet despite these austerities, Anna now often relaxed into happiness. There were group games of hide-and-seek right round the house, and her heart raced with the elation of playing with so many children. Sometimes, when she hid in a cupboard waiting to be found, she had to bite her knuckles just to stop herself from whooping out loud.
But although Anna appeared cheerful, even to herself, she was troubled by bad dreams at night. Sometimes her mother would grow old very suddenly, all grey and withered, or her face would begin to bubble with warts, with her small, straight nose turning bulbous and ugly. Anna would run to save her, but the scene would dissolve into a chase, with a faceless, implacable man following them everywhere, through cupboards, down streets, into every dark corner.
She cherished any remembered glimpses of her mother, but too often her face was unclear – a shape, a glance, her head turning, no more. Sometimes, Anna simply could not remember what she looked like. Yet she dreaded her mother’s hair turning white in her absence.
She began to wet her bed, unleashing a cycle of fear and shame. She would wake suddenly in cold, sodden sheets, and know with a shiver of panic that the matron would be furious with her.
Miss Harrison was fiercely impatient with any bed-wetters. She would publicly scold the offending children at breakfast, making them stand up one by one, before ordering them upstairs, shame-faced, to change their sheets.
Every night, Anna prayed solemnly for a dry bed. She avoided drinking any water, and went to the lavatory as many times as she could. Yet in the dead of night she would still wake up to a slippery damp mattress, the sheets icy-wet against her legs, her heart chilled with fear.
Every third Wednesday, the children had to troop down to the laundry room in a long line, dumping their sheets in wicker baskets. One morning, Anna was the first down, and she saw the junior matron slip out the key from a crockery cabinet to unlock the door.
Two nights later, she woke up alert and afraid in a wet bed. But she remembered the key to the laundry room. Quietly, she stripped the offending sheet from her bed and used it to sop up the wet mattress. Then she rolled her sheet up into a ball and started to creep downstairs.
First down the top stairs, where every step seemed to creak. Then she decided to walk down the forbidden mahogany staircase, to avoid the long corridor past the matron’s room. Down she went, clinging to the banister so as not to slip on the polished wooden steps.
She worked her way through the dark, cold hall, which glowed with lunar light off the marble floor. Now she had to pass Mr and Mrs Ashton’s rooms, and get down the steps to the basement. She heard an owl hooting outside, and her own feet scuffing the stone floor as she reached up, at last, for the laundry-room key.
She opened the door and felt her way round the dark room, not daring to turn on a light. She found the drawers where the sheets were held, and pulled one out. She couldn’t see in the dark if it was exactly right – it seemed to be a thicker sheet. So she felt for another. That was the one she would take.
She folded up her wet sheet as neatly as she could, and stuffed it into the back of the nearest drawer. Then, with her heart drumming, she relocked the door and crept upstairs the way she had come.
The Marble Hall was already showing the first glimmer of light as she hurried back to her dormitory. Another child stirred as she tiptoed towards her bed, but nobody woke up. She folded her blue, rough towel, and placed it over the wet patch on the mattress. Then she laid the new sheet over the top, with the bedclothes too, and fell into bed, exhausted, though not forgetting to remove her wet nightdress.
The next morning she dressed quickly and straightened out her bed. At breakfast, there was no fierce summons from Miss Harrison.
Twice more, she awoke suddenly in the night with icy wet sheets against her skin. Twice more, she ventured down to the locked laundry room successfully. But on her third trip she encountered something which she would never forget.
She was safely down the mahogany stairs, and through the Marb
le Hall, and was about to head down the final flight of stairs to the laundry room. Her journey took her past the great panelled door which opened onto the Ashtons’ suite of rooms. Occasionally, the children saw the door open in the daytime: they could glimpse a crimson sitting room, and a door beyond leading to the Ashtons’ bedroom.
As she left the Marble Hall behind her, she was shocked to see that the Ashtons’ door was open and their light was still on. She heard voices, and dashed to hide behind a Chinese lacquered dresser in the corridor’s corner. Cowering there, she waited with dread to hear the clack-clack of Mrs Ashton’s heels walking towards her. Blood pounded in her ears as she crouched there, still clutching the damp sheet.
No footsteps came near her, but there were sounds, and Anna strained to listen. She could hear an agitated voice – Mrs Ashton, she thought – from the next room. It must be the middle of the night. Didn’t they know their door was open?
After a few minutes Anna crept out from her position, and moved quietly, slowly, towards the stairs. But as she did so, her eye was drawn through the open door to a large oval mirror hanging on the crimson wall. She saw something move and looked again.
It was Mrs Ashton, naked.
Sheer shock branded the sight on her mind. She caught only glimpses, as Mrs Ashton moved in and out of vision through the bedroom reflected in the mirror. But it was a searing vision of a woman’s body. Anna had never seen her mother naked, and the sight of Mrs Ashton’s mature breasts and dark bush of hair was astonishing to her. She was repelled and entranced. Is that what would happen to her own skimpy body one day? She stayed rooted to the spot, her eyes fixed to the mirror, listening.
Though she could only catch snatches of what was being said, she recognized a desperation which frightened her. Mrs Ashton was swearing and choking on foul words at her husband. Violent language she had never heard before. Guttural sounds which chilled her.