The air of dereliction increased as one grew nearer. Nettles and other weeds struggled in the undergrowth, tall wild bushes, hawthorn and elder, tangled and struggled overhead. The path was deep in mud, wet and undrained. Janet’s town shoes squelched and sank into it, the light pram wheels left ruts. There were signs that the borders had once been cultivated—a few large stones stood around, as though by deliberation, grey and white, and one of them was strewn with the broken shells of snails, a thrush’s anvil. From an overturned stone pot struggling clematis straggled dry and wild like an old woman’s hair. A few purple flowers of honesty huddled and blossomed in the dark secret wetness. And strangest of all, a hawthorn tree which had fallen over, half-dead and rotten, soughing and waving in decline, athwart the path, still budded and blossomed, as though undeterred by death, the leaves still breaking from it in its grave.
It was hard to see the cottage, the path was so densely overgrown. She had heard it was a large one, and so it was, she saw, as she fought her way through the tangles and over the bumps. It was large, and must once have been well cared for, for there were vestigial signs of flower beds, a garden seat, a shed, stone pots and urns. But all was overgrown, the shed was roofless and windowless, the pots were sinking into the green and yellow tendrils of the grass, the roses were like trees, fierce and thorny, and brambles ramped wildly and savagely up to the front door. The one-time lawn was long and seeded, like a field. The windows of the cottage were boarded up, with planks and corrugated iron, except for one window on the ground floor. Plants stretched their creepers and suckers everywhere, creeping into crevices, picking at the stones.
Janet nearly gave up and went back, and a prophetic vision of Con’s corpse flashed across her mind. But she was not a coward, she told herself, she had not come all this way for nothing. And there was something in her that loved the place. It was fierce and lonely, it was defiant. She liked it. And there, suddenly, stood her Great-Aunt Con, her face looming pale at the only window, the only cracked window.
She certainly looked like a witch. Her hair was white, her nose was hooked, and she shook her fist at Janet and the pram. She shook her fist threateningly. Janet could hear a dog barking. Janet advanced, across the lush, damp tangled lawn. She stopped, about two yards from the window. The old woman was shaking a stick now, and making it clear, by unmistakable gestures, that she would set the dog on Janet if Janet did not leave. ‘Great-Aunt Con,’ called Janet, ‘Great-Aunt Con. I’m Janet. Janet Ollerenshaw.’
The old woman stopped shaking her fist and stick, and cupped her hand over her ear, then she shook her head. She was deaf, she indicated.
The two of them stared at one another. A bird sang. And Janet picked up the box of chocolates, and advanced to the window sill and put it down. The old woman watched intently, with seeming approval. Janet retreated, indeed ran back to the pram, suddenly overcome with terror, and was about to retreat, when she looked back and saw Great-Aunt Con beckoning and gesturing at her. She didn’t want to go back, she didn’t dare. She shook her head, and turned again, but this time Aunt Con rapped on the window pane with her stick. Janet faced her. Nothing would have induced her to go into the house. She knew it must smell, it must be in the last stages of decay, and she was fastidious. Nature could go wild, but not houses. She wanted to be back in her own polished tiled hygienic box. But the old woman, her blood relation, was still rapping and waving. What did she want with the baby? Did she want to see it? It would be ill luck, surely, to let her set eyes on the baby, she might wish it evil, she might cast a spell. Janet thought of those cracked grey shells in the snails’ graveyard. Sacrifices, on a small altar. Witches in the old days sucked the blood of infants and pounded their bones in mortars, pounded them into paste. What could that old woman think about all day?
Janet turned to go, trying to keep calm. And as soon as she had turned away, it suddenly seemed to her that it was very silly, to be at all afraid. She wasn’t a witch, the old woman, she was Connie Ollerenshaw, touched in the head, who liked to live alone. And Janet turned again, the last time, human, and saw the grey face mooning through the small dirty panes, and she picked up her baby so that Great-Aunt Con could see him. Con stopped rapping, and stared. Hugh slept on, wrapped in his baby blanket. A curious family group. There seemed no point in doing anything more, once Con had seen the baby—the sight of him seemed to satisfy her—so Janet waved, with an appearance of bravery, and set off back down the path, to the track and the bus stop and her own tidy house. The old woman did not wave back. Her attention was now turned to the box of chocolates lying on the window sill.
Janet felt rather pleased with herself, as she walked down the path. She had done her duty, she had visited her great-aunt, and she had got away free. Strange that she had wanted to see the baby, but now that Janet thought about it, hadn’t there been some talk once about Con herself and a baby? Perhaps that was what had driven her mad—a dead baby, a lost baby, a lost love. It was possible, but who now would ever know? Secrets remain secret, they become even more secret with the passage of time, with the shame of anxious relatives, and the gossip of neighbours. Perhaps Con herself couldn’t remember what had thus cut her off from the dull ditch-like flow of Ollerenshaw normality. The skeleton would never rattle from its cupboard. And as for Janet, she had bought herself off, she had offered a bribe of chocolates, and it had been accepted. She had placated an ancient spirit, a spirit of blood.
On the way down the drive, she noticed something that she found at first frightening, then reassuring. Hanging from the low branches of the bushes were other little offerings, dangling from bits of string. They looked like sacrifices in some pagan rite of propitiation, but on closer inspection they proved to be bits of bacon fat, a piece of coconut, a piece of cheese rind. Great-Aunt Con liked to feed the birds. And she was well-organized enough to get hold of cheese and nuts and bacon, she didn’t live on dandelions and nettles after all.
Feeling much better, Janet walked back to the bus stop. She would never tell anyone about this visit, she resolved. She would keep it to herself.
‘Do you mean to say, Mrs Bird,’ asked Ronnie Bennett, interviewer, before a potential audience of some million people, ‘that you thought she would attack you and the baby if you went any nearer? An old woman of eighty-eight?’
‘She had a dog,’ said Janet, firmly, trying to avoid the red inquisitorial eye of the camera.
‘And you thought,’ said Ronnie Bennett, with manifest disbelief, ‘that she would set the dog on you?’
‘I felt she didn’t want to see me,’ said Janet. ‘Or rather, I felt she didn’t mind seeing me, but she didn’t want to get any nearer.’
‘And didn’t you think to tell anybody about the conditions you found at Mays Cottage?’
‘No, I didn’t. Anyway, why should I have done? The Armstrongs must have known, they were always trying to get that cottage off her, or so I hear. And they lived much nearer than me.’
‘But didn’t you think it was your duty, as a relation, to intervene?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Janet Bird. ‘I think people should mind their own business, that’s what I think.’
Although Janet Bird took the line that skeletons should stay in their cupboards, others, of course, did not, as we have seen. Constance’s really caused quite a lot of trouble. It made Janet Bird, her mother and father, James Armstrong and his wife, a social worker or two, and the local vicar, and Sir Frank Ollerenshaw, appear in a most unfavourable public light. It drove Stella Ollerenshaw (no blood relation, as she hoped people would realize) into hospital in a state of collapse, and dragged her daughter Frances Wingate back early from Adra. It caused Karel Schmidt to miss Frances Wingate in Adra, and obliged David Ollerenshaw, a total stranger to Karel Schmidt, to accompany him back to London by air, leaving his beautiful green car in Africa. David Ollerenshaw had been willing to undertake the journey, for the press seemed to have been tormenting his cousin Janet, which he didn’t approve, and he felt he shoul
d stand by his family, both its older and its more recently discovered members, in its time of trouble. Whether or not Constance Ollerenshaw was responsible for the disappearance of Stephen Ollerenshaw and his daughter still remained to be seen: it was quite possible that the two events were quite unconnected, and had simply happened to coincide in time.
Frances spent her first night in England with Natasha and Hugh, telling them not to worry about Stephen, who had disappeared from his flat in Brighton with his baby, leaving a worrying note: she also listened to a detailed account of her mother’s alleged collapse. She also rang up her contacts at the Sunday Examiner and asked them what they thought they were playing at, couldn’t old women be left to die in peace. You’ve got no sense of social responsibility, but we have, she was told by a flip friend, who was notorious even in the profession for hard drinking, large overdrafts, and wife-beating. Fuck social responsibility, said Frances, I want to speak to the editor.
The editor wasn’t there, but Frances got hold of some subordinate who tried to turn the tables on her by hinting that it was people like herself, who despised the family unit, who led to solitary deaths from neglect, and would she like to give him her view of the breakdown of marriage today? Frances rang off.
The next day she went up to Wolverton. She drove herself up, and as she drove she tried to come to terms with the fact that she did, after all, feel a sense of family guilt about the old woman’s death. She shouldn’t have been left to die, like that, of hunger. Somebody should have known, somebody should have called in. Her father, in short, ought to have known. He was her nearest living relative, and he had not given her a thought for years. It was grotesque of the papers to persecute him, grotesque of them to imply (as they seemed to be trying to do) that he had cut himself off (aided and encouraged by Stella) because the Ollerenshaws were socially embarrassing and better forgotten. It was grotesque, but there was some truth in it. Had she not herself been astonished to learn that David, her new-found cousin, had been able to rise from the same slough that had produced her father? And of what was that astonishment a measure?
Blood is thicker than water, she said to herself as she drove up the M1.
She knew more details now, about Connie’s death. She had broken a leg, which had prevented her from getting over to the farm or down to the shop. She had dragged herself around for some time, eating what was in reach, and then had died. Neither the farmer nor the shopkeeper had registered her absence, which apparently wasn’t as surprising as it seemed, for she was in the habit of quarrelling with each for long periods, and each had assumed she was getting food from the other. Also, in the summer, she tended to look after herself more—she had vegetables in the garden, and fruit trees, and she would push an old pram round the lanes nearby, picking and scavenging. So nobody had missed her. Her dog was found dead on the bed.
The cottage was in a state of appalling neglect and had been shut up till it was discovered who now owned it. There was a will, a solicitor in Tockley had a copy, but he hadn’t divulged its contents.
A horrible mess it all was, really. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long to sort out. She wanted to get home again, to her children and her own aifairs.
When she reached Wolverton, she found, as she had suspected, that her mother had taken refuge from unwelcome questioning and publicity in hysteria. She had not, however, foreseen that the hysteria would be so unmanageable. Her father, over lunch, tried to hint that things were bad, and he himself didn’t look at all well. He kept shaking his head and sighing to himself, when he wasn’t speaking. After lunch, he took her to the hospital, where her mother lay in a private room in a blue nightdress with a shawl round her shoulders, looking not so much aged as washed away. Her face, soft and youthful, looked as though a storm had passed over it, taking from it all memory, all expectation. The tension of waiting had gone, there was a blank drop in the tight skin round her wrinkled eyes, and the eyes themselves had that curious lustreless bland unseeing gaze that so often accompanies or succeeds acute mental distress. Her very hands were changed: they lay on the white strapped smooth sheet, puffed and inert.
Frances half-expected her not to recognize her, so changed was she, but she looked at Frances with a placid look, a terrible nod. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said, as though continuing a conversation, with a calm and interrogating inflection, as though Frances had been at her bedside for hours.
And she proceeded to recount the death of Alice, a story which Frances had successfully tried to avoid for years, and avoided now, by the expedient of shutting her ears and thinking hard about other things. She wondered what her father was thinking. He had crossed to the window, he was looking out, with his back to the room.
Lady Ollerenshaw didn’t seem to be able to stop talking. Old sorrows, old grievances, were weighing on her mind, and she talked of them evenly, dully. Frances found herself putting her fingers in her ears and humming to herself slightly and very quietly, in order not to hear. After what seemed like hours and hours, a nurse came and tapped on the door and said that it was time for them to go, and they left. She and her father didn’t say a word to one another, as they walked down the corridor, and down the stairs, and out into the courtyard, and into the car. They drove back to the Lodge in silence.
‘She’ll get better,’ said Frances, over a cup of tea.
‘Oh yes, I suppose so,’ said her father. She didn’t know whether to speak to him, or not. She felt at a loss, useless.
Later in the evening, he asked her if she thought the Sunday Examiner would follow up its original attack, or whether it would forget the story. She said that she didn’t know; she suspected, herself, that the heat was off. (She’d finally got hold, that morning, of her friend Bill Merriton on the Examiner, and he hadn’t seemed particularly keen to pursue the story. He’d been much more interested in trying to find out whether she’d been doing anything worth reporting in Adra. I hear they’ve discovered uranium, he suggested: oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly, said Frances. He could chase that one up for a while.) No, she said to her father, I wouldn’t worry too much, if I were you. Something else is sure to happen before next weekend. There’ll be some drug firm that needs exposing, or some race riot in a comprehensive school that needs investigating, don’t you worry.
He said that her mother had only gone into hospital to get away from the journalists and the telephone, but that the longer she stayed there, the worse she seemed to get.
‘She’ll get better, perhaps, when the danger’s over,’ said Frances, and he agreed. ‘Though she has been rather odd lately,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s her age.’ Frances forbore to remark that her mother was well past the age where one might expect such a temporary oddness.
They talked, for a while, about the Ollerenshaw family, and Frances told him about her meeting with David. She had resolved to ask him if he knew the origins of the dispute between Ted and Enoch, but now she came face to face with the problem, she found that she dared not. He was too remote, and he had doubtless had good cause to remove himself; she did not wish to disturb him, she did not wish him to end up in a hospital bed. Let him deal with his life in his own manner, it was too late to ask questions. So she contented herself with telling him about David, and Spirelli’s views of kinship. Adra seemed a thousand miles away, as indeed it was, and she invoked it in her own defence, feeling as she had felt when a girl, invoking extra-family activities by inexplicable runic references, as though to reassure herself that there was a world elsewhere. Her father was interested in Adra, he was usually interested in information. He had followed her career with admirable paternal attention.
Before they went to bed, he asked her if she would mind going to Tockley for him, to see the solicitor. ‘I’d better stay near your mother,’ he said. ‘I’d ask Hugh, but I think you’re better at this kind of thing than he is.
‘And there’ll be a funeral to fix up, I suppose,’ he said.
Frances, rinsing out the coffee cups, saw herself as an adult,
her parents declining feebly to the grave. The matriarch, arranging funerals. It was a role that she might have expected, but it seemed to have come to her rather suddenly.
‘I’ll have to get back to my children at some point,’ she said, as her father, in a placating movement, dried the cups, although the cleaning woman would be there as usual in the morning. ‘I’ve already been away a fortnight.’
‘Where are they at the moment?’
‘They’re with Anthony and Sheila.’ Her husband, unlike herself, had married again, conveniently for Frances: Sheila liked to prove herself by being pleasant with the children. Frances thought of the children, back-chatting, wise-cracking, amusing, boiling themselves eggs and making cups of tea and studying physics and geometry and resolutely growing up, the rising generation.
‘Do they like it there?’
‘Oh yes. They like it anywhere, really.’
‘So you could spare a day or two more?’
‘Yes. Of course.’ She thought, she hadn’t sustained so long a personal conversation with her father for years. ‘You’ll have to tell me, though,’ she said, ‘what to do about the funeral, and that kind of thing. And the will.’
‘The solicitors will help you with all that. They’re a perfectly reliable firm. Brooke and Barnard. My father used to deal with them.’
Frances wiped the clean white kitchen surfaces, and folded the dishcloth much more neatly than she would have done at home, and hung it over the edge of the sink.
‘I suppose,’ said her father, rather helplessly, ‘I suppose I must be the next of kin.’
Stella Ollerenshaw lay in her hospital bed and thought about the death of Constance Ollerenshaw. One had to die at some point, but surely not like that. She couldn’t help thinking of her lying there all that time undiscovered. Not so long ago she’d read a very unpleasant item in the local paper, about an old woman in a council flat who had lived for four years in the same flat as her dead husband. When her husband’s maggotty skeleton was found, he was just lying there in the bed, under a blanket. The old woman didn’t seem to have noticed him at all. She was suffering from senile dementia. When questioned closely, she said it was true that she hadn’t seen her husband up and about lately.
The Realms of Gold Page 33