by Poppy Adams
I reach for my bedside clock, depressing the lime-green button on the top to illuminate it. It says 5:03 amid the ghoulish fluorescent glare of its face. A welcome advancement in the night. Any time past four-thirty and I feel I’m on the home stretch, that I will soon have the dawn to watch and listen to, propelling me to the start of the day. But before four-thirty I know I must try to take myself away from my conscious self once more before the night is over.
I may already have mentioned it, but I’m very keen on time. I never used to be, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized how essential it is. Keeping time, being on time and knowing the time. I live by it. Time and order. All things have order and people should be ordered, and I find that in most instances order requires some element of time.
I have six clocks: a watch on each wrist (digital on the left and dial on the right), a bedside clock, a ship’s clock in the kitchen, a longcase and a bracket clock in the hall (which both lose time, up to four minutes a week, and need to be reset and wound on Sundays). I like knowing I can find the exact time whenever I want to and, if I can’t, it unsettles me and I worry about the next time Michael might come so I can check it. It can be a couple of weeks between his visits and I don’t always see him. Michael’s only ever been in the flagstoned areas of the house—the kitchen and the pantries—and he always comes in via the courtyard at the back, never through the front door. It’s not my rule—it must be his own—but if I’m upstairs resting he won’t disturb me, and I might miss him.
We all have our idiosyncrasies, especially at my age. Some people—on approaching old age—fear senility, others immobility, memory loss, confusion, madness. What I fear is timelessness, a lack of structure in my life, an endless Now.
In the half-light, I can just begin to make out the few shapes in my bedroom: the stripped pine chest with four deep drawers that I keep a change of clothes in; the mahogany bedside table (with drawer), which has almost finished shedding its veneer; and an old wicker nursing chair, white, which once had a green-and-white-striped cushion. It stands just outside the bathroom door, but facing the wall because I use the high back as a resting post on my trip from my bed to the bathroom on those mornings that I can’t manage it in one go. The only other thing in here is this huge oak bed I’m in, which I inherited from Maud and Clive, high to my waist and with Gothic claws for feet.
The light is racing in now through the row of mullioned windows lining the south wall ahead. New tendrils on the Virginia creeper are in eerie silhouette, pointing at me with young, fresh attitude. It’s exhausting having to watch them, all curled up like a chameleon’s tongue, ready to unfurl and pounce towards the next foothold in their spring invasion of my room. Five diamond panes of glass from the top of the far right window (directly opposite my bed) are now smashed or have fallen out of their leads. I didn’t see it happen. I just woke up one day last winter with an extra draft running through the room. It’s as if all the elements of nature have come together to work slowly—imperceptibly even—on an old untended building to bring about its climatic downfall, with the rain and frost and wind somehow ensuring entry for invading plants.
It’s two minutes past seven when I hear the faint squeak of the sprung double doors that separate her landing from mine, followed by their whisper as they pass each other on the backswing. In my mind’s eye I see Vivien descending the stairs and, knowing where they creak, I judge her speed and her progress. A moment later I hear the water pipes banging and thudding round the house, as they do when you first turn on the cold tap in the kitchen. It’s strange, after all these years, to have someone else in the house, and I’m too tired to get up and join her, too tired to negotiate another person.
I’m always tired during the day. Sometimes, more often in winter, I’ll stay in bed all day, quite happy thinking my thoughts, undisturbed and unnoticed. Of course, the next day I’ll pay for it arthritically. The flexibility of my joints each morning, I’ve noticed, and the pain within them, are directly proportional to the amount of exercise they had the day before, in the order of more exercise, less pain. And the weather, of course—the surges and the seasons, they all announce themselves deep within my joints. I swear I’m able to feel pressure changes long before the mercury, and my predictions never fall short. But my instinct for the weather is more than a physical modification. I’ve spent a lifetime necessarily predicting it as part of my profession—a moth’s life is finely tuned to the forthcoming weather, and often it’s the habits of the moths themselves that give me the first and most infallible indicator of an approaching squall or drought.
Even though outside all I can see now is a blanket of low cloud, believe me, I can feel that spring’s on its way again, full of renewed energy.
* * *
There’s a knock at my door.
“Morning,” Vivien says, and without waiting for an invitation she busies round the door with two cups of tea on a tray. She flagrantly surveys the privacy of my bedroom. “I won’t draw the curtains then,” she says.
“There aren’t any curtains.”
She laughs throatily, then swallows it suddenly. “It was a joke, Ginny,” she whispers.
Of course it was a joke. I’m quite surprised I didn’t pick it up. I haven’t joked for a long time.
“You really have lived on your own for too long,” she says, as if she’d read my thoughts. Her face is neatly made up once again. Maud tried to teach me how to apply makeup, but I never understood why it was necessary. She used to say she felt naked without it, and I never once saw her venture farther than her bedroom with natural lips. They were always rose red.
“I’ve brought you some tea,” Vivien says. I think of the tea as a peace offering, the furniture forgotten. She stops in the middle of the room and for a moment I think she’s staring at me, but as I sit up, I realize she’s not. She’s studying the bed, the tall oak headboard behind me, blackened by years of polishing, with its heavy octagonal corner posts and fleur-de-lis finials. It’s one of the very few old bits of furniture left and, though I agree that Maud and Clive’s old bed is outlandish, I must say it’s incredibly comfortable. It’s very difficult to give up a bed you get used to.
“Where shall I put it?” she says, jerking her attention back to the tray in her hand.
“Anywhere.”
“You need some more surfaces,” she remarks vaguely, as she walks around the bed to put the tray on the bedside table on the other side. Then she sweeps her hand along the top of the chunky headboard and regards the fluffy dust collected on her palm. She pulls a disgusted face. “You might not like mess, Ginny, but you don’t mind flup,” she says, reminding me of Vera’s pet word for dust and rubbing the flup onto her dressing gown. “I’ll have to give the house a good clean sometime. Did you sleep well?”
“I kept thinking of things we used to do when we were children, things I’d forgotten,” I say.
“Oh. I hope it was fun.”
“It was,” I agree. “But then I remembered playing card games with Dr. Moyse.”
“Card games?”
“Yes, where me and Dr. Moyse are—”
But Vivien interrupts. “Goodness me!” she exclaims. “You’re not still having those peculiar dreams about Dr. Moyse, are you?”
“I haven’t thought about them for years actually.”
“Well, I am sorry,” she says, as she sits down heavily on the end of my bed. I’m slightly shocked. She did it without thinking, as if it had come naturally, but it’s not as if I’ve had anyone sitting on my bed for the last forty-something years. I can’t work out whether I like it or not. I want her to be there, but I can’t help wondering how long it’s going to take me to straighten the sheets. I’m finicky about sheets.
Vivien scours the empty bedroom that was once our parents’. It’s a lovely room, south-facing, with tall ceilings and an oak floor that slopes west with age, so I’ve had to stuff three old British Countryside magazines under the bed legs to level it. Back then it was far from s
parse. It was chock-a-block with antique furniture, paintings and photo frames, gilded mirrors, bowls of potpourri and varnished gourds, a stuffed sea-bird collection on a shelf above the picture rail, untidy clothes and all sorts of clutter.
The windows, now bare, were once dressed with thick green silk curtains, and the large burgundy snowflakes, which danced boldly across the wallpaper, have now faded pink, embellished under the width of the sills and in the corners of the room by a series of watermarks, as though a dog’s been scenting his patch. In places the paper is peeling off altogether, exposing damp powdery plaster that every so often becomes unstable and comes crashing down in a great plaster avalanche. It’s not an uninteresting pastime, looking at the progression of the damp through the walls, the peeling of the ceiling paint and the marching of the creeper up the wall and in through the window.
“Do you remember the chandelier?” Vivien asks, looking up at the lonely brass hook hanging down from the center of an ornate wreath of leaves and roses, the climax of the ceiling’s plasterwork.
Even for such a grand bedroom the chandelier was enormous, raining shafts of providence into the room, collecting light from the windows and splitting it, directing it, combining and reflecting it, not shy to exercise its mastery of the laws of refraction. Maud had taken it from the even larger and grander drawing room downstairs, where she’d rightly thought it was hardly noticed and when, she’d said, the fashion was to have side lamps. Maud liked statements, not understatements.
“Don’t you miss it?” Vivien adds, but before I have a chance to tell her I don’t, she carries on, “Remember how Maud let us lie in here when we were ill? I spent hours gazing up at that chandelier, imagining that all the sparkly light was helping me get better.”
“Were you? I was always thinking it was about to fall on me,” I say. “I spent all the time watching the hook at the top, trying to work out if it was close to giving way. Exhausting.” I sigh. “What about their fake-fur bedspread? Do you remember it?”
“Oh, that thing,” she says. “Horrid. I’m very glad you got rid of that. I always thought it was crawling with lice.”
Maud had been comfortable amid her clothes and clutter, so the room, like the rest of the house, was grand and shabby at the same time, full of warmth and belonging. Clive, being more of an exacting personality, had learned to ignore the mess or, rather, being on the verge—as he always was—of many important scientific discoveries, he preferred not to consider it.
Both my parents said they knew, the instant they met, that they were right for each other, even though, more often than not, they seemed complete opposites. When Maud’s father enlisted a keen young chemist called Clive Stone as his new apprentice, by all accounts, Maud and Clive spent the following year conducting a clandestine relationship. When they married, my grandfather retired and, his wife having died some years before from tuberculosis, moved lustily to one of his hunting grounds—Brazil—where he lived out the rest of his days in pursuit of rare butterflies and beautiful women. Clive moved into his father-in-law’s place, taking over the advancement of our knowledge of the moth world within the attics, cellars and outbuildings of Bulburrow Court. Maud sometimes teased him, saying he’d married the attic and got her thrown in too, considering the amount of time he squirreled himself away there.
They said it was their love of conservation—long before it became a fashionable affair—that brought them together, but I think even that they came at from very different directions. Maud loved nature. Each and every animal and plant was to be cherished and the miracle of nature something to be preserved. She was a pioneer of conservation and recognized, even in the 1930s, that, rather than assuming nature could take care of itself, we needed to assist the natural world by cultivating and planting natural habitats. Of all these, she spent the most time caring for her meadows and would discuss them at length with the gardeners: when to cut and where to shake the seeds, the grasses that were taking over and needed to be culled. Now and again she’d come home from the other side of the county, having procured some hay bales that contained the seeds of a new species she wanted, like wild carrot or yellow rattle, or a new type of dropwort. Then, on a windless day, she’d stomp around the meadows shaking the hay about, trying to infiltrate the grass with them.
Clive wasn’t so much fond of nature as fascinated by it, as though he wanted to preserve the miracle just so he could unravel it. Together they transformed Bulburrow’s gardens and grounds into an ecological haven, creating every possible type of habitat—marsh and meadow, wood and downland, heath and bog—and, over the years, stocked them with birch and alder and willow, elm, lime, poplar and plum, hawthorn, honeysuckle, blackthorn and privet. Every inch was given over to something that a moth, a caterpillar or a pupa might find useful or appetizing.
So the giants of the family, the great Hawk-moths, were enticed with limes for the Lime Hawk, pines for the Pine Hawk, poplars and aspen for the Poplar Hawk, and for the Privet Hawks, privet, ash and lilac. The eleven acres of meadow that ran from the gardens to the brook were assiduously laid out for grass lovers like the Ermines and The Drinker, whose black hairy caterpillars could easily be heard on warmer spring mornings noisily sucking the dew off the tall grasses. By the brook, bog plants were introduced to feed the Gold Spot and The Shark, willows were given over to the Kittens and the Puss, while copses and pockets of woodland, glades of ancient beech, elm and oak held the homes of the Lobster and the Scalloped Hazel, the Peppered and the Goat. Orchards of plums and pears were nurtured, not for their fruit but for the leaves that tempted caterpillars of the Grey Dagger, the Magpie and other fruit-tree lovers, and up on the ridge to the north you’d have found the brightly striped orange-and-black Cinnabar caterpillars in their thousands, and the Lappet, Yellow-tail, Sallow and Angle Shades flitting and fluctuating over willowherb and ragwort, bindweed and dock in the warmth of their short summer lives.
The fields were left wild and unkempt, smothered with weeds, and hedgerows a mess with sallow and bedstraw, brambles and sloe. A disgrace to a farmer but a haven for those species like the Prominents, the Tussock and the Eggars, whose ebbing existence is greatly worried by the taming of the countryside. And the suburban garden species were not forgotten. The formal terraces to the south were sculpted and manicured with lilac, buddleia and sweet-scented tobacco, urns of Mediterranean geranium and oleander, petunia and fuchsia, vine and balsam, all designed in the hope of sighting the Garden Tiger, the Elephant Hawk, the Dot, the Dark Dagger or the extensive tongue of the Convolvulus stealing nectar from the pink-tinged trumpets of the plant after which it is named. Even that rampant creeper outside my bedroom window, which in autumn paints the south wall a deep, aristocratic red, was planted primarily in the hope of encouraging the elusive Death’s-head Hawk.
“Can I get in, darling?” Vivien asks. “I’m chilly.”
I nod. “If you like.”
“I suppose it’s really my bed too,” she says, and I wince as she draws the sheets and blankets right back, pulling them loose from the sides of the bed to get in. It doesn’t make an awful lot of difference now because, to be honest, it’s just as difficult to straighten one part of the bed as it is to start over and do the whole thing again. The sheets are held to the blanket with safety pins along the top and have to be tucked in in a very particular way at the bottom. I hate it when they go saggy, when you can kick your foot at the bottom of the bed and not feel any resistance because they’re loose. I’d probably have found myself taking off all the bedclothes and starting from scratch anyway. It takes fifty-five minutes and there’s a definite method to it. I usually get away with doing it once a fortnight when I wash the sheets. I know what a bore it is so when I go to bed each night I make sure to slip between the sheets without drawing them back any more than is absolutely necessary. Once I’m in, and I’ve checked the pressure of them all over, I lie very still. In the morning when I get out—also very carefully—the bed hardly looks slept in at all.
I’d never have said no to Vivien getting into bed with me, not when she offers that sort of closeness. When we were young, she would often crawl in with me if she was sad or lonely or frightened of the wind, and things she needed to discuss had a habit of coming to her in the middle of the night, things that could never wait until morning. Back then I felt honored, and now, besides the tedium of straightening the sheets, I can’t help feeling the same. Vivi always had a wonderful way of making me feel special by assuming that her world and mine were inherently each other’s, without any barriers between them.
“Ginny and I are going for a walk,” she used to announce, without asking me first, but it made me feel as if I’d been specially selected, out of a world full of people, to go for a walk with her.
So when Vivien asks if she can get into my bed, the privilege is all mine. She snuggles down on what used to be Maud’s side, tucking her body into a ball, like the girl she used to be. Her head is resting on the upper part of her arm while her hand stretches up and her fingers feel their way childishly along the panels of Gothic tracery carved into the headboard behind her, reading it like a blind man would. For a moment she is far away in thought with her fingers. I can’t help thinking that every minute I have with her, the less I see the old woman who arrived on my doorstep yesterday and the more I see the little girl I’ve always adored.