The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

  Cicely had eventually volunteered. Although the idea of traveling halfway around the world to sort out her husband’s inheritance was not in the least appealing, it was the obvious solution. She had never been to Scotland and had no particular desire to go, but she had realized that the situation could work in her favor. She made a bargain with her husband: She would sort out his windfall on the condition that, as well as his expedition, it be used to finance their daughter’s education in Scotland. Kitty would learn Greek, Latin, mathematics, and science; she would be properly educated. Maybe one day she would go to university. As Cicely expected, George had been totally against the idea of the Scottish boarding school. But beggars can’t be choosers, and he eventually had to accept.

  Steam had stopped rising from the bath. Cicely held her hand under the tap. The water had gone cold. She undressed, slipped into the lukewarm bath. and washed as quickly as she could. Was it possible ever to feel completely warm in this house? She supposed not; she suspected that one just got used to being permanently chilled. All those high ceilings and huge windows were elegant but came at a high price, and the truth was that few people could afford to run a place like Balmarra the way it was designed to be run, with a dozen servants and a fire burning in every room. They would try to sell the entire estate to a single owner, as George’s father had wanted, but there was a good chance it would be sold off in lots or become an institution, a hospital, or a school. Surely that was better, however, than letting the place decay and run to rack and ruin—it was halfway there already.

  How long would it take to sort everything out? A week might be enough. She would show Edward Pick’s letter to Antonia and her husband at lunch. She hoped they wouldn’t hate her: She was only claiming what was rightly her husband’s, what his father had wished. In their place, however, she would find it hard to remain civil.

  As she dressed her hair in the bedroom mirror, Cicely’s hands were trembling, and not just because she was cold. Sweat had collected at the base of her throat and in the creases of her palms. How could she do this? How could she not? The view from her bedroom window at home calmed her, the mountain range, Kanchenjunga, Kabru, and Lashar, rising up on the other side of the valley, snowcapped and wreathed in cloud like the softest down. She closed her eyes and summoned it up in her mind’s eye; she listened to the gentle ringing of prayer bells and felt the luminosity through the gauze curtains, so warm that you could feel it seep into your skin until you were as saturated as her grandmother’s gulab jamun with rosewater syrup.

  The letter wasn’t in her handbag: She had emptied it twice. She opened the suitcases and trunks, even though they had already been unpacked, and looked in every pocket and pouch. It wasn’t with her travel documents, tickets, passports, or letters from the school either. After searching the room four times, she sat down on the bed and tried to remember the last time she had read the letter through. Could it have been on the train from London? Could she have left it in the folds of a newspaper or a napkin, to be screwed up and thrown away? Her face grew hot. Surely she wouldn’t have been that careless? But it had gone, vanished. She tried to calm down, to think rationally. It was bound to turn up when she had more time to look for it. Without the backup of the letter, however, explaining the purpose of her visit would not be easy.

  “Hello!” George’s sister called up the stairs. “We leave in five minutes.”

  Cicely pinned on her hat and began to button her coat. Her clothes were neither water- nor weatherproof, but they would have to do. A crash came from the nursery.

  “Kitty!” she called out. When there was no answer she went to investigate. The nursery was lined with shelves of books, games, and toys. A rocking horse stood beneath the window. Her daughter was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by wooden animals and a small wooden boat, the picture of innocence.

  “It fell out of the cupboard,” she explained. “It’s a Noah’s Ark, I think.”

  “It must have been Daddy’s,” Cicely said. “Or your aunt Antonia’s.”

  “Do you think she would give me this?” Kitty held up a small wooden bear. “I want to give it to my ayah.”

  Cicely felt the rise of irritation and paused before she spoke.

  “You’re going to school, remember,” she said. “Besides, the animals went in two by two. The other bear will be lonely.”

  Kitty frowned, and tears welled up in her eyes.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said. “I’ll be lonely.”

  “But you’re a big girl now, and big girls go to school and make new friends.”

  “Not all of them do,” she replied. “Some stay at home with their ayah.”

  “Only babies,” she replied, taking the bear and placing it back in the ark. “Don’t be scared. You know you can do anything if you set your mind to it.”

  It wouldn’t do to let her daughter know the truth—that just the thought of being apart was almost unbearable to her. But the alternative was even worse. Without an education, Kitty could look forward to nothing other than marriage and motherhood, a life played out in the doll’s house of domesticity, with a husband who, like George, might follow his own whims and desires while she was left to pick up the pieces. Was she a terrible mother? All she wanted was something different for her daughter than her own experience.

  “I don’t suppose you want to come for a walk?” she asked Kitty.

  Kitty glanced up at the window as a bluster of fresh rain hit the glass; she shook her head. Silently she lined up the other wooden animals side by side. The rain outside cascaded down from the guttering and they could hear it splashing on the ground below.

  “I think we may need a boat,” Cicely said lightly. “Can I borrow that one? ‘I Once Loved a Sailor.’”

  It was a popular song they’d learned on the steamer. A tiny smile formed on Kitty’s face.

  “Once a sailor loved me,” sang Cicely softly.

  “But he was not a sailor,” sang Kitty in return. “That sailed on the wide blue sea.”

  Cicely reached out and stroked Kitty’s hair.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she said. “When you grow up, you’ll never have to use a curling iron.”

  “My ayah says only silly ladies with nothing better to do use a curling iron,” Kitty replied.

  “Does she now,” said Cicely.

  * * *

   Antonia strode up the path beneath an avenue of lime trees to the top of a small col. Here there was a stone bench with a view across the island and water to the rise of mountains beyond. It was too damp to sit, so she ran her fingertips along the stone, over the soft green moss and crumbling surface of the backrest. The pounding in her chest was lessening, yet the bruise from her argument that morning with Malcolm, while invisible, still seeped through her in shades of dark blue and brooding purple. She would not think of it now; she would resist the urge to work out all the things she should have said. Let it go, she told herself. Instead she focused on how much she liked this view, this spot, this bench. Today the garden was awash with rain, the grass soggy underfoot and the bright green lime leaves above cascading showers of droplets.

  Her fingertips almost itched, and she wished she had her materials to hand. The bag packed with her sketchbook, watercolors, and brushes was still lying where she had left it, abandoned after Cicely and Kitty’s arrival. She had always found solace in painting, in botanical illustration. As a girl she had been encouraged by her father to paint flowers and shrubs, and found she had a talent for it. She had grown to love the rhythm of the seasons, the long fallow winters and the short intense summers, and the annual miracle of snowdrops or the haze of bluebells. She would pull on her waxed coat and galoshes, go out in any weather, ignoring the damp or the rain that fell from the brim of her hat, and paint. Her sketchbook was a diary of sorts, a visual journal, the plants and flowers acting as a record of her shifting moods.

  There had been a time when she had thought she might take it further and attend art s
chool. The Haldane Academy was opposite the Glasgow Green in the East End, and sometimes, on trips to the city, she persuaded her family to take a stroll on the Green so she could pass the school, with its white facade and sculpture of a young scholar above the west wing, and imagine herself inside.

  And yet she had gotten ahead of herself and was brought down, she remembered, with a crash. Without asking her, her father had shown some of her work to a professional, and the verdict was that although her work was “pretty,” she lacked natural talent. Art school, her father said bluntly, would be a waste of time and money. Even after all those years she still felt a stab of hurt when she recalled that dinner.

  “Don’t take offense,” George had said. “Your work is lovely. But isn’t art school for serious artists, not illustrators?”

  “That’s why I want to go,” she retaliated. “I want to learn.”

  “My dear sister, I just can’t see it, you with plaster on your hands and paint in your hair—”

  “Leave the challenging vocations to those who are built for it,” her father interjected. “To men.”

  Antonia had kept her temper, she had swallowed the rise inside.

  “Surely a person’s sex has nothing to do with it?” she replied.

  “Can you imagine a woman painting the Sistine Chapel?” George laughed. “She’d be standing at the bottom of the scaffolding drinking tea and talking about the price of bread.”

  Her father had snorted with amusement while she sat there puce faced, pushing her food around her plate before eventually being excused. She hoped they both jumped in their seats when she slammed her bedroom door so hard the house seemed to shake. Not that it did any good in the long run. She hadn’t argued; what was the point? The disappointment was so acute that she barely left her room for weeks. But eventually, once she got over the shock, she decided to continue but keep her work to herself. No one knew about her painting anymore, not even Malcolm.

  To compensate for his daughter’s perceived failings, perhaps, her father had taken a keen interest in art. As well as self-portraits, he had commissioned a painting of Balmarra from a local artist. The picture captured the house and gardens as seen from Karrasay, the mountain rising behind and a golden evening sky all reflected in the loch. At her father’s insistence, the artist, Henry Morris, had added a stag grazing at the shore and an eagle wheeling above. Although it was undeniably accomplished, Antonia hated it. Not only was its tone cloying and sentimental, it suggested a wholly fictional reality rather than a dour, real, wet Scottish one. It had hung in the hallway for years, placed so it was the first thing visitors saw. Every time Antonia passed it, which was often, she turned her head the other way so she wouldn’t have to look at it.

  There were no stags in evidence from the stone bench that day, no wheeling eagles or heroic beasts beneath the lime trees. There were a couple of blackbirds, and she’d seen a siskin and a couple of blue tits—nothing special—and the rain had finally stopped. A steamer sailed from Hunter’s Point toward Gourock, its wake a stroke of chalk on a blue canvas. The sun came out and lit up the moorland on the other side of the loch, and the world beyond was suddenly illuminated with vibrant color: dark orange, mustard, and the palest lilac. And at the center of it all, partly hidden by trees, was Balmarra, the house she had been born in and had lived in all her life. The wind in the sycamore tree above lulled, and her husband’s voice was suddenly audible.

  “According to the forecast it will be overcast until Tuesday,” Malcolm was telling Cicely. “After that a band of high pressure will sweep in from the west.”

  “Really,” she replied, barely disguising the blade of disinterest.

  They were walking slowly up the hill. Her husband had taken the morning off work to be here, to be hospitable, but their unexpected guest appeared completely oblivious. Though she was still angry with him, Antonia felt a surge of indignation on his behalf. Finally they reached the col.

  “This is one of my favorite spots,” said Antonia, rising.

  Cicely took in the view, what there was of it, with a glance, then stamped her feet and rubbed her arms.

  “Surely summer can be cool in the mountains in India, too?” Antonia asked.

  “You can’t compare it,” she replied.

  Antonia suddenly felt the urge to apologize for the climate, for the precipitation, but swallowed it. The phrase “Like it or lump it,” one of her father’s, suddenly came into her head. Cicely Pick yawned. Would nothing please her? Not the light, the ruffled water, the colors of velvet-covered hills?

  “Tell me,” said Malcolm. “What occupation is your husband currently pursuing in India?”

  Cicely pulled her shoulders back.

  “He’s a horticultural explorer and collector, as I mentioned yesterday.”

  “But surely that is simply a hobby,” Malcolm replied, “not an occupation.”

  “A hobby?” she repeated. “No, botany is his life and his occupation.”

  “But is botanizing”—Malcolm struggled for words—“lucrative?”

  When Cicely finally spoke it was with much deliberation.

  “For plant hunters, the collection of rare and undiscovered botanical species is more than a vocation,” she said. “It’s a calling, a métier. Look around you, there’s barely a garden in Europe that doesn’t display discoveries made by my husband’s profession.”

  “Perfectly true,” said Antonia. “That’s a Hamamelis virginiana from North America. And over there, that’s a Euodia hupehensis from China.”

  These were two trees that she had recently painted, and for once looked up and memorized their Latin names.

  “But hasn’t everything already been found?” he asked.

  “Well, obviously not,” Cicely said. “Or why would he be looking?”

  There was a small, ringing silence.

  “One flower, to me, looks very like another,” he admitted.

  “Indeed,” said Antonia. “You don’t even know the difference between a daffodil and a dandelion.”

  She immediately felt a twinge of guilt. She shouldn’t side with George’s wife, not against her husband. As usual, however, he tried to make it into a huge joke.

  “Must be rather fun tramping through the back of beyond, eating yak. Where is he, anyway?”

  Cicely sighed, then replaced her hat.

  “Have you heard of the Mekong?”

  “No,” said Malcolm. “I haven’t.”

  “There is a valley, and the river that runs through it empties into another called the Mekong. In this valley are alpine meadows that are filled with a profusion of flowers, anemones and primulas and gentians as well as many other as-yet-undiscovered species. So yes, I suppose it is the back of beyond to some people, but to George it is the center of everything.”

  Cicely took a deep breath and gazed into the middle distance.

  “And yak meat can be rather good, actually,” she added, then smiling such a smile that Antonia could actually see her husband lose his train of thought. Even in the rain, in the pale green light that filtered through the leaves above, Cicely was striking, her chin raised, her back straight, her eyes half closed as if looking down at the world. She had the look of a dancer and skin the color of caramel. No wonder, Antonia thought, her brother had married her. She couldn’t have been an easy catch, not like the girls from Dunoon or Gourock George had gone with as a younger man, some of whom he hadn’t even bothered to tell he was leaving the country.

  Malcolm looked at his pocket watch, his hand, Antonia noticed, trembling ever so slightly.

  “Goodness, it’s later than I thought,” he said, thrusting both his hand and his watch back into his pocket. “I am in court tomorrow. Working for the Crown one can’t afford to be ill prepared. Please excuse me, ladies.”

  He started back down the path.

  “Take her up the glen,” he called over his shoulder. “Show her the American redwoods. There, see, I know a plant or two!”

  They both watch
ed until the path turned and he was gone.

  “What does your husband do?” Cicely asked.

  “He’s an advocate depute,” she replied. “That’s what we call a barrister in Scotland.”

  Cicely turned and glanced at her strangely, a look of incomprehension that was there and then gone again. Antonia felt momentarily winded.

  “He was your father’s lawyer?” she asked.

  “Oh no,” she replied. “He’s not that sort. He works for the Crown Office, prosecuting criminals.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Maybe, Antonia considered, she had imagined it. She searched Cicely’s face once more but found nothing changed.

  “People are usually fascinated by Malcolm’s occupation and ask all sorts of grisly questions,” said Antonia.

  “Do they?” said Cicely.

  “Let’s see those trees, then,” Antonia suggested. “Before the rain comes on again.”

  As they walked up the glen, she could see a splatter of mud on the hem of Cicely’s coat. Her heels left tiny indentations in the path, and her shoes would no doubt be wet through by now. She wore such beautiful clothes but seemed unconcerned by their ruin. She must have plenty more in her multiple trunks and suitcases. Even so, maybe Antonia should have offered galoshes and an overcoat. And yet there was something gloriously nonchalant, something fanciful, about Cicely’s appearance. To say she looked out of place would be an understatement. She looked positively alien. But it was not just her sense of fashion.

  “Her skin’s a little dark,” Malcolm had said that morning. “And so is the girl’s. They seem, well, foreign.”

  “The Indian sun would color anyone’s skin,” she replied. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Hmm,” said Malcolm doubtfully. “What reason did they give for coming?”