by Tanith Lee
Both women seemed the same as before, they hadn’t changed. Jackie was still slender and boyish in her sleeveless T-shirt that showed pinkly-tanned, rounded arms and neck. Her eyes were jewel-blue, bright. The grey-haired woman had put her long hair into a ponytail but she looked bad tempered still, frowning over her change and a box of Kit-Kats. The man was about thirty, balding and gangly, with an amused face.
“Excuse me,” said Susan. She felt self-consciously and fakingly adult, something that had not happened much for two or three years. “It’s Jackie, isn’t it?”
“That’s me,” said Jackie.
“And who are you?” barked the other woman, frowning worse.
“Oh, you won’t remember me – I was at the house once, and you let me go round, because my grandmother was the one who owned it before. Susan. I’m Susan Wilde.”
“No, I don’t remember you,” said the woman.
But Jackie said, “Hi, Susan.”
“This is Patrick,” Susan said, feeling she must, at this point.
They looked at Patrick, and Jackie said, “Hi, Patrick.”
Then the amused balding man said, “We ought to get a move on, Jackie. Or we’ll miss our train.”
“You make it sound like the royal train,” said the bad-tempered woman.
“We’re going to Devon,” said Jackie. “Have to get into London first.”
“Ten bloody hour journey by the look of things,” said the other woman. “Bloody murder.”
“It isn’t ten hours,” said the balding man.
“Yes all right, Clive.”
Susan said, “Is someone else looking after the cats?”
“Oh, the cats are already down there. That was quite a do, I can tell you, six vanloads of the beasts. But worth it. They love the new place.” Jackie delved into the carrier bag, took out a chocolate orange and sniffed it like a connoisseur.
Susan said, “But what about –”
The bad-tempered woman said, “We got a better offer than that house. The Devon deal is a bloody mansion, with seven acres attached. We’d hardly say no.”
“Cat Sams in style,” said Jackie, putting the orange back in the bag. “The old house here is up for sale. But we’ll get most of the proceeds from that too, so we’ve done really well.”
Something meowed stridently and Susan saw the man called Clive carried two huge wire-fronted cat-cages, which seemed to contain two or three cats a-piece. His arms were very long; years of transporting such burdens had no doubt lengthened them.
“These are ours,” he said to Susan. “They travel with us.”
Patrick spoke for the first time. “So, Susan’s gran’s house is standing empty?”
“Oh, yes. We were actually all cleared out by last week. Some couple seem to want it, the agents said. They’re prepared to do it up, and it will take some doing, I can tell you, after our lot.” Jackie laughed, proud of their legacy.
The bad-tempered woman glared at Susan. “And it’s haunted you know. Did you know that?”
Susan stood there.
Jackie said, “Mill, why say that?”
Something had changed, nearly indefinable. It was like the first premonition of nausea, or flu. But – up in the air.
“I’m not superstitious, you know that, Jack. But I also know that house was full of something. And the cats knew it too.”
“Mildred,” said Jackie.
Bad-tempered Mildred said, “Those windows that always opened by themselves. And the noises. You and Bill didn’t mind them, but you two sleep like logs. I don’t. And things being moved – hidden –”
Patrick said, “You’re saying there was a ghost?”
“There was and is psychic activity. We’ve left, but that has not.”
Jackie looked at Susan. “There may have been some odd things sometimes. But none of it that couldn’t have a normal explanation. Mildred isn’t saying it was old Mrs Wilde.”
“She didn’t die in the house,” Susan heard herself blurt. “They found her on a park bench. She had hypothermia, probably. She was covered in frost. Her heart failed.”
Mildred’s intolerant face softened as if a blow had spread it.
Susan wished Patrick would say something, but he didn’t, merely stood there, looking at all their faces, Mildred’s in particular, almost certainly because he thought hers the most drawable face, with all those cracks and fissures of inclement temper sculpted into it.
But Mildred looked at Susan and said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s nearly quarter to two,” said Clive, who still appeared amused, but now with a type of smiley embarrassment.
“Come on,” said Jackie.
“Good luck,” Susan said.
“Thanks. You too.” They turned, moved off, a single entity, garlanded by raucous meows.
“Where are you going?” Patrick asked Susan.
“I want a drink.”
“Right. Sure. Then we can get on.”
“No we can’t. The house will be shut up. We won’t be able to see anything now, or get in or stay.”
“There’s always some way in. We can get over the wall or something. I’m not giving up now.”
He stood in the shop and waited while Susan paid for her diet coke. Then he selected a chocolate bar for himself and bought it.
Susan felt a stab of irritation. Why did they always have to pay for everything separately – okay, meals or alcohol perhaps, but a coke – a Marathon – bus fares?
“I don’t want to go there now, Patrick.”
“Because of what they said?”
“No. I’m not sure.”
“She had a marvellously crazy face, that older woman. I suppose she was marvellously crazy. Anyway, it’d only be your gran.”
“She had to be called Grandmother, and her name was Catherine Greyglass. It isn’t that. I don’t want to go scrambling over walls and getting tetanus and arrested.”
Astounded, Patrick stared at her. Then they stood there on the street under the high afternoon sun. Neither of them made a move either forwards or back.
He ate the Marathon.
“Look,” said Patrick, “why don’t we just go and see? If it’s ropey or they’ve got security, obviously we’ll leave it. But the way you spoke about it – I’ve got a feeling it’s just what I’ve needed for some outdoor studies – and no one else will have anything near it. It really would help me, Susan.”
So, they went on.
Of course.
She had gone up to look at the books in the book-room. Despite having been sold once, they were all still there, all those sombre black or maroon volumes stretching up and up, like bricks in the cases. And the long table was there, and on the table the glass dish. In the moonlight, the glass wasn’t yellowish but grey.
Something was knocking somewhere, or tapping. Tap-tap. A tree branch on a window in a wind that didn’t blow. Or something in the turned-off water pipes.
Hearing it, Susan was not disturbed. Not afraid. Even when the book-room window slid up with a sharp hiss, not even then.
But she had to get back downstairs, and return to the sunken room where Anne and Anne’s mother, Catherine, were confronting each other.
Susan didn’t hurry. She was grown up now. She went out and along and down the stairs, and when she reached the room, she stood in the doorway, glancing about.
Why had Anne brought her at night? They never came here then. That time before the funeral, even, when they had been each day, clearing up, they had always left the house before it got really dark.
The trees outside were huge, monolithic, and heavily-furred as black bears. Through the crystal panes they cast their ink-black shadows.
There was no one in the room, no one and nothing. No furniture – not even any cats now, not a single plant.
Then something screamed in a terrifying way. Susan leapt out of her skin of sleep and crashed against Patrick in the depths of the double sleeping-bag.
&nb
sp; “Hey – what? What is it?”
“Oh God –”
“What?” He rolled aside and switched on the torch, blinding her with a broad eye of light.
“Something –” she said. “There was a noise.”
“It’s those cats in the garden. Ssh. It’s all right.”
She lay down against him. “Patrick, I dreamed about her – only she wasn’t in the dream. Only – I think she was. Patrick?” Patrick was silently asleep once more.
Susan looked up where the eye of the torch still flamed on the ceiling of the bare upper room. Cat’s-eye.
Outside she could hear them now, the eerie wailing of the small tribe of cats, which still remained rampant in the eldritch garden. She and then Patrick had counted nine or ten of them in the undergrowth outside.
The smell of cats’ urine was still strong in the house, too, but Patrick dismissed it, did not seem to care. He did not mind the several boarded-up ground floor windows, or the leak which had occurred in the drains to one side, and added another foul odour.
They had got in without trouble. Others had already been before them at the gate, breaking boards, squeezing through. The For Sale sign had Under Offer pasted over. There were no notices about dogs or vigilance.
He had stood on the drive, among the vast architecture of trees and thickets, and the deep green sea of nettles, gazing at dim faded wedges of cut pumpkin walls.
“The colours are like you said – but even better than you described them. It’s almost prehistoric-looking out here. The whole thing is worthy of Cézanne. Or – Klimt.”
To have pleased him so much should have been enough, but now it was not. She had hoped the outer wall would be impassable, and then, when it wasn’t, that he would hate the house, be repelled.
The garden, where, during the afternoon and evening, they had come to see the cats, was what involved Patrick most, the glimpses of the house slotted into boughs of cabbage green foliage.
He left Susan quickly and suddenly. Taking his sketchpad and a handful of crayons and pencils, he was off, dumping his rucksack beside her in the grass, so she felt she had to stay to guard it.
Then she saw him too in glimpses, climbing a terrace by a pool clotted with enormous fretted angelica leaves, between the bay trees and the holly and rhododendrons. He sketched, leaning at angles, matching the angles of the house, perhaps.
Finally Susan dragged the bags to one of the side doors. Standing outside this door, she could not recall it. With all the boarded windows, only the colours of the house – as Patrick had partly said – were really as she had recollected them. Ivy was growing in festoons along brickwork and drainpipes.
She thought the door would be locked. But it gave. Very likely the others had already broken in.
Patrick was by then up an apple tree, among the last of April blossom.
She shoved the bags inside the door, then sat down on the path in the sunlight, her back to a wall.
Later, she began to see the cats, some black and white, and a tabby one, then three gingers, moving singly, or poised in groups behind ferns or high grass. They must be escapees from the flight to Devon. Had Jackie known?
Somehow – I don’t remember that apple tree. Did they plant one – a mature one? Oh, he’s climbing down now. Nor that monkey-puzzle up there. They always look man-made, monkey-puzzles, but by someone very artistic. Made out of papier mâché, then covered with prickly black velvet.
The sun shifted. The path sank violet with shade and it became colder.
At last Patrick walked over. “Don’t you want to make any drawings?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Okay, let’s take the bags in. See where we can sleep tonight.”
“Do you still want to?”
“Sure. That’s fine.” As if to please her, since she wanted to, which she had (feebly?) tried to tell him she did not.
“This light,” he said, “is so good. Look at the sunshafts. I’d like to set up for a quick study with paint – just gouache. Before the light goes.”
It was after five-thirty. Beyond the doorway, the house gaped in cracks of shadow, split with long passages and the side of a staircase. It looked totally unfamiliar. Susan might never have been here before. Changed so many times by the on-building of Catherine and Richard Wilde, did the house still go on altering itself, adding parts, shifting rooms around?
“I’m hungry,” Susan said.
“Yes, I am. Did you bring anything?”
“No. You do the bags. I’ll go down to the high street. What do you want?”
They decided on fish and chips, and he said keep the bill, he would give her his share when she came back.
“It’s all right,” she said briskly. “Anne sent some money. I’ll get it.”
When she and Anne had lived in Constance Street, they took a different route to reach the high street. She almost thought of doing that now, to make the walk longer. But that would mean going back through the park, and they had crossed the park earlier and it had subtly depressed her again, it’s barren openness, its increasing irrelevance.
Westering sun lay brazenly along the roads. The roar of homeward traffic rushed like the sea.
Homeward, she thought. All those people going home.
Susan thought of Anne, of going home to Anne in the various flats. Of nights when Anne stayed in and taught her card games, or they read books, curled in the armchairs, or watching TV, and sometimes ate toasted cheese sandwiches with grilled tomatoes before going to bed. Susan never ate cheese now. A small price to pay for good skin. But even so, one more fun delight forever lost.
Had she been happy then, as a child, with Anne? Yes, quite happy.
As she stood in line in Chiporama, Susan weakly regarded her nostalgia for a past only some three or four years away.
Wizz had stopped the past. Sliced it clean through. As she had known she wouldn’t, she hadn’t seen Anne since. Oh, seen photographs Anne sent, there had been a ton of those, usually with Wizz – on a beach in Florida, at a wine-tasting in New England… that sort of thing. And she and Anne had spoken now and then on the phone, but seldom, for Susan’s phone was always a shared one in a hall, and unless a time was scrupulously pre-arranged – and stuck to by Anne – the phone was not often free.
She looked happy, Anne. Always slim and vivid, well-dressed, tanned, her hair still undergoing metamorphoses – Do you like this short style? Wizz says he likes it for the summer. And, Don’t you think this curly mane is neat? Eve fixed it for me. We had a ball.
Wizz too was tanned and well-dressed, and looked a bit fatter. But Susan tried not to see him in the photographs. Because of Wizz she pushed them all into a box at the bottom of the curtained-off rail that was her wardrobe. Because of Wizz, and not wanting to see him, even the ones of Anne on her own. (Husband and wife: one flesh.)
When Susan got back to the house with the fish and chips, a bottle of wine and a cheap corkscrew, Patrick had vanished deep into the garden.
She thought of eating her fish first, before locating him. The food was almost cold by now anyway.
But then she went to look for him.
The garden never struck her as anything but abnormal. There was something more than verdancy or undiscipline about it. Prehistoric was Patrick’s word, but an apt one.
Briars clawed at her, rose bushes that had become tall hedges, all thorns. Paths tunnelled through the black green cavities between terrace-sides, clumps of giant docks, and trees whose roots had cracked up the paving as if a bomb had fallen.
“Here I am. You wandered right past me.”
“I’ve been trying to find you for an hour.”
She thrust the fish and chips at him. She didn’t know where they were, in some insane wilderness or forest, staring out through a sort of hole in the trees, at a ruin with boarded-up windows, while the sun died and the sky turned khaki.
“You seem fed up,” he said.
“I am.”
Did he even hear her? Ye
s, he heard, and was sympathetic – but indifferent. They were two separate people. They were bound to have unlike states of being. It didn’t concern him. Painting did.
His painting of tonight was slapdash, watery, effective. They drank the wine.
The sky looked better now, a blue-grape dusk with some stars. Now and then, as the shadows meshed the garden into solid darkness, the whitish forms of two or three cats glimmed and faded.
“What a wonderful place,” he said.
“Is it?”
“Don’t you think so? We were lucky, getting in before they started pruning and cutting down and wrecking everything.”
But the wine made her feel better. The wine said, Oh, it’s all right.
“That house,” he said, “is strange, isn’t it. I just put the bags upstairs. There’s a room there with some old curtains on the windows. People have got in. Someone had a fire in a fireplace, recent, could have burnt the house down. How many rooms are there, do you know?”
“No, not really. I told you, my grandparents built a lot on.”
“Why didn’t you get the house, Susan?”
She glanced at him. In the dusk, Patrick too was a shadow, with gleaming cat’s eyes.
“I said. Anne and Catherine didn’t get on.”
“I wish you had,” he had said. “I wish it was yours.”
“So you could come here and paint it,” she said.
“Yeah.”
And the wine said, Oh, it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps the wine, or the greasy fried fish, caused her to dream of the book-room. And of the sunken room below.
For a long while after she woke from it, Susan lay tensely, with the torch-splash above her like a parasol of useless hope, listening to Jackie’s cats courting and fighting in Catherine’s garden.
Then she must have slept again, because she woke up and bright light was coming in at the threadbare curtains.