Читать книгу The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books - Elspeth Davie - Страница 5

ANYONE VISITING THIS house for the first time found himself unexpectedly and uncomfortably exposed before going a step from the iron gates. Tough soles and a thick skin were needed from the moment when, turning in from a soft, country road, he would find the thickly-sown, cutting little stones of the drive working their way over the tops of his shoes and through his shoelaces. And if, while removing them, he were to raise his eyes, he would meet the unbroken, aggressive glare of rows of unscreened windows. For there was no hiding from this place. The gravel was not only harsh but also noisy underfoot. There were no soft bushes to screen the visitor while he made his way to the front door, and nothing about the place made a concession to nerves, withdrawals or second thoughts of any kind. It was a large house – not distinguished by age or design, but formidably plain and square, built in a smooth, grey stone which had begun to take on the polish of marble simply through the care spent on it since it was first built. No one, after meeting the people who lived in it, could think of it again as a house which was owned. It was not owned, but painfully served. It existed not for shelter or comfort, but to announce its own immense gravity and the fact that it was packed from top to bottom with a massive deposit of possessions. The foundations of any ordinary house would have sunk askew, the walls and roof, long before this, have bulged and cracked under the strain.

A family of five lived there – two sisters and three brothers who had been together since they were children. Although the men went back and forth to offices in the city and the women went down to the village with shopping-bags like other housewives, they had no real communication with anyone else, but remained in their tight group – all five of them – thin, anxious people who, like their parents, uncles and aunts before them, had hurried up and down in service to the house. The brothers – Joseph, James and Edgar Findlay, seemed to have effaced themselves so completely in the world that they had become almost indistinguishable to outsiders. They were tall, gaunt men – dark without being interesting, and with a melancholy so grey and unromantic that people did not in the least wish to enquire what might be behind it. There were a few years between them in age, Joseph, who was fifty-nine, being the eldest, but they might have been triplets for all the interest that was taken in them as separate individuals. They were seldom described by name or profession, and any epithet, good or bad, which came their way, did for the three of them and sometimes for all five. The women were never apart and were not expected to need the luxury of their Christian names, Edith and Clara, to distinguish them. They were conveniently known as the Findlay sisters and could be told apart, when necessary, by the fact that Edith, who was oldest of the family, had grey hair, streaked with black, and Clara, who was the youngest, had fairish hair, going grey.

But the house was never spoken of except by name. It had a definite position on the map and in guidebooks; it stood high up and could be seen from a long distance, and the paths, the lines of trees and hedges, the position of the long, wedge-shaped flower-beds surrounding it had all been designed, from the beginning, to point out the house dramatically and give it an importance which it might well have lost as time went on. For the family who made their pilgrimage daily up and down over the thick layer of sharp-edged stones had never asked why this house and everything in it must be cherished long after it had ceased to provide any comfort for themselves. Habits laid down long before they were born had become laws for them, and because a time was coming when there would be no one left to whom this special care could be handed on, the house exacted from them – the last of the family – a greater effort than had ever been made before. As it grew older it was merciless in its demands. Year after year it was buttressed and strengthened. Ladders were never away from the walls while it was painted, pointed and chiselled. There was a continual scraping, hammering and screwing going on inside and out. Yet underneath it all remained the gnawing anxiety that some day something would begin to crumble or rot, that something absolutely essential to the safety of the house would start to rattle or swing suddenly loose. Ivy, too eager to hide the sharpness of its staring eyes, was torn from around the windows. Hedges were continually being cut back so that its view should be unimpeded, and the branches of old trees, dripping too near the roof, were lopped back to raw stumps at the first patch of damp which appeared on the ceilings.

The family who lived in the house made no demands for themselves. In their own eyes they had very little importance at all, and compared to the house and the heavy accumulation of stuff which it contained, they felt themselves to be lightweights. Their modesty was unnatural; they had never been noticed and did not wish to be, and most of their leisure time was spent inside the house, as though, if they were seen too often, their peculiar lack of distinction might take something from the importance of the place, and let down those people who stared confidently at them from their frames on mantelpieces and the tops of writing-desks. Yet inside the house there was little room for the five of them. It was not so large, after all, and every room was crammed with the possessions of those ancestors and relations who had been a great deal wealthier, more popular, generous, artistic, more widely travelled and more extraordinary in every way than themselves. People had obviously strewn gifts on them wherever they went, had photographed them leaning against giant tree-trunks in California, holding their hats on the decks of Atlantic liners, sitting at the centre of intimate picnic parties on the banks of unknown rivers, or smiling and waving from the windows of train carriages. If they had also sacrificed themselves to a house, then the service had taken the form of a perpetual treasure-hunt and they showed no signs of the strain, except for a wanness under tropical skies, or a certain puffiness about the eyes owing to the difficulties and uncertainties of getting the kind of food they were accustomed to. Most of the time, however, they had been flamboyant creatures, always on the move; and as though to carry on this tradition in the only way possible, the two sisters kept the treasures which had belonged to them always in motion so that, with constant shifting and rearranging, the objects might still seem to have a restless life of their own.

So they polished and dusted, and carried the fragile tables, jingling with curios, from one corner to the other; or placed some ornament nearer the window at a certain time of day so that the sunlight might, for an hour or two, strike the rare metal or glass; or turned some piece of china round into the shadow so that a chip or crack might be hidden. They knelt, side by side, both straining at the handles of huge bottom drawers which held leaden wads of white linen, yards of lace and silk, and the caps and aprons, tunics, collars, petticoats and stockings of national costumes from all over the world. These they were constantly folding and shaking and wrapping up with fresh supplies of mothball, and when the time came to shut the drawer again, they would push with their heads down, gasping, and straining the muscles of their stomachs in order to confine the bulging piles of stuff to their former space. The pressure behind the door of every cupboard and beneath the lids of chests was terrifying even to those who were used to it. At times the five of them could feel the pressure inside their own heads, and a suffocating weight would lie on their chests when they woke in the night and thought of the straining house ready, perhaps, to split, ready to crack if it were not carefully handled. When, on stormy nights, they thought of the fragile things poised on tables, and the heavy objects hanging from the walls on old cords, every nerve in their bodies would tighten with the effort which, even flat on their backs, they made to resist the fraying and the splintering which might be going on there in the darkness. Above all, it was the long attic at the top of the house which crushed them. In the daytime they were conscious of it, like a great layer of heavy atmosphere. But at night, alone in their own rooms, staring at the ceiling, they felt their own identity lost under the mass of stuff up there which weighed on their lids even when they had shut their eyes, and bulged through grotesquely into their dreams when they were asleep.

The family seldom took a holiday away from the house, and to one another they showed the special loyalty of a group of people living under a tyrant whom they respected and even reverenced. The rigid timetable which they kept to, and the discomforts which they endured for the sake of the house, had kept down all superfluous flesh and feeling and prevented any extravagance showing in their expressions or behaviour. They were all silent people, chillingly resigned – the men, relieved to be away from one another in the daytime, were also relieved to be back again in the evening to a relationship which seemed to go on forever, safely, monotonously, unlike the precarious relationships which they caught glimpses of on their way back and forth to the house. There had been certain incidents in the past – times when someone had tried to advise or interfere, or shown some sneering disregard for the house and its property by trying to remove one of them away from the others into marriage or to some prosperous post abroad, or into debts just deep enough to give a taste of risk and pleasure. But all that was a long time ago. No interference from without had come for many years.

It was from inside the house, however, that the greatest disturbance was to come – beginning with an unimportant incident which occurred in its pressure-centre – the attic. It was a mild Autumn afternoon, and the elder sister, Edith, had gone up to look for a small table-lamp which she knew had been lying for many years under a heap of unidentified stuff. Indeed, nothing had been moved in the attic for a long time except the soft, outer layer of cloths, pillows and bedspreads which covered the broken, upturned furniture and the tangle of springs and wire like flesh covering the sensitive bones and nerves of an old invalid. In the course of years, however, one or two lanes had been hollowed out through the pile and one deep cave made out of two sides of tightly-wedged furniture, covered over at the top with various lighter objects which included folded tents and fishing rods, umbrellas, golf clubs, curtain-rails and a pair of broken crutches. Over everything else were two heavy lids of linoleum which had, at one time, been sliced into curious shapes to fit the awkward cupboards under the stair. At the far end of this hollow Edith had found the lamp she was looking for, but in pulling the flex she had also dislodged a heavy, mantelpiece clock. The square block of black marble and metal, built with side pillars to resemble a Greek temple, fell across her foot, all its machinery jangling and whirring for a second as she screamed.

It was nearly suppertime. The whole family had been sitting together downstairs waiting for her to come down, and now they came up to the attic – not quickly, for that was not their habit, but close on one another’s heels, and apprehensively. They noticed, before anything else, that their sister was angry, and because they had never before seen an expression like this on her face, it appeared to them more like some momentary madness, caused by the pain. Two brothers bent over to examine her foot – the others bent with equal solicitude over the clock which chimed softly, once, as it was gently lifted and put into a safe corner.

‘Not even the glass smashed,’ murmured the younger sister as she peered into its face and ran her fingers round the rim. Edith now began to sob wildly, and three of them helped her down the attic stairs to her bedroom, as one ran to phone the doctor. They were now amazed and alarmed at this breakdown of her reserve. It was, after all, nothing so serious, as the doctor assured them later that evening. She must lie up for a day or two and have her foot bound – three days at the most, if she wished to be on the safe side.

It was very soon clear that Edith not only wanted to be on the safe side, but that she had made up her mind to stay there indefinitely. She rested for three days and, when her foot was healed, discovered that she was far too tired to move the rest of her body. With the voice of authority which belonged to her as the oldest of the family, but which she had never used before, she informed her brothers and sister that she had decided to stay in bed and regain some of the strength which she had lost in the house over a great number of years. They accepted the announcement silently and did not discuss it any more than they had thought of discussing other unaccountable things which had happened to them. By keeping silent, and simply not paying too much attention, they had vanquished all sorts of mysteries – from the appearance of apparitions to the turning up of unexpected visitors. Nevertheless, coming from within the family, Edith’s words struck them as ominous.

On the day after this – a Sunday – the four of them went up and down many times during the afternoon and evening to visit her. Propped bolt upright against her pillows, and framed by the gilt, knobbed bedhead, their sister allowed herself to be identified for the first time. So this was Edith – this stern woman in the fancy bedjacket who stared back at them without a hint of guilt or misgiving in her blue eyes. On the days following they came in with their trays and books and newspapers, on tiptoe or shuffling awkwardly according to their moods, but as time went on they became more wary under her gaze.

For Edith, who had seldom sat down in her life except to get nearer some bit of work, now seemed to want only to lie and watch them coming and going, following all their movements with a close attention embarrassing to people who were unused to walking sympathetically in and out of sickrooms. She would discuss the affairs of the day with them, or listen to the account of some mishap in house or office, but not as though she could ever be involved herself again. Though looking attentively, while they spoke, at their faces, she gave the impression that she was studying the movements of their lips and eyes with amusement, rather as a foreigner might listen to a language he does not quite understand, while unwilling to be done altogether out of his entertainment.

After ten days, when Edith’s foot had long been completely healed, her sister sat down on the edge of the bed one afternoon when she had removed the tea-tray, and carefully took Edith’s hand in her own. It was not easy to take this hand for it was a large one, and felt hard and strong under Clara’s timid fingers. But, flushing slightly, she kept an awkward grip on it.

‘Now, Edith,’ she said, smiling gravely at the space of wall directly above her sister’s head, ‘you will tell me what is wrong, will you not? There is something wrong, of course, or else you would not stay in bed long after the doctor has said you may get up – you would not cause us such serious worry for nothing. No, Edith, you would not, and you must tell me at once what is the matter!’

Her voice, slow and persuasive at the beginning, ended quickly on a note of nervous disapproval. Edith, meantime, had withdrawn her hand to flick up the lace of her collar, and answered calmly enough.

‘Why, of course I will tell you, Clara. But surely I have told you all often enough what is the matter. I will tell you again, if it is any help. I am seriously tired – that is all. I have been like that for years, so I did not expect any of you to notice. But lately the pressure has grown worse, much worse, so there is nothing for it but to give up for a while until something can be done about it.’

‘Well, I am glad you have told me at last,’ replied her sister, smiling her strained and patient smile. Not finding Edith’s hand again on the coverlet, she smoothed her own mechanically as she talked. ‘Of course we can take life more easily after this – I shall see to it. You will rest in the afternoons, and Martha can stay later. But, at any rate, I can relieve your mind on one thing. The blood-pressure you mentioned just now; do you think Dr Fisher has taken no account of these things, or that we should ever let him overlook anything as important as that?’ Clara leaned forward, widening her tired eyes in an effort to make them look triumphant. She spoke slowly and emphatically: ‘No, Edith – the last time the doctor was here he said that there was absolutely nothing wrong with your lungs, your heart or your blood-pressure. Everything is normal. It is nerves, Edith. There – I’ve told you now. It is only right you should know what he said – just a little worry about yourself after the shock of your accident. You have given yourself too much time to brood, that is all. And you must not talk about this blood-pressure again!’

‘Oh, but I didn’t say blood-pressure!’ exclaimed Edith with a frown. ‘It is not a pressure from inside at all. It is from outside – from the house. Don’t say you haven’t felt the weight of all that junk, Clara! Don’t tell me you are going to put up with it indefinitely – that ton weight on top of us till we die!’

Clara shuddered at ‘junk’ as though her sister had spoken an obscene word. Never, not in the worst moments of the spring-cleaning, had such a word been even whispered between them, and, seriously alarmed, she got up swiftly and began to arrange the little objects on the mantelpiece, with her back to Edith as though she had not heard.

‘Moving them about will not help in the least, Clara, as you know,’ Edith remarked quietly, as she watched her. ‘We have been doing it for years to try and relieve the pressure. There is not a thing in this house which has ever been in the same place for more than an hour at a time. But it does no good. The only way is to get rid of it all. Indeed, it must be done, and I will not be able to get out of bed until it is!’

When the doctor came on a special visit the next afternoon he was in no hurry to be away. He went softly about the large bedroom, looking about him easily and picking up various objects from desk and mantelpiece which he said were of rare value – collectors’ pieces, he called them as he turned them about in his hands admiringly. He studied the photographs for a long time and asked about the relations, and as he crossed over to the bed, he tapped the chairs with his fingers and slid his hand down the length of the wardrobe with an envious sigh. It might have been the house which he had come to examine and to praise for its excellent health and appearance, and he seemed almost reluctant to have to turn his attention to Edith.

It was not an uncommon thing, he told her, when he had settled down at last, to feel, in certain cases of mild nervous disorder, the kind of symptoms which she had described to her sister. On the contrary, it was quite a common experence to have the feeling of heaviness in the limbs – a sensation of pressure in the chest or head – yes, and even a feeling of suffocation – of being unable to breathe freely for the weight on the chest – a sensation, perhaps, of cramp about the heart. He smiled, and stretched his fingers tightly across his chest, then bound them around his head to express the familiar meaning. In most cases, he assured her, after a little rest, these common nervous symptoms disappeared very quickly – once the patient showed herself willing to get up and get on with her normal work. And this – he impressed it upon her as he got to his feet briskly – was the most important part of what he had to say. For there was absolutely nothing organically wrong with her. He repeated this as he went out of the door, and again to the family who were waiting downstairs to hear his verdict. But he was in a hurry now, and no longer took any notice of the precious things which jingled along the shelves of the hall as he strode past with his heavy tread.

A few days later Clara was having supper upstairs alone with her sister. A heavy responsibility had fallen on her – not only for the whole house and its upkeep, but also for the care of a woman whose thoughts, day and night, were now directed on this house with a ruthlessness never before known to the family. Edith’s eyes could no longer be said to rest on objects; she now raked through them with a glance so reckless and scathing that the more fragile stuff could not be expected to last long under it. This evening, however, after the meal, she lay for some time with her eyes shut, and Clara, praying that the obsession was passing, drew in deep breaths at the open window. It was a beautiful October evening. Below her the weekly gardener was brushing up the leaves, and soon the smoke from his bonfire drifted through the room. To Clara the smell was a narcotic, reminiscent of autumn days stretching back through monotonous years, and of the blue haze which hung in the wintry, upper rooms of the house – scarcely opened except for the spring and autumn cleaning. But Edith opened her eyes and sniffed the air with triumph.

‘You must begin with this room, Clara,’ she cried, suddenly sitting up straight and staring about her sharply. ‘That bureau over there has worried me for a long time. You see how it is packed with letters and papers which must be burned at once. No, of course they are not valuable. Why should they be? I don’t intend to look over them. They must simply be taken out, bundle by bundle, and put on that bonfire. It is better than choking the chimney. Yes, Clara, of course I mean what I am saying! I am not ill and I am not joking.’

Just before darkness fell that evening, Clara came slowly from the bedroom and down the stairs with her arms full of papers. Her brothers followed her out into the garden, keeping some little distance from her, like sober attendants on a bride, and automatically catching at the white strips and ribbons of paper which blew about her in the wind. At first the flames did not seem strong enough to consume the dense wads of superior notepaper, but after a while the sheets blew open, revealing for a glaring second time-honoured secrets of home and business, scraps of ancient family scandal and a smattering of long-forgotten endearments. Exclamation marks and question marks quivered together on the paper, and formidable lists of figures curled up swiftly into scrolls of fire. When the flames died down there was nothing left but some flimsy black scales floating in the air, and a grey ash on the ground.

The fire had not brought any colour to Clara’s face. She was paler than ever as she walked upstairs again to Edith’s room. It was her sister who was flushed, as though the flames had burned her cheeks.

‘The men can help you tomorrow,’ was all she said. ‘It is a beginning, anyway.’ She turned to the wall without another word and Clara left the room.

‘The doctor said it was particularly important not to give in to her,’ she said to her brothers as she wished them goodnight. They could not tell from her voice whether this was an apology or a challenge, and she looked preoccupied – uncertainly opening and shutting drawers and continually glancing about the room as she spoke as though sizing the place up after a long absence.

‘What is this?’ she asked, picking up an object from the sideboard as she was turning to leave.

‘What is that?’ replied James, looking uneasily at it. ‘Why, Clara – what are you talking about? You can see it is a brush with a curved handle. It has been there for years – and with a tray to match. There are two others like it in the drawer.’

‘Yes, that is true – and what are they all for?’ said Clara with unaccustomed sharpness.

‘What are they for? Why, surely they are crumb-brushes, Clara. You must have known they were for brushing crumbs off a tea-table!’

‘Then must there be three of them?’ exclaimed Clara. ‘Do we make more crumbs than anybody else, in this house? Is it likely that this one will get worn out with brushing in our lifetime – that there must always be two in reserve? It is very unlikely that I, at any rate shall use another brush while I live – far less the two of them. Do you even know how old I am?’

‘But of course, Clara,’ her brother replied hurriedly, ‘and there are certainly not an excessive quantity of crumbs about the place. Why must we discuss the brushes, if it upsets you? They were not ours, in the first place. You have forgotten that they came to us with the napkin rings and hot water bottles when Aunt Helen gave up her house. If they are not used, they can be handed down. What has your age to do with it, Clara? You are too sensitive about that. We remember you are the youngest. And we do not expect you to use three crumb-brushes.’

Clara tossed her head and left the room. But her brothers remained standing together long afterwards, apprehensively staring about them, and puzzling over the meaning of various objects which they had caught sight of for the first time.

Two days later, in the absence of the gardener, Clara made her own bonfire – a magnificent affair, far bigger than the last, and lighting the whole garden up to the tops of the highest trees. When the three brothers came out of the house to see it they exclaimed in admiration. This time they could show little interest in what was being burned, for great flames destroyed the boxes and packets before they could be identified, but they drew nearer, step by step, to warm themselves, and their eyes shone outrageously in the light. Every now and then, as the garden grew darker, the fire threw a shimmer of light upon the front of the house. When this happened the woman and the three men stood motionless to stare at the quivering windows and wagging chimneys and at the grey stone which swelled and trembled as though it were no more solid than parchment. Now Joseph, the oldest man, went striding off quickly towards the house and returned in a few minutes with a heap of papers which the flames tore from his hands and devoured with a roar as soon as he had thrown them down.

‘Papers are not enough to keep it going,’ said Clara as the fire subsided again. She went back to the house, running this time, and returned, out of breath, with a couple of heavy wooden trays.

‘There was no time to pick and choose,’ she explained. ‘I took the largest of the half-dozen behind the sideboard. At any rate they will keep it going while we find more stuff.’

They waited for a moment to see the flames lick round the tray-handles which were carved in the shape of crouching monkeys, gripping melons between their fingers.

‘What a sin to waste them – and all the people who must be wanting trays!’ cried Clara, shuddering with disgust and pleasure. All four of them now started to run towards the house, looking back over their shoulders to judge how long the fire might last. Clara sped upstairs – but not to her sister’s room. For the moment she had almost forgotten about Edith. Instead she ran to a spare bedroom, and opening the drawers of a large chest, she began to shake out rolls of cloth and undo the great bags of woollen underwear. Mothballs bounced about the floor as she dug down into the piles with her fingers, but at last she had pulled out as big an armful as she could carry. The men were in the garden before her, however, making for the corner where a thin smoke still rose, and carrying between them as many inflammable objects as they had been able to lay hands on. With their awkward loads and anxious faces, they had the look of people working to save their possessions from a burning house, having caught up the first things which came to hand. James, in the lead, was carrying a basket-chair, piled up with raffia table-mats which he tossed on, one after the other, when he was still some distance away from the fire. Bursts of flame and a crackling like a forest going up forced them to stand aside when the chair went on; and the work-baskets, tea-cosies, clothes-brushes and picture-frames which followed the chair were lost at once in a blaze which sent sparks flying far above the chimneys of the house. This was no ordinary fire. It was more exhilarating than an explosion of sky-rockets. Beyond the vibrating circle where they stood, they caught glimpses of a house which appeared to rock gently on the quaking ground. Clouds, flowers and iron railings trembled together, and the agitation of their own faces made them appear to one another like persons undergoing, moment by moment, the most violent changes of emotion from quivering despair to the wildest glee. When the time came for Clara to unwrap her bundles of underwear their spirits were dampened.

‘Perhaps they will smother the fire,’ said Clara as she threw on the pants, vests and combinations bequeathed from uncles and great uncles who had died young, long before they could wear a hole in the wool. But when she saw the flames slowly eating through the outer layer she added: ‘There must be thousands of people who could do with them – people without a stitch to their backs. What a waste and a sin!’

But the sin and the shame of it stirred them to even greater efforts, and they prodded at the fire until it leapt up again to devour a clothes-horse and a couple of small wooden cake-stands in a matter of minutes.

It was dark before the fire at last fell apart into a smouldering heap of ashes. Clara and her brothers were so exhausted with their orgy of destruction that they could scarcely stand upright, but as they approached the house they lifted their heads and stared up at it boldly. A little of the stuffing had already been taken out of it – even through the darkness they could feel that. The stone did not seem as smooth to them now. They could imagine it dented, here and there, where the surface caved in over certain hollow patches, odd corners which were not packed so tightly as before, and in spite of their exhaustion they felt a quiet satisfaction in the evening’s work.

After super Clara went up to see her sister. She was sitting up in bed, reading, looking fresh-cheeked and rested, and she glanced up with a smile when her sister came in. There was no mention of bonfires, but Clara asked casually, as she drew the curtains: ‘I suppose you will be getting up tomorrow?’

‘Hardly so soon,’ replied Edith. ‘No, not yet – it is not quite time for me to get up and come downstairs, if that is what you mean. But I will certainly dress and get up for tea in my bedroom. That will be a beginning and help to cheer you all up.’

They were not cheerful as they brought up the heavy trays to her room next afternoon, but they sat with an expectant air, talking absentmindedly and listening for the sound of the lorry which arrived at this hour every week to remove the rubbish. They heard it at last a long distance away, coming up the steep road below their garden wall, and while it laboriously turned the corner of their drive, they excused themselves one by one and went out to meet it, accompanying it for the last few yards of the way as though guiding a triumphal car to the chosen place. When the three dustbin men saw this place – not the mean pair of ashcans, nor the paltry pile of tins, papers and grass-cuttings, but a great hillock of soft stuff, studded with glinting ornaments – they stopped some distance off and approached it reverently on foot. In five minutes, having prodded through the top layer, they returned to the family who were waiting nearby.

‘Say – what’s going on, here?’ asked one, pointing to what he held up in his other hand – a green china mermaid, who also pointed with a puzzled air to the wave on which she sat. ‘Are you moving off or what? Sure, that’s a funny way to be doing it – clearing out all the fancy stuff and hanging on to the plain. Maybe you’ve made a mistake, folks. We’re not buying and we’re not selling and we’re not mending and we’re not shifting the stuff to any other place. There, it’s on the lorry – Cleansing Department – and that’s us. In other words – your things are for the dump!’

But as they only backed away, nodding and smiling, he went after them.

‘Tell us what’s up,’ he shouted. ‘For all I know you’ve got heirlooms and all tucked away under that little pile! And what about her?’ He brandished the mermaid in front of them, but James waved him back nervously and angrily, exclaiming: ‘Take it away! Take them all away! There is nothing to discuss. There is illness here – a nervous breakdown in the house. The things are to be removed in the normal way, and there is nothing more to be said!’ Still shouting he disappeared with the rest of them inside the house.

The men now got to work on the pile with gusto and without wasting further words. The inmates of the house might be cracked, but the stuff they unearthed was unbelievably whole – basins and ewers, teapots and metal trays which had not taken a dint or a crack in fifty years, china baskets of unchipped violets and draped dancing figures without a pointed toe or finger missing. They lay together, smugly shining there amongst beaded shoes and piled soup-plates, as though on their usual spring-clean outing.

The family did not come out again, but the men worked on in frenzied enthusiasm in case they might suddenly appear with a changed mind about their possessions. They now went at the pile without plan or method, scarcely looking at the stuff, but grimly lifting up the clinking armfuls towards the lorry. Small ornaments fell and were ground underfoot as they staggered about, and they began to shout and threaten one another over each coveted piece. Like some deep archaeological site, the heap revealed layers of life in the history of the house – layers which, although only laid down that morning, contained objects which had not, before that, seen the light of day for a generation. The flimsier stuff, skimmed from the tops of drawers and shelves, had been deposited first, and this the rising wind took up and whirled along with the dust and leaves. Clawing at the ground, the men ran, shouting, after ghostly, lacey evening gloves which spread themselves against tree-trunks, and oriental fruit-baskets and initialled collar-boxes which bowled, lightly as hoops, in front of them.

At last, the furious slamming of the lorry doors brought the whole family to the windows in time to see the men drive off at a breakneck pace down the drive and around the corner. Behind them, where the dazzling hillock had stood, there was now only a churned-up patch of ground where fragments of glass and china lay, and on the long grass nearby stray ribbons and tassels hung mournfully. When the dust from the lorry had settled, the others looked at Edith who had stood beside them in her dressing-gown and was now turning to go back to her room.

‘You are surely not going back to bed, Edith,’ said Edgar reprovingly. ‘Not now. Not after you have seen all the changes that are going on these days. Will we expect you down for supper tonight? Surely you will dress and come down for a little while and tomorrow you will feel yourself again. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the gaps in the cupboards and the open space on the top landing. We have heard you opening and shutting the drawers all morning.’

‘I feel a different person – I admit it,’ Edith replied as she walked away, ‘– different, but not absolutely better yet. You certainly cannot hurry an illness like mine, Edgar. In a day or so. One more day, perhaps, will make all the difference. It depends on so many things.’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the things as she looked back from her bedroom. Calmly she stared through the other doors and at the heavy brass lamp on which a nymph, still smiling, writhed in an effort to hold up the fringed parchment shade, and beyond that to a massive wardrobe with its magnificent false top, and at the bursting trunks wedged so tightly under the beds that the mattresses above had grown hideously deformed over the years. Finally she lifted her head and gazed, without hatred, up the steep stairs towards the attic. They noticed then what they had never seen before – the extraordinary determination of her chin, so like the chins in all the framed photos of the house, but now to be seen jutting out with a witch-like ruthlessness which outdid all the rest.

‘Sell or burn.’ She murmured these words, as she gently closed the door behind her. Less than a week ago it would have seemed as though the devil himself had spoken, but now they stood around savouring them, listening for more. But there was silence in the house, except for the sly creaking of the bed as Edith climbed into it again.

The auctioneer’s men started to work early the next afternoon. The gaps in corridors and cupboards widened behind them as they tramped about, and great spaces opened out in the rooms whose surfaces had already been smoothed of ornament. They worked slowly and cautiously, half expecting that the inmates of the house, who stood about crossing items off lists, would change their minds, or stampede to the front steps to say a last goodbye. But there was no interruption, and when they came to the attic they had the place to themselves.

Downstairs, the family – all five of them – were sitting round the table in the dining-room. There was nothing on the table, and they sat silently in the fading light, looking before them and listening as intently as people at a séance, waiting for the vibrations to start. The first indication of movement in the attic was the faint smell of dust which sifted down to them from three floors above – a familiar enough smell, but one which this evening gave to their nostrils a sensation lively as the tingle of snuff. Then they knew that the soft quilt of stuff on top was being gradually moved. It was not much yet, but they could feel it slowly lifting from them, as though a heavy swathe of hair was being lifted up and cut from their aching heads. Next they heard the grinding of things being forced painfully from the positions they had held for years, and the formidable thud and rattle as they were dragged down from stair to stair on to the landing below. It seemed as though the whole house was splitting from the top; and automatically the family below raised their hands to their heads. When they removed them again the noise overhead had stopped. Up there was silence and emptiness. Still the grinding and thudding went on in the corridor beside them, but a pressure had been removed from the top of their skulls and from the nerves at the back of their necks. It was even easier to hold up their heads, they discovered, and they lifted them quickly now to watch Edith who had got up from the table and was whipping off the photos from the mantelpiece and windowsill, from desks and bookcases and the tops of china-cupboards. In a few seconds the eyes which had not wavered for years – eyes grave, wistful, stern and piercing, but all terrible in their watchfulness – and disappeared. The photos, in a neat pile with faces down, had been placed in a corner of the sideboard. It was as easy as that to be rid of onlookers. The people round the table allowed themselves to smile at the audacity of this idea, but nevertheless a conspirator’s brightness shone from their own eyes as they glanced about.

Though relieved of the pressure in their chests and heads, they slept badly that night. Like people unused to a rarefied atmosphere, they were restless and their nerves were on edge; and after twelve o’clock the wind began. At first it was only a breeze from the open windows – a welcome fluttering of curtains and loose papers breaking the stillness. In half an hour the wind had risen to a hysterical note, and gusts of rain, sharp as nails, struck tiles and windows and swept through the chips of gravel on the path, grinding them together with a sound like pebbles grinding on the shore. In the early hours of the morning, when the gale was at its height, the house, without its ballast, shook like a hollow ship at sea, and from all parts came a drumming, a rattling and a banging as though doors and windows had been suddenly prised open to let the furies in. But nobody got up to investigate. As though by a mutual agreement from they day before, they lay rigid the whole night through – letting the house rip.

In the morning Edith was up first. The others, waking slowly from their first, deep sleep, heard her voice calling to them from overhead, and giving themselves time for only a glance at the flooded garden, they dressed and went up to find her. She stood in a corner of the empty attic, surrounded by all the buckets and basins she had collected together and listening with interest to the variation of notes struck from them by the rapid drops of water falling from the roof. Craters and grey rings of damp covered the celling and the floor was thick with drifts of plaster which had blown far and wide, so that even the webs in distant corners were hung with a fine white dust.

‘But there is more to see down below,’ said Edith, after they had listened to a full range of musical notes for some time. Following her down through the house, they were soon aware that, in the attic, they had only seen where the softening-up had taken place – a crumbling at the top which had convulsed the body of the building with more spectacular results.

The house had plainly given up. It had allowed the screws to loosen and the hinges to crack, and let the watery blisters rise under the face of paint. Tiles, sticking grimly to the roof through the storms of years, had been lifted in a matter of minutes, like slices of bread off a board. The glass lay everywhere. Long splinters were piled under the broken windows, and shining crumbs of it, fine as sugar, crunched under their feet in odd corners as they moved about. Throughout the morning they came on the fragments inside old shoes or in the folds of newspapers. They cut their fingers on it in the fringes of rugs and down the sides of armchairs. In every fireplace a heap of soot had fallen and lay, thickly quilting hearths and rugs and thinning out to sift with the leaves and plaster around passages where the cold wind still blew. It was difficult, they discovered, to get out of their own front door. Pushing against a bank of sodden leaves and twigs, they came face to face with a great, jagged branch which had fallen against the steps, and was still quivering and clawing at the door with a persistency which made them draw back at once into the hall with a feeling of panic. For as long as the scraping went on they remained inside, whispering and peering occasionally out into the garden through the slot of the letter-box.

Only when the wind had died down did they begin to hear the complaint of the house itself. There was a creaking and a wheezing about them, and a far-off rattling of unidentified broken things from places which they had not yet investigated. They could hear the heavy shifting of the house through all its loosened boards and joints, like a patient cautiously turning over to feel which of his limbs pain him most, and from overhead a faint whine and whistle in the chimneys and a half-hearted hiss as another puff of soot came down. But above all it was the huge sighing of the building which they heard, as a last gust of wind blew through it from end to end. They recognized it at once as a sigh which came from the bottom of its heart – a heart from which, in the last week, they had extracted as much life-blood as it was possible to take away without a complete collapse ensuing. The foreboding which, since morning, had increased in all of them except Edith, they now diagnosed in one another as the growing pangs of guilt.

Edith had now to work harder than she had ever done before to disperse the atmosphere of this guilt which hung about the place and threatened to thicken and congeal in the empty spaces where they had felt such light-heartedness only a few days before. She set about the task bravely, but at times it was too much even for her.

‘It is a case of complete breakdown, I am sorry to say,’ she would remark, as she came across further signs of damage in the next few days. ‘We have done everything we could for it all these years. No people could have done more. But now is the time to make a change. Luckily for us, we have done most of the moving already – we have only ourselves to take away now. If other people can move themselves, so can we.’

But they were not convinced. Indeed if they had taken pickaxes and sledge-hammers to the house, they could not have felt more responsible for the damage. Nevertheless, it could perhaps be patched and propped again. The harm was extensive but not, after all, so serious. If necessary they could even pack the place up with furniture again – they could replace and rebuild and reorganize, and in a few years they might manage to make up to the house something of what it had lost and suffered at their hands. They would take it upon themselves.

‘We will take it upon ourselves.’ This was the phrase they repeated over and over again in answer to all the consolation and suggestion which Edith offered them. Already they were sagging under the weight. Again they had begun to assume the resigned, identical expressions of a united family – still shaken, but ready for their folly to be forgiven and forgotten. Very soon they would try to go back, not to where they had started, but far further back to a state of absolute and unquestioning innocence. Decidedly, they were to give up the rest of their lives to regain favour with God and house.

Their elder sister now began to search the place methodically from top to bottom, as though her own life depended on it. She would disappear early in the day, to be found hours later, moving about on her knees in some dark corner, or lying flat on her back, prodding and knocking on a low slant of roof above her head; or they would hear her in some distant part of the house, stamping slowly about in a circle, as though engaged in some ritual dance of her own. There were times when they wondered whether she might be searching for hidden treasure, known only to herself, or thumping the walls to find some secret cupboard where the family fortune lay. Most of the time, however, they took little notice and seldom mentioned it amongst themselves. The possibilities in human nature had only lately been opened up to them, and it was a discovery which, given time and their usual routine, they hoped would one day be completely forgotten as though it had never been made.

Meantime Edith appeared to have lost interest in the damage in the house. She passed by the wastes of damp, the cracking plaster and broken windows many times every day, with scarcely a glance, and made no comment when, after six days, slater and plasterer had failed to turn up. Nor did she comment on the limitations of her three brothers who stood about much of the time with their loose, clean hands at their sides or deep in the pockets of jackets which they had never removed. She had nothing to say about all this because she had better things to hope for. She was hoping in fact for bigger and deeper damage – damage long-standing, spectacular and terrible to cure. Dry rot was her aim.

She found what she was looking for one evening in a small unused bedroom downstairs, which until lately had contained a chest-of-drawers, a bed, and a marble washstand with ewers. There was nothing here now except one cane chair against the wall and a picture over the fireplace. Where the furniture had been, pale shapes, complete with knobs and spirals, were traced on the wallpaper, and above them, one long rectangular strip where a school photo had hung, keeping in living memory for over sixty years two hundred boys in striped blazers and tabbed socks. The remaining picture was a sombre reproduction in brown and white, but its subject was a garden in midsummer, where a family of young men and women were giving a tea party to their friends. There was nothing sombre about these people; they were obviously a frolicking crowd with generous and careless habits. Fruit of all kinds had been allowed to spill from baskets into the grass where tame birds pecked at it. A puppy was lapping up the milk running from a jug which had been knocked over in the midst of some game, or perhaps by the foot of the girl in a white dress who was swinging in a hammock above. Behind her in the distance could be seen an imposing house, not unlike their own, and at the gate stood an eager young man, identical with the other men in the picture, but showing by his anxious face and his untidy necktie that he had seen the world and found it wanting, and was now only too thankful to be back. As she stared at this picture – A Homecoming – Edith stamped mechanically but strenuously at the floorboards beneath it.

She did not need to stamp long. After a minute her foot went softly through the crumbling wood and a long piece of boarding fell in, covered on its inner side with a thick web of greyish-white strands, blotched here and there with blue and yellow patches. Edith fell on her knees and peered down into the area which had suddenly split open under her eyes. It was a place of primeval dampness and darkness, smelling of must and decay, but seeming, at first sight, to be nothing more than a disagreeable hollow under the floor. As she became accustomed to the darkness, however, she saw that what she stared into was not an empty hole but a world, well-established and powerful, where a secret growth had been going on, over months or years, spreading insidiously about the roots of the house. Here and there, springing out of the darkness, white blotches could be seen, stuck like tufts of cotton wool to the rotting wood, and between the black cracks spongey, yellowing mushrooms grew out. Further down, spread widely over the level places, was a layer of poisonous-looking red powder. Only one corner had been opened up, but Edith knew she knelt over a place where life had spawned and spread in the darkness over a vast area, wider and deeper than anything she had imagined during her rapping and stamping of the past week.

‘This, at any rate, had nothing to do with us,’ said Edith, when she had summoned the family together. ‘The place will die of it sooner or later, if nothing is done. No doubt something will be done. But not by us. We brought it safely through its choked drains and its damp spots. We patched it up where it was thin. Pruned it down where it bulged. We can’t forget the money spent to give it space to expand at the back, the cost of the paint it soaked up, year after year, to prevent the rust from getting it! But the cure of this is beyond us. We have our own health to think of. We are not surgeons or nurses to stand by at operations of this scale! Let it go to somebody else. As for us, there is nothing else for it – we must get out and stay out!’

As they stepped forward, one after the other, to look down into the opening, they breathed an air which smelt not only of decay, but also of certain freedom. This time they saw there was nothing more for them to do. Under these boards conscience could be finally buried. They would pack up and leave the place forever.

On a dark morning in the middle of November, they stood together for the last time outside the front door of the house.

‘We have everything to look forward to!’ exclaimed Edith after a long silence, while they braced themselves for the final departure. It was true, at any rate, that they were looking straight in front of them now – down the stony drive, and beyond it to the bleak stretches of empty fields, already beginning to darken under the rain. It was not, after all, the whole world which was before them, but a small hotel nearby, from where they would carry on the long-drawn-out negotiations over the head of the house. California and the decks of the ocean liners were as far off as they had ever been, and it was too late to group themselves, as their relations had done many times before them, for an exuberant send-off photo on the front steps of the house. The men required every scrap of jauntiness still left in them simply to carry the luggage down to the gates, and the women, worn out with their own displays of excitement and enthusiasm, had let their faces fall again, and now longed only to settle as soon as possible under some other roof.

They did not look back when they came to the gates, and when they were beyond them they did not immediately shake the dust of the place from their feet, for nothing as soft as dust had been under them. But the three men put down their cases and sat down outside to remove, for the last time, the cruel pieces of gravel which had lodged in the heels of their shoes. This done, and walking with greater confidence and dignity, they passed out of sight of the house forever.