Faustine (4 page)

The night I arrived in England – the night of 20 June – was as unexpected in its outcome as the afternoon had been, my early half-acknowledged memories of the place becoming quickly overlaid by the contrived memories of a woman who was a monster, whether she was alive or dead. And so this tentative sense of
déjà vu
was cancelled, making a mockery of my journey, reminding me yet again, if I needed
reminding
, that my childhood was well and truly buried and that wherever I might choose to look for myself, I would find only evidence of another life.

I suppose some stubborn wish still lingered in me, drove me up the wide flight of stairs, rather than out through the whispering green door into the beginnings – at least – of the world of today, a world with telephones and a taxi sitting on the narrow road that makes a black line between the river and the downs. Some vague hope that my grandmother had lived and worked here once, at least; had left a memento perhaps, a clue as to where I might find her now, made me hold the wide, pale oak banister as I went upstairs thickly carpeted like the museum/hall below. A wish made me go, even if it were to have a gloomy answer (and I feared, for some reason, the little Norman church I had spied from the cobbled courtyard, the line of graves where Muriel might, just conceivably, be buried). I had to know, and I climbed to the top of the flight and walked as if by instinct to a door
that was left ajar, a glimpse of bed and lace quilt visible beyond.

The room was succumbing, as the hall beneath had already, through the thickness of wistaria and clematis
pressing
against panes that were small and diamond-shaped, to an evening gloom; but here, one storey higher, the sun came in a direct shaft that made me think of the dawn rites at Stonehenge – ahead of where I stood and probably not more than half a mile away as the crow flies. The orange beam of light blinded me for a moment, and I stood feeling
ridiculously
defenceless in this part of the house, to which I had most definitely not been welcomed by Mr and Mrs Neidpath. I felt, at the same time, a presence – though whether it was at the other side of the old manor, down one of the landings and further flights of stairs I had seen on reaching the top of the principal flight, I couldn’t at first say. Lisa Crane was just possibly inured here, I thought – and I cursed myself for being a reader of trash gossip columns and not even retaining the information I had lazily ingested. Somewhere within the walls of the house – and thus accounting for the feeling of a lair, a sanctuary, rather than an arranged
exhibition
of her life – Lisa Crane might by lying, asleep, with the Neidpaths as her custodians. I thought, even, I could hear the quiet tread of the couple as they climbed the stairs, and the faint clink of china and cutlery on a tray; they were very likely bringing her evening meal and must have
considered
me long gone, slipping out most probably when they were engaged elsewhere in the house. My agitation suddenly doubled. What if they had gone to the top of the drive, seen the taxi, impatient of waiting, no longer there, and considered me ensconced in it, already approaching the
suburbs
of Salisbury, the spire rising to greet me and the
dolmens
of Stonehenge left well behind? What then? How was
I to explain myself? So great was the power of the slumbering house, of the past that choked any idea of the present-day or the mundane, that I found the very concept of ringing for another taxi quite laughable. Somehow, even if the
Neidpaths
in their Cerberus’ gate room to the life-in-death
chamber
of Lisa Crane possessed the telephone already fantasized about and longed for in my dangerous position here, I could barely see them lifting the receiver and calling to a denizen of the outside world.

As it happened, a second burst of noise from the downs – the first had caused only a flicker of interest, I remembered, but this was much louder – stopped the footsteps on the stairs for at least a minute, if not more, and made me realize, as a police siren and wail of ambulance followed, that the road running along the boundary of the manor’s grounds was the focus for all this activity. The hippies, as Maureen had eagerly informed me, were at their most disruptive at Stonehenge at the time of the summer solstice. The road would by now be almost certainly out of bounds, the taxi dismissed back to the rank at the station.

The steps resumed and, coming up to the door, paused for a moment before John Neidpath came in with a tray – as I had rightly surmised – with folded napiery and a bowl of soup and a half-bottle of a very yellow wine, glinting in the last of the setting sun.

John Neidpath – as if it were the most run-of-the-mill thing that I should be in this room (and, as I looked hastily round in the dying light, I saw it was a master bedroom, almost without doubt the bedroom of Lisa Crane herself) – set the tray down on a rosewood table at the foot of the bed and informed me in a quiet, neutral voice that my car had indeed been sent away and that the road in front of the manor’s thick shrubbery was blockaded by police at both ends.

Then, apologizing for the lack of a dining-room ‘at
present
’, he made his way out of the room, flicking on an array of downlighters and brightly coloured sixties lighting
equipment
as he went.

 *

I ate the soup and I drank the wine. It was very quiet (there was no TV or radio). I lay on the bed, with its lacy flounces, its patchwork of purple satin that hangs over the headboard like a pious reminder of those heady days of fame and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I dreamed of the great stars of the past, and the marijuana-scented picnics on the lawns outside, by the bushes of wild briar and the clumps of bamboo that hide the river and the boathouse beyond. I dreamed of the boathouse, where Maureen had said there had been an invasion of gypsies … of hippies with guitars and fiddles and dogs – in the long reeds by the boggy marshland there.

 *

When I woke, it was the middle of the night. A Tiffany lamp, ruby glass with showers of droplets around the base of the shade, was trembling a little, as if a footfall had disturbed the room; or as if the equilibrium of the whole house, marooned in secrecy for years, had suffered from some unwonted intrusion. I lay with my eyes wide open. There, ahead of me, were the decorative panels, showing Lisa Crane blown-up, giant portraits, grainy and fading now, by Bailey and Donovan; there, to the left of me on a marble table inlaid with the faces of the Beatles and Lisa, all Lorelei hair floating across her beautiful face, was a pile of books. The slight shaking of the glass fringes of the art nouveau lamp subsided and the room was as quiet as before. But I was awake now – and for good. I reached out for the book on top of the pile. Were these arranged too for the maximum illusion of time standing still? Would I find the works of the new Utopians
of Lisa’s age, the Laings and Buckminster Fullers; the
Step
penwolf
and
Magus
of those distant years? I lifted the book. It was heavy and a sweet, oniony smell came from the pages as it fell open on the quilt in front of me. Mrs Beeton’s
Book
of
Household
Management.
My surprise caused me to read the title of the book out aloud.

I felt, at that moment – it is hard to describe, but the nearest I ever came to it, I think, was when I walked one night alone from school to home, and in the dark bushes in the last stretch of the road something breathed, or made itself known – a sense of the existence of something in the room, and then it was gone; I felt a presence hovering round me as I opened the old book of household management and stared down at the flyleaf, with its spattered trails and smears from long past.

It was the name – how long did it take me to see the name, written there in a small, neat hand? – the name, as unobtrusive and efficiently presented as a housekeeper, a keeper of the keys, was expected to be, each letter joined to the next with an almost schoolgirlish respect for form and continuity. Still, the name was as I first saw it; and as it jumped out at me, a slight flutter from the paper
photo-panels,
half decayed now after twenty years’ exposure, made me look up again and into the eyes of Lisa Crane, magnified in the poster to lakes of darkness. But I registered the name and understood it and my heart gave a leap of joy. Muriel Twyman, read the faded script. Then, further down the page, and demonstrating, as if it were needed, the
compelling
urge to imprint herself everywhere, to own every scrap of paper as well as all the wealth and beauty in the world, lay the flourish and the signature of Lisa Crane.

So she had been here! My instinct was right. My memories of my grandmother always in the kitchen – the steamy air
and the smell of meat stews, warmed and warmed again if my mother was late coming in; the gingerbread men that she was proud of making and I always hid in a crevice under the chair because I couldn’t abide the taste.

Of course, Muriel had been a cook and housekeeper here for Lisa Crane.

She still is, very possibly.

She’s away somewhere, and Mr and Mrs Neidpath have taken over until she returns.

But my heart grows heavy. The cold, antiseptic kitchen downstairs is no temporary fixture. The atmosphere of Muriel is nowhere here.

And I know I must understand that this is final proof that she is dead.

 *

The door of the room opens and a man is standing there. He comes in, and I feel nothing but the faint breath of cool wind that seems to come in with him. I feel I have seen him somewhere before. I am too frightened to feel fear.

The man is in a dark suit. He is elegant, somewhere in his late forties. His eyebrows very nearly meet over his black eyes. His rage is cold, so cold that I’m frozen into the lacy sheets, the frivolous foam of Lisa Crane’s bed.

‘What in hell are you doing here?’ he says.

And before I can speak, he has gone. But I see, suddenly, the man on the train, with the handmade shoes built up at the heel.

If he lives here, why didn’t he come to the house at the same time as me?

Dawn has come very early. It’s midsummer. It’s bright. There’s a distant shouting from the downs, as the day of the solstice breaks at last. A creeper with bright-green leaves knocks against the window and a bird begins to sing.

I get up and go out on the landing. A blueish half-light lies over the bales of silks and gold-striped saris and straw hats Lisa must have left there on purpose, to remind her of days of travel, of Hollywood nights and dinners on mountain tops in Nepal and Kathmandu. The blue light gives them a drowsy air, as if they had already become a part of her dream and would crumble to dust if touched or picked up.

I go down to the mausoleum, which is lit with an
incandescent
mauve and magenta glow, and pass a little altar to Lisa’s love – a red rose under a glass dome, a picture of an impossibly handsome young man, dancing, twirling, falling on his knees; a triptych of images in black and white, of Lisa and her lover together, smiling, holding hands, smothered in confetti with palm trees and the neon lights of a casino just beyond. And I push open the green baize door that takes me out on to the stone passage and chocolate-brown and green paint of the far side of Woodford Manor. I know I must leave now. Muriel is dead and long gone. I have no place here, and never did.

 *

Although it’s so early, Mrs Neidpath is in the kitchen and
the electric kettle is giving out a long plume of steam. The back door is open too, and John Neidpath is washing down the cobbles with a stiff broom and a pail of water. The air, the glimpse of trees beyond, are as sweet as freedom to a prisoner. And I think, I was fortunate to escape this place, for something about it is like a web; and whether or not Lisa Crane is the spider lying at its centre, I am no fly. I resolve not even to ask who the strange man was who came into my room and vented his rage on me so devastatingly. After all, none of it has anything to do with me.

But John Neidpath, quite by accident – just by pushing his bucket over and releasing a gully of soapy, mud-coloured water – holds up my immediate flight, my attempt to walk, crawl or hitchhike back to Salisbury. He digs into his pocket for a cloth as I waver, in my thin-soled shoes, on the brink of the spreading flood.

It was then, as I turned to look out at the untenanted village green and the little church beyond, in the hope, I suppose, of seeing someone – a vicar, a parishioner, anyone who would help me from this place – that I saw a woman walking on the soft, mossy grass.

She had her back to me, but I could see that she was old.

And I recognized, with a pang, the fact that Muriel must be in her early seventies now; that I would hardly know her, very probably, if I came up against her just anywhere.

But here is where I have come to look for her. And the woman in the dull raincoat, with the headscarf and the basket with blue and red flowers from the overgrown garden at Woodford Manor, can only be one person. She is Muriel Twyman. My grandmother.

The woman walks away from me – as I run, under the curious eyes of Mr and Mrs Neidpath, over wet cobbles to the path that skirts that soft expanse of grass. (It must have
been a bowling-green once, I decide, where villagers,
grateful
for the space allocated for their leisure by the lord and lady of the manor, played on summer evenings, the thwack of the wooden ball on the ground seeming to ring in my head from ages past. Would Lisa Crane – given that she was still there, of course – care to think of the comforts of her labourers, provide them with the amenities which once had bound owner and tenant, employer and worker, in some sort of mutual agreement? I doubted it. Lisa Crane thought only of herself.) And as I ran after the fast-disappearing figure, which turned under an arch of yew, hidden from sight by a dovecot that leant precariously on stone supports, I realized I was within a minute or so of understanding the relationship of Lisa Crane to my poor grandmother. This woman, who lay becalmed in a monstrous memorial to the years of her youth and beauty, must employ her in some way, must depend on the legendary kindness of Muriel for her continued existence in the world.

I run – and as I dodge past the dovecot, all its
nesting-holes
empty and abandoned now like the buildings round the village green, I see her again and I call out for her to stop.

She does. She turns and stares at me, framed in the
archway
like some ridiculous sentimental picture, like the
Victorian
Christmas cards Bill Fisher’s old mother used to collect, in her bungalow in the suburbs of Melbourne.

‘Grandma!’ I call again. I am aware too, as she stands there uncertain, that we resemble some kind of masque – played out on an English green as a pageant at a fête – one of those morality plays where everyone dresses up as someone else and good triumphs over evil in the end.

But, as in the fairy-tales most alarming to a child (
Red
Riding
Hood,
perhaps, as the most extreme case of mistaken
identity, of innocence betrayed), my grandmother doesn’t seem too sure of who I am at all. Like the Neidpaths’ odd combination of both knowing and not knowing who I am, the old lady stands irresolute under her covering of yew, while the sun streams down on her and lights up her face and – she has removed her headscarf now – her grey hair.

She comes, a step or two at a time, to meet me.

And now it is my turn to wonder if this can be Muriel. But how can one know what changes age will make, over nearly a quarter of a century? For those who weren’t there to see the pre-emptive leaps, the bounds towards death, what gauge can there be of identity?

She stops. She looks as if she has seen a ghost.

‘Who is it?’ says the old woman, who, I suddenly know, is not my grandmother at all.

And when I say, I’m Ella, her face breaks out in a smile and she hurries now to fold me in her arms.