The Bad Sister (42 page)

The searching eyes of the outside world had caused Uncle Rainbow's house to turn into a succession of boxes. In defence, each room and staircase fitted neatly into each other, with hinges and grooves that flew open when the house expanded and Uncle Rainbow, attended by Letty, made his occasional walks. This Chinese arrangement gave the house a closed-up look, and even on the more innocent days, when the boxes were sprawled like a child's building bricks over the lawns, or on moonless nights when they hummed with music, it was impossible to forget how forbidding and stacked-away it could appear. From the conjunction all round the house and gardens of the first ancient roads, and the henges of wood and stone which first gave shape to man's seeing mind, and the woods where the first human acts had been committed and recognized, the house was forced to protect itself. The hall had a filmy air, as if it might be obliged to disappear at any moment. Even Uncle Rainbow's extraordinary treasures, collected from a life of wandering the world, seemed to suffer under the attack of this vortex of the south. There was no question of animation here. The house boarded itself up against the power of spring. It could provide no memories, or returning spirits: only the eyes, fierce as bluebells against the window, transfixed it for ever in a passive and helpless state.

My mother, though she was used to the shrieking winds
and violences of the north, fell easily into the muffled tones and silence that smelt of crystallized fruit which hung on the landings at Uncle Rainbow's. From the moment she said: ‘Well Letty, here we are at last. How nice to see you', she visibly gave herself to the house. Her eye went in pleasure round the objects trapped all over the world and here displaying their inability to harm anyone. The more exotic, the more disappointing Uncle Rainbow's relics were: a shark's head, with pointed teeth more frail than the white petals of the flowers outside; a great straw suitcase from which flowed Eastern silks, and from which, because of the paralysis set up inside the house by the growth of the spring, the silks refused to flow with grace and excitement. My mother nodded to show her familiarity with all of Uncle Rainbow's odd collection. She stepped firmly into the house, and it fitted round her. In it, she sat and sewed with Letty, in the room the colour of an unripe apple behind the dining room. She wore a calm, abstracted expression. For just as the cruel winds of the north had provoked her into anger and resentment, the dynamic workings of the southern spring seemed to bring her peace. She was both engaged in them and beyond them, observer and beneficiary. Letty would prick her finger as she sewed, and my mother would look from the droplet of blood to the white cherry blossom that stood outside the window in absolute stillness. Letty would smile slightly. But my mother, who had known Letty for years – Letty, who seemed never to grow any older, who had looked after Uncle Rainbow since he was a boy, noticed nothing. She trusted Letty completely, equating her with the bland cooking that appeared on the table three times a day, the sponges and junkets and white potatoes, and with the quiet, artificial rhythms of the house.

Uncle Rainbow's house was enfolded in the centre of the world. The old, magic roads that went off to Glastonbury in the west and to Stonehenge in the north, pinned the house in its maze by the long water-meadows. The beginning of time was still heavy in the air, which even in spring was
thick and smelt of water. Over the downs, unmarked by the pictography of barley or wheat, there ran rough traces, worn by the dragging of stones. Men had dragged stones, to build their dial to the watching sky. But these ways, no more than a charcoal smudge from the windows of Uncle Rainbow's house, went as deep and narrow in the earth as the groove from the keel of a ship. When the world was water, and the downs were a green, running sea, ships glided over them and let down the stones on to the ocean bed. There they grew, into a city of grey walls and fish darting about amongst them, as bright as window-boxes.

Uncle Rainbow's ancestors had made bows for the battle of Crécy, from the giant yews on the hills. The house they had built was fortified, but it had long ago fallen and been built and rebuilt, an endlessly shuffling succession of boxes and cubes. In its chosen spot it invited, and was unable to avoid, the coming in and passing over of every message in the cosmos. From a satellite up by the moon, bands of pure colour would dance into Letty's sitting-room and become people and shapes of her own world. Sunk in the swamp from which life first emerged, the house held its latest occupant with the tenacity of a shell. Uncle Rainbow, knowing the dangers of his position, led so quiet a life that even when my father was there he seldom took him as far as the giant yews. The house might have been overcome by the time he got back. In the villages which lay in the flanks of the downs, the stone buildings were all pointed in the direction of Uncle Rainbow's family house. Pylons stood along the downs, ready for the stride which would knock both Uncle Rainbow and his house into the ground. And as Letty slept, in her bedroom under the eaves, swallows flew about the house in a circle, and perched on the telegraph wires to feel the stream of voices running under their feet.

My father always found the first days of his visit hard to bear. He wandered about, trying to define both the house and himself, and Uncle Rainbow, in some sort of recognizable proportion. He went into Letty's sitting-room, where Letty and my mother were cutting out recipes, and pushing
knitting into wicker baskets, and stood uncertainly by the fireplace. He saw on the mantelpiece a saucer of conkers, still polished brown, which Letty had collected in the autumn from the big tree outside her window. He looked out at the big tree and saw the buds bursting and swelling. And in that glance he showed all his astonishment at the spring. He opened the window sometimes, and leaned out to touch the buds, and drew his hand back in as if it had been bitten. The saliva stained his fingers. He had to endure Letty's laughing at his hand which he held like a paw as she scrubbed, and at her knowledge of the gallop of seasons that went by in his mind at the sight and touch of the leaf. He saw the first dazzling green, and then the white and red candles, and the heavy shade they gave when the leaves darkened and spread. In the turn of the year, with the fat brown nuts Letty liked to rub against her shirt, he saw the coming of death. But he said nothing, only went from the room to wander the house again, or out to the flagstones to look at the flowers that came up every year between them, in the cracks.

Uncle Rainbow lay most of the day in his room, on a bed covered with spotted scarves. There he talked in a desultory way to my father, but his eyes often fell shut, and my father, compelled to sit in silence on a gold chair near the bed, allowed the house to stretch, expand, reduce and add to itself in the absence of mind of its owner. Sometimes a gallery of rooms appeared, each room leading off the last, and my father strolled in them. He saw that one room contained only a harpsichord, which gave off a melancholy sound, and that outside were yew trees, reminding him of the north. In another room, panelled in oak and empty except for one leather chair, he sat and looked out at an unfamiliar garden. The rooms moved and subsided and in their shifting he thought he heard a scale of laughter. He never knew if Letty was laughing – at him, at his impotence in the face of the activities of the spring, and the eyes that stared in at the house, from trees and grass and lilac, from the raindrops that settled on the windows – or whether the
sound came from the harpsichord, long after the rooms had gone away.

On the days when it had rained early in the morning, my father was particularly restless in this house where nothing spoke to him of his past. He went on to the wide landings, and looked out at the green wash over the downs. The smell from the poplars made him think of illness. The river had spilt on the grass again, and coots paddled in the grey water. Behind my father, arranged in an iconography of his life, stood Uncle Rainbow's most important possessions. The silks from the East gave off a sharp tang in the hours before anyone was about. Old photographs, crushed in frames of enamel water-lilies, had faded to the point of extinction, so that only an eyebrow of the sitter remained, or the sweep of a chin above a collar. Uncle Rainbow's letters and diaries, written in inks that became stronger in colour with each renewal of the spring, the sepia of the early entries turning as brown as earth, blues and greens intensifying and bursting from the page in a floral calligraphy, lay in leather trunks at my father's feet. The words confessed, boasted, and implored: my father stood motionless, in a dawn which had too little and acid a light for the space allotted it, and cursed the heavy weight of the south. In his mind, even the trees were buried in snow. Only the tops were visible, the straggling hairs of a brush dropped by the racing wind.

In the half-light, while my father still dreamed at the window, he saw himself go out infinitesimally small into the mists of the garden. Crocuses hung over him in imperial canopies, the purple edges chewed by birds. In the cracks between the flagstones were ruined temples and tombs. He went under the yews, which held up the sky with their enormous branches. The mists cleared, and the first sun tipped the world upside down. Chandeliers stood in the grass, and cloud gardens were blown across the sky. My father walked into a city of crystalline water. The seven colours of the spectrum made the shimmering walls. When
the sun came down it was as solid as gold, and the cities of glass melted. The first shadows of the yews fell on the brilliant green. Then my father went back to bed, triumphant at the sunrise and the contracting time to breakfast. Still tiny, he climbed into the bed that smelled of sleep. And he waited, while the sun's yolk poured in under the curtains, so yellow that my mother's eyelids twitched and sparks of gold flew in her sleeping pictures of the spring.

I knew my father took up his position on the landing in the early morning in the hope that this would stop me from going out to see what Letty and Uncle Rainbow did when they left themselves behind in the house. He stood over the entreaties of Uncle Rainbow's past, the violet dashes and brown, faded exclamation marks that looked as if swords had been thrown between the sentences. Some of the envelopes on the floor had a scarab of sealing-wax on the stiff paper. My father looked down in distaste at these emblems of the split second of excitement, the moment when the heart stops for news or words of love. He kicked them aside to stand closer to the window. When I ran across the grass in front of the house, I saw his round eyes at the pane, looking mournfully out. He was a snail who has climbed by mistake into a conch: the pink spiralling chambers that lay behind him were Uncle Rainbow's, not his, and with his northernness removed from him he appeared baleful and ill at ease. His finger stubbed the glass, and he stumbled on the shifting piles of letters under his feet. Nuts of sealing-wax cracked, giving a scarlet dust.

Uncle Rainbow, although the recipient of those long-dead letters, had few marks of distinction. The house, and the deep gardens, and the woods where spring came every year, were indifferent to the nature of the incumbency. They had seen so many versions of him, in the long generations since the first building and fortifying of the house, that when one puff of life went, and another came, it was no more than the shedding of a lizard's skin. That was why, at supper in the early spring days, when the lights were
on in the dining room, and reflecting in on us from the windows like the eyes of tigers in the garden, my mother would catch her breath at the sight of Uncle Rainbow. From the portraits above him and around him on the walls, he had taken an eye, a twitch under the cheekbone where the artist's hand had trembled with his brush, a left shoulder higher than the other and narrow and arched as a shoe-horn. The portraits, yielding their secret, genetic information, imparting their idiosyncrasies to Uncle Rainbow, became bland, and also forbidding.

No one asked, when Uncle Rainbow's insignificant life had blown away, whether the house would have to go empty at last. For Uncle Rainbow's one mark of distinction from his forebears was precisely his refusal to continue them. The house and land demanded for their survival this continuation. In the spring they brought forth the origins of life to assail Uncle Rainbow. Tired and pale as he usually seemed in our visits, he was fighting them ceaselessly. My mother was probably unaware of this, and would have treated him with less glancing scorn if she had known the powers of resistance Uncle Rainbow needed to stop himself from being repeated amoebically in every room in the house.

In the earlier part of our visit, when the chestnut buds were swelling and spring was still racing underground, my mother watched Letty closely and sat with her a long time at night. She was afraid that Letty might grow and fill the house. Then, thick, satiny limbs would entwine on the stairs and from Letty's vast body, pressed deep against landings and windows, a litter of living things would jump out. Letty's breasts swung, as she handed bread sauce with the chicken, and my mother looked on with a slight frown. On these evenings, we sat too long with the curtains open in the dining-room, and in our anticipation of spring became ourselves a lit shrine in darkness: the curious eyes outside which pressed in on us saw our odd assortment: the icon Uncle Rainbow's uncle had brought back from Constantinople,
with its downcast eyes and inexplicable grief; the portraits of red-faced men in white wigs; and the living family group at a table under a constellation of shells. When Letty went to close the curtains, against the gaze of these nights of spring, her buttocks moved together amicably, and my father's eyes fell on the divide. He grew thoughtful, and turned to Uncle Rainbow with some sudden remark. But Uncle Rainbow was as studiously looking away from Letty as my father was unable to stop himself from staring. Uncle Rainbow chose always to examine the picture of hills and cattle that hung in the corner furthest from the door. Thus, he wouldn't even see Letty as she came and went, bringing with her smells of new carrots and the acid smell of spring as it crept along the corridors outside. He looked only at the watering-place where the cattle had gathered, and the thin stream that wound down from the brown hills.