Greyglass Read online

  GREYGLASS

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Book One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Book Two

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Book One

  I

  She lived in a vegetable house. As time passed, it grew about her. Rooms and passages added themselves, stairways, attics, cellars; windows formed. Outside, and all around, the gardens also extended into mossy terraces with pools, massive stands of huge trees, thickets of rhododendrons. Where visible through these, the house appeared like an orange pumpkin – the one in Cinderella perhaps, which became a coach to take her to the ball. However, the house was only volatile in an accretive, sedentary way, adding to itself, certainly determined not to move anywhere else.

  “We’re going up to see the old lady now. Put your coat on. Hurry up.”

  Susan glanced at her mother, and laid down the nail scissors with which she had been cutting figures of thin paper.

  “Are those my nail scissors?”

  “– – -”

  “I said, are those my nail scissors?”

  Whose nail scissors, after all, could they be?

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “Don’t call me Mum.”

  “– – -”

  “Say Mummy.”

  “Mummy.”

  “I’ve told you not to use the nail scissors for that. It spoils them.”

  Susan looked at the spoiled scissors. They appeared the same as when she had taken them from the bathroom cabinet half an hour ago, as her mother was peeling vegetables for – don’t say dinner, say lunch – lunch.

  “Go and put your coat on. Will you hurry, Susan!”

  Susan ran out. She was twelve. For a year she had been menstruating regularly, using deodorant and mascara, and wearing tights. She felt twenty, then fifteen. Then eight. Even between one running step and another she might change.

  Her mother was calling again. Susan had been supposed to put on her school blazer from the hall. But Susan ran into her bedroom and took up the jacket from her chair. In the mirror, as she passed, she glimpsed a plump ugly girl, with short fair hair, who, sometimes, by careful arrangements of light and shade, the mirror and herself, might be transformed into something else, someone of consequence, even perhaps attraction.

  “Susan! What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to go up there,” said Susan, to the corner of the room. The corner did not reply.

  It was spring outside. More spring than had yet got into the year, or the old building, or the flat on the second floor. The Georgian pillars and porch had burst into slices of sunlight and the steps were warm.

  “Why have you put that jacket on, Susan?”

  “You said –”

  “I said a coat. Your blazer.”

  But now there was no turning back.

  The sun dappled leopard spots through the chestnut trees by the wall. The buds were sticky, still red but not green.

  Susan looked at her mother. A slim beautiful woman, a fully-formed creature, at no disadvantage since adult. Her hair, which was black this month, gleamed with a reddish light like that on the chestnut buds.

  “Why do we have to?”

  “What? Why do we have to what?”

  “Go up there.”

  “You know why. You know perfectly well why.”

  “But –”

  “And we’re late.”

  They walked quickly along Constance Street, where the tree roots had here and there upheaved the pavement, and into Dunkirk Street, where there were no trees and the sun fell hot, burning on their heads.

  “You brushed your hair,” said the adult woman.

  “Mmm.”

  Susan had not, what a bit of luck.

  Sundays would be all right, if it weren’t for this – this, and the approaching shadow of school tomorrow, but that was almost a whole day away.

  “Oh damn, we’re so late. Come on.”

  In at the park gates. People were strolling about. There was a van selling ice-cream. Dogs rushed barking, and somewhere children screamed, and a big blast of exciting drum-thick bad music roared from a radio on the lawns.

  “Bloody music,” said Susan’s mother. “People.”

  They were almost running now.

  Straight through the park, with its possibilities of life, straight along the gravel path by the black, still-winter beds, a handful of crocuses and anaemic daffodils, and out of the other gate.

  Here was ominous, curving Tower Road, with its enormous beech trees and oaks, its gardens behind ten-foot stone walls clung with ivy. Set far back, roofs of houses showed, like the upper turrets of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

  “Mum, I’ve got a stitch.”

  “Mummy. Damn, it’s ten past twelve. Oh damn.”

  “Why do we have to go? You don’t want to. She just goes on.”

  The road curving and coiling, like an ancient riverbed, slid in under the trees, cold now in the fragmented shade, heavy as smashed masonry, sky watery as broken blue eggs. And now, landmarks, plants lodged in a wall. A turn, a gap where grass grew, rather long for the time of year, and the two particular oaks, sentinels which marked the border of the witch’s kingdom.

  Her mother pushed the tall, old and rusty ironwork gate, and pushed herself and Susan through it.

  “Why, Mummy – She doesn’t want us here – she doesn’t like us.”

  “No,” said Susan’s mother, defeated after all, stopping dead, just over the border, there under the weight of cascading evergreens, the overgrown drive running away and away towards the orange pumpkin that was the witch’s house.

  “Why then?”

  “You know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She’s your grandmother.”

  The housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, opened the door. Danve
rs wasn’t really her name. Susan’s mother had coined it for her from the character in the book by Daphne du Maurier.

  Mrs Danvers was very thin and hard of frame. She seemed made of iron, and then clothed to hide it, just her head and neck and hands, and sometimes her lower arms and calves, if visible, gone over with a flesh substituting material like sallow creased rayon. She was old, over forty. (Susan’s mother, also over forty, seemed somehow not old, her few facial lines invisible, her skin and make-up flawless, her hair, now blonde, now black, her eyes large and grey.) But Mrs Danvers had got this all wrong and in reverse, black eyes and grey permed hair.

  “She’s been waiting,” said Mrs Danvers.

  “Yes,” said Susan’s mother, shortly.

  The hall was very wide, much wider even than in the house where the flats were. A stained glass panel in the door, once it shut, threw jade and crimson shapes along the old cracked lino which was, apparently, ‘dangerous’.

  Susan stepped on each of these shapes, to see the colour seep instantly up through her feet and appear instead on the top of her disappointing flat shoes.

  But her mother had left Susan.

  She had walked forward briskly, into one of the great rooms which opened to one side of the wide hall. This she crossed, and went through another door and vanished into another room.

  Mrs Danvers too had moved off. Susan left the shapes and ran after her mother, across two rooms or three, down a step at one or two of the doorways, into a sunken part of the house.

  A green-rain light flooded the rooms here, from the bay trees and conifers pressed close to the sides of the house. The old furniture caught the green reflections, shining in a watery way.

  “I’m sorry we’re late, Mother. I had to dash out to the shop before twelve, everything was hung up.”

  Susan was not really aware of the irony of this scene, so familiar, not only from repetition, but from similar scenes of her own: the daughter standing before the mother, making lame excuses.

  Susan’s mother had a mother, but this did not become apparent to Susan until years after. Susan’s mother was simply performing an unavoidable ritual before Susan’s grandmother – who must always be called Grandmother, not ‘gran’, ‘nan’ or any other degrading counterfeit.

  The grandmother sat in a window, where a big pot contained a plant with strange scarlet leaves, which Susan had long ago christened Martian Rhubarb.

  The grandmother did not turn her head. Her profile stood there against the greened glass like something stamped into a coin.

  Mrs Danvers was old, but the grandmother had passed on into another country. She was no longer human. Which gave her, it seemed, inordinate powers.

  “Well,” said Susan’s mother, “how have you been?”

  “She steals from me,” said the grandmother.

  “No she doesn’t,” said Susan’s mother.

  “How would you know? You’re never here.”

  “I am here now.”

  “Once a fortnight.”

  “Once a week, Mother. Sometimes more often. But I have a job, Mother, and a child, and I can’t always –” the words were bitten out, “do exactly as I want with any spare time I might have.”

  “Butter,” said the grandmother.

  “What do you mean, butter? She steals butter?”

  “Food. All types of food. What can I do? I have to rely on the woman.”

  Susan’s mother sighed, opened her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes.

  “Yes, you may smoke.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mrs Danvers came back into the room. On a tray she bore two glasses of a pale dry sherry, and one of fizzy lemonade, a dish of nuts and an ashtray. The ashtray she placed at once by the chair of Susan’s mother.

  “Thank you, Mrs Marks.” Marks was Mrs Danvers’ real name. But not really, no, never.

  Susan took the lemonade, and sat in a chair drinking it like a parched alcoholic. She knew better than to wander about the room. She must stay still, as must her mother, all attention fixed on the old woman.

  If Mrs Marks-Danvers was made of iron and a partial covering of rayon, from what substance had the grandmother been created? Her thinness was so acute, every bone in her body had been accentuated, distorted. Her skin was folded and refolded, sewn down in tense appliquéd lines. Her skin was brown, like that of someone tanned, or from a foreign country. Her eyes – her eyes disturbed Susan – they were full of something but not colour. Perhaps they had been grey once, like her mother’s.

  Mrs Danvers had gone.

  “She takes the sherry, too. And the wine. You’d notice, if you stayed for lunch or dinner, that she fills the bottles up with water. Tap water I may add. How is your sherry? No, don’t say it’s all right, Anne, I know quite well it’s watered down.”

  “Mother, I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “Yes, you’re sure of everything, Anne.”

  “Have it your own way,” said Susan’s mother, Anne.

  “Have it my own way? I have nothing my own way.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Look at me. What do I have my own way?”

  “You have this house, you’re well looked after –”

  The grandmother broke in here with her usual curt melodramatic laugh. “Oh yes. Oh yes. Very well.”

  “Mother, what am I supposed to do? What can I do?”

  “Nothing, of course. You can do nothing. You couldn’t possibly move into this house with me.”

  “I live as near as I am able.”

  “If you lived in this house, you could give up your job, as you’re pleased to call it. The child could have proper clothes instead of the extraordinary things I see her wearing every time I do see her –”

  Susan, feeling the terrible eyes turn to her at last, flinched her own away, finding some sudden fascination with the worn Persian carpet under her feet.

  “Mother, I’ve explained all this to you. I simply can’t throw everything up on a whim.”

  “A whim? A whim? To be with your own mother?” There was neither anger nor pleading in the tone, scarcely, now, even any sarcasm. The old, unwhole voice, with its well-educated accent, was devoid of anything but clipped abrasion.

  “I like my work,” said Susan’s mother crisply. “And I like a little independence. God knows, it’s a good thing I do.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know perfectly well what it means.”

  “That you could not rely on me for help.”

  Susan’s mother sat with lips of smooth coral stone.

  The grandmother had twisted her lizard profile fully round into the room, her gaze fixed with a blind still ferocity on a row of china ornaments in the black hearth.

  Susan put down her empty glass.

  She got up, and edged away from the arena’s centre.

  Absorbed now, they let her do it.

  “Can I go and look at the books?” Susan whispered, too low to be heard.

  They heard her.

  Not glancing at her, the grandmother rapped, “You have only been here five minutes. If you want the lavatory, say so.”

  “Then may I go to the lavatory?”

  “Yes. Wash your hands afterwards.”

  Humiliated beyond blushing, Susan left the room by another exit.

  Along the passage, where other curious plants luxuriated in narrow winding spaces, Susan heard the voices still. “I have never asked you for anything.” “I have never refused you anything.” “There were always terms. Impossible ones.” Susan heard this conversation, or dialogues of the same kind, on most Sundays.

  She opened the lavatory door and went in.

  The lavatory was quite big, for what it was. The suite, if so it could be called, a dingy white, both toilet and bowl and hand basin verdigris-stained, with long hairs of cracks. The hot tap did not run hot, nor even warm. In winter, Susan had sometimes marvelled to find its issue felt colder than that of the cold tap.

 
; Before drying her hands, Susan scooped a handful of water up on to the runner of the towel, to make it very wet, proving she had used it. But the water also sploshed on the floor by the don’t-say-toilet, making it look as if she had peed on the lino. So then she had to take some of the soft toilet paper and mop the floor, and then, to dispose of the paper, she had to flush the lavatory again. And if they heard all this, as they well might, or if the housekeeper heard it, her grandmother might later say to her that the lavatory was there for its ‘purpose’, and not to be played in. Or, worse, that Susan should have attended to her bowels before she left home.

  Leaving the lavatory, Susan crept up a brief staircase and went along another corridor, and sidled into what her mother called the book-room.

  Susan did not really like these books. She was averse to them. They were fairly uniformly sheathed in uninviting dark skins, and some had gilt lettering, and many were anyway out of her reach. Long ago the old woman had said she might ‘look at the books’. Susan had assumed this was exactly what she might do – look. She didn’t touch them, except now and then to put her finger on their spines. The titles besides were unencouraging, even unintelligible, like gibberish, and some were in other languages her mother said were French or German, or Latin.

  On the long table was a dish. It was of yellowish pale glass, the colour the sherry had been, and it was kept empty.

  Susan looked into the dish.

  She would have to go back in a moment or be accused of something, having a bowel movement, trespassing, something.

  The sun went in beyond the window and sudden rain began to hiss over the thick wild trees which closed the view.

  “Susan.”

  Her mother’s voice.

  Susan ran from the room, along the corridor, back downstairs, into the passage. Her mother was standing, smoking, in the doorway of the sunken room, and behind her the grandmother stood, not leaning on anything at all, not on a stick, not even the arm of a chair.

  “Where have you been?”

  “To look at the books.”

  As if rationally, the grandmother said, “Why don’t you stay to lunch, Anne? There’s plenty for three.”