Greyglass Page 2

  “No, thank you, Mother. I have to go out this afternoon. I told you. Besides, I left our lunch ready. I can’t afford to waste it.”

  “Let the child stay, then,” said the grandmother, hard as granite, demanding a hostage.

  “Susan has homework to do.”

  This was a lie. The one they usually told, when this thing came up about lunch, as so often it did.

  “And what,” said the grandmother, “will Susan have for lunch in your flat? A sandwich, I suppose.”

  The mother did not answer. The grandmother stared now, right at the child, “You tell me, then, what is this so-splendid lunch you can’t possibly miss?”

  Susan looked at her mother, but Anne had turned away.

  Hopelessly Susan said, “We’re having omelette and chips, Grandmother.”

  “Ah.”

  “And tomatoes,” apologised Susan.

  “Indeed.” The grandmother walked across the room. She moved very slowly, stiffly, but without apparent effort. Where was she going? The fireplace? She reached the fireplace, stretched her arm across the mantelpiece, and drew off a small ornament, an apple of rosy china. “Look, do you see? Chipped. That precious woman, who cares for me so well, wantonly chipped it. That’s what I think of when I hear the word chips. I think of accidents to china, Anne. And so that is what you’re giving my grandchild for her lunch. Bits of smashed china ruined by careless servants.”

  Then she gazed at Susan again. Her eyes were full of – what was it – milk, or venom?

  “I shall be taking soup, homemade, of course. Cream of celery, I think. Then a casserole of lamb with dumplings. Roast potatoes and green peas. Then there is some Stilton, but naturally I have raspberry ice-cream, if anyone were to want it.”

  “Mother, I’m sorry. Perhaps next Sunday –”

  “You haven’t eaten a meal in this house for ten years.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “It is true. What is the point,” said the old woman in the pumpkin house, “of my being alive? There you are, the two of you, flesh of my flesh, children of my body, there you are and I am alone. Alone with a petty thief. This is what I have come to.”

  Or tears. Was that what it was in her eyes? Thick resinous and opaque as glasses fitted under the lids. But Susan’s grandmother never wore glasses, not even to read. Her eyesight, like her hearing, was still phenomenal.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Mother.” Exasperated, Anne. “Then we must stay. We’ll stay for lunch. Yes, very well. Only I wish you’d made this more clear before I’d peeled all those potatoes at home.”

  “No, no,” said the old woman. “No, I can’t ask you to stay, I’m afraid. If you’d said before. But there isn’t enough for three. Oh, there might be, if that woman didn’t squirrel so much of it away for herself. But as it is…”

  Somewhere, in another room, a clock struck. One o’clock, or two, who knew, in this limbo of mind-fuck and exasperated despair.

  Mrs Danvers, however, re-entered, punctilious as a robot.

  “Yes?” asked the grandmother. “Lunch? Already?”

  It seemed it was.

  “Well, goodbye, Anne. Goodbye, Susan.”

  They shook themselves, outside, like dogs shaking off the fluids of the vegetable house. They walked for thirty minutes back to the flat in the rain.

  “Can we play the card game this afternoon?”

  “No. I’ve got to get ready and go out.”

  “Oh. Oh –”

  “Don’t start, Susan.”

  “You said you’d read through my essay with me.”

  “I will. Tonight.”

  “You’ll be in late tonight.”

  “For Christ’s sake, stop it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “To the pictures?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I wish I could go.”

  “You can. I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Monday. It’s school.”

  “Don’t talk as if it’s spelled H E double L.”

  “It is.”

  “I mean, I will take you tomorrow night. If you promise not to make a fuss about getting up on Tuesday morning.”

  “Will you? Will you? Won’t you mind if you’ve already seen it?”

  “No I won’t mind. Eat your chips.”

  “China chips,” said Susan.

  “Poor old bitch,” said Anne. “God, what can I do?”

  “I said we shouldn’t go.”

  “You were quite right.”

  “Why do we? She hates us. Doesn’t want us there, even though she says all that stuff.”

  “She doesn’t hate us. She’s very fond of you.”

  “She isn’t.”

  “Yes she is. It’s just difficult for her to understand. She’s a very old lady.”

  “You said bitch.”

  “Yes. She is a bitch. So am I. I expect you will be too, when you’re older.”

  Susan, cheered by this inspiring prospect, finished her lunch.

  Later, she sat on the edge of the tub as her mother had a bath, admiring Anne’s taut curved body, the shallow but beautifully rounded breasts, the fleece of pubic hair, not black or blonde or auburn, but a cool mouse brown.

  Then Susan watched her mother paint her toenails, put on a new dress, redo her make-up and spruce up her hair.

  “Just made it.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “No later than eleven. Now remember, supper is in the fridge. Don’t open the door to anyone, even if they insist they’re your fairy-godmother. TV if you like, or that book I’ve just read was good. It’s on my bed, I think. Bye for now.”

  No information was given, and no question asked about whom she might be going with. Who all the delicious scent and powder and scrupulous time-keeping were for.

  A man, Susan did know that. Susan knew about men. Her father had been one, after all, even if she had never seen him. Her mother had only seen him, apparently, one more time than Susan.

  When she was younger, Susan hadn’t liked being alone so well. Even so, she had been alone a lot. Now she didn’t mind. Sometimes it made her feel grown-up, the fifteen – or twenty-year-old phase.

  She fetched the nail scissors, and began cutting out more thin paper figures.

  At nine p.m. the phone went.

  Susan answered and gave the number, as people still did then, something which, ten years later, she would never have done. A woman spoke.

  “Is that Susan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I speak to your mother, please, Susan.”

  “Mum’s out.” Should have said Mummy.

  “Oh.” A long pause. “When will she be back?”

  Well drilled in this, as in so much, Susan said, “I’m not quite sure.”

  “Where is she, do you know?”

  “Just at a neighbour’s.” Also part of the drilling.

  The voice sounded relieved. “Oh then, would you mind going along to fetch her for me?”

  “I’m not supposed to go out.”

  “No, but this is urgent. I’m afraid you must. You won’t have to go far if it’s just one of the other flats –”

  Susan did not know whose the voice was. Presented with the now insuperable dilemma of not revealing that her mother was out until eleven o’clock, (or after) at a location Susan could not be sure of, Susan hesitated.

  The voice said, “This is Mrs Marks, Susan. I need to speak to your mother at once.”

  Susan did not know what to do, and so she put the receiver down. She had seen her mother respond with this solution quite frequently. When the phone rang again, Susan ignored it, but when it kept on and on ringing it began to make her panicky. She went into the front room and turned up the TV. Finally the phone stopped ringing.

  Then it rang every quarter of an hour, rang twenty or thirty times. It began to seem alive, the phone, an enemy.

  At five to midnight, when Su
san’s mother came in, looking tired and drained and lipstickless, the phone had just started to ring again.

  “Who on earth is that at this bloody time of night?”

  “It’s Mrs Danvers.”

  “What?” Anne picked up the phone.

  Standing, neurasthenic by now, ears still phone-ringing on and on in the silence, Susan watched her mother’s drained face alter, become horribly alert with some invading life-force that had nothing whatever to do with her; heard her say, “When?” Heard her say, “Why?” saw gradually through her, as if through a sheet of filmy paper, to some other place beyond that was unidentifiable and yet, peculiarly, also to be recognised.

  It was the middle of the night, about two-thirty a.m., when a policeman arrived. After Mrs Danvers, they had gone to bed, and so had to get up again. Anne, confronting the youthful PC, snarled, “I suppose you have to be up all night, so sod us, so do we, is that it?”

  “No, madam.”

  “I thought you always waited twenty-four hours for a disappearance.”

  “Not always, madam. I understand the lady is very old.”

  He sat in the front room, asked questions, took some notes. Susan sleepily wandered about making coffee for her mother.

  When the policeman had gone, Anne did not return to bed. She paced up and down, smoking cigarettes, frowning.

  “Mummy –”

  “I’m all right. Go and get some sleep. Bloody woman. Bloody old woman.”

  They had learned, from Mrs Danvers, that the grandmother had vanished from her lunch table between one fabulous calorific course and the next.

  Since this had once or twice happened before, Mrs Danvers hadn’t been unduly put out. “She has a habit of coming back, you see, and eating the rest cold.”

  However, Susan’s grandmother did not do that on this occasion. The rich food congealed in its tureens and on its dishes. The half carafe of red wine stood undrunk. “She always has the wine. Her doctor says it’s good for her.” “I’m sure it is,” Anne had said, “it’s claret. Ten quid a bottle and that’s supposed to be economising, isn’t it.”

  In the afternoon, after the uneaten lunch had been cleared and the service washed, Mrs Danvers put her feet up for a couple of hours, as she generally did, before preparing the five o’clock tea.

  “That was when I still couldn’t find her,” said Mrs Danvers. “At five o’clock.”

  She then looked, she said, everywhere, and Susan conceived a perhaps-accurate picture of Mrs Danvers patrolling the length and breadth of the abnormal house, up and down all its twisting stairs, along all its tunnels and slopes, in and out of the endless and uncountable rooms. “I even looked up in the attics, Mrs Wilde, and she hasn’t been up there for years. The stair is too steep for her, she says.”

  At nine o’clock Mrs Danvers, concerned and unsure what to do, had called the flat. “But there was a fault on the line, your daughter and I got cut off.”

  “Yes, quite.”

  “I kept trying. I couldn’t get through.”

  “No.”

  “Did I say, I looked all over the garden? I even went through the garden again, in the dark, with a torch.”

  Standing there in her militant belted mac, like a spy for the Eastern Bloc, Mrs Danvers, who had summoned a taxi to bring her to their door, now announced she had also contacted the police.

  “Why?” Anne, (Mrs Wilde) was aghast.

  “Well, Mrs Wilde. She hasn’t left the house for several years. I think – she’s a bit fearful of the outside world. I do all the shopping. I do everything. She never has to go out.”

  “Obviously then, my mother is still indoors. Mischievously hiding from you. What else would you expect?”

  “I hope so, Mrs Wilde.”

  “Was the cup of coffee all right?” Susan asked, as she was about to leave her mother pacing in the room where the policeman had sat and Mrs Danvers had stood, and where a kind of hollow still remained from their unwanted presences.

  “The coffee was disgusting, thank you. Go to bed.”

  Obscurely frightened, still Susan slept, her body used to the habit of slumber – a handy, childish knack she didn’t then suspect might ever desert her.

  The next morning, anyway, her grandmother was found.

  She had not after all been in the house, or the vast, accumulated garden. She was sitting on a bench in the municipal shrubbery by the Long Pool in the park. There had been a late frost that night, which gathered on her edges, like white crochet. She was completely dead.

  “I thought she’d live to be a hundred,” said Anne, sombre, speaking softly. “There was nothing wrong with her. Her doctor checked her every three months. He saw her last in January. Her heart was sound. No diseases. She didn’t even have rheumatism for Christ’s sake. How can she be dead? Oh God, now we’ve got this death business, forms, mess, and the bloody funeral.”

  The bloody funeral was actually rather pathetic. She had left, the old woman, explicit instructions for a low-budget burial, at a local cemetery, the plot already purchased. (There was no adjacent grave belonging to anyone. Her husband, Anne’s father, had been lost, body and soul, to a Second World War flying bomb in the City.) Anne and Susan attended, and Mrs Danvers in a black coat that was too large and too hot for the tepid rainy afternoon. No one else came.

  They stood together over the oblong hole in the earth, and watched the coffin go down, and heard the elderly priest speak about a Christian resurrection that, Anne presently declared, not quite out of earshot, her mother had never believed in.

  Afterwards they walked to the nearest pub.

  “Of course my daughter is over sixteen,” snapped Anne at the barmaid.

  In her high heels and eye make-up and lipstick, Susan tried to look worldly and old.

  The barmaid let it go; even at sixteen you couldn’t supposedly drink alcohol in a pub in those days, and Susan was only having a pineapple juice.

  Anne and Mrs Danvers talked desultorily. Susan ate crisps, wondering incoherently and too lightly what it meant, that hole, that box of darkness and its descent.

  She had been aware of the fact of death since she was nine, sitting up one night from sleep, thinking, One day I’ll die. She never knew what prompted the revelation. She didn’t know really if it made her afraid or not. Sometimes, since, she had tried to imagine dying and stopping, or not dying and going on for ever. Both solutions seemed equally alarming and appalling. Gradually the problem faded back in her mind.

  Now, she wondered where the old woman, her grandmother, was. If she was anywhere.

  “I heard from the solicitors, yes,” Mrs Danvers was saying, sipping her magenta vermouth. “She’s been generous to me. I did my best, but that’s my calling. I certainly didn’t expect anything like that.”

  “The cats’ charity will be pleased, too,” said Anne, acidly, drinking her second double gin and tonic. “And the other one. What was it? Some medical research or other.”

  “I’m sure it was an oversight, Mrs Wilde.”

  “Are you?”

  Mrs Danvers seemed uneasy. “It must have been.”

  “Well if it was, she made a damned good job of it, didn’t she. What’s the matter with you?” she added to Susan an hour later, as they rode home on the bus.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not upset, are you?”

  “No. I didn’t like her. She was awful.”

  “Yes, she was. I didn’t like her, but I’m upset.”

  “Are you?” Susan stared.

  “Because I’m not crying and tearing at my hair doesn’t mean I don’t feel anything.”

  Years, twenty years after, Susan would think, That was her mother – was she upset? What did she feel?

  Susan was depressed, and when they got to the flat, the grey wet warm light trapped inside, depressed her further.

  She understood, from what her mother had told her, that the grandmother had left all her money, except for the mediocre funeral expenses, and se
veral thousands of pounds for Mrs Danvers-known-as-Marks, to various charities. Even the house had been left to a charity devoted to the succour of cats. “I didn’t know she liked cats,” Mrs Danvers had remarked, defensively bemused. “She never had a cat. A shame really. I’m quite fond of them myself. I’d have had one, if I’d known.”

  Anne had been left nothing. Not even a keepsake. Nor, as far as Susan knew, had Anne taken anything for herself from the house. But who would want any of those heavy and dismaying things, the non-edibly chipped pieces of china, the cumbersome Victorian furniture, none of it, even so, properly antique or of any beauty. Anything of value was itemised and to be sold. Had there been jewellery? Susan saw none.

  “Did you ever live here when you were little?” Susan had once asked Anne, years before the disappearance, the park bench, and death. “No. I lived with my aunt in Lincoln. I’ve told you.” “Oh, yes.” Estranged, always separate. Strangers going by the misnomer of Relation.

  “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,” said Susan.

  “You never want to.”

  Susan hung her head.

  “All right, all right. It’s Friday anyway. Have a long weekend.”

  A weight hung about Susan’s neck through Friday, alone in the flat, while her mother worked. And also through Saturday. Like the Albatross, or one of the walnut mammoths of furniture from the vegetable house.

  On Saturday night Anne went out with a man.

  Susan mooched about the rooms, unable to sustain an interest in anything. She put all the lights on, too.

  “Why are all the lights on?” said Anne when she came home at one a.m. “I’ve said, don’t do that, Susan. I have to spend enough on bills as it is.”

  “A light bulb only costs a penny for three hours. I read it somewhere.”

  “Rubbish.”

  The next day was Sunday. Sunday, the day of visits to the old woman.

  There had already been two Sundays after her death, of course. But they were taken up with seeing to things to do with the funeral, or the clearing of the house.

  What had she died of, the grandmother?

  “Old age.”

  “It says heart failure on the form.”

  “That’s what everyone dies of. It was old age.”

  But Susan thought of the words heart failure. A lapse of the heart, not only unable anymore to beat, but to reason, to reply, to communicate – This heart was a failure.