Greyglass Read online

  Rod Ayres tired Susan, talking always about the ‘technical side’ of drawing, reducing art relentlessly to a kind of mathematics. He was thin and smelled too much of aftershave. Though over fifty, she thought, he had begun to seem interested in her in an amorous way. At first she hoped it was just his manner, then she realised from things said to her by other students, that they were considered to have something ‘going’.

  Susan became increasingly frustrated, feeling she must keep in with Rod Ayres to ensure fulfilment of the Masonic code of the Job, but wanting to avoid him. He knew she was no longer unavailably involved with Patrick.

  As Rod lit his fifteenth cigarette, his voice droning, Susan thought of Anne, re-installed by now in Manhattan with the straying Wizz. She thought of Anne’s odd new garrulousness, her rhythm of talking which seemed to have altered so much, perhaps only inevitably mirroring the phonetics of the people she now spent all her time with. The mirror too, obviously, of Wizz.

  “So, we’ll go and see old Mike, see what he can suggest. Then maybe I’ll take you for lunch, eh, Susan.”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Rod looked displeased. Affronted even, as if she had loudly burped or spat at him.

  What was she supposed to do? If she simply said, I’d hate to have lunch with you, or anything else, he would cease to assist her up the ladder of Work.

  “I have to see a relative.”

  “I thought your mother was now in the States again?”

  “Yes. I have to visit my grandmother,” Susan said.

  “Your grandmother? Do you have such a being?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Why did I say that? Never mind. His ruffled plumes were settling.

  “Keep the old folk happy, eh,” agreed Rod, refusing to see that to Susan, and the other students, he was one of the happy-needy old folk, too.

  So, I’m coming to see you Catherine.

  Sitting on the train, alone this time, Susan did not feel strange. She felt slightly amused.

  Another day off college, but then, she’d have lost far more of them if Anne had returned and she had stayed with her at the hotel.

  But what, really, was she doing?

  After the bus and train, another bus, then Constance Street, which now meant absolutely nothing, and then the other street and the park, which was full of a schools’ match of football, boys shrieking and jerseys. And Tower Road. But Tower Road was meaningless, too. The vast houses looked smaller and a lot of trees seemed to have been scythed down. Even the two great oaks on the grass as you approached the final wall, had been viciously pruned, and had produced hardly any summer leaves.

  The witch’s house. The vegetable house. The Labyrinth.

  Susan loitered along the wall. It was stripped of most of its creepers, the stonework tidied up. The For Sale – Under Offer board was gone, and the old iron gate was gone, replaced by a new green-painted wooden door, with a name in iron letters on it: Borders.

  Why had Susan come here? Why had she come here the other two times? Patrick had wanted it last time, yes, but it was more than that. She could have resisted. And she had come here before then, the first occasion, when Jackie and the cats had Catherine’s house.

  Was it the lure of the past, where things were safer since they had already happened?

  Surely, the past hadn’t been in itself that appealing, not safe, or really ideal in any form.

  Did this always happen? Any previous time, however dull or bad, was going to seem better than the time you were stuck in now?

  Susan opened the green door by its natty metal ring, thinking as she did so of the green door which led to the Afterlife or astral plane in H.G. Wells.

  And the door did open. Not surprisingly, of course. Deliveries, postmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses would need to get in.

  The drive had been cleared substantially, the trees cut close, as if pushed back. Things had a glossy, well-kept garden look, and framed by their widened avenue, the house broke clear, shocking Susan. It too had been stripped and cleaned, and repainted a bold, dazzling primrose. There were shutters on some of the upper windows, polished blue, like the front door.

  A vague rumble she had been aware of now solidified into a moving machine, some sort of small excavating digger, trundling out around the far side of the house. Earth sprayed about it. She could see anyway, as Patrick had predicted, dense vistas of growth had vanished. Open space was in Catherine’s garden now, spatially marked by the poles of so-far surviving trees.

  I’m trespassing.

  What now? What now?

  What did she want from this ever-metamorphosing place?

  As she walked along the drive between the neatly manicured plants, the gaps of ground from which nettles and docks and briars had been wrenched, Susan formulated her plan. A silly plan, and why anyway do it? But why do anything – it was all a sort of game, with intractable yet deadly-inane rules.

  There was a bell, as there had been in the days of Catherine and Mrs Danvers. It shrilled through the house in a horrible attempt at two melodic notes.

  At the same moment the digger started to make enormous gulping sounds.

  No one would hear.

  Standing there, Susan realised the stained glass panels of Catherine’s door had been incorporated in this other one. She thought of wading through the pool of coloured lights inside, jade and crimson, the last okay part of Sunday before her grandmother.

  The door opened.

  “Ye-es?”

  Susan felt herself blushing, but took no notice of it, carried on. (What point was there ever in taking too much notice of the constant betrayals of the body?)

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Jackie – she used to live here, the cats charity, Cat Samaritans –”

  “Jackie. Oh yes,” said the woman who had opened the door, her face in turn betraying her, too, hardening and seeming fixed and intent. “Yes, I’ve got her address somewhere, Devon, I think. Come in a minute. I’ll have a look.”

  “So you knew Jackie?”

  “Yes – I had a cat from her.”

  “Of course. Yes. We had to contact her about some of the cats that were left behind. They kept on sneaking in and fouling, which was a bit of a drag – the house was nearly a ruin, you know, not kept up at all – and we were trying so desperately to get everything fixed, and the decor sorted out.”

  The decor in the wide hall was now Pale Milk, (Olivia said) with one Coffee wall and some Chinese Red accents. In the side room where they now were, a large room Susan didn’t recall – perhaps made out of two rooms knocked through – it was darker Coffee, with notes of Royal Blue, and kaftan upholstery.

  Everything smelled immensely clean, slightly of paint still, and of induced aromas, pot-pourri and scented candles, and the vast cloud of roses and freesias in a black pot by the fireplace, (which had green marble inlay.)

  Olivia rummaged vigorously through some old address books from a bureau. She seemed one of those effortlessly groomed, youngish women that Susan had always marvelled at on TV, or in London – they appeared to spring out of bed or the shower sparkling, and fully clothed, the make-up minimal on unblemished matt skins, and their hair washed and made delicious in the night by pixies.

  Olivia’s hair was long and densely blonde, as blonde as Anne’s had been, but this looked natural. Unlike dyed hair, the roots were of a deeper, gleaming platinum colour, by the hairline and the casual, perfectly-designed robot parting.

  Susan watched Olivia with envy and some uneasy visual pleasure. Olivia was the Unattainable State, the patently other kind, as were her conditions, her persona, everything about her.

  She had told Susan quite a lot, quite quickly and fluently, as if telling strangers who she was came quite naturally. Her husband, Jeremy, was in the City now in his twelfth floor office above the Thames. A girl – an au pair, Susan deduced – that Olivia seemed to call Dosha, was due to come in and bring them coffee for which Olivia had shouted lightly
along the hall.

  “Here we are. Yes. Now – Jackie – I can’t read the second name, Jem’s awful handwriting – but I expect you know… look, see if you can make it out.”

  Susan took the book and carefully copied out Jackie and the cats’ address in Devon, on a piece of paper from her bag.

  While she was doing this, the girl who must be Dosha rushed into the room.

  “Dosha – gently, gently –” said Olivia. But her voice oddly had an edge of something that did not, suddenly, belong to the flawless Olivia-Jeremy World.

  “Olivia – it’s there again – it’s there on the stairs. I see it when I am coming to go out of the kitchen – and then the faucet spouts on in sink –”

  “Dosha,” said Olivia, “calm down, please.”

  But Dosha only poised, a dark-haired slender girl of about Susan’s age, waving her hands and her eyes wide.

  “Oh dear,” said Olivia. She glanced at Susan. “It doesn’t do anything, Dosha. You know that.”

  “It is there.”

  “Yes, it’s there. Look, go back and get the coffee. It’ll be gone by now. It always goes as soon as we see it, doesn’t it.”

  “I don’t want to see it.”

  “No, but you have and now it’ll be gone.”

  Dosha slunk out of the door.

  Olivia turned round and looked at Susan. Her own eyes were big and frank. “We have a ghost, you see.”

  Susan said, “Do you? Really?” She sounded polite, quite interested, pragmatic but open-minded.

  “Actually, Susan, I was hoping – as you knew Jackie a bit – that you might know something about this – oh this bloody house.” Olivia flushed angrily. She stood up and flexed her well-shaped legs in their tailored jeans. “When I think of the K’s we’ve poured into it, the mess it was in. And the garden, they’re still working on that, and the landscape gardener – all these things we’ve had done. And then no sooner did we get in the bloody place than all this starts. I thought it was a poltergeist, but Jeremy says they’re always caused by young children – and we don’t have any kids.”

  Susan felt now as if she were not necessarily operating her own body. As if she were only sitting up inside her head, like Jeremy in his office gazing down like God on the city and the river.

  “What happens?”

  “Oh – just lots of unimportant awful things. All the time. I hoped it would stop. I had a friend in, she works with crystals and that sort of stuff, professionally. She exorcised the house for us, she got the energies going the right way – or so she said. But it actually made things worse. Look, did Jackie ever mention –?”

  “Well, yes. She said there was a knocking sound and windows opened by themselves. And Mildred – one of the others – said that things went missing –”

  “They do, Christ knows they do. I lost my first wedding ring – I mean the ring from my marriage before I married Jem. I don’t wear it, I keep it in a box – and then it was gone. And I thought for a minute Dosha had – well it was terrible, because she’s a darling girl, from Helsinki, and she would never – and when I got that sorted out, the ring reappeared – under the box, where I’d looked – but then my jogging shoes went missing – jogging shoes. And oh, lots of things. And yes, there are sounds. Not knocking, I haven’t heard that, perhaps Dosha has – more – sort of breathing – pacing –”

  Susan stared. She saw that Olivia was pale, Pale Milk, like the hall without the splash of stained glass window light thrown there.

  “But the worst thing is, we do see things.”

  Susan no longer felt removed. She felt as if she were trapped, one of the lesser stars, in a horror film.

  “What?” she fumbled out.

  Dosha came in wobbling a tray of priceless coffeepot and cups, and some exotic biscuits. She seemed calmer now, as Olivia had told her to be. Putting her tray on a coffee table, Dosha said, suddenly, “It has gone.”

  “It always does,” said Olivia. But she had by now frightened herself out of any pretence at organisational cool, and Dosha stood there, shaking her head bleakly.

  “Mr Jeremy say,” said Dosha, “he has never been the one of us to see this thing.”

  “No, he hasn’t, the bastard. He never sees it. Or hears it. He says it’s possible, but won’t believe we have it. He thinks I’m mad. Dosha’s mad. That we’re hysterical and affect each other and imagine it. Even about the ring, he said I’d lost it.”

  “What is it,” said Susan, “that you see?” She didn’t want to know.

  Dosha spun round and stared at Susan wildly. “Up on the stair, out in passage. Or in rooms. Once in my room – is on the wall – like a fly–”

  “Yes, she saw it in her room, didn’t you, Dosha. And I have, in the bedrooms and even in Jem’s study. Down here, everywhere.”

  Susan heard herself again: “Is it – a person?”

  “No,” said Olivia surprisingly, and with abrupt flatness, most of the energy seeming to leave her. “I can’t describe it. It’s – a sort of absence of anything else. Like – oh, if you look at something too bright and there’s a dark patch on your vision a few moments. Only not like that. And then taps turn on, and sometimes lights, or they go out when they’re on. They fuse all the time, too. At least Jeremy has to believe in that.”

  The coffee sat on the table. They all looked at the coffee, not making a move to try anything with it.

  Susan said, “What will you do?”

  “I hoped you might know something. I haven’t had the courage to ring up Jackie. Honestly, I’m afraid of what she might say, after the thing with the cats.”

  Susan said, “I do know an old woman used to live here, once.” As she said it, she felt the hair rising on her own scalp.

  The digger outside had fallen quiet again. An enormous silence filled the house, a stillness as if time had come to a stop.

  “An old woman. Oh God. And I suppose she died here.”

  “No I don’t think she did.”

  “Only that was it about the cats. Let me explain. Even though this will sound crazy. Crazier. Cats were in the garden, a lot of them, about fourteen. I saw them, Jeremy saw them. The builders saw them – some of them left bits of food, which Jeremy put a stop to. But the cats got in anyway and peed up the walls, apart from screaming the place down every night. So I called Jackie and said could she do anything about the cats she’d left here, and Jackie said they hadn’t left any cats, they were all accounted for. So I said it must be a feral colony then, that had moved in when the house was standing empty for a few weeks, what a strange coincidence, sounding sarcastic because I didn’t believe her. Then Jackie said, of course a few cats had died during the years they were here. Old ones or sick ones that didn’t make it. Which got me thinking, because by then I’d heard the noises, and Dosha had seen something in her room – Oh, I don’t know. I just know I’m bloody sick of it.”

  Dosha had by now sat down in a chair done in complex jazzy russet weave.

  Olivia said, with fresh sharpness, “Coffee, Dosha.”

  Then Dosha got up, and poured out coffees and handed them round with the biscuits.

  “Could you get a priest?” Susan said, lamely.

  “Tried that. They won’t come. We’re not Catholic, anyway. They’re the only ones who pay attention to ghosts or demons. And what have we got? An old lady and some cats.”

  Susan said, “She really didn’t die here, the old lady. She – I think she left the house and went into the park and they – she was found on a bench. It was cold.”

  “Christ.”

  Dosha said, “That’s why she is here, then.”

  “Oh Dosha,” said Olivia.

  “She has to come back she thinks, though she should go elsewhere, for she’s dead. So she goes the wrong way, and is stuck now.”

  “No, Dosha. Just shut up.”

  Dosha said in a low stubborn howl, “I have written to my uncle. I am to be going home.”

  “All right, Dosha. Let’s talk
about it later with Jem.”

  Out in the wide hall, the light had moved from the glass in the door.

  Susan looked around. The entry into the other succession of rooms had surely been moved, it was further along. On the blank of new wall thus provided, hung a sepia photograph of a Roman aqueduct.

  But she thought of how she dreamed once, of Catherine, in the sepia photograph she, Susan, had perhaps seen, or not.

  “She was called Catherine,” Susan said. She felt ashamed.

  Olivia looked at her, evidently wanting her to go now, and to forget all this nastiness until the next thing happened.

  “I mean the old woman. Catherine.”

  With no warning Olivia turned and shrieked violently, malevolently into the ringing body of the silent painted house: “Go to hell, Catherine! Clear out, Catherine! Fuck off! Fuck the fuck off!” Then turning back to Susan, no longer quite flawless, and hair ruffled, her eyes like those of a scared bacchante, Olivia murmured, “Great to meet you, Susan. Take care.”

  Book Two

  V

  This isn’t for me. It’s for Flat 6C.”

  “I know. She’s out again. Can you take it?”

  Susan looked at the postman’s pale, stare-eyed, harassed face. “All right.”

  He, or one of the many postmen who came and went, was always pushing letters for Flat 6C through her own door, which was marked, obviously confusingly, 6E. This however was a package, not very large, but too big to fit in either door.

  6C was directly across the hall. Susan had never glimpsed the occupant, although she knew her name from all the wrongly-delivered-letters – Ms Crissie Fielding.

  Crissie Fielding, the only truly adjacent neighbour, was very quiet. Which was also explainable if she was out a lot. The faint strains of popular music or TV that frequently strayed from the other flats, (6A, B and D) down the corridor, never emanated from 6C.

  Susan took the package back into the kitchen.

  Sitting at the small table, with her half-eaten croissant, she glanced over the package. Apart from the address, it bore a small label. G.D. Register.

  Vaguely, Susan felt reluctant to confront Crissie-of-the-unusual-spelling Fielding with the package. (Before it had only been a matter of putting post through the letterbox.) Why on earth?