This morning, of course, I had to see her, because of the boy. I went round to the side of the house, skirting the lawn. About twenty yards of this route (the part adjoining the lawn itself) are clearly visible from the terrace, but my sister did not glance in my direction. I entered the house through the conservatory in the rear and went directly up to my room. I washed my hands and face and changed from my tunnelling suit (locking this up, as always, in a suitcase) into a blazer and flannels, donning also, as an afterthought, a maroon cravat. I think it was because of the cravat that as I plastered down at the mirror my somewhat dishevelled hair—my hair is very fine in texture and tends to wispiness, especially in the region above the ears—I began to feel quite debonair, a morning-coffee man. I was aware of course that this feeling was superficial, underlying it there was still the anxiety about the boy, but it persisted as I advanced towards Audrey across the terrace. True, I became a little flustered at the last moment, a familiar sense of unreality descended on me, but I attempted to disguise this—I think successfully—by making nonchalant motions with my hands.
‘Ah Audrey,’ I said. ‘There you are. What a beautiful morning.’
She looked at my hands, which I had commenced to rub together, then at my face. Then, after a considerable pause—terribly disconcerting to me—she said, ‘If it is coffee you want, Simon, you will have to go and get another cup from the kitchen.’
Involuntary as breathing, of course, this dryness of tone she immediately adopts in my expansive moments. She has been using it against me since she was seven and it is no less effective now than it was forty years ago.
‘Something of the sort,’ I said, attempting a genially indifferent tone. ‘Something of the sort I had in mind.’
Rather moodily I went back into the house. Marion was sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of coffee herself, and reading one of her True Romance magazines—it was on the table before her, open at a brightly coloured picture of a golden-haired girl sitting holding a letter under a flowering tree, musing. Marion is much addicted to these magazines, there are piles of them in her room as I noticed when, some months ago now, I obeyed an impulse of curiosity and went in there. Her elbows were resting on the table and her thin back was bent forward so that I could see, under the cotton dress, several of the little bumps of her spine. Her face when I entered was very close to the page and I thought that Marion probably should have her eyes tested; she has those warm, brown, very gentle eyes that often seem to weaken early. She straightened in her chair as I approached her and looked round and smiled in her vague startled way, then looked away again immediately. She never seems to look at anything or anyone for more than a second or two as though further scrutiny would reveal too much, bring something irrevocably into the open. I smiled at her. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I only want a cup and saucer. I can get them myself.’ Marion brings out some vestigial protective instinct in me. If Howard had lived she would not have been left to her own devices so much, she would not have devoted her leisure to home-perms and True Romances. Howard took her in at twelve when her mother died (her father had deserted them some years before this). The mother was related to him, though not very closely, and he had plans for her education, but then he died and Audrey got involved with the Dramatic Society and nothing was done for Marion at all except that Audrey taught her how to sew and bake cakes, things like that; now, of course, Audrey looks down on the girl because she is uncultivated, she uses her as a sort of servant really, and lately she has taken to shouting at her and even slapping her on occasion. So although I never say much to Marion we have a kind of alliance because we are both subject to Audrey’s tyranny.
I got the cup and saucer and carried them carefully back to the table on the terrace. Audrey was looking out over the grounds. She did not turn her head. Pouring, I regarded the backs of my hands. I have fingers that are best described as spatulate, with neat nails, despite all my digging, and immaculate half-moons. The veins on the backs of my hands were unhealthily distended this morning.
I sipped my coffee, resisting thoughts of my imminent dissolution, watching Audrey who had continued to look out over the lawn. Her face had that semblance of a slight smile it always wears in repose, an accidental upward tendency of the corners of the mouth. I have never known a face less diffident, less expressive of doubt than Audrey’s, less vulnerable to surprise attack. The set of the mouth, the unvarying order of her hair, the level, very narrow grey eyes all combine to give her the appearance of someone who has discounted in advance whatever one has to impart, however startling. If this is what is meant by poise, she has it.
It doesn’t deceive me, of course. There are these plunges of hers, that I have mentioned already. And latterly she has screamed quite often in her sleep.
‘Do you know what I saw this morning in the grounds?’ I began, in what I thought was an arresting tone, but she continued for some moments more to look calmly out at the overgrown lawn, and I saw from the slowness of her movements as she raised the cup and something consciously queenly about the set of her head, that she had fallen into her Prospero part, confronting with unimpaired dignity the uncouth communications of this Caliban. Since she became a member of the Dramatic Society Audrey’s grip on reality has weakened. And not only that: she brings dreadful people to the house now. That very evening, I suddenly recalled, the whole committee of the Dramatic Society was coming to supper.
‘What did you see then, Simon?’ my sister said at last, with an indulgent, governessy inflection.
I saw a squirrel,’ I said. ‘In the grounds. One of those little red fellows.’ I had not meant to say this. It broke from me at the last moment, because of nervousness and an ingrained dislike of direct communication. And I was conscious of its inadequacy after my preliminary tone. I attempted to fill the gap with further gestures of the hand, but could feel her eyes upon me.
‘Is that all?’ she said.
‘I saw a boy,’ I said, ‘there was a boy in the grounds this morning. I sent him packing, of course. You know he actually—’ I infused my tone with laughter, suddenly seeing how totally mistaken I had been to bring up the subject at all.
‘Did your boy have a badge?’ she asked. ‘A badge he was eager to display?’
‘He had some such thing, some wretched thing on the reverse side of his lapel. As though that entitled him—’
‘It must be the same boy I met some days ago as I was going down the drive. I told him he could get bluebells.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t give him permission, did you, to wander about the grounds at will?’ Despite myself a certain asperity had crept into my tone, and Audrey noticed it, as I could tell by an extra sort of stateliness that now began to settle over her.
‘I may well have done,’ she said, beginning to space her words out more, to show her command of the situation.
‘But my dear Audrey,’ I said, aiming at a tone of easy expostulation. I had, however, begun to tremble slightly.
She raised one arm, rather languidly, I watched it go up in apparent slow motion, an arm clad to the wrist in pale-blue jersey—the paler shades of blue she affects greatly—culminating in a plump creased wrist, plump white fingers. Despite a certain avidness of temperament, my sister’s hands do not resemble talons, but have instead a too human look, a rather horrifying plumpness. They are hands you could almost call chubby. She had indicated the swarming lawn, the thickets and tangles of the grounds beyond. ‘All this land,’ she said, ‘for the use of only two people, two people getting old, Simon? The land is for all, land is like love, it is not divisible, you can build fences, of course, but basically I mean, land is not divisible.’
I strove to maintain an appearance of dispassion. ‘Why not then throw the place open to picnickers, trippers, have a coach park built and, save the mark, urinals? Why stop at one smelly boy?’ Such rhetoric always annoys me, such superior self-enhancing views, requiring no sacrifice. I blame the Dramatic Society for Audrey’s constant adopting o
f these attitudes nowadays. Territory and property, things inalienably one’s own, are necessary, all these sharers have been half-baked from the Galilee lot onwards. She should see my robins, they could show her whether land is divisible or not, haven’t I seen them fight for land till they were blind with blood? Of course for Audrey there is no threat, no challenge, no need to fly at anybody’s eyes. The house and grounds are hers for her lifetime. Anyone who, like myself, occupies his territory only provisionally and on sufferance will understand my feelings as I looked at her closed complacent face. ‘You are being sentimental,’ I said. A wounding word, which I saw at once, and with immediate alarm, had gone home. Some of Audrey’s stateliness deserted her. She looked at me more narrowly. And when she spoke her voice was much less leisurely.
‘There is another thing I have to tell you,’ she said. Another thing? What had the first been? Suddenly I knew that a disastrous new fiat was about to be uttered. With an instinct of postponing the moment I set down my cup and rose to my feet. I said some words in an incoherent manner and adjusted the set of my cravat.
‘I can’t hear you,’ Audrey said. ‘No, just a minute Simon, if you don’t mind. There is something you ought to know. I have been to the Labour Exchange.’
‘The Labour Exchange?’
‘Howard kept the place up while he lived. The grounds and so on. It was a model of its sort in those days, for many years a model, everyone agreed. There were arbours and bowers in the grounds then, seats disposed about. What has happened since to them I don’t know. They were there.’
‘And are still,’ I said.
‘Somewhere, no doubt, in the . . . herbage, they are still. All those improvements Howard introduced, all that work gone for nothing.’
‘I keep things in check,’ I said, ‘in a number of small, perhaps imperceptible ways. . . .’
‘All gone for nothing. Sometimes I could break down altogether Simon, and weep, yes weep. You, of course, do nothing. The grounds could revert to immemorial forest, primeval swamp. You would merely watch, through your binoculars, the alligators or parakeets. Perched in some ridiculous hide. You won’t play a man’s part, Simon. So I have been to inform them that a vacancy exists.’
‘A vacancy,’ I repeated, still not understanding. I had for some reason a vision, at this word, of a breach, something like a broken window or a gap in the hedge, something that might need repairing.
‘They assured me that they would send a reliable man.’
Now at last I understood. She had been behind my back to the Labour Exchange to ask for someone. ‘You have been to ask for a gardener,’ I said, in a voice that was not completely under my control.
‘Not a gardener, exactly, Simon,’ she said, and now she had reverted to that domineering leisureliness. ‘A handy-man.’
I could find absolutely nothing further to say. I began to retreat across the terrace, making, in order not to seem too shaken, some farewell gestures. Audrey went on talking just as if I had not moved: ‘It is not as though we need a skilled gardener, not at this stage. There is dead wood to be cleared, weeds of every sort to be uprooted. A person sufficiently robust is what we need. Of course I did not explain all this to the officials at the Labour Exchange. . . .’
I descended from the terrace and went quickly round the corner of the house. I went straight upstairs and changed out of my morning-coffee kit into my tunnelling suit. It is quite possible for one who knows, by taking a circular route on the west side of the house, to reach the heart of the grounds without at any time coming into view from the terrace. This I did. I was making, of course, for my tunnel; that was the only place where such a shock could be even partially absorbed.
My tunnel extends from the point in the midst of the rhododendrons that I have already mentioned, diagonally across the grounds for about seventy-five yards, avoiding the denser areas of vegetation, but always adequately screened. From one point or other along it I can command a view of the whole central area of the grounds and also the house front including the terrace and lawn. I am hoping this summer, or was hoping before this bombshell of Audrey’s, to continue it another twenty or thirty yards right up to the hedge that runs along the road. If I could succeed in this, I should be able to watch from the bottom of the hedge, the girls cycling past at weekends, careless of their skirts on the empty road, their legs moving up and down, up and down. I adore the abandoned leg movements of cycling girls.
It is not really a tunnel, of course, but rather a roofed trench. It has taken me two years to complete this much of it. I am no longer sure what led me to excavation. Delight in the work for its own sake has to a large extent obscured my original motives. However, it is certainly true that some months after Howard’s death Audrey began to tamper with my belongings. She was entering my bedroom in my absence, handling my books. My room was kept locked, of course, but anyone can have a key duplicated. When I returned there was always some slight change in the appearance of things, a modified aspect; nothing definitely displaced, she was too cunning for that. I devised small traps for her, like placing one of my hairs across Bentley’s Birds of the British Isles in such a way that anyone opening the book must infallibly have disarranged it: when I returned the hair was exactly in place. Nevertheless I could not be deceived, there was always something subtly different in the appearance of things when I returned to my room. Such care to cover her traces was particularly menacing. It became plain to me that, Howard gone, Audrey was attempting to take over my life.
So I hit on the idea of excavating a subterranean room in the grounds and moving the objects I most valued into it. The trench was necessary because a concealed approach to the room was necessary. Like most truly artistic conceptions it grew magnified in the execution: I extended the trench further and further as the unique opportunities for observation that it conferred became clear to me. . . .
In the more shaded parts of the grounds dew has not dried on the dock leaves and flowering nettles. Spiders’ webs glitter in every thread. I move forward cautiously, and now I am among the rhododendrons, screened, invisible. Quickly now I go down on hands and knees, crawl into the heart of the rhododendron bush, the bitter smell of the leaves fills my nostrils. The entrance here is simply a square of tarpaulin lightly covered with earth. It can be removed in one piece. I remove it, and insert my body down into the hole, replacing the cover immediately, and with great care so as not to dislodge the earth. Now I am in complete darkness. I take from my jacket pocket the small electric torch which never leaves my person, proceed at a shuffle along the trench. The trench is narrow so my arms are constricted, and the roof is a good twelve inches lower than my full height which obliges me to crouch and incline my head. The thin beam of the torch lights up the walls of the tunnel, in some places smooth, in others pitted with small holes. The smell of clay is very strong. I proceed at a steady shuffle, head down, watching in the torchlight the motions of my brown brogues. Here and there I notice with some disquiet the gleam of wet: water is getting in from somewhere. Flooding is what I dread most. Repairs are constantly necessary, the canes I have used for the roof become brittle and have to be replaced, the sods waste and show a suspiciously geometrical line of rot. However, for considerable stretches there has been a completely successful integration of foreign and local matter, a solid roof has been formed that could be trodden on without damage.
I continue until I reach the side turning and now I have to go on hands and knees for a few yards, this tunnel is very low, descending steeply to a circular pit, about six feet in diameter. It is this I call my underground room. I have had to buttress the roof of this tunnel and that of the pit itself with poles to prevent caving in. It is only four feet from the floor to the ceiling so I generally find it more convenient, while down here, to go on hands and knees. I crawl over to the corner and light the oil lamp that rests in the recess in the wall. Now I have need no longer for a torch. The rosy light from the lamp illuminates my bookshelf, cut into the clay and lined with felt an
d oilcloth, with its row of bird-books and my collection of advertisements for ladies’ silk stockings, the Monet nude over the wall, whose yellow skin and complete unconcern I find deeply satisfying, the wooden stool and the strip of red linoleum on the centre of the floor. All these things I have gradually, and with immense labour, conveyed here.
I sit on the stool and look straight before me. Only here do I experience real peace. The roof is at least four feet thick and the ground above in any case inaccessible as I have taken care to excavate below the thickest part of the shrubbery. Not many can have a room such as this, as private as an undivulged idea or desire. Except for my heart there is no sound at all. I inhale the clay smell. I wonder if a wireless might be feasible. Strains of music might be faintly audible to anyone in the vicinity above. They would doubt their senses. Like the god leaving Anthony. . . . Gradually, as I sit here, all strain and anxiety leave me. The problem of the gardener I deliberately postpone.
I was still postponing it at half past six that evening, when I took up my usual position in the corner of the grounds. At half past six or thereabouts the woman in the bungalow across the field is quite often preparing herself to go out. And while she is in the midst of this preparation it may be that her husband calls out for something or she remembers something she has left elsewhere, hair-pins, stockings, something of that sort. These interruptions in her toilet cause her to pass quite frequently from bedroom to living-room, and on these warm evenings, with the front door open, there are prospects of incidental revelations. She feels secure, of course, so far from the road. And this element of confidence, of unconcern, is an important, indeed an essential one. I used at one time to go up to London as frequently as I could afford it to see what are called tableaux, the enactment by nude persons of mythological scenes, but I used to feel resentful, sitting in the dark, sharing, and then there was the complicity of the performers themselves, I disliked that intensely. No, there has to be unawareness. One evening last June, she stood for quite three minutes dressed only in bra and pants right in the open doorway. That incident, and the brief sojourn of a pair of hoopoes among the apple trees behind the house, were the highlights of last year.
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