Marina shrugged. ‘We was just wondering,’ she said.
‘You want to be careful of thieves in these parts,’ Betty whispered, ‘kids with hidden faces have been breaking into cars and such like of late.’
‘Well, I’ve been offered several other places around Stabman’s Reach,’ I told them, ‘. . . if you’re not sure.’
Betty’s chin trembled and I could see she wanted to say something else, but her sister’s fingers tightened suddenly over hers. The café was steamy and noisy and full of the smell of burnt toast and I wanted to get business done and be on my way.
‘The only reason we asked was you’ll need paraffin for the heaters,’ Marina said quickly. ‘We can get the paraffin man to go out to the house. At least he might. Depends.’
I took out my cheque book and the sisters stared down at it in wonderment.
‘We don’t use them things; we don’t do nothing of that sort, we don’t.’ Betty said, glancing at Marina.
‘Well shall we draw up an agreement, and shall I get you cash instead?’
‘No. No agreements wrote down on paper,’ Marina said loudly, ‘we’re not having anything of that lark.’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference if it was wrote or not if . . .’ Betty muttered.
‘I would appreciate it if you could tell the paraffin man about me,’ I persisted, trying to mentally circumvent their curious behaviour. ‘And just how far is the house from Stabman’s Reach?’
The sisters looked at each other again, this time for the answer it seemed. ‘Couple of mile; no more than that; not a lot anyway.’
I followed their instructions and found the old house on the edge of the marsh, although it was further away from the village than they’d described it. It struck me as a peculiar place in which to have built a house as there was not a single tree to be seen and the horizon was as flat and straight as a piece of neatly folded cloth. The sky was the whole thing and on that day the dark clouds were dense and hanging.
I was not pleased to see the Werrett sisters standing at the gate just two weeks later. As they would not move from their position, I was obliged to walk out to them and I realised they must have come from the village on foot. The coldness had cast a white shadow across the marsh for as far as could be seen and that same sense of whiteness was in the air itself. The women were frozen. ‘It’s bitter out here,’ I said. ‘Come inside quickly.’
‘Stingy old weather today,’ Marina answered, staring over my shoulder at the house. ‘We come across the carnser; it’s worse out there. You been all right so far, Miss Wood?’
I nodded and turned sharply back to the house, but on that day it wasn’t much warmer inside because wind was booming down the chimneys making mockery of the damp stuffy warmth put out by the single huge and stinking paraffin heater. As I led the sisters into the drawing room with its vast windows, it seemed to me that they were examining every surface, the windowsills, the floor, the skirting boards and the ornate ceiling.
‘I haven’t damaged anything. I haven’t had time yet. Sorry, that was a bad joke,’ I said, and was startled when they began to laugh quite wildly. Even from the other side of the room however, I could see that while they were making the sounds of laughter, their rough, narrow faces suggested they were afraid of something. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’ I asked, hoping to sound gentle now, and trustful.
Marina stepped forward. ‘He was a bad joke seeing as you’re educated, and educated people don’t destroy things. No, we was just looking for water. Sometimes there’s water. Has there been?’
‘Anywhere?’ Betty put in.
‘Do you mean is the house leaking?’
Marina shrugged. ‘Leaking is one thing, yes.’
I thought for a minute. ‘No. I can’t say I’ve noticed any leaks, Miss Werrett.’ And I looked upwards at the ceiling to search it for damp spots, as if suddenly influenced by the women and their concern I did not trust my own words. ‘It’s really cold in the bathroom, though,’ I said to prompt them further. ‘I guess it’s to be expected in a house like this that rears right up out of nothing on the edge of a marsh. . . .’ the women didn’t seem to have heard me, ‘. . . with such frosts and savage winds and no trees for miles,’ I continued, entranced by their oblivion.
‘Your card in the newsagent’s said a quiet house wanted, it did, which is why we thought he might suit,’ Marina said loudly, as if suddenly in attendance of the moment again.
‘Oh, it does suit, please don’t think otherwise.’
‘I’ve heard it’s like the tropics in London, palm trees and coconuts and things,’ Betty announced suddenly. ‘Someone told me that’s been; wholly Tarzan country accordingly to him.’
‘Don’t be so soft,’ Marina whispered. ‘Miss Wood will think us ignorant, she will.’
‘Well it is warmer in London than up here,’ I told them. ‘It’s Doctor Wood by the way, but I’d be happy for you to call me Megan.’
I saw Betty nudge Marina as they stood side by side looking at me and both of them simultaneously cleared their throats and joined hands. ‘We don’t want to crowd you, we don’t, but we’re moving in,’ Marina declared, ‘today.’
The room darkened as they spoke, and I shifted closer to them so that I could look properly into their strange faces. ‘You’re going to do what?’
‘Our things is by the gate,’ Marina said. ‘Betty will step out for them.’
I laughed. ‘The idea is I pay you money and in exchange you let me live in the house alone and undisturbed.’
‘We won’t disturb you,’ she answered. ‘Do we do, you can tell us to scarper. We’ll cook for you and take your clothes to the launderette; that type of thing.’
‘Keep our eye on everything,’ Betty added, looking upwards once again.
They were perplexing. It seemed they were holding each other’s hand for comfort, and I suspected also that Marina was able to control what Betty said that way.
‘I don’t need your help,’ I told them.
‘That type of housework takes the whole live-long day. At least in these parts it do, even if it don’t in London, and you said you had to work on your church things,’ Marina reminded me.
‘And we don’t want paying, we don’t,’ Betty said.
‘What?’
‘We want to look after you,’ Marina replied, and she tried a smile that seemed to me cringing and false. ‘Betty’s a good cook and we won’t do nothing to get us wrong.’
As we’d been standing there in the top room, a vicious howler of a wind, worse than the persistent one, had torn across the marsh and it was as if it had wrapped itself several times around the house and was intent on full entry.
‘That’s rafty out there,’ Betty whispered.
‘There’s plenty of rooms in this big old house and we’ll be quiet like little mice,’ Marina said, ‘you won’t even see us if you don’t want to.’
I knew quite suddenly that part of me welcomed the idea of them staying, it was as if all the time I’d spent there so far, I’d been in a strange state of caution, as if I hadn’t breathed the air quite normally—as if in fact, I was trespassing. ‘You told me when we met that you lived in a council house on the edge of Stabman’s Reach,’ I said, struck suddenly by an unsettling thought.
‘Can we get our things in now?’ Betty asked, staring at me intensely, her wide whiskery mouth slightly ajar.
‘But this house is really yours isn’t it?’ I asked them, as I was wondering how a couple of impoverished country women could own a four storey Georgian property of such grandeur.
The sisters glanced at each other and nodded hard. ‘We do own him, we do,’ Marina whispered. ‘It’s in the family.’
‘Blast me, Miss Wood, can I get our things before that drat wind do?’ Betty asked.
‘The council know Werretts own this house, if that’s what’s bothering you,’ Marina said, and I saw that she’d intuited my thought.
‘But they still gived us a pla
ce to live far away from here,’ Betty put in, speaking quickly.
‘You two are the owners then?’ I persisted.
The sisters looked at each other in a curious hard sort of fighting manner that they must have imagined I couldn’t see, and it was that look more than everything they’d said that aroused my curiosity about them mightily, and perhaps it was that alone that caused me to decide. ‘This is a very odd business,’ I said, speaking to them slowly, ‘but go on then, bring your bags in. Only remember I’ve paid you a lot of money so things had better work out between us.’
***
It can’t be denied that at first my life was easier in the old place when the sisters moved in. Sometimes I could hear them creeping about in the corridors or up and down the wooden staircase talking in low voices, but for the most part they stayed in the gloomy kitchen and managed to keep it quite warm in there. Betty cooked heavy pies and meat and rough gritty vegetables like swedes and turnips and the heat from the range took the chill out of the air. We fell into a pleasing routine, pleasing at least to me as all my meals were provided, and it was curious how quickly I adapted to the arrangement and took it for granted that hot food would be ready for me when I was hungry. I’d never been married, but I could now understand that for a certain type of man being cooked for must be a powerful reason not to leave a wife however greatly he might despise her.
I was getting on well with my research and quite often as I drove out to photograph my next church, I’d give the sisters a lift into Stabman’s Reach to get groceries or to go to the laundrette, or occasionally I dropped them in the local town where they hardly would venture normally. On the way home, they’d sit together with their arms linked in the back of my car and tell me in some detail what they’d seen and done.
Then I became aware that they’d developed a way of talking to me in a slightly formal, but jovial and overbearing manner and it began to tire me so that when we ate together, I tried not to inadvertently encourage the behaviour through enquiry of any kind. But at the same time Marina had a series of ploys to stop Betty speaking too much; I’d noticed it right at the beginning of our acquaintance. If she did not tell her directly to be quiet, she’d nudge her, or step on her foot right there in front of me. I was fascinated by the fact that they imagined I could see and understand nothing but could not tell if it was my presence that was causing their behaviour, or if, like two old trees, they’d grown twisted together over time and habitually performed their strange double-act like old married couples often do. In any event, beneath their chatter, I intuited there was something they were hiding from me, but I’d become used to their eccentricities and imagined that while it might have been something of enormous importance to them, if they were to reveal it, I would find it as laughable as coconuts growing in London.
When the frost had thawed and the wind changed direction, the sisters took to going for walks across the marshes. From the top room as I worked, I could watch them until they became as small as little peg dolls in the distance, and as I was engaged in doing that one morning, a bead of water slid down the wall beside me, and glistening in the light as it did, it caught my eye. I stood up and looked at the ceiling but there was no obvious dampness there, and just as I was about to sit down again I noticed a small shiny puddle of water on the floor close to my desk. Again, on searching, I could not find its origins. My work room was not directly beneath the bathroom, but going up the little flight of back stairs and opening the bathroom door, I was momentarily startled as if I’d burst in on someone using it. Both taps were dripping, but after feeling about under the sink around all the heavy pipework, my fingers came away dry.
The sisters returned before noon. They’d been down to the reed beds to watch the marshmen at their harvesting work they told me. ‘Mostly Werretts down there,’ Marina said, ‘the reeds is for thatching.’
‘Your family are thatchers?’
‘No, Miss Wood, marshmen.’
‘So marshmen cut the reeds, then?’
She nodded. ‘Marshmen do plenty of things—to do with water that is.’
Betty nodded too, and then began to bite her bottom lip.
‘Stop it, Betty,’ Marina said, hitting her arm hard, ‘do you don’t do that. You ain’t fell apart yet. She’s faring badly today,’ she explained, ‘she gets troubled a lot.’
‘I can’t help it when I step into this house,’ Betty said, ‘looking about to see all the time. Nor can you, Rina; it’s just you won’t admit it.’
We were sitting around the table in the kitchen and it was so dark on that deep winter day, that we had all the lights on and the shutters closed to keep out the dreariness. I hesitated to pry into their business and I got the impression they didn’t expect me to pursue the conversation, so I changed it. ‘There was a strange little puddle of water in the house this morning,’ I told them.
Betty stood up instantly, and went such a weird colour that she really did frighten me. Marina stood up too and reaching out, took her sister by the shoulders and seemed to be both caressing and shaking her at the same time. The hissing sound of Marina’s voice when she spoke caused my back to arch with alarm. I sensed I was witnessing something intimate between them, a thing that had happened many times, and if I’d felt superior to these women before, I did no longer. Rather, I began to feel a slowly creeping dis-ease in their company. Then, as if suddenly coming too, Betty pulled herself away from Marina and stared at her. ‘Told you so,’ she said.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked them. ‘You were on the lookout for water when you first moved in here, remember? That’s why I let you know about it.’
‘Waits till we go out,’ Betty said, ‘. . . then he get in and do it.’
I could see that Marina was struggling to stop her sister talking so that the pretence of normality could be re-established, but I’d become determined now to make these women speak to me candidly. ‘Who waits till you go out, Betty?’
‘Don’t take no notice of her; she’s a real spluttergut,’ Marina said quickly, ‘has been since a child.’
‘It’s time you both levelled with me,’ I answered. ‘I’m getting tired of your weirdness.’
‘Where was he?’ Marina asked, craning her neck forward as if to inspect me.
‘What? The water, you mean? Upstairs by the table I’m working at.’
Betty sat down again and pulled her slide out so that her wintery brown hair fell forward and partially hid her face. ‘Don’t think we can now,’ she whispered, ‘. . . look after you.’
‘We should stand up to him,’ Marina said. ‘About time we did.’
‘You mean deal with the water problem?’ I asked and my growing frustration at their refusal to confide in me must have shown in the tone of my voice. ‘I wiped it up, but do you want to see where it was?’
‘Seeing the place won’t help,’ Betty said.
‘So you don’t care? If this house was mine, I’d want to know.’ Neither of them responded. Marina sat down beside her sister and began to fiddle with the little pink heart-shaped hair slide. ‘You know you’re the strangest couple of landladies I’ve ever met and I’m not sure that things are working out. You make me think this house really isn’t yours to let out in the first place.’
They looked up at me, startled and angry and Betty’s eyes glinted through her veil of hair. ‘It does belong to us,’ she said, ‘but there’s a certain Werrett man that’s our uncle who thinks it belong to him, he do.’
Marina turned slowly towards her sister, and reaching out, took her hair from her face, and shushing her the while, put the hair slide back in carefully.
***
I was pleased with most of my photos; even though the light was sometimes difficult to work in, I had some dramatic pictures of churches with round towers. There was one in particular I intended to visit again because I suspected that the west wall of the nave was from Saxon times and that it originally had a round tower. I’d seen a lot of Saxon stonework, sometimes hidden aw
ay within the complexities of the churches I’d visited, and I’d found a lovely Saxon doorway into the church at St Lucus.
The sisters had made themselves especially scarce since their confession that they were in dispute about the house with one of their male relatives, and I decided not to press them about it. Should some Werrett man loom up and disrupt our arrangement and I had to leave, I’d move into the little hotel next to the doctor’s surgery in the local town for the remainder of my stay. I decided also not to tell them about the damp patches I was finding from time to time on my bedspread in the room in which I slept as I would return later only to discover that they’d dried out completely. It took me a while to realise that I only found dampness or beads of water, or small puddles on the floor when the two of them were out. As queer as this was, as my work progressed I was more and more inclined to want to stay put as the house was in a perfect position in relationship to the villages and churches that were of most interest to me. I hadn’t forgotten, either, Betty’s response the first time I’d told them about the puddle by my desk, and I did not want to witness that hysteria again.
As the weeks passed, the women were spending more time outside the house than in it, and I had begun to notice that before their departure, they would gaze at each other, and I could not rid myself of the impression they were transmitting unspoken thoughts, a notion I found so unsettling that each time they did it I felt my stomach tighten in response. Although they revealed little about themselves, I gathered that they’d lived in the house as children and that it had belonged to a relative ‘who had come upon good times’, as they described it quaintly.
Often, when they left the house, they took a basket with them and I supposed they were taking food down to the reed harvesting. Usually I felt nothing but relief to be without them for a while, as by now there was something shiny and suspicious about Betty’s face all the time as if she was constantly on the verge of tears or fury, and I was sick of the sight of it. But one clear and cloudless morning of some beauty, I discovered quite suddenly as I gazed after them, that I didn’t want to be alone, and I startled myself terribly with the realisation. I stood up quickly and walked to the window. My impulse was to run after them. I felt bereft, and the closest I can remember to such a feeling before was when I was a child and I nearly lost my mother in a crowd.
Seven Strange Stories Page 9
