The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times

by Xan Brooks

  The three men, all outcasts, stand together in companionable silence. The Long Boys play ‘Beale Street Blues’ and ‘China Boy’ before wrapping the set with the lovely, lilting ‘Tar Paper Door’. Sweetpea – his eyes closed, his face serene – sings of the heaven which lies across the river and beyond the hill, where a man may throw off his irons and run free as the west wind. He sings that this is where he is going and that he is no longer afraid. His forefathers have sprinkled a trail of grey pebbles to lead him to their door. Lucy is rapt, transported. Involuntarily she sways and spills champagne down her front.

  From somewhere close behind she hears the Tin Man remark, “No doubt about it. Completely off the beat.”

  After that come more platters, more powder. The night slips in and out of focus. The merriment extends all the way until dawn. At one stage Chrissie White breaks down in tears for no apparent reason. At another, York Conway and Truman-Jones remove the fire extinguishers from the wall and, purporting to check that they work as advertised, proceed to direct foam upon the guests standing to either side. A conga line rampages through the downstairs chambers. A naked woman has either leapt or been pushed into the ornamental pond. All told it is judged to have been a most satisfying party.

  Come and go as you please, Clarissa had advised, and this is what she elects to do. Most evenings, after a tea of tinned salmon or rabbit stew, she finds the gate in the wall and takes the path to the house where the silver platters contain powder and the crystal flutes are always full. Some nights the funny men come dragging behind. More often than not they remain drinking in the yard. They are guests of Grantwood and yet they still know their place. The house with its noise and finery is not their natural habitat.

  The Scarecrow, having finally managed to light his cigarette, calls, “Do let us know what becomes of the cat. The cat that was only a cat until the time it looked back.”

  The Tin Man says, “I’ve started to look a bit askance at that cat. Frankly I’ve started to wonder whether it’s really a cat.”

  At the gate she shakes her head and tries a smile. She says, “At least the men in the house do things with their lives. What do you do? Besides sitting here drinking scotch every night.”

  Toto chuckles. “She’s got you there. One-nil to Lucy.”

  Outside his cottage, Coach scrapes dried mud from his boots. He shouts, “What are the little doxies up to now?”

  Fred says, “We’re going to the house, so you can like it or lump it. We’ve been invited. Have you been invited?”

  Coach considers this, still scraping at his boot. “Mercy,” he says. “Hark at Fancy O’Mally.”

  The groundsman once mattered. He does not matter anymore. He has become a minor irritant, a grumbling distraction, forever fussing about in the yard or agonising over the root rot that’s eating the trees in the orchard. Eventually she supposes she will have to negotiate a price for him to drive her to town. She has money to deliver and she is yet to spend a shilling. But she finds she has no great desire to drive out past the Palladian lodge. Grantwood House has the girl in its grip. It enthrals and enchants. It bolts the gate on the outside world.

  In the space of a fortnight the Griffin has faded. The pub has become absurd and unreal in a way that the camel is not. The legends are true: the camel exists. She and Fred have observed it on the lawns beside the great house, standing unconcerned amid the grazing sheep. They tried to approach it but the beast is standoffish and haughty and they’ve been warned that it spits. Fred christens it Edith and is delighted to find the name adopted by the others. Within the space of a day everyone is referring to the camel as Edith. How’s Edith getting on? Where in hell has Edith got to? Is she feeling the cold? Lucy asks why the camel was brought to the estate to begin with but Fortnum-Hyde laughs and replies that he hasn’t thought that far ahead. He has a habit of buying items that snag his interest and then sitting with them a while to discover the role they will play and precisely where they fit in. Invariably, he says, his instinct is correct. But he has yet to decide what he should do with Edith. If it turns out to be nothing he can always offload her onto someone else. In the meantime she’s happy, which means that he’s happy too.

  What an incredible place Grantwood House is. How astonishing that she should come to be here at all. She has to keep pinching her arms to prove she’s awake and not dreaming and then pinch herself again just to double check. She canters in and out of the cobblestone yard, grabbing at her forearms until she raises red welts.

  “Stop that!” the Scarecrow barks from the doorway to the workshop. “Honestly, Lucy, don’t keep savaging your own flesh.”

  “I can’t help it, I can’t help it. I’m just too happy to be here.”

  The girl is embarrassed by her clothes until Clarissa takes her in hand. The flower-print dress from the camphor-wood chest has frayed at the neck and tattered at the hemline, but the lady flings open the doors to her own dressing room. Clarissa says she sees no reason why Lucy should not dress like a lady; she says that Lucy’s more lady than most of the real – as in titled – ladies she knows. The girl ought to dress and act the way she wants to be and that way, with a little good fortune, she can make it come true.

  She says, “The world is full of people who’ll try to tell you you’re one kind of person. It’s up to you to say that you’re not. Tell them often enough and they’ll come to believe it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Take those friends of yours from the cottage. They regard you as a plaything when you are jolly well not. You don’t have to be what they want you to be. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

  The girl nods uncomfortably. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Lucy,” she says, “you can be whatever you want. Believe you me, the clothes are just the start of it.”

  Clarissa’s dressing room is a marvel. It is like a department store on Oxford Street where all the colourful goods are strung together on rails. Now Lucy and Fred trip through the loggia in pageboy tunics and last season’s shoes. They wear translucent nylons that peel off like snakeskins. Fred’s string of beads is so long she has to loop it three times round her throat and even then the last coil extends below her navel.

  These are the good times, before the leaves turn. During the day she prepares lunch and dinner and is sure to keep the cottages clean. She joins Toto in his room and the Tin Man in his and arranges herself on the bed so that they may each attend to their business. But she performs these tasks automatically, almost listlessly, and rather has the sense the funny men do as well. The onset of autumn has cooled their ardour. They were at their hungriest in the summer, in the woods. These days they appear to be preparing for a long winter sleep. The Scarecrow leads the way. He is spending more time in his workshop, or away with his books. Never once has he requested that Lucy accompany him upstairs, although he continues to chip in his share at the end of each week. She resists pressing the point about the difference in pay. Were she to ask for more money they might reasonably demand that she did more to earn it.

  Fred fidgets in bed and complains that her bladder is full. They have mislaid the pot which means she must step outside to the yard.

  “Go and use the toilet then. You’re keeping me awake.”

  “The amount you put away I’m surprised you’re not dead. Besides,” she adds, “it’s too cold in the yard.”

  “Oh do get it over with. If you fall asleep now you’ll end up wetting yourself.”

  Fred says, “Wouldn’t it be good if we had rooms in the house? Do you think they might let us? Clarissa’s taken such a shine to you and there’s easily enough space. One wing is shut. They could open it up.”

  “I don’t know. What about the funny men?”

  “Who cares? I’m tired of the funny men.”

  “Ha,” Lucy scoffs. “Do you think the young master would pay you for the work?”

/>   “He might if I asked. Even if he didn’t, I’d probably do it for free. Or he could set us both up in one of his houses in London. Imagine that. Me and you living like ladies in a big London house.”

  Lucy turns over and gets one arm under the pillow.

  Fred says, “What an idiot Edith was. She could have been here with us now if she wasn’t so stuck up and stupid.” A moment later she says, “Bloody hell, I need to pee.”

  “Then good heavens, go and do it. You’re driving me spare.”

  But it seems as though Fred has barely left the room when Lucy becomes aware of her screaming outside in the yard where the shared toilet stands. The girl tumbles from bed, her senses in uproar, and flings open the door to the landing. She knows all too well who was lying in wait. The horrid little man who claimed to be the Devil.

  Fred climbs the stairs at speed. Her head is down. “Is it him?” cries Lucy. “Is it Mr Elms?”

  Fred snaps, “No, get inside. I’m alright. Shut the door.”

  And yet Fred is not right, something has rattled her. She pulls up the chair and wedges it beneath the door handle; almost knocks Lucy over in her dash to the bed. A moment later come footfalls and the footfalls are followed by a hard tap at the door.

  “Freddy,” calls a familiar voice. “Don’t take on. It’s only me.”

  “Go away!” Fred shouts.

  “Come on, Freddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

  “Go away!” They can hear the man’s laboured breathing on the far side of the door. Eventually he turns and limps away on the landing.

  Fred whispers, “I don’t know why I put the chair there anyway. He can’t turn the doorknob with those fucking hooks.”

  They huddle together, the blanket pulled up to their chins. The cottage has settled. All its inhabitants have returned to their beds.

  “Are you really alright?”

  “Yes,” says Fred. “It gave me a fright.”

  Lucy nods sympathetically. “He needs to use the toilet as well, you know.”

  “Then he should get properly dressed when he does,” Fred says. “He really, really ought to put on his mask when he does.”

  She weighs this up. “He probably thought it was safe. It’s so long after midnight.”

  “Feel my hand. Is it shaking?”

  Lucy does; it is. “Fred. You knew what they were like. The funny men from the war.”

  “The funny men,” says Winifred and then laughs.

  24

  The clocks in this house all tell different times. Electric bulbs burn in some rooms but do not work in others. The upstairs bathrooms are imperfectly plumbed, so that the taps release brown water at intervals, on a whim, no matter how tightly they have been turned. The telephone in the entrance hall rings so feebly that it is only heard by accident, if a figure happens to be passing the mahogany table. One evening Clarissa Fortnum-Hyde discerns its trill and cups the device to her ear.

  Into the mouthpiece, she says, “Hallo.”

  As through from an inordinate distance, a faint voice says, “Hallo.”

  “This is Grantwood House. Who is this on the line?”

  A moment later the voice returns. “This is Grantwood House. Who is this on the line?” The woman replaces the earpiece with a queer sense of vertigo. She feels as if she has spoken across many miles to some doppelgänger, standing in the hall of a cavernous house in a parallel world.

  The trees in the valley turn coppery orange and chimney-pot red. Storm clouds of starlings draw patterns in the sky. A heron targets the pond and devours the carp, and this infuriates Raine who has tended to them all year. The mercury drops and the estate shrinks in sympathy. When it grows too cold to sit out in the loggia, the guests retreat first to the Regency Room and finally, in October, to the grand drawing room with its crackling hearth and velvet wall hangings and its heroic, life-sized oil portrait of Lord Hertford’s son. Each time Lucy and Fred are shown in, they find its occupants spreadeagled in armchairs or lying prone on the sofas, already in the grip of cognac or cocaine.

  Fortnum-Hyde regards their approach with languid amusement. He says, “Here they are. The pleasure dolls.”

  Spacious though it is, Grantwood House is unable to accommodate rival writers of stature. Patrick Foster has taken his leave, which means that the Scarecrow and the Tin Man will never discover what became of the cat that was not really a cat. Even Julius Boswell appears to remain only under sufferance. The playwright is still officially engaged to marry Clarissa, but her interest in the matter is on the wane and she has begun to direct her attentions – in a playful, unfocused fashion – towards Sweetpea Long. At regular intervals Arthur Elms will try and fail to get his hands aflame, burble an apology and then return to his seat. And Truman Truman-Jones explains that he needs to depart for India by next week at the latest; he has recently been forwarded a quite vexatious telegram. He shifts his immense bulk and makes the furniture squeak. He adds that by rights he should have been in Bombay by June.

  “Tell them to fuck off and stop bothering you,” York Conway advises. “Why do you want to be governor of Bombay anyway?”

  “I’m not convinced I do, quite.”

  “I’ll do it,” Winifred volunteers.

  “Don’t be preposterous, child.”

  “Oh, let her do it,” Rupert Fortnum-Hyde snorts. “Let Fredo go to Bombay and whip the natives into shape. They’d never know what hit them, poor devils.”

  “I think I’d be good,” Fred says.

  As a result of the incident in the yard, Fred informs Lucy she has made an important decision. She’ll continue to provide Toto with Mench – every now and again, should he ask her nicely – but she will no longer consent to lie down with Tinny. The Tin Woodman is too disgusting for words. She keeps recalling the sight of his face in the yard and feeling sick to her stomach. She can’t believe she ever went with him to begin with. She cannot imagine why he was ever her favourite. She will go with Toto, assuming of course that she is in the mood to be kind. But she has resolved to have nothing further to do with the Tin Woodman. Even when he is wearing his mask she can hardly stand the sight of him because she knows how revolting he really is underneath.

  Lucy thinks this over. She recalls her conversation with Clarissa in the dressing room. At length she says, “They’re all disgusting, that’s the truth of it. I’d rather not have Mench with any of them.”

  Fred nods excitably. “They’ve had a good time with us until now. But enough is enough. I might not even do it with Toto.”

  Lucy has an absurd urge to reach over and shake Winifred by the hand. This feels like a breakthrough or some thrilling escape – more significant, even, than her flight from the Griffin. Still, she is concerned about the money and would prefer to avoid a confrontation. If they were to tell the funny men outright that the old arrangement was over, the funny men would almost certainly then demand that they leave. And she does not quite know how she would feel about this.

  Fred says, “They can keep paying us to cook and clean for them. But if they don’t want to do that I’m moving up to the house.”

  “We can’t live in the house. You just try it and see.”

  “I will,” vows Winifred. But Lucy detects a note of defiance and wonders if the girl might not also have her doubts.

  At first all fears of a row appear to be unfounded. Previously garrulous, the Tin Man has become passive and shy. The encounter in the yard has upset him more than Fred. In the days that follow he does not request Mench and neither does Toto; maybe the dwarf is shy, too. When the evenings draw in, the funny men retire to the cramped kitchen to drink and play cards, leaving the way clear for the girls to slip past them unnoticed. It appears that the confrontation could be avoided or at least forestalled, except that the lack of resolution chafes at Winifred’s spirit. She is not a girl to leave things unsaid.
She cannot identify a crisis without trying to cure it. She can’t see a calm without whisking it into a squall. On departing the cottage, lavishly decked out in scarlet chiffon, Fred pulls up short in the hall, pivots on her heel and cries, “By the way, Lucy and me had a very interesting talk. None of you are getting any more Mench out of us.”

  “What’s that?” barks Toto.

  “Lucy said you’re disgusting and I reckon she’s right. You’ve had your fun. It’s over now.”

  The Tin Man steps hesitantly to the kitchen door. “Freddy,” he begins.

  “You can take your mask off if you like, we don’t care any more. No hard feelings, but we’re not giving you Mench.”

  “You’re not giving us anything,” Toto shouts from his chair. “Last I checked, you’re earning one pound every week.”

  Brightly she says, “Is that the time? We must really be off. See you tomorrow, funny men.”

  “Now hang about, for God’s sake. You can’t land us with something like that and then run away.”

  The girl treats him to a corrosive smile. “Then chase me, Toto. Chase me up to the house. Let’s see how fast you can go in that little chair.”

  Outside, by the tennis court, she says, “Dirty bastards. I’m done with them,”

  “I think you might also be done with your pound every week.”

  The girls dart out of one drama only to pitch headlong into a second. When Raine opens the door to the draped drawing room, he puts a finger to his lips and won’t let them in until he is confident of their silence. Lucy gathers that they are interrupting a private performance of Julius Boswell’s latest play. A sofa has been shifted to clear a stage by the hearth. Boswell has taken the role of the corrupt factory owner; Fortnum-Hyde the young firebrand, hailed as a hero by his downtrodden co-workers.

  He says, “You ask what became of the honest working man? He fought at the Somme and he learned vital lessons. His college was built out of mud, blood and gas. He educated himself there. He learned he had worth and that he should not be mistreated. He learned that he controls the means of production and he understood that this makes him of greater value than you. You ask what became of the working man? Well, here he is, Mr Doncaster. Do you like what you see?”