by Barbara Vine
You can always tell an old lady’s place from anyone else’s. It doesn’t seem to matter at what period they were young, the thirties, the twenties, the teens of the century or even its first decade, or what was the style in furnishings when they first grew up. In the here and now they always have the same sort of decor. Chairs done in grey velvet with a little pattern of red flowers and black leaves, chintz sofas with extra covers for the arms, in case, I suppose, people with dirty hands sit in them; tables with piecrust edges and curly legs, glass-fronted bookcases full of books by authors whose names are long forgotten, grey and pink rugs on top of bigger red and black rugs on top of green and beige carpets, umbrella stands and standard lamps with parchment shades and workbaskets full of cotton reels, vases of fluted glass shading from emerald through jade green to white, stained brown inside from chrysanthemums left standing too long in stale water, landscapes in gilt frames, their shiny surfaces darkened to invisibility by time and neglect, innumerable tiny white china pots and urns and vases bearing the name and crest in red and black and gold of the seaside town where they were bought a lifetime before. And, of course, the framed photographs, depressing to the visitor because their subjects are nearly always lumpish and awkward, miserable while trying to look happy, or posed in unnatural or fake surroundings.
In old Mrs Fisherton’s there was one of these of Max, in academic gown and mortarboard, apparently seated in a library. I could just about tell it was Max from the protuberant round eyes which hadn’t changed and the long, then smooth and unwrinkled, neck. The other people in the pictures might have been Max’s grandfather, his father, his mother, aunts, uncles. The mystery was why anyone would want to keep them down here after their original owner was long dead.
I walked about the flat from room to room, examining everything. Claustrophobics are better when they’re on the move. One good thing about the place was that the rooms were big and the ceilings quite high, though lower than on the upper floors. The bedroom was the least subterranean and the top few inches of its window were above the top of the wall that divided the back area from the garden. I was thankful for that because there I was to sleep, and in this old lady’s high bed with wooden headboard carved with ridges and shelves and designed apparently to stop you sitting up in bed, still less reading, and panelled wooden footboard on which to stub your toes. The clothes cupboard, which I didn’t know then should be called a wardrobe, was the kind nervous children imagine things will come out of in the night. I was too old for that but still I didn’t like this wardrobe, its blackness, its panels with carvings on the bits in between, its clawed feet like the paws of a very old arthritic lion; and I very much disliked the kind of crest thing that surmounted its front and which looked to me in the dim half-light, and many times later after I knew what it really was, like snakes and scorpions engaged in some dreadful struggle, inextricably intertwined.
I unpacked my cases. A great many wire hangers, the kind they put your clothes on at the dry-cleaner’s, were on the rail inside the wardrobe. They jangled with a ringing noise like discordant bells, not only when you opened the doors but if you so much as touched the wardrobe when you passed it. I hung up my clothes, I put my sponge bag in the bathroom (claw-footed bath, the tub iron-stained, no shower, overhead toilet flush with a chain). There was linoleum on the floor, something else I didn’t know the name of until Beryl enlightened me, probably at the same time as she told me the wardrobe was a wardrobe and that I could buy lightbulbs ‘fit for a human person not wanting to lose her eyesight’ round the corner at the supermarket.
The black and white television held my attention for about half an hour. Sitting down for longer than that became unpleasant, so I walked about, looking into the two rooms I was never to use, a spare bedroom and a dining room with no window at all, only a string you pulled to set a fan going. That dim and shadowy cavern with prints on the walls of ancient manor houses and ships in storms at sea, a large square table and eight bow-legged chairs, a sideboard and an old metal trolley stacked with apparently an entire green and gold porcelain dinner service, I resolved never in any circumstances to enter again. Things might have been very different if I’d kept to that resolution and not hidden Liv’s money in the sideboard drawer. I should have locked the door and thrown away the key, only there was no key. I was breathing rather quickly and shallowly when I came out, catching my breath and very nearly sobbing. That evening – and it was probably the very worst of all the evenings – I asked myself what I was going to do, how was I going to handle things, how was I going to stand it?
When we get older one of the things we learn is that things change. Hardly anything stays the same. If old Mrs Fisherton’s didn’t change, I would and my circumstances would, but I was only nineteen and a very young nineteen, in spite of the life-transforming experience I’d had. Max and Selina shouldn’t have treated me the way they did but, on the other hand, they’d let me have a large flat rent-free in a highly sought-after part of London and quite near the college I was going to. The flat had been got ready, was clean and had clean sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom. I see it that way now but I didn’t then. I don’t mean I thought they had treated me badly, I didn’t, but I felt ill-used by some disembodied fate and I felt afraid.
Fortunately, I suppose, I was so ignorant of any sort of household management that when I went into the kitchen I didn’t notice there was no fridge and no machines for washing clothes or dishes. My eyes focused fearfully on the gas oven and the electric ring with an old blackened kettle standing on it. I had never in my life cooked anything, I had never made a cup of tea, though I had – and to this accomplishment I clung as to a lifeline – poured boiling water on to a spoonful of powdered coffee in a mug.
Like most teenagers I was a late retirer, never in bed before midnight. But that night I went to bed early, I didn’t know what else to do. Before going to bed I did one more thing. I took the key Selina had put on my tray, unlocked the door at the end of the passage that led to the outdoors and found myself on a stone-flagged floor, seemingly at the bottom of a tank with mossy walls over which trailed long-stemmed ivy-leaved plants. But the sky was up there and the open air at the top of the iron staircase. I went up it and into the front garden, marvelling that I’d noticed nothing of the ‘area’ when I arrived.
It was a mild night and windless. I’d been used to darkness and starry skies. No stars were visible here in the smoky purplish redness above me. Street-lamps were on, amber-coloured cubes like fruit gums. The huge pale glimmering façade of the houses opposite was punctured by squares of light. I looked up, of course, I always do look up to top floors and gables and peaks and chimneys, and saw that on the fourth floor, on the very top, there were as many lights, all shining from windows tucked under those dizzyingly high roofs. Who lived up there? Who had the luck to live there? In those days, I don’t believe I ever considered that for those who fear depths and enclosed spaces there are just as many who are afraid of heights, who would die rather than go to the top of a tower or look over the edge of a precipice.
I never thought of it but went indoors again and crept, struggling for breath as if the place were full of gas, towards the bearable place, the bedroom.
3
I’m not as self-indulgent as I used to be. I don’t suppose you want to know the details of the trapped-in-an-underground-cell dream I had early the next morning and from which I woke up screaming, so I won’t go into it. In fact, one very seldom actually screams in those circumstances. What comes out is a feeble squeak. I didn’t make enough noise for Max and Selina to hear me, even if by that time they were down on their ground floor. It was late for anyone but teenagers, past nine. I had slept for eleven hours and if anything had come out of the wardrobe, I’d missed it.
By then there was enough natural light in the bedroom, almost enough, to read by. It showed me the scorpions and snakes on top of the wardrobe for what they were: ivy tendrils and oak branches. I looked out of the window, I mean
by this that I pressed my head against the glass and craned my neck to look upwards, saw a brick wall with urns and stone animals on it, a segment of lawn, clusters of spindly tree trunks and far, far up above, a pale blue sky criss-crossed with the white plumes of plane trails. Whether it was that morning or some other that the tortoiseshell cat came and stood on the wall and looked down at me with hopeful yellow eyes, I can’t remember. I know that I had only been a short time at old Mrs Fisherton’s when she came. I went to get my breakfast, creeping warily again into the twilight zone, and found that Selina’s milk had gone sour. But among the ancient kitchen equipment was a toaster that worked. I experimented with it and after two attempts produced a burnt slice.
It was Saturday and on the following Tuesday the autumn term, the college year, was due to start. That was what I was doing there, that was why I had come, to begin and if possible (I doubted then if it was possible and I was right) see through to the bitter end the course I had been accepted for. I knew nothing of psychology but at least I could summon up a glimmer of interest in it. Business was another matter. Not only was I ignorant of business, I scarcely knew what was meant by the word, but I knew very decidedly that I wanted nothing to do with it. So why was I embarking on it? It’s easy to ask that now. The answer is weak and defeatist, I know. I had to do something, I had to train for something, I couldn’t be a recluse living with my parents in the country until they died and I got old, which was their way of putting it, and what at times I’d have liked to do. Brooding about Daniel’s death and my part in it, which they didn’t say but I thought, hiding myself, knowing no one, or best of all but impractical, going back in time and dying myself in Daniel’s place.
I had been seventeen when it happened and my A-levels were a year in the future. But after the pylon I was ill for months. One thinks of people falling ill as the result of a shock or a traumatic event as something confined to characters in Victorian novels, but it really happens. I was in the hospital for four weeks and then in bed at home, feeling, I suppose, the way you do with a really bad flu, lethargic and hopeless and unable to do anything, scarcely able to move. More than that, though I had cried and cried, I felt the pressure of unshed tears, as if my head was full of salt water. I wanted to tell Daniel about it, tell him how I felt. Strange, wasn’t it, longing to tell the dead person you’re grieving for how sad you are?
The counsellor used to come to me because I couldn’t go to her, and when she was done with me, bringing about no change in my condition, the tutor came to coach me for my A-levels. In spite of that, I made a mess of them. Except in one subject I got poor results, and that exception was an A in Physics. I only got that A because science was easy for me, logical and plain and undeniable, as I saw it, and I didn’t have to work at it. Considering the circumstances, eleven months after the pylon, in which I did those A-levels, it’s not surprising I got Ds in English Literature and History. The three grades were quite good enough for the Grand Union Polytechnic, I may well have been the one student they had who had an A at A-level in anything, and my only difficulty was choosing between Psychology and Business Studies and the other option, Management and Social Sciences. I chose the former because at least I knew what one of the words meant.
When I left old Mrs Fisherton’s by way of the area and the iron staircase that Saturday morning, I intended to find a route to the polytechnic. It had to be an itinerary that didn’t involve going in the underground or, to put it more precisely, going in the tube. If you’ve a phobia, you become very aware, not quite all the time but for part of every day, of the possible encounters you may have with whatever it is that threatens you. In the previous week I had found out, from an old street plan of my father’s and a book he had about London Transport, that a line runs from Baker Street via Paddington to Ladbroke Grove and Latimer Road and for none of its route does it pass underground. All I had to do was get to Paddington which, according to the map, was a short walk away. If I had then had the A–Z I’d have seen there was a catch in it, but I had only bought the A–Z the day before.
It was a lovely morning, very warm for late September, and there were a lot of people about. That was when I first saw the au pairs doing their best to be nannies, Liv-lookalikes, one of them may even have been Liv, pushing buggies with one or two children in them and holding another by the hand. By the canal, then as now, the tourists congregated, walking very slowly, pointing out to their companions a particular house or a boat. One of the boats had vases shaped like swans all along its roof and green plants growing out of the swans’ backs. One of the houses had a vine with bunches of green grapes hanging against the white plaster façade. This is the smart bit of the canal, the part that lies between Blomfield Road to the north and Maida Avenue to the south. I stood on the bridge along with the tourists and looked along the canal’s shining course to where it disappears under the low arch into the Maida Hill tunnel. Outside the café above the tunnel mouth, people were sitting at tables having morning coffee or drinks, and I thought how I’d like to have been there myself, maybe with one dear friend, only the one dear friend I had had was dead.
The boat that plies between Jason’s Wharf and Camden Lock came smoothly out from the under the bridge below me and I felt the same sort of envy of the girl who steered it, she looked so free and yet so responsible. But she took the boat and all its passengers under the café and into the tunnel mouth and I no longer wanted to be her because I knew how it would be for me, the low, slimy, moss-covered tunnel walls, the rocking boat on the black water and the darkness but for a pinpoint of light ahead. Claustrophobics need not experience a place to know how it will be. Their imaginations do that and more.
I walked along Warwick Avenue, looking at, and by now hearing, the traffic rushing across the concrete flyover that scars the blue sky, the green spaces and the pretty houses. The Westway. It was on the A–Z but not on my father’s old map. I stood on the Harrow Road and saw that I hadn’t a hope of getting across it. There were barriers on the pavement to stop anyone crossing. To go to Paddington, or even as I later learnt, to get to the southern bit of the Edgware Road, you had to go under it. The underpasses were marked in my A–Z. I even found one of them, its entrance close to St Mary’s Church and Paddington Green, but rather than go inside, I’d have risked my life dodging the cars tearing along the Westway at seventy miles an hour.
Standing there, I could see that there might be one way. There might be one route to Paddington that avoided the subterranean: the canal. An arm of it branched off here, its waters must have been under my feet. That was how I came to retrace my steps and after several failed attempts to make the descent, went into the little garden and down the winding shrubbery path to the canal bank. Even so, I still had to pass under the bridge, under the road I had been on minutes before, but it wasn’t dark or enclosed. I was soon out on the other side where the boats were and the gardens and a boat-owner’s dog sitting on a red-painted roof above the nameplate that said Cicero.
It seemed very unlike the London I had known from my rare visits, a backwater (literally) of floating homes and flowers and trees in tubs, chairs and tables on the canal bank, someone even had a barbecue, brambles and stinging nettles and buddleia and builders’ rubbish, dumps of rubble and tin cans, plastic bags and bits of timber drifting on the green shining surface. And a backdrop of old and new buildings in the Edgware Road. Was the Stakis Hotel there then? The white tower was, the huge one with the scarlet piping on its top, so that it looks like a piece of equipment for a giant’s kitchen, a freezer maybe or a hi-tech cabinet. Dull, dark, ancient buildings were there too, all their windows broken and all their doors padlocked, and in the distance, though I knew nothing of this then, the old engine sheds and marshalling yards of Paddington Station. I walked along beside the trees, under the second bridge, and came to a path and a ramp and there, on the left, was the exit from the underpass whose entrance made me shudder when I looked at it from the other side. I didn’t have to go in, I turned my ba
ck on it, and went up in the open air and the sunlight to the Harrow Road roundabout and over Bishop’s Bridge to Paddington. It was easy, I could do it every day.
It’s an odd thing how success in a venture like that can transform, if temporarily, not just the problem that’s worrying you, but your whole outlook on existence. Suddenly I was happy. I had found a tunnel-free way to GUP and because of that become capable of shopping for food, even possibly cooking food in a basic way, of adjusting to life at old Mrs Fisherton’s and somehow putting up with windows that looked out on to brick walls and an iron staircase.
I did find the shops and the food, though the things I bought in the beginning, a piece of ham I didn’t understand had to be boiled, various things that could only be cooked by microwaving, and beans I didn’t know how to slice, were a mistake. But the pizzas and the Dundee cake weren’t a bad choice. I lived on pizza and fruitcake, washed down with milk, for a week. The ham I gave to the little tortoiseshell cat, not knowing then what a vet later told me, that cats can’t digest pig meat. It seemed to do her no harm.
It was a long time before I went back to Russia Road that day. I found a park with green lawns and trees and a single flowerbed, sat down on the grass and ate my lunch of biscuits washed down with milk. Most of the afternoon I slept. My counsellor had told me that the sleeping I did, all night and half the day sometimes, was a way of avoiding facing my problems and perhaps she was right, though I seemed to face them all the time I was awake. I was very lucky no one stole my shopping bags while I slept. Maida Vale and Little Venice and Paddington, not to mention Kilburn, are a den of thieves, as I was soon to find out through personal experience. You only have to put something you want to be rid of, any kind of rubbish, a broken teapot, a carpet cut-off, a heel-less shoe, out on the pavement for someone to take it. But no one stole my shopping that afternoon, nor my purse, which was sticking out of my jacket pocket, nor my watch that I had taken off and laid on the grass because the buckle on the strap was sticking into my arm. It was still there and it told me the time was nearly half past six.
