by Barbara Vine
Max and Selina were having a party, a garden party, though I don’t suppose they called it that. I heard the voices of their guests before I saw them. I climbed up on the chest of drawers under the bedroom window but even then all I could see was legs, legs in trousers, male and female, a woman’s long elegant legs in high-heeled shoes whose skirt I couldn’t even see, it was so short, and a man in shorts. I knew it was a man only because the legs were so hairy.
Someone gave a little cough behind me and I nearly fell off the chest of drawers. It was Selina, very smartly dressed in a stiff and shiny red silk suit with pink pearls round her neck and pink-pearl nail varnish to match. She hadn’t knocked at the door at the top of the stairs but even if she had I wouldn’t have heard her down here.
‘I’ve been looking for you, darling,’ she said reproachfully, ‘ever since ten this morning. An enormous trunk has come and your mother’s been on the phone, she’s frantic, and I don’t wonder. She says you promised faithfully to phone her last night.’
I’d forgotten. ‘There isn’t a phone,’ I said.
‘Not down here, naturally.’ She said it in a highly indignant tone. Who would ever have needed or expected to find a phone at old Mrs Fisherton’s? She could only have looked more affronted if I had pointed out the absence of a jacuzzi. ‘Surely you knew you could use our phone in an emergency?’
Phoning my mother to tell her I had successfully made a journey of seventy miles was an emergency? ‘You’d better do it now, hadn’t you? Yes, I really think so.’ She had begun one of those arguments with herself. ‘I mean, I can show you where the phone is now, it may not be possible later. We shan’t want a lot of disturbance later, shall we?’
I said I could do it whenever she liked and followed her up the stairs, one flight, then another and another. The backs of her stockings had seams and tiny red roses printed on them from the heel to halfway up the calves. Their drawing room – as both of them called it – was a magnificent place, its windows, two facing the front and two the garden, were dressed, for you couldn’t say ‘curtained’, in streams of golden brown velvet, overhung with swathes of yellow satin. The chairs were covered in yellow satin and the sofas, of which there were three, in some sort of brown and yellow and emerald striped material. Huge gilt-framed mirrors faced each other across an expanse of emerald carpet. Max told me one day, much later, that the vases were famille jaune, and I was impressed without having the faintest idea what he meant.
The phone was between the windows that overlooked the garden. While I spoke to my mother and suffered in silence her reproaches, I watched the company on the lawn. There were about fifteen people out there, drinking champagne. The man in shorts with the hairy legs was smoking a cigarette, which made me think that I’d like one, that I’d start smoking again, my parents having made me stop while I was so ill. As soon as Mum had finished admonishing me and giving me all sorts of advice over the phone, not to speak to men, what to eat and what to drink and to remember never to be late for anything, I’d go out and buy a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros.
Selina stood there, listening. I suppose she was listening. At one point she too looked out of the window and, when I’d rung off, she said, ‘Jack Silverman is smoking, it’s too bad of him when he knows how Max hates it.’ She turned to me. There is a rule in Latin about questions expecting the answer ‘yes’ or the answer ‘no’. Daniel, who was doing Classics, told me that, and though I have forgotten the Latin words and everything else about it, I could tell Selina was asking me a question expecting the answer ‘no’ about as strongly as could be. ‘I don’t for a moment suppose you’d want to come to the party, would you, darling?’
At least she had asked. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going out again.’
She shook her head. For some reason she disliked that. She escorted me from the room and shut the door behind us. Perhaps she thought that if she left me there on my own for five minutes I’d wreck it. ‘By the way,’ she said at the head of old Mrs Fisherton’s stairs, ‘Max would like to see you.’ There was a kind of relish in the way she said it. ‘In his room.’
I didn’t ask why, though I wanted to. ‘When?’
‘Whenever it suits you before Tuesday, darling. That’s what he said, “whenever it suits her”. Of course it will have to be when he’s not writing his book, when he’s finished for the day, that is. He never finishes before five.’ She put one finger to lips that matched the red silk. ‘That’s why we all have to be very, very quiet all day.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow at six-thirty.’
She couldn’t leave it quite like that. She tripped off towards, I suppose, the garden door, turned back and said, ‘You’ll remember about the being very, very quiet, won’t you, darling?’
I went out to buy my Marlboros, opened the packet and lit one as soon as I was outside the shop. It was the first I had had for two years and the first draw made me feel a bit faint and dizzy, though not sick, and smoking again was such a relief, such a bringer of contentment, that I wondered why on earth I had held off for so long. I walked back slowly, the way known to me now, the neighbourhood not yet familiar but no longer strange and frightening. Broad daylight still and the sun not yet reddening, the sky a misty blue.
That evening began my love affair with the architecture of Maida Vale and Little Venice. I knew nothing about architecture then (I don’t know much now), only a few terms like ‘Palladian’ and ‘pediment’ and ‘architrave’, but I was keenly alive to its beauties, favouring, like most people except architects, the Georgian and the Early Victorian. But what attracted me most about those single villas, those pairs of houses and long, long rows of houses, was their height. It’s natural that it did, I love heights just as I hate depths. The psalmist who wrote about lifting up his eyes to the hills might have been writing for me, only I’d substitute ‘sky’ or ‘rooftops’ for ‘hills’.
There were buildings in those streets six and seven storeys high, the tower blocks of the nineteenth century. Later on I was to learn from Wim, who mountaineered on their roofs, that one red-brick fortress of a block called Clive Court was eight or nine storeys high. That evening, as I strolled slowly along one of the broad avenues, smoking my cigarette, I gazed up to the top floors of terraces with gables on the ends of mansard roofs or eyelid dormers peeping under eaves, to classical pediments of moulded acanthus leaves and bucraniums (you can look that one up), to chimney stacks, long disused, with their sprouting row of pots, forming high walls that divided one pair of houses from the next. The sky had a look of evening that comes without a loss of light. By then the sun was low and its rays a dull yellow, the old trees that lined every street casting long spidery shadows. For a while I had a feeling of hope, of optimism, but it was the last I was to have for a long time.
In Russia Road the party guests were going home. I recognized the man Selina called Jack Silverman. He was on the doorstep of No. 15, inserting his key into the front-door lock to let himself and his wife in. That was my first sight of Silver’s parents and glimpse of the interior of their house, the darkish carpeted hall, the phone on the table between two tall candlesticks, a painting on the wall. The front door closed behind them. In the plasterwork above the big triptych window the head in its wreath of flowers was a man’s in a turban. Another couple came out of 19 as I opened the gate. They took no notice of me. I went down the iron staircase, the trailing ivies brushing my face, and into old Mrs Fisherton’s.
Max’s room was at the top of the house, on the fourth floor not counting the basement. Going to see him in this way, toiling up all those stairs at a precise fixed time, was very like being sent for by the headteacher. I think he and Selina knew this and it brought them satisfaction, it and subsequent summonses were their reward for letting me live in their flat. My mother was a stickler for certain kinds of etiquette, though she had never had to use it much and some of it was of the kind to seem absurd to a rational person in the present-day world. One of the things that had
rubbed off on me, for I can’t say she taught me any of it, was that no one knocks on doors in a private house. The time was right, exactly half past six, so I opened Max’s door and went in.
He was sitting with his back to me at a big computer linked to a huge printer, both of them old-fashioned even then. He wasn’t using them but writing in a notebook with a fountain pen. The room was a wild jumble of books and papers, books face-downwards on the desk, the various small tables, the floor. Sheets of manuscript, of newspaper and magazine cuttings, of photocopies, some flat, some screwed up, covered every surface, balanced on top of stacks of books or tucked into bookshelves on top of book spines. Everything was dusty. Beryl told me she was never allowed in there, it was a sacred place, only for the elect. A wastepaper basket as big as a dustbin overflowed with paper. The green velvet curtains at the window Max faced had been flung back, presumably when he came up here in the morning. One of them was looped over the edge of his desk, the other caught on the back of a book-laden chair. The place smelt of dust and newsprint and old books.
Like an actor playing a headmaster in a film about nineteenth-century school life, he went on writing for about two minutes after I came in. Two minutes is a long time in those circumstances. He neither looked round nor said anything. At last he put down his pen, looked over what he had written and turned it face-downwards on to a blotting pad. Rather slowly he swung his swivel chair round and regarded me with pursed lips. His eyes protruded like a King Charles spaniel’s and his wild white fluffy hair seemed to be standing on end. Perhaps he had washed it that morning.
‘Sit down, Clodagh.’
There were three other chairs in the room but all were repositories for books and papers, folders and box files. I took hold of the smallest pile and put it on the floor.
‘Be careful, please. Watch what you’re doing. I have a method, it’s fragile and it’s easily disrupted.’
He made it sound like an ecosystem in some endangered wetland. I thought he might be joking but not the faintest hint of a smile touched the deep gravity of his face. He looked grimmer and sadder than ever. Selina told me some time after this that he felt unfairly treated because he had never received any honour, not only no peerage or knighthood but not even an MBE. That was why, she said, he kept writing all those books about the First World War and the decade before it, hoping that at last his worth and expertise would be recognized.
‘So you begin at this polytechnic of yours tomorrow?’
It was a question that seemed to require no more answer than a nod. I nodded.
‘I don’t know very much about that sort of establishment. I have never had occasion to be associated with any of those places. They are rather outside my ken.’ Max might have been speaking of a strip club instead of what was, after all, a perfectly respectable centre ofhigher education. ‘From what your parents have told me, it looks as if you personally, indeed wantonly, destroyed your chances of a real education by your criminal behaviour and its inevitable consequence.’
I had expected a lecture but not this. When I was young – I mean a schoolgirl – and Max used sometimes to come and stay for a weekend before he was married, he had helped me with my history homework. He had seemed kind enough. I even quite liked him. When he said those things, I took my eyes from him and looked down into my lap.
‘But now you are committed to this mixed course at this polytechnic –’ I could hear the inverted commas sticking out round the key words – ‘you must put all possible effort into doing well. You must redeem yourself. You must make your parents feel, and Selina and me feel, that our efforts on your behalf have not been in vain, and then gradually you will be able to mount once more in the world’s esteem.’ He changed the subject, sniffing suspiciously. ‘Have you been smoking, Clodagh?’
‘I sometimes have a cigarette,’ I said.
‘Yes, I can smell it. You smokers believe you don’t smell of your habit but there you are wrong. It’s one thing in a man, quite bad enough, but repulsive in a woman. And you are a woman now, you know. You must give it up. It’s expensive and bad for your health. I am sure I don’t have to tell you that in no circumstances whatsoever are you to smoke in Grandmother Mabel’s flat.’
So that was what she had been called, Mabel. A strange old-fashioned name. I rather liked it and I’m afraid that to me the most important detail in Max’s homily was the disclosure of old Mrs Fisherton’s first name. Never mind the smoking, the wantonness, the blowing of my chances, I had found out what she was called. I smiled at Max.
His features relaxed. Not quite into a smile, not that, but there was a softening. ‘What do you want to do when you have your, er, degree, Clodagh? Have you any ideas for a future career?’
I hadn’t, I had never thought about it. Something to do with business and psychology seemed indicated. I wasn’t going to say that. I needed to say something that would make him angry. No doubt, in some ways, I had been the prototype rebellious teenager, and now that I had left my own parents, I was projecting parenthood on to Max and Selina. Perhaps I learnt that was possible and even common from the few months I stayed the psychology course. This was what I’d have said to Dad if he’d asked me that question.
‘I’d like to be a steeplejack.’
His face hard again and his eyes bulging, Max shook his head this way and that. ‘I was serious, Clodagh, as you well know. Don’t you think I deserve a serious answer and not a rude, frivolous one?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘To both, I mean. I don’t know.’ I got up and asked, like someone half my age as I well knew, ‘Can I go now?’
He shook his head again, then nodded. I went downstairs, feeling a bit hollow inside, as if I had done something appalling. Would they throw me out? And if they did, where was I to go? Once inside old Mrs Fisherton’s, old Mabel Fisherton’s, I broke Max’s rule and lit a cigarette. I thought about the answer I had given to his question (‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’) and what I had meant by it. Of course it had been frivolous and not considered at all, I might as well have said I wanted to be a plumber or a bus driver. On the other hand, had it? Had it been so frivolous? Ever since the pylon – well, not ever since but lately – I had been thinking, as part of my continual facing what I had done, that I needed to atone and not only to atone but get something positive out of the experience as well. I had failed and Daniel had died because I, who had instigated the whole thing and badgered him into it, knew nothing about the pylon. When I said to Max ‘I want to be a steeplejack’, maybe in my unconscious was a feeling that I ought to be, that I ought to make a career of climbing up tall buildings and repairing them, for working constructively on heights was what I owed the world and Daniel’s memory and myself.
After a while I unpacked my trunk. Then I looked in the drawer where I had put the stuff out of my suitcases and found the photograph I had of Daniel. It’s quite a big photograph, a portrait his mother had had taken on his sixteenth birthday. I hunted among old Mrs Fisherton’s framed photographs, found one of anonymous people, two men and two women dressed in the fashion of I don’t know when, maybe the twenties, but in a good silver frame. I took the four unknown people out and put Daniel in. He looked nice, very young and handsome, surrounded by chased and fluted silver. I did something I had never done before and have never done since I left Russia Road, I brought the portrait to my lips and kissed the glass where Daniel’s mouth was. The unshed tears were still there, still behind my eyes, and I wondered when I’d find someone I could tell about my grief.
It was coincidence that when I went out into the area to climb the staircase and pollute the nice fresh air with another cigarette, I saw Silver’s parents packing up their car in preparation for going back to the country. They had been in London for a rare weekend, though I knew nothing about their country place then, or that London weekends were a rarity. Jack Silverman’s legs covered in dense fair hair, almost fur, were the first thing I had noticed about him. Now those legs were covered up in
jeans and I’m afraid I thought him too old to wear them. Silver’s mother was in jeans too, the designer kind, I expect, and she had a very smart tweed jacket on as well and a Hermès scarf (I think), the sort that have a pattern of ropes and knots all over them. She was as dark as he was fair and looked Jewish with her handsome aquiline nose and full lips, though he was as much so as she.
He went back into the house and came out again with two more suitcases which he put into the boot before closing the lid. It was Beryl who told me they had a country house in Hertfordshire they had bought when his business moved out to St Albans. Erica Silverman liked being there far more than in Russia Road and they spent as little time in London as possible. As I watched, she got into the passenger seat and he into the driver’s seat and they drove away towards Sutherland Avenue and the Edgware Road.
I came out into the front garden (two flowering currant bushes, a Christmas rose and a couple of thistles) and looked up at the house they’d left, I don’t know why. Foresight perhaps? I had no such feelings at the time. I fancied I saw a light in a window on the very top floor, in a dormer on the mansard, but it was only where a slanting ray from the setting sun had touched the glass. As far as I knew, the Silvermans had left behind them an empty house.
