by Tanith Lee
This was like an interview – perhaps by the police.
“I didn’t have very much anyway. Living in London is very expensive.”
“I’m sure it is. Well, never mind. You’re here now. I’ll take care of you.”
I felt in that moment like a child – small, thirty-four-year-old orphan. I wanted to say, Stuff it. Get up and stalk out, perhaps throwing the half-dead banana at the dirty windows first. But I didn’t. I had less than five hundred pounds in the bank and less than forty in my wallet. My three bags contained every scrap I owned that I hadn’t sold for next to nothing. Because of my almost freelance status with the company, my tax situation was in a muddle. I wasn’t highly skilled, had no tremendous talents, and for every job I was likely to seek, there would be at least fifteen other eager or desperate applicants. It used to be people over fifty who had difficulty getting work. Then it was forty. I’d begun to believe the age had recently fallen even lower. I’d been stacking shelves in the supermarket when Jennifer wrote to me.
If I wanted a breathing space, I would have to put up with her.
After all, it wasn’t so bad, was it? The house was uncared for but lush, the gardens glorious, and the beach and swim-in-able sea just down the hill.
I said, I’m stupid now.
“Well, Laura, if you’ve finished your meal, perhaps you’d better take your bags up and settle into your room.”
Dismissed.
“Okay. Thanks, I will.” I rose and said, feeling I still had to, “It’s very kind of you –”
The horrible creeping smile squeezed over her face again. She was all over-powdered and rosy like a girl gone quite wrong, and her hair was thick and old and coarse and too brown, so I knew it was from dye, and not a very good one either. Naturally.
Oh God, she made me sick. I was allergic to her.
She said, “That’s all right, Laura. I know you had an unfortunate time with your mother, that can’t have helped you. Anyway, pop upstairs now.” She gave me directions to the room, with no intention of stirring herself to show me. Then: “I usually eat about seven. You’ll find all the things ready for you in the kitchen. It’s easy to find, the back-stair is just along from your room, on the left.”
I checked.
“You mean the way to the kitchen?”
“Yes,” she said.
Hold on, I thought. Am I hearing what I think? She plans for me to go down and fix dinner. Scullery maid, did I say? But no, it isn’t that. She just means there’s some sort of cold stuff ready, and I’m to bring it upstairs to save her aged legs.
“I’m afraid,” she added, arch and acid, “I don’t have a microwave. You’ll have to manage the cooking without. I’ve never accepted those things are safe.”
I found my room without problems. It wasn’t a maid’s room – those, if there were any, were up in the attics, I expect. But it could have won a prize for Smallest Guest Bedroom in Britain.
After I’d propped my bags against the single bed, I edged past a huge, bear-like wardrobe, and stared out of the window.
The view was good – inland, to fields and beech woods honey-spread by a westering sun. It was already almost five.
I knew that from my watch, not from any clock. The house had clocks – I’d passed one in the narrow side corridor, which led to this very room. But none in my bedroom. She had presumably anticipated I’d bring my own.
There was a bathroom to the right of the room, down an awkward step. It had bath and lavatory and so on, even a hand-held shower-attachment. There was some soap, (not new), and a couple of towels, and toilet-paper, bright green and rather cheap. The bathroom also had a tear in the lino floor-covering and some loose wall tiles. But the flush worked, and the water ran hot. Why complain? I’d lived with worse.
But after I’d showered and re-dressed, I sat on my lumpy bed, smouldering in my anger.
She wanted a skivvy. I knew it. Had I known before I came? No. There had been nothing in the letter to indicate any of this. Or... could I be wrong?
All right, then. Give it till tomorrow. And then, if necessary, take off. Because it would be better to do almost anything than become maid-of-all-work for my Aunt Jennifer. Oh – I could bloody murder her –
It was then that the clock clanged in the corridor.
So we come to the clock.
I’d barely looked at it on my way to the bedroom, but when I came out again to locate the kitchen stair, I first walked back the short distance down the corridor, and stared at the thing.
It was the ugliest clock, perhaps the most ugly piece of furniture I have ever seen.
It was about ten feet tall, made of some black old-looking wood that had a strong odour of must or rot to it, uncarved or decorated, except for a painting on its high-up face. A type of grandfather clock, I deduced, but the oddest thing was that, where in such a clock there’s usually a glass panel to look through, and so observe the swinging pendulum – even a door that can be unlocked in order to adjust the mechanism – in this model there was not, only the closure of unrelieved wood. Nor did the clock make any working sound. None of that deep tugk-tockk you hear so much of in a good atmospheric period radio play. It had only made one noise, the single monstrous clang.
As I said, the face of the clock did have a decoration. First there were, in black, the Roman numerals. The hands were both firmly clamped to the VI, which was six all right – the actual time – but surely, if they had reached six and the clock had struck five minutes ago, the hands should now have moved on? I watched them awhile, and nothing happened. VI was all it was going to be.
To return to the decoration, though. The left side of the numerals was a woman’s face done like a mask. The style was old-fashioned – it looked eighteenth century to me. It was also nasty in some way I couldn’t quite determine – save that, since it was a mask, though it had smiling red lips, the eyes were gaps of black, and in the black of each gap was a tiny silver point, so little that, from that far below I couldn’t see what it was – but they looked like pins.
On the other side of the clock-face was the image of something even less appealing. I took it for a monkey’s head, this one wizened and evil-looking.
Having inspected the clock, I turned round and found the back stair, a twisting treacherous corkscrew lit by a couple of the narrowest windows. The kitchen was along a passage at the bottom.
Any doubts were cancelled. Everything was shoved on the big wooden table, ready for preparation, vegetables, potatoes, a (shop-made) fruit pie. Placed in the middle was a postcard with a view of the town, on the back of which were instructions about the stove, the cutlery and plates, and where the fridge- freezer was with the sausages.
Apparently my aunt had faith I could cook. But she also perhaps knew how ineptly, or why hadn’t she wanted something more elaborate?
II
“This is all a little cold, Laura. Did you heat everything thoroughly?”
I said nothing, refusing now to play her game.
Before she started her critique of the food, (including its late arrival), she’d commented on the size of my meal – “Two sausages, Laura? And all those peas – Surely a young woman needs to watch her figure... and I thought I had left a cabbage out. The frozen peas were for Sunday.”
Everything was fifth rate anyway. The sausages tasteless, the potatoes floury. Even the pie was flavoured mostly with chemicals and had about three apple slices in it.
We ate in the dining-room. This was another wide chamber, with windows giving on the lawn with the view of the sea. As daylight sank away, pink clouds and swallows came on, and then a high, blue-green dusk. By then I’d been back down for the apple-less pie, and down again to make instant coffee.
She didn’t ask me to do this, she told me. And I obeyed.
And I kept thinking, I can’t arrange a thing tonight. I’ll sort all this out in the morning.
Am I spineless? Less that than rather tired.
The instant coffee, too, was not the
kind that makes people alert, sexy and wise in the adverts. It was the kind you use to scare out the drains.
After dinner she opened the French doors, however, and said we should have an after-dinner stroll on the lawn.
Was she showing me what I would be missing if I rebelled and ran away?
The sea lay far out, adrift in the sky, dark now, and darker than the luminous dusk, just as it had been more blue than the sky, before. The air was fresh and pure and smelled of roses, clematis, and salt.
“Tomorrow,” said Aunt Jennifer, “perhaps you should make an early start. I’m afraid everything has got very dirty. Perhaps you should begin downstairs. You won’t forget to clean the windows, will you?”
I drew a breath of the beautiful air.
“Where in your letter to me,” I said, “exactly, did you specify that if I came to stay in your house, I would automatically become your cook and cleaner?”
“Housekeeper, Laura.”
“I see. Did you mention a fee, then, the wages I’d get for being your – er – housekeeper? I seem to have missed all that. “
“Oh, I can’t afford to pay you. I can’t afford that sort of luxury. But you’re getting your keep, aren’t you?”
I was, despite everything, dumbfounded by her relaxed demeanour. I thought, wildly, she’s been dreaming this up, perhaps, for years. Why? To get at my mother? At me? What had I ever done to her?
We’d been walking along the lawn all this time. As if engrossed in the most ordinary, friendly dialogue.
Now, around the bushes, the drop opened before us, a sailing away of the hill in air and darkness, quite dramatic. And I thought, Shall I just push the old cow over? But naturally I would never do that.
And then she said, “Did you see the clock in the corridor near your door?”
“What has –?”
“Didn’t you think it rather peculiar?”
I said nothing, less from stern resolve than an inability to keep up with this.
“It has a story. That clock.”
She was, my aunt, a very dumpy, unattractive figure in her sensible jumper, skirt and shoes. Yet in the last of the twilight, she was melting to a shadow of her former self, a dumpy solid shadow, lit now and then by a smeary flash of eyes.
“This house was built about 1900, only about a hundred years ago. Some playwright owned it. Some homosexual creature. He used to collect eccentric bits of furniture. I’m sure I have no interest in him, or in them, and none of them remain. Apart from the clock. The clock was one of his finds, and it’s always been in the house. Quite a curiosity. One can’t move it, you see.”
Despite myself, I reacted. “Why not?”
“Because it was nailed to the floor of the upper storey, and in such a way, it would mean all the floor-boards and the joists would have to come up, to pry it loose. I was warned about this. It’s an eyesore, of course,” she announced. “I don’t imagine even you, Laura, with your extreme notions, would like it. At one time the previous tenants had it boarded up – but all that gave way, and well, I couldn’t afford to have it done again.”
“And besides, I added, “it’s only in the corridor that leads to the back stairs.”
“Yes, quite.”
Dark now. Night had come. The swallows were finished and instead the odd bat was flitting over. I could just hear the sea, its slow sighing, so intimate, so eternally indifferent.
Jennifer said, “Did you see the two images painted on the face?”
“Yes.”
“Youth and Age, they’re called.”
An explanation disconcertingly formed in my mind. The mask was youth – rather a quaint idea, I supposed – a hollow false face that didn’t last and eventually had to come off to reveal what was truly there inside. Which was the evil-looking monkey? Yes, old age, the mischievous joker. It could make you ugly. Animal.
Was that precisely what was happening to Jennifer – mask ripped away, the mad beast beginning to show...?
But she said, “All a lot of nonsense, of course. The interesting part is about the main body of the clock, the area inside the wooden frame.”
The day had been warm. It was getting chilly now. A stiff light wind, blowing in over cooling seas, iced down my arms and through my T-shirt, and between my sandalled toes crept the breaking dew.
“So?” I said. Why was I indulging her in this? What the hell was the matter with me? Tell her to fly off the hill, the old witch. Or I should. God, there must be a pub around here somewhere – light, warmth, sanity and booze –
Jennifer said, “It’s haunted. The clock.”
She said it with enormous relish. As if she was counting it, like her money.
“Oh I see.”
“It’s only a story, evidently,” she glibly said, facile in her absolute certainty she was getting to me. Was she? I didn’t believe in – “I found the history in an old book once, a library book, or I could show you – An unpleasant little tale. Most unpleasant.”
“How do you know the clock in the book is the same clock?”
“Oh, the estate agent told me years ago, when I was buying the place. In case I found out, I imagine, and got ratty. Then when I read the story in the book, I recognised it was my clock, or rather the house clock. And the book gave a lot more details.”
“You’re obviously dying to tell me.”
I tried to sound patronising, but really just wished I’d keep quiet.
She would tell me anyway.
But then Jennifer said, “Well, I don’t know, Laura. At this late hour. I remember what a nervous child you were – I don’t want to alarm you. It’s not a nice story. It might keep you awake. And you’ll need your sleep if you’re to get an early start on the house in the morning.”
And then – then – the foul old bag turned on her clumpy heel and marched away from me up the lawn, towards her economically faint-lit house. Leaving me with only the cold night and the indifferent sea, and the uneasy suspicion that if I didn’t hurry after her, she might lock me out all night.
Had I been nervous as a child? Not especially. And yet there was a kind of something in me, always had been, a sort of feral awareness of – God knew what. Maybe that’s why, in part, I don’t believe in the supernatural. It’s less that I don’t than that I won’t.
My father had been sensitive. Not afraid or cowardly, I don’t mean that. But the rubbish of the world could get to him, truly upset him; reported cruelties in other countries, or my wretched mother... It was why he’d died, I think. Worry, and trying not to worry, or rather never passing the worry on to her, because he couldn’t, to me because he wouldn’t.
I hated thinking of him like this, now, sitting up in the awful bed, wondering – I couldn’t help it – if Jennifer, who had been his elder by three years, had tried to frighten him when he was a little boy. They’d both been kids when the war started, and evacuated together to some farm. I had this picture of them in the unknown dark, he only about four or five, and she telling him horror stories.
All the time I sat there, I too was in the dark. There was no side-lamp, just the overhead bulb with the switch by the door. Another form of economy? Since, unless you wanted to sleep with the light full in your eyes, you had to turn it off before getting into bed.
Then the clock went off again. And I nearly jumped out of the house, let alone my skin.
This time, it clanged twice. But it was only just past midnight, according to my luminous alarm-clock.
I thought, (irrationally?) that’s the other reason she’s put me in here. So her damn clock can keep me awake.
Then, I heard the rustling sound.
Okay, I admit my hair stood on end. There I was in the spooky dark, alone, and here was this crepuscular little noise suddenly coming to join me, over there, by the door.
It’s mice I decided.
So I switched on the torch I’d had the sense to bring, conjuring country lanes by night, and shone it full at the doorway, expecting to pick up two or more li
ttle bright mouse eyes.
It wasn’t mice.
There, pushed in under the door, were some sheets of paper.
I gaped at them. Then I got out of bed, crossed the intervening three feet of room, and picked the papers up. Then I switched on the overhead light.
The papers were handwritten, and I knew the writing, over-ornamented and tightly cramped, as if nothing must slip between the words or letters. It was hers. I’d seen it on her letter.
Disbelieving, despite the rest, (and the obvious fact she must have crept soundless to my door in order to slot this under it), I read:
Laura, I remembered I had copied this from the library book I told you about. I thought you might be intrigued. I’ve pushed it under your door in order not to disturb you. Read it in the morning. No doubt, to your sophisticated mind, it will seem a very silly tale.
How was that for contradictory malice? Also, she knew I’d be ‘disturbed’, unless I was stone deaf and hadn’t heard the clangs of the clock.
I sat down on one of the bed’s rocky humps, and read the remainder of the hand-written pages, which detailed carefully the story of the clock. They did read as if these passages had come from a book.
The clock, the text informed me, dated back to 1768, and had been made in France. In those days it had had the normal glass window, through which the pendulum might be seen, and the whole front of the lower clock might be opened in order to reach the workings. The face, then and now, was decorated with a macabre motif then current in decadent Paris, and entitled Youth and Age, represented in either respective case by a mask and a distorted, monkey-like human head.
During the French Revolution, the clock reached England, brought over, for some inane reason, by fleeing aristocrats. And in 1820, it passed into the possession of an English family named Trente. They placed it in their country house, somewhere in the vicinity of Lathamfold.
Due to various reverses, there came in time to be only two females left to represent the Trente family, a young woman, Sabia Trente, and her elderly aunt, Eugenia. Both had experienced rather irksome lives, the old aunt unmarried and impoverished, dependant on her young niece, who, apparently no longer rich, and quite plain, was herself without hope of catching a suitable man.
