The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  The housekeeper stood up and clapped her hands. “To bed, the lot of you, after you’ve checked on the fires and done your work. I’ll have no more of this slovenly mayhem. And take off the coat, Dorothy,” she said icily. “Good night, my lady,” she said to Lucy, and we left to the sound of chairs scraping and cups clattering in the sink, to a hum of disgruntled voices and laughter.

  Twenty-Three

  I was so busy talking to Lucy, nervously, quickly, trying to paper over the cruel talk of her mother in the kitchen by rambling on about coat camouflage in the polar circle, that I did not realize I was following her up to her own rooms before I entered the door behind her.

  She set down her torch and took out a large box of matches, and I watched the quick, practiced motion of her hand, the flaring match and the splutter of the first candle she lit before moving to the next and the one after that. The embers of her fireplace were warm and there were candles scattered over every surface—desk, chair, tables, mantelpiece.

  “It’s quite a lot of candles, isn’t it,” she said bashfully, noticing my stare. “I’ve always been deathly afraid of the dark, you see, so I have my own stores just in case.”

  “That’s very wise,” I said, picking up the spare box of matches. “Let me help.” And with every match I lit, every flame that hissed into being, I felt an ease settle into my body.

  “They were right, you know,” she said ruefully, as she stood on tiptoes to reach a candle on a high shelf. “My mother would have gone crazy if we had borrowed her furs. She was possessive about her belongings, and paranoid. She thought that if someone had a lock of her hair, they could make spells against her. She was so worried that something would happen to her, that she was in danger here.” Lucy rocked back on her heels and lit a fresh match. “And yet when death found her, she was elsewhere.”

  “How did the accident happen?”

  “They said she saw something, someone on the road, that she swerved and the car hit a tree. But if there was someone there that evening, they never came forward.” Her sigh made the flames on the mantelpiece flicker.

  “I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been; I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She put a hand on my shoulder in passing and sat down on the end of her bed, pulling the remaining pins from her hair so that it sprung free and curled around her neck and shoulders.

  I finished lighting the last few candles and sat down opposite her on the gold pouffe.

  “We haven’t spoken much recently, you and I, have we?” she said, one hand plucking at the silk of her bedspread.

  “You’ve been . . . busy,” I said, not knowing how else to put it.

  She laughed wryly. “I’ve cocooned myself away, you mean. I think that I’ve been embarrassed, about my nerves, about the nightmares you must have heard. At my age.” She shook her head. “I’ve suffered from nightmares since I was about eight or so, terrible ones, but they slowly lessened over the years, as any childhood affliction might, and yet my mother’s death has stirred them up again. I would understand if they frightened you, though, if I frightened you.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” I said. “The only thing I felt when I heard you cry out was concern.”

  “Thank you, Hetty.”

  “The museum has missed you.” I’ve missed you, I also meant.

  “And I have missed the museum. As is evident from my nightly excursions,” she said wryly. “You’ve not noticed anything moved since that night, have you? I gave the keys to the housekeeper so I wouldn’t know where they were.”

  “No, nothing,” I said. I rubbed at my neck where it still itched from the fur. “If you wanted to, you could continue your work—if that wouldn’t upset you—or I could give you something else to do, if you wanted, there’s no need, of course, maybe answering the letters, we get some very strange letters—”

  “I’d like that, it’s good to keep busy.”

  “Yes.” I nodded quickly. “I’ve always thought so myself.”

  “Tell me, I haven’t been at breakfast or dinner—Dorothy has been bringing me sandwiches—is cook feeding you well enough?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “no complaints.”

  “It’s just with the rationing starting . . .”

  “I wager that a Lockwood sandwich would be far superior to anything I prepared for myself in my lodging house in London,” I said, and then blurted out, “One reads and hears advice to housewives about how to feed their menfolk great feasts of meat and drippings and it feels like another world, for truthfully I would be quite happy to eat only vegetable soup and some toast, maybe a square of chocolate now and then.”

  “Chocolate, you say.” Lucy got up to rummage in her bedside table.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean—”

  She came over to my side, pressing a warm hand to my hip as she passed me the chocolate bar. “Please, I insist,” she said, and I broke off a piece and let it melt on my tongue as she sat back on the bed and crossed her legs, licking her own chocolate from her fingertips. “I know what you mean. When I was younger, I had this figure of a future husband in my mind, and when I learned to sew I would think, this is how I will darn his socks, or when cook showed me how to bake a cake, I would think of how pleased he might be to have a slice of my cake after a long day’s shooting. And more intimate thoughts than that,” she added, “how he would like my clothes, my hair, my underthings, how I would stand, how I would kiss him.” She laughed. “My grandmother used to begin sentences with When you have a husband . . .” She spread her hands and then shifted them behind her so that she could lean back.

  “I had a little of that,” I said, pleased to be able to talk about thoughts that had long languished unspoken, “but I was also oblivious in a way that infuriated my mother, blithely chattering away to her about the zoological facts I had learned and my plans for university, all the while she was worrying about my disinterest in stepping out with anyone. I think I can count the number of dates I’ve had on one hand.” Or less than that, I thought, but was too embarrassed to admit.

  “I’ve had dalliances here and there,” Lucy said, shifting her posture on the bed.

  I could feel the warmth of the fire on my side, see the flames of the candles dip and bob at the corners of my vision as I looked at her.

  “But nothing that’s stuck, nothing that would tempt me to give up my solitude,” she continued—a little wistfully, I thought. “And I hardly ever think of that anonymous husband now,” she added. “It’s my mother looming over me instead, judging me. I suppose daughters always disappoint their mothers.”

  “I know that I have disappointed mine dearly. I don’t know if I would have disappointed my real mother, the one who passed away, but I like to think not, I like to think—I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eye with a knuckle, feeling the sudden prickle of tears, the remnant of tonight’s shock finding a new tributary to flow through. “I never really talk of it—”

  “Oh no, Hetty,” she said, voice rich with sympathy as she came to kneel beside me, “I’m sorry. Here I am talking about mothers, all the while knowing that you were adopted.”

  “It’s not a competition,” I said drolly, a lone tear trickling down one cheek, “and besides, you lost your mother only last year.”

  “And now I’ve made you cry,” she said, and hugged me, and I found myself hugging her tightly back, feeling her rib cage move beneath my hands, surrounded by a cloud of her perfume.

  “No, please, I did that all myself,” I said, and then pulled away, wiping my eyes with my scarf. She smiled hopefully at me, the warmth of the room lending a sheen to her skin.

  “Now, I’ve given you sustenance, but nothing to drink, poor hostess that I am. What do you say to some crème de menthe, for old times’ sake?”

  An ember cracked in the fire, spitting sparks. “I had better get back,” I said, even though I felt reluctant to leave. It was only that this room, with its cozy glow, felt like some kind of intimate haven; I did not wish to overstay
my welcome, to overtax her.

  “Oh, I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I, embarrassing you.”

  “No, please,” I said, clutching her hand. “I’m not embarrassed. I loved talking with you, I always do; it’s so wonderful to have a friend here. You will come back to the museum now, won’t you, when you feel up to it? Please say you shall.”

  She squeezed my hand. “I shall indeed. Thank you, Hetty.”

  When I returned to my cold, dark room, I thought what a fool I was not to have lingered longer up in that turret room with Lucy, in the warmth of her fire and company both, instead of scurrying back here—especially as she had insisted I take the mink coat with me and now it lay in a pale heap over my chair, as if there was something crouching there, and even in the dampening cold I could smell it: the must of animal’s pelt, of mothballs and champagne and long-forgotten revelries.

  Twenty-Four

  It did not matter how busy I made my days, how tired I was by the end of them—each night, as I tried to fall asleep with the lights in my room left blazing, my eyes would open, almost of their own accord, to stare fearfully at the door and the blackout windows, and in my mind, I would be walking down the spiral staircase outside my bedroom and along the corridors of Lockwood, through room after room after room, pretending I was simply counting them and not searching for something lost, hunting for other horrors. I was still waking from those dreams of the leveret, still haunted, still thinking I might open my eyes to find myself back in the dark of the blue room again.

  My insomnia, my crazed dreams, my jangling nerves—were these my lot in life or were they a ripple from my mother’s death, a wave that would lessen with time? Had her own madness kept mine at bay in a strange sympathetic magic? The thought of ever leaving Lockwood, of the life I had been planning before that motorcar accident—of London, and parties, and a job somewhere, a little flat to call my own—seemed unfathomable. If I couldn’t sleep without the lights on, if I was terrified of closed doors and curtained windows, if I had to flee to my bed every other day with sudden terrors, then how would I fare living independently?

  I had slept in the nursery on the first floor of the house for the first few years of my life, before my mother had moved me to my rooms in the west turret.

  “I would have died for a room like this when I was a girl,” she told me, “a fairy-tale tower of my own; you don’t know how lucky you are, protected here. Back home I used to wake to birds in my room, to the shutters banging open in a storm, to rats scurrying about the floor. Our house was wooden but this one is good stone,” she said, pressing a small hand against the wall of my bedroom. “Nothing can get through this.” She spoke as if she was trying to convince herself.

  There were three rooms in the tower: my bedroom and, above it, the blue room that was bricked up when I was still a child, and my playroom, which was converted into a private bathroom as an eighteenth birthday present while I was on a rare trip away from Lockwood, touring the South of France with my grandmother; a trip I returned to again and again in my mind as a glimpse of life far from here. The warm, sandy beaches; the hills with their winding road leading to villages teetering at the top; the endless fields of lavender and the way my clothes still smelled of it when I came home; and the dresses, the glamour, of the French women and the visitors to the Côte d’Azur.

  As a young child I liked that my bedroom was situated above my parents’ because I found the murmurs that I heard through the floor, the opening and closing of wardrobe doors, the rush of water as my mother ran a bath, to be comforting. But as I grew older and realized that my parents’ marriage was not something from a fairy tale, that my mother’s jealousy and paranoia and my father’s brusque obstinance meant that they were often at odds with one another, I overheard many an argument that made my stomach ache with worry, and further kept me from sleep.

  Later, when I was a young woman, and Lockwood had fewer guests on account of my mother’s growing madness, she abandoned the rooms she shared with my father and took to sleeping in other, vacant rooms. She would sleep in one room, the yellow bedroom, or the twin room perhaps (though never the purple, because she was convinced it was haunted by the woman in white) for a month and then work her way through the others, one a night, before settling on a new space—my old nurse’s room, or the rose room, or the yellow bedroom again—which meant that I would never quite know where she slept or where to find her as she dozed the morning away, or napped after lunch; would never know where to lead her to when she was having one of her fits in the evening. It certainly gave the poor servants more work to do, but at least they could confer with one another in the servants’ wing about which door they shouldn’t knock on, or where exactly to deliver her ladyship’s breakfast. I felt embarrassed to ask them where I might find her, as if it reflected poorly on me, and my grandmother was little help either, indifferent as ever to the travails of her daughter-in-law.

  It felt like some cruel echo of our games of hide-and-seek. She never again locked me in a room, but now here she was shutting herself in different rooms and here I was trying to find her. It seemed as if she believed that if only she chose the right room, she might fix her frantic thoughts, make the world become solid again.

  There’s too many rooms, she would mutter angrily. I can’t stand it, I can’t hold them all, I can’t remember.

  For me, back then, it was as if my mother was in every bedroom, all at once, that each door I crept past for fear of waking her was the door which she slept behind. The way she treated me—loving one moment, irrational the next; kind, and then frightened; utterly mad, followed by moments of startling lucidity—was discombobulating enough, but now that had expanded to fill the whole house, as if it were a maze and she stood at each corner for me to find.

  It had not been a year yet since she died, and still her presence seemed to linger. Still I thought I might find her behind any number of doors: drowsing on the bed with her black hair tangled on the pillow; sitting upright on a chair, waiting to tell me off for startling her; peering out of the window, spying on the gardeners; or, the sight that had always disturbed me the most, weeping into her hands, her voice small and young, as if she were only a mirror of me, as if her fate was mine, as if what the house had done to her would be done to me just the same.

  She’s here, she would say, her cheeks flushed with tears. She’s found me. And I would turn around, my heart kicking, as if expecting there to be a figure waiting behind me, ghostly, hungry, wild.

  Twenty-Five

  There’s someone been thieving the sugar,” the cook was saying, one day that spring. “It’s hard enough with the rationing and now I can’t scrounge up any cakes.”

  I was in the parlor and could hear her in the servants’ sitting room, the smell of tea and cigarettes seeping through the wall.

  “The sugar? Someone’s taken my hat,” Dorothy said. “It’ll be one of those new maids, the ones that don’t last a week, thinking that they’re above it all, cheeky buggers, going on and on about their army sweethearts who are going to marry them and set them up in a home. Fat chance of that!”

  “You’re worrying about hats, I’m worrying about the Germans—”

  “If I see someone wearing it, I’ll scratch their eyes out—”

  “There’s too many bloody rooms,” another maid’s voice butted in, putting something heavy down on the floor. “Christ, all these bedrooms, just close them up for god’s sake, who are they waiting for?”

  “The Germans?” the cook offered sardonically as the other two laughed.

  “If her ladyship, the Major’s mother, was still alive you know she’d be inviting them to tea the minute they invaded, nasty bitch.”

  “Dorothy.”

  “Well, she was, wasn’t she? And good riddance to her.”

  “You might change your tune when we get a new Lady Lockwood, when the Major remarries; the new one might be worse than the others.”

  “As if that man will marry again, he’s having
far too much fun.” Dorothy laughed.

  “Ah, but he’ll have to—didn’t you hear him shouting at his money man on the telephone the other week?”

  “What’s this,” the cook said sardonically, “gossip that Dorothy doesn’t already know? Are you slacking in your snooping, dear?”

  “Shut up, will you?” Dorothy replied crossly.

  The mood in the house was fractious. There had been a flood of servants leaving for the war effort and the housekeeper was struggling to find anyone to permanently replace them. The duties for those remaining—Paul, the cook, Dorothy and Joyce, the housekeeper herself—were overwhelming. Dust was accumulating in corners of the house; fingerprints blazed on streaked windows in the yellow spring light; muddy footsteps lingered for days; and the floors of the bathrooms were slick and mildewed.

  Nature herself was pressing in on Lockwood too, ivy crawling up the walls of the house, rosebushes shouldering further toward its windows, moss creeping inside its doors, the odd leafy plant growing through cracks in window frames, muscling into empty rooms. When the cherry tree bloomed, its sodden petals were soon tracked inside or blown by the wind even upstairs. I told Joyce one day, as I saw her struggling with brush and pan, that I would sweep them up and save her the work, but it seemed like a futile task when they stuck to the floor or to my hands, when they rotted to the carpets and refused to be shifted by brush or cloth and left their sour-sweet note of decay in the air.

  I was worried about the animals with every news report from mainland Europe, with every bad dream, checking and rechecking where the stirrup pump was, circling the outside of the house each dusk to see that the blackout curtains were firmly in place.

  “We are waking up from a childish dream of peace,” the white-haired groundskeeper, who was too old to be conscripted, said to me one day as he stood listening to the wireless reports drifting out of the drawing room window, “to find the monsters at our door, having learned nothing at all from the Great War except how to breed another one.”