Heap House for Hotkeys

by Edward Carey

  Strange, I thought, that such lively-looking forms, that such beauty should be so heavy. I know they had never lived, and yet they always seemed to me so lifelike. Sitting as a child in Grandmother’s room, condemned to silence, to sitting upright and not making a sound, I thought I caught them breathing once or twice. I should dearly have loved to have spent some time with them alone, but Grandmother was always there. And that was the point: Grandmother never left that room.

  It was a large room with six full windows. Grandmother was born in this room, and shortly after, the great marble thing shoved in with her. During her long, long life she had never left the room, never once. In that room, in that single space, was all that Grandmother could ever need: her bed was there, her water closet discreetly hidden behind a panel, and all the things of Grandmother’s life, her infancy, her childhood, her schooling, her marriage, proof of her children, her old age, all of her living, every shade of it. Since she couldn’t go out into the world, then the world must come to her. All the best bits of Iremonger pilfering came to Grandmother, she had the finest porcelains, she had a Qing vase from China, she had Russian silver and Gobelins tapestries from Paris, she had so many famous Victorians in her room. The wallpaper was by William Morris, there was a large painting of a young woman in a large dress by Lord Leighton. She wasn’t all modern grandmother in her room, she had older things too: a painting by Joshua Reynolds, a Van Dyck portrait of a doomed cavalier, she had a drawing of a courtier by Hans Holbein. She had all time, I used to think, kept with her in her room. She grew bored of objects soon enough, some things were only played with for a day or two, others stayed for years, and she was always redesigning her rooms; she’d call for a painting of Venice, she’d call for Chinese silks, she’d demand things, and Grandfather should do his very best to please her, for she would be in a temper until her demands were met. And though she could never leave the room on account of her massive marble mantelpiece, still her fury was felt all about the house; it was a temper as big as a mansion. She’d demand things, she’d pull on her bell pull and pull and pull, have the butler with her all day and the housekeeper, demand to have sixteen servants in her room, call in all the uncles and aunts from London. So Grandfather always did his best for her.

  To please her, early on, it was Grandfather who bestowed upon his wife the business of choosing birth objects for each of the family members. And how she had relished this occupation. She complained about it often enough, of how it exhausted her, of how it was wearing her down, of how it should be the very death of her, but, under all that, she loved it, she loved it, for then she chose the life – she whose life had been so confined – of all the members so great and so small of Iremonger Park. Thus had my grandmother handed out hairbrushes and bath plugs, whistles (and matchboxes, Lucy so dear to me), eggcups and doorstops. It was a certain thing that, since Grandmother had come into her portion, she had delivered very ordinary things here and there, everyday bits and pieces, commenting on the very average nature of her family, never impressed, dismissing, condemning for example, poor Uncle Pottrick with a noose for a birth object, thus she ruined the man’s life. She felt no remorse, why should she, she was stuck for ever in a single chamber; how could any pain ever be greater than hers? At times, so I have been told, when she was younger, she would be so furious at her confinement that she would throw great valuables out of her window, that she would smash crystal glass and grandmother clocks and alabaster busts. The only constant in that constant room with her was the great marble mantelpiece. All else was in a state of flux. Once, after a long and loyal service, Grandmother, her mood – like a tempest – up, and, having scratched at the floorboards in her misery until her fingernails were cracked and bleeding, had opened a double set of windows and propelled her own beloved body servant from her room down, down onto the cobbles below. All was for ever changing, only Grandmother and the mantelpiece remained the same.

  It seemed to me that Grandmother was long at war with her mantelpiece, it was always youthful, always beautiful. Grandmother had been a child, looking up to that great thing, playing around it, dressing like it, and, with the aid of stepladder, arranging things upon its shelf, then Grandmother had grown up and had married Grandfather, and then Grandfather visited and I do think then that there were moments when Grandmother was very jealous of her caryatids, that their voluptuousness mocked her, for she was always so thin, Grandmother, flat-chested, narrow of waist, and all bone. Grandmother, day by day, had grown old and had grown frail and had shrunk but those marble girls were still as big and powerful and so rounded and she stooped and brittled and took her teeth out and hurt here and there with her aging. For months at a time Grandmother would have the mantelpiece covered up. Once, for a year or so, it was even bricked over. Later she would scratch at it with things, she marked it and she dented her own birth object. Taking up a hammer and chisel, she added wrinkles here and there to her nearly naked ladies, and yet, despite all this, I think she loved them. For that great marble thing, unlike all our foot pumps and hot-water bottles, unlike our shoes and folding pocket rules, unlike our watering cans and footstools, was a thing of startling beauty.

  I had not visited Grandmother for several seasons, the last time I was there, she had been very short with me, had called me a tremendous disappointment. On that occasion, she had blamed my father; she said that my father had never been much of anything, that he had been a terrible mistake for my mother, even that he had killed my mother, that, if it wasn’t for Father, Mother would still be alive now. How right she was, she had told me, to have given him a chalkboard rubber, so that he might rub himself out. She had said, crying then, that she could see something of Mother’s face in mine, but it was a dismal version of it, a bad imitation, a flawed mimicry. She had packed me off then, saying she never wished to see me again, that I was horrible history, that it was better for her to suppose that my mother had never been born, because the agony of the loss of her was too, too sharp a thing to bear.

  And so I was not to visit Grandmother and I was not to go near her wing. It was to be, for Grandmother, as if I wasn’t about at all. Instead she liked to have Moorcus and Horryit beside her. They were frequent visitors. She gave them many treasures, she called them beautiful and made so much of them, she said they were the future of the Iremonger family, she said to Horryit, so Moorcus liked to relate, that one day, not a soon day it was to be hoped, but one day inevitably, Horryit should be the one to choose birth objects, and what a marvel she would be at it.

  And there, once more, I stood. Trousered now at Grandmother’s door. I knocked, but the noise I made was so feeble I feared I was not heard. I stood outside a little while. Get this over, I thought, and then, later on, you may go to the Sitting Room and find Lucy Pennant there. Still no answer. I knocked again, louder this time.

  ‘Who is it?’ came Grandmother’s impatient voice.

  ‘It is Clod, Granny, your grandson Clodius, Ayris’s boy.’

  ‘Wipe your feet.’

  ‘Yes, Granny.’

  ‘And step inside.’

  ‘Yes, Granny.’

  Grandmother’s Footsteps

  The room had changed a good deal since last I saw it. There were new curtains and some new paintings. Her bed was different, and it seemed to me her bathtub too – there were steps up to it. She was sat up in a high-backed armchair, she looked very small in such a thing. She was dressed all in black and in thick black boots which were very worn; there was nothing unusual in that particularly, she often had a serving Iremonger wear her shoes in for her, so that the shoes might go about the world even if she didn’t. She wore a complicated white cap which made her head twice as tall. She was wearing at least ten strings of pearls, some tight around her thin wrinkled neck, others pooled in her lap; the weight of them made her head bow forward, not unlike a tortoise I thought. I could hear the storm outside, see the last bit of light still out there. Small objects were being pelted against the glass of her windows: pebbles, broken
straps of leather, little shards of porcelain, pages of newspaper. But my grandmother sat oblivious to all the snaps and clinks upon her windows.

  ‘Hullo, Granny, how are you?’ I said. ‘It’s so nice to see you again.’

  ‘Come forward, child, kiss me.’

  I stepped forward, my shoes creaking on her floor, across her floor, to the very feet of her. And then that smell of old and of damp, slightly sweet, something a little mouldy, something gone off, my grandmother.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said again.

  I leant down and gently kissed her cheek and though my lips touched the surface of something, that something, the corrugated pelt of old Grandmother, seemed barely there at all, as if I’d kissed a cobweb. Brussels sprouts. That was the smell, mostly.

  ‘Sit, Clodius, sit.’

  I sat on the edge of a neighbouring sofa, an empire sofa all upright and hardness and no sink to it at all. I perched there and tried not to look into those old yellow eyes.

  ‘Sit up, Clodius.’

  ‘Yes, Granny.’

  I looked about the room, most specifically at the mantelpiece, at the marble ladies there, still lovely. And, between the moans of the storm and the tics and the tocks of Grandmother’s many timepieces, I heard the marble tell me, ‘Augusta Ingrid Ernesta Hoffmann.’

  And so, I thought that early evening, you’re a person too, Miss Hoffmann – I could certainly not think of you as plain Augusta; to be so familiar to my grandmother’s own birth object couldn’t be done. What sort of a person were you before you became a marble mantelpiece? Quite some person, I thought, quite an extraordinary thing to have turned out so striking. Outside, an old empty dress, stained and ripped, slammed against the windows, and I shook. Grandmother paid it no heed.

  ‘Well, Clodius, how good of you to visit your old grandmother. How long has it been, pray tell, since last you came?’

  ‘It has been a good few seasons, Granny.’

  ‘It has. You have grown. Not well perhaps, not exactly upright, at an angle shall we say, like a truculent plant seeking out the sun through a crack in a curtained window. So long it has been.’

  ‘I should have come sooner, Granny, but –’

  ‘You should not have come sooner. You should not have been received. But you are here now, because you have been sent for. I wished for it. I wished to see you before you go away. To catch again some hint of Ayris’s face. My daughter. My own dead daughter.’

  She was silent again a while and so I sat, upright, and listened to all those clocks and their marking, to the storm outside whistling and cackling, and to the mantelpiece telling its name in a clear young voice. Tic. Tic. Tic. Smack. Tap. Crack. Was one of those tics the ticking of Grandmother’s old heart pump, thrusting and sloshing the old, but so pure, Iremonger liquid all about her, to every Iremonger corner of her? Tic. Tic. Tic. Crack. Plick. Snap. There was a whoosh as some old blankets were blown up by the storm and hovered a little before the window, as if they wished to take a peek, before falling down again, actually falling, unlike the cloth around the marble women.

  ‘You are wearing trousers, Clodius.’

  ‘Yes, Granny, new today.’

  Tic. Tic. Tic.

  Plick. Plack. Crack.

  ‘How do they feel?’

  ‘A little prickly, Granny, to tell the truth.’

  ‘You are given your trousers, early too, and all you can say on this momentous day is: a little prickly. It’s not good enough, Clodius. You must try better.’

  ‘Yes, Granny. Sorry, Granny.’

  Tic. Tic. Tic. Smack! Crash! A small book hit the window, as if it were a bird desperate to get in.

  ‘Pinalippy, Clodius. You have seen Pinalippy, I think.’

  ‘Yes, Granny. We have had our Sitting.’

  ‘I know you have, Clodius, I know everything about you. Just because I don’t see you doesn’t mean I’m not told. How was she? Pinalippy?’

  ‘Ah . . . very nice, Granny. Thank you.’

  ‘Very nice! Very nice, he says! She’s plain, Clodius, as plain as a mop. The skin is not pleasing. Hair on her lip, dark hair on the arms. The movements rather masculine. Tall too and thick with it. No grace. No music there at all!’

  ‘No, Granny.’

  ‘Well, you’re to marry her!’

  ‘Oh yes, Granny, I know.’

  ‘Rather you than me. But she’s loyal I think. And durable. She won’t die on you, Clodius. Things like that live long. She’ll outlast you.’

  ‘I’m very sure of that, Granny.’

  Tic. Tic. Tic. Smack. Tinkle. Crack. Things were pelting against the window very often now, making me jumpy.

  ‘How’s your bath plug?’

  ‘My bath plug? Do you wish to see him? It, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting. Of course I don’t wish to see such a thing. It was I, Clod, that picked that out for you. Especially so. There were a great many objects brought before me that I might have chosen. But I pointed out the bath plug for you.’

  ‘Yes, Granny, I thank you.’

  ‘It was a hard one. I thought over it a very long while.’

  ‘Did you, Granny? Thank you, Granny.’

  ‘Very tiresome.’

  Tic. Tic. Tic. Crack. Crack. Crack. And then an almighty wallop as what appeared to be the remains of a cat smacked into the windows.

  ‘Fearful weather, isn’t it, Granny?’

  ‘Of course I was in no state to be choosing birth objects. Not so soon after Ayris’s death.’

  I said nothing to that. Tic. Tic. Smack. Whoosh.

  ‘Some days I remember her so clearly that I can almost see her. She played here in this room. She was a little girl standing over there in that corner. I see her now, almost, leaning against my mantelpiece.’

  Tic. Tic. Crack. Tic. Smack. Tic. Howl went the wind. I’d better speak, I thought, I’d better say something to that.

  ‘I’m very sorry I never knew her. My mother.’

  Grandmother made a noise as if she were blowing out a very stubborn candle. And then she was silent again for a while and the noises were left to fill the room. I shall go to the Sitting Room soon, I thought, I shall see Lucy before the sun comes up again. It’s so dark out already, it is such a bad storm to have taken all the light with it. Tic. Tic. Crack. Snarl. Scream. The door opened, and I jumped, but it was only five maids stepping in, bowing at my grandmother, one of them asking, ‘May we, my lady, if it is quite convenient, close the shutters now?’

  ‘So early?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘It is gone seven, my lady.’

  ‘Already?’ She regarded a clock. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘And the storm, my lady . . .’

  ‘Get on then, don’t make a fuss.’

  They went about their task, nervous and fretful; each time a window was opened – for the windows must be opened in order for the shutters to be folded out and the bolt-slides to be dropped down – each time this happened the storm entered the room and danced about it. It leapt and laughed and set the room in disorder, it picked things up, hurled them the length of the place, it shivered all the paintings. Even Grandmother’s great mobcap was ruffled by it, such was the storm’s cheek. My own new trousers flapped about me with the weather, and my parting was unparted. The storm spat at me, there was rain on my cheeks. It filled my head with its noise and its foul breath had me wincing. But most of all, of course, was the noise of it.

  At last all the shutters were shuttered up and the windows closed behind them and the room quite sealed in, and, as if in happy victory, the clocks were much louder and more confident. Tic! Tic! Tic! I mopped at myself with my handkerchief, Grandmother looked disapproving. The maids lit my grandmother’s lamps, then went about righting the place, and at last, with their bows and crouching down and my-ladying, left. And we were together again, and it was only then, for the first time, that Grandmother showed some hint of disquiet.

  ‘Your grandfather’s late,’ she said. ‘I have not heard the tra
in yet. I do not think I could have missed it.’

  ‘No, Grandmother,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it has come back yet.’

  ‘He is late then. I do not like him to be late.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the storm, Grandmother.’

  ‘It is not like Umbitt to be affected by a storm. Though I must own that it is a bad one. No doubt he’ll be home again soon enough. And tomorrow, Clodius, you are for the city?’

  ‘Yes, Grandmother, I am to take the morning train.’

  ‘I have never been to the city.’

  ‘No, Grandmother.’

  ‘I should not like to now. What could there be for me in the city, what might I gain from it, over there, all the way over there? I can’t see the point of it at all. I’m much better off here, I’ve everything I need here. There have been times, long gone now, when I thought I might like to see it, but not now, never now. I curse my former foolishness. Even I, Clodius, was young once. Does that sound strange to you?’

  ‘No, Granny, not at all.’

  ‘It sounds strange to me.’

  Tic! Tic! Tic!

  A knock on the door, Grandmother looked as if someone had shown her something very ugly, something lewd perhaps.