The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

  That night they camped next to bend in a river. While her father rested and the cook prepared dinner, Cicely and George sat on an outcrop of rock on the bank, smoked his packet of Rothmans, and talked. And as the mountain water rushed by and the campfire filled the air with the smell of roasting spices, as he described traversing ravines and meeting natives who were not particularly friendly, her eye fixed on the curve of his ear and the turn of his lip. She took in the sound of his voice when he spoke her name, which he did frequently. And even though at that point she had known him for only a matter of weeks, she was already in the grip of an infatuation that she believed was the first stirring of love. Until, that is, over dinner her father uttered those hateful words:

  “I suppose, George, you’ll want to get back for Christmas to see your intended.”

  Cicely had put down her plate of half-eaten stew and walked down to the riverbank alone. The shock, she remembered, was visceral, painful, sudden, like a slap across the cheek. How could he have talked so much about his life and failed to mention that he had a fiancée? She felt idiotic. It wasn’t entirely his fault: What claim did she have on him? she asked herself. What right did she have to feel so wronged?

  Away from the campfire’s bright blaze the river reflected the yellow disk of a full moon. In the darkness no one could see her face crumple and her heart contract. And then he was there, at her elbow, standing close, much closer than he would have dared had it been light.

  “Cicely?” George said softly.

  “You don’t need to explain anything,” she replied. “It’s quite all right.”

  “There is no intended,” he whispered. “I invented one so your father would let you come on the trip. I so wanted to be with you.…”

  And so her cards were played; his too. He turned her face around and kissed it, hot tears and all, in the dark, beside the boil and roll of the river, his body pressing into hers as if he were a force of nature that could not be stopped.

  “Cicely?” her father called.

  They pulled apart, a sheet of paper torn; then she sauntered back to camp alone. George appeared a little later from the forest, carrying an armful of tinder for the fire. How clever they thought they were, how discreet. Thankfully Cicely’s mother, who could sense a white lie from a bitten lip or the turn of a gaze, wasn’t there.

  The rest of the trip was taken up with carefully packing and drying precious specimens to ship back to England. It was quite a haul. Cicely gravitated to George’s side whenever she could. To be near him was to be filled with an energy she had never felt before; her pulse quickened, her mouth parched, her stomach turned over; it was unbearably wonderful.

  “I have never found such a perfect spot for orchids,” George said more than once.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “So glad I came.”

  “Here you are,” a voice cut through the memory.

  Cicely came back with a jolt to the present, to Scotland, to the library in Balmarra. Antonia was standing in the doorway.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

  From the corner of her eye, Cicely noticed that the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet was still open. How careless she had been.

  “I was just admiring your fine collection of books,” Cicely replied. “But I couldn’t manage to open the window. Could you try?”

  Antonia strode across the library and with both hands lifted the window easily. Cicely closed the drawer gently with her calf but was unable to return the postcard without Antonia noticing.

  “What have you got there?” Antonia asked.

  “This? An old card,” Cicely said. “From George.”

  “Wherever did you find it?” Antonia asked.

  “On a shelf,” she lied. “At the back.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  Antonia smoothed the image with the flat of her hand, then turned it over.

  “‘Home by Christmas,’” she read. “Famous last words.”

  She smiled, but there was something of a rebuke in her manner, Cicely noted. Surely it was not her fault that in ten years George had never once returned to see his family? She had hardly entrapped him. Nothing and no one had that power over George except, perhaps, his vocation.

  “It was so thoughtful of my brother to suggest you pay us a visit,” Antonia said. “I only wish he were here with you.”

  Here was her chance to tell Antonia the truth. The words were on the tip of her tongue, all she had to do was to open her mouth and let them out. I have come to claim George’s inheritance. All this will soon be gone, sold, auctioned. You are about to lose Balmarra. Antonia was looking at her, waiting for a response.

  “We’re glad to be here,” she found herself saying, a platitude that was absolutely false. “George would have come himself if the political situation had not arisen.”

  “The political situation?” echoed Antonia.

  “In China,” she replied

  Antonia looked completely lost. Did she never pick up a newspaper? The Qing Dynasty was crumbling, and the army had staged an uprising. Chinese troops were withdrawing from Tibet. All the former restrictions on travel would be lifted.

  “Ah,” Antonia said, straightening the spines of the books on the nearest shelf. “That political situation.”

  They were silent.

  “Did he send any message?” Antonia continued. “A letter perhaps? It’s been so long since we’ve seen him.”

  “I think he meant to,” she replied. “But he has been rather occupied of late.”

  She remembered the wastepaper bin in his study that she found filled to the brim with sheets of writing paper, each screwed into a ball. “Dear Antonia,” George had written in one. “It has been longer than I intended.” “I regret I wasn’t around more,” he had written in another. “I hope we can remain on the best terms.” She also remembered their argument on the day before he left.

  “Maybe you should write and tell them we are coming?” she had suggested.

  “And tell them what?” he had replied.

  Too much time had passed. Too little contact had been sustained. Even without the difficult issue of the inheritance, the ties appeared irreparably broken.

  “Tell me,” Cicely said. “Was George always more interested in plants than anything else?”

  Antonia ran a hand along the length of a shelf and then examined her finger for dust.

  “First it was insects,” she said. “He kept them in a jar. Then he had another phase—tadpoles. Then it was birds.”

  “Then plants?”

  “Yes. My father was absolutely against him becoming a botanizer,” said Antonia, looking at her directly. “I think that was why George pursued it.”

  “Really?” She smiled. “But your father himself collected plants.”

  “He was a man of contradiction.” Antonia shrugged. “I think he had some kind of bad experience. Anyway, take this.” Antonia held out a volume that had been lying faceup on a shelf. “It might come in useful when you and your daughter explore the estate. You know you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you wish. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Cicely took the book, a much-thumbed copy of Familiar Garden Flowers, thanked Antonia, and excused herself, the book snug in her pocket beside the solicitor’s letter. She wished Antonia would stop being so accommodating. Did she really have no idea? As for the “bad experience,” it was probably something clerical, such as being overcharged or sent the wrong species. He seemed like a man who could hold a grudge against an entire profession. Now that she had the lawyer’s details, however, it was perfectly possible that she could be home before the monsoon season was over. The idea calmed her a little. She was back on track.

  * * *

   Antonia closed the door of the library behind her. The first emotion she had felt on seeing Cicely in the library was alarm. She kept her sketchbooks on the top shelf—dozens of them, all filled with notes, drawings, and paintings from the last twenty years or
so. They were safe up there, she had thought. Malcolm wasn’t interested in books, and her father hadn’t spent any time in the library since his eyesight began to fail. It didn’t look as if Cicely had discovered them. But where on earth had she found that old postcard? What was the woman doing in there? If one was being cynical, it looked a little like snooping. Maybe Malcolm’s suspicions were correct. There was no letter, no message. How could they be sure that the woman was George’s wife? And the child? Was she really her niece? And if they were, what would it mean? Had her father known about Cicely and Kitty before he died? Did this change anything? And if so, what?

  Antonia walked along the corridor to her bedroom, closed the door, and placed the silk rose from Cicely’s hat in her top drawer. It was here she kept her secret collection of “borrowed” objects: a single gold cuff link from the painter Henry Morris; a copper thimble from sewing class at school; a silver bangle and an enameled hair clip from a former school friend. She had vowed to herself that she would stop. At best it could be seen as a compliment, at worst as theft. It was after the death of her mother when she was twelve years old that she had become attached to small mementos: a tram ticket, a tortoiseshell comb, an embroidered handkerchief. And now she found the compulsion to pocket things that belonged to other people and wouldn’t immediately be missed nearly overwhelming. She had become addicted to the race of her heart and heady rush of adrenaline, the sense of power and the thrill of duplicity, especially when enlisted to search for the lost object. Would she ever return them? One day, perhaps, planting them in obscure places to turn up unexpectedly—in the lining of an old jacket, for example, or in the toe of a Wellington boot.

  Maybe it was the house, the estate, the weight of all the responsibility on her shoulders that made her do it? Sometimes she dreamed of walking away from it all and into an alternate life where she was an artist more concerned with the slant of light than the cost of coal. An image of Henry flickered through her mind. His hair was long, his face clean shaven, and he smelled not of French cologne like Malcolm, but of turpentine and fresh air. How many years ago was it now? How many decades? Two? Long before she was married, anyway.

  At first it had been awkward, difficult. She would wander down to the causeway where he sat with his easel, his canvas, and a case of paint, and take a quick look at how the painting was progressing. She loved to watch him work, the way he held himself, tense, like a cat about to spring, his brush in his hand and his eyes narrowed as he took in the angle of a roof or the shiver of the trees. And then he had spoiled everything, painting in that stag and eagle at her father’s request, and she saw that like her, he was not free after all.

  She sat down in front of her dressing table and tried to look at herself objectively in the mirror. She knew how she appeared to the world. She read it on Cicely’s face the moment they first met. She was cosseted, sheltered, as fragile and ridiculous as a fig tree wrapped up in muslin in winter to guard it from frost. Portraiture had never interested her, but she wondered now if she should have painted herself at eighteen just to compare. She smoothed her face around her eyes to see if the skin was already wrinkling. To her dismay she noticed a slight droop under the jawline. It was not surprising given the events of the last five years. They had taken their toll. Strands of hair had escaped from their pins and formed a pale halo around her face. Her father used to call her “the Bitter Angel,” an insult and compliment rolled into one. She was neither an angel nor was she bitter. Or only slightly. She had once wanted so much for herself; she had dreamed of days infused with the smell of linseed oil and pigment, of light on scrubbed wooden floors, and of the soft strokes of black charcoal on white paper. She would have liked to have spread her wings, bitter or not, and be taught, be challenged, and meet new people. She would have liked just a little for herself, not recognition exactly, but the possibility of praise. But it was not to be. She had stayed at home with her father while George had gone away.

  A door slammed somewhere in the house, and she jumped despite herself. Cicely’s daughter certainly made her presence known. Ever since they had arrived, doors were always banging, taps running, floors creaking, toilets flushing. At least they had come in summer; winter was not a comfortable season at Balmarra. Seen from their angle, however, maybe Kitty wasn’t too noisy but the house itself too quiet.

  Earlier that morning, just after breakfast, she had heard a noise coming from the room above. Not squirrels again? But this didn’t sound like rodents, no manic racing and sudden silences. Maybe it was a pigeon? The room directly above her own was the nursery. Another noise, this time a muffled crash. Maybe it was the roof? It seemed that not a month went by without another dozen slates becoming dislodged by the wind and needing to be replaced.

  She glided up the stairs; in her father’s last few months she had become adept at moving silently around the house, avoiding loose floorboards and walking on tiptoe. The nursery door was slightly ajar, and from inside came a rhythmic squeaking. She peered through the gap—the rug was covered with toys she recognized, wooden soldiers and wooden animals from a Noah’s Ark. A mechanical tumbling bear stood on its head, and a game of bagatelle lay open, its pieces scattered everywhere. Underneath the window, sitting on the rocking horse, was the girl.

  “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” she sang softly as she rocked. “Come on, horsey, giddyap.”

  In the soft winter light, the resemblance between the girl and her brother was striking. Would her own daughter have looked a little like Kitty?

  Antonia shivered and felt a sense of loss as keen as if a door had opened to let in the chill. Malcolm had done his best. He had taken time off work to accompany her to doctor’s appointments, he had uttered all the right words. But she hated the way he patted her on the arm while they waited; she couldn’t bear the way he way he nodded gently when the doctor had explained her predicament as if he understood what it felt like to be her. And as they sat in the chemist’s waiting for her prescription, a tonic to help her sleep, and Malcolm leafed through the local newspaper, she had wanted to rip it out of his hands and burn it. The fault wasn’t his, however, but hers. She had thought that she might be a better mother than she was an artist, but apparently this was not the case.

  “We could continue trying,” Malcolm had suggested more than once. But they had tried, and she had failed several times already. When she saw how easily other women fell pregnant, her blood turned to vinegar. How could she let herself be touched when she was so sour inside? Several months after the last mishap, as he called it, Malcolm had given up. They had slept apart for years now, and—she told herself—had probably both forgotten all they once knew. How quickly they had moved from being bedfellows to being friends, and sometimes she wasn’t even sure if they were that.

  Kitty had started to hum and began to sing another song with words Antonia struggled to make out.

  “Roti, makhan, chini,” she sang. “Chota, baba nini.”

  The girl was not like George or any of her unborn children. She was foreign, different, strange.

  At lunch Cicely had told Antonia they were sending Kitty to boarding school, somewhere she had never heard of called Glenrannoch, near Stirling. Antonia felt a pang for the girl. How would she fit in?

  At her dressing table, Antonia unfastened her plait. They had never discussed what would happen to the estate when he died, but her father had always assured her that it would eventually belong to its caretakers, and that, surely, meant her and Malcolm. George had done his best to disinherit himself. Anyway, her husband wasn’t worried. Malcolm was her father’s son-in-law, and more important, he kept an eye on his legal affairs. If there was any chance that anything was about to be snatched from under their noses, so to speak, he would have told her. Besides, there was nothing much of value at Balmarra. And she doubted George had the money or the will to finance its ruinously expensive upkeep, especially not from five thousand miles away.

  She tried to flatten her hair with the palm of her ha
nd, but still it bounded back again, coiling into thick spirals. It was impossible. Sometimes it felt as if her life was a series of challenges that defeated her every time. She picked up the pompadour frame she had bought in Glasgow several years earlier and placed it on her head. The process was painful, difficult, and the style never turned out the way it was supposed to. First she began to roll the front of her hair over the frame, and when it was lifted away from her face, to anchor it in place with pins. Next she rolled up the rest of her hair into a “foundation tail” and wrapped it in a figure eight the way the hairdresser had shown her. Then she threaded in hairpins until her hair was piled into a loose chignon. The results were better than usual: F inally she looked presentable. But before she even rose from her stool, one hairpin and then another began to loosen. The frame wasn’t straight, the roll of hair was sliding forward, and strands sprang out on both sides.

  This time, she decided, she would not give up. If Cicely made the effort, then so would she. After all, she was the lady of the house. She pulled out all the pins, removed the frame, brushed out her hair, and started again.

  4

  Cicely followed the footpath that led down to the boathouse on the shores of the loch. The rain was soft, fine, and came down in blusters and wisps like pale smoke. It was too late to go to Dunoon and see the solicitor. She would go first thing in the morning. In the meantime she craved fresh air and open spaces, a place to escape. She had rushed out of the house, ignoring the skies that threatened rain, taking no account of the rough terrain. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, her shoes were sodden.

  All of a sudden, the birds stopped singing and it started to rain so heavily that she was forced to take shelter under a holly tree. There was a taste in the air she recognized. This was more like the rain she knew, this was a deluge, this was almost a manasuni. As she stood beneath the dripping leaves, she wondered what George was doing at that particular moment. Was it raining too? Had he reached the valley high up in the mountains that he had told her about or was he still in the foothills? How many specimens had he collected? She remembered the one he had given her after the first expedition: a Cymbidium mastersii, a winter-blooming orchid with white petals, a pale yellow lip, and an almond scent. Its flowers, George had explained, never fully opened. And then he had kissed her again, the taste of him like nothing she had ever tasted before: flash floods and waterfalls and lightning.