Would her life have been different if George had not abandoned her? It was impossible to know. One day she hoped they could heal their relationship. He was her brother, after all, and until Cicely and Kitty arrived, her own only living relative. She opened his bedside drawers one by one, to see if he had left anything behind, but apart from a scattering of dried lavender flowers, they were empty. She looked around her brother’s room for a final time and then opened the door to let herself out.
At the end of the corridor, a staircase circled up to the attics. The huge space above hung in her chest like a weight; for months she had been intending to sort through her father’s collections of china, paintings, and Roman artifacts. He had been an avid collector of the rare and the ancient and the obscure. He had accounts at all the major auction houses in Edinburgh and London and was often approached by dealers looking to make a private sale. His taste was eclectic, and he spent hours poring over auction catalogs looking for bargains. Some of his collection was valuable; some of it was junk. The problem was that she wasn’t sure which was which. Today was the day, she decided, to start the process. No more procrastination, no more delays.
Daylight revealed the narrow gaps and holes in the eaves made by squirrels and roosting birds over the years. Lit up by the cracks of light were suitcases and winter galoshes, Christmas decorations and boxes of her old things—toys, threadbare animals, and books, their covers faded or spotted with mildew. She lifted a rag doll that had once been beloved, held it to her face and sniffed. But nothing of her childhood self remained; it smelled of damp with a hint of mouse. In fact there was a hole in the doll’s arm and kapok stuffing was falling out like snow. What was the use of keeping these things now, she asked herself, when there would be no children to hand them down to, no new toys to replace them?
Her father’s collection of books, antiques, and paintings had been bought, he was fond of boasting, for a song. Antonia doubted that was true. Once the thrill of the purchase had faded, he stored most of it out of sight as if the memory of how much it had cost had become vulgar to him. Beneath a blanket was a stack of oil paintings, their gilded frames scuffed and peeling. In the dim light she looked through them; landscapes and still lifes that depicted fruit, dead birds, tarnished copper plates, and drooping flowers. Others were figurative: portraits of her father he clearly hadn’t liked; a young African woman in a pale blue gown; some nudes, where pairs of young women with puckered buttocks and plump breasts gazed out of the canvas as if inviting the viewer to touch them. Antonia quickly pulled the blanket back over the paintings again. No wonder her father had kept these hidden. What would her mother have thought? Did she know what he had bought, or had he started to collect them only after her death? Antonia began to suspect that she hadn’t known her father as well as she thought. What other secrets had he kept from her?
After an hour Antonia had managed to unpack only one tea chest containing a few pieces of china and a set of silver teaspoons. There were at least forty more tea chests as well as stacks of paintings. It was a mammoth task. She vowed not to leave such a mess behind when she died. What was the point of accumulating so much? The only things she valued and would be sad to lose were her sketchbooks in the library.
On her way back downstairs, she noticed Cicely had left the door to her room ajar. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed it open and stepped inside. What was she looking for? A clue, evidence? She opened the wardrobe and ran her hand over Cicely’s gowns. As she expected, they were beautiful, made in fine fabrics and bold shades that would never suit her own insipid coloring. She picked up a scent from the dressing table, sprayed it on her wrist, and sniffed. It smelled different on her skin, sharper, almost sour.
The drawers contained nothing but undergarments and stockings. She looked in the bedside cabinet, the back of the wardrobe, the single drawer of the writing table, but there was nothing personal or private. She was about to look under the mattress when she heard the sound of someone knocking at the back door downstairs. She felt herself blush deep red, as if she had been caught in the act. Quickly she checked that everything was as she had had found it, then she let herself out and ran down the servants’ stairs.
The knocking had stopped by the time she reached the back door. Mr. Baillie’s nephew was standing on the doormat, deep in thought, his hat in one hand and a notebook in the other.
“Oh, hello,” she said as she opened the door. “Are you looking for Cook? It’s her day off. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Only if it’s no trouble,” he said.
She filled the kettle and placed it on the range to boil. It was no trouble, but it was certainly novel. Cook would have a fit if she found out. But what nonsense it all was, Antonia told herself. She might be the lady of the house and he might be the gardener’s nephew, but fundamentally they were just two people who needed a cup of tea. And so they stood, he at the door and she at the stove, and waited for the kettle to boil.
“So how is it?” she said when she could not bear the silence anymore. “The garden, I mean?”
Mr. Baillie’s nephew seemed to be holding his breath.
“Well,” he blurted out, “a few trees came down in the spring gales, but otherwise—”
At last, after a small eternity, the kettle boiled, steam whistling through its spout. She filled the teapot and took out two cups and saucers.
“Milk?”
He shook his head no. She handed him the cup and saucer. They looked too small in his hands, like toy crockery. He raised the cup to his lips and blew on the tea to cool it. Was she going to have to stand there while he sipped the whole cup? She had rather hoped he was a swig-it-down-in-one-go kind of man.
“Remember when we used to play in the forest?” he asked suddenly. “I think you were about nine. I was eight. Your brother was younger.”
She frowned. For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. And then a memory came back as faint and jumbled as a dream. A boy on a tree stump with a stick in his hand.
“I used to come for summer. With my mother. Maybe you don’t remember?”
Antonia stared at the gardener.
“Oh, my goodness, yes!”
“You fell into the stream once. I tried to pull you out and fell in too.”
She did remember. The wet rocks, the green moss, the smell of leaf mold and rain.
“And then my governess wouldn’t let me play with you anymore.”
Antonia remembered whispered discussions, doors closed, the sense that there was something wrong with him, something shameful. What was it? And then it came back to her. He didn’t have a father. Now she felt sorry for him, sorry for what had transpired all those years ago.
He cleared his throat and then put the teacup and saucer on the table. For a moment they were silent. Then they seemed to fall back into themselves, into their roles.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “Can I pass on a message to Cook?”
“It was you I was coming to see, actually,” he said. “I was wondering if I could borrow a few books from your library.”
Antonia frowned.
“Whatever for?” she asked before she could stop herself.
His face turned red. But any embarrassment he felt did not dissuade him.
“I thought there might be some works of reference I could use,” he said. “I tried the library in Dunoon, but they had nothing. My great-uncle said you had quite an extensive collection of books relating to botany and horticulture and the like.”
“Did he now?”
She turned and put the kettle back on the stove. Ever since her father had taken ill, the library had become her own personal space. When she had found her brother’s wife there, she had felt somewhat invaded. And now before she could stop herself she pictured mud on the Persian carpet, dirty handprints on the walls, a lingering smell of manure and loam.
“I wouldn’t ask,” he said softly. “But it’s either this or I take some time off and go to the library at the Roya
l Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. And I wouldn’t want to leave the stoking of the boiler to my great-uncle, not when he’s been so poorly.”
“Absolutely,” she replied. She had no idea that old Mr. Baillie had been poorly. She would tell Cook to make him up a basket of fruit. “You’re most welcome to use the library—”
“Jacob,” he said.
“Of course,” she replied. “Jacob.”
“Thank you, Mrs. McCulloch.”
She remembered him quite clearly now, his knees all muddy and his blue eyes clear as marbles in the sunlight. He hadn’t come back the next summer, and she had missed him. George had been never been one for playing imaginary games. But after a few years of playing alone she had forgotten all about him.
“You can use the back stairs,” she said. “The library is directly across the hallway at the top.”
As she listened to the soft pace of his boots up the servants’ stairs, she felt the peace of the house dissipate. The library door opened and closed again. Now, whatever she was doing, her ears would strain for the smallest disturbance, a cough, a sigh, the slap of a closing book.
She poured the rest of the tea down the drain—a terrible waste, and just as well Cook wasn’t there to witness it—and then made the rounds of the servants’ quarters to make sure, she told herself, that all was in order, all was well. The larder was tidy, as was the boot room. The laundry smelled of starch and soap. Washing day was tomorrow and all the household’s whites had been left to steep in a sink in a mixture of soap and soda, just the way her mother had always insisted. Over the years she had been tempted by advertisements for rotary washing machines that were meant to save time and labor. But Malcolm had balked at the price and said that he didn’t want to put Dora out of a job. He had a point, in a way.
A door closed upstairs. The gardener, Jacob, was finished in the library. How strange it was to realize who he was after all those years. And how strange that she had completely blocked him out of her memory—that without a prompt, whole sections of her childhood were inaccessible to her. She wondered what else she had lost. She listened to him coming down the stairs, walking along the hallway and through the kitchen, then letting himself out the back door. The house was quiet again. Still.
Her eye was drawn to a small pile of tickets and receipts on the draining board, the contents of her husband’s pockets. She was about to throw the lot into the dustbin when she noticed that one of the receipts was from a hotel in Dunoon. It was for two drinks, a whisky and a port and lemon. She put it in her pocket and stepped into the hallway. Light was streaming through the trees outside and through the glass pane above the front door to create a shifting, moving carpet. She put one foot forward, half expecting the wooden floor to bend and buckle beneath her weight. Her heel struck the parquet; the ground was still solid. And yet she felt something slide within her, a sense of vertigo, a loss of balance, as if the world were spinning beneath her feet and she had only just noticed. A small nap, she told herself, would sort her out. As she lay down on the coverlet of her bed, however, the feeling did not diminish. She had closed the curtains to shut out the light, but she could not make herself unsee what she had seen. She pulled out the receipt from her pocket and smoothed it with her fingers. Port and lemon. A woman’s drink.
6
Kitty slammed the front door hard when they returned, the glass shivering in its frame, the wood creaking in its joints.
“Hellooo!” she yelled. “We’re back!”
There was no response. Cicely suspected that everyone in the house was pursing their lips or rolling their eyes, or both. The house was colder inside than it was out. The fire in the drawing room, although laid, was unlit.
“Let’s make a cup of tea,” Cicely suggested.
“And a piece of toast?” Kitty suggested. “With butter and honey?”
Although there was no one there, the kitchen was cozy, the range lit. They both stood for a moment and warmed their hands.
“Now, where’s that tea?” She had just reached for a tin on the shelf above the sink when they heard the bustle of someone approaching.
“Madam!” Cook’s voice rang out. “What on earth are you doing?”
As Cicely turned, the tin flew out of her hand and into the air. Landing with a crash, it sprang open and sent tea leaves scattering all over the tiled floor. For a second they all just stared.
“I’m so sorry…,” Cicely began.
Cook could barely contain her fury. She looked at the wasted tea and the mess on the floor and the houseguests who had come, uninvited, and Cicely knew that everything that had been bothering her—the inconvenience of two extra people to her menu plan, the pain in her feet, the son who had taken up with a girl she didn’t like or some such quandary—was suddenly all their fault.
“If Madam wanted tea,” Cook said through gritted teeth, “then Madam should have rung the bell and requested it.”
“I thought it was your day off,” Cicely said.
Cook’s mouth quivered. She was wearing a coat over her apron. It looked as if she had just returned from somewhere.
“We still provide a basic service,” she replied. “If we are able to accommodate, we will. The point is to ring. And if there is no answer, then…”
Then, the suggestion was, they do without.
“Very well,” Cicely said. “Next time I’ll ring.”
“Do you not have domestic staff in India? Or do your kind get their own tea?”
Cicely blinked.
“Our kind?” she repeated.
Cook grabbed the kettle, strode to the sink, and began to fill it.
“Please go to the drawing room,” she said. “Tea will be sent forthwith.”
Cicely hesitated. Was it worth a confrontation? Cook’s gaze was fixed on the kettle, her great bosom rising up and down.
“We’ll have toast and honey, too,” Cicely added. “Thank you so much.”
They left the warmth of the kitchen and headed up the stairs toward the drawing room.
“Mummy!” said Kitty, looking at her in amazement once they were out of earshot. “You made her practically explode. I thought her eyes were going to pop! What did she mean by ‘your kind’?”
“From India, I expect,” she said.
Cicely knew what the cook was really referring to, though she was surprised to hear it vocalized. In Scotland she had seen very few people of color. Apart from an illustration of a Negro on the marmalade jar, the culture was predominantly white. On the voyage Cicely had been taken for Italian or Greek. Her hair was brown and her skin a few shades darker than Kitty’s, but she had not expected a servant to comment on it.
Her grandmother, Nani, had married her grandfather, a British soldier, in secret. Her family had been aghast, heartbroken. She had already been promised to a suitor, and his family demanded half of her dowry as compensation. Instead Nani became part of the community that was called kutcha butcha, or half-baked bread. Although she gave up her sari and adopted Western dress, a corset and crinoline, she still wore traditional glass bangles on her wrist that jangled as she moved. Rejected by both her own family and the resident British population, hers had not been an easy life by all accounts. Shortly before she died, she started to wear the bindi again, a red spot made of turmeric and lemon juice that she applied between her eyes.
Cicely’s mother had been raised by an ayah. At eighteen she knew how to sew and enough math to keep the household accounts but that was all. Cicely had been sent to a day school in Darjeeling run by Catholic nuns. She had grown up playing with poor Europeans and children of mixed blood like herself, Anglo-Indians or chi-chis—which meant dirt. Although she had been schooled in algebra and Latin, she had been badly informed about many things, including human biology and social engineering. She had thought race did not matter, that in Britain no one would care about her ancestry. It was a shock to find it otherwise.
They heard the rattle of the tea tray long before it arrived. Cook had calmed down and
now proudly placed a pot of tea along with a plate of hot toast spread with butter and honey on the dresser.
“Will there be anything else?” she asked from the doorway.
Cicely was of half a mind to request something just to see the look on her face.
“No thank you,” she said.
Cook gave a tight smile. She ran her finger down the polished brass fingerplate on the door with a proprietorial air. She had no doubt lived and worked at Balmarra for years, maybe decades. A change would be good for her. She hadn’t just become stale: She was practically fossilized.
Cicely cradled her cup and watched as Kitty ate her toast.
“Do you think we can swim in the water here?” Kitty asked when she had finished the toast.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Too cold.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
For a moment they were silent. Cicely had, she realized, spent longer with her daughter on this trip than at any other time in her eight years. Even when they had been together, they were never really alone, there were always other people—Kitty’s ayah, the groom, the houseboy to carry their things. Cicely had been blocking it out, but now the truth of their situation rushed forth in an unwelcome torrent. Once her daughter was gone, how long would it be before she would see her again? What if they couldn’t afford for her to come home in the holidays? They could be parted for years. She would come back a stranger, all grown up and silent, raised in quite a different soil from her own. How could Cicely bear it? She was certain it was the right thing to do, but she would miss her so.
“Remember the day we went on that picnic next to Senchal Lake,” Cicely said, “when Daddy taught you to swim?”
“The day I almost drowned?”
Cicely remembered it vividly. George had thrown Kitty in where the water was deep and murky and then simply watched as she went under. Cicely had been on the brink of jumping in to save her, but George had held her back until her girl, her precious little girl, had surfaced, coughing and spluttering, and had splashed and kicked her way to shore.
The Glass House Page 9
