The Song House (10 page)

I’m holding the bag for my mother to drop the holly into.
I mustn’t touch it because it will prick me. I’m calling her now,
Nell! Nell! because she’s gone round the back of the hedge
and there’s a car coming. I always have to shout if there’s a car.
She pulls me to the side of the road, but the car stops anyway
and the river man sticks his head out of the window. There’s
the orange and white dog sitting next to him, and in the back
is the boy. He’s wearing a tartan hat with a bobble on it like
Woody wears on
Top of the Pops
. My mother says hello to the
river man and wishes him a Merry Christmas.

Have you got your tree yet? he asks, and my mother says,

No, Ed says we aren’t Christians, so why go to all that
bother?

The man laughs, and my mother does too, although I can tell
she thinks she’s done something wrong because she goes red
when the man points his thumb behind him.

Or maybe it’s because there’s nothing left to stick a fairy on,
he says, and then he drives away.

My mother is going:
Fuck off, Fuck off
, shouting down the
lane.

Ed has cut down all the trees around our house, for firewood.
Nell always says there’s no privacy any more but then he says,

What’s your problem? Who do we ever see up here?

Or sometimes he’ll smash his hand on the kitchen table and
make all the cups jump, yelling,

If we had bloody trees, no one could see us freezing to death.
Is that what you want?

Any of these things can make Nell’s lips go white. Later, when
she tells him about what the river man said, Ed says,

Fucking water bailiff, he should learn to mind his own
fucking business.

Then he says he’ll speak to his father about it. That’s my grandfather,
who we hardly ever see. You can tell when he’s about
to pay a visit because Nell cleans the whole house and the
toilet and everything smells of bleach. My grandmother has
never come to see us; she lives in Chelsea.

We did have a Christmas tree in the end. We went to sleep
one night and when we got up in the morning it was there
in the living room standing in a bucket. The whole place
smelled like frost. Leon said the fairies had brought it, but then
Nell laughed and said,

Thank you, Baby,

and kissed him, so I knew it was Leon, really.

There are no such things as fairies and ghosts: there are only
people; nice people, friendly people.

I have always slept in the big bed with Nell. Leon has always
slept on the sofa downstairs. Ed has always slept in the back
room, which they call the Spare, because Nell says his snoring
keeps us awake, even though Cindy doesn’t seem to mind it.
Cindy is like a cat; she will sleep anywhere. Sometimes she
comes in with me and Nell, sometimes she’ll curl up next to
Leon downstairs, or else she goes in the Spare. Nell tells me
it’s because Cindy’s a gyppo. I think the way of things is fixed;
I think people are fixed. I can find them in their beds, I can
find me in mine. But then Ed goes with Cindy to London to
make his fortune, and his bed is empty. I want to tell Nell I
don’t like it. I should be the singer, not Cindy. He promised
me. But Nell doesn’t want to talk about him any more. Sometimes
in the afternoons I lie on his bed and smell his smell and
think about him moving around and laughing.

My mother says, Who knows where the time goes? and cries
a bit but she still won’t talk, and if I try to cheer her up with
a song she’ll say, Shut it, you’re doing my nut.

It’s February and spitting solid rain when Ed and Cindy
leave for London. Nell rages when she finds out that Cindy
has taken her fur hat, but Leon says, What does it matter, I’ll
make you one. Leon catches rabbits and cooks them on the
fire. He makes my mother a rabbit-fur hat but we have to leave
it in the shed to cure, he says, which is to make it not smell
of death.

March is snowing when the postman comes, sliding up to
the door and banging on it. There used to be a bell on a rope
outside but it went missing one day and no one knows where.
Nell jumps with fright when the postman does that. She says,
Why does he have to bang so loud? And, He should be a debt
collector with that gift.

This time it’s a telegram for Leon, from someone called
Athame, telling him they are going to make a record – Come
up. Stop. Paved with Gold. Stop – it says at the end. Nell says
Athame is a bad word and will bring us bad luck, but Leon
says it’s the new band name and is quite cool, really. My mother
cries again. When I ask her why, she says the postman has
wanton eyes and what will she do if Leon goes to London as
well?

On Walpurgis night, Leon and Nell drink wine and make
a sacrifice to the god of Mammon. They burn Leon’s drums
on the bonfire. My mother takes down the sketch that Ed drew
of her with me in her belly, and burns that as well.

Shame, says Leon, I liked looking at your big belly.

The days start burning too. May has not a speck of rain, and
the river man comes over and says we’re not to draw water
from the river on account of depriving the fish. He says there’ll
be trouble at this rate. Nell says, As if I would, to his face, and,
What bloody fish? when he’s gone away again. She tells me
that this is the hottest summer in history. We try to fry an egg
on the ground, but it doesn’t work, even though they did it
on the telly. It just sits there on the path looking sticky. Later,
the birds come down and peck it all up and Nell goes, Look
at that, filthy cannibals.

Nell says you can’t be too careful in the sun. She buys me
a straw hat and puts oil and vinegar on my skin whenever I
go out playing, but she wraps a piece of tinfoil under her chin
when she sits in the garden so that she’ll catch the rays. Leon
builds a greenhouse out of some old window frames and grows
tomatoes and weed. He sells the tomatoes on the road at the
top of our lane, and the weed to the lads in the MarketTavern.
For my fourth birthday, he buys me a
Wombles
annual, and Ed
sends me the Joni Mitchell songbook from London. When
Leon sees it, he says, It’s way beyond, and shakes his head. I
don’t know what the Wombles are, except hideous, with their
beady eyes and their pointy snouts. I have to hide the annual
under the bed to stop them looking at me. Nell teaches me
to read using the songbook. We start to sing again. We learn
‘Blue’, and make loveheart tattoos on our skin using cochineal
out of a tiny bottle, but when we get to ‘Cold Blue Steel and
Sweet Fire’, Nell always skips the page. She says I’m not ready
for those words, or the ones in ‘Banquet’, but I’ve seen them
and they’re easy enough. Everyone says I’m an exceptional
reader. I’ve got my own library tickets and everything, even
though the lady in the library said it wasn’t allowed. Nell said,
She can read, you show her, my Bird, and lifted me onto the
counter. I read a whole
Janet and John
and then the lady said,
I suppose we can make an exception for such an exceptional
little person. I think words are songs waiting to happen. I think
talking is singing: I don’t ever separate the two. When the
Newbury Advertiser
gets delivered on Fridays, I sing the articles
out over breakfast. I think this is how everybody reads. Leon
says I sing like a bird and calls me Birdie all the time. Nell calls
me Birdie too, and My Little Bird, My Dove.

Nell says I’m old enough now to know what’s right, and
to be careful, and although I’m not allowed to go in the river
– Never go in the river, she warns – sometimes she lets me
sit by the bank. That’s when I first see him, hiding on the
opposite side. He likes to watch. Sometimes he’s in the boat,
sunk low down so only his head is poking up; sometimes
he’s sitting really still like a squirrel on a branch. Once I waved
at him, and he waved back, but last time, I shouted, Hello!
and he ran away in a mad rustle. Now I have to look really
hard to see him; I can’t always tell if he’s there. Nell’s more
relaxed about the river, but always says, Don’t go in, Bird, a
person can drown in an inch of water, and Leon asks her what
planet she’s on. Planet Leon, she says, crinkling her nose and
smiling so wide you can see right through the gap in her front
teeth.

One afternoon, I come in from the garden and see Leon in
my bed with Nell. He says, It’s cool, come ’ere, kid, and Nell
is smiling and she looks shiny-faced and sleepy. We were just
having a snooze, she says, throwing back the covers, Want to
cooch up?

It’s funny having Leon in the bed. There’s less room, for
starters, and his legs are hairy and rough. The bed smells
different as well, bleachy, like the toilet. I don’t quite like it. I
suppose that’s why I end up sleeping in Ed’s bed. I end up in
the Spare.

Maggie comes down in the late afternoon, the Mahler
symphony still circling in her head. She’d fallen into a fitful
doze, lying on her bed with the curtains drawn, and dreamed
of taking a train. The whistle of the boy Trill became the high
clarinet of a cuckoo in the chestnut tree, then the tree began
to weave in time to the music, and its eyes slid sideways, beckoning
her. The branches parted to reveal a cobbled yard, a
wooden door set low in the wall. The sun, beating down
through her bedroom window, found the gap between the
curtains and fell on her in a long bright strike. It was in this
half-waking state that she realized: she wasn’t looking
at
the
door, but from behind it. Her eye to the slat; a single white
line of arid heat.

She woke with a terrible thirst, her tongue stuck to the roof
of her mouth and her head pounding. A sliver of light in the
darkness, the feel of rough wood under her fingertips. What
else was there? A smell of leather, and something else. She licked
her lips and at once could taste the smell. Spearmint. Leather
and spearmint, and the roughness of the door, how pulling at
it gave her splinters, how blinding the light was.

She’d made the decision, sitting up in the sweated air of the
bedroom, to talk to Kenneth directly. She wouldn’t have to
give too much away; she would be discreet. Maggie knows
how tight-lipped people can get when she starts to ask questions.
A few weeks after her mother died, she had gone to visit
Thomas Bryce, the water bailiff, long since retired, with the
hope that he might be able to remember some details about
that time. She didn’t know what she expected, but Bryce was
in no mood for answering questions. The mere sight of her
seemed to frighten him. Even if she could find the words, she
would need to be very careful about what she asked Kenneth.

Instead of music playing, and Kenneth’s wide smile to greet
her, she finds the kitchen empty. A dusting of soft light across
the room, the back door closed and bolted. A single sheet of
paper is stuck with a magnet to the door of the fridge.

Dearest Maggie,

I am in London. Wretched business meeting. Back in a few
hours. Explore!

xK

ps. If you would like to cook for us tonight, there’s something in
here to give you inspiration.

Wretched business meeting, indeed. She knows Kenneth is
retired; knows – as anyone would who’d read the local press –
the size of his golden handshake from Newton and Crane. She
intuits that he spends most of his time upstairs in his office
with his feet on the desk and his headphones clamped over his
ears, listening to Mozart. Or in his den, trying to decipher his
wild hieroglyphics.

Maggie looks in the fridge. Amongst the jars and yoghurt
pots he has laid two Dover sole on a plate, covered with cling
film. On the shelf below is a bottle wrapped in tissue. She can
feel by its weight and shape that it’s champagne, but rips the
paper off anyway. After she’s shut the fridge, she considers for
a moment, then goes back to take an opened bottle of Chablis
from the door. She carries it to the prefect’s office. Her notebook
is still in her room, hidden under the mattress like a
schoolgirl’s diary. Cradling the bottle of wine, she makes her
way up to the first floor. If Kenneth’s not here, she thinks,
there’s no reason for her to be stuffed under the stairs like a
pair of old boots.

Passing the landing and Kenneth’s office, she pauses.
Explore
,
he’d written, but when she tries the door, it won’t open.
Maggie feels a surge of fury; apart from the cleaning lady, they
are the only two people in this house. So why lock her out?
She stalks the long corridor. A room on the right overlooks
the staircase; this door at least is unlocked, but when she throws
it open, she sees why. It’s a bedroom – a guest room, she
supposes – furnished with polished antiques. She lies on the
bed for a while. The quilt smells freshly laundered, the pillows
plumped and smooth, as if awaiting the imminent arrival of a
visitor. She listens to the ticking of the grandfather clock in
the hall downstairs, stares at the ceiling. Tilting the neck of the
bottle, she takes a couple of deep swigs. The wine tastes clean
and sharp: immediately, she feels better, and takes another long
drink. Maggie tries to work out how many rooms are on this
floor. Five on this corridor, she guesses, and then at the very
end there’s another locked door, just beyond the steep staircase
leading to her bedsit. Which would put her in the servant’s
quarters. She gets up, angry again, and swings open the door
to the next room. It is almost exactly the same as the first,
made up for immediate occupation. She searches the drawers
of the dressing table; all unlined and empty. Perhaps this was
Rusty’s room. But no, there’s nothing here to suggest a feminine
presence, not a hairgrip, not a hair.

The next room is a shock, seemingly out of place: Kenneth’s
bathroom. It’s enormous inside, high-ceilinged and hollow
sounding. Maggie stands for a moment and breathes the scent
of him. Gazing up to where the cornice at the far end of the
ceiling disappears, she realizes that the room has been modified; that the door at the other end must lead into his bedroom.
She closes the toilet seat and sits on it, takes another swig of
wine. She hardly knows what she’s doing. Opposite the bath
is a chaise longue with a velvet footstool beside it; on either
side are two large potted palms in gilded bowls. The Victorian
toilet with its high-level cistern and brass chain; the claw-foot
bath; the chrome towel rail – all are spectacularly clean and
shiny, just like new. But the washbasin has a residue of soap
around the inside edge, and the mirrored cabinet above it is
dappled with opaque white spots that come away when she
rubs them and smell faintly of mint. Inside the cabinet, she
finds a stockpile of lotions and pills and ointments. She tries
not to feel the shame creeping up under her skin, and pulls
out a bottle at random. It takes her a second before she realizes:
he dyes his hair. Of course he does, she should know that.
No man in his sixties would naturally have hair that dark. But
his eyelashes? She sees his eyes again, the lucent blue of them,
his direct, trusting gaze on her. Behind the gummy, misshapen
tubes is a plastic bottle with a picture of fruit on the front:
Think Well! Wild Blueberry Supplement, she reads. And then
there is the Nytol, and a bottle of Sleep Tite, which, when she
rattles it, feels almost empty. She catches a look at herself in
the mirror, at her guilty face. It’s enough; she doesn’t want to
see Kenneth’s bedroom now. She is fearful of the idea: leather
slippers placed neatly at the side of the bed, a plaid dressing
gown hanging on a hook behind the door. She doesn’t want
to know if he has a magnifying glass on the bedside table or
a reading light clipped to the headboard. She doesn’t want him
to dye his hair, have sleepless nights. She wishes she didn’t care,
because all of this is getting in the way. What she wants to find
is arrogance, contempt for others, self-regard. And here, instead,
is Kenneth; gentle and foolish, staving off the years with pills
and lotions.