Was it loneliness? A matter of not having enough to do? The beds in all the other bedrooms (I mean not counting the two they’d locked) except the one I was meant to have (which, I did note, was the smallest) were stripped bare when I arrived. It doesn’t do much for a bedroom, a bare mattress. It looks as if someone has died or at least left forever, whereas a bed newly made up tells you that someone is expected. The bare mattresses were sad, but it was on the same afternoon that I discovered my new bedroom that I began to mind about them very much indeed.
It was the baby’s room, perhaps. All that expectation. Such a cheerful thing, a room waiting for a new person. Or maybe it was my new clothes and my new room that were already making me feel so different, so that the idea of a child of my own seemed just another thing that I’d almost managed to forget about wanting very badly, but could now have.
Please don’t think I lost my marbles or anything like that, because certain realities never quite left me. Not even I thought for a moment that I could produce a child at sixty-four. But that evening I took my supper into the drawing room and ate in front of the fire. (’Do not take food out of the kitchen’. Of course the list had said that, but I didn’t even think of the list that evening and it would have made no difference if I had.) Afterwards I sat thinking.
I have always liked the sound owls make and that evening the owls were the only thing I could hear apart from the fire. I think they nest in the barn or the eaves of the pool pavilion. As I listened, the thought came to me that this house has stood for over four hundred years; even the teapot made it through a couple of centuries before I turned up. All the bits and pieces I’d seen that afternoon- the candlesticks, the clothes, the white bear with velvet paws, even the typewriter- they had all been chosen by somebody at some time, acquired somehow and put here, for reasons which must have been valid enough and perhaps even compelling at the time. But now those reasons didn’t matter any more, nor whose reasons they were. Less still did it matter when those reasons mattered, whether last month, last year or 1600, because they were in the past.
I saw then that everything that is ever thought or done by people disappears. All human reasoning and actions die, because the minute they’re done with, they belong to a time past and they don’t come back. Oh, but you might say, what about memory, or the consequences of what people do? They last, don’t they? Well, they may survive for a while, but they are on borrowed time. I mean that quite literally. Though it may be longer in coming, the death even of memory comes around, and the effects of actions grow weaker until they are unfelt and cease, and then it is as if they have never been. What is history, then, I suppose you might ask next, if not the past lasting into the present. And I would reply that history is only what we keep hold of in order to explain the present in a way we like. If history is a sort of looking through a window into the past, we choose not just the shape of the window but the view we get from it too. I have read enough historical biography to see that. History is not the remembering of events that were significant in their own time, it is only the resurrecting and preserving of things dead and past upon which we hang our reasons for the way things are now, in the hope that those reasons may seem less paltry. Nothing in the history of anything, not one thought or deed of a single soul, can ever outlive its usefulness in providing acceptable reasons for the present. So not even history lasts.
But things, things last. They last beyond the time when their significance, or that which originally made them significant, has been forgotten. Whatever the things in this house had meant to someone once, whatever fond stories were attached to them no longer mattered, because time had passed and now the things simply belonged here, neutrally. I could disregard the old stories and tell new ones, and who’s to say mine would be less true? That teapot- looked it up on the inventory- was made in Canton around 1650, silver gilt mounts added later at Augsburg. Insured for hundreds of pounds (I forget the exact figure, it isn’t important). Isn’t that ridiculous? Now suppose I were to add that it had been bought by, let’s say John Walden, an ancestor on my father’s side. I could put that it was mentioned in a Deed of Probate (since lost) at Walden Manor in the mid 19th century. Suppose I were to go on to say that it was used by my beloved great-aunt as a button box? Who’s to argue? I will admit that these thoughts, as I sat that evening with the owls calling in the dark outside, quite excited me.
I had already begun to picture this kind great-aunt of mine sewing a button from the teapot on my favourite dress, talking softly as she did so to her little niece Jean, and it suddenly seemed perfectly right to continue with the story (this teapot was letting me tell any story I wanted) and say that at some point later on in all this huge, wasteful expenditure of time, Jean conceived a child out of wedlock, gave birth to a son and had him adopted. Forty-seven years ago, say, that would make it 1955, when I was seventeen, the year after Father died. A man of forty-seven might well have children of his own by now, perhaps even grandchildren! How happy I would be to find him again. This would be a fine house for a large family, with its gardens, the pool, the paddocks, so many fine rooms.
I swear that this notion that I could once have had a baby and that nobody could insist that I hadn’t, it actually made me happy, because it seemed not at all an invention but more like a forgotten thing remembered. So later that evening before I retired to my new bedroom for the first time, I made up all the other beds, too. There was any amount of bed linen. I chose the best, pure linen with lilac piping for Michael and Steph’s room, the one with pale dove-grey walls and darker grey velvet curtains (although of course I didn’t know then, precisely, that this room would be theirs).
Oh, and that was the evening I burned the inventory, too. Over the course of that day it had become an even greater irrelevance than Shelley’s letter, and so it went the same way. I remember that it was still less than halfway through January, and perhaps there was something of a Resolution for the New Year in what I did.
The next day Jean left the house in a beautiful olive tweed coat. In the hall she caught sight of her reflection in the long mirror and noted almost with complacency that she looked elegant. How could one fail to, in such a coat? There was a kind of clarity in the silhouette she made. And the same clarity was beginning to enter her mind, pushing aside anxieties and opening it up to small pleasures, such as the way she could spin almost like a dancer as she twisted to see the swing of the coat from the back. The coat she had arrived in, already in her mind just that old navy thing, was still lying slung across the oak chest. Turning from the mirror, she picked it up gingerly, as if it were a heap of used bandages. It already felt much less hers than the olive tweed, so the feel of the inferior cloth disturbed her only for a moment, off-handedly; but the smell of it, sacky and with a tang of railway station about it, pulled her dangerously close to acknowledging the old Jean who had worn it last. She bundled it into the cloakroom and as she closed the door on it she lifted one olive tweed sleeve and took a deep breath. The new scents, floral, English, reassuringly her own, glided up to her. She still had on the raspberry cashmere things underneath the coat and had taken from the wardrobe some black shoes, gloves and a leather bag, all of which, she hoped, would make sure that the old Jean did not waylay and follow her when she left the house.