— This is Gina, Mamie said to the ladies while she got out her purse to pay. — She’s the daughter of a very gifted and creative friend of mine. We’re here today because she loves this writer’s books so much and has written her A-level essay about him. She’s very, very bright, and is taking her Cambridge Entrance in the autumn.
Their smiles at Gina were coldly unenthusiastic. They advised the visitors to start in the room on the right and make their way around to the study, which was arranged as it had been in the writer’s lifetime. If they went upstairs at the end of the tour they would find an exhibition of editions of the works. — Which might interest you, one of them suggested sceptically.
The house was furnished — sparely, exquisitely — with a mixture of antiques and curiosities and modern things: a venerably worn Indian tapestry thrown across an old chaise longue, an elm art deco rocking chair, drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was dark everywhere and the lamps were switched on in the middle of the day: the low, deeply recessed casement windows were running with rain and plastered with wet leaves. Mamie moved through the rooms in a kind of hushed rapture.
— So sweet! she whispered emphatically. — What a darling place. What treasures.
Gina thought perplexedly of the letters Morrison had written from Wing Lodge: full of damp walls and leaking roofs and smoking chimneys and penetrating cold, as well as self-deprecating confessions of untidiness and neglect. The writer had never made much money: she hadn’t imagined that his house would be like this. How could he have afforded these kind of possessions? The rooms were like Mamie’s rooms: glossy with value and distinction, a kind of patina of initiated good taste.
— Do they live here? she asked. — Those ladies.
— Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you? It feels very much a home rather than a musem. The widow stayed on here, apparently, until she died a few years ago. So I suppose they’ve just kept a few of the rooms as she left them. It’s only open a couple of afternoons a week.
There was a photograph of Anne, the American wife and widow, on the plain writing table in the study: young, with a Katherine Mansfield fringe and bobbed hair and a necklace of beads the size of cherries. Morrison had been a world-wanderer, with a Scottish father and a Norwegian mother (you could feel the influence of a certain Scandinavian neurasthenia in his novels). He had settled down at last to marriage here in the south of England, and written his best books here, and died here, in his fifties, in 1942.
— Can’t you just imagine being able to write, at this desk? said Mamie encouragingly.
Gina looked at her dumbly across the charming room with its waxed floor slanting quaintly to the window, its framed woodcuts on the walls. It seemed unlikely to her that anyone could ever write anything worth reading in a place like this. She thought of art as a concealed ferocity; writers were like the Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt. What could one do, set up in the too-complete loveliness of this room: write cookery books perhaps, or a nostalgic memoir? At the same time she was filled with doubt, in case she was deluded, in case it turned out after all that art and the understanding of art was a closed club she would never be able to enter, she who had never owned one thing as beautiful as the least object here.
Sometimes Gina came out victorious from her struggle with Mamie’s pressing hospitalities, and succeeded in staying at home when everyone else went to the beach. (The sea was only a few minutes’ walk from the front door across the dunes, but the beach they liked best for swimming and surfing was a short drive away.) She heard and winced at the little crack of impatience in Mamie’s voice — ‘I suppose it’s awfully good of you, to want to have your head buried in a book all day’ — but that was worth incurring, in exchange for the freedom of having the house to herself for hours on end.
She didn’t really spend all that time studying. She drifted from her books to the windows to the cupboards in the kitchen, eating whatever Mamie had left for her almost at once, and then spooning things out of expensive jars from the delicatessen (only enough so that no one could ever tell) and ferreting out the forgotten ends of packets of cakes and biscuits and nuts. She made herself comfortable with her bare legs up over the back of the collapsed chintz sofa, hanging her head down to the floor to read Becky’s copies of Honey and 19. She took possession of the lovely weather-washed old house with a lordly offhandedness she never felt when the others were around. She ran herself copious baths perfumed with borrowed Badedas in the old claw-foot tub with its thundering taps. She tried on Mamie’s lipstick and Becky’s clothes. She browsed through the boys’ bedrooms with their drawn curtains and heaps of salty sandy beach gear and frowsty sock-smells; she experimented with their cigarettes and once for an hour lost herself over a magazine of dizzyingly explicit sexual photographs she found stuffed down between one bed and the wall (she didn’t know whose bed it was, and the next time she felt for the magazine it had gone). She sat in a deckchair on the sagging picturesque veranda whose wood was rain-washed to a silvered grey, drinking Campari in a cocktail glass with a cherry from a bottle and a dusty paper umbrella she found in a drawer: afterwards she cleaned her teeth frantically and chewed what she hoped were herbs from the garden, so no one would smell alcohol on her breath.
Once, after about an hour of this kind of desultory occupation of the place, she happened to glance up through the open French windows from her dangling position on the sofa and was stricken with horror: she had been sure they had all gone to the beach (except Gabriel, who was back in London), but there was Tom, stripped to the waist, cutting the meadow of long grass behind the house with a scythe, working absorbedly and steadily with his back to her. Tom was particularly frightening: moody like his father, dissenting and difficult enough even to have required at some point consultations with psychologists (this from more confidences over the pins and pattern-cutting). Actually, he was the one Gina chose most often for her fantasies, precisely because he was difficult: she imagined herself distracting, astonishing, taming him.
Appalled to think what he might have seen of her in her rake’s progress around his mother’s house, she scuttled to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the long day in a state of siege, not knowing whether he knew she was there or not, paralysed with self-consciousness, avoiding crossing in front of her own bedroom window, unable to bring herself to venture out from her room even when she was starving or desperate to pee. Tom came inside — perhaps for lunch or perhaps because he’d finished scything — and played his Derek and the Dominoes album loudly as though he believed he had the house to himself. Gina lay curled in a foetal position on the bed. She dreaded that he might open the door and find her, but dreaded too that if he didn’t find her, and then learned that they had shared the house for the whole afternoon without her even once appearing, he would think her — whom he mostly scarcely noticed — something grotesque, insane, something that deserved to live under a stone.
She wept silently into her pillow, wishing he’d go, and even at the same time mourning this opportunity slipping away, this long afternoon alone in the house together that was after all the very stuff of her tireless invention. They might have conversed intelligently over coffee on the veranda; she might have accepted one of his cigarettes and smoked it with offhanded sophistication; surprised at her thoughtfulness and quiet insight, he might have held his hand out to her on impulse to take her walking with him down among the dunes. And so on, and so on, down to the crashing inevitable too-much-imagined end.