Sally was good. I didn’t know to be proud of her then, but I am now, when I think of her standing and staring across a rutty dirt road and a stretch of baby-barf-colored dead grass at the house that had looked so great in the Polaroids. I couldn’t see her face, but she said in this perfectly daily voice, “Come on, Jenny, let’s go. We’re home.”
Everybody carried a couple of suitcases or boxes, because you couldn’t drive right up to the house back then. You can now, of course—it took Evan a year to find the original carriageway about two feet down, under three centuries’ worth of guck—but I’ll always remember the lot of us, heads down, nobody saying a word, just schlepping our stuff across that dirt road toward that old, old house that didn’t want us. I remember Sally shifting a duffel bag to carry it under her right arm, so that she could reach out with her left hand to take hold of Evan’s arm. The way he looked down at her I’m really not a total idiot. I knew damn well, even then, that Norris hadn’t ever looked at her like that.
And I remember the windows. There were so many of them—round and long and square and pointy—and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn’t look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn’t reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through.
Julian was walking really slowly, hanging back more and more, until Sally looked around for him and let Evan go on ahead so she could take Julian’s hand. Then I wished I was a scared little English kid wearing a dumb school cap whom she didn’t even know a week ago, and then I got mad at myself for feeling like that. So I grabbed his other hand and just marched on up to the house. To the Manor.
For a farmhouse, it’s enormous, the biggest house I’m ever likely to live in, the biggest house in this part of Dorset, and when it was built in 1671, it was the biggest in the whole county. But Dorset’s never run to mansions, even in the towns—it’s always been farms and villages, like in Hardy’s books, and Stourhead was always a farm, from the beginning. So compared with some of those humongous old piles they run tour buses out to, the Manor is a studio apartment. But compared to it, my cousin Barbara’s house in Riverdale, that she was so snotty-proud about, is a broom closet in a Motel Six. I hope she reads this.
I’ve already said I don’t know how to describe rooms and interior decoration, and the same definitely goes for houses. The Manor has been built and rebuilt and burned down once—I think only once—and then it was rebuilt again and added to and added to, until nothing exactly fits with anything, which is just how the English like it. Anyway, the house has three floors, with a sort of east wing and a sort of west wing, and then there’s what everybody still calls the Arctic Circle, the central section, where you come in. Tony was the one who started calling it that, the Arctic Circle, because that part of the house is on the original stone foundation, and you can’t ever get it really warm, even today. But when we moved in, that was the only part of the house that worked, with running water and some electricity, and a cooking range the size of a pool table. I can still see us all clumped together there, hanging on to our bags and stuff, everybody trying to think of something cheery to say. Everybody except me, I mean.
Sally finally managed it. She said, “Well, a gas range, that’s great! I’d much rather cook over gas.” And Evan gave her this incredibly, unbelievably mournful look and said, “Actually, love, it’s a wood stove. I’ll show you how to work it, it’s not that hard.” And after that, nobody said anything for the next year and a half.
Finally Julian announced in that creaky little voice of his, “Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m going exploring.” And before anybody could grab him, he was out of there, his chunky new school shoes rattling on the oak floors. (That’s one thing about the Manor, it’s got fantastic floors—they’re so old and hard, even the termites break their teeth on them. When this house dissolves, those floors will still be hanging in the air.)
Tony said, “I’ll get him,” and Evan said tiredly, “No, he’s right, let’s look around this museum. There’s supposed to be a caretaker here somewhere, but I think the boggarts got him.” So we all went trooping after Julian, with our footsteps echoing up stairs and down corridors, in and out of one room after another, with the boys already fussing over who was going to sleep where. They’d always had to share a bedroom; there was no way in the world they could deal with that kind of abundance. Nice word.
I couldn’t take any of it in myself. I’d never in my life been in a house like this one. Farm or no, you could have dropped our old apartment into some of those rooms without raising dust or knocking over a plant stand. And then there were some no bigger than bathrooms, narrow as coffins, which is what they really looked like. Evan said those were for the servants. First useful thing I learned about the seventeenth century.
What else is important to put in about the first time I saw the Manor? The smell, of course, I should have done that right at the start. Not just because the house was so old, but because of the way the different families running the farm had been letting it go to hell for the last hundred years or so. So you had the old smell, which is one thing, and you also had that dark, dead-cold mousey smell of the layers of neglect, no getting away from either of them wherever you went. Six years of cleaning, six years of repairing and replacing, scraping and painting, digging away at those layers, and some days I can still taste them, both of those smells.
We didn’t get above the second floor that day because the third was closed off then, which everybody thought was just as well. It was, too, and not just because we were all absolutely worn out by that time. But all I’m going to say about the third floor right now is when Julian was home on his last holiday, he found a whole new room we’d never seen, a little tiny chamber like a lady’s dressing room, tucked away behind a door about as wide as an ironing board. There were a couple of semisecret passages, too, but they didn’t go anywhere. The third floor’s like that.
It made me think of Tamsin, when Julian found that room, because that was how
No, I’m scratching that out, that has to wait. I’m still talking about that first day. We brought all the other stuff in from the car and dumped it in the front parlor, which Sally’s got looking great now, but which was just bare and gray then, with nothing on the floor but a dirty rag rug and a beat-up harmonium in a far corner. Evan broke up a junky old table and got a fire going, but it didn’t help much, because the ceiling’s way too high. He stood up from the fireplace with his back to us, and took a really long breath before he turned around. “Well, my legions,” he said. “Doesn’t look much of a bargain, does it?”
Tony said, “It’s not so bad,” and Julian said, “It’s big,” at the same time. Sally just laughed. She said, “Darling, it needs work, I knew that. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t need work.”
“The farm doesn’t,” Evan said, “not so much.” Then he laughed himself and said, “Well, yes, it does, it needs a deal of work, but I can handle that. It’s this house. I knew it was going to be hard for a bit, but I didn’t quite realize how hard. I want to say I’m sorry, everybody.” Then he looked straight at me and added, “Especially to you, Jenny. You didn’t need this on top of all the rest of it. I’m very sorry.”