Outside the window I can see the fog creeping in. The light is fading even though it’s mid-afternoon.
Vivien and her driver are talking upstairs. I can just about hear their muffled voices. I’m watching one of the last faint ribbons of steam funnel out through the teapot’s spout and, I have to say, I’ve been wondering if she’s planning not to come back downstairs at all. I had thought, briefly, of taking the tea up to her but I couldn’t possibly. She’s on the other side of the landing from my bedroom, through the glass-paned double doors, and I’ve not been in that part of the house for more than forty years. I doubt I’d even be able to. I wouldn’t feel safe. It’s not for superstitious reasons, I’m far too levelheaded for that. It’s just not what I call the Normal Order of Things. I do like Order.
As the tea is made and I’m lost for anything else to do, I wonder if I go to the pantry and put my head against the door frame, I might be able to hear something of the conversation she’s having. I try all sorts of positions and, although I can’t hear her very clearly, I gather she’s on the phone, a one-sided conversation in which I think she’s thanking someone for their help. Her voice tails off as she walks away, her footsteps telling me she’s heading down the corridor towards the small bathroom, just left of the landing door. I catch up with her movements as I get to the hallway beneath her and I hear her ask her driver if he’d “reach up for it.” I’m surprised to find that as I creep between the two pantries, the back stairwell and the kitchen, straining to hear her movements and the other noises above me, I can visualize a little of what she’s up to.
Now someone is coming heavily down the stairs and I hear Vivien shouting “Thank you” from the landing. I’ve moved back to the teapot and cups, and as the driver passes the kitchen doorway, he pauses, taking a firm hold of the door frame with one hand and leaning into the room. I’m focusing on his hand, wishing he hadn’t put it there, thinking I’ll have to scrub it pretty hard after he’s gone to get him off it. Then I look up and briefly catch his eye. This might sound strange to you, but that fleeting contact unnerves me; I haven’t looked a stranger in the eyes for an awfully long time now and it at once feels domineering, intrusive. Does he know I’ve been listening? Instinctively I drop my gaze to the floor, inherently apologetic, but a moment later I wish I hadn’t as his other hand shoots up in a firm, friendly wave, and I realize I’ve misread him. He calls out cheerily, “Good-bye, then,” as he passes. I want to answer but I’m not quick enough. I feel like a little girl again, back at school, waiting for the ridicule, the scorn, and never being fast enough to reply.
Did I tell you it was Maud who taught me the self-control that I desperately needed when I was teased? She told me about that place you can go in your head, a place you can walk into and barricade up so no one can come close and you don’t need to listen and you don’t get hurt. Of course, I had to learn to hold my breath while I ran down the tunnel away from myself. All I hear is the pounding of my footsteps, and their echoes, echoes of echoes chasing up my heels and the rushing of the dark wind screaming past my ears, blocking out all other sounds. Distant voices merge with the rushing wind; unidentifiable sounds, incomprehensible meanings in a constant faraway flow, like a ball of thunder yelling along the tunnel behind me, collecting and bulking as it rolls, gaining on me in speed and size and momentum. Until at last I reach the end, stepping into a room of my own, heaving the door closed behind me, shutting out the rushing wind, the ball of noise, the cascade of footsteps and echoes and nonsense. Safe and secure, I can bolt the door slowly. Confidently. One iron rod at a time, from top to bottom, slamming them firmly into their catches, unrushed and unflustered. There’s an infinite number of bolts, so I am able to slide across as many as I want to give me the comfort I need in hearing them snap shut, one by one, until finally, when I’m alone, all I can hear is my own serenity. I have found composure. Peace. I can breathe again, silently and calmly. And I can check: Has it stopped? Have they gone?
I wait and listen to the car as the door is slammed, the engine starts and it purrs off along the drive, leaving Vivien and me alone. I hear the car reach the end of the drive, stop, then turn left into the lane, its engine straining up the steep hill and briefly becoming louder again as, at the top, the lane curves nearer to the house. Then it’s gone, and as I glance out of the window, I see I am unable to make out the beech hedge just four yards away. The house is stranded in thick fog. And, apart from the sonorous ticking of the two hall clocks, silence.
Normally I would have welcomed this fog, by no means uncommon in the Bulburrow valley. As it swallows the house, it makes me feel safe, a blanket of warmth and security, asylum from the rest of the world. But today, it doesn’t seem to bring me its usual solace, as if isolating Vivien and me from the rest of the world has made our own separation more stark. The thing is, I’m just not used to knowing someone else is sharing this house with me and, it might seem absurd to you, but I’m finding it most distracting. My concentration has shifted from its solitary focus on my life, to what each of us is doing in relation to the other. I could quite easily convince myself that Vivien and I are alone on this world, inextricably linked—nothing else exists and the other is our only hope of refuge. I’m waiting to hear her walking, talking, shuffling, anything, but I hear nothing. I’m transfixed by the silence, staring at the stagnant fog outside, empty of thoughts, existing in stillness, in a space somewhere else.
It’s just after four o’clock when I hear a lorry pull up outside the house. Vivien never came down to drink her tea. I wander into the library—with its walls of bare shelves—where I’ll have a better view from the window, and finally hear Vivien on her way downstairs. Like an apparition through the fog I see the outline of a small lorry and can just about make out the hazy black lettering on the side, R & S FURNISHINGS, CHARD. Two young men jump down from either side of the cab, screech open the tailgate and carry a small single bed, in pieces, into the house and up to Vivien’s room. Then they collect a small table, a basic rack to hang clothes on, two lamps—one of which they bring back and return to the van—and some other things that I can’t see clearly. I spend the entire time listening and distracted, uncharacteristically preoccupied with a growing need to know what’s going on.
They stay upstairs for a while, and from my listening post at the bottom of the back stairs I can hear them doing what I suppose is putting the bed together, muffled voices talking and, at intervals, laughing. I can’t quite catch what is being said, but I feel strangely compelled to stay and listen until well after I hear the men leaving in their van.
“Ginny, darling, there you are,” Vivien announces as she strolls into the library a while later. “I fell asleep earlier. Utterly zonked,” she says. “It must be the country air.” She’s behaving as if she doesn’t realize she’s stood me up for tea. Perhaps she doesn’t? I’ve forgotten how exhausting I find it to predict other people’s frame of mind or to assess their general humor.
After my moment of thought, I say, “It’s probably this house. I’m always falling asleep during the day.”
“Well, we’re up now. What do you say we make pizza? I’ve bought some bases and lots of different things to go on top….” She fades as she walks back into the kitchen with me following. Should I have thought of what we’d have for supper tonight, her first night? How did she know I hadn’t?