This night has been unusually restless. First, I’ve woken up exhausted, as if sleeping and resting have made me even more tired. Second, my head has been invaded by a surge of long-forgotten memories that have scratched their way to the surface and crowded the front of my mind. As a rule, I don’t like to dwell on the past. I’ve always thought that as soon as the past is permitted to fill more of your thoughts than the here and now, it precipitates old age. But I can tell you that since Vivien arrived yesterday I’m remembering things that happened half a century ago so much more clearly than what I did last week, as if her presence has given them the courage to crawl out of the past. I’ve thought of things I haven’t considered again since they happened. Nothing of any significance, and often just fleeting, unrecognizable moments vying for my attention and becoming exhaustingly tangled and disordered in my mind. My childhood, my family, school, and then there are the games I’ve just remembered I used to play with Dr. Moyse, card games he’d made up himself. I can’t tell you if it was real or something I’d dreamed, but I remember how the memories of it plagued me. I sense we played often. Different times, different places: in the kitchen and it’s sunny outside; wrapped up in a rug in the drawing room while it’s hailing or snowing; on the sofa in the library. I don’t say it, but the games are a bit boring and Vivi’s never allowed to play. It’s private. She’s not even allowed to watch. Maud brings me biscuits, she ruffles my hair, she looks over our shoulders.
Even though I know Dr. Moyse thought I wasn’t very good at the games, he always enjoyed them more than I did.
It feels like Vivien’s been home for ages, but she arrived only yesterday afternoon, precisely fifteen hours and thirteen minutes ago. I heard her during the night, twice I think. I’m sure I heard her go to the kitchen and then the kettle whistled so I can only assume she made herself a cup of tea. Milky tea, I’ve noticed. I couldn’t possibly drink it the way she likes it, it’s hardly got a hint of color. I wonder if Vivien is as restless as I am during the nights, and if one day we’ll meet on one of our nighttime excursions and discover another trait that we share. Twisted fingers and night rambling. All I know is that, according to my bedside clock, she got up at 12:55 to make the tea, and then again at 3:05 when she went to the lavatory or, rather, when she’d finished in the lavatory. I didn’t hear her get up that time, but from my bed I heard the water gushing along the landing pipes once she’d pulled the flush, as it raced to join the downpipe in my bathroom.
I reach for my bedside clock, depressing the lime-green button on the top to illuminate it. It says 5:03 amid the ghoulish fluorescent glare of its face. A welcome advancement in the night. Any time past four-thirty and I feel I’m on the home stretch, that I will soon have the dawn to watch and listen to, propelling me to the start of the day. But before four-thirty I know I must try to take myself away from my conscious self once more before the night is over.
I may already have mentioned it, but I’m very keen on time. I never used to be, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized how essential it is. Keeping time, being on time and knowing the time. I live by it. Time and order. All things have order and people should be ordered, and I find that in most instances order requires some element of time.
I have six clocks: a watch on each wrist (digital on the left and dial on the right), a bedside clock, a ship’s clock in the kitchen, a longcase and a bracket clock in the hall (which both lose time, up to four minutes a week, and need to be reset and wound on Sundays). I like knowing I can find the exact time whenever I want to and, if I can’t, it unsettles me and I worry about the next time Michael might come so I can check it. It can be a couple of weeks between his visits and I don’t always see him. Michael’s only ever been in the flagstoned areas of the house—the kitchen and the pantries—and he always comes in via the courtyard at the back, never through the front door. It’s not my rule—it must be his own—but if I’m upstairs resting he won’t disturb me, and I might miss him.
We all have our idiosyncrasies, especially at my age. Some people—on approaching old age—fear senility, others immobility, memory loss, confusion, madness. What I fear is timelessness, a lack of structure in my life, an endless Now.
In the half-light, I can just begin to make out the few shapes in my bedroom: the stripped pine chest with four deep drawers that I keep a change of clothes in; the mahogany bedside table (with drawer), which has almost finished shedding its veneer; and an old wicker nursing chair, white, which once had a green-and-white-striped cushion. It stands just outside the bathroom door, but facing the wall because I use the high back as a resting post on my trip from my bed to the bathroom on those mornings that I can’t manage it in one go. The only other thing in here is this huge oak bed I’m in, which I inherited from Maud and Clive, high to my waist and with Gothic claws for feet.
The light is racing in now through the row of mullioned windows lining the south wall ahead. New tendrils on the Virginia creeper are in eerie silhouette, pointing at me with young, fresh attitude. It’s exhausting having to watch them, all curled up like a chameleon’s tongue, ready to unfurl and pounce towards the next foothold in their spring invasion of my room. Five diamond panes of glass from the top of the far right window (directly opposite my bed) are now smashed or have fallen out of their leads. I didn’t see it happen. I just woke up one day last winter with an extra draft running through the room. It’s as if all the elements of nature have come together to work slowly—imperceptibly even—on an old untended building to bring about its climatic downfall, with the rain and frost and wind somehow ensuring entry for invading plants.
It’s two minutes past seven when I hear the faint squeak of the sprung double doors that separate her landing from mine, followed by their whisper as they pass each other on the backswing. In my mind’s eye I see Vivien descending the stairs and, knowing where they creak, I judge her speed and her progress. A moment later I hear the water pipes banging and thudding round the house, as they do when you first turn on the cold tap in the kitchen. It’s strange, after all these years, to have someone else in the house, and I’m too tired to get up and join her, too tired to negotiate another person.
I’m always tired during the day. Sometimes, more often in winter, I’ll stay in bed all day, quite happy thinking my thoughts, undisturbed and unnoticed. Of course, the next day I’ll pay for it arthritically. The flexibility of my joints each morning, I’ve noticed, and the pain within them, are directly proportional to the amount of exercise they had the day before, in the order of more exercise, less pain. And the weather, of course—the surges and the seasons, they all announce themselves deep within my joints. I swear I’m able to feel pressure changes long before the mercury, and my predictions never fall short. But my instinct for the weather is more than a physical modification. I’ve spent a lifetime necessarily predicting it as part of my profession—a moth’s life is finely tuned to the forthcoming weather, and often it’s the habits of the moths themselves that give me the first and most infallible indicator of an approaching squall or drought.
Even though outside all I can see now is a blanket of low cloud, believe me, I can feel that spring’s on its way again, full of renewed energy.
There’s a knock at my door.
“Morning,” Vivien says, and without waiting for an invitation she busies round the door with two cups of tea on a tray. She flagrantly surveys the privacy of my bedroom. “I won’t draw the curtains then,” she says.