“There aren’t any curtains.”
She laughs throatily, then swallows it suddenly. “It was a joke, Ginny,” she whispers.
Of course it was a joke. I’m quite surprised I didn’t pick it up. I haven’t joked for a long time.
“You really have lived on your own for too long,” she says, as if she’d read my thoughts. Her face is neatly made up once again. Maud tried to teach me how to apply makeup, but I never understood why it was necessary. She used to say she felt naked without it, and I never once saw her venture farther than her bedroom with natural lips. They were always rose red.
“I’ve brought you some tea,” Vivien says. I think of the tea as a peace offering, the furniture forgotten. She stops in the middle of the room and for a moment I think she’s staring at me, but as I sit up, I realize she’s not. She’s studying the bed, the tall oak headboard behind me, blackened by years of polishing, with its heavy octagonal corner posts and fleur-de-lis finials. It’s one of the very few old bits of furniture left and, though I agree that Maud and Clive’s old bed is outlandish, I must say it’s incredibly comfortable. It’s very difficult to give up a bed you get used to.
“Where shall I put it?” she says, jerking her attention back to the tray in her hand.
“Anywhere.”
“You need some more surfaces,” she remarks vaguely, as she walks around the bed to put the tray on the bedside table on the other side. Then she sweeps her hand along the top of the chunky headboard and regards the fluffy dust collected on her palm. She pulls a disgusted face. “You might not like mess, Ginny, but you don’t mind flup,” she says, reminding me of Vera’s pet word for dust and rubbing the flup onto her dressing gown. “I’ll have to give the house a good clean sometime. Did you sleep well?”
“I kept thinking of things we used to do when we were children, things I’d forgotten,” I say.
“Oh. I hope it was fun.”
“It was,” I agree. “But then I remembered playing card games with Dr. Moyse.”
“Card games?”
“Yes, where me and Dr. Moyse are—”
But Vivien interrupts. “Goodness me!” she exclaims. “You’re not still having those peculiar dreams about Dr. Moyse, are you?”
“I haven’t thought about them for years actually.”
“Well, I am sorry,” she says, as she sits down heavily on the end of my bed. I’m slightly shocked. She did it without thinking, as if it had come naturally, but it’s not as if I’ve had anyone sitting on my bed for the last forty-something years. I can’t work out whether I like it or not. I want her to be there, but I can’t help wondering how long it’s going to take me to straighten the sheets. I’m finicky about sheets.
Vivien scours the empty bedroom that was once our parents’. It’s a lovely room, south-facing, with tall ceilings and an oak floor that slopes west with age, so I’ve had to stuff three old British Countryside magazines under the bed legs to level it. Back then it was far from sparse. It was chock-a-block with antique furniture, paintings and photo frames, gilded mirrors, bowls of potpourri and varnished gourds, a stuffed sea-bird collection on a shelf above the picture rail, untidy clothes and all sorts of clutter.
The windows, now bare, were once dressed with thick green silk curtains, and the large burgundy snowflakes, which danced boldly across the wallpaper, have now faded pink, embellished under the width of the sills and in the corners of the room by a series of watermarks, as though a dog’s been scenting his patch. In places the paper is peeling off altogether, exposing damp powdery plaster that every so often becomes unstable and comes crashing down in a great plaster avalanche. It’s not an uninteresting pastime, looking at the progression of the damp through the walls, the peeling of the ceiling paint and the marching of the creeper up the wall and in through the window.
“Do you remember the chandelier?” Vivien asks, looking up at the lonely brass hook hanging down from the center of an ornate wreath of leaves and roses, the climax of the ceiling’s plasterwork.
Even for such a grand bedroom the chandelier was enormous, raining shafts of providence into the room, collecting light from the windows and splitting it, directing it, combining and reflecting it, not shy to exercise its mastery of the laws of refraction. Maud had taken it from the even larger and grander drawing room downstairs, where she’d rightly thought it was hardly noticed and when, she’d said, the fashion was to have side lamps. Maud liked statements, not understatements.
“Don’t you miss it?” Vivien adds, but before I have a chance to tell her I don’t, she carries on, “Remember how Maud let us lie in here when we were ill? I spent hours gazing up at that chandelier, imagining that all the sparkly light was helping me get better.”
“Were you? I was always thinking it was about to fall on me,” I say. “I spent all the time watching the hook at the top, trying to work out if it was close to giving way. Exhausting.” I sigh. “What about their fake-fur bedspread? Do you remember it?”
“Oh, that thing,” she says. “Horrid. I’m very glad you got rid of that. I always thought it was crawling with lice.”
Maud had been comfortable amid her clothes and clutter, so the room, like the rest of the house, was grand and shabby at the same time, full of warmth and belonging. Clive, being more of an exacting personality, had learned to ignore the mess or, rather, being on the verge—as he always was—of many important scientific discoveries, he preferred not to consider it.
Both my parents said they knew, the instant they met, that they were right for each other, even though, more often than not, they seemed complete opposites. When Maud’s father enlisted a keen young chemist called Clive Stone as his new apprentice, by all accounts, Maud and Clive spent the following year conducting a clandestine relationship. When they married, my grandfather retired and, his wife having died some years before from tuberculosis, moved lustily to one of his hunting grounds—Brazil—where he lived out the rest of his days in pursuit of rare butterflies and beautiful women. Clive moved into his father-in-law’s place, taking over the advancement of our knowledge of the moth world within the attics, cellars and outbuildings of Bulburrow Court. Maud sometimes teased him, saying he’d married the attic and got her thrown in too, considering the amount of time he squirreled himself away there.
They said it was their love of conservation—long before it became a fashionable affair—that brought them together, but I think even that they came at from very different directions. Maud loved nature. Each and every animal and plant was to be cherished and the miracle of nature something to be preserved. She was a pioneer of conservation and recognized, even in the 1930s, that, rather than assuming nature could take care of itself, we needed to assist the natural world by cultivating and planting natural habitats. Of all these, she spent the most time caring for her meadows and would discuss them at length with the gardeners: when to cut and where to shake the seeds, the grasses that were taking over and needed to be culled. Now and again she’d come home from the other side of the county, having procured some hay bales that contained the seeds of a new species she wanted, like wild carrot or yellow rattle, or a new type of dropwort. Then, on a windless day, she’d stomp around the meadows shaking the hay about, trying to infiltrate the grass with them.
Clive wasn’t so much fond of nature as fascinated by it, as though he wanted to preserve the miracle just so he could unravel it. Together they transformed Bulburrow’s gardens and grounds into an ecological haven, creating every possible type of habitat—marsh and meadow, wood and downland, heath and bog—and, over the years, stocked them with birch and alder and willow, elm, lime, poplar and plum, hawthorn, honeysuckle, blackthorn and privet. Every inch was given over to something that a moth, a caterpillar or a pupa might find useful or appetizing.