I watch Simon sleeping silently on a pillow in front of the dresser and wonder where she is. She’s in the house, I know, because if she’d gone out I would have heard the door. She’s had her breakfast and now she’s gone off somewhere in the house. Even the birds outside stop singing for a moment to let me listen. Silence.
This house is more than thirty thousand square feet, including the cellars and the attic rooms. My parents were the first to trim the living space by gradually closing off rooms they didn’t use. They shut off most of the north wing when we were still children and then the rest of that wing when Vera finally vacated it in death. Later, when there was only me, I closed off the rest of the rooms except the ones I still use—the kitchen, library, study, my bedroom and bathroom—and the hall and landing that connect them all. Forty-seven years ago I shut the doors and never went back, not to see the state of their decay and not when Bobby cleared them of their furniture and clutter. I didn’t want to dwell on the past—best left alone undisturbed in the dust, sealed up, not to be rifled through. Live for today, I always say. It’s dangerous to throw open the past. The deal with Bobby was he’d clear the lot and whatever he couldn’t sell he’d get rid of to save me going through it myself.
As each of Bobby’s trucks went down the drive I felt the burden of history lighten and float away after it. I’d watch it until it was well out of sight, taking with it not just our childhood and my life but one and a half centuries of the Bulburrow epoch. It was delightfully purgative. It’s difficult for me to explain to you why, to put it into words. All I can say is that it feels reassuring to know that the rooms are empty, and if I don’t see them again, I won’t have to worry about what’s happening in them, the dust and the dirt and the gradual decline. Perhaps it’s that, on one hand, I couldn’t stand to see their clutter, but on the other, I don’t want to remember them any other way. Now it’s strange, disconcerting even, to know Vivien is somewhere deep within the bowels of the house, infecting it.
I get up from the table and move to the hall door. I’m curious—I’ll admit I’m almost frantic—to know where she’s gone and what she’s doing. Perhaps I could get some bearing on where she is by listening intently from certain parts of the hall. Bulburrow is a house of echoes, more so since it’s been emptied of furniture. Sound travels through the air spaces—the beating of the weather on one side, a squeaking door on the other—so maybe I’ll be able to hear the sounds of Vivien too. I need a prop. I return to the table and pour some milk into a glass, even though I don’t actually drink milk, and then, glass in hand, I venture out into the hall. I know it’s rude and it’s none of my business and I really ought to stop myself getting fixated on Vivien’s whereabouts, but I hope you understand that it’s so new to me, so different, to have someone else here that I just can’t help myself. Besides, there’s no harm done.
I’m standing in the shadow of the kitchen doorway, looking out into the hall. Jake the pig-head smiles high up on the wall above me. Opposite me is the library, to my right the cellar door and then, farther along, the great curved oak stairs begin their gentle ascent. Off the first, wide tread there’s a door to the little study behind the kitchen.
I walk straight ahead, as smoothly as my enfeebled legs allow me, passing the porch on my left and stopping in the wide architrave of the library door. I swap my glass to the other hand, aware of the fatigue in my fingers, which have been squeezing it too tight, and ready it to put up to my lips if Vivien were to appear from the library or the study, or at the top of the stairs. I put my head to the door—no sound—and then I move, crablike, along the edge of the hall wall, pausing at intervals to put the glass near my mouth and listen, but there’s not a sound. I pass the stairs that run down the opposite wall and stop by the drawing-room door. I listen again. Nothing. Farther along there’s another door, which leads to a different part of the house—the orangery, loggia, potting shed and out to the courtyard behind. It’s another area that’s off-limits, as it were. Could she have gone down there? What could she want there?
Right here and now it comes to me, with sudden understanding, that Vivien is looking for something. Well, it is rather odd, don’t you think? Yesterday she tramped all over the first floor. At the time I thought she was just sorting herself out and settling in, but now I’m beginning to see it must be something else entirely. Vivien’s come home with an ulterior motive, and it’s one she’s not telling me about.
Then I hear her. Footsteps, far away and above me, and then Vivien coughing. From here, I can see up the stairwell to the vaulted ceiling above, and beside it the vast stained-glass window that only comes to life with the evening sun. As I creep up the stairs I hear the footsteps again, and by the halfway landing I know she’s in the attic. There are two ways up to the attic. The obvious one is via the spiral staircase behind a door off the main landing, but between you and me, I think Vivien must have secretly snuck up the back stairs by the pantry or I’d have heard her.
In fact it’s not an attic at all, it’s the second floor, but with so many rooms on the first floor for accommodation, it’s always been called the attic and is entirely given over to moths. Three large “museum” rooms house the famous collections my intrepid ancestors amassed from around the world, all displayed in highly polished Brady cabinets. Then there are the larva rooms, hibernating cages, pupation troughs, net-lined emergence rooms, dry rooms, damp rooms, storerooms, a vast private library, the laboratory and a little workshop where Clive cobbled together his own boxes and breeding houses from crates and ammunition cases, jars and biscuit tins. I hadn’t let Bobby into the attic so nothing’s been removed.
But what’s Vivien doing there? She’s never been interested in the moths. This was something I never fully realized until the summer we were expelled.
Maud had asked us to seal her jams, ready for the harvest festival. Usually it was one of our favorite chores—melting a pot of discarded candle stubs and pouring the runny wax on top of the jam in the jars. But Vivi was silent and sullen, as she’d been most of the summer. I think it riled her that I was happy to have been sent home while she was so upset. She took up the ladle and nonchalantly scooped up the hot wax, dribbling it carelessly over the bench on its way to the first jar, then tipping in so much so fast that the jam’s level was mucked up and some went down the side rather than settling on the top. She wasn’t usually so slipshod. Then she dribbled it over the edge of the jar and across the workbench to the next, sloshing some into that one too.
“Do you mind if I have a go, Vivi?” I said as sweetly as I could.
“Is it not neat enough for you, Virginia?”
“I’d like to do it,” and that was as much the truth as not wanting to watch her slop it about. She handed me the ladle. I dipped it into the wax and swirled it round, melting the last solid clusters as if they were chocolate. Then I scooped out the smooth wax, tipping the ladle backwards to catch the drips on its belly, then poured it carefully over a jam, watching it spread out and fill up the glass side smoothly. I poured slowly and evenly and cleanly before nodding the ladle to stop the flow and moving it over to the next jar. Vivi sat down and began to cut out squares of tartan cloth with pinking shears. Later, when the wax was cool, we would tie them over the tops of the jars with twine.
I’d found that if Vivi was very silent for a long time, it often meant she had something to say. I also found it wasn’t always best to ask her: if I did and it turned out to be something I’d rather not have known, she’d always end with “You did ask….”