Half Broken Things (5 page)

In the large bathroom next to the dressing room she ran a deep bath, poured in two or three scented oils, and stepped in through the steam that had formed in the cool air. She lay back and waited. She would not wash away her old self. The violence of rubbing at her own skin would be almost crude and impatient, and she felt only the magnanimity of a person who is content to wait for her true status to be recognised. She lay in the lapping heat until, as she knew she would, the old Jean simply detached herself, rose up and disappeared into the steam, like a person dissolving into fog. Jean lifted a hand and stirred the water almost in a gesture of farewell, and sighed, looking down the length of her own body. She found she quite liked it, and was finding also that she had all at once become a person who knew that little sensory pleasures were not proscribed; that taking a slow bath in the afternoon was not merely permitted, but smiled upon. What else but approval could be meant by the sight of her own limbs and stomach, the reward of the slippery hot water, such sweet-smelling steam and soap, the thick towels?

After her bath she dried and scented herself, and spent the next hour in a thrill of experiment, trying on her new clothes. The underwear was no good, made for somebody whose bosom and backside were larger than hers. The shoes were a little too wide, but not bad if she could find some insoles. Most of the clothes were comfortable and also rather too big, so that they bestowed upon Jean the extra little compliment of making her feel dainty. The sight of herself in them was so gratifying it was as if the mirror were a new and encouraging friend. Wearing a deep raspberry-coloured cashmere skirt and sweater, Jean rearranged the wardrobe, pushing the few things that did not suit or fit her to one end. She then brought her own few bits of underwear from the tiny back bedroom and moved them in. She binned the toothbrushes in the bathroom and placed her own by the basin. In the bedroom she unlocked the dressing table and set out on its polished top the hairbrushes, scent and jewellery she found in the drawers. Before gathering up her key collection and leaving the room, she turned on the radiators, closed the curtains, switched on the bedside lights and turned back the bedclothes.

Bringing her new warm scent with her back onto the long landing, Jean opened the third locked room, which, when she entered it, seemed to have been longer uninhabited than the other two. Silence and stillness were more deeply in possession; the baby's cot and shelves of toys seemed never to have moved or had a moving thing come near them. The rocking chair stood balanced and fixed in its immobility. A touch of Jean's hand sent a wooden mobile of woolly sheep, hanging frozen over the Moses basket, into a reluctant spin. At least three dozen pairs of eyes watched her from the shelves; peering through acrylic fur fringes, a menagerie of toy bears, ducks, cats, tigers, elephants and pelicans stared out, glassy and despairing.

In the chest of drawers Jean found volumes of unworn baby clothes, many still in their wrappings, and unopened bottles of every imaginable unguent for the washing, scenting and soothing of baby skin. A baby alarm, still in its box, stood on a small antique nursing chair along with a breast pump, also new and unpacked. Jean saw at once how it all fitted together. Mrs Standish-Cave must be pregnant, which accounted for the quantity of temporarily redundant, non-maternity clothes in the wardrobe, and she and her husband must have gone abroad for the obvious reason. She was going to spend her pregnancy abroad and have the baby there. Perhaps she was even foreign herself and had gone to be with her mother, or perhaps she just had views about the standards of English hospitals. She could, in either of these cases, afford options. No doubt they planned to return with the baby when it was a few months old, where the perfect nursery would be waiting. Jean picked a white bear with maroon velvet paws off the shelf and stroked it, allowing her jealousy of the woman's wealth and, a more familiar envy, her motherhood, to wash through and leave her. It was perhaps a little more understandable now, the peremptory, selfish list, if only marginally less exasperating. Even the locking of the rooms might be thought almost forgivable. Didn't women get fussy and obsessional about their homes when a baby was due? Nest building, fixing, sorting and controlling and having everything just so? Jean fingered the sleeve of her raspberry cashmere jersey and smiled. She could imagine it, the sweet anticipation of preparing for a baby—she had imagined it often enough, though long ago now. But for a reason she did not examine she could imagine it now quite painlessly, rather than with a vague though sapping sense of regret.

Was it loneliness? A matter of not having enough to do? The beds in all the other bedrooms (I mean not counting the two they'd locked) except the one I was meant to have (which, I did note, was the smallest) were stripped bare when I arrived. It doesn't do much for a bedroom, a bare mattress. It looks as if someone has died or at least left forever, whereas a bed newly made up tells you that someone is expected. The bare mattresses were sad, but it was on the same afternoon that I discovered my new bedroom that I began to mind about them very much indeed.

It was the baby's room, perhaps. All that expectation. Such a cheerful thing, a room waiting for a new person. Or maybe it was my new clothes and my new room that were already making me feel so different, so that the idea of a child of my own seemed just another thing that I'd almost managed to forget about wanting very badly, but could now have.

Please don't think I lost my marbles or anything like that, because certain realities never quite left me. Not even I thought for a moment that I could produce a child at sixty-four. But that evening I took my supper into the drawing room and ate in front of the fire. ('Do not take food out of the kitchen'. Of course the list had said that, but I didn't even think of the list that evening and it would have made no difference if I had.) Afterwards I sat thinking.

I have always liked the sound owls make and that evening the owls were the only thing I could hear apart from the fire. I think they nest in the barn or the eaves of the pool pavilion. As I listened, the thought came to me that this house has stood for over four hundred years; even the teapot made it through a couple of centuries before I turned up. All the bits and pieces I'd seen that afternoon—the candlesticks, the clothes, the white bear with velvet paws, even the typewriter—they had all been chosen by somebody at some time, acquired somehow and put here, for reasons which must have been valid enough and perhaps even compelling at the time. But now those reasons didn't matter any more, nor whose reasons they were. Less still did it matter
when
those reasons mattered, whether last month, last year or 1600, because they were in the past.

I saw then that everything that is ever thought or done by people disappears. All human reasoning and actions die, because the minute they're done with, they belong to a time past and they don't come back. Oh, but you might say, what about memory, or the consequences of what people do? They last, don't they? Well, they may survive for a while, but they are on borrowed time. I mean that quite literally. Though it may be longer in coming, the death even of memory comes around, and the effects of actions grow weaker until they are unfelt and cease, and then it is as if they have never been. What is history, then, I suppose you might ask next, if not the past lasting into the present. And I would reply that history is only what we keep hold of in order to explain the present in a way we like. If history is a sort of looking through a window into the past, we choose not just the shape of the window but the view we get from it too. I have read enough historical biography to see that. History is not the remembering of events that were significant in their own time, it is only the resurrecting and preserving of things dead and past upon which we hang our reasons for the way things are now, in the hope that those reasons may seem less paltry. Nothing in the history of anything, not one thought or deed of a single soul, can ever outlive its usefulness in providing acceptable reasons for the present. So not even history lasts.

But things, things last. They last beyond the time when their significance, or that which originally made them significant, has been forgotten. Whatever the things in this house had meant to someone once, whatever fond stories were attached to them no longer mattered, because time had passed and now the things simply belonged here, neutrally. I could disregard the old stories and tell new ones, and who's to say mine would be less true? That teapot—looked it up on the inventory—was made in Canton around 1650, silver gilt mounts added later at Augsburg. Insured for hundreds of pounds (I forget the exact figure, it isn't important). Isn't that ridiculous? Now suppose I were to add that it had been bought by, let's say John Walden, an ancestor on my father's side. I could put that it was mentioned in a Deed of Probate (since lost) at Walden Manor in the mid 19th century. Suppose I were to go on to say that it was used by my beloved great-aunt as a button box? Who's to argue? I will admit that these thoughts, as I sat that evening with the owls calling in the dark outside, quite excited me.

I had already begun to picture this kind great-aunt of mine sewing a button from the teapot on my favourite dress, talking softly as she did so to her little niece Jean, and it suddenly seemed perfectly right to continue with the story (this teapot was letting me tell any story I wanted) and say that at some point later on in all this huge, wasteful expenditure of time, Jean conceived a child out of wedlock, gave birth to a son and had him adopted. Forty-seven years ago, say, that would make it 1955, when I was seventeen, the year after Father died. A man of forty-seven might well have children of his own by now, perhaps even grandchildren! How happy I would be to find him again. This would be a fine house for a large family, with its gardens, the pool, the paddocks, so many fine rooms.

I swear that this notion that I could once have had a baby and that nobody could insist that I hadn't, it actually made me happy, because it seemed not at all an invention but more like a forgotten thing remembered. So later that evening before I retired to my new bedroom for the first time, I made up all the other beds, too. There was any amount of bed linen. I chose the best, pure linen with lilac piping for Michael and Steph's room, the one with pale dove-grey walls and darker grey velvet curtains (although of course I didn't know then, precisely, that this room would be
theirs
).

Oh, and that was the evening I burned the inventory, too. Over the course of that day it had become an even greater irrelevance than Shelley's letter, and so it went the same way. I remember that it was still less than halfway through January, and perhaps there was something of a Resolution for the New Year in what I did.

———

The next day Jean left the house in a beautiful olive tweed coat. In the hall she caught sight of her reflection in the long mirror and noted almost with complacency that she looked elegant. How could one fail to, in such a coat? There was a kind of clarity in the silhouette she made. And the same clarity was beginning to enter her mind, pushing aside anxieties and opening it up to small pleasures, such as the way she could spin almost like a dancer as she twisted to see the swing of the coat from the back. The coat she had arrived in, already in her mind just
that old navy thing,
was still lying slung across the oak chest. Turning from the mirror, she picked it up gingerly, as if it were a heap of used bandages. It already felt much less hers than the olive tweed, so the feel of the inferior cloth disturbed her only for a moment, off-handedly; but the smell of it, sacky and with a tang of railway station about it, pulled her dangerously close to acknowledging the old Jean who had worn it last. She bundled it into the cloakroom and as she closed the door on it she lifted one olive tweed sleeve and took a deep breath. The new scents, floral, English, reassuringly her own, glided up to her. She still had on the raspberry cashmere things underneath the coat and had taken from the wardrobe some black shoes, gloves and a leather bag, all of which, she hoped, would make sure that the old Jean did not waylay and follow her when she left the house.

The walk down the drive took twenty minutes. She had never seen it in daylight except in the distance from the upper windows, because she had arrived by taxi long after dark on her first evening. Since then she had been outside the house only to walk round the gardens, bring in logs and to try the doors of the outbuildings. Now, walking between the fields of Walden that bordered the drive on both sides, she felt there was little to see beyond their mild contours except for lines of drystone walls and stands of trees. The landscape itself, empty of livestock, people or buildings was pleasant; it harboured no threat and so held little interest. Jean felt mildly grateful, for that was all she required of it for now. In fact the kind of people (Mother was one) who noticed things in the countryside—interestingly shaped roots or poisonous fungi or how many berries there were—had always rather irritated her.