Possession (14 page)

Sir George came back and built up his fire with new logs, hissing and singing.

“Joan is making tea. I’m afraid we don’t have too many comforts or luxuries here. We live only on the ground floor, of course. I had
the kitchen made over for Joan. Every possible aid. Doors and ramps. All that could be done. I know it’s not much. This house was built to be run by a pack of servants. Two old folk—we echo in it. But I keep up the woods. And Joan’s garden. There’s a Victorian water garden too, you know. She likes that.”

“I’ve read about that,” said Maud cautiously.

“Have you now? Keep up with family things, do you?”

“In a way. I have particular family interests.”

“What relation are you to Tommy Bailey then? That was a great horse of his, Hans Andersen, that was a horse with character and guts.”

“He was my great-uncle. I used to ride one of Hans Andersen’s less successful descendants. A pig-headed brute who could jump himself out of anything, like a cat, but didn’t always choose to, and didn’t always take me with him. Called Copenhagen.”

They talked about horses and a little about the Norfolk Baileys. Roland watched Maud making noises that he sensed came naturally, and sensed too that she would never make in the Women’s Studies building. From the kitchen a bell struck.

“That’s the tea. I’ll go and fetch it. And Joan.”

It came in an exquisite Spode tea service, with a silver sugarbowl and a plateful of hot buttered toast with Gentleman’s Relish or honey, on a large melamine tray designed, Roland saw, to slot into the arms of the wheelchair. Lady Bailey poured. Sir George quizzed Maud about dead cousins, long-dead horses, and the state of the trees on the Norfolk estate. Joan Bailey said to Roland, “George’s great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. He keeps them alive. They’re not fast conifers, they’re mixed woodland, some of those rare trees are very old. Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We’ve lost acres and acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things.”

“Do you know,” said Sir George, “that up to the eighteenth
century the major industry in this part of the world was rabbit-warrening? The land wasn’t fit for much else, sandy, full of gorse. Lovely silver skins they had; they went off to be hats in London and up North. Fed ’em in the winter, let ’em forage in the summer, neighbours complained but they flourished. Alternated with sheep in places. Vanished, along with much else. They found ways to make sheep cheaper, and corn too, and the rabbits died out. Trees going the same way now.”

Roland could think of no intelligent comments about rabbits, but Maud replied with statistics about Fenland warrens and a description of an old warrener’s tower on the Norfolk Baileys’ estate. Sir George poured more tea. Lady Bailey said, “And what do you do in London, Mr Michell?”

“I’m a university research student. I do some teaching. I’m working for an edition of Randolph Henry Ash.”

“He wrote a good poem we learned at school,” said Sir George. “Never had any use for poetry myself, but I used to like that one. ‘The Hunter.’ Do you know that poem? About a stone-age chappie setting snares and sharpening flints and talking to his dog and snuffing the weather in the air. You got a real sense of
danger
from that poem. Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying. We had a sort of poet in this house once. I expect you’d think nothing to her. Terrible sentimental stuff about God and Death and the dew and fairies. Nauseating.”

“Christabel LaMotte,” said Maud.

“Just so. Funny old bird. Lately we get people round asking if we’ve got any of her stuff. I send them packing. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Joan and I. There was a frightful nosy American in the summer who just turned up out of the blue and told us how honoured we must be, having the old bat’s relics up here. Covered with paint and jangling jewellery, a real mess, she was. Wouldn’t go when I asked her politely. Had to wave the gun at her. Wanted to sit in Joan’s winter garden. To remember Christabel. Such rot. Now a
real
poet, like your Randolph Henry Ash, that’d be something different, you’d be reasonably pleased to have someone like that in the family. Lord Tennyson was a bit of a soppy old thing
too, on the whole, though he wrote some not bad things about Lincolnshire dialect. Not a patch on Mabel Peacock though. She really could hear Lincolnshire speech. Marvellous story about a hedgehog. Th’otchin ’at wasn’t niver suited wi’ nowt. Listen to this then. “Fra fo’st off he was werrittin’ an witterin’ an sissin an spittin perpetiwel.” That’s real history that is, words that are vanishing daily, fewer and fewer people learning them, all full of
Dallas
and
Dynasty
and the Beatles’ jingle jangle.”

“Mr Michell and Miss Bailey will think you are a frightful old stick, George. They
like
good poetry.”

“They don’t like Christabel LaMotte.”

“Ah, but I do,” said Maud. “It was Christabel who wrote the description I read of the Seal Court winter garden. In a letter. She made me see it, and the different evergreens, and the red berries and the dogwood and the sheltered bench and the silvery fish in the little pool.… Even under the ice she could see them suspended—”

“We had an old tom cat who used to take the fish—”

“We restocked—”

“I’d love to see the winter garden. I’m writing about Christabel LaMotte.”

“Ah,” said Lady Bailey. “A biography. How interesting.”

“I don’t see,” said Sir George, “that there’d be much to put in a biography. She didn’t
do
anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn’t a
life.”

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t a biography. It’s a critical study. But of course she interests me. We went to look at her grave.”

This was the wrong thing to say. Sir George’s face darkened. His brows, which were sandy, drew down over his plummy nose. “That unspeakable female who came here—she had the impudence to hector me—to read me a lecture—on the state of that grave. Said its condition was shocking. A national monument. Not
her
national monument I told her, and she shouldn’t come poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted. She asked to borrow some shears. That was when I got the gun out. So she went and bought some in Lincoln and came back the next day and got down on her knees and cleaned it all up. The Vicar saw her. He comes over once a month, you
know, and says Evensong in the church. She sat and listened in the back pew. Brought a huge bouquet. Affectation.”

“We saw—”

“You don’t have to shout at Miss Bailey, George,” said his wife. “She’s not responsible for all that. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be interested in Christabel. I think you should show these young people Christabel’s room. If they want to see. It’s all locked away, you know, Mr Michell, and has been for generations. I don’t know what sort of a state it’s in, but I believe some of her things are still there. The family has occupied less and less of this house since the World Wars, every generation a little less—Christabel’s room was in the east wing that’s been closed since 1918, except for use as some kind of a glory-hole. And we, of course, live in a very small part of the building, and only downstairs, because of my disability. We do try to have general repairs done. The roof’s sound, and there’s a carpenter who sees to the floors. But no one’s touched that room to my knowledge, since I came here as a bride in 1929. Then we lived in all this central portion. But the east wing was—not out of bounds exactly—but not used.”

“You wouldn’t see much,” said Sir George. “You’d need a torch. No electricity, in that part of the house. Only on the ground-floor corridors.”

Roland felt a strange pricking at the base of his neck. Through the carved window he saw the wet branches of the evergreens, darker on the dark. And the dim light in the gravel drive.

“It would be marvellous just to have a look—”

“We should be very grateful.”

“Well,” said Sir George, “why not? Since it’s all in the family. Follow me.”

He gathered up a powerful modern storm-lantern and turned to his wife. “We’ll bring you back any treasure we find, dear. If you wait.”

They walked and walked, at first along tiled and bleakly lit corridors under electric lighting, and then along dusty carpets in dark shuttered places, and up a stone staircase and then further up a winding wooden stair, cloudy with dark dust. Maud and Roland
neither looked nor spoke to each other. The little door was heavily panelled and had a heavy latch. They went in behind Sir George, who waved his huge cone of light around the dark, cramped, circular space, illuminating a semi-circular bay window, a roof carved with veined arches and mock-mediaeval ivy-leaves, felt-textured with dust, a box-bed with curtains still hanging, showing a dull red under their pall of particles, a fantastically carved black wooden desk, covered with beading and scrolls, and bunches of grapes and pomegranates and lilies, something that might have been either a low chair or a prie-dieu, heaps of cloth, an old trunk, two band boxes, a sudden row of staring tiny white faces, one, two, three, propped against a pillow. Roland drew his breath in minor shock; Maud said, “Oh, the
dolls”
—and Sir George brought his light back from a blank mirror entwined with gilded roses and focussed it on the three rigid figures, semi-recumbent under a dusty counterpane, in a substantial if miniature fourposter bed.

They had china faces, and little kid-leather arms. One had fine gold silken hair, faded and grey with the dust. One had a kind of bunched white nightcap, in white dimity edged with lace. One had black hair, pulled back in a circular bun. They all stared with blue glassy eyes, filled with dust, but still glittering.

“She wrote a series of poems about the dolls,” said Maud, in a kind of dreadful whisper. “They were ostensibly for children, like the
Tales for Innocents
. But not really.”

Roland turned his eyes back to the shadowy desk. He did not feel the presence of the dead poet in the room, but he did have a vague excited sense that any of these containers—the desk, the trunks, the hat-boxes—might contain some treasure like the faded letters in his own breast-pocket. Some clue, some scribbled note, some words of response. Only that was nonsense, they would not be here, they would be wherever Randolph Henry Ash had put them, if they had ever been written.

“Do you know,” Roland said, turning to Sir George, “whether there were papers? Is there anything left in that desk? Anything of hers?”

“That was cleared, I suppose, at her death,” said Sir George.

“May we at least look?” said Roland, imagining perhaps a hidden drawer, and at the same time uncomfortably aware of the laundry lists in
Northanger Abbey
. Sir George obligingly moved the light across to the desk, restoring the little faces to the dark in which they had lain. Roland lifted the lid on a bare casket. There were empty arched pigeonholes at the back, fretted and carved, and two empty little drawers. He felt unable to tap and tug at the framework. He felt unable to urge the unbuckling of the trunk. He felt as though he was prying, and as though he was being uselessly urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity—not greed, curiosity, more fundamental even than sex, the desire for knowledge. He felt suddenly angry with Maud, who was standing stock still, in the dark, not moving a finger to help him, not urging, as she with her emotional advantage might well have done, further exploration of hidden treasures or pathetic dead caskets. Sir George said, “And what in particular might you expect to find?” Roland did not know the answer. Then, behind him, chill and clear, Maud spoke a kind of incantation.

Sir George swung the light back onto the dolls’ cot.

“Very good,” he said. “Fantastic memory you’ve got. Never could learn anything by heart myself. Barring Kipling and the Lincolnshire bits that amuse me, that is. What is it all about, though?”

“It sounds, in here, like a treasure-hunt clue,” said Maud, still with a strained clarity. “As though Dolly is hiding something.”

“What might she be hiding?” said Sir George.

“Almost anything,” said Roland, suddenly wanting to put him off the trail. “Keepsakes.” He could feel Maud calculating.

“Somebody’s children must have had those dolls out,” said their owner plausibly, “since 1890.”

Maud knelt down in the dust. “May I?” He turned the light down on her; there she was, her face bending into shadow, as though Latour had painted its waxiness. She reached into the cot and plucked out the blonde doll by the waist; her gown was pink silk, with little rosebuds round its neckline and tiny pearl buttons. She handed this creature to Roland, who took it as he might have done a kitten, cradling it in the crook of his elbow, and adding to it, in turn, the nightcapped one, in tiny white pleats and broderie anglaise, and the dark-headed one, severe in dark peacock. They lay along his arm, their tiny heads heavy, their tiny limbs trailing, rather horrid, a little deathly. Maud took out the pillow, untucked the counterpane, folded away three fine woollen blankets and a crocheted shawl, and then lifted out one feather mattress and another, and a straw palliasse. She reached in under this, into the wooden box beneath it, prised up a hinged board and brought out a package, wrapped in fine white linen, tied with tape, about and about and about, like a mummy.