When we came home from Saudi Arabia, we had various houses. Some of them had minor poltergeists, and one of them was home to a nebulous cat. People less suggestible than me were aware of these anomalous phenomena, rational people who didn’t make their living by what they could conjure up; so I feel it’s all right to admit that I gave houseroom to some ghosts. Ghosts are the tags and rags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don’t know what to do with, knowledge that you can’t process; they’re cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page. ‘Ghosts’ are whatever it is that moves the furniture, stops the clocks, hides things from you and arranges for you to be locked out of your hotel room. It’s just the little dead, I say to myself, kicking up a fuss, demanding attention by the infantile methods that are the only ones available to them.
We lived first in a tiny flat in Windsor, the castle looming in at the window. Then, to buy space, in a no man’s land along an arterial road, somewhere outside Slough. At the time we bought Owl Cottage we were living in Sunningdale in a ramshackle flat converted from a former mother and baby home, which had been run by nuns.
Drummond House was built of a red brick whose colour time didn’t soften. By the look of it, it had been put up in the 1890s, with 1920s additions. Its façade was blunt, square and ugly; the back of the building was tile-hung, like an overgrown cottage, and almost had charm. After the place had been hacked into flats, there were four households under the one roof, and a poor sort of roof it was; when it rained we had to run around with buckets. The big rooms were gracelessly partitioned, and there were crucifixes and Latin mottoes in unexpected places, and one of the neighbours was spiteful and intractably litigious. But there were compensations; a copper beech behind the house filtered into the rooms, on winter afternoons, a lemon-coloured light, and as you lay in the deep Edwardian bathtub, you could hear in the background the reassuring shuffle of branch-line trains. In summer there was a backcloth of shifting, rustling green, green against green, as if the whole world were made of leaves.
We had been seven years in this house. Then, within the space of a few months, it became unbearable. It was a wasting asset, its lease shortening. We decided to sell up to a builder, who would give us the market rate for the flat in return for our deposit on a patch of rutted ground eight miles away, ground on which stood, preconceived but not yet embryonic, a five-bed detached ‘executive home’.
We had looked at the plans of the ‘executive homes’ with fewer bedrooms, but they were dispiriting hutches. ‘We’ll go for the biggest one,’ we said: five beds and three baths. I can have two offices, I thought, in two of the bedrooms. And think; a spare room with the beds made up tidily, where guests will be en-suite and always expected: instead of this ambling around in the small hours with a drink in one hand, a pillowcase in the other, a towel over your shoulder and the guest trailing behind you, bleating, ‘Don’t go to any trouble.’ And we’ll have a garden that will be—unlike our garden in Sunningdale—attached to the house. And think of the central heating—our own modern controllable system, instead of the monster boiler of Drummond House, housed in its own shed or cave, which demanded each autumn the sacrifice of seven virgins before it would agree to splutter into life and infiltrate a vitiating heat between the whistling draughts.
We spent a nervous summer, thinking that the litigious neighbour would somehow spoil this happy arrangement. In the evenings, we drove over to the building site, where down the hillside spilled walls grown to the height of eight-year-olds. These walls, soon, would be raised up; one evening we stood under the vast gaping skeleton of the roof, looking up at its timbers, arched above us like the ribs of a brontosaurus. On later visits, we climbed into the pre-rooms, and looked out through the holes where windows would be. We would see other couples, picking their way through the caterpillar tracks in the churned-up earth, between the pipes and cables; we would see the wondering look in their eyes. No one could believe that out of these bits of plastic and concrete the vast solid structures would grow, the structures of family houses, houses for the stable modern families of Middle England.
They were not, our neighbours-to-be, the kind of families whom the break-up statistics comprehend. They were not the sort for adulterous upsets, for drunken fumbles, for spring folie, for subterfuge and lies. They were grounded infotec folk, hardware or software people, bright philistines, sharp and intelligent. They were mobile in their habits till their children fixed them; keen, pragmatic, willing to defer gratification; committed to their offspring, investing in them. Men and wives met each other halfway, gentle fathers and defined, energetic mothers. They were a new sort of people who didn’t seem to feel the need of history, personal or collective. They seemed to have sprung straight from a pot in Homebase, putting out glossy, polished leaves; they had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Sundays like their barbecue forks. In this part of the world each family unit runs like a model small business, and the accounts, you may be sure, are squared at the end of each quarter; and if quarter is wanted, a small measure is granted; and if quarter is granted, the favour must be returned; and when the columns are totted they must balance, I think, husband to wife, wife to husband, with none of the shocking deficits that are incurred in the wilder parts of the world.
One evening we drove up to the site and saw that they were putting the façade on our executive home. The drawings had lied to us; we had not been promised this. For some time we sat in our parked car. I may have used some rough language, and said I wanted out of the deal. But my sentiments dried on the air. It was too late. We were committed. After all, I said at last, when you’re in it, you don’t have to look at it, do you?
We moved in November. They were someone else’s problem, the half-timbered elevations from Disneyland, the herringbone ‘brickwork’ that was as thick as cardboard, glued on to the raw building blocks beneath: the fake leaded windows. Our problems, the builders told us brightly, were just what you call ‘snagging’, for instance, the central heating that creaked and banged, and groaned in the night like a ghoul. Once we had settled in, we were able to relax and appreciate the house’s more charming features. The washbasins were specially designed so that the soap slid off them, unless you wedged it behind the tap. The watered-down paint on the walls was so thin that a casual wipe with a cloth would remove it, along with the mark that had offended you.
Summer came. The newly turfed gardens sprouted a mini-estate of multicoloured Wendy houses and play shacks, plastic slides and swings and paddling pools. I should like to say that the happy laughter of children drifted in from the gardens, but more often it was their aggrieved wails as they pitched off their climbing frames head first, or were beaten up by their brothers and sisters. As I sat in my stifling upstairs room, coaxing out of my computer the novel concealed somewhere in its operating system, I could hear their mothers’ voices from below, running the gamut from coaxing to shrieks of fury. I asked myself, why don’t they like their children more? Why are they so angry with them for doing childish things? If they hate childhood so much, why didn’t they arrange to give birth to adults?
For a year or two in the new house, our possessions expanded to fill the rooms. The cupboards were packed with linen and towels. We bought everything by the dozen. We had bath cleaner by the crate: enough sandwich bags for a primary school picnic: enough tinfoil to wrap a town hall. Shuttling to and fro between Surrey and Norfolk required lists, master-lists and sub-lists, and constant calculation and re-calculation of stocks and supplies. Was everything scrubbed and scoured? Was everything warm? Was every cupboard full to capacity, and everything scraped up to the standard that—God knows why—I had set myself? My husband knew a couple, childless like us, who ate out every night. They kept nothing in their fridge but a bottle of champagne and an inch of souring milk. Imagine, I thought, any woman so deficient in household arts; imagine any man, so wretchedly deprived of pies. Myself, I never peeled two pounds of potatoes if I thought five would do. I would take up two great fistfuls of spaghetti and toss them in the boiling pot. I used to think, there’s plenty here, for anybody who drops in.
There must have been a moment of realisation, though I don’t remember it clearly: a moment when I looked at the contents of the cupboards and said, but who is all this for? Who am I expecting? I knew, if I thought about it, that I was expecting the unborn. But could I face them, any more? Perhaps I’d grown away from them, without noticing it, over the years. One day, when I was upstairs in one of my two offices, listening to my best bit of Telemann, the merry, jingling ice-cream van lurched around the corner: ‘Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.’
I left my desk and fell into my armchair; a chair which (like many of our chairs) could be pulled out to form a spare bed. Bugger off teddy bears, I said: hugging myself, my head drooping. I had always thought that song was sinister: ‘If you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise.’ I was angry, unreasonably so. I felt I had been invaded by the juvenile, my attention trashed. What would I do if real children came padding at the door, smiling their sticky smiles, smearing my printout with sticky hands and pressing ‘delete’ on my keyboard? I could have coped once, of course; I’d have found a way to laugh about it. I’d have said they were my inspiration, that I’d be only half a woman without them. But that was then, when I was twenty-five, in the days when, notionally anyway, I was fertile. Now I was tired, more fragile, less tolerant. I stood up, closed the window, put the Telemann on again and sat down at my desk.
Then a thing occurred to me, about ghost children. They don’t age, unless you make them. They don’t age, so they don’t know it’s time to leave home. They won’t, without a struggle, be kicked out of your psyche. They will hang on by every means they know; they won’t agree to go, until you make your intentions very clear. They’re stupid, so it’s not enough to tell them; you have to show them as well.
I went round to my next-door neighbour. ‘You know you said, if we were ever selling the house, that we should tell you before we told anyone else?’
Oh, wow, said my neighbour. You’re going, are you?
Come over, I said, when the children get home. Have a look around. Think where everything would go. At four o’clock they came in a gang. The children whooped through the rooms. They couldn’t wait to evict us. Only the three-year-old sobbed, ‘When do we swap the pets?’ for she thought that we were exchanging houses and all their contents, and that she had to give up her white rabbit for the cat who was steadily hating her from a bookshelf, thinking which way to prey on her would be best. Once we knew her mistake, we soon ironed it out, soothed her temper. That evening, over a bottle of wine, we shook hands on the deal. Our ‘second home’ must go as well, we decide. If we’re going to remake our lives, we must do the job properly.
It is 12 August, 2000: a Sunday in Norfolk. We are taking Owl Cottage apart. My elder brother and my husband carry out the pine table, which I remember as my first purchase for the Windsor flat. I remember working at that table, when it was new and smooth as glass, the sash windows flung open to spring sunshine, the kitchen smelling of daffodils and chopped onions; and a few trial words going down on paper, words scented with furniture polish. I have a nervous sort of nostalgia for any surface I have written a book on, or even half a book; I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood. But the pine table is bashed and battered now, its surface gouged and its legs wobbling; I am touched by fellow feeling. I pat it for the last time: good table, good table. I don’t watch it leave the house. It’s going to a good home in my brother’s workshop: light duties, an honourable retirement.
Owl Cottage sold within an hour of going on the market. One of Mr Ewing’s ladies rang, her voice astonished, to say were we happy to accept the asking price? I have never had anything before or since, that another person wanted so much. And as we pack up, we are rushed, a little flustered; we hadn’t thought we would have to quit so soon.
My mother arrives. Now we are going to do something difficult, which is to clear the loft. Some boxes were stowed up there by Jack when my parents first arrived in the county, and left there; now no one can remember what is in them.
When I went to Africa, I left a box of my own in the eaves of my parents’ house. In it was my Complete Works of Shakespeare, which they had bought me (to keep me quiet) when I was ten. Even when it was new it was cheap; but what did I care? It was bound in fraying black cloth, its paper was yellowing and woody, its blurred type looked as if it were running from the page; I loved that book. My child’s fingerprints were on every leaf of it. I felt as if it talked back to me, as if I had exchanged breath with it; no other Complete Works would ever be the same. By the time I was leaving England the book was nearly fifteen years old, it was falling apart, its glue drying, its pages brittle; I still liked it too much to trust it to sea freight. I knew that to pack it in my suitcase—a book like a house brick, against my allowance of twenty kilos—would be a little ridiculous. Besides, I feared the effects on it of a change of climate. ‘I’ll just store it in the eaves,’ I said, for the eaves were spacious, dry and cool. In the box, also, was a bibliography for my French Revolution book, kept in a humble school exercise book with a stiff burgundy cover. I thought—and I was right—that it wouldn’t be much use to me where I was going.
Three years later—around the time I went to St George’s to have my insides remodelled—I came back to my parents’ house to reclaim the box. The Revolution book was with a publisher, and if it was accepted I would need my bibliography, to help me with editing and checking. I felt a sober, righteous pleasure as I waited for it to emerge from the eaves, and I anticipated opening my Shakespeare, wondering which passage I would alight on first. But the searchers drew a blank. They frowned, puzzled, and rubbed out of their hair the fine dust of accreted pigeon droppings. It must be in there somewhere, they said. They dived in again, bent double, and emerged rubbing their backs, shaking their heads. No box, no Shakespeare, nothing at all conforming to the description of a burgundy notebook with five years of my reading life in it. ‘Oh, look again,’ I begged. They did; they drew a blank. The family said, that’s strange. Where oh where can Ilary’s box be? Some suggested supernatural reasons for its disappearance. But I had my own theory. Shakespeare is bunk. History is bunk. Why are women always smiling? Smile, smile, smile.
So much for my box. Now, at Owl Cottage, Jack’s boxes come down from the loft, the men’s feet bouncing on the steel ladder. The boxes are heavy, covered in what looks like iron filings. We take them into the kitchen and wipe them down. One box contains a tidy stack of National Geographic magazines. We know the contents before we open it, because it is precisely labelled in Jack’s fading hand. Another box seems to be full of old engineering textbooks. Why keep them, I wonder? But it’s not for me to judge the quality of someone else’s nostalgia. It is five years since his death. Soon after the funeral my mother packed up his watercolour paints, ready for me to use, at some unlikely date when I have the leisure. We framed what we could from his last sketchbook, anything that was nearly complete: sea, sand, clouds. We put the sketchbook away with the paints, and with it the pictures he must have been working on: another seascape, and what may be, emerging from the paper’s weave, an apple tree under a darkening sky.
‘Get another cloth,’ I say. ‘There’s a whole big box of them, under the sink.’ The textbooks—sad waste paper—we pile in a stack. Then out comes an edition of Creasey’s Decisive Battles, which I gave Jack because of its fine binding and marbled endpapers—and which, surprisingly, he decided to read. Now comes—I laugh as it emerges—an ancient, grimy relic called ‘An Analysis of English History: with Appendix and Maps.’ I pick it out of the box; as I try to open it, its pages fall like loose cards into my hand. Inside the cover is written ‘Beryl A. White, 58 Bankbottom, Hadfield, Near Manchester, England’. Beryl, my heroine, my cousin after whom I named my pointy-headed doll! I shuffle the pages, I look at a few. Their content is only slightly familiar; but is this not the tale of my native land? The story begins in the days when all the main players are called Ethel, those days when the successor of Ethelfrith marries Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert: hilarious consequences ensue. I shuffle the pages again: ‘War with France: this war arose from an unseemly jest.’ Shuffle again: ‘The skeletons of two children were found buried at the foot of a staircase…Marlborough took the field, but owing to the extreme dilatoriness of the Dutch…’ The book—if it can be called a book, in its loose-leaf state—is full of moral judgements, against unseemly jesting and turning up late for the fight. King John died of a fever brought on by anxiety, which one sees was weak of him; the character of Mary Tudor, naturally mild, took a turn for the worse ‘when she gave her hand to the Spaniard’.
I put down the Analysis regretfully, vowing I will get back to it. Here is another book of Beryl’s, her name in pencil in a round baby hand. ‘She must have it back,’ my mother says. ‘I’ll keep it for her.’ It is ‘Alice’—both adventures—in a jacket of porridge-coloured canvas. Next—but why?—comes a copy of Lorna Doone, abridged for the young. It is the remnant of a set of miscellaneous nineteenth-century novels I had for Christmas, perhaps the year I was ten. The colophon is a silhouette of a man in a tall hat, holding by the hand a silhouette child; the publisher’s name is Dean & Son. How has this one survived, when Treasure Island has gone, the only one of the set to have a yellow jacket; where is Jane Eyre, bound in dull green? I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre: probably every woman writer does, because you recognise, when you have hardly begun it, that you are reading a story about yourself. The books with their coloured bindings were passed on, down the family; I remember how my youngest brother liked Children of the New Forest. It had a peach-coloured binding; I thought it was tedious, myself. Kidnapped came in dark-blue. I knew by heart its opening lines and, running through my memory, the words still affect me with a shiver of trepidation: ‘I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.’ Like a wimp, like a girl, I wanted David Balfour to stay at home, with the kindly minister Mr Campbell, with his dead parents who lay in the churchyard under the rowan trees. The plot would never have got beyond its second page, if it had stood to me: its hero would never have left Essendean. I loved and trusted Alan Breck, his bantam swagger, his defiance of logic and the odds; but I worried about David and his welfare, much more than I worried about Jane Eyre, who, in my opinion, had stitched Rochester’s eyes shut long before he went blind.
It is summer at Owl Cottage; light bounces on the black-and-white tiles of the kitchen floor. I put my arms, briefly, around the shoulders of my mother and my brother’s wife. The box we are dipping into seems deeper than we thought, darker and fustier. Almost at the bottom of it, we find one of Jack’s own books—one of those that came with him when he moved into our house at Brosscroft. It is Out with Romany, its title almost illegible now, its cover, which I remember as green, now faded to grey. It is illustrated with naïve woodcuts: a hedgehog, a bird’s nest, hares dancing. We pass it from hand to hand. I’d like it, says my brother’s wife, I like these pictures. Yes, take it, love, my mother says. Then last of all comes the vast tome of Tennyson, square and brown like a well-packed parcel, like a parcel that has been left in a sorting office for thirty years. I open it, and the odour of decay rises up, so powerful and bitter that it seems like the smell of burning. For a moment I stand, shaken, recalling this book in my child’s hands: it was old then, the pages freckled with butter-coloured marks. ‘Can I have this?’ I ask. ‘It must be middle age, you know, but I’ve been wanting to reread Tennyson lately.’ I open the book, and my fingertips turn grey as I leaf through it.
When cats run home and light is come, And dew is cold upon the ground…
My mother, standing next to me, brushes my elbow; silently, heads bent over the empty box, we begin to cry.
October 2000: moving day at last. The sales of our two houses have been tied up neatly, completion of both on the same morning. Owl Cottage has been packed up by removal men; I couldn’t stand to do it myself, to turn the key for the last time and leave Jack’s baffled spirit locked in the shell of the house. At our Disneyland villa, as our furniture vanishes into the removal van, our neighbours, their children and their friends spread out over the garden, brooms and vacuum cleaners held like bayonets across their chests, ready for the charge. They have taken down a fence panel between the two gardens to give themselves access; as soon as the phone rings, as soon as the word from the lawyers comes through, they storm down the slope of the lawn and pour through the french windows, mob-handed. I have to plead for a safe corner in the house, for a twenty-minute respite, till the cats and I can be collected, for we are going last. I sit on the bathroom floor, the door locked against the mob, waiting, the minutes ebbing away, talking to the cats to soothe them, while they fume and moan in their travelling cages and rattle the bars. By the time I come downstairs, and walk out of the front door for the last time, the neighbours have got their furniture in place, their milk in the fridge, their food in the cupboards. It is theirs already, and they fit it; I cannot believe this house ever belonged to me. It has four children in it; solid, squalling, overexcited, ready for a showdown about who gets which room. The cats shake their fists at them, and curse as I hand over the spare door keys: as the tailgate of the car slams on their bawling, the house becomes history.
The place we live in now is an apartment in a converted lunatic asylum. It was built in the 1860s, one of a loop of great institutions flung around London to catch and contain its burgeoning mad population, the melancholic and the syphilitic, the damaged and the deluded, the people who had forgotten their manners and the people who had forgotten their names.
Aren’t you afraid of ghosts? visitors say. But I smile and shake my head; I say, not I. Not I: not here: not now.
We are on the top floor; but a spiral staircase leads even higher, to a small square room in the clock tower. We are the keepers of the gargoyles that guard the roofs, and we have a long view over the country, over the city of Guildford, dropped into the landscape like an egg into a dish: to a distant, fuzzy line of uplands that, on rainy days, when cloud thickens and almost obscures it, I can easily imagine is the moorland of my childhood.
Two wings of the old building have been preserved and converted, but thousands of houses have been built on the asylum’s land. It is hard to believe that seven years ago it was open fields. An elderly man who grew up in the district told me what this countryside was like, before the mechanical diggers moved in. It was an area of market gardens and plant nurseries, and open land cut up with streams and ditches, into which, when he was a boy and out rabbiting, he would invariably fall; and pick his way home, at twilight, half drowned and dripping, to be shouted at by his mother. He was a good talker, and I found myself sliding, in imagination, into the country that he had shown me, so that it became a part of my own terrain.
Now on light clear nights, I sometimes go out on to the balcony; the clock face hangs above me like a second moon, lighting up the flickering tongues of the gargoyles, stone saureans leaning out into darkness and space. It is quiet up here: except for the background purr of travelling cars, on the circular road that holds the new houses, the new families, in a loose, careless embrace. I wrap myself in a blanket, and rest my forehead on the balcony’s freezing rail, and think about what I have lost and what I have gained. For me, the balcony is the best thing about the asylum. I am out there in all weathers, looking over the army land that is the last remnant of the unpopulated place this used to be. Sometimes, at dawn or at dusk, I pick out from the gloom—I think I do—a certain figure, traversing those rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write. But when was God ever willing? And what is this dim country, what is this tenuous path I lose so often—where am I trying to get to, when the light is so uncertain? Steps to Literature, I think; I have tottered one or two. I move back from the window, dawn or dusk; I think of other houses, which seem not so long ago.
At 20 Brosscroft, the windows printed on our curtains are alight from within, their flowerpots spilling scarlet blooms, the candle flames swelling, flickering boldly against the fading northern afternoon. The table is laid, and the dead are peering at their place cards, and shuffling into their chairs, and shaking out their napkins, waiting, expectant, for whatever is next. Food or entertainment, it’s all one to the eyeless, the shrivelled and the thin: to the ones who have crossed into the land where only the living can provide their light. I will always look after you, I want to say, however long you have been gone. I will always feed you, and try to keep you entertained; and you must do the same for me. This is your daughter Ilary speaking, and this is her book.