PAPERWORK

Ruth Rendell

My earliest memories are of paper. I can see my grandmother sitting at the table she used for a desk, a dining-table made to seat twelve, with her scrapbook before her and the scissors in her hand. She called it her research. For years three newspapers came into that house every day and each week half a dozen magazines. Her post was large and she wrote at least one letter each day. My grandfather was a solicitor in our nearest town, four miles away, and he brought work home, paperwork. He always carried two briefcases and they were full of documents.

Because he was a man he had a study of his own and a proper desk. The house was quite large enough for my grandmother to have had a study too, but that was not a word she would have used in connection with herself. Her table was in the sewing room, though no sewing was ever done in it in my time. She spent most of her day in there, covering reams of paper with her small handwriting or pasting cuttings into a succession of scrapbooks. Sometimes she cut things out of books and one of the small miseries of living in that house was to open a book in the library and find part of a chapter missing or the one poem you wanted gone from an anthology.

The sewing room door was always left open. This was so that my grandmother might hear what was going on in the rest of the house, not to indicate that visitors would be welcome. She would hear me coming up the stairs, no matter how careful I was to tread silently, and call out before I reached the open door, ‘No children in here, please,’ as if it were a school or a big family of sisters and brothers living there instead of just me.

It was a very large house, though not large enough or handsome enough to be a stately home. If visitors go there now in busloads, as I have heard they do, it is not for architecture or antiquity, but for another, uglier, reason. Eighteen fifty-one was the year of its building and the principal material used was white bricks which are not really white but the pale glabrous grey of cement. The windows were just too wide for their height, the front door too low for the fat pillars which flanked it and the portico they supported, a plaster dome shaped like the crown of my grandfather’s bowler hat and which put me in mind, when I was older, of a tomb in one of London’s bigger cemeteries. Or rather, when I saw such a tomb, I would be reminded of my grandparents’ house.

It was a long way from the village. The town, as I have said, was four miles away, and anything bigger, anywhere in which life and excitement might be going on, three times that distance. There were no buses. If you wanted to go out you went by car and if there was no car you walked. My grandfather, wearing his bowler, drove himself and his briefcases to work in a black Daimler. Sometimes I used to wonder how my mother had gone, when I was a baby and she left me with her parents, by what means she had made her escape. It was not my grandmother but the daily woman, Mrs Poulter, who told me my mother had no car of her own.

‘She couldn’t drive, pet. She was too young to learn, you see. You’re too young to drive when you’re sixteen but you’re not too young to have a baby. Funny, isn’t it?’

Perhaps someone had called for her. Anyway, a denizen of that house would be used to walking. Had she gone in daylight or after dark? Had she discussed her departure with her parents, asked their permission to go perhaps, or had she done what Mrs Poulter called a moonlight flit? Sometimes I imagined her writing a note and fastening it to her pillow with the point of a knife. I used to wonder about these things, for I had plenty of time and solitude for wondering. One day I overhead my grandmother say to an acquaintance from the village, ‘I have never allowed myself to get fond of the child, purely as a matter of self-preservation. Suppose its mother decides to come back for it? She is its mother. She would have a right to it. And then where would I be? If I allowed myself to get fond of it, I mean?’

That was when I was about seven. A person of seven is too old to be referred to as ‘it’. Perhaps a person of seven months or even seven days would be too old. But overhearing this did not upset me. It cheered me up and gave me hope. My mother would come for me. At least there was a strong possibility she would come, enough to keep my grandmother from loving me. And I understood somehow that she was tempted to love me. The temptation was there and she had to prevent herself from yielding to it, so that she was in a very different position from my grandfather who, I am sure, had no temptation to resist.

It was at about this time that I took it into my head that the scrapbook my grandmother was currently working on was concerned with my mother. The newspaper cuttings and the magazine photographs were of her. She might be an actress or a model or some other kind of famous person. Did my grandparents get letters from her? It was my job or Evie’s to take up the post and on my way to the dining room where my grandparents always had a formal breakfast together, I would examine envelopes. Most were typewritten. All the letters that came for my grandfather were typed letters in envelopes with a typed address. But regularly there came to my grandmother, every two or three weeks, a letter in a blue envelope with a London postmark and the address in a handwriting not much more formed than my own, the capitals disproportionately large and the g’s and y’s with long tails that curled round like the Basenji’s. I was sure these letters were from my mother and that some of them, much cut about, found their way into the scrapbook.

If children are not loved, they say, when they are little, they never learn to love. I am grateful therefore that there was one person in that house to love me and a creature whom I could love. My grandparents, you understand, were not old. My mother was sixteen when I was born, so they were still in their early forties. Of course they seemed old to me, though not old as Evie was. Even then I could appreciate that Evie belonged in quite a different generation, the age group of my schoolfellows’ grandmothers.

She was some sort of relation. She may even have been my grandmother’s aunt. I believe she had lived with them since they were first married as a kind of housekeeper, running things and organising things and doing the cooking. It was her home but she was there on sufferance and she was frightened of my grandmother. When I wanted information I went to Mrs Poulter, who was not afraid of what she said because she did not care if she got the sack.

‘They need me more than I need them, pet. There’s a dozen houses round here where they’d fall over themselves to get me.’

The trouble was that she knew very little. She had come to work there after my mother left and what she knew was from hearsay and gossip. Her name she knew, and her age of course, and that she wanted to marry my father, though my grandparents would have liked her to marry anyone but him.

‘They called her Sandy. I expect it was because she had ginger hair.’

‘Was it the same colour as the Basenji?’ I said, but Mrs Poulter could not tell me that. She had never seen my mother.

Evie was afraid to answer my questions. I promised faithfully I would say nothing to my grandmother of what she told me but she distrusted me and I daresay she was right. But it was very tantalising because what there was to know Evie knew. She knew everything, as much as my grandparents did. She even knew who the letters were from but she would never say. My grandmother was capable of throwing her out.

‘She wanted to throw your mother out,’ said Mrs Poulter. ‘Before you were born, I mean. I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this at your age but you’ve got to know some time. It was Evie stopped her. Well, that’s what they say. Though how she did it when she never stands up for herself I wouldn’t know.’

Basenjis are barkless dogs. They can learn to bark if they are kept with other sorts , of dogs but left to themselves they never do, though they squeak a bit and make grunting sounds. Basenjis are clean and gentle and it is a libel to say they are bad-tempered. They are an ancient breed of hound dog native to Central Africa, where they are used to point and retrieve and drive quarry into a net. Since I left that house I have always had a Basenji of my own and now I have two. What could be more natural than that I should love above all other objects of affection the kind I first loved?

My grandparents were not fond of animals and Evie was allowed to keep the Basenji only because he was a backless dog. I am sure my grandmother put him through a barking test before she admitted him to the house. Evie and the Basenji had a whole section of it to live in by themselves. If this sounds like uncharacteristic generosity on my grandmother’s part, in fact their rooms were two north-facing attics, the backstairs and what Mrs Poulter called the old scullery. All the time I was not at school (taken there and fetched by Evie in the Morris Minor Estate car) I spent with her and the Basenji in the old scullery. And in the summer, when the evenings were light, I took the Basenji for his walks.

You will have been wondering why I made no attempt to examine those scrapbooks or read those letters. Why did I never go into the sewing room in my grandmother’s absence or penetrate my grandfather’s study in the daytime? I tried. Though my grandmother seldom went out, she seemed to me to have an almost supernatural ability to be in two places, or more than two places, at once. She was a very tall thin woman with a long narrow face and dark flat rather oily hair which looked as if it were painted on rather than grew. I swear I have stood at the top of the first flight of stairs and seen her at her table, the scissors in her hand, her head turned as she heard the sound of my breathing, have run down and caught her just inside the drawing room door, one long dark bony hand on the brass knob, twisted away swiftly and glimpsed her in the library, taking from the shelves a book destined for mutilation.

. It was all my fancy, no doubt. But she was ever-alert, keeping watch. For what? To prevent my discovery of her secrets? She was a mistress of the art of secrecy. She loved it for its own sake. At mealtimes she locked the sewing room door. Perhaps she hung the key around her neck. Certainly she always wore a long chain, though what was on the end of it I never saw, for it was tucked into the vee of her dark dress. The study was never locked up but all the papers inside it were. One day, from the doorway, I saw the safe. I saw my grandfather take down the painting of an old man in a wig and a red coat and move this way and that a dial in the wall behind it.

On Fridays Evie put all the week’s newspapers out for the dustmen, a sizeable pile which I went through in the hope of finding clues. Windows had been cut out of most of them, sometimes from the sports pages, sometimes from the arts section, from the home news and the foreign news. Once, in possession of a mutilated copy of The Times, I managed by wheedling and importunity to persuade Mrs Poulter to bring me an identical undamaged copy which she helped herself to from another house where she cleaned. But the cut-out pieces had been only a report of a tennis tournament and a photograph of a new kind of camellia exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show.

I used to badger Evie about my mother but she would never answer. She told me frankly that she dared not answer. But at last, driven mad by my pestering, she must have said something to my grandmother, for one morning at the breakfast table after my grandfather had left, after I had brought in the post which included one of the letters in the blue envelopes, my grandmother turned to face me.

‘These letters which you have been so curious about come from someone I was at school with. Her writing is rather immature, isn’t it?’

I blushed. I said quite feverishly. ‘Tell me about my mother.’

The tone didn’t change or the look. ‘Her name is Alexandra. I seldom hearing anything of her. I believe she has married.’

‘Why didn’t she have me adopted?’ I said. Why didn’t you?’

‘Naturally I can’t answer for her. I would have had you adopted if it had been in my power. The mother’s consent is needed in these matters.’

‘Why didn’t she want me? Why did she go away?’

‘I shan’t answer any more questions,’ my grandmother said. ‘You’ll know one day. When we’re dead you’ll know. All about your mother and what little is known of your father, about the murder, if it was murder, and everything else. And you can tell Evie from me that if she gives you any information about what is no business whatsoever of hers I shan’t see it my duty to give her or that dog of hers houseroom any longer.’

I passed this message on to Evie. What else could I do? My grandmother always meant what she said, she was a fearful woman, a cold force to be reckoned with. But the murder what was the murder? In the ten years before I was born there had been two in the part of the country where we lived. A woman had killed her husband and then herself. A young man, not a local, had been found dead at the wheel of his car which was parked at the edge of a wood. He had been shot through the head. They never found who did it. During my childhood I was in my teens by then a local man was found hanged, had hanged himself I suppose, because he was about to be arrested for fraud. There were hints of an unknown partner in this swindle. I didn’t have to ask Mrs Poulter about these things, they were common knowledge, but I did ask her what they had to do with us.

‘They weren’t even near here, pet,’ she said. ‘The woman who killed her husband and gassed herself she’d only been living in her house for six months. And that young fellow, he drove up here from London, he was a stranger.’ She was more easily able to explain what my grandmother meant when she said I would know everything one day, when they were dead.

They’re going to leave you this house and its contents. I know it for a fact. He got me in there to be a witness to their wills.’

‘But they don’t even like me,’ I said.

‘You’re their flesh and blood. They like you as much as they like anyone, pet. Anyway it’s no big deal, is it? Who’d want it? Great white elephant, it’s not worth much.’

Not then, perhaps, not then.

When I was fifteen and the Basenji was twelve and Evie getting on for eighty, my grandfather went out into the wood with his gun one morning and shot himself. They said it was an accident. After the funeral my grandmother got a carpenter in from London and had him build her three cupboards in the sewing room. She had the kind of doors put on them which security firms recommend nowadays for the front doors of London flats. Into these cupboards she placed the contents of my grandfather’s wall safe and all his documents. She probably put her own complete scrapbooks in there too, for I never saw her at work with scissors and paste again and there was no more mutilation of books.

There were rumours, and more than rumours, that my grandfather had been in trouble. Converting his clients’ money to his own use or persuading elderly women to make wills in his favour – something of that sort. I suppose that when he went out into the wood that morning it was because he was afraid of criminal proceedings. His death must have averted that. His secrets were in the papers my grandmother hid away. She changed after he was dead, becoming even more cold and remote, and the few acquaintances she had she shunned. It was a cold house, though she had never seemed to feel ill. She did then. Evie began lighting a fire in the grate and for some reason unknown to me it was my grandfather’s cigarette lighter she used to light it, a silver object in the shape of an Aladdin lamp which stood in the centre of the mantel piece. For a while my grandmother continued to leave the sewing room door open and when I passed and looked in the fire would be alight and she would be writing. She was always writing. Memoirs? A diary? A novel?

Records of births, marriages and deaths were kept at Somerset House then. When I reached the age my mother was when I was born I went by train to London and looked her up in the appropriate great tomes. Alexandra was her name, as my grandmother had said (she never told lies) and she had married, as she also said, a man called Jeremy Harper-Green. They had two children, the Harper-Greens, a boy of six and a girl of four. I think it was when I saw this that I understood I would never meet my mother now.

The Basenji was the first to die. He was fifteen and he had had a good life. Evie and I buried him at the bottom of the garden which was on the side of a hill and from which you could look across the beautiful countryside of Derbyshire and see in the distance the landscape Capability Brown made at Chatsworth. It was winter, the woods dark and the hillsides covered in snow. I dug the grave but Evie was there with me in the biting wind. She caught a cold which turned to pneumonia and a week later she was dead too.

There was nothing to keep me after that. I packed up everything I owned into two suitcases and went to the sewing room and knocked on the door. For the past year she had kept that door closed. She said, ‘Who is it?’ not ‘Come in’, though it could only have been me or a ghost.

I told her I was leaving, I was going to London. She asked no questions about money so I was spared telling her that I had taken all the notes I found hidden in Evie’s rooms, in old handbags and stuffed into vases and wrapped in a scarf at the back of a drawer. Evie had told me often enough she wanted me to have what she left behind. My grandmother didn’t ask me but she did me the one service I ever remember receiving from her hands. She gave me the name and address of that old school friend, the one who wrote the letters in the blue envelopes and who was part owner of a London employment agency.

After that she shook hands with me as if I were a caller who had dropped in for half an hour. She didn’t get out of her chair. She shook her head in a rueful way and said, not to me but as if there were someone else standing in the doorway to hear her, ‘Who would have thought it would have gone on for eighteen years?’

Then she picked up her pen and turned back to whatever it was she was writing.

That was nearly thirty years ago. The friend with the employment agency got me a job. I stayed with her until I found a room of my own. I have prospered. I am managing director of my own company now and if I am not rich I am comfortably off. My marriage lasted only a short time but there is nothing unusual in that. Children I never wanted and I have none. Five Basenjis have been my companions through the years and they have been more to me than lovers or children.

Mrs Poulter told me my grandmother had left me the house. The chance of this I believed I lost for ever on the day I left. I had never heard from my grandmother, had written no letters and received none. I seldom thought of her. Then one Monday morning three years ago a letter came from a law firm telling me she had died and left me the house. The funeral had taken place. I wondered who had seen to the arrangements. The Harper-Greens? If they expected a legacy they were disappointed, for it all came to me, the house and its contents, the grounds from which you could see the meadows and woods of Chatsworth.

Now I should know the answers to those questions, the solutions to many mysteries. I drove up there one morning in autumn, my pair of Basenjis with me in the back of the estate car. Was the truth that she had loved me all along, valued me in her cold inexpressive way? Or had she simply not bothered to change her will because, though she cared nothing for me, there was no one else she cared more for?

We let ourselves into the house, the dogs and I. It was dusty and the ceilings hung with cobwebs, but the smell that met me as I walked up the stairs was the smell of paper, old paper turned yellow with time and packed away in airless places. The sewing room door was not locked. There were ashes in the grate and the silver Aladdin’s lamp lighter still on the mantelpiece. A sheet of paper lay on the blotter on the table that was big enough to seat twelve. There were lines of writing on it, the final sentence broken off, the fountain pen lying where my grandmother had dropped it and a splutter of ink trailing from the last, half-completed word.

With the keys from the bunch I held I unlocked the burglar-proof cupboard doors. It was all there, all the secrets, in fifty scrapbooks, in a thousand letters received, and a thousand copies of letters sent, in a hundred diaries, in deeds and agreements and contracts, in unnumbered handwritten manuscripts. The smell of paper, or perhaps it was the smell of ink, was acrid and nauseating. The dogs padded about the room, sniffing in corners, sniffing along skirting boards and around chair legs, sniffing and holding up their heads as if in thought, as if considering what it was they had smelt.

I began emptying the cupboards. Everything would have to be examined page by page, word by word, and in this house, in this room. How could I take it away except in a removal van? I imagined the misery of it, as sad and dreadful things were slowly revealed. Presently I got up and took my grandfather’s silver lighter off the mantelpiece. I struck it with my thumb and the flame flared orange and blue. The Basenjis were watching me. They watched me as I applied the lighter to the pile of paper and the flame began to lick across the first sheet, lick, die, smoulder, lick, crackle, burst into bright flame.

I picked up the dogs, one under each arm, and ran down the stairs. The front door slammed behind me. What happened to the keys I don’t know, I think I left them inside. I didn’t look back but drove fast away and back to London.

It had been insured but of course I didn’t claim on the insurance. The land belongs to me and I could have another house built on it but I never shall. Two years ago a tour company wrote to me and asked if they might bring parties to look at the burnt-out shell as part of a scenic Derbyshire round trip. So now the coach that goes to Chatsworth and Haddon Hall and Bess of Hardwick’s house, follows the winding road up the hill to my childhood home, shows off to tourists the blackened ruin and the incomparable view.

I will never forget the way the police told me my house had burned down. Later they hinted at arson and this is how the guide explains things to visitors. But that evening when I had only been back a few hours, the police came and spoke to me very gently and carefully. I must sit down, keep calm, prepare myself for something upsetting.

They called it bad news.