‘Is there anyone there?’ asked Sara Toffener to the closed and wormy door which faced her, and then murmured aloud, as memory dictated, the words of the Walter de la Mare poem:
‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.’
She spoke the words as she would a charm. When Sara was little, her grandmother would give her two shillings for every poem she learned by heart. Sara had always favoured Walter de la Mare because his lines were so short. Still the door did not open. She took up the yard broom which stood, witch-like, by and beat upon the disintegrating wood: paint and dust flew everywhere. There were movements in the air behind her; a stirring of her hair. It was probably a bat; she would not be surprised at all if it were a vampire bat.
‘Bats in the belfry!’ she chanted, opening the letterbox, putting her lips to the rusty, metal-lined slit. ‘Bats in the belfry!’ Why not? Inside, they were all deaf as posts. They must be, or they would surely have opened to her knocking. In the end, people did.
Wildlife conservationists, as well as social workers, had long tried to gain access to Lodestar House. Bats – protected by an Act of Parliament and a rarity in London – nested in the folly at the end of Lodestar’s garden. A barn owl had been sighted in the line of ragged trees – once a neat hedge that had divided the orchard from the paddock, but now grown into rampant and crude disorder. It was absurd, Sara said, and Tully agreed, and not only absurd but unnatural and disagreeable; firstly that nature should have this hidey-hole in an urban area, secondly that no one was allowed in to supervise, let alone make a profit from it.
The Physic Garden down the road from Lodestar at least put its few acres to good purpose, cultivating natural medicinal herbs according to scientific principles, showing visitors round for a fee, attracting tourists. But Lodestar’s garden had simply been let go, and cities could not put up with neglect for long. Every year that passed, the environmental lobby became more powerful, inquisitive and interfering, and if old Lady Wendy wasn’t careful, didn’t act soon or, better still, die soon so Sara and Tully could take over, some law would be passed making it illegal to turn urban green into concrete, or giving bats precedence over human beings, and Tully’s plan to build studio apartments facing the river would come to nothing.
‘And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head,’ said Sara Toffener.
‘And he knocked again upon the door a second time.
“Is there anybody there?” he said.’
Now Sara took off her high-heeled shoe and banged it upon the door of Lodestar House, this place of crumbling turrets and dried-up moats within the head.
‘And no something something something,’ Sara went on, at the top of her voice. Who would hear? A woman could be raped in this hooded brick doorway and no one be any the wiser. Or she could be swept away by sudden floods. If Sara had anything to do with it, this entrance would be boarded up, the old front door restored. Down here was just a Black Hole of Calcutta, whatever that might be.
‘No voice from the something stairs –’
Why hadn’t her grandmother, the vampire bat, just given her daughter a couple of shillings and not made her dance for her money, learning lines. It had been humiliating. Her whole childhood had been humiliating; a training in bohemian family traditions she wanted no part in.
‘Open the door, you stupid old bats,’ yelled Sara Toffener through the little grated window in the door. The spring in the letterbox was heavy: it might have snapped back and trapped her lips. This was safer. ‘I’m family. I wish you no harm.’
Sara knocked again upon the castle door. What goes to make an obsession? She had been born in this house and cast out of this house before she was three: her mother Una prevented from returning, for reasons as clear as a pikestaff, whatever a pikestaff may be, which Sara refused to see, and why should she, for it was no fault of hers that she was the daughter of her grandmother’s husband Mogens, and at her mother Una’s clear instigation, not her father’s. Una did the seducing, not Mogens. Sara saw herself cast out for no good reason, out of spite and whim; this door hers to open when she chose, and as she chose; this house to burn if she so decided.
You couldn’t see in. The windows were too clouded with dirt.
What I’d like to do this very moment, thought Sara, is to bring a bulldozer to bear on this problem. How pleasant to charge the door with heavy iron, driven by clanking gears: to just burst in, carrying lintel and frame along with the giant shovel; to open up; to beckon in teams of policemen, social workers, psychiatrists, dustbin men, rat exterminators, cleaners; to set to work, to clear the house of its present occupants, its past, ghosts; to rid it of trauma, dirt, pests, vermin; to throw out everything broken, chipped and dusty, human and inhuman; to clean the place out, hose it out if necessary – as one of Wendy’s cousins had allegedly been hosed out of a rear gunner’s cockpit in the Second World War. Only the antiques would be spared from the cleansing onslaught, and a team of restorers and valuers would come close behind – Tully would insist. He couldn’t bear waste, let alone scandal. If Wendy and Congo survived, they’d be well looked after in a nursing home, given the psychiatric care they needed. That would take money.
Tully was in the House of Commons. It was a late-night sitting. Whenever was it not? It was Sara’s custom, when Tully was away, to drink a bottle of wine or, if there was nothing else to do, to go round and visit her grandmother. Or so she described it to friends. She was a very family kind of person. She said so, often. What she normally did was what she planned to do tonight: to bang upon the door and make her presence felt, and go. But the moon was full, the tide was high, so tonight she quoted poetry.
The hate, the resentment, the discordance of body and mind that Wendy’s behaviour gave rise to, Sara revealed to no one except Tully, who, amazingly, understood. Only Tully, pink in the face, tight in his body to the point of bursting, seemed to understand the power and purpose of indignation, outrage, when it related to principle. It was not right, simply not right, that Wendy Warby, although in her nineties, should refuse to make a fortune when all that was needed was for her to sign a simple piece of paper. A fortune which Tully and Sara would then inherit. Something is due from family: if not love, why then possessions.
A window on the first floor opened and Congo stuck his head out and shouted in his hoarse old voice:
‘Go away, or I’ll call the police. This is private property.’
‘But whose property?’ called up Sara. ‘Shall I just come up and we’ll discuss it?’ She spoke as sweetly as she could manage, remembering Tully’s advice. If you act as loving family should, you’re not likely to end up disinherited, no matter that the deceased had willed the wealth away. Courts can, and often do, override the wishes of the departed in the interests of the living. As in matters of alimony, so in inheritance law; those who have most get most. Let’s all speak well of the dead: their shekels are more likely to be ours.
The old man was gibbering and pointing down at the wall behind her. Sara looked. Only bricks, pavement and weeds which shouldn’t be there: no flood water. He beckoned her closer. She gazed up at him. She feared spittle might fall from his barely-toothed mouth.
‘You brought them in with you,’ he hissed.
‘Brought who?’
‘Arabs,’ he said, more calmly. ‘Twenty of them behind you. Don’t look now but they’re sitting just behind you. Men, women, children too. The women are wearing black, the men are in white. What do they mean? What do they want?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sara. ‘They didn’t tell me.’ Encourage him in his delusions: the sooner he’d be certified insane.
‘They’re waiting for me to die,’ said Congo. ‘But why Arabs? Why the robes? What will happen to Wendy when I’m gone?’
He scraped open the door for her. Sara pushed past him and went up the wide staircase to see her grandmother. Cobwebs brushed her face. It was like being in the Ghost Train. Una had once taken her to a funfair; that was the day before she left for ever. The smell in the vaulted room was oppressive – vomit, urine, stale food, alcohol, acetate upon ancient breath. But Wendy sat upright in bed against yellowed Victorian cushions; she seemed a long way from death. She waved her glass about, cheerfully.
‘Who are you?’ asked Wendy.
‘I’m your grand-daughter Sara,’ Sara said.
‘What big teeth you have,’ said Wendy – and indeed Sara had protuberant teeth and a bad bite. Una had given up on Sara’s looks early on: there was hardly enough to work on, as she’d told Mogens, in Sara’s hearing.
‘I have no grand-daughter. I had one once called Sara, but I didn’t like her, and anyway she died.’
Sara tried not to be hurt, tried to stay angry; noted that the refrigerator in the bathroom had grown so much ice the door no longer closed and counted the empty vodka bottles on the floor, the better to build up her dossier for the Social Services, for when the time came to send for the men in white suits and a compulsory order for their admittance.
Do not suppose that just because a young woman with the sweet name of Sara knocks upon a door and has difficulty gaining entrance, and quotes poetry, and visits her grandmother, that the young woman has a sweet nature. If I were Congo, I just would not have opened the door. My husband’s defection has taught me to trust no one: Brian Moss’s files confirm the lesson.