IN THE VAST HOUSE

When I was small I lived with my Grandmother—all alone except for the servants—in a big house. All around was the spreading park which shut out the world. Everything was very still in the house; there were only the voices of the servants which could sometimes be heard through the closed doors and the singing of my grandmother’s canary. It was a green bird in a wonderful Chinese cage of silver gilt set with coral and lapis lazuli.

My grandmother was very old and queer; she always wore the old-fashioned cravat and tail-coat of a man. Below the waist I do not think she ever wore any outdoor clothes, as she always sat in a wheelchair with a rug tucked around her legs. Her hair was yellow-grey, brushed forward into romantic wisps about her ears, to which were fastened two black pearls. She would sit all day long by the French window in the library, looking out across the park. Sometimes she would grunt and swear to herself.

She did not really like me very much and I was either left alone to do as I wished or else put in the charge of Will, the footman.

He was tall and broad and I loved him dearly. If I were playing on the floor while he was serving my grandmother at her table by the window, I would creep up and kiss his strong legs. He would shift his feet slightly to show that I tickled, whereupon I would do it again until my grandmother, hearing my heavy breath and my giggles, would shout, ‘Geoffrey, come out from under the table and stop teasing Will.’ Then she would turn to Will and say, ‘Take him away, Will, and give him a good flogging if you think he needs it.’ She always spoke of any sort of corporal punishment, however mild, as flogging.

Will, with a shamefaced, repressed grin, would then bend down and say, ‘You come along with me, Master Geoffrey.’ I would feel his dry hands groping for me under the table and the scratch of their hard palms as they brushed my face and legs. Then I would be borne up by those arms, which always seemed to me like an iron crane, and held against his warm hard chest. I would feel the regular hammer against me and, like this, we would leave the room, myself an anxious but willing prisoner. When the library door was shut and we were in the wide, portrait-hung corridor, Will’s nature would expand and he would lift me on to his shoulders and walk with a swaggering step, sometimes running and lunging. I was delighted and terrified and would tighten the grip of my legs around his neck, so that the short hair at the back of his head would prick my flesh and he would shout out that I was choking him and would bring his chin down on to my knees and expand his neck muscles. I would relax my grip and he would hold my hands up and would pretend to be a dancing bear with a monkey on his back.

If it were after lunch and the time when I should rest, he would often take me to his room, which was in the dome, and so of course at the top of the house; he would climb, with me still on his shoulders, up the narrow servants’ stairs, and at last would throw me down on his narrow, white-counterpaned bed. His face would often be shining with sweat after so much horse-play and the veins would stand out on his large hands which were covered with the red-gold hairs which I liked so much. I used to think that his hands looked as if they were dusted with powdered gold, when the sun shone and made the fine hairs glint.

When he had made me settle myself to rest on the bed, he would take off his coat and, sitting down by the window, he would begin to stuff his pipe and to find the sporting news in the paper.

I would watch him through the slits of my half-closed eyes, my eyelashes knitting together and making a veil through which he appeared.

I would see the slight furrow, as his eyebrows were brought up and down by his concentration on the scores. The white sleeves of his shirt would be rolled up and the blur of gold hair would lie like a bloom over the flesh of his arms. They were as thick as my thighs and I exulted in their hugeness and strength.

My eyes would pass from him to the dressing-table where the swing-glass would be hanging drunkenly, and where the photographs of Will’s sweetheart and his sailor brother would stare back at me. Will’s sweetheart had soft hair, like a mouse’s nest, and eyes that focused on a future of which she seemed terrified.

His brother was in a gym vest and sailor’s trousers, sitting on a cardboard rock with arms akimbo. His eyes seemed to say, ‘What next, what next? I’ve done all that’s expected of me so far.’

I would watch a fly sitting on one of Will’s studs and then hear it buzz as it threw itself against the mirror trying to fly through it. Perhaps at last I would doze off, and when I awoke with a slight feeling of sickness I would see that Will’s chair was empty and that his pipe, with the ashes still in it, was on the windowsill.

I would steal across to the window in my stockinged feet and pick up his pipe. I would wipe the mouth-piece and then put it in my mouth, pretending to be Will. The taste of the burnt tobacco would sting my tongue and fill me with nausea and strange pleasure.

If he had left any clothes lying about, I would slip them on furtively and feel my warmth releasing the pleasant smell of Will’s body, so that I seemed to be lapped and enveloped in him.

If I heard him approaching, I would hurriedly wriggle out of his garments and pretend to be putting on my shoes. When he came in he would help me and then bend my face up to him and draw his strong fingers through my hair like a comb. He would take me down to the varnished room, where tea was laid every afternoon, and leave me there alone until he fetched my grandmother in her wheelchair. I would sit by the hissing fire and look round at the room, which never ceased to amaze me. It had been decorated for an ancestress in the eighteenth century and everything was painted or lacquered in it. The ceilings and walls were panelled in wood and painted with strange, erotic scenes from the classics. The doorway and wainscot, window frames and chimney-piece, were green-and-red marbleised wood and there were columns and architectural ornaments with wreaths of flowers. The varnish with which all this painting was covered had mellowed to deep amber and the whole room, ceiling and walls, was polished once a month with beeswax so that it glinted and glistened from sunlight and firelight. The furniture was mostly Venetian, gilded and painted and decorated with old engravings, mixed with Chinese cabinets covered with thick lacquer on which were incised faded peonies and flying birds. There were Chinese jars filled with dried rose leaves, so that when Will took the lids off before my grandmother appeared, the breath of a hundred summers rose faintly from them. Every year another handful of petals was put in and the jars were so large it would seem that they would never be filled.

On the mantelpiece and on the top of the tallest cabinet were octagonal silver vases, swelling in the middle, which held faded ostrich plumes, dyed yellow, crimson, green and blue, darkened with dust and age. From the centre of the room hung the great chandelier of Venetian glass decorated with coloured flowers and leaves and bristling with wax candles.

While I was staring at all these things, the door would open slowly and my grandmother would be pushed in by Will. The corners of her mouth would be pulled down so that it would look like the sagging slit in a pillarbox. Her eyes would go straight to the tray by the fire, where the silver kettle and the spirit-lamp with the honey jar shaped like a Grecian urn and all the other tea things were laid out. Then, when her chair had been wheeled up to the fire, Will would leave us and we would settle down silently to eat the soft floury scones, the toast, the sandwiches and the cakes. I was only allowed one piece of cake and would nearly always choose the rich, black plum-cake which was made with molasses.

My grandmother would eat greedily, with great concentration, and when she had finished she would lie back in the wheelchair and restlessly turn the rings on her fingers and pluck at her cravat pin, running her hand endlessly up and down the lapels and seams of her coat. Sometimes she would take a book from her lap and read to me, but she would never finish the story and always left me in a terrible state of suspense. Once, while she was reading one of The Ingoldsby Legends, I noticed that her voice was thickening and faltering. I grinned and squirmed on my chair. I did not know what was going to happen. At last she stopped reading, letting the book fall into her lap and flattening her hands out on it with a smack as it fell. She threw her head back against the chair, looking up at the ceiling, and cried out in a voice heavy with grief, ‘Emma used to love this one, the ghosts always frightened her so.’ She was crying bitterly by now and I sat, as still as a mouse, thinking of what I knew of Aunt Emma, as I called her.

When my grandmother had married she had told my grandfather that Emma must come to live with them too. He was ready to agree to anything at that time and so Emma had come, and thenceforward my grandmother and Emma had lived a vital life almost totally excluding my grandfather. While they were fishing or riding or boating on the lake, he would be left to wander morosely in the park or to read alone and unwanted in the library.

At last, worn out with boredom and disappointment, he had died. His loss was hardly noticed, except that Emma and my grandmother now hardly even bothered to disguise their passion. They shared the same room and were inseparable in everything. When Emma suddenly died, my grandmother completely withdrew from everyone, living alone in the vast house until, when my parents died, I joined her.