5

Attics

TUESDAY 8TH JULY 2008

Jane took the ninth of eleven staircases up to the attic floor to her studio. As usual, she carried a duster, a torch and a bucket useful for emptying the pots and pans strategically placed to catch incoming rainfall. There was never a moment, in summer or winter, when some part of Trelawney Castle’s one-acre roof wasn’t leaking. Reaching the top floor, she turned left along a corridor known for many centuries as Housemaids’ West Wing.

It had been nearly three weeks since Jane had had time to go to her studio. Swinging her duster like a scythe, she swept away the gossamer cobwebs hanging across her path. A recent storm had poured in through a hole in the roof, leaving the pale floorboards below dark and soaked. Rounding a corner, she saw that the stone lintels on either side of the window had cracked and the architrave was buckling. Its collapse might block access to her studio and Jane’s heart contracted. She couldn’t imagine a life worth living without this creative outlet. Weeks passed without making the long trek upstairs, but its very existence and the promise of another session sustained her.

Jane had found the printing press ten years earlier while trying to locate the source of a leak in the third ballroom. She’d never been to that section of the fourth floor before and was amazed to discover thirty nearly identical rooms, each almost bare save for twin iron beds and a small cupboard—the staple furniture of junior domestic staff. Opening the door of Room 128, Jane wondered why, and for that matter how, anyone would heave a laundry mangle to the attic so far from the washing rooms downstairs. Forgetting the search for the leak, she examined the heavy cast-iron table with a large metal roller at one end. Using all her strength, she managed to turn it around, forcing the roller majestically and rustily from one end to another. The contraption must have weighed half a ton. Intrigued, Jane opened the neatly stacked wooden crates lining the wall. They contained blocks of typefaces and letters in different fonts and dried-out bottles of ink. In a nearby cupboard she found some fading printed posters, all relating to the suffragette movement and specifically to a women’s march from Penzance to London on 19th June 1913. Jane laughed out loud. Someone had deliberately hidden the press in the farthest maid’s room in the attic, where neither the butler nor any member of the family would dream of venturing. It made her happy to think that, deep within the heart of this ancient bastion of absolute male hegemony, there had existed a small and defiant opposition: a group of feminists prepared to risk their jobs and livelihood for the rights of their own sex.

The following day Jane returned with some oil and set to work dismantling the old machine, lubricating and cleaning each of its parts. It took three weeks. She bought some inks, carving tools and lino blocks in a local art shop and made her first drawing since school: a fox running through a cornfield. It took many attempts to reproduce the drawing on a piece of lino; at first, her etching lines were wobbly and inept. To her, the image had none of the elan of a child’s drawing and lacked the sophistication and surety of an adult’s, but a touchpaper was lit. From then on, she spent every spare moment trying to improve, working for hours at a time, neglecting other duties. Six months later she produced an image worth printing.

The same afternoon, Jane inked her design and, covering it with a piece of paper, cranked the roller over it and held her breath. Slowly, she peeled the paper away from the linocut. Her heart quickened and soared as she saw her fox in brown ink sneaking through an imaginary garden. It was a naive, inept print but it was a start, a clarion call. Room 128 became her exclusive world, independent of Trelawney and the overwhelming burden of her husband’s inheritance. Her printmaking was a safe space to explore her own feelings and to be herself. Her inspiration was the Cornish landscape; her drawings were, ostensibly, of the local flora and topography. Had any of her family (who occasionally wandered into her studio) looked closely, they would have detected a strong autobiographical element. Her nearest kin were transformed into trees and plants: her mother-in-law was an all-pervasive and poisonous ragwort; her father-in-law, an overblown elder; Arabella, a wild rose; Ambrose, a stocky privet; Kitto, an elegant ash; and Toby, a kindly oak. For herself, Jane chose a series of wild weeds: a usurper, tenaciously clinging to the rocks.

With time, she learned how to print and overprint and create layers of colour bringing depth and life to the studies. The simple images evolved into complicated, dense designs, reflecting her mood and waning sense of optimism. As she became more proficient in technique and style, she graduated from linocuts to woodblocks, and then to etching. For the first few years, she hung the finished prints to dry on a makeshift washing line strung along the wall before stacking them in neat piles beside the old suffragette posters in the cupboards. Soon, unable to express her ideas on single pieces of paper, she graduated to rolls of wallpaper, printing her phantasmagorical landscapes onto strips measuring fifteen feet by four. She bought wallpaper paste and plastered her creations around the walls until they covered most of the rooms in the attic corridor. When a room was fully papered, from the skirting board and often over the ceilings too, she locked the door and hid the key.

Anastasia’s letter, though discarded, had triggered an overwhelming urge to make a new print. So it was on that Tuesday afternoon in July that Jane took a box of old photographs to her studio and, looking through the images of her erstwhile friend, wondered how to depict her.

“Mum, Mum, are you up there?” Toby’s voice rang out from a distant corridor. Jane was tempted not to reply. He’d want food or the answer to a question.

“Mum!” The voice was insistent now and she heard footsteps.

“Here,” Jane called.

“Why didn’t you answer?” Toby said, stopping to brush dust off his grey school trousers. “What are you doing?” He looked around the room and at his mother sitting on the floor.

“Going through some old things. Are you OK?” She looked up at her son, already freckled by the weak summer sun, too tall for his trousers, which flapped around his ankles. Like his siblings and father, Toby had the Trelawney auburn hair and hazel eyes.

“I want to go out tonight. Is that OK?” he asked.

“A date?” Jane said, teasing, never imagining that her sixteen-year-old son had any interest in the opposite sex. To her, he was unformed physically and emotionally.

Toby went bright red but said nothing. He sat down heavily on the floor, sending eddies of dust into the air. Jane laughed.

“Toby Scott, have you got something to tell me?”

Toby traced a smiley face in the dust.

“I hope she’s good enough for you,” Jane said fondly. There was something deeply sympathetic and touching about her middle child. Unlike the other two, he noticed people’s feelings.

“She’s nice.” His tone of voice closed the conversation down.

Jane smiled at her son. “If you ever want to talk about it…”

Toby shrugged and shook his head. “There is something I want to ask.”

“Anything, darling.” Jane looked forward to dispensing maternal advice.

“Why don’t we have any hot water?”

This was the question Jane dreaded: how to explain their dire circumstances to the children? The unexpected appearance of Kitto’s Aunt Tuffy yesterday morning had staved off, temporarily at least, total penury. Jane hadn’t recognised the fluffy-haired woman with eyebrows like white animated caterpillars who was wearing a moth-eaten sweater and pulling two suitcases. Trelawney, Jane thought, was a long way for a tramp to come. It was only when Tuffy spoke in a deep voice and held out three plastic Lidl bags of £50 notes that Jane took the visit seriously. The old lady’s cottage had become infested and she wanted to move into rooms in the castle. Rent would be paid on the first Monday of the month and the only stipulation was that no one would, under any circumstances, invade her private space. In return she would pay the family £400 a month in cash. Jane would have offered her the whole castle but Tuffy chose the former butler’s apartment which had its own entrance. Jane celebrated the windfall with a bar of her favourite Floris Rose Geranium bath essence, a luxury given up many years earlier. She also bought small bunches of red and green grapes and stopped off at the butcher for an organic chicken. On her way home she had dropped by and paid her cleaning lady, Glenda Sparrow, four weeks’ back wages and another three in advance.

Determined to reassure her son if not herself, Jane said in a bright voice, “Things are going to change. Your father’s been very clever and got us into a special kind of investment. Over the last eighteen months our money has grown by 18 per cent. We’re going to hang on to the thingy until Christmas and then sell up.”

“What makes him so sure?”

Jane didn’t tell her son that she had asked Kitto the same question.

“I thought we didn’t have any money.” Toby was confused.

“We have a second mortgage.” Jane tried to stifle her sense of foreboding.

“Who’s going to pay the first one? Isn’t that robbing Peter to pay Paul?”

“Your father says debt is an asset class.” Jane repeated Kitto’s maxim with confidence if not conviction.

“Might we go on holiday?”

“Once we’ve filled the oil tanks and done a few other things, of course.”

Toby didn’t look convinced but was distracted by something on the floor.

“Who’s this? She’s well fit,” he said, picking up a faded photograph. Even at fifteen, in a grey, shapeless school uniform, one sock up, the other down, Anastasia’s beauty had the power to shock. She was standing on the back of Blaze’s horse, holding an imaginary telescope. She wore white breeches and a green felt jacket and matching hat with a large pheasant feather at a jaunty angle. Her long blonde hair hung in two thick plaits. Jane held the pony’s bridle and tried to look insouciant (she had been frightened of horses in those days). Blaze had taken the photograph and her elongated shadow made a stripe across the bottom right-hand corner of the frame.

“That is Anastasia Kabakov. Her beauty could stop traffic.” Jane remembered her former friend, dressed in a flimsy white sundress, golden hair on bronzed shoulders, crossing King’s Road on a July evening. Two men jumped out of their cars and tried to persuade her to go for dinner. Anastasia had laughed prettily and refused.

“We were close friends for over ten years,” Jane told her son. “We spent holidays together, here, and called ourselves the Three Musketeers: Anastasia, your Aunt Blaze and me. From the ages of eleven to twenty-one we were inseparable. It was inconceivable that anything or anyone would dent our friendship.”

“So what happened?”

Jane picked up a photograph showing the three young women lying in the sun, their legs and arms entwined, laughing and squinting. It had been Blaze’s birthday, a hot summer’s day, and they’d spent hours swimming in the estuary. Jane remembered the tightness of her sunburned shoulders and the lightness of spirit.

“She lives in India.” Jane was unable to explain how events had unfolded.

“That’s only a nine-hour flight,” Toby said.

“We lost touch,” Jane replied.

“Why?”

“These things happen,” Jane said with finality.

From outside came the mournful cry of the rooks returning to their roost. The light was fading. Jane switched on the lamp, which cast a flickering, half-hearted pool of yellow light on the floor. “Shouldn’t you be going to see the girl?”

Toby looked at his watch and scrambled to his feet. Giving his mother a quick peck on the cheek, he took off along the corridor at great speed.

“Bye,” Jane whispered after him.

She picked up a photograph of Anastasia, wondering what kind of plant or animal her childhood friend should become. A rare rose? An exotic orchid? Taking her sketchbook, Jane started to draw and play with different images, but only one depiction seemed to vivify on the page; Anastasia would be the kind of ivy whose tendrils threatened to choke all in its path.

A few hours later, Jane tore herself away from her work and went downstairs to make supper for her in-laws and Arabella. She felt constantly guilty about her fifteen-year-old daughter, who needed far more time and maternal support than Jane was able to give. Opening the fridge, she hoped that there was something to reheat but only found the remains of yesterday’s mince, the meat greying in its package. She decided to hide it under a tomato sauce and a topping of stale breadcrumbs, minced carrots and chopped nuts. Pooter nudged her leg: she’d forgotten to feed him; worse still, she’d forgotten to buy any more dog biscuits. She gave him the mince and made the others a Spanish omelette. Arabella came into the kitchen and sat down at the table to eat her supper.

“Where’s Toby?”

“He’s gone to see a girl.”

“Celia.”

“Oh, you knew.”

Arabella snorted. “Everyone knows.”

“I didn’t.”

“You don’t notice anything.”

Jane felt stricken. Was there something her daughter was hiding? “Darling Bells, you can tell me anything you know.”

Arabella looked up in surprise. “Like what?”

Jane sat down next to her and took her hand. “Is there something you’re worried about?”

Arabella snatched her hand away. “I’m worried that I might have to eat mince again.”

Jane laughed. Her daughter didn’t.

“Or eggs,” Arabella added.

Jane hesitated. “Arabella, could I talk to you, seriously, just for a few minutes?”

Most of the time a cloud of curly auburn hair covered Arabella’s pretty freckled face. Now, pushing her hair out of the way and cupping her chin in her hands, she looked at her mother suspiciously.

“You’ve got cancer!” Arabella said.

“No,” Jane laughed.

“You and Dad are getting a divorce. Like we all saw that coming.”

“We are not! We’re very happy, actually.” Jane gave a defensive cough.

“So what is it?”

“I thought we ought to have a little chat about—” Jane struggled to find the right words “—about contraception.”

Arabella recoiled. “That is so gross.”

“It’s natural. Nothing to worry about.”

Arabella pushed her chair away and stood up. “We learned about all that three years ago in PD.”

“PD?”

“Personal development. Silly, as Helena Diggs and Sabine O’Grady had been having sex for years.”

“Aged twelve? Isn’t that a bit young?” Jane felt the blood rush out of her face. How could she be so out of touch with her daughter and her friends? She knew Sabine and Helena: sweet, pint-sized girls who seemed to like horses and dolls.

“It’s 2008, not the Middle Ages.” Arabella went towards the door.

“Arabella, come back here,” Jane said. Flashing her mother a broad grin, Arabella left the room.

Later, Jane wiped the kitchen surfaces for the last time, turned off the lights and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Sixteen generations of Trelawneys had slept in the huge Elizabethan four-poster. Jane and Kitto had invested in a new mattress as a wedding present to themselves but, two decades on, the springs poked through and, when her husband was at home, Jane had trained herself to lie in a “S” shape to avoid them. With no hot water, Jane washed herself with a flannel and brushed her teeth. Though she had bought her children duvets, she preferred the weight of blankets and even in July she needed two. Their room was one of many without heating and, in the depths of winter, husband and wife would close the heavy tapestry curtains around their bed to try, vainly for the most part, to keep out the icy Cornish winds that worked their way under lintels, down the old chimneys, under the doors and through cracks in the windowpanes. For eight months of the year, Jane undressed in bed under the covers to conserve heat. From November to March she wore socks and in January and February flannel pyjamas and a jumper to sleep in.

At least they had electricity, she thought, undressing and putting on a white cotton nightdress. She got into bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin. It had been a long day; she was tired. Flicking the light switch off, Jane lay in the dark for a while with her eyes closed but then, unable to sleep, she got up and looked out into the garden below, at her tiny patch of tended roses and beyond to the muddle of misshapen topiary, remembering how, nearly thirty years earlier, the three friends were still schoolchildren playing jumping competitions, each on an imaginary pony, each vying to win a national event, and being chased out by the head gardener. Looking over to the far right, she saw the falling-down Temple of Dawn where she, Blaze and Anastasia had carved their initials framed by a heart into the remaining column. As she rested her forehead against the cold pane, a lump of emotion hardened in Jane’s throat. Anastasia’s letter had made her realise something: Jane didn’t miss wealth, or youth; what she missed desperately was friendship.