The rattle, now more like a smoker’s cough, seemed to be coming from up above her and she looked up, but there was only the
thirty-foot
chamaedorea
palm tree, planted by the architect seventy years ago and still growing up towards the atrium skylight, and a source of yet
another dissatisfaction. Its leaves were stirred gently by the fan that switches on automatically whenever the lights go on
to save the plant from too much condensation and consequent mould – Wells Coates left nothing to chance – and would at least
turn itself off after an hour was up. Perhaps it was to do with the fan rather than the plumbing? The lower leaves of the
palm were discolouring and needed to be removed but how could Scarlet get up there to do it? Why couldn’t she have a living
room like anyone else, with a couple of armchairs and a sofa and a telly?
‘No,’ said Louis, bluntly. ‘What I am telling you is that you have to choose between no children and me.’
This was strong stuff. Scarlet was usually the one who issued edicts. Again, unwise of Louis; the balance stops wavering,
tilts towards Jackson.
‘Well, sorry,’ said Scarlet, ‘if you won’t move house to somewhere more sensible and not out in the sticks, that’s about that,
isn’t it? I like my life as it is. It’s far too early for me to start worrying about having children and why should I have
them with a man who cares more about a pile of crumbling concrete than me. Sorry, but there are other fish in the sea.’
What she meant, of course, was that she loved Jackson more than she loved Louis, and just at the moment if she wanted anyone’s
children it would be Jackson’s, and when Jackson kissed her goodbye outside the BarrioKool club in Shoreditch earlier that
evening, saying, ‘Move out from him, move in with me, let him take his gauze curtains and go back to his mum,’ the feel and
promise of
his arm across her back made her catch her breath. ‘What have you got to lose? A house built seventy years ago by some tosser?’
So lightly had Jackson swept away decades of aesthetic aspiration, dedication and financial investment on Louis’ part that
a kind of shift took place in Scarlet’s vision. If Nopasaran was not to be taken seriously, was Louis either? Louis could
be seen by others not as an alpha male but as a pretentious wanker. At least Jackson had the respect of a lot of howling,
enthusiastic, underdressed girls. The chattering from the tree dwindled into the kind of sparky noise which the cooker makes
when you press the electric button to light the gas, but somehow suggested there was no time to be lost.
Run, run, run
was what she was hearing.
‘If I was choosing between you as you are tonight and the house I’d certainly go for the house,’ said Louis.
As you are tonight.
He is hedging his bets; he is at his school-teachery worst. Why can’t he just commit himself and say: ‘I hate you’? Scarlet
despised him the more. He was like his mother, po-faced and prudent, bloodless.
‘Pity you couldn’t have married your mother,’ said Scarlet, ‘instead of her opposite.’
Louis launched a furious blow into the air, which Scarlet managed to be in the way of, so that his knuckles scraped her cheekbones,
thus giving herself the more reason to do what she wanted without qualm. Truth, tears, rage, insults, hysteria, then blended
into distasteful memory; all that was clear to Scarlet now was that Louis took her favourite pillow with him to the lower
spare alcove in the hope, he said, of silence and a good night’s sleep. Scarlet of course lay sleepless, while her husband
presumably slept soundly, after the fashion of men, for the rest of the night.
So that was the row. And in an upper spare room, or scoop, or
alcove, Scarlet’s niece Lola, who had slipped in unnoticed after her night out, listened to and cherished every word and wondered
how best she could use them to her advantage.
For your information, reader, your writer is working on her laptop down here with the spiders in her basement, where she has
set up office, away from e-mail, landline and winter draughts. Stone walls prevent contact by mobile. It is very silent, even
lonely, and the only music is the sound of the boiler switching itself on and off, and the washing machine stirring and churning
in the otherwise empty room next door.
Yatt House is on a hilltop, large, square, stone and respectable, typical of the kind built in the 1840s for the wealthy professional
classes. There is an acre of garden, and crumbling outbuildings. My workroom is part of the old servants’ quarters, and the
hard blue-limestone stairs down to it are worn in their centre from their constant toiling up and down, up and down, labouring
to keep those upstairs fed, watered and comfortable. For some reason I feel it to be my natural place down here, and I like
it, but I reckon the last time anyone replastered or decorated was in 1914, when the young men of the house – three sons –
went off to war, poor things, and only one returned.
Bits of plaster flake from the walls and dust collects from nowhere on the flagstone floors, as do fallen leaves, though I
have no idea how they get in. Concrete filler crumbles into tiny black balls and drifts across the shiny white windowsill
beneath the
cracked shutters, where someone once bodged a repair. But my laptop works as well here as anywhere, thanks to WiFi, and it
is warm, so the drama Scarlet is about to release into the world by her intemperate and imprudent action, her running away
from home, can grow and blossom unhindered by fingers too cold to work the keyboard. Which is what happens in my proper, smart
office upstairs when the prevailing south-west winds blow hard and cold.
The ground slopes away from the house quite steeply here, so that my window is at ground level. It overlooks a narrow concrete
patio and then a stretch of green grass falls away, so it is far less sinister than the rooms at the front, where the old
iron ranges and the locked wooden cage around the wine racks still remain. It is a kindness to call them rooms at all – cellars
would be more accurate, lit as they are by tiny grated windows set into the brickwork. The room I have chosen to work in must
have been the servants’ sitting and dining room. The old bell rack is still here, and the rusty mechanism quivers when anyone
rings the front-door bell, though I cannot find any wire that connects them.
The house above is safely bright, cheerful and light, and children love to open the door to the basement and look down the
worn stairs to the dark space below where I lurk. Some venture down to explore, some don’t. My little grandchild Tahuri came
yesterday, shuddering with delighted fear. She’s four, and half Maori, of a warrior tribe, and brave.
‘Do I have to go down?’ she asked first. I heard her.
‘Of course not.’
‘I want to, but suppose there are kehua?’
‘Kehua live in New Zealand,’ said her mother, ‘on the other side of the world. They don’t have them here in England.’
‘They could come in an aeroplane’. She pronounces the word
carefully, aer-o-plane. She is proud of it. ‘They could have come with us, in the luggage rack.’
‘The kehua are just spirits who come to take you home after you’re dead. They’re perfectly friendly unless you’ve done something
really, really bad.’
‘Are they making that rattling sound I can hear down there?’
‘No, that’s just your granny typing on the keyboard.’
‘I’m a bit scared.’
‘Don’t be,’ says Aroha. ‘Kehua live in trees, not houses.’
‘Do they hang from the branches upside down like fruit bats?’ Tahuri asks.
‘I expect so,’ says her mother.
Tahuri decides it’s safe enough to come down. She is very brave. Aroha follows.
I ask Aroha to tell me more about kehua and she says they’re the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, adrift from their ancestral
home. They’re not dangerous, just lost souls making themselves useful, though people can get really frightened. Transfer them
to another culture and they’d be ghostly sheepdogs, snapping at your ankles to make you do what you should while scaring you
out of your wits. Kehua see their task as herding stray members of the whanau back home, so the living and dead can be back
together in their spiritual habitation. Kehua are the ones who come to collect your soul after the proper death rituals have
been performed: the ones who make you homesick if you’re away too long from the urupa, the graveyard, a beautiful place special
to the tribe. Kehua put thoughts into your head to get you there, and not necessarily sensible ones. They’re not very bright,
just obsessive in their need to get the whole hapu back together in one way or another.
‘The hapu?’
‘The Maori are very family-conscious,’ says Aroha. ‘Hapu is what they call their kinship group, which is a subgroup of the
iwi, or tribe. The taniwha, river monsters, who guard the iwi, are a very different matter. You don’t want to meet them in
a place you don’t belong on a dark night. They have teeth and talons and can do you physical harm. Kehua just use mental and
emotional pressure.’
I ask her what kehua look like and she says nobody quite knows, you hear them rather than see them, they’re thought to have
wings, which they rub together to make a clattering chattering sound. It registers with you as good advice but you’re not
wise to listen. They’re like the grateful dead of Central European mythology, or the Jewish dybbuks, or the hungry ghosts
in Japan. They try to return you a favour but they understand only what the dead want, not what the living need, so they get
it wrong. Poor things. They haven’t much brain. Why should they have? They’re dead.
Aroha has a Master’s in Anthropology from King’s College London. She’s a lovely, warm, rounded, vibrant creature and I am
pleased to have her in my basement, and little graceful Tahuri too, who says she has just found the ghost of a daddy-long-legs
on my unswept windowsill and holds it up by one fragile leg to examine it.
‘Does this have a kehua?’ she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, just drops it into a dusty corner where it joins its family
of assorted dried-up, dead-and-gone insects. We all go up for tea in the living world.
The next night it snows and it settles, so when I go down early to work and open the shutters, light streams in and for once
the room is actually bright, so I don’t have to turn on the overhead light. The early sun is making the snow sparkle, and
the red spindle-berries glow in the hedge the far side of the garden, so it’s all white, green and red, like the Italian flag.
And then I see a large rat run
across the snow just in front of my window, leaving a trail where his belly dragged. Mice leave rather charming little footprints,
rats leave runnels. Well, well, it’s all metaphor.
Let me remind you. Scarlet is our heroine, Louis her common law husband, and Jackson her lover. She is between her husband
and her lover, but although we are already on
page 23
she has still not got any further than her grandmother’s kitchen where
she has brought food for the freezer. It is this sort of novel, I am afraid. Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads
sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise. Well, never mind. It is what it is. If Scarlet had lived in a more
ordinary house we could have got on faster; had she only known, she could have blamed Louis for this too, for making her live
in Nopasaran. Yet the unofficial wedding party was held in its garden and she was happy enough about it at the time. So much
sexual guilt will do you in. Blame and opprobrium are hurled with abandon by the betrayer towards the innocent party.
Beverley is the grandmother with the new knee and the splendid kitchen in Highgate. So far referred to but undescribed are
Scarlet’s mother Alice, a staunch Christian, and Cynara, Alice’s daughter, fifteen years older than Scarlet, who is a staunch
feminist barrister. Staunchness runs in the family, though it does seem to have rather bypassed Scarlet. Lola, whom we met
briefly pretending to be asleep in the spare room at Nopasaran. Lola, who is Cynara’s daughter and Scarlet’s niece, is a treacherous
little bitch, staunch only in her desire to have Louis and Nopasaran for herself.
The goodies from Waitrose that Scarlet unpacks – should you have a yen for such detail – include creamy fisherman’s pie, lamb
biryani chicken with lime and coriander, oriental salmon with lima beans, steam-fresh broccoli, par-cooked croissants. (I
am really hungry as I write this – I have had no breakfast and it is already lunchtime.) Scarlet, as we know, had hoped to
be out of the house by mid-morning, but now that she has rashly blurted out the truth, her grandmother will clearly not let
her go without further discussion. Scarlet wishes she’d stayed quiet and waited for news to seep through to friends and family
in the normal way. As it is there will be uproar enough when they find out.
You can’t do this, Scarlet,
her mother will say.
Just stay where you are and see it through. You inherit instability from your fathers. Both you girls do. I will pray for
you as ever – what else can I do? – but sometimes I feel I’m wasting God’s time.
You are, you are,
Scarlet will want to say.
Not that there is a God. And Alice will want to reply, What are we then? A plague of woodlice on a rock hurtling through space?
So they will not have the conversation. The subject is too fundamental. Neither mother nor daughter is quite prepared to
cut the other off. Both hope the other will recover their reason and believe as they do.
Scarlet’s sister Cynara will roll her eyes sigh and say,
Out of the frying pan into the fire. Do think again, Scarlet. Louis isn’t so bad, but isn’t there some nice woman you can
shack up with? Anyone can see you’re a lesbian.
Which they can’t. But then Cynara’s specialty is seeing what she wants to see, not what is, and what she sees everywhere
is the villainy of men.
But Scarlet does rather look forward to telling her friends of the severance of her bond with Louis. The more boring ones
will no doubt protest briefly and say,
You can’t do this to us. We’ve got too
used to saying Louis-and-Scarlet.
The others, the fun ones in fashion PR, will say,
Jackson Wright? Wow! Go for it, Scarlet.
But all they know is that Jackson got a lot of column inches for his last vampire film, so their advice can’t be relied upon.