Observatory Mansions (14 page)

Everything was temporary; all those little bodies would lie there for no longer than three months. Only the stains, the beds, the orderly were permanent. During the day when the orderly sat at his post with his paper (unless we were allowed to sit outside or in a large classroom) everything was silent, only the rustling of blankets or sheets was heard or the quietest of whispers, for the orderly’s presence was a perfect notice – BE QUIET. But at night, after the meal of a glass of milk (she remembered, looking at Claire Higg, for it was the glass of milk that had sparked off her memory), soup, bread and biscuits, after the door was locked and the passageway was silent, the noise gradually began.

At first there were quiet whisperings from here and there, from this bed or that bed, this mattress or that mattress: never progressing beyond the originating bed or mattress where the occupants were whispering to each other. So the first conversations were only between two. Couples whispered, whispers that began timidly, not knowing if the neighbour would react, with – It’s dark, or It’s cold, or You awake? And then the answers came back – You’ll get used to it, or Am I taking too much blanket? or I’m awake, I don’t mind talking for a bit. And then they’d ask each other’s names, where they came from, did they know where they were going next, how long do we stay here? The talking gradually grew in confidence, the words came quicker, were spontaneous now, she remembered, not carefully thought out. All about the dormitory the numerous private conversations grew in volume, and those other pairs at first too scared to talk gradually let out their own sounds – and so the words fell from bed to bed or leapt across to the row on the other side, darted from head to head: words not coming from one or two places now but from numerous, uncountable origins. Anna Tap said at this point, when everyone was talking excitedly, sitting up in their beds,
calling to the new girls many beds away, that those were the sounds she loved most. They meant to her company, pure, necessary company noise. The girls in that dormitory shook hands, imitating adults, feeling for them in the dark, smelt each other’s voices, told of their lives so far. And if one child told a life story that was exceptionally sad or frightening or funny or moving, she would be asked to go to another part of the room so that others might hear it. This task – the sifting and swapping of stories – was executed by the senior girls who had been there for weeks or months. They acted as editors, organizers, not brutally controlling the nights but rather helping them along; encouraging each new child to speak. But each night would end disastrously.

The senior girls, so called not because of their age but because of the length of time spent in the dormitory, had listened to nights and nights of stories and greedily awaited this time of day. They were brilliant listeners and they prided themselves on their memories. They listened without interruption, nodding at the right places or looking sympathetic, or laughing when required. But once a story was ended and was a few nights old we’d often hear it again. This time it would be told by a senior girl who had adopted it, but if questioned would swear on her life that it had actually happened to her. And this was where the trouble began. Though names and certain smaller incidents would have been changed, reworked in the quiet day to be ready for the night performance, its source could not be denied. Often the girl, the originator, who had told the story would hear it being claimed by a senior and react violently. Though her story may or may not have been true, there were surely elements of truth in it, and it often included the one sacred person, animal, object or incident that the child had treasured so completely, and now, hearing her own tale on another’s lips, it was as if someone had stolen her life. Anna Tap explained that they had no possessions, no luggage, even the clothes they wore
belonged to the orphanage. If a child arrived with her own clothes they would be removed, forcibly if necessary, and never seen again. Bullying had been reported, with stronger girls seizing such items of clothing and claiming by their possession an individuality that was not their own.

The stories that the new girls were tricked into telling were stolen and, like losing cherished photographs or letters, they felt that suddenly they had never belonged to a past, to a place, to people. Stories and memories were the only possessions left to them and they fought when they had been stolen, they violently struck out, bit, pulled hair. It often happened that two or more seniors stole the same story; for they grew bored of their own tales and changed them as often as three or four times a week. And when it happened that the same story was stolen by two seniors or three or four, a larger fight for ownership began, sometimes including the true author, sometimes with the true author looking on in tears.

With the beginning of the fights, the stories ceased for the night – the sounds grew ugly, crying now was often heard, beds being pushed about, other children yelling as the fights trod on them, heads being banged on bedheads. And then the wounded and the victor would slowly return to their beds and a quiet sobbing might be heard for a while and then silence. If someone, new girl or senior, were to say something then, even if in a whisper, a chorus of
shut up
would silence her. And the silence would continue until the next night when it all would begin again.

The dormitory was a museum of stories, original, stolen, fused. And the curators were the seniors who, rather than cataloguing the works, mixed them up, disposed of many, lost many.

Francis Orme remembered – 2
.

The section of Miss Tap’s history about children’s possessions (or lack of them) reminded me of other children’s objects. I remembered the attic rooms of Tearsham Park, and in the attic rooms furthest from the stairs, beyond the servants’ quarters, I spent many hours discovering the objects of dead people. All the dead people’s objects were kept out of the way there. Many of those dead people’s objects were an embarrassment to the still-living people who dwelt down below. But some objects in the attic rooms were kept there because their dead owner was supposed to remain a secret. Hidden in a locked wooden trunk in one of the smaller rooms I found a child’s possessions, among them a teddy bear without a mouth (lot 174).

Peter Bugg remembered – 2
.

The prattle about dormitories, as Peter Bugg viewed it, about all-girls dormitories, reminded him of other dormitories, filled with boys, where he had turned the lights out at night and left the boys to their thoughts of girls. The names of some of those boys came sir-siring up into his head once more. And among those names was that of the boy who had died, that of the boy Peter Bugg was certain he had brought to death by his own mean ways. Tears rushed down his face as the boy, sitting on top of his bald head, slipped again under the lubrication of his excessive sweating into his eyes. Alexander Mead. He remembered so many boyhoods, so many schooldays, so why could he not lift the image of this boy’s face from his eyes. The boy stayed, smiled into Bugg’s skull when he blinked.

This is a remembrance of his that he declined to share with Higg, Tap and Twenty. But he told me later on about the boys’ dormitories …

Francis Orme remembered – 3
.

 … So that I, seeing girls and boys sleeping in beds, remembered a time when I was in possession of fifty-four porcelain dolls. The Time of Dolls boasts as its characters: myself, Master Francis Orme, then only recently after the Time of White Gloves, and fifty-four porcelain dolls. These dolls had belonged to my paternal grandmother and they were said to be extremely rare and valuable. Mother had not let me touch them. They lay in their various white cardboard boxes, lined with protective tissue paper, in those distant and out-of-bounds attic rooms of Tearsham Park. However, during the Time of Mother’s Greatest Unhappiness, which coincided with the Time of Dolls, my mother kept herself locked in her bedroom and so was unable to see me up in the attic. I took the dolls from their boxes and, standing them all on their dainty feet, imagined myself married to every single one of them and saw myself living happily in the seclusion of the attic rooms of Tearsham Park. I saw myself, I remembered, strolling about nonchalantly under the pressures of marriage, and wherever I saw myself I was pursued by fifty-four diminutive porcelain wives. During the second stage of the Time of Dolls I undressed all the dolls and examined them very studiously. I became an expert in the anatomy of dollkind. (At the waxworks I once tried to examine the wax flesh under the clothes of the wax people. The wax people did not have wax bodies, the wax people had bodies made of polystyrene and fibreglass – some of them, the ones with long dresses, even had wooden stumps for legs.) The third stage of the Time of Dolls, and sadly the last, found me returning all the still-unclothed dolls to their white boxes and numbering each of them. I found enough white cardboard around Tearsham Park to fashion for myself a somewhat larger white box. This I labelled fifty-five. I would lie down, also naked, save for my white gloves, in my box and meditate. The Time of Dolls
ended abruptly: Mother, out of her room once more, though paler and thinner, discovered (naked) me with my fifty-four (naked) porcelain wives and divorced me from them immediately. The last time I saw my wives, I remembered, was during the auction that took place on the lawns around Tearsham Park. The dolls were clothed then and fetched an exceedingly high sum. (All but one, who managed to escape. Lot 192.)

Twenty remembered – 6
.

Twenty, recovering progressively from her amnesia, thought of all the dogs of Tearsham Park Gardens. She told of how she had passed the time with them. She recounted unmentionable things. Unmentionable I say here because the appalled Peter Bugg refused to share them with me. She cried tears of remorse about all those dirty deeds. I wasn’t always like that, was I? No. She remembered now, she remembered a flat with the number twenty on the door. She hadn’t always been the Dog Woman of Tearsham Park Gardens. I’ve done such ugly things. She had done them for the love of Maximilian, whom she missed, she recalled, acutely.

Claire Higg remembered – 5
.

Twenty’s recollection of her, then quite recent, dog days reminded Claire Higg of those innumerable days of time equally ill-spent, though not in such unmentionable pursuits, that she had passed in front of her television set. I’ve lost so much time, she realized, aloud, tearing all the pictures of the deceased moustache man from her walls. What have I done?

She had been doing precisely nothing for over seven years and the sudden shock of it made her pull the television plug out of its socket and vow never, not for a single second, to watch her television again.

There was only one face for me, she remembered aloud, ripping the cut-outs of the moustache man into a thousand fragments. He was pale, she remembered. His photograph was on that wall. Look there, it was there! But it was there no longer.

Twenty remembered – 7
.

And Twenty, seeing Claire Higg ripping up the magazine cut-outs of her moustache man, remembered another moustached man. This moustached man, she recalled with excitement and a slight laugh, did not have perfect teeth. This moustache man she remembered seeing outside the flat with the number twenty on it, and inside it too. He was, she exclaimed, her husband. But his marriage status and hair growth were temporarily all she could remember of him.

Then, exhausted as they all were, and momentarily out of memories, it was decided that another break should occur. They all left Claire Higg to her turned-off and unplugged television. Peter Bugg, after he had visited his own flat, knocked on the Orme family’s door. It was then that he told me of all those remembrances that had been breathing upstairs in flat sixteen. He carried with him a photograph of a man, his father, which he said he could no longer share his rooms with. Though, he said, he could not bear to destroy it either. Could Francis, he asked, take care of it for him, just for a while. I could. He said, also, that he was being troubled by a certain matter which would not allow him to rest, and though he could not yet bring himself to share it with anyone, would Francis, if the time came, be willing to listen to it. I would.

Then Peter Bugg, troubled, crying and sweating on his way out, whispered a terrible thing:

Do you know where Chiron is?

And left without waiting for a response.

A short voyage around the memory of the
teaching methods of Peter Bugg, as remembered
by Francis Orme
.

After the death of Emma it was decided, principally by Mother, that I should be made to read and write. Father spoke of his old tutor. Mother wrote to him and finding that Bugg was then temporarily, as Bugg put it, out of work, employed him. My parents had decided not to send me to school, partly because of what I called my unwillingness and they called my limited ability, but also partly because Father had never been to school, so that it somehow made sense that I shouldn’t go either. I was taught exactly what my father had been taught in his childhood. The years of civilization’s progression between Father’s schooling and mine were ignored or else believed insignificant, and so for a long while I was prepared for a world that no longer existed.

Peter Bugg, my new teacher, reeked of history; there seemed to be nothing modern about him. His pale body looked as if it had long since died and his clothes seemed to have been tailored two or three generations earlier for people that belonged in black and white photographs. Bugg was a small man. He had a tiny, unmuscular body from the corners of which came matchstick arms and legs. His neatly parted hair was so black that it accentuated the pallor of his skin. He had a huge head, which looked as though it belonged to someone else. I believed that this was because he was always exercising his head, but never his body.