The Cuckoo's Child (16 page)

“You might as well,” I said, “they're not doing me much good.”

“Are you looking for somet'ing special?”

“I'm looking for a room to rent that doesn't cost the earth, somewhere I don't need an armed guard if I'm out after dark.”

She laughed.

“Hard to find that somewhere. Have you t'ought about places outside London? Somewhere like Wimbledon? Kingston? Try the local papers, and places where people put up adverts—laundromats, newsagents, like that. They're the ones don't cost so much, not like these,” and she rattled the papers in her hand.

So it was that I set out for Wimbledon and started a search for those boards covered with plain white cards and torn scraps of paper in the corners of windows crammed with cheap sweets and toys, newspapers and plastic pens, or hanging over the worn chairs and cracked laundry baskets, vying for wall space with the detergent and bleach dispensers, the industrial-sized dryers and the boxes full of odd socks.

In the end none of these produced anything worth pursuing. I gained an indelible impression that the entire population of Wimbledon were semiliterate owners of aging cars dying to get rid of their white elephants. There was a thriving business in the exchange of baby garments and nursery furniture “like new,” and a somewhat less flourishing trade, to judge by the dinginess of the cards, in gents' suits, bridesmaids' dresses (fuchsia satin, worn once), and assorted
LP
records (mono only).

Depression was setting in once more, when I caught sight of a tiny store a little way down a side street. It was a grocery of a kind long since mown down by the supermarket juggernauts. It resembled one I could dimly remember Mum going to before we moved to Canada. I wondered if this one had tins of broken biscuits, big drums of dusty currants, and a gleaming bacon slicer? Maybe even bags of Smith's Crisps with a twist of salt in dark blue waxed paper?

The interior was dark, and the only thing I could see through the window was a display case for Mr. Kipling's cakes and a refrigerated cabinet full of Coke and 7 Up, disappointingly modern. There was an old-fashioned counter, dim in the background.

On the inside of the door, where you couldn't avoid seeing it as you went in, was a single white card. It was written in a beautiful angular hand. It read:

For Rent

Single room in a large house in an older residential neighbourhood. Suitable for mature lady. References required. Applicants should be able to climb stairs and tolerate animals. Enquire within.

I pushed open the door. A bell jangled discreetly. The shop was overcrowded, the result of modern packaging and promotion techniques at war with the solid fixtures of an older style. I squeezed past piles of Tide and Omo. Packets of Ryvita and Jaffa Cakes mounded in front of tall dark wood shelves that wouldn't have been out of place in a library. I was breathing in the smell, which was exactly right despite the Coke cans and the thoroughly modern freezer compartments, when the owner parted the bead curtains at the back of the store and took her place behind the counter, the long strings of beads clashing behind her.

“Can I help you?”

She was a small woman, deft and contained. She looked at me, head slightly tilted, dark eyes bright and alive. Like a wren.

“I've come in to inquire about the card on the door,” I replied. “I'm looking for a place to rent.”

“You realize it's just a room?”

“Well, yes, that's all I really need. I just want a place to call home while I'm in England.”

“That's all right then. I didn't want you to go round and then find it wouldn't suit. We don't want to disturb the ladies for nothing.”

“The ladies?”

“The house belongs to three old ladies, regulars of mine, been coming here for donkey's years. Between you and me, I don't think they really wanted to rent out, but I suppose they find it hard to keep that great barn of a place going. You'd think they'd sell and move somewhere smaller, but they've lived there for years and it's hard to change when you get older, isn't it? Did you want the phone number, then?”

A short call from a public phone at the station got me the address from a gentle, refined voice after it had asked me a preliminary question.

“Do you have strong legs?”

I wondered what kind of tower this room might be in.

“I think they're in tolerably good shape.”

“They would need to be,” said the voice. “This is how you get here.”

The house, I was delighted to learn, was a ten-minute walk from the station. But going there from the noisy main street and the busy railway lines was like entering another world. Prosperous Victorian merchants and businessmen had built these houses for their large families and small armies of servants. They would use the newfangled railway to get to their offices in the city, but could retire at night to an almost rural calm, surrounded by fields and heath and small villages. Life in the country for the landless but wealthy bourgeoisie.

The street was lined with huge old trees, limes and chestnuts, and sycamores as I learned later. The houses were all tall, three storeys at least, a fantastic miscellany of architectural styles from Gothic arched windows with stained glass to black-and-white Elizabethan half-timbering. The overall effect was confused, but a confusion that time had softened to an endearing eccentricity, backed as it was by the certainty of so much enduring red brick.

My destination was a case in point. The long driveway, much obscured by dripping laurel bushes and rhododendrons, led to a circular gravelled area outside the front door. Like its neighbours, the house was built of brick, but here the dominant influence was medieval. The windows were white stone, Perpendicular style, and the panes were leaded. The front door was a Gothic arch, at the top of a flight of worn steps. More steps led down to a basement or cellar door.

There were three floors as well as the basement. The edge of the roof, far above, sported crenellations like miniature battlements, and I could just see tiny dormers in the roof, which indicated an attic. Was the room up there?

A further eccentricity was the tower at the corner of the house. It was attached to the house proper by a colonnade at ground level, rose up foursquare, punctuated by lancet windows, and culminated in an open belfry. There was even a bell. It reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of Tuscan churches.

A large white cat sat on the top step. It stared at me with eyes green as peeled grapes.

A gargoyle head of brass hung on the door, but I opted for an ancient bell push. The house was so large, I thought, the ladies probably wouldn't hear my knocking, not even if it reverberated like the sound of doom in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The door swung open silently, and a face peered cautiously round its edge as the cat shot inside.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “I've come about the room. I phoned just a little while ago.”

The face, and the hand clenched on the door, relaxed visibly. The door opened wider.

“Of course, do come in. You got here much sooner than I expected. May I take your coat?”

I decided to hang on to my coat. The air in the dim hallway was decidedly chill.

“Come through this way, my dear. We tend to stay the other side of the house mostly. Come and meet the others. Mind the umbrella stand, it always takes people by surprise.”

It did. Suddenly a massive stand with receptacles like elephant legs at the bottom for umbrellas and a rack of hooks and pegs, branching out like moose antlers, at the top for hats and coats loomed out of the darkness. My guide was disappearing down a long hallway and I feared losing her altogether, but then she flung open a door and a stream of light showed the way.

“Girls, here's the young woman about the room.”

There was an instant twitter of anticipation. By the time I entered the room, my guide had joined the other ladies, and the three of them stood in a line facing me, beaming nervously. One of them was holding a ginger cat firmly in her arms. Its tail was lashing furiously, and it was struggling to find purchase with its back feet and writhe out of her grip.

“Hello,” I said, “you seem to have a problem there.”

“Oh, my dear,” said the cat's jailer, “he's being so naughty. I just can't get him to take his medicine. He's had an abcess at the back of his neck and he's supposed to take antibiotics, but do you think he'll cooperate? How are you going to get better, Orlando,” she continued sternly, addressing the flailing animal, “if you don't take your medicine like a good boy?”

I suggested wrapping the cat up and offered my help.

One of the ladies hurried away and returned with a large towel. I took the cat and swaddled it so that its legs were all contained and only its head was sticking out, then tucked it under my arm, feeling like Alice with the flamingo. The cat behaved in much the same way as that uncooperative bird, but I managed to hold it reasonably still and cooed to it while it concentrated all its hostility into a furious stare and one of the ladies gently introduced the dropper into the side of its clenched mouth. Most of the medicine went down, to cries of approval, and I let the cat loose to escape.

“That was kind of you. I don't know why I didn't think of that. You'd think
three
of us could manage something between us, wouldn't you? And we haven't even introduced ourselves yet! What must you think of us?”

The lady who spoke was Evelyn Hoar—“as in frost, dear, not the other sort.” The lady who had let me in was Mildred Plover, and the third, plump and girlish, was Isobel Rowntree. They were very different, physically, yet gave the impression they would all bear the same trademark if you tipped them up and looked for the stamp on the soles of their feet. All three wore light tweed skirts with deep pleats fore and aft, rather baggy in the seat, but good for many more years of wear. Their feet were shod in sturdy, sensible walking shoes, brown to go with the tweed, and polished to a high gloss. Each one wore a blouse with tiny pearl buttons up to the neck, blue for Miss Hoar, pink for Isobel, and a strange greenish fawn for Miss Plover. Lambswool cardigans in neutral shades of grey and oatmeal completed the outfit. Isobel wore a string of pearls and a turquoise ring, Miss Hoar had a gold signet ring, and Miss Plover wore no jewellery except for a small gold watch with a fine guard chain. They might have been wearing the uniform of the girls' boarding school they had undoubtedly once attended.

“Would you like some tea?” chirped Isobel. “Do say yes, we get so few visitors.”

Miss Plover intervened.

“Perhaps Mrs. Alvarsson would like to see the room first,” she said firmly. “We can think about tea after that.”

“Oh right,” said Isobel, “that's me all over, getting the cart before the horse. I'll just put the kettle on while you're upstairs, then.”

“Better get your climbing boots,” observed Miss Hoar.

“Now, Evelyn, it's not as bad as that,” said Miss Plover. “She will tease, but she doesn't really mean it. Are you ready? Splendid!”

And she extended her bony hand, the fingers carefully together so that the hand looked like a paddle on the end of her arm, in what I came to know as an utterly characteristic
Shall we go?
gesture.

She led me out of the kitchen into the chilly hallway and made for the stairs that rose in the centre of the house. The first landing ran around the stairwell with doors opening off it on every side. Miss Plover stopped here, breathing hard.

“Isobel and I have our rooms here,” she said. “Evelyn's on the next floor. She used to go climbing—got better wind.”

We climbed again, and this time I caught a glimpse into one of the rooms, not a bedroom, more like a workroom, almost a laboratory. Miss Plover nodded.

“Evelyn likes to work on her specimens. She taught botany, and she's never given up on it though we retired many years ago.”

She led me round a corner and opened a door at the end of a short passage. Behind it was yet another flight of stairs, with a plain whipcord on the treads this time instead of the faded Indian carpet on the main staircase.

“Not much farther,” she encouraged, and indeed it was just a few more steps to another door that she opened wide. “Here we are,” she said, holding out her hand like a small signboard again. I stepped past her into the room and an involuntary exclamation escaped my lips.

“Oh!”

It was the room every child wants. High up on the back of the house in a little turret overlooking the garden. A circular room with a great sweep of windows and a wide, polished window seat piled with cushions. A huge tree outside, some of its branches tapping on the side window, a copper beech with wine-dark leaves, I later discovered. A bed. A desk. An easy chair. A big wardrobe.

“The bathroom is just down the stairs,” said Miss Plover. “I hope that isn't too inconvenient, I know people like to have bathrooms attached to their rooms nowadays, but this is rather an old house, you see. At least you would have it all to yourself; Evelyn's got her own, don't you know.”

“I think it's wonderful,” I said and meant it.

Miss Plover looked around the room.

“I used to like it,” she said wistfully. “It was my room when I was a child. I just can't manage all the stairs these days.”

“You've lived here all your life?”

“Yes. My father left it to me when he passed away. Isobel and Evelyn came to share it just after the war. I couldn't have kept it on without them. Do you think you would like the room?”

“I would,” I said, “no question. But I'm afraid I can't give you any references quickly. I'd have to send to Canada for some; I don't know anybody over here.”

“That's all right, dear, we can dispense with that. I think I'm quite a good judge of character. After all, I was a deputy head mistress for many years! So, you'll take it?”