The Cuckoo's Child (27 page)

She surprised me, though. Sentimentality was not apparently part of her makeup. She had arranged for the council to deposit a skip outside the house, and we started at the top floor and worked down. We set aside the clothes to be bundled onto the bike for several runs to the thrift shops, and the same was true of some household items Deirdre said she hated or had no use for. The rest we checked quickly and dumped with mounting glee in the skip, for Aunt Sarah had been a packrat of the worst kind, and it was soon obvious there was little of any value in the rubbish she had stowed away into every cupboard and drawer, piled in ancient cardboard boxes that leaned in towers against wardrobes, stacked under beds, behind chests and chairs, lining the hallways and spilling over onto the treads of the stairs.

It was mostly paper, and largely newsprint, although there were boxes of household bills and receipts and several huge caches of silver paper.

“War effort,” said Deirdre when I raised my eyebrows.

Hundreds of clippings about royal weddings, train crashes, murders, state visits, elections, film stars, exhibitions, and the opening of supermarkets and bingo halls. It was a sociologist's dream, but Deirdre waded into the dusty, yellowed remains with all the zeal of a Puritan removing the taint of Popery from the local church. None of my fictitious ruthlessness was required; in fact, I was the one who would vainly cry out as some gem flashed past on its way to Deirdre's rejection pile.

Maybe she was cleverer than I thought. She'd lured me to Brighton by representing herself as unequal to this task, and I'd fallen for the implied compliment. Perhaps what she really wanted was a witness to her scouring, someone who would know that Deirdre was, from that moment, someone to be reckoned with, an individual in her own right who stood alone with no reference to anyone else. And then again, perhaps she just wanted help with a filthy job.

When I left her in her strangely echoing house, the dust motes swirling visibly with the cat hair in the sunlight, she pressed a little packet in my hand.

“This'll mean more to you than it does to me,” she said. “It's the picture of your mother Mum always kept on the mantelpiece. I left it in the frame for you. Let me know how you get on with the Holy Terror, won't you?”

I unwrapped it in the train. It was a typical snapshot, black and white, not quite in focus. A slender girl with dark hair in a long plait stood in front of a flowerbed and laughed at the camera, holding a kitten up to her face and pointing, as if encouraging it to pose too. She wore a simple cotton dress with a white collar, ankle socks, and sandals. Her face was guileless, consumed by the happiness of the moment. I could see little of myself in her, although I recognized the shape of her mouth and the way her eyes narrowed and curved downward as she smiled. Nothing bad could ever happen to her in her sunny garden. She looked about fifteen.

I was just setting the photograph in its frame beside the gas mask case in my room that evening when Isobel called up the stairs.

“Telephone!”

It was Uncle Magnus. He made none of the customary preambles.

“I've had a rare old time,” he said, “but I've got her to agree to see you at least. Now don't you go thinking you're all set,” he added quickly before I could respond, “she's not putting out the welcome mat, and I don't know what she'll say—it would be just like her to say nothing. I told you, she's wonderful stubborn.”

“When should I come?”

“Sooner the better, if you ask me, before she has a chance to change her mind. Can you make it tomorrow?”

I said I could and would.

“I'll be seeing you then,” said Magnus. “Just don't expect too much.”

The three ladies were eagerly waiting to hear what had happened. Once again they launched immediately into plans to convey me to Hescot Park.

Late that night I phoned Neil.

“Oho,” he said, “going to beard the Minotaur, are you? Make sure you take a ball of string!”

Before I went to bed, I slipped the photograph into my purse. And although I was keyed up and my head whirred with speculation, I fell instantly into a sleep so profound I was aware of nothing until the starlings woke me next morning, shouting to one another in the top of the tree.

Once again, the stately journey in the old car, floating through a landscape blushing green and greener as leaves clotted the skeletal arms of trees and solidified the walls of hedges. Once again, the ladies deposited me at the side of the road and waved as they drove off, and I stood and felt the stillness wash back as the car sailed round the corner.

I was on my own this time. The cows had moved to another pasture, and there was no sign of life in the far fields, not even a cry from a hidden cuckoo. The rotting net still drooped from its post, and the water lay dark in the pools, trickling sluggishly over the steps, but I was in no mood for elegiac reflection and hurried through the wood and the stable block, anxious to meet Magnus.

Black clouds were massing, marching up from the southwest, swelling importantly as they came. The louring sky darkened the interior of the greenhouse, giving it a green underwater cast. Magnus sat in his office waiting for me, a shadowy bulk in the dim light.

“Right on time then,” he said. “Well, let's get this over with.”

He led me through an archway to a grassy area bordered by a row of stone cottages. They were old and charming, sunsoaked stone, slate roofs neat as fish scales. Each cottage resembled a child's drawing of a house—symmetrical windows, front door in the middle—but there was a balance and grace of proportion that spoke of an earlier age with a thoroughly adult taste for elegance, even in the humblest things, such as dwellings for labourers.

We approached the middle cottage, which had a lattice porch wreathed in the canes of a climbing rose, already covered with tiny pink-edged leaves. In front of the house stood a fruit tree just coming into bloom. On one side the tree had pink flowers, while the other half was a delicate drift of white.

I stopped to admire it as Magnus fumbled his door key out of his waistcoat pocket.

“My old dad did that, back when he and Mother married. It were a wedding gift, I suppose.”

“What are the two plants?”

“He grafted a flowering cherry onto a damson. Did a good job, didn't he? He were a dab hand at grafting, my old dad. I try my hand at it too, but you can never be sure it'll take, or last. The graft's always the weak spot, no matter how old it gets.”

I clutched at the image of the pied tree as he held the door open. Can you see why? It was the first evidence I'd come across that anyone in this new family of mine indulged sentiment, and I wished I had known this grandfather who expressed his feelings in living symbols. What a beautiful declaration of love, of confidence in the union, that brought together two disparate entities, quite perfect in themselves, and out of them created an astonishing third. It was the perfect metaphor for the ideal of marriage. Had he been disappointed when the reality fell short, for I had no doubt it had from what Magnus told me? Did the tree then become a daily reminder of the frailty of humans, of the way ideals are eroded? The lovely innocence of my grandfather's act tugged at me; in it I thought I could feel a link between generations, passing from his tree and his craft to my mother's love of poetry and her flight, then on to the importance of images in my own life, my search for patterns in the natural world and my place in them. I can tell you, I needed the reassurance of connection at that moment. I feared what was coming.

I was in a dim cave. There were stone flags underfoot, and through a door that stood ajar, I could see into a pantry with black slate shelves. What light there was came in two shafts from the windows, which weakened as they penetrated farther so that although the walls were whitewashed, they reflected little, and the recesses of the room were shadowed and mysterious.

A large table, blond with years of scrubbing, stood in the centre of the floor, with ladder-backed chairs ranged about it. A tray holding a silver teapot, milk jug, and slop basin and three china cups and saucers stood ready. The cups were square, and I wondered briefly how one drank from them. Behind the table loomed a large oak sideboard and china cupboard, a range of blue-and-white plates, and two copper pots winking against the sombre wood.

On one end wall was a fireplace with a coal fire quietly glowing in the hearth. To one side of it crouched an old leather armchair, sagging in the seat and highly polished where heads and hands and backsides had rubbed against it. A small table stood alongside, and I deduced from the clutter of pipes, ashtrays, and a large box of Swan Vestas that this was my uncle's chair. At the other side of the fire, with its back to the window and a standard lamp behind it, was a large Windsor armchair, upholstered in nubbly brown tweed. The Holy Terror filled it.

Magnus urged me to sit down, and I pulled out one of the wooden chairs and perched on the edge of the seat, keeping a substantial piece of the table in front of me. While my uncle laboured through an introduction that produced no reaction, I stole a first glance at my grandmother.

I don't know what I was expecting. Well, I do. Movies and cartoons have equipped us well to imagine villains. I expected a monster, massive and overbearing, ugly and menacing, wearing her malevolence openly on her face. Jabba the Hutt in a dress, perhaps. What I saw was so ordinary, I was disarmed. Looking back, though, that unremarkable exterior was what made my grandmother doubly terrifying.

What I saw was an old woman who looked exactly what she was: a countrywoman at the end of a long life, white-haired, toil-worn, and plump. She sat very straight in the armchair, hands clasped loosely in her lap, thick legs mummified in elastic bandages beneath opaque stockings planted solidly on a small footstool. Her hair was looped off her face in graceful snowy curves like the wings of the fantail pigeons and skewered to her head with long silver pins. Her cheeks were pink from the network of tiny veins broken in a lifetime of exposure to the elements, but the skin was soft and faintly furred like a peach.

She wore a dark blue long-sleeved dress, the bodice tucked and buttoned up to the uncompromising square neckline. An old locket, also square and heavily chased, hung around her neck. Her torso was a tightly packed cylinder, rigid under the cloth, as if her flesh had solidified over the years into something dense but slightly yielding. Rubber, perhaps. I suspected old-fashioned corsetry, pink and laced and stiff with whalebone.

The hands lying still in her wide lap were large and ugly. They spoke of days plunging sheets and clothes into laundry tubs, baking the week's bread, scrubbing the stone floors, stripping the feathers and guts from chickens, sewing long seams, waging war on flies and ants and dirt, grubbing in the earth, and clambering up ladders into the trees to pick bushels of fruit, then enduring steam and spitting pulp and boiling syrup as she put it up in jars of preserves that glowed like jewels on the cool slate shelves of her still room. Even now they showed calluses and rough, cracked skin on the fingertips, but lumpy veins squirmed across their backs, and the joints were swollen and contorted, making useless claws of the once nimble fingers.

I was so swayed by these images that I said the first thing that came into my head as I met the old lady's eyes and Magnus ground to a halt. There was a silence. Magnus was mutely urging me to fill it.

“Grandmother,” I said.

The effect was immediate. The pale eyes behind their wire-rimmed glasses were clouded and rheumy, but for a second they glistened like wet stones. A red tide swept up her throat to her face. Apprehension clutched my throat.

“What did she say? What did she call me? The sauce of it!”

Magnus weighed in hurriedly.

“Now, Mother, you know what I said. You
are
her grandmother. I'm quite sure of it. I told you all the things she has. How else could she have them, if she weren't Susanna's girl, eh? Come on now.”

She steamrollered over the voice of reason.

“Don't you tell me to come on! You're a simpleton, Magnus, daft as a brush, taken in by a chit of a girl with a silly story. Anyone can make up a story about some old pieces of rubbish!”

I felt I had to interrupt.

“Why would I want to do that? It's not as if I'm laying claim to a fortune or anything.”

“And short shrift you'd get if you were, miss,” my grandmother snorted. “You'd have to get past me first, and I'm not so easy to fool.”

“Mother,” Magnus insisted, “this is silly. She has Sarah's address on a scrap of paper I tore out of your address book and gave to Susanna myself. It fits exactly. Want to see for yourself? How in the world would she have that if she hadn't been with my poor sister when she died? Why would anyone else in the entire world be interested in that address? And how did she come to have that seed packet with Dad's writing on it? And the gas mask with our name on it? Don't tell me she found the lot in some junk shop and just decided to make the whole thing up. What in God's name would she want to do that for?”

“Blasphemer!” shouted Grandmother, but I could tell her reply was automatic, a cover for rapid thought. “She's no granddaughter of mine. How can she be?
You
don't have any children, do you? Never found a woman to take you on, as far as I know.”

“But you had two daughters as well,” I objected before Magnus could speak. But I had given her the opening she wanted.

“I have
no
daughters,” she crowed.

“How can you say that? You had two: Sarah and Susanna.”

“There were girls, oh yes, but they were no daughters of mine! Shameful hussies, the pair of them, sunk in their shameful wickedness. So how can there be grandchildren, tell me that, eh?”

“You can disown them all you want, but you can't erase them just because you didn't approve of them, and expect everybody to go along with you. They existed! Sarah died just a few weeks ago! I've talked to her daughter, Deirdre, your other granddaughter, by the way. Was I hallucinating? She looked pretty solid to me.”