The Song House (5 page)

Maggie searches for some conciliatory words. Finding nothing
to stem his self-pity, she simply looks at him.

I’ll let you into a secret, he says, My mind these days, it’s a
runaway train. One minute I’m doing something ordinary –
opening a tin of tomatoes or writing a memo – or, or listening
to music – and the next, I’m thirty, forty years away from what
I’m doing. As if I’ve been invaded. And I have to find some
way to control it. Contain it. I want to bottle the memory, I
want to pull the cork out and be back in that same time. That
shining time. It might be hard for you to understand now, but
one day, you will.

She doesn’t know if she understands, but she knows there’s no
way to bottle a moment and keep it as it was; there’s too much
stale air trapped between the memory and the cork. Best to
let it breathe, she thinks, but doesn’t say.

So I have to get it right. And that— he gestures to the wastepaper
bin – That is not how I wish to relive my life. I want
the good stuff. I’ve read plenty of memoirs, Maggie, politicians
and film stars and suchlike. And they’re interesting – not like
that drivel.

That’s because they’re ghostwritten, she says, You don’t think
celebrities spend their days dictating their life stories, do you?
They tell them to other people, and then the writer goes away
and does the research. Why don’t we try it? You tell me your
memories and then I’ll write them up. I’ll write a story for
your story. I’ll be your ghostwriter.

As she speaks, Kenneth moves from behind the desk and wanders
back to the window. Maggie doesn’t know if he’s heard
her.

Will they still be my memories, he says, finally, If you’re
writing them?

I’m a very good listener, she says.

And you’ll be my interpreter, he says, catching air in his fist,
That’s what you said?

That’s right, agrees Maggie, not correcting him, You see,
we’re both good listeners.

Maggie opens the notebook at the front, weighting it with her
cup of tea. She switches on the electric typewriter, which
makes a series of buzzing protests, and feeds a piece of paper
into the slot at the back. The machine seizes it from her grip
and winds it round the platen. Click, whirr, silence.

ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
, she types. She
pauses, looks around her. The prefect’s office under the main
stairs is no more than an angular cupboard: just enough space
for a shelf, a chair, and a desk. This last is a long piece of oak
running the length of the wall. Typewriter, paper, correction
fluid. Maggie picks up the bottle and shakes it. Hearing
nothing, she twists the top off: the fluid has long ago become
solid, and now she sees only dried flakes of white on her fingers.
She sniffs them for the faint scent of solvent.

All creatures, she says, staring at the page, All creatures great
and small.

Above her is a casement window, glowing with leaded lights:
blue diamonds in each corner and a circular motif in the centre
depicting a woman in profile. She knows it’s not the Virgin
Mary; the robe is rose pink, and there’s no halo. Maggie reaches
up and releases the latch, pushing the window wide. Outside
is the entrance, a gravel drive cut into a sloping lawn. Beyond
lie the rhododendron bushes, their leaves dark and glossy, the
space underneath them a deep spill of shadow. Nothing will
grow under there. She feels, but cannot see, the river running
in a black ribbon at the edge of the estate. Maggie breathes in
the soft evening air and the sweeter tang of the honeysuckle
growing up the wall. Wood pigeons throb out their song.
Resurrect his time, she tells herself, and then your own. But
she falters, her hands poised over the typewriter keys. It makes
such a racket, the machine. Every key she strikes results in a
flurry of noise. She takes up the pen, lifts her cup from the
notebook, and turns to the pages at the back.

They spend most of the summer down by the river. My mother
sits a little way off from the bank, so she can barely see the
water. Ed loves it, though; he jumps in and out, in and out,
shaking the droplets off his body like a happy dog.

If she had said nothing, the businessmen would still be
fishing here, and she wouldn’t have to spend so much time
near the water. But Nell hasn’t learned about consequences
yet; there is talk in the papers about the butterfly effect, but
she doesn’t understand what butterflies have to do with CND
or flood or famine: she simply wanted the fishing to stop. After
the man had put his hand on the glass and looked in, she told
Ed about it, how it frightened her. She told him about the
names they called her.

The day before the men’s next visit, Ed went to the iron-monger’s
shop in the market place. He bought two industrial-sized canisters of liquid soap and a long length of rubber
hose, which he attached to the outlet from the bath. Early the
next morning, he set to work, snaking the hose through
the high grass, up to the corner of the field and down through
the nettles at the far bank where he settled it at the river’s edge.
He filled the bath with soap and water, then emptied it, filled
and emptied it, leaning out of the little window to see how
the river was looking. He said it was like watching a cloudy
sky go by. Nell was worried about the fish, whether it would
kill them, but Ed just laughed at her.

There are no fish in that river, you dimwit, except when
the river man stocks it. For when the
chaps
come down from
town, he said, in a languid, mimicking drawl. In his ordinary
voice he added,

Reckon that should buy us some peace for a while.

Nell is not sophisticated, but she’s not stupid, despite what Ed
thinks. She has simple ways – an innocent, Cindy calls her; a
child of nature, says Leon – and she does have a childlike quality
that certain types of men find attractive, and certain women
think is an act to trap such men. But she’s not thick. She knows
what she likes.

She likes it when the cow parsley grows tall and the only
thing she can see at the bottom of the garden is a mass of
nodding white. Then mullein, willowherb, clumps of elephantine
dock, all crowding together as if to shield her from the
river beyond. She knows the names of the plants and herbs
that grow in the hedgerows around the house; to her library
of fairy tales she adds books of natural remedies, traditional
cures, none of which she ever considers using. She reads avidly.
She is
not
thick.

Ed keeps busy, devising a plan to make paintings from the
colours of the earth. He’s bored with the art scene and its labels;
tired of the conceptual, of the minimal, the performance; fed
up to the back teeth of fluxus and navigus and all the other
us-es; he won’t be pigeonholed. He tells anyone who will listen:
his art transcends all that; it is transcendental. It’s a transcendental-active-nature vibe. He calls the movement Trans-Act
and declares himself the sole practitioner of the group.

Can you have a group of one? asks Nell, innocently snipping
the heads off a bunch of dandelions.

We used to call them piss-the-beds, he says, nodding at the
weeds, But you’d
know
that.

Ed’s art is indeed very active. He digs holes in the garden,
squatting over them naked, pouring in water and swirling it to
mud with a stick. Finding a new use for his mallet, he pounds
up nettles and berries and throws them into the mix. Soon,
the garden is pocked with muddy hollows, so to venture out
at night is to risk a broken ankle. Inside the cottage a collection
of jam jars clutters the draining board and kitchen table,
in shades of green and brown, algaeous and putrefying. After
a while, the jars give off the same stench as the river. Ed won’t
allow Nell to throw them away; he paints pictures of rainbows
in these hues, on the walls and occasionally on canvas, every
one of which dries to a dull khaki brown.

My mother is productive too; she makes dreamcatchers,
which sell well in the craft shop in town. She finds the feathers
in the neighbouring fields, striped golden-brown and shiny
blue-black ones, tiny white chick down clinging to the brambles
on the verge outside the cottage. She uses the feathers
sparingly, even though they’re not hard to find; sticky clusters
of them lie on the main road at the end of the lane, buzzing
with flies. She leaves these alone.

Ed’s cousin Leon comes to live with them. His band is
finished, he says, the guys have had musical differences. He
brings his tabla and a rucksack and a case of whisky, and
overnight, Ed’s Trans-Act movement comes to an end; he and
Leon decide to form a duo. They sing to the tall grass, to the
birds, to Nell and Cindy; and they swim in the river, drink
whisky, roll six-skin joints that leave them parched and motionless
under the shade of the trees. The evenings are long. Leon
patters accompaniment on his drums, while Ed composes
songs, inventing chords on his guitar. He calls to Nell to write
his lyrics down, quick! before he forgets them. Nell is never
still at this time. She treks in and out of the cottage, bringing
fish-finger sandwiches, charred toast disguised with baked
beans, anything left over in the pantry that she might pass off
as edible.

The men like to sleep out in the open, like cowboys; it’s
not warm, and most nights they need to light a fire. When
they’ve used up the stock of logs in the shed, they saw branches
from the trees that border the property. Nell realizes she can
be seen from the road when, one day, the water bailiff and the
boy pass by and shout hello.

It gets too cold, or the wood they’ve cut is too green to
burn; whatever the reason, they move back indoors. Now Nell
can’t listen to her records at night, because they want to sing
– to rehearse – and cannot be disturbed by her noise. Gong
and America replace Joni Mitchell and Carole King. The smell
of Ed snoring next to her is the sweet and sour of hash and
whisky.

Leon takes to sleeping on the couch in the living room
under an Indian blanket. When Nell gets up to make breakfast
in the kitchen, she can see him, wrapped up like a mummy,
through the gaping hole in the wall. The improvements Ed has
started don’t progress: in the daytime, the hole becomes a
serving hatch; in the evenings, they light the candles stuck onto
the exposed brick ledge, and it becomes a kind of altar. When
Ed peers through it, he looks to her like Christ bestowing a
blessing. Nell’s not unhappy: she has Ed and Leon, and sometimes
Cindy, for company, and soon she’ll have me, although
she doesn’t know it yet. Summer lags into autumn.

Maggie reads through what she’s written: her handwriting, neat
and right-leaning, looks like soldiers on the march. She takes
pleasure in imagining her mother’s past, and thus far, it’s been
easy: tales told and retold by Nell, at bedtime, to help them
both sleep. It was a funny and sometimes strange amusement
for Maggie – at only five years old an attentive listener – but
welcome relief from the silence and the dark. Through the
history Nell created, they could both visualize a life only one
of them knew. It avoided talk about the one they shared.

She turns to the typewriter and the heading –
ALL THINGS
BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
– at the top of the page. Beneath
it, her fingers on the keys crash out just two lines:

He gave us eyes to see them
And lips that we might tell.

They spend the evening together again. Maggie hadn’t intended
it. After writing up the music notes, she wanted to be away from
Earl House for a while. She caught the bus into town and bought
food at the supermarket: pasta and tomatoes and tinned tuna;
easy, thoughtless stuff. She treated herself to a bottle of Fleurie,
planning a night in front of the snowy television screen. Just
her and the remote control and the wine. But on her return,
she found a note had been slipped under the door: Kenneth’s
writing, looping letters in a stylized, old-fashioned hand,
requesting the pleasure of her company. It ended with a large
flourish for the K. Underneath his signature he’d added, almost
as a plea, ‘Come and try my latest concoction!’