The World and Other Places (11 page)

This morning I noticed there was one room missing.

In a house like mine rooms can go missing; we close up entire wings during the winter and the house does not fly at all, but sits among the trees, brooding.

In summer, alight with parties and ablaze with sun, the house is lofty, all movement and voices, hardly a thing of stone at all.

Nevertheless, it is my house in winter that I love, my house clipped and silent, and me its master.

You will understand that I do not trouble myself with covering up the furniture or shutting up the fireplaces. Others do that. Room by room the house is quieted for the winter, until only I am its beating heart. Only I, the rise and fall of its lungs, the house and I breathing together in the night.

It was my father’s house, and his father’s before him, and so on, back through history as though history were a family album. I flick through a few hundred years and come to myself, gene descended, different from the Archbishop, the Admiral, the Viceroy of India, by my clothes not my face.
My face could be theirs, it is theirs, just as this house was theirs and now is mine.

It is not necessary to prolong life; life prolongs itself. The pen they put down I pick up. The wine they bought I drink. Whose hand turns the knob? Theirs or mine?

When I walk past the family vault and glance at the shelf reserved for me, can I be sure that I do not lie there already? The line between life and death is a couple of inches at most. The width of a door that connects two rooms. The dead are, as we say, on the other side. Indeed they are, the other side of the door, and sometimes the door is open; their hand on the knob or mine?

My family have not been lucky in love. There is a strain of madness on the female side that has been cargoed in the DNA ever since 1590, when the wife of the Admiral had to be locked in the poop of the
Goodship
for six weeks for her own safety. Conditions were not of the best and she starved to death. It is not abnormal for a person to go blind before they die of starvation. They found her, filthy, crawling, dark, and so she is, still, holed down inside us, waiting to break out.

We choose carefully, but the more carefully we choose the more vicious is our disappointment. My mother, as healthy
and clean a creature as you could wish for, developed an eating disorder and preferred to take her meals in the stable with the horses. Eventually, to help her, my father let her have her own stall and she slept on straw and ate out of a leather bucket. He had a little saddle made for her so that we children could ride on her back. He called her filly and beauty and treated her as kindly as he could but she had a wild thing’s nature and what should have been soft was hoof. My sister and I grew up with a governess, who is here in the house now, using the rooms like tunnels, blinking her way against the light.

I am never sure how many servants we have, a house full or none at all. Things are done but by whom? As I walk from room to room the door I did not enter shuts softly, the fire is lit or swept, there is a tray of refreshments, but no one, no one to say ‘Thank you Sir’ or curtsey, as in my father’s day. In the summer it is quite different. We hire staff like everyone else with a large house open to the public.

But this is not summer. This is winter. The house does not enjoy being violated.

When there was money, real money, the doors were inlaid with mother of pearl and the box hedges were topiary swags. It was my great-grandfather who made a second fortune out of Public Hygiene. That is, he dug the London sewers. I have a sepia photograph of him in his frock coat
and top hat standing beside the great blind digging machine on the banks of the Thames.

That sewer, the deepest and biggest of its kind then, silted up within nine months. It had to be abandoned. There it is now, secret, hidden, a history trap. The accumulated waste of the past not dispersed and made neutral by the flow of time, but packed and waiting. Waiting for what? Human greed to bury its face in filth. You see, the sewer served some of the most expensive addresses in London. Early plumbing was a child’s affair, without the bends, traps, waste filters, vents, graded outlets, that quietly and efficiently chug away your deposits and mine. Think of straight simple pipes of clay and copper passing from the basin, where Lady Muck bends her head, into the deep sewer. Her diamond earring falls off, down, down into the patient dirt. Think of coins, rings, collar studs in silver, neck pins in gold. Think of teaspoons, medals, watch chains, the boot boy cleaning the boot hooks. Down, down, all down, with the remains of the Clos de Vougeot and the housemaid’s swill.

This house has its own private sewer system. I live above a minotaur’s maze of brown passages and green chambers. We light our cellars with methane gas piped directly from our ancestral mass. There is a faint smell, not unpleasant, but marked. It amuses me to find my way guided by the last gasp of a good dinner.

There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewerage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. What more? The hate, envy, malice, greed, stupidity and evil that lie under the floor of everything.

If I have secrets so do you.

My secret life. Secrets scurrying behind the walls like mice in the wainscotting. At night the noises are louder. I have noticed how much talk there is of openness these days which must mean there is a great deal more to hide.

When I open my house to the public I shut away the precious things. The private apartments are locked. My visitors trail their way through an impassive sanitised game of a house playing hide and seek with itself. When I welcome the paying herds at the main door I wear a suit I never wear for any other purpose. It is a very good suit and it was made for me and it is quite similar to all my suits. Nevertheless it is a costume.

What do you think? That I am a typical product of my age and my class? Perhaps I am but so are you, and don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the
letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

Hide me, hide me, quiet grave. My face turned away at last. One life is quite enough to bear. Perhaps that is why I never married.

There was someone once. Someone whose fingers curled and uncurled like a fern as she slept. She slept on the river bank where the water carried her dreams away. I stood at the weir and caught them. I had no dreams of my own.

On that beat below the house I still see her, her hair down and flowing like the river, her eyes, water-blue. She glistened and shone, my hands were wet, empty and wet, with only the skin of her, her dress left behind.

Things to hide. The archive is never complete. Certain photographs are destroyed. Certain information is withheld.

My name is Samuel Wisbech. I am fifty-three. I live in the county of Dorset, England, and have done for three hundred and thirty years. We did some service to Elizabeth the First. That Queen gave us lands and buildings which were for a long time disputed. They are disputed again, this time by some gentlemen from the Tax Office.

Before we were landed we were at sea. All at sea every one of us, Flemish merchants who settled in London and ran our ships up and down the accommodating Thames.

In those days scores were settled with a knife at night. My family were murderers. Most families were. It was difficult to run a business without killing someone now and then. It still is, but we are more civilised. We don’t take their lives, we take their livelihoods.

I prefer the more direct method. Don’t turn away. It’s just a joke. Just a joke.

You will notice that the little preamble I give my visitors is not necessarily well received. Some of them would like to leave at once and I enjoy the visible agony of mind fought out between their distaste and the fact that they have parted with £10 entrance money including tea.

The tea wins. It is waiting for them, holding out a promise of the future where all is spice buns and warmth. I am in the past with the murderers. I am a figure already receding down a corridor marked ‘
PRIVATE
.’

PRIVATE
. That’s the part they really want, those visitors of mine. There’s always someone ready to step silently backwards into the shadows. They duck under the ropes as though the house were a boxing ring. Who is it in the Red Corner?
Me, always me, waiting for them politely. A house like this, people don’t understand, a house like this is alive. They think it’s closed circuit television. No, no, it’s the house itself.

The other day the telephone rang and I answered it myself. I had to inform the caller that the house was not open until April. Enthusiastic by race, American, she said, ‘No problem.’ I took that to mean she would book herself on the first tour of the season. She took it to mean she would arrive one evening, face lively, cheque blank.

I answered the door myself. I cannot seem to find any servants at all at the moment. I answered the door. I am a gentleman. I showed her in and poured her a drink. It was not so very difficult. Perhaps I am too much alone.

My sentences were a little stilted, formal. I tried to say, ‘My name is Samuel Wisbech. I am fifty-three …’ but she held up her hand. She had heard it already, last summer on a tour, wouldn’t I just talk to her, be myself?

Myself? Itself? The house, me, me the house. My voice sounds like the wind at the window. My skin is the texture of flaking plaster. I am upholstered like an old man, an old house, there is decay on us both.

What shall I say? The words here are out of date, we have never replaced them, there is no need of speech when
the stones cry out. The house and I understand each other and there is no one else. I think the servants must have left long ago.

I watched my visitor taking in the room. I used her eyes. Perhaps it does look odd, the furniture cowering under dustsheets, the paintings taped over with brown paper. I did explain that we were not open.

She asked me to show her over the place, as though she were looking for a mortgage and I were an estate agent. Her voice was as bright as cut glass. She stood up on those heels of hers and we set off, the sound of her tapping like a hammer at my head, myself passing as silent as ever.

‘There’s plenty of work for you to do before opening day,’ she said, as another door fell from its hinges.

‘These rooms are private,’ I said.

‘But there are so many of them.’

I smiled. I was turned away from her but I smiled. The secret places pile one on top of the other like bodies in an open grave.

I showed her the revolving fireplaces, the priest’s hole, the trap door, the dungeon. I showed her the kitchen and the wheel where the beagle was chained to tread endlessly and turn the spit for roasts.

‘How barbaric,’ she said. I nodded. Myself, I hardly eat at all these days.

‘Here’s the dog,’ I said, opening a cupboard. A heap of dust fell out, a collar somewhere in the middle of it, worn, chewed, with a lead medallion,
REX
.

My visitor fainted. I thought she would.

Night came and with it the fog. The house was held in the fog’s long embrace. I half carried, half dragged my visitor back towards the fire, whispering to her, stroking her hair. I told her these stories and many more. The stories I had learned from the house.

As I talked it seemed to me that the house itself was craning inwards to listen. Then I knew it was the house speaking. My lips flapped uselessly. I sat in the lap of the house. The house had its arms round me. I was safe.

April the first. Opening Day. The garden is an orchestra of flowers; strings of wild clematis, tulip flutes, a timpani of lily pads on the skin of the pond, and the raised horns of the daffodils blaring light. Spring is so noisy.

I am pleased. Pleased with the crowd at the door and the new roof for the west wing. My American visitor paid for that. We talk almost every night. She loves the place. She loves the place so much she will never leave. I have let her have mother’s room. Did I mention mother’s room?

My mother’s room is not part of the tour. It is preserved exactly as she left it, in 1921. When she entered the stable. She was bound to keep it as my grandmother had left it, when she died in 1895. The heavy curtains, the ink well, the blotter, yes the blotter with its strange inverted message, ‘I am going mad.’ There is something theatrical about the female sex.

I took my visitor there on the night she arrived. I thought it unwise for her to attempt to leave in the fog. I made her as comfortable as I could, although the bed was musty and had a stain in it. I told her to ring the bell if she wanted anything. From my own quarters I heard the bell’s dull clapper all night. I would speak to the servants if I could find them.

I took her breakfast the following day. I took her lunch. I thought it unwise for her to leave. We talked that night and many others, she said less and less. It is something to do with the house.