Her mother pushed the tall, old and rusty ironwork gate, and pushed herself and Susan through it.
“Why, Mummy – She doesn’t want us here – she doesn’t like us.”
“No,” said Susan’s mother, defeated after all, stopping dead, just over the border, there under the weight of cascading evergreens, the overgrown drive running away and away towards the orange pumpkin that was the witch’s house.
“Why then?”
“You know why.”
“I don’t.”
“She’s your grandmother.”
The housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, opened the door. Danvers wasn’t really her name. Susan’s mother had coined it for her from the character in the book by Daphne du Maurier.
Mrs Danvers was very thin and hard of frame. She seemed made of iron, and then clothed to hide it, just her head and neck and hands, and sometimes her lower arms and calves, if visible, gone over with a flesh substituting material like sallow creased rayon. She was old, over forty. (Susan’s mother, also over forty, seemed somehow not old, her few facial lines invisible, her skin and make-up flawless, her hair, now blonde, now black, her eyes large and grey.) But Mrs Danvers had got this all wrong and in reverse, black eyes and grey permed hair.
“She’s been waiting,” said Mrs Danvers.
“Yes,” said Susan’s mother, shortly.
The hall was very wide, much wider even than in the house where the flats were. A stained glass panel in the door, once it shut, threw jade and crimson shapes along the old cracked lino which was, apparently, ‘dangerous’.
Susan stepped on each of these shapes, to see the colour seep instantly up through her feet and appear instead on the top of her disappointing flat shoes.
But her mother had left Susan.
She had walked forward briskly, into one of the great rooms which opened to one side of the wide hall. This she crossed, and went through another door and vanished into another room.
Mrs Danvers too had moved off. Susan left the shapes and ran after her mother, across two rooms or three, down a step at one or two of the doorways, into a sunken part of the house.
A green-rain light flooded the rooms here, from the bay trees and conifers pressed close to the sides of the house. The old furniture caught the green reflections, shining in a watery way.
“I’m sorry we’re late, Mother. I had to dash out to the shop before twelve, everything was hung up.”
Susan was not really aware of the irony of this scene, so familiar, not only from repetition, but from similar scenes of her own: the daughter standing before the mother, making lame excuses.
Susan’s mother had a mother, but this did not become apparent to Susan until years after. Susan’s mother was simply performing an unavoidable ritual before Susan’s grandmother – who must always be called Grandmother, not ‘gran’, ‘nan’ or any other degrading counterfeit.
The grandmother sat in a window, where a big pot contained a plant with strange scarlet leaves, which Susan had long ago christened Martian Rhubarb.
The grandmother did not turn her head. Her profile stood there against the greened glass like something stamped into a coin.
Mrs Danvers was old, but the grandmother had passed on into another country. She was no longer human. Which gave her, it seemed, inordinate powers.
“Well,” said Susan’s mother, “how have you been?”
“She steals from me,” said the grandmother.
“No she doesn’t,” said Susan’s mother.
“How would you know? You’re never here.”
“I am here now.”
“Once a fortnight.”
“Once a week, Mother. Sometimes more often. But I have a job, Mother, and a child, and I can’t always –” the words were bitten out, “do exactly as I want with any spare time I might have.”
“Butter,” said the grandmother.
“What do you mean, butter? She steals butter?”
“Food. All types of food. What can I do? I have to rely on the woman.”
Susan’s mother sighed, opened her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes.
“Yes, you may smoke.”
“Thank you.”
Mrs Danvers came back into the room. On a tray she bore two glasses of a pale dry sherry, and one of fizzy lemonade, a dish of nuts and an ashtray. The ashtray she placed at once by the chair of Susan’s mother.
“Thank you, Mrs Marks.” Marks was Mrs Danvers’ real name. But not really, no, never.
Susan took the lemonade, and sat in a chair drinking it like a parched alcoholic. She knew better than to wander about the room. She must stay still, as must her mother, all attention fixed on the old woman.
If Mrs Marks-Danvers was made of iron and a partial covering of rayon, from what substance had the grandmother been created? Her thinness was so acute, every bone in her body had been accentuated, distorted. Her skin was folded and refolded, sewn down in tense appliquéd lines. Her skin was brown, like that of someone tanned, or from a foreign country. Her eyes – her eyes disturbed Susan – they were full of something but not colour. Perhaps they had been grey once, like her mother’s.
Mrs Danvers had gone.
“She takes the sherry, too. And the wine. You’d notice, if you stayed for lunch or dinner, that she fills the bottles up with water. Tap water I may add. How is your sherry? No, don’t say it’s all right, Anne, I know quite well it’s watered down.”
“Mother, I’m sure it isn’t.”
“Yes, you’re sure of everything, Anne.”
“Have it your own way,” said Susan’s mother, Anne.
“Have it my own way? I have nothing my own way.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Look at me. What do I have my own way?”
“You have this house, you’re well looked after –”
The grandmother broke in here with her usual curt melodramatic laugh. “Oh yes. Oh yes. Very well.”
“Mother, what am I supposed to do? What can
