scattered with natural shards of silver that made them sparkle as bright and vivacious and hypnotic as the girl herself. But now they’re faded to a weak gray-blue, dulled by the life they’ve seen.
“Is anyone I know left in the village?” she asks finally.
“No, I don’t think so. Michael’s still here of course, still in the Stables.”
“Well, he obviously doesn’t do the gardening,” she says, referring to the mass of tangled undergrowth and wild jungle that our once manicured terraces and meadows had become.
“No. He hires out those big tents in the peach houses for parties and he’s made a fortune.”
“He bought our glasshouses?”
“Years ago, with the Stables and the bit of land by the lower spinney. He stores the marquees in them.” Vivien’s eyes are shut, the lids flicker restlessly as she listens. “A few years ago he offered to buy this house and let me live in the Stables.”
She opens her eyes quickly, bright thoughts rousing a remnant sparkle. “Swap with the gardener, darling? What is the world coming to?” She laughs. “Would you have to do the gardening too?”
I tell her that Charlotte Davis’s daughter, Eileen, is now living in Willow Cottage. Michael told me she came back a few years ago, after her mother died. “I haven’t seen her, though. Do you remember the Davises?” I ask.
“Yes, of course,” she says, as she props up her head on an elbow. “Mrs. Davis and her beloved carthorses. What were their names?”
“Alice and Rebecca.”
“Alice and Rebecca.” She sighs. “That’s right. Your tea’s gone cold, darling.”
“Never mind,” I reply ruefully—but, to tell you the truth, I’d never have drunk it. It’s far too milky and it’s been spilt on the saucer. My tea needs to be the exact mix of strength and color, and there’s a definite
Chapter 7
Vivien leaves my bedroom and I start the routine that gets me up and dressed. Then I take the cup and saucer to my bathroom and pour the cold tea into the washbasin. I manage to tip it directly down the plug hole without getting a drop on the white porcelain, and I feel satisfied to have spared myself the bother of rinsing it.
When I get down to the kitchen Vivien’s not there, but a breakfast place has been laid for me at the table, with a couple of pieces of cold toast propped up against the sugar bowl. The butter and jam are out, and there’s an egg in an eggcup with the egg toppers by its side. Is this what Vivien had for breakfast? I go to the cupboard to get my cornflakes and a bowl, but even as I sit down I’m not the least bit hungry.
I watch Simon sleeping silently on a pillow in front of the dresser and wonder where she is. She’s in the house, I know, because if she’d gone out I would have heard the door. She’s had her breakfast and now she’s gone off somewhere in the house. Even the birds outside stop singing for a moment to let me listen. Silence.
This house is more than thirty thousand square feet, including the cellars and the attic rooms. My parents were the first to trim the living space by gradually closing off rooms they didn’t use. They shut off most of the north wing when we were still children and then the rest of that wing when Vera finally vacated it in death. Later, when there was only me, I closed off the rest of the rooms except the ones I still use—the kitchen, library, study, my bedroom and bathroom—and the hall and landing that connect them all. Forty-seven years ago I shut the doors and never went back, not to see the state of their decay and not when Bobby cleared them of their furniture and clutter. I didn’t want to dwell on the past—best left alone undisturbed in the dust, sealed up, not to be rifled through. Live for today, I always say. It’s dangerous to throw open the past. The deal with Bobby was he’d clear the lot and whatever he couldn’t sell he’d get rid of to save me going through it myself.
As each of Bobby’s trucks went down the drive I felt the burden of history lighten and float away after it. I’d watch it until it was well out of sight, taking with it not just our childhood and my life but one and a half centuries of the Bulburrow epoch. It was delightfully purgative. It’s difficult for me to explain to you why, to put it into words. All I can say is that it feels reassuring to know that the rooms are empty, and if I don’t see them again, I won’t have to worry about what’s happening in them, the dust and the dirt and the gradual decline. Perhaps it’s that, on one hand, I couldn’t stand to see their clutter, but on the other, I don’t want to remember them any other way. Now it’s strange, disconcerting even, to know Vivien is somewhere deep within the bowels of the house, infecting it.
I get up from the table and move to the hall door. I’m curious—I’ll admit I’m almost frantic—to know where she’s gone and what she’s doing. Perhaps I could get some bearing on where she is by listening intently from certain parts of the hall. Bulburrow is a house of echoes, more so since it’s been emptied of furniture. Sound travels through the air spaces—the beating of the weather on one side, a squeaking door on the other—so maybe I’ll be able to hear the sounds of Vivien too. I need a prop. I return to the table and pour some milk into a glass, even though I don’t actually drink milk, and then, glass in hand, I venture out into the hall. I know it’s rude and it’s none of my business and I really ought to stop myself getting fixated on Vivien’s whereabouts, but I hope you understand that it’s so new to me, so different, to have someone else here that I just can’t help myself. Besides, there’s no harm done.
I’m standing in the shadow of the kitchen doorway, looking out into the hall. Jake the pig-head smiles high up on the wall above me. Opposite me is the library, to my right the cellar door and then, farther along, the great curved oak stairs begin their gentle ascent. Off the first, wide tread there’s a door to the little study behind the kitchen.
I walk straight ahead, as smoothly as my enfeebled legs allow me, passing the porch on my left and stopping in the wide architrave of the library door. I swap my glass to the other hand, aware of the fatigue in my fingers, which have been squeezing it too tight, and ready it to put up to my lips if Vivien were to appear from the library or the study, or at the top of the stairs. I put my head to the door—no sound—and then I move, crablike, along the edge of the hall wall, pausing at intervals to put the glass near my mouth and listen, but there’s not a sound. I pass the stairs that run down the opposite wall and stop by the drawing-room door. I listen again. Nothing. Farther along there’s another door, which leads to a different part of the house—the orangery, loggia, potting shed and out to the courtyard behind. It’s another area that’s off-limits, as it were. Could she have gone down there? What could she want there?
Right here and now it comes to me, with sudden understanding, that Vivien is
Then I hear her. Footsteps, far away and above me, and then Vivien coughing. From here, I can see up the stairwell to the vaulted ceiling above, and beside it the vast stained-glass window that only comes to life with the evening sun. As I creep up the stairs I hear the footsteps again, and by the halfway landing I know she’s in the attic. There are two ways up to the attic. The obvious one is via the spiral staircase behind a door off the main landing, but between you and me, I think Vivien must have secretly snuck up the back stairs by the pantry or I’d have heard her.
In fact it’s not an attic at all, it’s the second floor, but with so many rooms on the first floor for accommodation, it’s always been called the attic and is entirely given over to moths. Three large “museum” rooms house the famous collections my intrepid ancestors amassed from around the world, all displayed in highly polished Brady cabinets. Then there are the larva rooms, hibernating cages, pupation troughs, net-lined emergence rooms, dry rooms, damp rooms, storerooms, a vast private library, the laboratory and a little workshop where Clive cobbled together his own boxes and breeding houses from crates and ammunition cases, jars and biscuit tins. I hadn’t let Bobby into the attic so nothing’s been removed.
But what’s Vivien doing there? She’s never been interested in the moths. This was something I never fully realized until the summer we were expelled.
Maud had asked us to seal her jams, ready for the harvest festival. Usually it was one of our favorite
