The Realms of Gold (42 page)

‘My sister Connie, June 5, 1908,' said the inscription, in Ted's script. So that was Connie. (Connie, dead like a dog in a ditch, with her stomach full of paper.)

Janet had asked Heather if she could have the photo, and had taken it home with her. It seemed a kind of talisman. It proved that Connie Ollerenshaw wasn't an old lunatic, a dirty old tramp, a vicious recluse, at all: she was a handsome young woman looking destiny coldly in the eye.

A week or two later, she'd taken it out and showed it to her mother and father, and her Uncle Alec, and her cousin Flo, and her Auntie Maureen, thinking they would say something at least of interest about it. And they did. They embarked on a long session of abuse about Ted, Ted's wife, Con, Ted's father, Eel Cottage, a wardrobe that had belonged to Ted's mother, Con's cottage, and various other ill-connected topics. Janet had listened, half-bored, half-fascinated. Then she asked them if any of them had ever seen Connie Ollerenshaw. Whereupon they all pursed their lips and shook their heads (Maureen
was
a common woman, thought Janet, and Flo was just as bad, the way she let her baby suck a dummy smeared with syrup was really the end, and so were her earrings, especially with that pink jumper)—and all denied Great-Aunt Con, with the exception of her father, Great-Aunt Con's cousin, who, fat and weak, recovering from his stroke, a privileged invalid, owned up to having known her quite well in the old days.

‘But does she live quite alone, now?' she said. ‘Don't any of you ever go and see her?'

‘Eh, there's no point,' said her mother. ‘She's mad. Mad as a hatter. She sees no one.'

‘She'd chase you from the door,' said Alec, and laughed with grim pleasure in the thought.

‘What'll happen when she gets old?'

‘What happens to anyone when they get old?' said her father. ‘They die, don't they?'

Janet was rather glad, subsequently, that social workers and investigating journalists had not overheard this interchange.

The next week, she set off herself to visit Great-Aunt Con. (She wasn't really her great-aunt at all of course—if she was anyone's great-aunt, she belonged to Ted's son's children, if he had any, but they probably didn't even know she existed, it was so long since Ted's son had left the district.) She thought to herself, it will make a nice walk, for myself and the baby. She walked long distances, in those days, having nothing better to do. She said to herself, perhaps she will like to see the baby. Some primitive edict of some long disrupted kinship network she was obeying, as she boarded the bus with her baby and folding pram, and asked for a ticket to Barton.

Con's cottage was two miles' walk from Barton. It was spring, it was fine and warm and the air, after the cold winter, met her cheeks mildly. The baby slept. The hedges were in bud and fluttering with birds, in the hedge bottoms there were celandines and coltsfoot and tiny white stars of chickweed. Loneliness possessed her sweetly like a reassuring desolation. The grass was company, the birds were company. It was a pretty corner of country, less flat and dull than the rest of the county, with hedges and copses, and a little dell, where she had often come as a small child, the most famous place for bluebells in the neighbourhood, and only a few miles from Tockley, in the least built-up direction. If things were like this, she thought, I could perhaps live alone forever. Like Con.

The track was muddy, little used by vehicles, though there were wheel marks and hoof marks in the spring mud that bordered it. She wondered where Aunt Con bought her food. At the next village? From the farm next door? Did she grow her own? There was a little all-purpose shop a mile further on, where the track met the next main road: it served a cluster of cottages, and perhaps also Great-Aunt Constance.

She had brought her a box of chocolates, she didn't quite know why. It lay on the end of the pram, on the blue pram rug. Black Magic.

A fat black bird swooped in front of her, and into the hedge, like a familiar. And there was the cottage, behind the trees. She glimpsed its red roof.

As she approached the path, she began to falter. The cottage looked inaccessible. Surely nobody could have been down the path for years. Surely Con must be dead, thought Janet, three months before she died in fact.

The air of dereliction increased as one grew nearer. Nettles and other weeds struggled in the undergrowth, tall wild bushes, hawthorn and elder, tangled and struggled overhead. The path was deep in mud, wet and undrained. Janet's town shoes squelched and sank into it, the light pram wheels left ruts. There were signs that the borders had once been cultivated—a few large stones stood around, as though by deliberation, grey and white, and one of them was strewn with the broken shells of snails, a thrush's anvil. From an overturned stone pot struggling clematis straggled dry and wild like an old woman's hair. A few purple flowers of honesty huddled and blossomed in the dark secret wetness. And strangest of all, a hawthorn tree which had fallen over, half-dead and rotten, soughing and waving in decline, athwart the path, still budded and blossomed, as though undeterred by death, the leaves still breaking from it in its grave.

It was hard to see the cottage, the path was so densely overgrown. She had heard it was a large one, and so it was, she saw, as she fought her way through the tangles and over the bumps. It was large, and must once have been well cared for, for there were vestigial signs of flower beds, a garden seat, a shed, stone pots and urns. But all was overgrown, the shed was roofless and windowless, the pots were sinking into the green and yellow tendrils of the grass, the roses were like trees, fierce and thorny, and brambles ramped wildly and savagely up to the front door. The one-time lawn was long and seeded, like a field. The windows of the cottage were boarded up, with planks and corrugated iron, except for one window on the ground floor. Plants stretched their creepers and suckers everywhere, creeping into crevices, picking at the stones.

Janet nearly gave up and went back, and a prophetic vision of Con's corpse flashed across her mind. But she was not a coward, she told herself, she had not come all this way for nothing. And there was something in her that loved the place. It was fierce and lonely, it was defiant. She liked it. And there, suddenly, stood her Great-Aunt Con, her face looming pale at the only window, the only cracked window.

She certainly looked like a witch. Her hair was white, her nose was hooked, and she shook her fist at Janet and the pram. She shook her fist threateningly. Janet could hear a dog barking. Janet advanced, across the lush, damp tangled lawn. She stopped, about two yards from the window. The old woman was shaking a stick now, and making it clear, by unmistakable gestures, that she would set the dog on Janet if Janet did not leave. ‘Great-Aunt Con,' called Janet, ‘Great-Aunt Con. I'm Janet. Janet Ollerenshaw.'

The old woman stopped shaking her fist and stick, and cupped her hand over her ear, then she shook her head. She was deaf, she indicated.

The two of them stared at one another. A bird sang. And Janet picked up the box of chocolates, and advanced to the window sill and put it down. The old woman watched intently, with seeming approval. Janet retreated, indeed ran back to the pram, suddenly overcome with terror, and was about to retreat, when she looked back and saw Great-Aunt Con beckoning and gesturing at her. She didn't want to go back, she didn't dare. She shook her head, and turned again, but this time Aunt Con rapped on the window pane with her stick. Janet faced her. Nothing would have induced her to go into the house. She knew it must smell, it must be in the last stages of decay, and she was fastidious. Nature could go wild, but not houses. She wanted to be back in her own polished tiled hygienic box. But the old woman, her blood relation, was still rapping and waving. What did she want with the baby? Did she want to see it? It would be ill luck, surely, to let her set eyes on the baby, she might wish it evil, she might cast a spell. Janet thought of those cracked grey shells in the snails' graveyard. Sacrifices, on a small altar. Witches in the old days sucked the blood of infants and pounded their bones in mortars, pounded them into paste. What could that old woman think about all day?

Janet turned to go, trying to keep calm. And as soon as she had turned away, it suddenly seemed to her that it was very silly, to be at all afraid. She wasn't a witch, the old woman, she was Connie Ollerenshaw, touched in the head, who liked to live alone. And Janet turned again, the last time, human, and saw the grey face mooning through the small dirty panes, and she picked up her baby so that Great-Aunt Con could see him. Con stopped rapping, and stared. Hugh slept on, wrapped in his baby blanket. A curious family group. There seemed no point in doing anything more, once Con had seen the baby—the sight of him seemed to satisfy her—so Janet waved, with an appearance of bravery, and set off back down the path, to the track and the bus stop and her own tidy house. The old woman did not wave back. Her attention was now turned to the box of chocolates lying on the window sill.

Janet felt rather pleased with herself, as she walked down the path. She had done her duty, she had visited her great-aunt, and she had got away free. Strange that she had wanted to see the baby, but now that Janet thought about it, hadn't there been some talk once about Con herself and a baby? Perhaps that was what had driven her mad—a dead baby, a lost baby, a lost love. It was possible, but who now would ever know? Secrets remain secret, they become even more secret with the passage of time, with the shame of anxious relatives, and the gossip of neighbours. Perhaps Con herself couldn't remember what had thus cut her off from the dull ditch-like flow of Ollerenshaw normality. The skeleton would never rattle from its cupboard. And as for Janet, she had bought herself off, she had offered a bribe of chocolates, and it had been accepted. She had placated an ancient spirit, a spirit of blood.

On the way down the drive, she noticed something that she found at first frightening, then reassuring. Hanging from the low branches of the bushes were other little offerings, dangling from bits of string. They looked like sacrifices in some pagan rite of propitiation, but on closer inspection they proved to be bits of bacon fat, a piece of coconut, a piece of cheese rind. Great-Aunt Con liked to feed the birds. And she was well-organized enough to get hold of cheese and nuts and bacon, she didn't live on dandelions and nettles after all.

Feeling much better, Janet walked back to the bus stop. She would never tell anyone about this visit, she resolved. She would keep it to herself.

 

‘Do you mean to say, Mrs Bird,' asked Ronnie Bennett, interviewer, before a potential audience of some million people, ‘that you thought she would attack you and the baby if you went any nearer? An old woman of eighty-eight?'

‘She had a dog,' said Janet, firmly, trying to avoid the red inquisitorial eye of the camera.

‘And you thought,' said Ronnie Bennett, with manifest disbelief, ‘that she would set the
dog
on you?'

‘I felt she didn't want to see me,' said Janet. ‘Or rather, I felt she didn't mind
seeing
me, but she didn't want to get any nearer.'

‘And didn't you think to
tell
anybody about the conditions you found at Mays Cottage?'

‘No, I didn't. Anyway, why should I have done? The Armstrongs must have known, they were always trying to get that cottage off her, or so I hear. And they lived much nearer than me.'

‘But didn't you think it was your duty, as a relation, to intervene?'

‘No, I didn't,' said Janet Bird. ‘I think people should mind their own business, that's what I think.'

 

Although Janet Bird took the line that skeletons should stay in their cupboards, others, of course, did not, as we have seen. Constance's really caused quite a lot of trouble. It made Janet Bird, her mother and father, James Armstrong and his wife, a social worker or two, and the local vicar, and Sir Frank Ollerenshaw, appear in a most unfavourable public light. It drove Stella Ollerenshaw (no blood relation, as she hoped people would realize) into hospital in a state of collapse, and dragged her daughter Frances Wingate back early from Adra. It caused Karel Schmidt to miss Frances Wingate in Adra, and obliged David Ollerenshaw, a total stranger to Karel Schmidt, to accompany him back to London by air, leaving his beautiful green car in Africa. David Ollerenshaw had been willing to undertake the journey, for the press seemed to have been tormenting his cousin Janet, which he didn't approve, and he felt he should stand by his family, both its older and its more recently discovered members, in its time of trouble. Whether or not Constance Ollerenshaw was responsible for the disappearance of Stephen Ollerenshaw and his daughter still remained to be seen: it was quite possible that the two events were quite unconnected, and had simply happened to coincide in time.

Frances spent her first night in England with Natasha and Hugh, telling them not to worry about Stephen, who had disappeared from his flat in Brighton with his baby, leaving a worrying note: she also listened to a detailed account of her mother's alleged collapse. She also rang up her contacts at the
Sunday Examiner
and asked them what they thought they were playing at, couldn't old women be left to die in peace. You've got no sense of social responsibility, but we have, she was told by a flip friend, who was notorious even in the profession for hard drinking, large overdrafts, and wife-beating. Fuck social responsibility, said Frances, I want to speak to the editor.

The editor wasn't there, but Frances got hold of some subordinate who tried to turn the tables on her by hinting that it was people like herself, who despised the family unit, who led to solitary deaths from neglect, and would she like to give him her view of the breakdown of marriage today? Frances rang off.

The next day she went up to Wolverton. She drove herself up, and as she drove she tried to come to terms with the fact that she did, after all, feel a sense of family guilt about the old woman's death. She shouldn't have been left to die, like that, of hunger. Somebody should have known, somebody should have called in. Her father, in short, ought to have known. He was her nearest living relative, and he had not given her a thought for years. It was grotesque of the papers to persecute him, grotesque of them to imply (as they seemed to be trying to do) that he had cut himself off (aided and encouraged by Stella) because the Ollerenshaws were socially embarrassing and better forgotten. It was grotesque, but there was some truth in it. Had she not herself been astonished to learn that David, her new-found cousin, had been able to rise from the same slough that had produced her father? And of what was that astonishment a measure?