The Root Cellar (3 page)

“How tiny you are,” she crowed. “My goodness, I can hardly see you inside that jacket. I write stories for girls. It’s to get away from boys, your Uncle Bob says, so you can imagine how nice it’s going to be to have you here. Of course, the new one might be a girl.” Aunt Nan patted her stomach; and Rose realized that some of the plumpness was because Aunt Nan was expecting a baby.

“Not that I don’t like boys.” Aunt Nan’s voice sounded like a xylophone going up and down the scales. “I like my boys very much. Come and meet them. Imagine being this old and never knowing one another! Boys! Boys! Come and meet your cousin. Sam! George! Twins!”

The twins, dressed in identical jeans and dark blue sweaters, looked exactly like their mother, with the same round faces, the same brown hair and round eyes. They inspected Rose solemnly from the protection of their mother’s skirt.

“Jimmy and Brian are the babies. They’re six. That’s Sam. He’s fourteen.” Sam was crossing the yard with the fifth load of groceries. “Hello,” he said, nodded curtly toward Rose, and continued on his way. The only impression Rose had of him was that he was a big, stocky boy with bushy red hair.

“And that’s George.” Aunt Nan laughed. “George is fifteen. He talks a lot and thinks he knows everything.”

George slammed the back of the station wagon shut with his foot and came loping toward them. He had light curly brown hair, blue eyes, a wide full mouth in a small round face. In his jeans and worn brown sweater, too short at the waist and wrists, he looked like a scarecrow.

“Hi,” he said in a loud, croaking voice. “Hi. I knew you were coming today. You see, I read the letter and—”

“And that’s all of us, except Uncle Bob, who had to go to a meeting this afternoon in Soames. He’ll be back soon.”

“How do you do?” said Rose.

“Mother!” George was exasperated. “Mother, you forgot to introduce Grim. You see, Rose, we have a cat called Grim, for Grimalkin, which means gray cat—”

“Come on,” said Aunt Nan. “It’s starting to rain again, and the wind’s coming up. We’d better get your things inside, Rose, dear. Is that all you have, just that one little suitcase?”

“There are at least four thousand more in the kitchen,” said George.

“Oh, good! Rose, where’s Stella? How long have you been waiting for us out here in this wet yard?”

Rose explained again that Aunt Stella had been in a hurry. She was going to mention meeting Mrs. Morrissay, but Aunt Nan interrupted. “Same old Stella. No time for anything. I swear, someday she’s going to drop dead in the middle of a TV show, and when they go to pick up the body they’ll find it’s nothing but dust because she’s forgotten to eat for three months.” With one hand firmly on Rose’s arm, Aunt Nan steered her through the kitchen door, talking all the while. “Look at all those boxes! Oh, my goodness, child, I expect you left New York very early. You must be exhausted. Why don’t I take you right up to your room? We only found out last week, of course, that you were coming, so we haven’t had a chance to do much with it. Here, give me your suitcase. The boys can carry up the big ones.”

“No, thank you. I’ll carry it.” Rose held tightly to her overnight bag and followed Aunt Nan from the dark kitchen through another gloomy room and up a flight of steep stairs to a little room at the back of the house. Like the outside of the house, and the glimpse she had had of downstairs, the room was dismal. Its flowered wallpaper, dried and yellowed with age, was in shreds. The plaster had come away from half of one wall, and where the roof had leaked there was a large brown stain on the ceiling and running down the wall by the bed. She
could see that the wide boards of the floor had once been painted dark red, but the paint was almost gone and some of the boards had come loose. A brass bed stood against one wall. There was a small white dresser beside it. Opposite, next to the window, was a low desk also painted white. The room smelled musty and a little sour. Sam told Rose later he thought it was because of all the dead rats and mice in the walls.

“The dresser and the desk were mine when I was little,” said Aunt Nan, “and the bed was here in the house when we came. Isn’t it nice?”

Rose did not answer. She had never been to, nor dreamed of, any place uglier or more depressing than this one. As though in answer to her bitter thoughts, Aunt Nan sighed. “You probably think we’re all crazy. People do, I guess. We’re a bit disorganized, but we’ve only been here a month. Your Uncle Bob was in the forces, and he’s just retired. That’s why we came down here. He’s the game warden for the island, and this is all so much better for him we should have done it years ago. You know, the house is one hundred and sixty years old. It’s going to be beautiful when we get it fixed up and—oh, Lord, Bob will be home any minute. I’d better get supper started. I’ll leave you to settle yourself before supper. Okay?” Without waiting for an answer, she was off down the
stairs, her burbling words punctuated by the excited whispers of the twins.

Then came Sam and George struggling with two heavy suitcases each, the twins right behind them.

“What’s in these things? The Statue of Liberty? Haw! Haw!” George dropped the bags with a thump, tripped over Sam, and went down for more. Sam put his down, said nothing, and turned to follow George. The twins scooted after. Up they came again until all the suitcases and boxes were piled around Rose, who stood in the middle of the floor in an agony of shyness, willing them to be finished.

“Well,” said George, “I guess that’s done.” Rose mumbled, “Thank you,” but when she said nothing more, he cleared his throat, looked around, stared at her, and said, “Well, see you later,” and they were gone.

Rose closed the door after them as tightly as it would close. Still in her jacket and boots, she sat on the edge of the bed. For a moment the chaos of the last weeks threatened to overwhelm her. One week she had been with her grandmother on her way to Paris, steeling herself to face boarding school; three days later she had been flying home with her grandmother lying dead in the baggage compartment of the plane. Three weeks more and she was in a
run-down farmhouse in Canada surrounded by a family noisier, more rambunctious, than any in her worst imaginings. She clamped her lips tightly shut and reached down and unzipped her overnight bag. It had in it her nightclothes, in case she and Aunt Stella had had to stop at a motel, and her treasures: her music box and her mother’s old copy of
The Secret Garden
. They had been hers since her parents died, and Rose had always carried them with her, feeling that without them, and the silver rose she wore on a chain around her neck, she wouldn’t be any kind of person at all.

She became aware of a noise at her door. She looked up and saw the latch moving. She turned around quickly. “Who’s there?”

The door was edged open and two pairs of brown eyes peered through the opening at her. “It’s us,” whispered the twins.

“Yes?”

“Mother says it’s supper time.” They stood looking at her for a moment, let out a long sigh in unison, and retreated from the door. Rose could hear them thumping rapidly down the stairs.

She took off her boots, rummaged through her suitcases, found her loafers and the plaid skirt she was used to wearing, and put them on. “I don’t suppose I need to wash for dinner,” she muttered, but all the same she found her
hairbrush and swiftly brushed through her short curls.

On her way downstairs she passed the open doorway of the next room. She caught a glimpse of firelight and stopped to peek inside. To her astonishment, a girl was busily pulling up the covers on a big, handsome four-poster bed. There was a small black stove with a bright fire between the windows, a round rag rug on the floor, and a cheerful tidiness that wasn’t anywhere else in the house. Hastily she backed out, puzzled, and went downstairs.

Downstairs was like turning on a radio and getting all the stations at once. The television was going in the living room. George was perched on one arm of the sofa, making running comments as he watched. Aunt Nan was beating something with an electric beater in the kitchen and talking in a loud voice to someone who made an occasional rumbling response. In sing-song voices the twins were anxiously telling their mother, “We don’t want any peas, we don’t want any peas.”

Rose stood at the foot of the stairs trying to take it all in. The living room was in worse condition than her bedroom. It was a large room full of doors and windows, cluttered with furniture that appeared to have been left wherever the moving men had deposited it a month earlier. The bare lath was exposed through large holes in
the walls. She couldn’t understand why the front room upstairs had been made so charming while the living room was in such a state.

She went through into the kitchen, which was much more cheerful. It had been scrubbed and repaired. Along one wall there was a big old fireplace with a bake oven beside it. The other walls and the low ceiling were a honey-colored wood that reflected softly the light from the fire burning in the fireplace and from the lamps on the mantel and on the small table under the front window. Against the back wall was a big brown electric range, counters (obviously new), and a sink with small square windows over it. There were shelves for dishes over the windows—but most of the dishes were on the big table in the middle of the room or piled up dirty in the sink. An old wooden rocking-chair stood by the front window, covered—as was every other possible space—with books, magazines, rubber boots, and sweaters.

Something was burning. Aunt Nan pulled a smoking pot off the stove while she talked to a man with bushy black hair and a big black moustache, who sat on a high stool just out of her way. The twins were poking their fingers into various bowls and dishes until one them happened to turn and see Rose standing in the doorway. “Here she is,” he whispered and
tugged at his father’s hand. His twin echoed, “Here she is, she’s here!”

Rose drew back a step. Uncle Bob looked up. He got up and walked over to her. “How do you do, Rose?” He smiled and shook hands. “I’m glad you’ve come to stay with us.”

Uncle Bob was tall and thin like George, with those same bright blue eyes, but Uncle Bob’s had wrinkles at the corners and a quiet dreaminess about them. His nose was thin and long. He asked about her trip from New York and said he was sorry about her grandmother having died. Before she had to say anything, Nan called out that supper was ready, and they sat down to eat burned spaghetti, peas, and chopped cabbage salad. There was orange pudding for dessert.

Sam and George sat opposite Rose. “Do you always talk with that accent—
awrange
pudding?” George brayed.

Rose flushed with embarrassment. “I’ve never thought about it before,” she said.

“Did your grandmother really die in Paris?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m used to Paris and they know me in that hotel. I managed,” said Rose coldly. She did not want to talk to George. She did not want to talk about her grandmother dying in Paris to anyone.

“Do you—” George began.

“George!” Uncle Bob said sharply. “This is not a court martial!” He turned apologetically to Rose. “I imagine you’ll find mealtime here a bit different from what you’re used to.”

“Grandmother and I generally ate in restaurants,” replied Rose. She caught Sam looking at her, and in the quick way he turned she had the feeling he was angry.

Aunt Nan kept up a steady flow of talk. The twins sat on either side of Rose and did not take their eyes from her face throughout the meal. Nobody mentioned the girl upstairs making the bed and nobody mentioned Mrs. Morrissay. Finally, when dinner was nearly over, Rose got up her courage and asked about the girl. For an answer she got six blank stares and a dead silence.

“I expect she’s the maid,” said Rose.

“The maid?” Aunt Nan put down her fork.

George let out a yell of laughter. “The maid! That’s a good one!”

“Well, as she didn’t come to dinner I thought.…”

“What are you talking about, dear? There’s nobody upstairs. Are you playing a joke?” Aunt Nan smiled indulgently at Rose.

Rose did not answer. Everyone else was laughing. She flushed with embarrassment and anger. Why were they saying there was nobody upstairs? She had seen the girl. But she wasn’t
going to risk another bout of George’s laughter or Sam’s glowering, so she said no more about it and did not ask about Mrs. Morrissay either. Instead, in her primmest voice she said, “I’ve had a rather busy day. I’d like to go to bed.”

Uncle Bob said approvingly, “Good soldiers need their sleep,” and George called after her, “Tell the maid we need her in the kitchen if you see her. Haw! Haw!”

Rose went swiftly but sedately upstairs and straight to the front room. There was no one there. There was no four-poster bed, no stove with a fire in it, no round rag rug. The room was cold and dark and as ramshackle as the rest of the house.

She was scared. She went to her own room, closed the door, and sat down on her bed with her jacket over her. She wanted to be ready to run in case something horrible should happen.

“This place is very odd,” she whispered into the dark night. “It’s like that story about the girl who had the plague in a hotel, and they took her away and nobody would say she’d ever been there. I saw a girl making that bed. I know I did. What happened to her? Why don’t they want me to know about her? And I saw that old lady. Nobody’s said anything about her, and—” She suddenly remembered the strange vision of the house. “I saw flowers. Delphiniums. I saw them.”

She sat in the dark, silently huddled under her jacket, listening to the wind rattle the loose window frame and whistle through the cracks. A tree scratched on the window. The room was cold and musty. Usually, talking to herself was a kind of comfort. It was almost like having a companion. But on this night there was no comfort. She had a sudden sharp pang of loneliness for her grandmother. She did not deeply grieve for her—her grandmother had not let her come close enough for that—but she missed the comfort of their familiar relationship and the life they had known together. She ached to leave the frightening strangeness of people who were so noisy and unpredictable and whose house held in it people the others pretended were not there. She choked back the tears that threatened, as she always had choked back tears, until her throat was sore, and she sat with her arms tight around her knees until she fell over fast asleep.