The Song House (3 page)

Kenneth held it over the hearth and dropped it. It bounced,
twirled on its rim, and settled with a scuttering flourish.

I don’t seem to have your knack, he sighed, bending to
retrieve it.

Maggie crossed to the shelves, scanned them.

Seriously, though, if you don’t want to live with all this, why
keep it?

Ah, well, I’m on to that, he said, fanning the plate in his
hand, I’m sorting it out. See, here, I’m cataloguing everything.
He moved to a low table near the window and fetched an
exercise book from the top of a pile. She saw for the briefest
moment an emblem on the cover, before he opened it to show
her what was written inside: three long columns of words, some
of them scored out and rewritten, and on the facing page, lists
and bullet points and a great many exclamation marks. It was
a wild, meaningless scrawl. And she saw plainly what he’d
neglected to mention at the interview: he was unable to put
anything down in a coherent manner. His thoughts were everywhere
on the page. Maggie perceived his tone, his plea for
acknowledgement.

So you’re far too busy to do this
and
make your music notes,
she said.

That’s right, he agreed, and suddenly lit with a new idea,
Would you like some more wine? It’s such a nice evening, we
could sit on the terrace, watch the sun go down on the river.
What do you think?

Maggie has her own kitchen up here, off her bedroom: a
narrow space with a high window. This first morning she eats,
standing up, a piece of toast and marmalade, waiting for the
kettle to boil.

It was only three days ago they’d agreed the terms of the
job, but nothing in the kitchen looks newly purchased,
except for the milk and bread. The cereal packet has dust on
the top, the marmalade has a faded price sticker on the lid,
and the coffee granules in the jar are solid: she has to dig
repeatedly with a spoon to excavate them. It takes her back,
as everything does, to her mother, for whom the simplest
things became an act of deep concentration. Place the spoon
in the jar, scoop the granules up and hold the spoon steady
while you carry it to the cup. It was agonizingly slow to watch.
Maggie would have to grip her hands behind her back to stop
herself from snatching the spoon or the kettle or the plate –
whatever implement it might be – and doing the job herself.
After the feat was achieved, she’d sneak back into the kitchen,
wipe away the stains and spillages as if they had never happened.

She tries not to think of her mother, because it feels wrong,
at this, the start of her new life, to let her old life in: she would
like to keep them apart for a while longer yet. But there’s a
prickling at the back of her neck, a sense that if she were to
turn round, quickly, she would find her mother standing there
in the doorway with one hand on her hip, shaking her head
in disbelief.

And what do you hope to achieve by this?

It was her mother’s idea that if Maggie would be staying in
Berkshire for a while, she should get herself a job: nothing
too demanding, just so that she wasn’t stuck indoors all day,
she’d said, fussing over nothing,
fretting
. They ordered the local
and national papers, and in the evenings they’d look together,
Maggie half-heartedly, her mother with more determination,
reading out the most ridiculous posts.

Fork-lift truck driver, that’s local. Arborist. You could do
that. You know about trees and everything.

But the illness progressed so quickly that the prospect of
even a few hours away from her mother frightened Maggie;
the idea of hours, suddenly, being all they had left together. So
she never did apply for work, but they continued to look, all
the same; for amusement, for distraction, to pretend that everything
was normal. Towards the end, Maggie would sit on the
edge of the bed and read the advertisements out loud, one eye
on her mother, watching as she slipped quietly into sleep, like
a child being told a bedtime story. Then Maggie saw the advertisement
for the post at Earl House; a large blocked-out
rectangle in the
Times
: unmissable, beckoning. She didn’t read
that one to her mother.

Unable to finish her toast, Maggie throws it in the bin and
rinses her cup, forcing herself to concentrate on the moment,
and on Kenneth: she considers how long he might have waited
for the right person, feels a thin pulse of satisfaction that he’s
found her at last. And she’s conscious of how long she has
waited, too. Thinking again about what he told her at the interview,
she is struck by a way of laying her ghost to rest. Make
the past into a story, Kenneth said. Resurrect history. Her plan,
if she had thought it through, was not dissimilar: to resurrect
history, yes – if she only knew what that history was. She has
heard stories, has lived inside moments, has memories scattered
like light. She thinks these things aren’t facts. But Kenneth can
tell her, if she can only lead him to it. If he supplies the facts,
she’ll do the rest. Time to go to work.

She comes down to find the library empty. No sign of
Kenneth, no sound from the kitchen. On a low table next to
one of the chairs, she finds his instructions. ‘Make yourself at
home. Here’s the office equipment! Be with you soon, K.’
Beneath his note is a single slim exercise book, an exact copy
of the one he showed her yesterday, the same herald on the
front displaying a badge, the words
Veritate et Virtute
scrolled
beneath it. The paper inside is ruled with pale blue lines. Placed
next to it is a cheap gel pen. In the dimness of the shuttered
room, Maggie sits on the edge of the chair, opens the book
and turns to the back. She presses the page down flat with her
hand, and begins to write.

My mother names me Maggie, after the song by Rod Stewart.
She decides this as she lifts me in her arms and angles me to
the window, where both of us can watch the rain fall on the
glass. You’d think I’m an unexploded bomb, the way she holds
me.

Look, Baby, she says, That’s called rain, that stuff. You’ll see
lots of that.

Outside the window there’s an overgrown garden with a shed
at the far end. Abandoned deckchairs are grouped around a
burnt-out bonfire, with cups and glasses strewn across the grass.
A washing line stretches from the back door to the shed, the
whole length beaded with shimmering pearls. Everything is
sodden. The rain comes down fine and steady, softening the
view.

Ed is sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a joint. All the paraphernalia
– the silver tin, lighter, Rizlas, the torn-off strip of
an Embassy packet, the greasy wrap of red Leb – are set out
before him on top of a copy of yesterday’s newspaper. He ducks
his head slightly to lick the edge of the roll-up. His thick beard
hides his lips.

You can’t call her Baby forever, he says, nodding at the newspaper,
My family will want to put a notice in the
Telegraph
.
‘We are delighted to announce the birth of Cassandra Crane. Mummy and daughter are both doing splendidly.’ Ed laughs at
his joke, looking up to see my mother, still at the window,
facing away from him.

What would you like to call her? she asks, not rising to the
bait about his family. Of course they will want a christening,
as they wanted – will still want – her and Ed to get married.

Whatever you like, he says, It’s all cool.

So she decides, if it’s all cool, that she’ll call me Maggie, but
she won’t mention it just yet, because if she sees him pull that
shrugging, artless gesture again, she’ll throw something at him.
The sink is full of unwashed pots – any one of them would
do.

My mother takes me upstairs and lays me down in the centre
of the bed, then she undoes the buttons of her smock and steps
out of it. She’d like to take a bath, but she knows there’s no
hot water unless she lights the fire downstairs. She considers
the idea; Ed will grumble about burning wood in June, and
she’ll have to lug it in herself from the shed when he’s having
a sleep because otherwise he’ll insist on doing it but then he’ll
forget. And then it’ll be night, and she’ll have to go down there
in the black and scrabble around among the mice and insects.
She takes a flannel out of the drawer and calls downstairs for
Ed to put the kettle on. She’ll wash me and then she’ll wash
herself, squatting in front of the unlit fire as if the memory of
it will keep us warm. I’m a week old, she’s a month off twenty,
and this is the dampest, coldest summer she can ever remember.

My mother’s called Eleanor but everyone calls her Nell, and
Ed, my father, is called Edward Harper Crane. His father is a
circuit judge and his mother is a charity worker, which, he tells
Nell, means that she does bugger all except hold a coffee
morning once a week. Ed doesn’t appear to do anything either,
although when he first meets my mother he tells her he’s an
artist. There’s not much evidence of his work around the
cottage – a few drawings, the odd painting – and no hint of
his interest, except for the glossy catalogues he sometimes
brings back from his trips to London, full of pictures of glass
bowls and distressed wood.

Nell sits with her hands in her lap and surveys the room.
The furniture is old, remnant stock from when the cottage was
tied to the Lambourn estate. It was let to the Weaver family
for generations, and it’s still called that, despite the fact that the
Weavers vacated years ago, years before the Cranes got hold of
it, before Ed persuaded his father to let him use it. Nell likes
the simpleness of the place; the artisan patterns etched into the
dressing table and the wardrobe, the blunt iron crucifix set into
the wall cavity. She likes the walnut headboard of the bed, and
the way the mattress slumps in the centre, so no matter how
much you cling to the edge, no matter how angry you were
with him when you turned off the light, your bodies would
find themselves rolling together like ships in a storm. My
mother and Ed do a lot of fighting, and a lot of making up.
Now she has me. At night, holding me to her, she imagines all
the babies that have been born in the bed, the moans and sighs
and happy tears. Rather that than the piss, sweat and bloodstains
that darken the old mattress like a map of moil.

The walls are plain off-white, dusty to the touch, the distemper
cracking and falling onto the floorboards in wafer-thin
flakes. My mother doesn’t mind this, nor the way the floor slopes
down towards the back of the building, so everything is on the
tilt. What she minds is the river. It runs at the bottom of
the garden, behind the willow trees. Businessmen come at the
weekends to fish for brown trout. It’s part of the deal with Ed’s
parents, that Ed and Nell can live in the place rent-free as
long as they don’t interfere with the clients, who pay handsomely
to fish the private waters. The men bring hampers and
metal boxes full of kit, trudging up and down the path at the
side of the cottage, their laughter ringing off the stone walls.
Their Range Rovers, parked on the verge outside the living
room window, block the daylight.

Since meeting Ed, Nell doesn’t see many people. Through
accident or design, he keeps her close: he says she is his forever,
she was meant for him and he was meant for her. He wraps a
lock of her hair around his fingers as he says it, winding the
auburn curl tighter, and tighter, singing it, crooning it, tugging
her near. He couldn’t bear anything to come between them,
he says, his mouth so close to her ear she can feel the wetness
of his breath. Nell’s happy enough to hear it. She thinks they
are what a real couple should be like; not like her mum and
dad, who couldn’t stay in the same room without it ending in
a slap, or his mum and dad, who live separate lives under one
cold roof.

She enjoys the solitude, and she can put up with the aimlessness
of their days, the lack of adventure it brings. Nell’s not
one for adventure. Most of her friends are out in the world;
they send postcards from stops on the Silk Route, or from
Amsterdam, Paris, South America, with tales of their travels:
drunken nights on the beach, stoned nights in a blues den,
sober nights in a dank cell waiting for word from the embassy.
Others, the more serious girls she knows from school, have
become involved in liberation and consciousness-raising and
protest. The USA is the enemy, the state is the enemy, men are
the enemy. Nell understands this, but she isn’t convinced. And
anyway, it simply doesn’t apply to her. She is in a real relationship;
she thinks she is quietly growing up. She and Ed stay
in most days, and only go into the town to buy food or tobacco,
supplementing his allowance with their own vegetables, fizzy
home brew and elderberry wine. Their friend Cindy visits from
time to time, and Ed’s cousin Leon calls in when he isn’t
touring with his band. Occasionally, Nell sees Bryce, the water
bailiff, with a young lad in tow, patrolling the river. The bailiff
has a spaniel called Sonny; sometimes it swims across the river
to greet her. Nell tells herself she isn’t lonely, but can count
the faces she recognizes on one hand – apart from the men
who come down to fish.

She tries to ignore them until, one day, quite early on in
this new, shuttered life, one of the men comes close to the
window and peers in, thinking the place uninhabited. He takes
fright when he sees her, staring back out at him like a pale
reflection. She hears him call to his friends; hears the words
‘squatter’, ‘peasant’, their broad laughter trailing behind them.
She would go and have it out with the men, tell them what
she thinks of their remarks, but Ed is away, in London. She
knows it’s not her place to make a scene. And she would have
to follow them down to the river.

It isn’t visible from the house, but still Nell can feel its presence
everywhere; brought in on the stagnant, oily air of a
summer’s night, in the wheedling sound of the mosquitoes as
they trace her skin in the darkness, that sweeping metallic chill
before dawn. In winter, the river seeps into her clothes, her
hair, her bones, makes everything clammy to the touch. She’s
had to put her books on a high shelf above the fireplace, hoping
the rising heat will keep them dry, but she’s wrapped her most
precious ones in old blankets, swaddled them like babies: the
Shakespeare her mother gave her when she passed her eleven-plus;
an illustrated collection of myth and fable; her irreplaceable
copy of the Brothers Grimm. Its drawings of goblins
and witches terrified and enthralled her as a child, and would
do the same to me, later. These are her treasures. She won’t
let the river deform them with its slick caress.