Magpie Hall Page 4
That was when it happened. My hand rested on the glass and the window began to hum. I felt it pass through my fingertips, up my arm and down to my toes. The rest of the room began to rock gently, as if the house were a giant that I had disturbed from its sleep, shrugging its body from side to side, and my heart pumped so hard I could feel blood pulsing in my face. It was the sound that disturbed me the most as it travelled across the plains towards me, was all around me for a second, then travelled on through, a low throbbing.
‘Letting off steam,’ I reminded myself and lay back down on the bed. Even though I knew it was an earthquake, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the house had caused it somehow.
The last time I saw Grandpa his world had shrunk to his bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. He no longer read his beloved books — they hurt his eyes — but he often fell asleep with the TV or radio blaring. I could hear him at night from my room down the other end of the house. Waking up and unsure of the time, he would turn on the television and fall asleep again while infomercials blinked by, peddling exercise machines and kitchen appliances he would never use.
Sometimes I read to him from his favourite novels, novels by Dickens and Tolstoy, but I suspect he only heard half of what I said; the strain of shouting got too much for me, as did the strain of listening for him.
It amazed me how quickly old age had changed him. He was tiny in his bed, surrounded by plumped up pillows, and his wrists were thin and mottled. In contrast, his ears seemed to have grown and his face was yellowed like cotton sheets left out in the sun too long. It hurt to see him like this, and he knew it. When I sat and held his hand, he had a look of concern on his face that wasn’t for his own health, but for me.
‘You mustn’t worry about me, chook,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a long and happy life and all the cliches. You know that, right?’
I nodded.
‘I can tell by your face that I look terrible.’
I tried to protest.
‘You can’t deny it.’ His face cracked open in a smile. ‘You’re just lucky that I’ve put my teeth in for you. Susan doesn’t get that privilege, do you, Susan?’
The nurse didn’t look up from where she sat in a chair by the window, doing her crossword. ‘That’s right, Percy,’ she deadpanned. ‘You’re a monster.’
He chuckled. One of his last pleasures was the banter he had with her, and the two sniped at each other like a married couple. Susan was a squat woman whose children had all left home, so she could devote more than the usual amount of time to him. Grandpa had an alarm that he could activate if he needed her in the night, and she lived only a twenty-minute drive away. But sometimes, on the days when he seemed to be slipping away, she stayed the night in the austere single bed in the next room. She was tireless in her care of Grandpa, but when I tried to tell her how grateful I was, we all were, she shrugged it off and told me she was just doing her job, that she was well paid and satisfied.
It was his greatest joy that I had pursued his hobby of taxidermy; that it had employed me for a time after I left school, and again when I found myself penniless and alone in London and I took to crafting outlandish creatures and fashion accessories for a curiosity shop in Greenwich. Grandpa asked me again and again for stories of my creations — the hats I adorned with sparrows chirping in their nests, or the brooches I made from tiny mice, their tails replaced with silver chains and their eyes with jewels. I created strange hybrids of animals: cats with pigeon’s wings, rabbits with the antlers of a young deer. Grandpa lay basking in my words as I told him about the time my flatmates had come upon me, in my pyjamas, sawing the head off a dead fox on the kitchen floor, and had banded together to have me evicted. There wasn’t much blood, but they thought I had murdered it. I had actually found it dead and perfectly intact in the backyard, snout grubby from the neighbourhood rubbish bins. Poisoned, probably.
‘I’m glad you see the funny side,’ I said as he roared with laughter again. ‘I was homeless as well as broke.’
But I always found my feet. I ended up living with the young couple who owned the shop. They had no problems with me bringing home animals to store in the freezer.
‘Talk me through it, Rosie,’ he said, his eyes closed. ‘What did we do with that magpie, that first time?’
‘We cut it,’ I said. ‘Airway to arsehole, just as you told me.’
‘And then?’
He was like a child listening to bedtime stories. I told him about the time I worked in the professional studio, right after I left school, mounting hunting trophies mostly for rich American tourists — stags they had paid a fortune to kill. I was fired when I decided to give a wild boar a happy, friendly face instead of the fierce snarl I had been instructed to produce, and I never went back to that kind of taxidermy, where the animals were killed only for the purpose of mounting them. I only used roadkill after that, or donated pets, or even recycled specimens that I restored and gave a new life to, and when I left London to come home after my grandmother died, I started studying for my academic career and never seemed to find the time or space for taxidermy.
In the morning I woke early. Looking around in daylight it was hard to conjure up the eeriness of the earthquake and the still moonlit night. My head was foggy from the dust in the room. I still had my clothes on, but at least I had kicked my shoes off in the night. For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel the need to get up for anything. I was used to waking alone; Hugh had stayed the night at my flat only once, after he had returned early from a conference and not told his wife. My flatmate Rita had come across him at the kitchen table, my pink dressing gown straining across his chest, and she had backed from the room, apologising, as if she had found us naked. I hadn’t told her about him, but I think she instinctively knew there was something clandestine going on, because that evening she avoided me, and she never mentioned him or asked me about him.
Thirty-three years old and still waking up alone, despite the number of men I’d had relationships with. I had a tattoo for every time I’d been in love and that didn’t take into account the other men I’d slept with, or kissed. I didn’t really know what had gone wrong. To love so many, and yet none of them lasted. I enjoyed being single, but had never been so for long. I could have seen myself with Hugh, in our cottage in Wales, but as that dream faded, I had nothing to replace it with. Most of the good, interesting men were taken and were starting families, as were some of my friends. I knew that if I stayed with Hugh for as long as he wanted me to, my chance would pass me by altogether. Not that I needed a man to make me happy. Up until then I hadn’t thought that I cared whether I had children, but now I wasn’t so sure. It was nothing big, nothing conscious, just a feeling that was gradually closing in on me. That I would like at least to have the choice.
I made my way down the stairs, studying the family gallery as I went: snapshots of children and dogs and parties, blown up and framed like paintings; formal studio portraits that my family had organised for my grandparents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, with embarrassing hairstyles and clothes that were never to be worn again. That was the last time the wall had been updated, as though the life of the family stopped when I was thirteen. I suppose it did, in a way. Certainly there were no more brightly coloured family gatherings at Magpie Hall after that, just the occasional visit, with my mother always anxious to get away. At least when I visited later, on my own, I could concentrate on Grandpa and not linger over past regrets.
Further down the stairs, black and white photos of my grandparents and their children, on picnics and at weddings. My father and his brother as boys, smiling under Davy Crockett hats, rifles slung over their shoulders and a bouquet of dead ducks hanging on a stick between them. My aunt, Helene, looking serene and beautiful in a white wedding gown, her husband a good two inches shorter.
Further still the photos became grainy. Stiff portraits of my grandfather as a child, dressed in a smock with a big bow, held by his mother, a hard-faced woman with a Louise Brooks
bob, not unlike my own, and flanked by his father, Edward Summers. Daughters were dotted about them; daughters we had long since lost contact with, as they married and drifted away to other parts of the country, or were absorbed into their husbands’ families.
In most of the photographs, the house stood in the background, solid and unchanging. That was what I liked about it — it was a constant in everyone’s lives. I loved the fact that some of the furniture hadn’t changed, that the layout of the rooms was just as it had been when Grandpa was a boy, perhaps even his father before him; that Grandpa had courted Gram in the same way my father had my mother — by bringing her to his massive house in the country and showing her the gardens, the river, the outlandish taxidermy. And the women had fallen in love with it all; the house had become as much a part of them as it was of Henry Summers’ direct descendants, although my mother grew more detached from it the more it fell into disrepair.
Finally, at the bottom of the staircase, two very old and faded photographs in heavy oak frames. One showed a large group of women in Victorian jackets and long skirts with straw boaters, standing beside bicycles. I recognised the wide avenues from the park not far from where I grew up, although the trees were much smaller.
I had glanced at the other photo many times on my way past, but had never really stopped to examine it. It was a posed studio portrait of Henry Summers, the collector at work. He was dressed casually, in tweed trousers, with leather boots and leggings. Hatless, he gazed sombrely at the camera. He had a strong nose, slim brows and intense, dark eyes. Like my father and uncle, he carried a rifle, and at his feet sat a dog, with a bird held patiently in its mouth. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a pukeko, or a takahe. Henry was tall, with long, strong-looking limbs and a confidence born of status and achievement. I couldn’t tell when the photo had been taken. Before or after his wife’s death? He certainly didn’t look scarred by grief. Rather he was a man looking at the horizon and all the challenges and hopes it might bring.
I tried to imagine what kind of a man Henry had been, with his tattoos hiding under his Victorian clothes; what his wife had been like and how she had died; and what riches he had collected, then hidden away. I felt a strange connection to him through the hard-earned assemblage of animals and jars I had inherited, and knowing we shared a love of tattooing only made the feeling more acute. Suddenly I had an urge to know more about Henry and Dora, before the house was scrubbed clean of all their memories, along with Grandpa Percy’s. Now, though, I needed to get outside into the light and the air.
I was still wearing the black crepe vintage dress and tights I had slept in. By the kitchen door, I put on a pair of gumboots and a grey tweed riding jacket. I shoved my hands into the pockets, which were thankfully empty. I don’t know how I would have felt to come across the remnants of some departed person — a soiled handkerchief, or a sweet wrapper.
My breath fogged the air and the sound of the loose gumboots drumming on the path enveloped me. The skeletons of the poplar trees lining the front paddock were emerging as the leaves thinned, and a cloud of sparrows rose twittering from them as I passed. Beside them stood the windbreak, a solid wall of macrocarpas. Here the magpies nested, collecting straw and grass to make a home, but also barbed wire and pieces of old glass. Grandpa had showed me one of their nests once and it looked uncomfortable, to say the least.
I stopped to gaze over the paddock towards the river. Grandpa’s old nag Jimmy raised his head and gave a steamy snort, then went back to cropping the grass. Two magpie sentries strutted around him. The dark shape of Blossom the mare moved in the background. There was a time when the horses in this paddock would come running when they saw me, looking for treats and jostling each other, but these two had no interest. I hoped that someone was looking after them.
I plucked the wire on the fence, but it made no discernible sound, nothing as haunting and musical as the note I had heard the night before and on that morning all those years ago. For a moment I thought I saw another shape in the distance, smaller than the others; but my pony, the animal on which I had learnt to ride as a child, was long dead. Just another ghost I had worked so hard to forget.
I turned towards the walled garden, where my grandmother would spend most of her days, pottering about with a cigarillo hanging from her mouth, her long grey hair immaculately twisted high on her head. She paid more attention to that hair than to anything else, as though her house could gather dust about her so long as she was well presented in her person. She always wore slacks and gumboots when she gardened, with a paisley shirt buttoned to the top and pearls under the collar. When I was little she sometimes let me come and sit with her while she worked, but she never asked me to help, not since I had pulled out half her herb garden, thinking the oregano and thyme were weeds.
Gram carried herself with elegance no matter what her task. I always felt that she thought we were all a bit beneath her somehow, and it showed when she’d had one too many brandies and we felt the sharpness of her tongue. The only time I really saw her soften was when she thought she was alone with Grandpa. I would see a look pass between them, or a tender touch on the wrist, but she seemed determined to keep the rest of the family from seeing that softer side, as if it might be regarded as a sign of weakness on her part.
The garden was overgrown, brown in some places where flowers had died off without being lovingly dead-headed, and in other places a riot of green weeds, strangling everything in sight. Sunflowers that had once stood bright and taller than I was were slumped and desiccated. Once the B&B was in business, this could all be replanted, but I imagined my aunt and uncle would rather knock down the walls of the garden and turn it into a tennis court or a swimming pool — something easier to maintain and to use as an added attraction for those tourists. I imagined their sweaty bodies pounding the ground where Gram’s dahlias had been. I looked inside myself, poking around for some kind of emotion. But Gram had died more than five years ago, of lung cancer unsurprisingly, and any grieving I had done for her was mostly through watching Grandpa adjust to life alone.
I struggled down the path to the gazebo at the end, where I climbed the stairs and sat down on one of the wooden seats. From the raised vantage point, with the jungle of the garden in front of it, the house looked as though it was being reclaimed by nature. At any moment I expected the earth to rise up with a sigh and drag it underground. The tower jutted up against the grey sky. I used to go up there when I was a child and pretend to be Rapunzel, or some other princess locked up there. From the tower I could keep an eye on everyone and everything — the other kids, Gram in the garden, the horses sheltering under the trees from the sun or the wind or both, Grandpa, wherever he might be. But I had stopped going after the year I turned thirteen.
The long grass shook and a figure burst out from the undergrowth. The world tilted for a moment while I placed myself back in the garden and remembered I was not the only person on earth.
‘Jesus, you scared me!’ I hadn’t seen Sam the farmhand for two years, and then we’d only waved to each other in passing as he rode the back of the ute up the hill to the shearing sheds.
‘Sorry,’ Sam said, and looked at the ground in front of me. ‘I brought you these.’ He held out a blue ice-cream container, but seemed wary of approaching to actually put it in my hands. So I stood and moved the few steps to him. A clutch of eggs tilted the container — six of them, brown and white, one speckled.
‘Oh, thanks.’ I took them from him.
‘Yeah, I was going to bring you a rabbit, but Josh said you’re a vegetarian.’
‘I am. How’d you get the rabbit?’
‘Got caught in a possum trap. It’s fresh, though. Only happened this morning.’ He narrowed his eyes, suspicious that a vegetarian would be taking an interest in a carcass. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Are you going to eat it?’
‘Nah. I’m not much of a cook. I can skin it all right, but all those bones. Yuck. I’ll give it to the dogs.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah, Josh mentioned that too. Taking after the old man, then? Funny hobby for a girl. Specially a vego one.’
‘Did you want to sit down?’ I gestured to the seat, then sat down myself. Sam stood there, scuffing the toe of his gumboot on the bricks. His hair stood up almost straight on his head, fixed there no doubt by sweat and lanolin from the sheep. His Swanndri was big on him, and came down to his knees, a baggy plaid dress.
‘Nah, I’d better be getting back. You look like something out of an old story book sitting there.’
‘Which one?’
‘Dunno. The Secret Garden, maybe? You’re all old-fashioned looking with that haircut. And that dress! Great with the gumboots. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you were a ghost come to show me another world.’
‘Maybe I am,’ I said.
Sam took out a tobacco pouch and stood silently rolling a cigarette.
‘Thought you had to get back?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said lazily, and turned around as he lit the cigarette. ‘See ya.’
‘See ya. Thanks for the eggs.’ I watched his hunched shoulders as he walked away. He glided through the overgrown garden as if he were part of it.
I cradled the container of eggs in one arm and lightly touched them. Still warm.
Bags of food were strewn over the kitchen benches where I had left them the day before. Looking at the eggs reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since I arrived. The room was cold and empty. Mrs Grainger, the housekeeper, would have had a fire going by now, and been moving around as if on wheels, baking this, cooking that, the kettle freshly boiled. She looked after Grandpa well, gave the house a warmth and friendliness that he needed. I wondered sometimes if Mrs G wasn’t more like a wife to Grandpa than Gram was. Certainly after Gram died the housekeeper was a huge comfort. I suspected that towards the end she might have been more to him than that, although the one time I brought it up with my family they had looked horrified. When he became ill, he wouldn’t let her look after him any more than he would let us — that wasn’t what she was paid for, he said. He left her a tidy sum in his will, and she told us she had a fine lot of savings to show for thirty years living in the country with nowhere to spend her money. She had children of her own anyway, to care for her — she was in good hands and I didn’t need to worry about her. I was allowed to miss her, though — the buttery smell of porridge cooking on the stove, served not with brown sugar but with maple syrup.