Greyglass, Tanith Lee [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

see if her own building had reappeared. But that was silly. So she kept walking, and Capt. Kirk Street led, sooner than she recalled, into the park. Susan bought an ice-cream, from a van in the park, with a chocolate stick stuck in it. This was to compensate for the demolishment of her roots, and also for all the times she had been dragged through the park and not allowed to stop.

The park still looked big, but swept bare. Had it always been so bleak, even in summer? Long blank vistas of lawn, the groups of trees standing well back to the sides, as if unwilling to ask each other to dance. Among the trees in the left hand areas were the public toilets, and beyond, the path which led to the shrubbery and the Long Pool.

Susan finished the ice-cream, even the less-appetising cornet. Then she walked through the park and straight into Tower Road.

“I don’t want to go up there,” she had said. And Anne had always made her.

I don’t want to go to America and live with Wizz.

Could Anne make her do that too?

Tower Road, the prehistoric riverbed, roped its way among the cliffs of mossy, tree-hung walls, the cascades of foliage. It was midday, the sun directly overhead and raw with fire. Grasshoppers scratched among the hot stones. There was the antique sound of water, hidden behind brickwork, trickling, and in the blue-black recurring shade, a visual silence.

Why go on? No one was making her, now. There was no reason. The reason had been found on a bench, in a crochet of white frost, four years ago, dead.

“Hello – are you Helen Colly?”

“No.”

“No, I thought you weren’t. I think she’s older. And delayed, obviously. But it’s okay anyway, if you want to come in. The more the merrier.”

They walked up the drive.

The thing that struck Susan first, when the door was open, was the excruciating reek of cats’ urine. It was like a blow, so she grunted involuntarily and put her hand over her mouth, then took it down, because that would be rude.

“Yes, sorry about the pong,” said the woman, unconcerned. “We do our best, but we’ve got around two hundred on our hands now, and a lot of them aren’t litter trained as yet, or neutered. It’s the males spraying that’s the worst.”

She was about thirty-five, slim and boyish in her jeans and T-shirt, with spiky brunette hair, a clear sandy complexion and aquamarine eyes.

The stink, and the sight of several black and white cats among the bushes outside, now augmented by three tabbies cantering almost in tandem across the wide hall like a chariot team, provided recollection.

“Oh, the cats’ charity.”

“That’s us. Cat Samaritans. I thought that was why you were here, to have a look and choose one – or preferably six or seven of the buggers. Aren’t you?”

“Sorry.”

They stood in the hall. Meows sang through the upper air.

Aside from the cats, it was not as she remembered, not really. It seemed more empty, lighter. Bars of sun fell dramatically across the floor, which had new lino of a cold beige. Some of the trees had been cut back, by the walls, that was it, allowing the sunshine to pass in. The drive, though, had been if anything more overgrown, all but a central strip where the wheels of jeeps had recently smashed through the weeds.

The house itself, seen from the outside, as Susan had stood there on the driveway – the house… Somehow she had kept looking and looking at it, trying to see it, for somehow it wasn’t there, just like the flats in Constance Street. Somehow, the house had vanished.

And yet – they had just walked through the door. They were inside the house.

The woman, who had come around the non-house and advanced toward her, mistaking her for the delayed Helen Colly, now said, “Oh come and have a cup of tea anyway. If you can stand the smell.”

“It’s all right, really. I like cats.”

“Yes,” said the woman. “I like cats better than people, frankly. There’s five of us here at the moment, on the team. But I’m the only real peoplephobe.”

“I’m people…” said Susan inanely.

“Oh, you’re all right. You’re a cat really,” said the woman, strangely. “I’m Jackie, by the way.”

“Susan. My grandmother used to live here.”

They were in the kitchen by then, the lower kitchen right at the back of all the sunken regions of the house. They had waded there through waves of cats, which came rushing, screaming, towards them. Every one had a name, by which Jackie greeted them. Some had only three legs, or one eye, but all looked spruce, well-fed and healthy. Snake-like, they rubbed their soft fur over the women’s legs. And when Susan sat down at the long wooden table, two jumped as one into her lap.

“Just put them off if they bother you.”

“No… they’re great.”

“Let me get this straight. Your grandmother was Mrs Wilde –”

“Mrs Catherine Wilde.” Susan smoothed the cats, which slapped her under the chin with their tails, trampling her knees down to the proper consistency. Then she smoothed the kitchen table. It was the library table. That was where she had seen it last. In the book-room with the pale jaundiced dish on it, reflecting back her own round, half-formed, twelve-year-old face.

“She left us the house,” said Jackie, “as you know. It was an absolute godsend, I can tell you. We were trying to do this out of two basement flats.”

The lap-cats settled, edges and tails overlapping.

The rest of the tidal sea of fur ceaselessly moved back and forth through the kitchen, reminding Susan of the Countess Gertrude in Gormenghast. All the dim chambers of the house rang with meowing, purrs, snarls and screeches, sudden skitterings and thumps.

“I remember that plant. I used to call it Martian Rhubarb. It’s got much bigger.”

“Yeah, there were a lot of plants left. We take cuttings and start new ones, sell them when we have a jumble sale for the cats.”

Another woman stalked