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

into the kitchen, older, with long grey hair and a cross face.

“Do you know where the tablets are for the Putney Six?”

“Try behind the rag-cupboard like last time.”

“That window needs fixing again upstairs. And that knocking’s started again.”

She marched out. Susan drank some of the tea Jackie had put before her. She was becoming used to the urine-reek, noticing it less or not at all.

“Must seem strange to you. Us being here now.”

“Yes.”

“I gather she was quite a character, the old lady.”

Susan didn’t know what to say.

The strawberry-red leaves of the Martian Rhubarb, either the original, or a cutting, and now a massive three-foot high in a plastic tub, stirred suddenly, whispered to each other, rasped like dry old skin.

Jackie glanced at the plant.

“Did you want to look around the house?”

“Oh – maybe.”

“Go ahead, if you want.”

“Oh, but –”

“Frankly, Susan, I trust you. And even if you were a thief, we haven’t got much to steal, apart from the cats. And providing you can prove you have a good home for them you can have as many of those as you want, free.”

“Wish I could,” said Susan, politely.

She didn’t know if she wanted to go over the house. She had never, so far as she could recall, even come this distance, in her grandmother’s day, never seen the lower kitchen or the scullery. But now she supposed she must, must look at the house. It was full of an ocean of cats. No longer as it had been. No longer – here.

As she flexed her legs, wondering how to remove the two sleepers without jolting them, both woke and instantly sprang from her, indifferent to the passage of humans and random fate.

Was this a bit like having to go round a stately home on a school visit, something she had to do, and pretend to be interested in? How many rooms were there? They had been added on decades before, the house – already large – extending in all directions. Some rooms even no longer had windows, being trapped between outer rooms which did, or so Anne had once said. Susan found none of these. But Anne hadn’t seen much of the house, had never lived, consciously in the house. The grandmother, Catherine, had conceived Anne unexpectedly in her late forties. And then World War II had happened, and Anne, only about four or five, was sent to a well-to-do aunt, (her father’s sister) on a farm outside Lincoln. She never came back.

But really, Susan knew nothing about all that, as Anne seemed not to. Susan knew nothing about her – about Catherine. Nothing.

Of the cats, with which the house was now mainly furnished, Susan met all kinds, even a pair of Persians on a landing, who stared at her with demented apricot eyes.

Once she saw another human, a thin hurrying girl in trousers, who simply muttered “Hi” and trotted past.

A few doors were shut, and Susan left them alone. In some open-doored rooms were large cages, with single cats in them, presumably segregated due to ailments or unsocial temperament.

But the house – room on room, corridor on corridor, steps, annexes, was, despite cats and absence, still a vegetable house, a pumpkin: the Labyrinth.

Then somehow, coming down a crooked back stair, Susan emerged into a wide room empty of all furniture. Trees pressed at the windows, fir, pines, bays, and beyond lay an unexpected growing wall of garden, turning back from a once-pruning into a jungle.

This was the room, still cased in its emerald light, where Susan and Anne had last seen the old woman alive.

Cats lay in patches of sun on bare boards. Marks of territorial cat sprayings decorated the plaster, to an impressively high point.

But it was still that room.

Susan stood there.

She had thought she was lost in the house, had even uneasily wondered if she could find her way down to the front again, and if not would she be unable ever to get out?

But here she was.

The room was full of an immense stillness. Nothing moved that made any sound, not even the cats. Before a window, standing on the floor, another Martian Rhubarb, darker and greener than the other, raised its heavy flags to the scattered sun.

One by one the cats lifted their eyes, some their heads, looking all one way, towards a vacant spot in the room where a shaft of light faded slowly, perhaps unaccountably. The cats watched. They looked steadily up into the air, where nothing was, and followed it with their gem stone eyes.

Fine hairs rose on the back of Susan’s neck.

After a moment, the light changed again. A cloud must have crossed the sun. The cats resumed former occupations, mostly sleeping. Two began to fight. One bounded into the pot of the plant and urinated.

Jackie was standing talking in a room off the hall, with a big woman in a Laura Ashley dress. “Oh, yes, I’d like to adopt three, even four.” Helen Colly? That was all right then.

Near the front door, the grey-haired woman bent over a hamper with kittens in it.

“Thanks for calling,” she said to Susan, harshly. “Thinking of joining the team? It’s a tough life, you know. We’ll be out again tonight, all night, I expect, trying to catch ferals and bring them in. And every cat needs to be thoroughly checked over, you know, neutered, some need drugs. Look at these, abandoned in Hawthorne Road.”

“Poor things,” said Susan. She gazed at their milky grey eyes.

“Oh, they’ll be all right now. But it costs a lot. We do like a donation, where possible.”

Flushing, feeling like a criminal, Susan rummaged for a pound note and gave it to the woman. She imagined over and over, as she walked back up the drive, the woman saying to her colleagues, “Flash little bitch, handing me a pound like some duchess.” Or, alternatively saying, “Mean little cow. Only gave me a quid.”

“Had an okay day?”

“Mr V had one of his famous attacks,” said Anne, scathingly. “I get the feeling they’re