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

Susan turned her head from the rescuing spectres of Wizz and America the Golden, glinting at the back of her mother’s silver eyes.

“Anne – tell me about Grandmother.”

“What? What am I supposed to tell you, after all these years?” Anne flopped gracefully back in her chair, drinking icy orange-juice from the fridge, shoes kicked off, her feet, with their perfectly enamelled nails, propped on the stool. Heat lay over the flat like damp washing. “I’m tired, Susan. I’m going to have another bath. The trains are bloody in this weather –”

“I’ll run the bath for you.”

“Thanks.”

When Susan came back, she said, “Do you remember anything about the house, Anne?”

“Which house?”

“The house in Tower Road. When you were little and lived there with Grand – with Catherine.”

“No.”

“Not even –”

“I’ve said, You’ve asked me before and I’ve told you all I know. I remember being about four, and saying, Am I four? And someone said Yes. That may have been my father, or her. I don’t recollect. And I don’t remember anything about the house, it was just a sort of space around things. I don’t even remember the garden, except a piece with roses growing up something. That’s all. I’m not putting you off, Susan. I truly don’t remember a thing.”

“But you remember the farm. The drive with the lilacs. And Lincoln. How it was so flat, except for the hill with the castle and the cathedral. And the Roman arch in that street. All that.”

“Oh yes. But I was there until I was in my twenties.”

“I went there today.”

“Lincoln?” Anne looked quizzical, waiting.

“The house. Her house.”

“My God. What sort of state was it in?”

Susan smiled. “It was full of cats.”

“Yes, it would be.”

“No, it was nice. They take care of them and find them proper homes and everything.”

“How much did you give them?”

“Only a pound.”

“That’s quite a lot at your age, on our income.”

“But they let me look round. I’d never seen so much of the house, and it’s so peculiar, and I couldn’t make any – sense of it –”

“No,” said Anne. “They kept building on. It was a shambles. They were both mad, you know. Richard and Catherine. And then he got killed in London, when that bomb landed in the street. And that just left her to be mad on her own.”

“Did she want you back then?”

“No, she never wanted me at all. They didn’t want children, and she thought she’d never have any. And then, there I was. She was forty-seven, forty-eight. A horrible difficult birth. They had to sew her up. She told me once.”

“Oh – ugh –”

“You asked. So listen. I think she’d have given me away whatever happened, the War just provided a decent excuse. Before my late twenties, I saw her only once, when I was twenty-one. She came to my party. I didn’t know who she was. Aunt Margaret said, Here’s your mother, Anne. Can you picture it?”

“What did she look like?”

“Old. I was twenty-one, and she was – what would she have been – about sixty-seven or eight – nearly seventy. She had on a cream costume, and her hair was still fair, or she’d had it dyed, and it was permed in the latest fashion. Blood-red nails and lips. This was in the Fifties. Women looked like that then. But not necessarily old ones. She gave me a present. Oh, I’d had things before. They came by post. She handed me this.”

“What was it?”

“It was a cheque for a hundred pounds. That was real money then. Go and turn the bath off before it runs over.”

Susan went, shut off the taps, darted back. But now Anne looked at her moodily. “Look, Susan. I don’t really want to talk about this now. I didn’t know her, and suddenly she expected to be my mother. Margaret wasn’t exactly peerless, but she did her best. She was the closest I got. And then this dolled-up praying mantis appears before me.”

“You said –”

“I’ve said enough. Shut up. I’m going to have that bath. Oh,” pausing in the doorway, deliberate and cruel with her ace card, “thought any more about America?”

The phone rang when Anne was in the bathroom.

It was Jo.

“I tried you all afternoon,” accusingly. “Where were you?”

“I went out.”

“Can you come for a walk? I want to ask you something.”

“Maybe. I’ll see. What?”

“Tell you then. Meet you by Stratfords.”

Jo was already waiting by the shop, looking carefully at an array of oil-heaters, kitchen implements, and crockery in the window. Her tall sausage-like body was clad in a longish skirt and loose blouse. Her short, naturally-blonde hair, her only potential attraction, was greasy and pushed back behind big ears, as if she meant deliberately to be as charmless as she was able.

Susan could not be proud of Jo. Could not introduce her to anyone with a flood of pride – “My friend, Jo.” She resented this in Jo, and felt guilty for resenting it. It didn’t matter what people looked like. (No?) On the other hand, Jo could also be tactless, critical, and sometimes something that Susan would later refer to, in her late twenties, as spiritually obtuse.

They walked along the public paths of the common, as the last russet light dripped through the trees.

Young men, bare bronze-armed and legged, strode or bicycled past them, casting neither of them a single glance.

Nor did Jo have a boyfriend. She appeared not to want one. She was going to secretarial school, and an uncle had already promised her a lucrative secure job in a big London office. This seemed to be her only goal. Jo had never been in love, not even with anyone on celluloid. “Oh him,” she would say. “He’s all right, I suppose.” Even when Susan spoke admiringly of some glamorous woman: “Wish I could look like that,” Jo would sniff, “They don’t look like that in real life, you know.” How did Jo know anyway? Jo was very good at maths.

“My dad says I can have