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

brought you with me, Keith said it would have been fine – I should have risked it. This house, it’s like a stately home. Genuine Georgian. The Prince Regent, it seems, used to visit. In acres of parkland. There’s a boating lake. I’ve had the most fantastic time. But, God, Susan, I’m sorry, I’m not coming up to London again, there just isn’t time. The hotel is sending my stuff down, Keith arranged it all. A powerful guy, I may say, and she is very nice. Susan, it’s just too much hassle, you see, and I can get to Gatwick so easily from here – they’ve seen about changing the flight and everything – look, I have to go. I will write you as soon as I get back. And you’ll come over and see us, Wizz and me, in the fall, won’t you? That’s a must.”

Rod Ayres tired Susan, talking always about the ‘technical side’ of drawing, reducing art relentlessly to a kind of mathematics. He was thin and smelled too much of aftershave. Though over fifty, she thought, he had begun to seem interested in her in an amorous way. At first she hoped it was just his manner, then she realised from things said to her by other students, that they were considered to have something ‘going’.

Susan became increasingly frustrated, feeling she must keep in with Rod Ayres to ensure fulfilment of the Masonic code of the Job, but wanting to avoid him. He knew she was no longer unavailably involved with Patrick.

As Rod lit his fifteenth cigarette, his voice droning, Susan thought of Anne, re-installed by now in Manhattan with the straying Wizz. She thought of Anne’s odd new garrulousness, her rhythm of talking which seemed to have altered so much, perhaps only inevitably mirroring the phonetics of the people she now spent all her time with. The mirror too, obviously, of Wizz.

“So, we’ll go and see old Mike, see what he can suggest. Then maybe I’ll take you for lunch, eh, Susan.”

“Oh, I can’t,” she said. “Sorry.”

Rod looked displeased. Affronted even, as if she had loudly burped or spat at him.

What was she supposed to do? If she simply said, I’d hate to have lunch with you, or anything else, he would cease to assist her up the ladder of Work.

“I have to see a relative.”

“I thought your mother was now in the States again?”

“Yes. I have to visit my grandmother,” Susan said.

“Your grandmother? Do you have such a being?”

“Oh yes.”

Why did I say that? Never mind. His ruffled plumes were settling.

“Keep the old folk happy, eh,” agreed Rod, refusing to see that to Susan, and the other students, he was one of the happy-needy old folk, too.

So, I’m coming to see you Catherine.

Sitting on the train, alone this time, Susan did not feel strange. She felt slightly amused.

Another day off college, but then, she’d have lost far more of them if Anne had returned and she had stayed with her at the hotel.

But what, really, was she doing?

After the bus and train, another bus, then Constance Street, which now meant absolutely nothing, and then the other street and the park, which was full of a schools’ match of football, boys shrieking and jerseys. And Tower Road. But Tower Road was meaningless, too. The vast houses looked smaller and a lot of trees seemed to have been scythed down. Even the two great oaks on the grass as you approached the final wall, had been viciously pruned, and had produced hardly any summer leaves.

The witch’s house. The vegetable house. The Labyrinth.

Susan loitered along the wall. It was stripped of most of its creepers, the stonework tidied up. The For Sale – Under Offer board was gone, and the old iron gate was gone, replaced by a new green-painted wooden door, with a name in iron letters on it: Borders.

Why had Susan come here? Why had she come here the other two times? Patrick had wanted it last time, yes, but it was more than that. She could have resisted. And she had come here before then, the first occasion, when Jackie and the cats had Catherine’s house.

Was it the lure of the past, where things were safer since they had already happened?

Surely, the past hadn’t been in itself that appealing, not safe, or really ideal in any form.

Did this always happen? Any previous time, however dull or bad, was going to seem better than the time you were stuck in now?

Susan opened the green door by its natty metal ring, thinking as she did so of the green door which led to the Afterlife or astral plane in H.G. Wells.

And the door did open. Not surprisingly, of course. Deliveries, postmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses would need to get in.

The drive had been cleared substantially, the trees cut close, as if pushed back. Things had a glossy, well-kept garden look, and framed by their widened avenue, the house broke clear, shocking Susan. It too had been stripped and cleaned, and repainted a bold, dazzling primrose. There were shutters on some of the upper windows, polished blue, like the front door.

A vague rumble she had been aware of now solidified into a moving machine, some sort of small excavating digger, trundling out around the far side of the house. Earth sprayed about it. She could see anyway, as Patrick had predicted, dense vistas of growth had vanished. Open space was in Catherine’s garden now, spatially marked by the poles of so-far surviving trees.

I’m trespassing.

What now? What now?

What did she want from this ever-metamorphosing place?

As she walked along the drive between the neatly manicured plants, the gaps of ground from which nettles and docks and briars had been wrenched, Susan formulated her plan. A silly plan, and why anyway do it? But why do anything – it was all a sort of game, with intractable yet deadly-inane rules.

There was a bell, as there had been in the days of Catherine and Mrs Danvers. It shrilled through the house in a