Observatory Mansions (23 page)

Tearsham Park
.

Father standing in flat one said: This is the drawing room. It used to be, unless I’m much mistaken, about three times the size of this. It’s so dirty! Where has all this rubbish, all these empty cans and newspapers come from? And someone has smashed the windows. There should be, just above me now, written into the stucco-decorated ceiling with its roses and leaves, a date: 1687. Here, said Father kicking a wall, should be a fireplace, a great marble surround with columns supporting the mantelpiece, its twin should be a few metres further down, the other side of the wall. There, that’s in the way, that deceiving wall! There should be tapestries, it’s all too, too small! With your imagination put a sofa here. On this absent sofa I sit with my mother. My father is sitting alone over there. He is reading the last volume of the
History of the Ormes
. He had written this volume. He is laughing. I am playing with a magnifying glass. Father closes the book. It is finished.

Francis, says my father, you are heir to a great and old family. Look after it when I am gone. Cherish it. Marry, get yourself a son, at least one. Never waste money. Extend
Ormeland. If you can’t, keep it as it is. If you lose one inch of it you will be cursed by your ancestors.

My father takes me around the house showing me all our family’s possessions. Look at them, he says, aren’t they beautiful? Never lose one, Francis, he says.

Father takes Anna and me into the entrance hall and says: Here in the hall of Tearsham Park are many faces. Not bare and filthy wallpaper, and the floor should be black and white chequered marble, not threadbare carpet. Here are many faces painted in oil. Many proud profiles. Many old Ormes. One head on top of another, five heads high, climbing piggyback into the darkness. Many old dead Ormes. The dead that are frequently dusted, a chapel of history. All these faces arranged neatly in order of existence whisper
remember me
. All that spotless history. They look at me and there is no approval in their look.

Come here every day, says my father, as I have done. Look at these faces. If you
can
look at them then you are doing your duty, then these portraits will be your friends. If you
cannot
look at them then you are doing something wrong. Immediately right that wrong, Francis. If you buy land, and you will, you must go in and see the portraits. You will find them smiling at you. Never sell, Francis, extend, expand. That is the oldest Francis Orme up there at the top, Sir Francis Orme, who died in these grounds, in a tunnel that starts in the cellar. We are all his little children, he made us. In gratitude we borrow his name for our little lives and then pass it on. It is never ours to keep. Pass it on, Francis, keep it living. Read the
History of the Ormes
in the library, write your own. Do not let us down. Promise me you won’t. Swear by these portraits and on your own father’s life that you won’t let us down. Promise, Francis, promise.

I promise.

Observatory Mansions
.

Mother: This is flat sixteen. Its occupant is Claire Higg. Claire Higg is watching television. She has only recently taken up the habit of watching television and—

Mother suddenly stopped talking, she had heard Father moving about in the next door flat and rushed down a level.

Tearsham Park
.

Father inside flat fifteen: This is Peter Bugg’s room. This stern, jet-black-haired man is my tutor during his school’s holidays. He used only to have one room but now, strangely, it has extended to four rooms. Three of these rooms are fictitious. Ignore them. On the walls are school photographs.

Observatory Mansions
.

Mother: This, flat ten, belongs to Peter Bugg. This bald man who is always sweating and crying was tutor to my husband and to my son. He has only recently come to live here. His former home was repossessed. He keeps himself to himself and spends much of his time sitting at his desk writing. I do not know what it is that he is writing. There is a waste-paper basket by the window. It is filled with scrunched up pieces of paper. This wallpaper made of one huge photograph of a harbour with fishermen at work in strange looking boats has nothing to do with Peter Bugg. It was here before him. How ridiculous Mr Bugg’s school photographs look here, hanging just above an ultramarine sea. This strange wallpaper was placed here by the old resident of flat ten, an old man, who had spent many years working abroad. This photograph wallpaper was the view he had from his house in that foreign land of his, which he missed so much. The old man, Mr Wilson, had had to return to this country, his job out there
had finished. He hated it here and turned his flat into a museum of his old days spent abroad. Almost everything he placed inside it was from that foreign world. One day when he walked out, having not, I believe, left his flat for almost a week, he was so appalled by what he saw that he stood absolutely still, all his muscles tensed, and screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop screaming. The Porter called a doctor, the doctor called an ambulance. They took Mr Wilson away and they didn’t bring him back.

Tearsham Park
.

Father with tears in his eyes, back in flat one which he called the drawing room: Over there (he points to an empty, dirty corner) is my father. We think, my mother and I, that Father is sleeping. Mother goes to wake him, the gong for supper has gone, but Father will not wake up. Mother shouts at me. She tells me to go into supper alone. I never see Father again.

Shortly afterwards people will start demanding money from us, a great deal of money – taxes and duties that we have to pay entirely because Father has just died. They ask for so much money that Mother starts crying and we sell the two oil landscapes in the dining room, whenever we look at the gaps on the walls we are reminded of them. I see Mother at the desk in the smoking room, where Father kept his accounts. She says: In your grandfather’s time this house had twenty-seven staff, there were butlers and under butlers, footmen, lady’s maids and even lamp boys, but things have changed. That was a long time ago.

She sighs and tells me that we must further reduce the number of our staff. The house steward must go and one housemaid and the valet, too, and we can’t afford even to keep the pantry boy on any longer or even the daily woman for that matter. There won’t be enough people to keep the
place tidy any more and there’ll be no one to polish the floors.

Observatory Mansions
.

Mother, back outside Claire Higg’s flat (not rising to the third floor until she was certain that Father was away from the stairs and down on the ground floor): Claire has suffered a terrible loss. She sits alone, crying day and night. We have tried to take her out, we have offered her walks in the park and hot chocolate in cafés. She does not find our offers tempting. Every morning we come and knock on her door. She says she can’t come out because she saw a dead sparrow from her window, lying at the side of the road. It’s a bad sign, she says. On other mornings she says she can’t go out because she heard a car horn which meant to her that a dangerous driver was roaming the streets and she might be knocked down. Sometimes she tells us that she can’t come out because there is a storm about to break, though there is not a cloud in the sky. She stands at the window watching the traffic going around and around.

Tearsham Park
.

Father in flat one, in his reduced drawing room: The room is filled with girls. Mother presides over them. They are taking tea. I am sitting over there, a little way away from them. Mother tries to get me to talk to the girls but I am frightened. I keep quiet. The girls come every day and talk happily to each other, they are old friends. They do not talk to me. Mother is trying to find me a wife. I tell her that I do not want a wife. She slaps me. When the girls come the next time I am made to sit with them. Halfway through tea I upset a cup and it spills on to the dress of one of the girls. The girl screams at me, she says the dress was new. She accuses me of
upsetting the tea deliberately. She had a lovely face and a lovely smile. But the smile was only on her lips when she talked to the girls. When she screams at me, accusing me of deliberately ruining her dress, she does not wear her beautiful smile. The next time the girls come to tea, the girl with the smile is not with them. Slowly, there are less and less girls at Mother’s tea parties. Then they are abandoned altogether. I am much relieved.

Observatory Mansions
.

Mother still on the third floor, opened the sliding metal lift doors. She peered into the darkness. Mother: This is a prologue to what happened next, or before, before Miss Higg took herself away from the world. Look at that metal cord, that cord is one of the cords that used to gently pull the lift up or let it slowly come down. Look at the end of the cord. It is broken. There are rumours, that originated from Francis, that the lift cord was deliberately cut by the Porter. The police did think the cord looked a little too cleanly cut, if the cord had snapped from hard wear it would probably have been more serrated. But there was no proof.

Tearsham Park
.

Father, still in his diminished drawing room, labelled one: I’m sitting here. No one else is in the room. The door is opened, a different door to this one which has the number one on it, and it wasn’t such a cheap door, if you tapped it, it wasn’t hollow like this one. I can see that other door, I can see that other door open, a girl walks into the drawing room. The door is closed, I hear a key in the lock. I am left locked in the drawing room with a girl. That girl is to be my future wife. She came from the city, not from such an old family as ours I am told later, but a good enough family all
the same, according to my mother. She walks up to me and says hello. I look away. Now she comes closer and kisses me on the lips. I run to the door and beg my mother to open it. The girl follows me to the door and when I realize that my mother is not going to open it I turn around and the girl kisses me again. Her third kiss is longer than the other two. I stand frozen in absolute fear. I feel her tongue on my lips. Her tongue opens my mouth and wiggles about inside it. After a while she takes her tongue out and steps back from me. I realize that I have been holding my breath for a long time and feel dizzy. I breathe out. I must look upset because now the girl goes and sits in one of the chairs over there and starts crying. After a while I go and sit next to her. I pat her hand. She looks up at me. She smiles. I cannot disobey that smile. The girl smiles such a beautiful smile and says: Can I stay? I say: Yes, but not because I want her to stay. I say yes because it is impossible to contradict that smile. I hear a key turn in the lock. I hear my mother knock on the door. When I go to answer it my mother asks me, How are you, darling? I say, immediately without thinking, that I am in love. The words that have just come out of my mouth shock me. I think about them and I realize that in fact I
am
in love. I say it again: I am in love with … Then I stop. I do not know her name. I ask her: What is your name? She says that her name is Alice. I turn to my mother. I say: Yes, I am in love with Alice.

Observatory Mansions
.

My mother on the third floor, somewhere between flats sixteen and nineteen. Mother: There are milk bottles outside the doors of flats sixteen and nineteen. It is precisely seven thirty in the morning. The door to flat sixteen is opened. There stands Miss Claire Higg, dressed, suggestively enough, in her nightgown. Now the door to flat nineteen is opened.
Mr Alec Magnitt steps out, he is dressed tidily in an unfashionable grey suit with matching grey shoes. In one hand he holds a calculator. He picks up the milk bottle outside his door and, still keeping his door open, places the milk bottle in his fridge. Claire sees a little of his flat, that same fraction that she has always seen; she has never seen anything more. She sees a framed photograph of an old woman, possibly Alec Magnitt’s mother. Mr Magnitt returns to the landing and locks his door. Claire Higg, still posted outside the door of flat sixteen, smiles lovingly at him. He smiles nervously back. Alec Magnitt walks towards Claire Higg and places something in her hands. He opens the lift shutters and walks into the lift. He closes the lift shutters behind him. Claire Higg returns to her flat and closes the door behind her. She looks in her hands. She finds a passport photograph there of Alec Magnitt, on its reverse are written words full of love. Alec Magnitt, inside the lift, presses the button that says G on it, for the ground floor. Outside the lift a terrific noise is heard, the sound of something swiftly descending from a great height. Suddenly there is an enormous bang. Dust rises and spews out of the lift shaft on the first and second floors. Miss Higg opens her door again. She is no longer smiling. She rushes to the lift entrance on the third floor and pulls back its metal shutters. She looks down the lift shaft. She sees the broken metal cord dangling beneath her. Claire Higg screams.

Tearsham Park
.

My father gradually ascended the stairs, my mother hearing his approach rushed up to the fourth floor. My father stopped outside flat sixteen. He heard voices coming from inside the flat. Father: This door for some unknown reason labelled sixteen, has nothing to do with the number sixteen. This door is the door to my bedroom. (Father bangs on the
door.) I will not be locked out of my own bedroom. (Claire Higg curses inside. Father kicks the door. We beg him to stop, we beg him to imagine his old bedroom. He complains a little more and then, touching the door, he closes his eyes and smiles.) On the other side of this door I am lying on my four-poster bed, under the covers. I am alone. It is midnight. During the day that has just passed I have been married to Alice who I have fallen in love with; a small service in Tearsham Church. Alice is sleeping in Tearsham Park for the first time tonight. Her bedroom is two floors below. As I gaze at my ceiling I am disturbed by a knocking sound, a hand tapping on wood. Who is it? I ask. It is Alice, says Alice. The door is opened, without my permission, and Alice walks into my bedroom and closes the door behind her. She is wearing only her nightclothes. Now, hardly any time later, she is wearing nothing. Alice, completely naked, steps forwards and pulls the sheets and blankets away. Then she replaces the sheets and blankets with her naked self. She pulls down my pyjama bottoms and sits on me. She moves up and down. As she moves up and down I am overcome by a feeling of considerable pleasure. Shortly after this Alice looks down at me and asks –
Already
? I do not know what she is talking about and ignore her comment. Alice returns to her room. She will come back again on the next few nights and the procedure will be the same. I begin to look forward to these nights. Soon she stops saying
Already?
and stays with me for longer.