“Where were you, for God’s sake?” she said when she saw me. “What’s going on? Who is this girl?”
Lily, barefoot, in her crooked dress, was standing at a slouch some way behind her in the hall, chewing on a wad of gum and wearing a sullen look. The panic I had felt a minute ago was now replaced by a chilly calm. I have a gift, if gift it is, of quenching in myself at a stroke any fever of the blood or brain. There are, I mean there were, nights when I would cower in the wings, shaking, in a wet funk, as I awaited my cue, only a moment later to step forward in perfect poise, thundering out my lines without trace of tremor or fluff. A floating sensation comes over me at such moments, as if I were being buoyed up on some dense, fluent medium, a Dead Sea of the emotions. From out of this state of almost pleasant detachment I regarded Lydia now with a mild, enquiring air. I noticed my fountain pen was still in my fingers, cocked like a pistol. I almost laughed. Lydia stood with her head held up and to one side, in the attitude of a startled thrush, staring at me, her face set in a sort of rictus of baffled incredulity.
“That’s Lily,” I said lightly. “She’s the housekeeper.”
It sounded improbable even to me.
“The what?” Lydia cried, an avian squawk. “Have you gone completely off your head?”
“Lily,” I called, “this is Mrs. Cleave.” Lily said nothing, and did not stir, except to shift her slouch from one hip to the other, still rhythmically chewing. Lydia went on looking at me with that large surprised angry expression, leaning backward a little now as if to avoid the possibility of a wildly thrown punch.
“Look at you, the state of you,” she said, wonderingly. “Is that a beard?”
“Lily takes care of me,” I said. “Of the house, that is. She came most opportunely. I had been about to ask the nuns across the way if they might have a couple of orphans to spare.” This time I did laugh, an unfamiliar sound. “I could have dressed them up in knee breeches and powdered wigs,” I said, “my Justine and Juliette.” I once played the divine Marquis, in a headband and flounced shirt open to the navel; I quite fancied myself in the part.
A hurt helpless something came into Lydia’s look and it seemed for a moment she might cry. Instead she sighed heavily down her nostrils and tightened her mouth into a grim line, and turned on her heel and stalked off into the parlour. Lily’s eyes met mine and she could not suppress a little grin, showing the glint of an eye-tooth.
“Some tea, Lily,” I said softly, “for Mrs. Cleave and me.”
When I followed her into the parlour Lydia was standing at the window as she had that first day we had come here, with her back to the room and one arm tightly folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette in short, violent puffs.
“What are you doing, Alex?” she said, in a quavery voice. She did not turn. I hate it when she tries to act, it is embarrassing. She only addresses me by name when she is being theatrical. I let a moment lapse.
“You’ll be glad to hear,” I said in a bright voice, “that the house is known to be haunted. So you see, I am not losing my marbles after all. Quirke says some child—”
“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to hear.” I shrugged. She turned to the room and looked about vaguely with a frown. “This place is filthy,” she murmured. “What does that girl do?”
“I don’t pay her much,” I said. “In fact, since recently I haven’t been paying her at all.”
I hoped she would ask why this was, thus giving me the opportunity of breaking to her the delicate news of my uninvited house-guests, but she only sighed again, still with that preoccupied frown, and shook her head. “I’m not interested in your domestic arrangements here,” she said, with large but unconvinced disdain. She looked at the cigarette in her hand as if she had not noticed it before now. Her voice grew thick with breathy distress. “I take it you have left me and will not be coming back,” she said in a rush, still glaring at the cigarette with glistening eyes.
I made a show of pondering hard.
“Now, was that a line of anapaests, do you think,” I said, “or the rarer, shyer amphibrach? I ask out of professional interest. You really should be a poet.” I still had that bloody pen in my hand. I put it down on the mantelpiece, concentrating, so as not to forget later where I had left it; I am becoming very absent-minded, in the matter of small, inanimate things. I could see Lydia in the mirror above the mantelpiece, glaring at the back of my neck. “I’m content here, for the moment,” I said, in a considered tone, turning to her. “You see, it offers me a way of being alive without living.”
“Of course,” she said. “You’ve always been in love with death.”
“Spinoza says—”
“Oh, fuck Spinoza,” she said, but with little force, almost wearily.
She glanced about for an ashtray, and not finding one shrugged and dropped an inch of ash on the carpet, where it landed softly and did not crumble. I asked if she had heard again from Cass. She shook her head, but I could see she was lying. “Where is she, exactly?” I asked. Again that stubborn shake of the head, as if she were a child refusing to tell on a playmate who has been naughty in the nursery. I tried another approach. “What is the surprise you said she has for me?”
“She told me not to tell you anything.”
“Oh, did she.”
One of the things, the very few things, I have learned, or realised, about myself since coming here is that I am always on the lookout for someone or something on whom to wreak revenge. I do not know what I might be seeking revenge for, or what form my vengeance would take, exactly. I am like my mother waiting for the world to apologise to her for the nameless wrongs she believed it had done her. Like her, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that there is indeed blame to be apportioned, a score to be settled. I am content to wait, to take things slowly, to bide my time, but I am always sure that I shall be avenged, somehow, sometime. Perhaps when that time comes I shall know what the original insult or injustice was. What confusion there is in me; I really am a stranger to myself.
Out in the kitchen there was a sudden cacophonous blast from Lily’s radio, immediately silenced.
Lydia was watching me sidelong now, waiting to see what I would do next. Sometimes, for instance at moments like this one, I allow myself to entertain the notion that for all her strengths she is a little afraid of me. I confess I like to keep her on her toes. I am unpredictable. Perhaps she really does think I am mad, and might do her violence. Behind her in the window the garden was an incongruously Edenic medley of gay greens and shimmering, petrol blues. High summer’s abundance is a continuous surprise. “She wants to come home,” she said, “but she can’t, at the moment.” This struck a false note of attempted appeasement, which I refused even to acknowledge. At the moment, indeed.
“She confides in you, does she?” I said. “She never used to.”
This is true; whatever differences there may be between my daughter and me, we have always been close enough to read each other’s minds—and it is always, always the two of us against poor Lydia.
I heard Lily’s bare feet slapping along the corridor from the kitchen, and now she came in bearing a tin tray with a teapot and two unmatching mugs, and a plate piled high with thick, crooked slices of haphazardly buttered bread. I noticed Lydia noticing the crusted dirt on the child’s callused feet and etched into the wrinkled red backs of her heels. Lily, biting her lower lip at one side, carefully avoided looking at me, and set the tray down on the hearth, bending from the waist and deliberately showing the backs of her thighs, pale as a fish’s belly, right up to her narrow behind.