George was small for his age, very wiry, dark-haired, a darting kind of boy who was always laughing, who had often to be reprimanded by my father because his teachers said he was the most mischievous boy in his class. Alice, being two years older, was just the opposite: demure and silent, but happy in her quiet way, and beautiful, far more beautiful than I was. Isabel wasn’t beautiful at all. She was all freckles, with long pale plaits and long legs that sometimes could run as fast as George’s. She and George were as close as two persons can get, but in a way we were all close: there was a lot of love in 17 Lorelei Avenue.
I had a cold the day it happened, a Saturday it was. I was cross because they kept worrying about leaving me in the house on my own. They’d bring me back Black Magic chocolates, they said, and my mother said she’d buy a bunch of daffodils if she saw any. I heard the car crunching over the gravel outside the garage, and then their voices telling Salmon not to put his paws on the upholstery. My father blew the horn, saying goodbye to me, and after that the silence began. I must have known even then, long before it happened, that nothing would be the same again.
When I was twenty-two, Mr Mockler, I married a man called Acland, who helped me to get over the tragedy. George would have been eighteen, and Anna twenty and Isabel fifteen. They would have liked my husband because he was a good-humoured and generous man. He was very plump, many years older than I was, with a fondness for all food. ‘You’re like a child,’ I used to say to him and we’d laugh together. Cheese in particular he liked, and ham and every kind of root vegetable, parsnips, turnips, celeriac, carrots, leeks, potatoes. He used to come back to the house and take four or five pounds of gammon from the car, and chops, and blocks of ice-cream, and biscuits, and two or even three McVitie’s fruitcakes. He was very partial to McVitie’s fruitcakes. At night, at nine or ten o’clock, he’d make cocoa for both of us and we’d have it while we were watching the television, with a slice or two of fruitcake. He was such a kind man in those days. I got quite fat myself, which might surprise you, Mr Mockler, because I’m on the thin side now.
My husband was, and still is, both clever and rich. One led to the other: he made a fortune designing metal fasteners for the aeroplane industry. Once, in May 1960, he drove me to a house in Worcestershire. ‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ he said, stopping his mustard-coloured Alfa-Romeo in front of this quite extensive Victorian façade. ‘There,’ he said, embracing me, reminding me that it was my birthday. Two months later we went to live there.
We had no children. In the large Victorian house I made my life with the man I’d married and once again, as in 17 Lorelei Avenue, I was happy. The house was near a village but otherwise remote. My husband went away from it by day, to the place where his aeroplane fasteners were manufactured and tested. There were – and still are – aeroplanes in the air which would have fallen to pieces if they hadn’t been securely fastened by the genius of my husband.
The house had many rooms. There was a large square drawing-room with a metal ceiling – beaten tin, I believe it was. It had patterns like wedding-cake icing on it. It was painted white and blue, and gave, as well as the impression of a wedding-cake, a Wedgwood effect. People remarked on this ceiling and my husband used to explain that metal ceilings had once been very popular, especially in the large houses of Australia. Well-to-do Australians, apparently, would have them shipped from Birmingham in colonial imitation of an English fashion. My husband and I, arm in arm, would lead people about the house, pointing out the ceiling or the green wallpaper in our bedroom or the portraits hung on the stairs.
The lighting was bad in the house. The long first-floor landing was a gloomy place by day and lit by a single wall-light at night. At the end of this landing another flight of stairs, less grand than the stairs that led from the hall, wound upwards to the small rooms that had once upon a time been servants’ quarters, and another flight continued above them to attics and store-rooms. The bathroom was on the first floor, tiled in green Victorian tiles, and there was a lavatory next door to it, encased in mahogany.
In the small rooms that had once been the servants’ quarters lived Mr and Mrs Rachels. My husband had had a kitchen and a bathroom put in for them so that their rooms were quite self-contained. Mr Rachels worked in the garden and his wife cleaned the house. It wasn’t really necessary to have them at alclass="underline" I could have cleaned the house myself and even done the gardening, but my husband insisted in his generous way. At night I could hear the Rachels moving about above me I didn’t like this and my husband asked them to move more quietly.
In 1962 my husband was asked to go to Germany, to explain his aeroplane fasteners to the German aircraft industry. It was to be a prolonged trip, three months at least, and I was naturally unhappy when he told me. He was unhappy himself, but on March 4th he flew to Hamburg, leaving me with the Rachels.
They were a pleasant enough couple, somewhere in their fifties I would think, he rather silent, she inclined to talk. The only thing that worried me about them was the way they used to move about at night above my head. After my husband had gone to Germany I gave Mrs Rachels money to buy slippers, but I don’t think she ever did because the sounds continued just as before. I naturally didn’t make a fuss about it.
On the night of March 7th I was awakened by a band playing in the house. The tune was an old tune of the fifties called, I believe, ‘Looking for Henry Lee’. The noise was very loud in my bedroom and I lay there frightened, not knowing why this noise should be coming to me like this, Victor Silvester in strict dance tempo. Then a voice spoke, a long babble of French, and I realized that 1 was listening to a radio programme. The wireless was across the room, on a table by the windows. I put on my bedside light and got up and switched it off. I drank some orange juice and went back to sleep. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who had turned it on.
The next day I told Mrs Rachels about it, and it was she, in fact, who made me think that it was all rather stranger than it seemed. I definitely remembered turning the wireless off myself before going to bed, and in any case I was not in the habit of listening to French stations, so that even if the wireless had somehow come on of its own accord it should not have been tuned in to a French station.
Two days later I found the bath half-filled with water and the towels all rumpled and damp, thrown about on the floor. The water in the bath was tepid and dirty: someone, an hour or so ago, had had a bath.
I climbed the stairs to the Rachels’ flat and knocked on their door. ‘Is your bathroom out of order?’ I said when Mr Rachels came to the door, not wearing the slippers I’d given them money for. I said I didn’t at all mind their using mine, only I’d be grateful if they’d remember to let the water out and to bring down their own towels. Mr Rachels looked at me in the way people have sometimes, as though you’re insane. He called his wife and all three of us went down to look at my bathroom. They denied emphatically that either of them had had a bath.
When I came downstairs the next morning, having slept badly, I found the kitchen table had been laid for four. There was a tablecloth on the table, which was something I never bothered about, and a kettle was boiling on the Aga. Beside it, a large brown teapot, not the one I normally used, was heating. I made some tea and sat down, thinking about the Rachels. Why should they behave like this? Why should they creep into my bedroom in the middle of the night and turn the wireless on? Why should they have a bath in my bathroom and deny it? Why should they lay the breakfast table as though we had overnight guests? I left the table just as it was. Butter had been rolled into pats. Marmalade had been placed in two china dishes. A silver toast-rack that an aunt of my husband had given us as a wedding present was waiting for toast.