My brother Michael shared a room with my other brother Sebastian. They were twins, but not identical. My sister Catherine had the room opposite my parents, and sometimes I would creep into her room at night with a sheet over my head, and give her a fright, or I’d listen for when she went to the loo, and I’d lie down at the corner of the corridor and grab her ankle as she went past in the dark. It worked every time. Then my mother told me to stop doing it, because it was unnerving being woken up by screaming in the middle of the night. Catherine used to get revenge by leaning over the banisters of the landing, and spitting on my head when I was underneath in the hallway. It’s hard to imagine that she grew up to be so beautiful and refined, and married a baronet.
On the top floor up the back stairs, under the roof, is a lovely big dusty attic. I think it had been fitted out for a servant to live in, because it had a proper little fireplace, and the rafters were all boarded in. I spent hours up there. I fixed a dartboard to the wall, and I threw darts at it, backhand, underarm, over my shoulder, every possible way. I got very good at it. It was one of my party tricks. I used to go up there when I was miserable as well, because no one would know I was weeping.
I always liked the bells. You’d press a button on the wall in any room, and it would ring in the pantry, and a little brown semaphore would wave back and forth in a box above the door, and indicate which room you were ringing from. Catherine and I used to push the buttons to make my mother go to the front door and find nobody there. Once we did it, and my mother went to the door, and when she opened it, the cat was sitting there on the mat in the porch, looking up at her as if he’d pressed it himself. The cat just walked past her into the hallway, and my mother was astonished for a short time, until she realised that it couldn’t possibly have been Tobermory that rang the bell. Tobermory was named after a talking cat in a story that my father read to us once. The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it’s better not to tell the truth.
Our phone number was 293, amazing when you consider how long the numbers are nowadays.
I love sitting here at Christmas time, at the end of the garden. I don’t feel the cold. I like to sit here because the house looks so wonderful with the Christmas tree behind the french windows. There’s a full moon, and I can see everything around me with perfect clarity. The stars are out, and I can never remember which ones are the planets. Perhaps they’re the very bright ones. Sebastian used to point them out to me, but I don’t know how he knew. I used to point them out to girlfriends when I was being romantic, but I was bluffing. I knew that they didn’t know either. The house and the garden and the sky look like something out of a Christmas card, appropriately enough. The only thing missing is snow. I only ever remember one white Christmas, when it snowed as we came out of church, and Catherine was wearing a lilac coat with a hood that had a lining of white rabbit fur that framed her face and made me think that she was the prettiest sister that anyone ever had. Everything is silver and shadow now, except for the Christmas tree, which is glowing with all sorts of different coloured lights, that reflect off the tinsel and the glass balls.
It reminds me, it can’t be helped, of that dreadful night of the fire. We had little candles in those days, little candles that sat on cups that clipped to the branches of the Christmas tree, along with all the tatty taffeta angels that we’d inherited. It looked magical, but it wasn’t ever a good idea. The trees dry out, and they’re full of resin. They go up like a torch.
We all went to midnight Mass, and when we got home we had a nightcap. We talked about plans for Christmas Day. My father used to like to go shooting, but my mother more or less forbade him. She said it wasn’t nice to go round bowling over rabbits and blasting birds out of the sky on the day when our Saviour was born to bring peace and harmony to the world. We decided we’d all walk to Abbot’s Notwithstanding and back again before lunch, but my mother would have to drop out because someone had to baste the goose. I think she was probably relieved, because she wasn’t a great one for unnecessary exercise.
The whole family were there, including the baronet. We liked the baronet. He didn’t put on any airs, and he didn’t have any side. He had a quiet charm and a confidence. He gave up the army for Catherine’s sake, because she didn’t want to have to be sent off all over the world at a moment’s notice. It was decent of him because he was a Coldstreamer, he was doing well, and he obviously loved it. He and Catherine came down from Cambridgeshire in the Riley to be with us for Christmas. Sebastian and Michael came down from Merton, and I was living at home anyway, because I’d always loved that house, and didn’t want to move anywhere else, not unless I married, and anyway I’d found a decent job in Guildford. I paid rent to my mother without my father knowing, which seemed the best thing. Knowing her, she spent the money on shoes.
That night, what with us being tired and having a tot of whisky inside us, we forgot to put out the candles on the tree, just as anyone might, but the next thing I knew, I woke up choking. I got out of bed, hacking and coughing, and I groped about in the smoke, but I couldn’t find the lightswitch, and there was a terrible pain in my lungs, and I was coughing so much that it was agony. I felt that I was vomiting my lungs up. My eyes stung so badly from the smoke that I couldn’t open them, and even so they were still streaming with tears. I remember the pain, the coughing, the stinging in my eyes, and the insuperable fear, the not knowing where I was in the room, the roaring noise, and then it was as if my chest and my brain were full of molten lead, and I must have passed out. I don’t really know what happened next.
As I sit here at the end of the garden, on the rockery, looking at the Christmas tree with its electric lights, it’s hard to believe that the house was almost gutted. The tree must have set the curtains alight, and so on. Anyway, it’s all been repaired, and you’d never know that anything happened. It’s part of the wonder of the house. It doesn’t die, it just keeps on evolving. The house is alive. It watches over me always, and it’s watching me now as I sit here, not feeling the cold, looking at it from the end of the garden.
The house may be alive, but my family aren’t. They all perished in the fire, from inhaling the smoke, every one of them, including the cat. Even so, it doesn’t stop them turning up. Just now my father put his hand on my shoulder, and said: “Come on, my boy.” Death hasn’t changed him at all. He’s just as solid, he’s still got the same voice and even the same smell of Three Nuns Navy Cut pipe tobacco. He still smokes a pipe. He wears the plus fours and long socks and brogues that I used to find so embarrassing and old-fashioned. Every time I sit here, he comes and asks me to leave. I wish he wouldn’t. I love him, but he isn’t entitled to tell me what to do any more.
They’re all here now, as solid and real as when they were alive. There’s Catherine and her baronet, hand in hand, and Sebastian and Michael looking at me pityingly. There’s even the cat. It’s not Tobermory. This one is Gerald, and he was two cats later. Gerald used to drink from the dripping tap in the bathroom basin, whereas Tobermory would get under the sofa, stick his claws into the hessian underneath, and drag himself along on his back as fast as he could go. Gerald settles on his haunches and looks up at me with interest, as if I were an experiment.