June 1987 #2
And so I led my nymph’s youngest daughter around the house I’d grown up in.
The house her mother, in many ways, had grown up in.
Where she’d spent most of her girlhood. Where she’d made lifelong friends.
Where she’d had her first kiss and, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, her first orgasm.
Hell, for all I know her last as well. Then again, maybe I’m flattering myself.
I showed her the public rooms, the ones anybody was allowed in because that was always part of the deal with places like Patchley, at least in the postwar years: families like mine got to live there and in return families like yours got to poke around and look at things and bother us.
I’m not sure who got the better side of the bargain, if I’m honest.
But there were only so many parlours and galleries a person could pretend to care about.
Then I showed her the family’s rooms, including my own.
Including, and I’m not too proud to admit that this thrilled me just a little, the bed where all those many years ago I had—to borrow a phrase that I believe is increasingly common these days—fucked her mother.
I elided that detail, of course. But I said it was the young mistress’s room and asked idly if Doris had ever said anything about her. Which is to say, in case you’re not keeping up with the complexities of the narrative, about me.
She hadn’t.
At last I took Susan down to the servants’ quarters.
Honestly it wasn’t somewhere I went much, the rooms were pokey and frankly the servants didn’t much appreciate the family coming and nosing around their things.
I opened a door more or less at random and Susan slipped inside like a thief through a window.
Fortunately, the maid who would have been living there had already gone, although she’d left a cassette copy of True Blue on the nightstand and a stray stocking on the floor. Susan sat down on the bed, picked up the abandoned tape, and stared at it like it held the secrets of the universe.
And maybe it did. They were the same age, I think, Susan and Madonna.
Not exactly, but close enough. So here I am in my nineties thinking back thirty years to my sixties remembering a girl of twenty-eight staring at another girl of twenty-eight with her head thrown back on the cover of an album full of songs about true love inspired by a man she would later divorce.
Madonna, I mean. Not Susan. Although I confess I don’t know how her marriage played out. Still it seems apposite somehow.
“So…would she have had a room like this?” she asked me.
“Very much like it, yes.”
For some reason that seemed to strike her harder than anything else. She ran a hand over a mattress that was nowhere near old enough to have actually touched the nymph’s skin, and gazed in something like wonder at the walls of a room her mother may never even have been inside.
Meaning, I think, is very much where we make it.
“You know,” I told her, “they’re selling the contents of this place in a couple of days.
If there was anything your mother wanted she could”—and what was I doing, really?
Trying to bait a girl I’d known thirty years ago back to watch the death of a house she’d been happy in?
—“well, she might find something she liked.”
Susan looked down at the cassette, then up at me. “Yeah,” she said, “she might.”
She left soon afterwards, and I didn’t expect much to come of my little suggestion. And not much did.
But not much is not the same as nothing.
There wasn’t, if I am honest, a great deal left in the house after the hotel had taken what they fancied.
The drawing rooms, for example, they seemed to be planning to leave as they were, so that guests could get an authentic stately home experience during their stay, which meant none of those fixtures were up for sale.
Even the beds they kept, although I’m sure they’ve replaced most of them since—it’s been years after all, and hotel use isn’t kind to furniture.
Most of what remained for the general public was knickknacks, gewgaws, and tchotchkes.
And portraits, of course, but I doubted that anybody was actually going to want a painting of somebody else’s great-great-grandfather.
At least not at the prices we were asking.
I think most of them got bundled in with the house in the end.
In eighty-seven, though, they were still in the long gallery, all discreetly ticketed. I was there as well—in person and on canvas—and so, on that particular day, was she.
Age, I thought, had been kind to my nymph. I was under no illusions, of course, she was very much a woman in her sixties, her hair silvering and her skin lined, but I’d have known her anywhere—across years and continents.
I seldom weep—it was a habit I gave up in early childhood—but seeing her after all that time brought unfamiliar tears to my eyes. She was standing in front of my portrait, looking up at it with such an air of regret and melancholy that I froze.
Perhaps I should have spoken to her. I almost did, in fact. But then Susan came back through from the next room, a man beside her who I assumed was the elusive Mr. Jones. And when the nymph turned to her it was with such belonging and such easy intimacy, I could not quite bring myself to intrude.
Besides, I’d have needed to explain to the daughter that I wasn’t really a housekeeper, and that would just have been awkward. And I have a hereditary aversion to awkwardness.
I don’t know if she bought anything. Or what she said to her family when they asked her why she was staring at that one picture in particular or if they even asked her such a question.
They probably didn’t. I’ve been alive a long time now and something I’ve gradually worked out is that while I have fought for decades to remain at the centre of my own world, it’s a form of hubris to imagine oneself the centre of another person’s.
Secretly, I have always held, we are all of us solipsists.
So I left through the far door and retreated to my old room, half-stripped as it was, and sat on the window seat, crying like a fool or a child.
I never saw her again, and in the years since I have made my peace with the fact that I never shall.
In my own way, you see, I’m just as great a coward as Jimmy was.
I think perhaps I may have modelled myself after the wrong Mrs. de Winter.
The money and the lovers were rather wonderful things in the moment, but looking back.
Well. It’s that silly nameless girl I envy.
The one who took a chance and changed her life instead of spending the whole of it running away.
That’s probably what I saw in the nymph, you know. What I lo—what I admired about her.
There, are you satisfied?