Greyglass by Tanith Lee (story read aloud .TXT) 📕

It was after five-thirty. Beyond the doorway, the house gaped in cracks of shadow, split with long passages and the side of a staircase. It looked totally unfamiliar. Susan might never have been here before. Changed so many times by the on-building of Catherine and Richard Wilde, did the house still go on altering itself, adding parts, shifting rooms around?

“I’m hungry,” Susan said.

“Yes, I am. Did you bring anything?”

“No. You do the bags. I’ll go down to the high street. What do you want?”

They decided on fish and chips, and he said keep the bill, he would give her his share when she came back.

“It’s all right,” she said briskly. “Anne sent some money. I’ll get it.”

When she and Anne had lived in Constance Street, they took a different route to reach the high street. She almost thought of doing that now, to make the walk longer. But that would mean going back through the park, and they had crossed the park earlier and it had subtly depressed her again, it’s barren openness, its increasing irrelevance.

Westering sun lay brazenly along the roads. The roar of homeward traffic rushed like the sea.

Homeward, she thought. All those people going home.

Susan thought of Anne, of going home to Anne in the various flats. Of nights when Anne stayed in and taught her card games, or they read books, curled in the armchairs, or watching TV, and sometimes ate toasted cheese sandwiches with grilled tomatoes before going to bed. Susan never ate cheese now. A small price to pay for good skin. But even so, one more fun delight forever lost.

Had she been happy then, as a child, with Anne? Yes, quite happy.

As she stood in line in Chiporama, Susan weakly regarded her nostalgia for a past only some three or four years away.

Wizz had stopped the past. Sliced it clean through. As she had known she wouldn’t, she hadn’t seen Anne since. Oh, seen photographs Anne sent, there had been a ton of those, usually with Wizz – on a beach in Florida, at a wine-tasting in New England… that sort of thing. And she and Anne had spoken now and then on the phone, but seldom, for Susan’s phone was always a shared one in a hall, and unless a time was scrupulously pre-arranged – and stuck to by Anne – the phone was not often free.

She looked happy, Anne. Always slim and vivid, well-dressed, tanned, her hair still undergoing metamorphoses – Do you like this short style? Wizz says he likes it for the summer. And, Don’t you think this curly mane is neat? Eve fixed it for me. We had a ball.

Wizz too was tanned and well-dressed, and looked a bit fatter. But Susan tried not to see him in the photographs. Because of Wizz she pushed them all into a box at the bottom of the curtained-off rail that was her wardrobe. Because of Wizz, and not wanting to see him, even the ones of Anne on her own. (Husband and wife: one flesh.)

When Susan got back to the house with the fish and chips, a bottle of wine and a cheap corkscrew, Patrick had vanished deep into the garden.

She thought of eating her fish first, before locating him. The food was almost cold by now anyway.

But then she went to look for him.

The garden never struck her as anything but abnormal. There was something more than verdancy or undiscipline about it. Prehistoric was Patrick’s word, but an apt one.

Briars clawed at her, rose bushes that had become tall hedges, all thorns. Paths tunnelled through the black green cavities between terrace-sides, clumps of giant docks, and trees whose roots had cracked up the paving as if a bomb had fallen.

“Here I am. You wandered right past me.”

“I’ve been trying to find you for an hour.”

She thrust the fish and chips at him. She didn’t know where they were, in some insane wilderness or forest, staring out through a sort of hole in the trees, at a ruin with boarded-up windows, while the sun died and the sky turned khaki.

“You seem fed up,” he said.

“I am.”

Did he even hear her? Yes, he heard, and was sympathetic – but indifferent. They were two separate people. They were bound to have unlike states of being. It didn’t concern him. Painting did.

His painting of tonight was slapdash, watery, effective. They drank the wine.

The sky looked better now, a blue-grape dusk with some stars. Now and then, as the shadows meshed the garden into solid darkness, the whitish forms of two or three cats glimmed and faded.

“What a wonderful place,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Don’t you think so? We were lucky, getting in before they started pruning and cutting down and wrecking everything.”

But the wine made her feel better. The wine said, Oh, it’s all right.

“That house,” he said, “is strange, isn’t it. I just put the bags upstairs. There’s a room there with some old curtains on the windows. People have got in. Someone had a fire in a fireplace, recent, could have burnt the house down. How many rooms are there, do you know?”

“No, not really. I told you, my grandparents built a lot on.”

“Why didn’t you get the house, Susan?”

She glanced at him. In the dusk, Patrick too was a shadow, with gleaming cat’s eyes.

“I said. Anne and Catherine didn’t get on.”

“I wish you had,” he had said. “I wish it was yours.”

“So you could come here and paint it,” she said.

“Yeah.”

And the wine said, Oh, it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps the wine, or the greasy fried fish, caused her to dream of the book-room. And of the sunken room below.

For a long while after she woke from it, Susan lay tensely, with the torch-splash above her like a parasol of useless hope, listening to Jackie’s cats courting and fighting in Catherine’s garden.

Then she must have slept again, because she woke up and bright light was coming in at the threadbare curtains.

Had she dreamt anything this time? No.

Patrick,