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

At the same moment the digger started to make enormous gulping sounds.

No one would hear.

Standing there, Susan realised the stained glass panels of Catherine’s door had been incorporated in this other one. She thought of wading through the pool of coloured lights inside, jade and crimson, the last okay part of Sunday before her grandmother.

The door opened.

“Ye-es?”

Susan felt herself blushing, but took no notice of it, carried on. (What point was there ever in taking too much notice of the constant betrayals of the body?)

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Jackie – she used to live here, the cats charity, Cat Samaritans –”

“Jackie. Oh yes,” said the woman who had opened the door, her face in turn betraying her, too, hardening and seeming fixed and intent. “Yes, I’ve got her address somewhere, Devon, I think. Come in a minute. I’ll have a look.”

“So you knew Jackie?”

“Yes – I had a cat from her.”

“Of course. Yes. We had to contact her about some of the cats that were left behind. They kept on sneaking in and fouling, which was a bit of a drag – the house was nearly a ruin, you know, not kept up at all – and we were trying so desperately to get everything fixed, and the decor sorted out.”

The decor in the wide hall was now Pale Milk, (Olivia said) with one Coffee wall and some Chinese Red accents. In the side room where they now were, a large room Susan didn’t recall – perhaps made out of two rooms knocked through – it was darker Coffee, with notes of Royal Blue, and kaftan upholstery.

Everything smelled immensely clean, slightly of paint still, and of induced aromas, pot-pourri and scented candles, and the vast cloud of roses and freesias in a black pot by the fireplace, (which had green marble inlay.)

Olivia rummaged vigorously through some old address books from a bureau. She seemed one of those effortlessly groomed, youngish women that Susan had always marvelled at on TV, or in London – they appeared to spring out of bed or the shower sparkling, and fully clothed, the make-up minimal on unblemished matt skins, and their hair washed and made delicious in the night by pixies.

Olivia’s hair was long and densely blonde, as blonde as Anne’s had been, but this looked natural. Unlike dyed hair, the roots were of a deeper, gleaming platinum colour, by the hairline and the casual, perfectly-designed robot parting.

Susan watched Olivia with envy and some uneasy visual pleasure. Olivia was the Unattainable State, the patently other kind, as were her conditions, her persona, everything about her.

She had told Susan quite a lot, quite quickly and fluently, as if telling strangers who she was came quite naturally. Her husband, Jeremy, was in the City now in his twelfth floor office above the Thames. A girl – an au pair, Susan deduced – that Olivia seemed to call Dosha, was due to come in and bring them coffee for which Olivia had shouted lightly along the hall.

“Here we are. Yes. Now – Jackie – I can’t read the second name, Jem’s awful handwriting – but I expect you know… look, see if you can make it out.”

Susan took the book and carefully copied out Jackie and the cats’ address in Devon, on a piece of paper from her bag.

While she was doing this, the girl who must be Dosha rushed into the room.

“Dosha – gently, gently –” said Olivia. But her voice oddly had an edge of something that did not, suddenly, belong to the flawless Olivia-Jeremy World.

“Olivia – it’s there again – it’s there on the stairs. I see it when I am coming to go out of the kitchen – and then the faucet spouts on in sink –”

“Dosha,” said Olivia, “calm down, please.”

But Dosha only poised, a dark-haired slender girl of about Susan’s age, waving her hands and her eyes wide.

“Oh dear,” said Olivia. She glanced at Susan. “It doesn’t do anything, Dosha. You know that.”

“It is there.”

“Yes, it’s there. Look, go back and get the coffee. It’ll be gone by now. It always goes as soon as we see it, doesn’t it.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“No, but you have and now it’ll be gone.”

Dosha slunk out of the door.

Olivia turned round and looked at Susan. Her own eyes were big and frank. “We have a ghost, you see.”

Susan said, “Do you? Really?” She sounded polite, quite interested, pragmatic but open-minded.

“Actually, Susan, I was hoping – as you knew Jackie a bit – that you might know something about this – oh this bloody house.” Olivia flushed angrily. She stood up and flexed her well-shaped legs in their tailored jeans. “When I think of the K’s we’ve poured into it, the mess it was in. And the garden, they’re still working on that, and the landscape gardener – all these things we’ve had done. And then no sooner did we get in the bloody place than all this starts. I thought it was a poltergeist, but Jeremy says they’re always caused by young children – and we don’t have any kids.”

Susan felt now as if she were not necessarily operating her own body. As if she were only sitting up inside her head, like Jeremy in his office gazing down like God on the city and the river.

“What happens?”

“Oh – just lots of unimportant awful things. All the time. I hoped it would stop. I had a friend in, she works with crystals and that sort of stuff, professionally. She exorcised the house for us, she got the energies going the right way – or so she said. But it actually made things worse. Look, did Jackie ever mention –?”

“Well, yes. She said there was a knocking sound and windows opened by themselves. And Mildred – one of the others – said that things went missing –”

“They do, Christ knows they do. I lost my first wedding ring – I mean the ring from my