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

“Who on earth is that at this bloody time of night?”

“It’s Mrs Danvers.”

“What?” Anne picked up the phone.

Standing, neurasthenic by now, ears still phone-ringing on and on in the silence, Susan watched her mother’s drained face alter, become horribly alert with some invading life-force that had nothing whatever to do with her; heard her say, “When?” Heard her say, “Why?” saw gradually through her, as if through a sheet of filmy paper, to some other place beyond that was unidentifiable and yet, peculiarly, also to be recognised.

It was the middle of the night, about two-thirty a.m., when a policeman arrived. After Mrs Danvers, they had gone to bed, and so had to get up again. Anne, confronting the youthful PC, snarled, “I suppose you have to be up all night, so sod us, so do we, is that it?”

“No, madam.”

“I thought you always waited twenty-four hours for a disappearance.”

“Not always, madam. I understand the lady is very old.”

He sat in the front room, asked questions, took some notes. Susan sleepily wandered about making coffee for her mother.

When the policeman had gone, Anne did not return to bed. She paced up and down, smoking cigarettes, frowning.

“Mummy –”

“I’m all right. Go and get some sleep. Bloody woman. Bloody old woman.”

They had learned, from Mrs Danvers, that the grandmother had vanished from her lunch table between one fabulous calorific course and the next.

Since this had once or twice happened before, Mrs Danvers hadn’t been unduly put out. “She has a habit of coming back, you see, and eating the rest cold.”

However, Susan’s grandmother did not do that on this occasion. The rich food congealed in its tureens and on its dishes. The half carafe of red wine stood undrunk. “She always has the wine. Her doctor says it’s good for her.” “I’m sure it is,” Anne had said, “it’s claret. Ten quid a bottle and that’s supposed to be economising, isn’t it.”

In the afternoon, after the uneaten lunch had been cleared and the service washed, Mrs Danvers put her feet up for a couple of hours, as she generally did, before preparing the five o’clock tea.

“That was when I still couldn’t find her,” said Mrs Danvers. “At five o’clock.”

She then looked, she said, everywhere, and Susan conceived a perhaps-accurate picture of Mrs Danvers patrolling the length and breadth of the abnormal house, up and down all its twisting stairs, along all its tunnels and slopes, in and out of the endless and uncountable rooms. “I even looked up in the attics, Mrs Wilde, and she hasn’t been up there for years. The stair is too steep for her, she says.”

At nine o’clock Mrs Danvers, concerned and unsure what to do, had called the flat. “But there was a fault on the line, your daughter and I got cut off.”

“Yes, quite.”

“I kept trying. I couldn’t get through.”

“No.”

“Did I say, I looked all over the garden? I even went through the garden again, in the dark, with a torch.”

Standing there in her militant belted mac, like a spy for the Eastern Bloc, Mrs Danvers, who had summoned a taxi to bring her to their door, now announced she had also contacted the police.

“Why?” Anne, (Mrs Wilde) was aghast.

“Well, Mrs Wilde. She hasn’t left the house for several years. I think – she’s a bit fearful of the outside world. I do all the shopping. I do everything. She never has to go out.”

“Obviously then, my mother is still indoors. Mischievously hiding from you. What else would you expect?”

“I hope so, Mrs Wilde.”

“Was the cup of coffee all right?” Susan asked, as she was about to leave her mother pacing in the room where the policeman had sat and Mrs Danvers had stood, and where a kind of hollow still remained from their unwanted presences.

“The coffee was disgusting, thank you. Go to bed.”

Obscurely frightened, still Susan slept, her body used to the habit of slumber – a handy, childish knack she didn’t then suspect might ever desert her.

The next morning, anyway, her grandmother was found.

She had not after all been in the house, or the vast, accumulated garden. She was sitting on a bench in the municipal shrubbery by the Long Pool in the park. There had been a late frost that night, which gathered on her edges, like white crochet. She was completely dead.

“I thought she’d live to be a hundred,” said Anne, sombre, speaking softly. “There was nothing wrong with her. Her doctor checked her every three months. He saw her last in January. Her heart was sound. No diseases. She didn’t even have rheumatism for Christ’s sake. How can she be dead? Oh God, now we’ve got this death business, forms, mess, and the bloody funeral.”

The bloody funeral was actually rather pathetic. She had left, the old woman, explicit instructions for a low-budget burial, at a local cemetery, the plot already purchased. (There was no adjacent grave belonging to anyone. Her husband, Anne’s father, had been lost, body and soul, to a Second World War flying bomb in the City.) Anne and Susan attended, and Mrs Danvers in a black coat that was too large and too hot for the tepid rainy afternoon. No one else came.

They stood together over the oblong hole in the earth, and watched the coffin go down, and heard the elderly priest speak about a Christian resurrection that, Anne presently declared, not quite out of earshot, her mother had never believed in.

Afterwards they walked to the nearest pub.

“Of course my daughter is over sixteen,” snapped Anne at the barmaid.

In her high heels and eye make-up and lipstick, Susan tried to look worldly and old.

The barmaid let it go; even at sixteen you couldn’t supposedly drink alcohol in a pub in those days, and Susan was only having a pineapple juice.

Anne and Mrs Danvers talked desultorily. Susan ate crisps, wondering incoherently and too lightly what it meant, that hole, that box of darkness and its descent.

She had been aware of the fact of death