The Dumb House Page 5

  Mostly, I was alone. At lunch-time, I would sit in the library with my favourite book. I remember it clearly, even now: it was called The Junior Dictionary Illustrated. The cover showed a girl lying on the grass in summer, reading, and an ideal schoolmaster handing a book to an ideal boy, while another girl stood by, holding her own book like a pet or a baby. The first page bore the legend ‘We Live in a World of Words’, and showed a variety of objects in boxes, with captions for their names, and the country in which the names had originated: bantam and tattoo, from the South Seas; rose and mutton from France, bungalow and jungle from India, marmalade and cobra from Portugal. I loved that book. I loved its pictures of rhododendrons and rabbits, and perfect children skating on perfect ice rinks. I loved its simple definitions, the sense it gave that everything could be classified and explained, and I took what it said at face value: we live in a world of words, things exist because of language, and language could as easily change things as keep them fixed in place.

  Mother drove me to school in the mornings. In that school no one else travelled by car, and it set me apart from the others to glide by, and have them see me, sitting in the front alongside a woman who was always expensively dressed and utterly remote. Every now and then she took it into her head to offer a lift to some child who took her fancy, which only made things more awkward. After school, I insisted on walking home by myself. It was nearly three miles, but the road was straight and there was little traffic. It ran out of the village past the houses, skirted a row of allotments, then passed a farm. The farm always seemed deserted: I remember the yard, and a grey metal hopper blotted with rust, tilted over a hedge like a shipwreck. Sometimes a herd of muddy, black-haired cattle stood by the fence, watching me pass; sometimes a dog ran to the gate and barked, but mostly the yard was empty, a pile of logs against the barn, an old tractor marooned in a pool of weeds, rusted remains of farm machinery propped against the walls, like the remnants of a forgotten civilisation.

  In winter it would be almost dark by the time I reached the farm. For the next mile, there was nothing but fields on both sides. The silence was heavy and thick, like velvet, broken only by an occasional splash in the ditch beside the road, or a car swishing by on its way to Weston. There were no lights on that stretch of road, but that did not bother me till I got to Laurel Cottage, about half a mile from home. I never saw lights at Laurel Cottage, but I knew the foreign woman was there, watching me the way she did in the summertime. That bothered me. The people in the village said the foreign woman was mad. Nobody knew how she lived. Sometimes she would be sitting in her garden when I passed by, and she would be knitting, or reading a book. People who had seen inside the cottage said she had hundreds of books, all piled on the floor in the sitting room. Once I saw her standing at her door, eating an apple, and I plucked up the courage to say good afternoon. She looked at me and smiled, but she did not reply. I was intensely curious about her. I wanted to know where she had come from, and what it was that had made her mad.

  She wasn’t mad all the time. The people in the village said she took fits because of something that had happened to her in the war. I had seen her myself, on occasion, standing in her garden, talking to the trees, when the fit was on her. She would walk round in circles, talking in some language that no one else understood. At first I thought it was Polish or German, because people in the village said she had come from Germany as a refugee after the war. Later, Mother told me it was not a real language at all, but something the woman had invented. As far as I knew, she only ever spoke this language to the trees in her garden.

  Her fits would last for hours at a time. To begin with, she seemed excited, even happy: she walked quickly around the garden, sometimes reaching out and brushing a tree with her fingers as she passed. She would talk constantly in a kind of singsong – there was no structure, no syntax. The words seemed to merge, one into another, yet there was no doubt that they meant something to her, that she intended something by them. Then, about an hour after she began, her voice would change. Now there were spaces between one word and the next, everything began to collapse inward, into a kind of slow motion. Eventually she turned her back on the tree she had been talking to, and walked away. Whenever that happened, she always looked disappointed, as if she had failed in some task. Once, when I was out hunting for animals, I hid in a bush near the cottage and watched the whole thing. It was beautiful in its way, and I was curious about her private language. I wanted to know what it meant to her, what it was she thought she was saying.

  Once I was walking home in the springtime. It was late afternoon, still light; the rain had been falling all day, heavy and loud on the windows at school. Now it had stopped but the fields and gardens were still wet. The world seemed abnormally still, after the violence of the rain. As I approached Laurel Cottage, I thought I saw something move – or rather, I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing amongst the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get, playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden. I knew it was not an animal I sensed there, but a human being, though I could not have said why. Then, just as I reached the front gate, the foreign woman stepped out from amongst the leaves and stood there, stark naked, streaming with rainwater, and laughing softly to herself. She was so close I could almost have touched her. She was looking straight at me, but I do not think it was me she saw. She was playing a game with someone else, perhaps with someone who had died years before, or it might have been someone she had invented, but it was not me.

  I had never seen a naked woman. She was thin, but her breasts and hips were large, and the sight of her thick, dark pubic hair excited and frightened me. I could not take my eyes off her. As we stood there, face to face, I had the idea of touching her wet skin, of stroking the hair, but I hurried on, walking backwards so I could still see her, afraid to turn my back on her white body.

  I waited outside Mrs Olerud’s house for three hours. It’s strange, how a neighbourhood changes when the people leave. A silence falls; the arrival of a delivery van becomes an event; animals appear and move through the gardens in virtual slow motion. It always seems something has just happened, moments before, but when you look there is nothing.

  I didn’t notice the boy at first. Like one of the animals, he seemed to emerge from nowhere. I hadn’t seen the front door open, but he might have come from the back of the house. He was standing on the path, looking towards the end of the road, as if he was expecting someone. I was sure he hadn’t seen me. I got out of the car, clutching my bouquet of flowers, and walked over to the gate.

  ‘Hello, Jeremy,’ I said.

  He looked angry. It was obvious that he remembered who I was and didn’t want to admit it.

  ‘Is your mother home?’ I asked.

  He moved his head almost imperceptibly. I leaned down to open the gate and he retreated a few steps, holding his arms out, as if he could prevent me from entering by sheer willpower. I noticed he was holding something in his left hand.

  ‘What have you got there?’ I asked.

  He looked at his hand. It was shaped in a loose fist, cradling something that must have been breakable, or precious to him. Slowly his face broke into a half-smile. He took three steps forward, looked up at me and, holding out his hand, turned it over and unclenched his fingers, like a conjuror performing a trick.

  He was holding a baby mouse. It was tiny, almost bald, and quite motionless.

  ‘It’s a mouse,’ I said, in my best adult-to-child voice. He gave me a look of contempt. He didn’t want my kindness. Showing me the mouse had been some kind of trick on his part, some act of deception he alone understood. I held out my hand.

  ‘Shall I take it now?’ I asked him.

  He pulled away his hand and stepped back.

  ‘But it’s dead,’ I said softly.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You know
it is,’ I said. ‘It was only a baby. You should have left it in the nest.’

  I thought he would cry. His expression showed that I was responsible for the death, that the mouse would have remained alive, warmed in his clenched hand for hours, if I hadn’t turned up, to tell him otherwise. He lifted the animal to his face, and stroked the naked body against his cheek. Then he turned, ran back across the lawn and vanished around the corner of the house.

  I had no intention of following. I pushed open the gate and walked in. Now I could see that the front door was open, and slightly ajar. It might have been like that all morning, but when I knocked nobody answered.

  I walked around the side of the house to look for the boy. The garden at the back was dark, overgrown with deep weeds, the kind that ran and trailed through the trees, old man’s beard, bryony with its red, venomous-looking berries, tall stands of dock and nightshade along the fence. It was still wet. The sun hadn’t risen high enough over the roofs to penetrate this far and, even if it had, the air here was dark and heavy and it was probably never dry at the far end, where it had once been planted with shade-loving plants, aucuba and holly and elaeagnus. I felt that, if I walked to the end of the path, I could disappear, just as the child had done. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was there, crouched in the centre of his own private wilderness, watching me.

  The back door was wide open, but I was certain he hadn’t gone inside. He belonged to the garden, not the house. I had a momentary image of him hunting for small rodents and insects, his fingers and mouth caked with fresh soil, mouse bones cracking between his teeth.

  I thought of leaving. Then it occurred to me that something might have happened to Mrs Olerud. She had seemed on edge the previous evening, almost despairing at times; now the thought passed through my mind that she might have done something to harm herself. A few days before, on the radio, I’d heard how a couple had committed suicide in a holiday cottage in Wales. They had killed themselves with alcohol and sleeping pills and their two children, aged four and eighteen months, had been left alone with the bodies, too frightened to go out. It had been several days before anybody noticed something was wrong. When the police forced their way into the cottage, they found the children in the kitchen, huddled together behind the door. They had been living on corn flakes.

  I stepped into the kitchen and looked around. No one was there. I called out. Nobody answered. When I went through to the sitting room, I found Mrs Olerud, laid out on the sofa, in a floral-patterned dressing gown. She appeared to be asleep, or perhaps unconscious. On the coffee table, a bottle of gin, a glass, still half-full, a large plastic bottle of tonic, now empty, were the only objects that looked out of place in the clean, well-ordered room. I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece; it was eleven thirty. Lying there, with one arm raised, half-covering her face, Mrs Olerud was obviously drunk. The dressing gown was covered in large, dark flowers, it reminded me of something Mother had worn, years before, on summer afternoons; as far as I could tell, the woman was naked under the thin satin. I stood over her. She looked impossibly moist and soft; I could see her breathing and I imagined how warm she would be if I touched her, how smooth the skin would be on her neck and shoulders. The dressing gown was knotted loosely at the waist with a wide belt, in the same red and white material; it had fallen open just above the knee, where her legs were bent slightly; though her arm was raised to half-cover her face, I could see her mouth, and I was tempted to run my fingers over her full, red lips. I was struck again by how beautiful she looked; for a moment I was almost overcome by a feeling akin to grief, a mixture of longing and despair that surprised me. I set the flowers down carefully on the edge of the coffee table.

  ‘Mrs Olerud?’

  I stood waiting for her to respond; then, when she made no move, I sat down on the floor next to the sofa and rested my fingers, gently, on her ankle. I could not see her eyes, but I could tell she wasn’t so much asleep as unconscious. Her breathing was slow and shallow, somehow academic, like the breathing of an automaton, like the waxwork Sleeping Beauty I had once seen in a museum. I slid my hand lightly along her leg, past the knee, to where the thigh filled out, smooth and warm to the touch. I was excited. Looking at her like this, at rest, I could see she was all roundness, perfect in proportion, and I wanted to touch her everywhere at once, to have a thousand hands, to explore and describe the entire surface of her body. At the same time, the idea began to form in my mind that she was not unconscious at all; or at least, that she was half-aware of what was happening, and was only pretending she was asleep, to see what I would do next. I lifted my hand gently – it seemed what might disturb her, or make her take fright, wasn’t so much the moment of contact, as the moment’s withdrawal – and I found where the belt was knotted around her waist. She lay still. I teased the knot loose, slowly, taking pleasure in the way I was able to contain my desire, then I let the belt fall and turned back the gown so her hips and breasts were naked. I bent towards her. I could feel the warmth off her body; I could smell that sweet mustiness of sleep, mingled with her perfume. I could almost taste her hair, her wet mouth, the salt of her skin. Her breasts were a little smaller than I would have expected, and her belly was a little rounded; she had an old-fashioned body, like the figure of Eve in one of those medieval paintings that showed the Expulsion from Eden. I ran a fingertip along her arm. It was soft, warm, covered in fine down. Still she did not move. I reached out and stroked her softly, running my fingers lightly over her breasts, belly and hips. I was afraid she would wake at any moment; at the same time, I wanted her to know I was there, to respond, to pull me towards her, into the moist warmth of her flesh.

  Suddenly I was aware of something and turned. The boy, Jeremy, was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching me. I hadn’t heard him come in; he was quite still, quite silent, and I realised he’d been standing there for some time, literally holding his breath, curious to see what I would do. That was what I’d heard – that soft intake of breath – though something else was suggested, a slight turn of the head, as he scented the air, like an animal. Yes, that was it, he was scenting me, taking me in fully, perhaps for the first time. Now, seeing that I’d noticed he was there, he smiled, softly, conspiratorially. I pulled back the hem of the dressing gown and stood up. I thought he would run to his mother and wake her, but all he did was stand there, frowning slightly, disappointed, or puzzled by something, as if I had just given him some task to perform that he did not understand. I noticed that his hair and clothes were wet, and his hands were dirty, crusted at the knuckles with scabs of loam, as if he had just been digging.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s only sleeping.’

  I was aware of the defensiveness in my voice, the note of guilt, and it irritated me, that I had felt the need to explain myself to a child. Yet there was no sign that he understood, either what I had said, or what he had caught me doing. I backed away from the sofa, towards the door that led to the hallway.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I’ll call back later. When she’s awake.’

  He shook his head fiercely, like a dog, scattering drops of water everywhere. Then he turned and ran out, leaving a trail of muddy footprints across the kitchen floor. Mrs Olerud stirred then, or perhaps she only moved in her sleep, and I left quickly, leaving the front door ajar, just as I’d found it. As I walked away, I had the idea that I knew her in a way she would understand the next time she saw me, like the idea that sometimes comes when you touch someone in a dream then see them the next day, on the street, or in a shop, and you’re sure they remember the same dream, the one they had the night before, where you touched them and they responded, surprised by their own complicity, amazed by a moment of unexpected surrender. At the same time, I felt Mrs Olerud had intended it that way, that she had somehow contrived the whole thing.

  I returned at precisely two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, as we had agreed. Once again, Mrs Olerud was dressed impeccably, and she was as remote and polite as she h
ad been at our first meeting. Yet the thought remained that she half-remembered everything that had happened, that a secret complicity existed between us. Once again, I brought her flowers: before I arrived I had half-expected her to refuse them, but she accepted the gift naturally, and carried the bouquet into the kitchen, to put it in water. I noticed, then, that the flowers I had brought on my previous visit were standing on a shelf to one side of the fireplace, carefully arranged in a bright-blue ceramic vase. At that moment, I knew Mrs Olerud had been aware of me the previous day. She had allowed me to touch her, to explore her skin, and there was no doubt in my mind that she would have allowed me to go further. The flowers were a signal of that fact.