I still have the chair Rosa sat in. All the other chairs were cleared out a
long time back – I do not like furniture cluttering up the rooms, making
it difficult to move through them freely. When I have nothing better to do,
which is quite a lot of the time, I often come down here and sit in Rosa’s
chair. I even cross my legs, though they are far from shapely, and I sit quite
still and try not to slump. I do not close my eyes. I scarcely breath.
I see the room as Rosa saw it. Then I picture my young self obstructing her clear line of vision and I look over the top of what would have been my head and keep my eyes fixed on the light that falls inside the deep bay window. The shadows in the late afternoon will be almost the same as when she sat here though a number of the tall trees outside became diseased some years ago and had to be cut down. I have never let these walls be repainted so the dusty ochre is only dustier while all the other walls, in the rest of this large house, have been rendered a dazzling off-white. You can wander from room to room like Goosie Goosie Gander and never know where you are, or where you have been.
But here, in the half light retained in this room, I wonder again what Rosa was up to. Her own life was so glamorous, and varied, I cannot believe she enjoyed her dingy visits to this dull dark house. Nor can she have been fond of me, not when you consider the terrible way she abandoned me, finally. And Rosa must have known what an intolerable position she placed my poor mother in all those years, turning up without warning whenever it suited her, getting me over-excited. I don’t think Rosa really meant any harm. She was just careless and disruptive the way beautiful women can be and in the end she was the one who got killed. We live on here, quietly enough, without her.
I dare say Rosa pitied my mother and me our quiet, confined lives, dependent as we were on the goodwill and charity of others. My subdued existence must have seemed wretched compared to the wonderfully happy childhood she had enjoyed, cared for by two doting parents who loved each other. Maybe this was why – with some notion, even, of making up for my loss – Rosa told me so much about it. And why I was so keen to listen.
‘Jeannie is going to write it all down one day,’ Rosa said once, smiling at me in amusement. ‘It’ll be a bestseller like Anna Karenina, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles: The Life of Rosa Pegglar!’
My mother pursed her lips. But I laughed out loud at the very idea, Me – write it down when I wasn’t even bottom of the class because the teachers left my name off the lists. It would not have looked good for them, having a pupil who only got ‘0’; it was easier always to pretend I was not there. Which suited me. I would watch the other children at their lessons, frowning with concentration, sharpening their pencils and scratching away on the carefully ruled lines of their exercise books. Every so often they glanced up at the clock and I too liked the way the hands went round, one very fast, one not so fast and one that moved tardily through the days as if weighted down, like me.
‘Vacant, that child.’ the teachers would say, being kind.
The other children did not want me in their teams or sitting next to them at their desks and they said so, loudly. I stood on the sidelines while games were being played and I sat at the spare table at the back of the class ready the moment my friend, the hour hand, touched three to rush home to my mother waiting in the kitchen with a glass of warm milk and biscuits straight from the oven. But what I rushed home for was not my mother’s baking. I lived those days for the slight chance Rosa might pay us one of her visits. And continue her story.
‘There you are, Jeannie dear!’ my mother would greet me, trying to hug me, settling me down. Usually the pair of us passed the long boring evenings alone together. My mother did not talk to me the way Rosa talked, making the past and her part in it come colourfully alive. My mother only spoke in uncertain half tones and she rarely ever finished her sentences. She was not good company and, for all her quiet kindness, she was not the company I craved.
Sometimes the old woman who owned the house, who employed my mother, might come downstairs and the three of us would converse politely, although no one had anything much to say. She always descended when Rosa visited, and the house bubbled up overflowing with words and laughter. While my mother kindled the fire, we would gather excitedly round our beautiful visitor, admiring her lovely clothes and pressing her to stay. What warmth and happiness in this drab room those evenings! Of course, I didn’t know then that our lives would not go on the same for ever. Nor do I remember quite how it all started. How Rosa must have looked at me and for some reason said, ‘Now I will tell you, Jeannie!” And begun what she never finished, and what I have never forgotten.
I cannot light the fire now. I always sat too close to the flames so that my cheeks burned red and when my mother tried to draw me away, I refused to move. Like a loyal dog, I risked being trodden on. I crouched where I could smell Rosa’s perfume and know at once if she moved her elegant feet. Central heating, with sensible radiators and neat pipes, was put into the house a few years back, just before they felled the dead elms. The logs were taken away since I could not burn them. The fireplace had been sealed up because of the draught gusting and whistling down the chimney whenever it was stormy outside, making the curtains billow wildly, wrapping themselves around Rosa’s chair. Strangling her.
Suffocating me. I am the only one now who knows Rosa’s story.
For a long time, of course, I resisted. I tried to tell myself she was only teasing. It was not my responsibility. If Rosa wanted her story written she should have done it herself. Besides, I am not a writer of books. When I looked in the Public Library once, I saw that Anna Karenina and Tess of the d’Urbervilles had come off production lines. As if Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy had batteries of tiny hens laying eggs a dozen at a time in neat boxes. This is my one story, and it is not even mine except that I have made it mine. Nor am I writing it for the money. I shall tell the publishers so when I send it to them. The last thing I need is any more money – I am, as my doctor tells me, putting it modestly, well provided for.
By the old lady. I was never the least fond of her while she was alive – it cannot have been easy having a young child running about the house and I was such a great gawky thing, always getting in the way. I feel indebted to her now of course, now that I know. But then, when I observed how indulgent she was of the beautiful Rosa, I resented the way she ordered my mother about although that was what my mother was employed for and why we were allowed to live in this large house, all found. I too learnt to order my mother about. I did so shamelessly. There was shame, you see: I had no father. ‘As many children are born out of wedlock as are locked into these days,’ the nice doctor told me, ‘you must not blame your mother.’ But back then, when I was young, things were different.
I knew I should have been grateful for all that was given me, but like most children, in or out of wedlock, the more I had, the more I wanted. How I wanted Rosa sitting here in this chair with us, always! Sooner or later every child will ask about the past. ‘I want to know,’ I used to whine. And though there was much I could not understand – like how someone as downtrodden and dowdy as my mother had been taken on in this large house and treated so generously – it was Rosa alone who interested me. Her story I wanted to hear. ‘You must ask Rosa …’ my mother always said. She was no humble. It was not her place, she implied, to gossip – even to me.
‘Rosa will tell you!’ the rich old lady shut me up sharply. I had been impertinent. She did not like my questions. It was as if Rosa was the only one empowered to speak.
And speak she did. Yet, for all that I managed to make Rosa talk about the past and recount things that happened before I was born, I do not think she herself believed in a time before she was born. Most people don’t. ‘Ancient history!’ she’d laugh when I mentioned her father but sometimes if I insisted, her voice might soften and her eyes mist dreamily. ‘Ah, Pegglar, dear, dear Daddy!” And here in this dusty ochre room, she shared him with me, Pegglar who had no head for business. Pegglar, whose passion was for his poultry.
‘Poultry!’ I would yell like a traveller in a foreign country coming upon some familiar word at last. Pegglar’s famous hens might have entered the room, which in a way they had, I was so excited.
‘Shush, Jeannie,’ said my mother, glancing anxiously at the old lady. ‘It’s rude to interrupt.’
Rosa did not mind She smiled at my enthusiasm.
‘What was she like?’ I demanded childishly. I knew full well, of course, what Pegglar was like but I wanted Rosa to tell me again. How Pegglar the Poultryman wore earth-brown trousers that smelled of grass. How the light of far-off stars was reflected in his eyes as he watched over you from a distance, watching you thoughtfully from his great height. But he’d stoop down whenever there was anything you wanted to say. Which often there wasn’t. But Pegglar would listen to your childish nonsense as if what you were telling him was of the greatest importance to the world.
No one has ever listened to me like that.
My mother occasionally protested. ‘Forgive me, Rosa,’ she’d murmur gently, and the old lady and Rosa would turn to her in some surprise. Hadn’t this same stupid woman told me, only just now, that it was rude to interrupt? They were both too polite to remind her directly that she was only present because she was paid. But as I got older, I found myself pointing this out more and more. Not that I think my mother was truly in danger of forgetting. Blushing deeply, she stammered, ‘I think the child far too interested …’
It unnerved my poor mother, you see, my infatuation with Rosa. At the time, I naturally assumed she was jealous because no one could ever be infatuated with her. She was so plain and put upon; even her lover had left her. My father had, as they say, other fish to fry. Now I can see that my mother was only frightened that I would get hurt, as she had been hurt, and she probably also felt I would have done better to have been attentive, instead, at school.
Rosa did not find my interest in the least surprising. Or alarming. She smiled her beautiful quizzical smile. ‘So, our little Jeannie is far too interested!’
She patted my head conspiratorially. In spite of my mother or perhaps to spite my mother, Rosa always did continue her narration. But never enough or fast enough for me. ‘Be patient,’ Rosa would laugh as I urged her on. ‘We will get there in the end!’
Children never forget promises made to them, especially those that are later broken. I sit here now thinking what did happen in the end, and I am unable to forget all I never had that was cruelly taken away. Like a father who’d have loved me and given me his name. Our Father, they would say at school, Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name … My father, I would think rebelliously, Who could be Anywhere on Earth, but here …
Here with me now.
Rosa’s own father interested me greatly. After she died, I have liked to think Peglar the Poultryman in some ways more mine than hers, left behind for me along with this old worn chair. I uncross my legs. There is nothing about my perfume or my shapeless ankles to keep a faithful dog mournfully at heel long after I have gone.
It is dark now beyond the window so you would not know the old trees that used to whisper to me comfortingly through the nights when I could not sleep are no longer out there. Nor that Pegglar is not somewhere in all that interminable darkness, stooping down like a breeze barely tickling my cheek, attending to all my nonsense. Dear, dear Daddy!
‘Don’t sit there on your own in the dark, Jeannie,’ I can hear my mother saying. ‘And you really ought to pull the curtains.’ There was always some task to be done, she herself never sat down for a moment. Neither the old lady nor I would let her.
I’m not just sitting here, I think, but forbear to say. I am not on my own and I am not entirely in the dark...