Now that she was
properly awake, Virginia pulled back the green damask curtains. The shutters
were not necessary now, and Virginia only really used them in the severe cold.
The day itself was not as Virginia had imagined, the sky was the usual autumn
mixture of soft duck egg blue-grey and smoky grey. Not the azure shade she’d
had in mind. The particular shade she’d had in mind was more of a North
Yorkshire hue. The particular shade the sky was in reality was specific to the
neck of the woods in which Virginia currently resided. The grass was long and
lumpy, the borders filled with the dried stalks of golden-rod, teasels,
acanthus and even some of the tatty remains of the Onopordum Nervosum; Virginia
had not bothered gardening over the autumn. She’d got more and more low
spirited as the year had progressed and the prospect of the nation regaining
its sovereignty had grown further and further away.
Phoebe jumped off the bed and came to lean against Virginia’s side, sending
silent, telepathic sympathy to Virginia.
Virginia started to dress and wondered if there was a particular set of clothes
which would be more suitable for committing murder in. Was it going to be
murder, would she go the whole hog, or stop short, pull back, as she had
before? In the end, Virginia simply pulled on what she had worn yesterday, a
pleated wool, tweed skirt, which had belonged to her mother. She stopped a moment, in proceedings, considering
why she felt she needed to dress for the role at all. She wasn’t acting, her
skills were the same, whatever clothes she wore. Still, she pulled on a v
necked T shirt and her a black cashmere jumper, from a charity shop, which
drained all the colour from her face and flung a full length teal coloured,
mohair cardigan, which she’d bought at the vintage shop, on top; it made her
eyes glow, cat-like. She rummaged in a drawer of an ancient mahogany chest on
chest, for clean underwear and tights and shoved her feet into her old brown
brogues. Lord knows what all the blonde, would-be Lady Dianas would make of her
now, but since she had stopped Facebook, she hadn’t really given a damn about
her appearance. After a while Virginia decided this rag bag assortment of
ancient clobber was probably the most suitable attire. Slightly smelly,
uncoordinated, every day, woolly garb, of this sort was exactly the kind that
any reclusive old bag would have worn when causing trouble, down the centuries.
Phoebe bounded ahead of Virginia down the stairs, leaving white hairs and dust
and soil on the dark stained, deal surface. The children had left for work and
college long ago, the house was empty apart from the senile cat, who had
started howling like a Siamese, demanding food for his round worms.
The kitchen was warm from the Aga, the ancient refectory table was covered in
clutter, yesterday’s plates mixed up with treen fruit bowls, the two, huge arts
and crafts, brass pricket stands, probably made for a Church altar, a bread
board, a cheese board, the lazy Susan. The cups from last night’s final drink
of cocoa were still in position, squatting fatly round the edges of the table,
so many chamber pots, awaiting the ‘Inspector of the King’s Stool’. The dregs
down the side of each cup made this fleeting thought more real in Virginia’s
mind, so she whisked them into the dishwasher, upside down, where the cocoa was
out of sight. The cat leaped up and stepped delicately between the crockery,
keeping up his howling for breakfast. Catching sight of what looked like a
grain of rice, sticking to his tail Virginia grabbed a piece of kitchen roll
and removed it, quickly shoving the cat onto the floor with a deft motion,
simultaneously. Whatever she liked to imagine her heritage to be, Virginia
found it difficult to tolerate the more unhygienic aspects of the feline race.
Thinking of the cups arranged around the table reminded Virginia of the one occasion
when her half-brother, on her mother’s side, had experienced the strange power
of the spirits at work at Kineburn. He was twenty years Virginia’s senior and
lived in the upstairs part of a south facing wing of the house. He was a
cabinet maker and furniture restorer, the downstairs rooms he used as his
workshops. The floor of his workshop was always strewn with shavings and
splinters and the sandings of old and new furniture, it was this that had
taught Virginia, in her childhood, the value of antiques as receptacles of
other’s lives and hopes, containers of the particles of other ancient souls, who
had used them and loved them.
Mostly the slivers were benevolent, allowing limited access, in dreams, to the
ordinary pasts of ordinary people. But sometimes one found a sliver of
something that had witnessed violence, brutality, or deep sadness. Perhaps a
splinter from a wainscot chair, which had been the waiting place for a wife,
whose drunk husband was violent on his return. Perhaps a shaving from an old
half tester bed, where a woman and her baby had died in childbirth or of the
fever, later. Once Virginia had entered these scenes from long finished lives
by way of some sliver or shaving or even woodworm dust, she seemed able to
enter those ancient lives again, without a key, always in dreams, which were
not really dreams, and always in flight.
Virginia and her mother could never tell which piece of furniture in the
workshop had opened the gateway to the strong spirit, which had physically
moved several of the logs from the woodpile by the open fire to sit around the
table, in her brother’s flat, in front of each unwashed plate, as if the logs
were men, engaged in conversation.
Because Virginia’s brother was as fond of a spliff as the next ‘Baby Boomer’
they were never sure whether the arrangement was the work of his own hands or a
real poltergeist. Whatever the truth, the effect had been rather disturbing.
And her brother refrained a little in his drinking and smoking after that, for
a time.
Phoebe was now running around the smaller 17th century gate-leg table, in the
kitchen, widdershins, her usual way of asking for breakfast. Virginia dolloped
out the tinned chunks in gravy into the grubby dog bowl and topped up the
water. The gate-leg table was the only piece of furniture in the kitchen, which
had lived with Virginia in her childhood home. Though it had not stood on the
damp kitchen flags near the Rayburn, as it stood now on the grubby Indian
slates by the Aga, but had been in the oak panelled solar, under the transomed
and mullioned windows. There it had supported a carved oak bible box of a slightly
later date and an art nouveau pewter vase in the form of three fishes, which
had contained peeled honesty, which glowed like a collection of pearly moons in
the southern brightness as it poured in through the leaded lights and stained
glass, initialled, and dated 1627.
Virginia’s bible box was the oldest item, in her cluttered, unfitted kitchen.
It stood on a coffer from Guernsey, carved with a monogram and coat of arms,
which was 18th century. The coffer bore the Pilgrim shell and a helmet with an
open visa, and various other symbols, but Virginia had failed in her attempts
to authenticate it. The close proximity of so much Christian symbolism, the
fact that the table had been in contact with a bible and the three fishes, one
might have thought would be problematic, but Virginia had not found it so
before. Virginia’s bible box was also initialled and dated 1641. The date was
scratch carved, and Virginia was certain it was not a true date. Furniture
before the restoration was barely ever dated. Perhaps the item was roughly
contemporary with the date, even so it was 20 years at least older than the
year Virginia wanted a connection with, 1621. This had been the year of the
worst of the witchcraft and mischief making at Kineburn, when The Poet had
accused Alison Carter and the other women of bewitching his daughters. Virginia
was fairly sure her plan would work, unaided, but she thought if she could
travel back in time to that period her own magic would have a stronger effect
upon those whom she was intending to impose it. She wished there were one or
two more ancient items left in her possession with a stronger link to that
early date and to Kineburn.
The other items in the kitchen were 18th and 19th century, except for three
late 17th century back-stools. Virginia had bought these in the summer, on eBay
for 99p, from a couple who were emigrating, because they did not want to live
in England post Brexit. Virginia considered whether the chairs, which had spent
so much time in the possession of a family whose every political wish was
entirely opposite to her own, might exert an equal and opposite reactionary
force, to the one she was intending to exert herself. But after all, the chairs
had been made during the time of William and Mary, they were born with the
Declaration of Rights and The Coronation Oath Act, at the hands of a humble
furniture maker, who would have been proud of his country and his new King and
Queen upholding Magna Carta, these, Virginia decided, were Brexit voting chairs.
She laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of her turn of thought and made
herself a bowl of porridge.
Virginia was a Christian, as her forebears in this line had been. The former
housekeeper and witch, Alison Carter had been Christened in the font at the
village church, where Virginia had been Christened herself, though the church
had burned down and been rebuilt, since Alison’s baptism. The Christianity
didn’t seem to make all that much difference to the mischief making (despite
her knowing the importance of naming things properly, Virginia didn’t like to
call it anti Christianity.) Virginia was descended from Alison on her mother’s
side. She had wanted to bring back the surname, Carter, and use it as a middle
name for her daughters, but her husband had wanted a surname from his side too,
so in the end they had agreed to have neither. Without the name her daughters
would not necessarily lack the power, but as they grew up they were
contemptuous of it anyway, having inherited their father’s rational, scientific
mind.
Leaving the kitchen Virginia caught her hip against the old oak dresser. This
too was William and Mary, vernacular, rough, but with the applied geometric
mouldings that dated it to that era. Virginia was often struck by how odd a
thing fashion was. This dresser was like the roughest, farm labourer’s
daughter, dressed up in the fashion of the day. Country cabinet makers had
dressed their furniture in the height of fashion, because the common country
people they supplied would not have wished to appear behind the times. An image
came to Virginia’s mind of the girl at the riding stables, her daughters had
attended, This creature had dyed white hair, orange fake tan, leather trousers
and drag queen eyebrows and lashings of black mascara, in Virginia’s memory she
was standing next to the muck heap and turning the air blue as she joked with a
farm hand. Virginia, by contrast only ever wished to appear behind the times.
Yet without this habit of her fellow men, for wanting the latest thing,
Virginia would not have been able to date any of her possessions, she relied on
the vulgarity of mind that wanted to be fashionable in order to date and value
her collection by its design. Yet old things were more beautiful, in other
ways, than new ones, apart from their history, and the particles of souls that
clung to them and other people’s lives they contained. They had been made with
more love and care and skill, so that they were lovable and therefore such
objects as to which one would wish to cling. In the future, Virginia wondered,
would one be able to experience the past lives of others through fragments of
MDF, flat pack furniture screwed together, which had been bought at Ikea or Argos.
Sitting on the back shelf, of the dresser, in the middle, above the little
cupboard door with the ancient ironwork, was one item which Virginia had
forgotten about. It was a large pewter plate, dating from about 1620 and it had
been on display in the entrance hall at Kineburn, on top of a 17th century mule
chest, before Virginia had brought it home, to its current position. This would
do, this would serve her purpose. Virginia left the house via the back door,
pushing her way past the velvet lined, William Morris curtain, which kept the
draught out of the rest of the house when the cat flap was stuck, as it mostly
was, in the open position, and made her way across the greenish York stone
flags, to collect a metal file from the potting shed.
No comments:
Post a Comment