3The Keeping of the Room

I have been asked, since, how a woman of sense could have done what I did at Wintering House, and I have never been able to give the answer people want, which is that I was frightened, or bewitched, or weak. The truth is duller and far worse. I was happy. Whatever else is written of me, let that be written honestly: my part in it began not in terror but in the plain domestic contentment of a woman who has been given a task and told that she does it well.

Miss Ravenscar came for me at nine, before I had finished pinning my hair, and stood in my doorway with her hands clasped like a girl with a treat to give.

“You’re to have the keeping,” she said. “Aldous says so. He says you’re steady, and God knows we could use steady. Come, come, bring your shawl — it’s the only warm room in the house, but the gallery isn’t, and I won’t have you catching your death in your first week.”

She talked all the way along the gallery, and I have thought since that Charlotte Ravenscar talked the way other people bar a door: not to be heard, but so that no silence should get in. She told me that her mother felt the cold dreadfully. That the fire was never, on any account, to go out. That the water in the ewer was to be changed each morning though it was not used, because stale water is a melancholy thing in a sickroom and one wants a room to be ready. That the curtain might be drawn back to the second fold and no further, the light being an affliction to her. That the little walnut table beside the bed was to be dusted about, and not moved, and the book upon it was on no account to be closed.

“She has her place kept,” Charlotte said. “She’ll want to go on from where she is.”

And she said it so lightly, with such easy affection, in the tone of a daughter describing a mother’s harmless vanity, that I heard nothing in it at all, and I want the record to show that this is precisely how it is done. Not with a dark saying on a stair. With a cheerful woman in a morning gown telling you not to close her mother’s book.

She opened the door, and the warmth came out to meet us like a held breath.

I had been three days in that house, and three days is long enough to be made cold — to have the chill get into the small of your back and stay there, so that you carry it to your work and into your bed and out again in the morning. I crossed the threshold of the mistress’s room and the warmth took me the way water takes you, all over at once, and I stood in it with my eyes shut and, may God forgive me, I was grateful before I had even looked around.

Then I looked around.

It was a good room, and a woman’s room, and it had been loved. A fire built high and properly banked, red at the heart of it, with a full scuttle beside and the tongs laid straight. A dressing table with a candle-branch and a hairbrush and a small blue jar of the sort that holds hand-cream. A chair drawn up to the hearth at the exact angle of a chair a person means to come back to. A bed turned down on one side — one side only, the counterpane folded back in a neat triangle, the pillow bearing the faint hollow that a pillow keeps. On the walnut table, a pair of spectacles folded upon an open book, and a glass of water, clear and lately filled.

It was a room in which everything waited, and nothing was dusty, and nobody was.

“There,” said Charlotte, from the doorway, and her voice had gone soft and pleased, and I turned and found her looking not at me but at the room, with an expression I could not then read and can read now perfectly well. “Isn’t it nice?” she said. “Isn’t it a nice room to come back to?”

“It is very comfortable, Miss Ravenscar.”

“Charlotte,” she said. “You’ll say Charlotte, or I shall be cross.” And then, quite naturally, as she came in past me and gave the fire a touch with the poker it did not need: “Good morning, Mama. This is Miss Thorne, that we told you of. She’s come to sit with you.”

She said it to the bed.

I have wondered a great many times since what a better woman would have done in that moment. Laughed, perhaps. Or asked. Or gone straight down the black drive with her box on her shoulder and never looked back at the grey house on the moor. What I did was stand quite still in the warmth with my hands folded at my waist, in the attitude of a companion being presented, and feel the cold clear part of me lift its head — and then, deliberately, the way one puts away linen, I folded it down.

Because I had seen Charlotte’s face while she said it. And she was not mad, and she was not playing, and she was not cruel. She was easy. She was a woman greeting her mother, and there was more plain love in that small foolish sentence than had been shown to me in ten years of other women’s houses, and some starved thing under my ribs turned toward it and would not be called back.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I said, to the turned-down bed.

And Charlotte took my hand and pressed it and said, “There,” in that way she had, and went out and left me to the keeping, and I was alone in the warm room with the fire and the folded spectacles and the fourth place at the table that nobody sat in, and I found that my eyes were wet, and that I was smiling.

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I did the work well. I have always done the work well; it is the only property I own.

I changed the water in the ewer, and carried the stale away, and set the fresh. I dusted around the walnut table and did not move it. I laid a little coal on and let the fire take it slowly, which is the only way to feed a fire that must never be let out. I drew the curtain back to the second fold and no further, and the moor came into the window grey and streaming and immense, and I stood a moment with my hand on the cloth and thought that whoever had chosen that room had chosen it for the view, long ago, when the view had been a pleasure and not a weather.

And I tidied the dressing table, and it was there that the first wrongness came to me, and it came, as they always did in that house, dressed as nothing at all.

The hairbrush had hair in it. Of course it had; a hairbrush does. I took the hair out of the bristles the way one does, wound about a finger, to burn it — and it did not behave as hair behaves. It was grey, and it was dry past greyness, and it came away from the bristles stiffly, without spring, without that faint living resistance the least strand of hair will give you. It came away like thread. It came away like something that had been in that brush a very long time, kept warm, and turned to thread.

I stood with it in my hand and my heart going, and then I put it in the fire, where it did not smell of burning hair, which hair does, but of nothing much at all; and I told myself, in the reasonable voice with which I have talked myself into every wrong place I have ever stood, that an invalid does not brush her hair often, and that the room is warm, and that dry air will do that, and that I knew nothing whatever about the hair of old women, having never been one.

And then, because I am what I am, I went to the walnut table and looked at the book.

It was a common enough book — a volume of sermons, a lady’s book, the sort of thing that is given at Christmas and read at the rate of a page a fortnight. It lay open, face up, at the eleventh sermon. The spectacles lay upon it, folded, the way a woman lays down her spectacles when she means to take up her page again after a little rest.

The paper of the open page was brown.

Not stained. Not foxed, as old paper goes foxed all over, in spots. It was browned in one shape only — a long, clean, slanting shape across the upper corner, sharp-edged, precisely the shape of the light that came through that window between the second fold of the curtain and the frame. The facing page was brown in the answering shape. The pages beneath were white as milk.

I have kept house for other people all my life and I know what light does to paper, and I knew, standing there with my duster in my hand, exactly how long a page must lie open under a window, day after day after day, in the same light, at the same angle, before it goes that colour.

Not a week. Not a season.

I looked at the folded spectacles, laid down for a moment’s rest upon the eleventh sermon. I looked at the hollow in the pillow. I looked at the good fire, banked and red, that some hand had fed in the night while I lay in my cold room and told myself it was the wind.

And Mrs Hale came along the gallery just then with the linens over her arm, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at me looking at the book, and her face did not change at all.

“You’ll want to close that,” I said. My voice came out very level. “The light’s spoiling it.”

“It’s not to be closed,” said Mrs Hale.

“No,” I said. “Miss Ravenscar told me.”

And I put down my duster, and I straightened the counterpane where I had leaned upon it, and I did not close the book. I stood in the warm room in the good warm light and I heard myself say, in the pleasant useful voice of a companion of ten years’ standing, “It’s a comfortable room. She’ll be glad of it, when she’s strong enough to come down.”

Mrs Hale looked at me a moment longer than she needed to, as she had looked at me on the doorstep in the rain. Then she came in and put the linens on the chair.

“You took to it quick,” she said.

“I hope I’ve given satisfaction.”

“Oh, aye.” She smoothed the pillow that already bore its hollow, and she did it gently, the way you would for someone. “They all take to it quick, miss,” said Mrs Hale, “and there’s no shame in it, and don’t you let anybody tell you different.” She went to the door. “Fire’s low. Mind it doesn’t go out.”

Then she was gone, and I was alone in the only warm room in Wintering House, tending a fire for a woman I had not met, in the best month I had spent in ten years — and I said good morning to the bed each morning after that, because it was easier, and then because it was kind, and then, God help me, because it had begun to feel like company.