a changed mind about their possessions. They now went at the pile without plan or method, scarcely looking at the stuff, but grimly lifting up the clinking armfuls towards the lorry. Small ornaments fell and were ground underfoot as they staggered about, and they began to shout and threaten one another over each coveted piece. Like some deep archaeological site, the heap revealed layers of life in the history of the house – layers which, although only laid down that morning, contained objects which had not, before that, seen the light of day for a generation. The flimsier stuff, skimmed from the tops of drawers and shelves, had been deposited first, and this the rising wind took up and whirled along with the dust and leaves. Clawing at the ground, the men ran, shouting, after ghostly, lacey evening gloves which spread themselves against tree-trunks, and oriental fruit-baskets and initialled collar-boxes which bowled, lightly as hoops, in front of them.
At last, the furious slamming of the lorry doors brought the whole family to the windows in time to see the men drive off at a breakneck pace down the drive and around the corner. Behind them, where the dazzling hillock had stood, there was now only a churned-up patch of ground where fragments of glass and china lay, and on the long grass nearby stray ribbons and tassels hung mournfully. When the dust from the lorry had settled, the others looked at Edith who had stood beside them in her dressing-gown and was now turning to go back to her room.
‘You are surely not going back to bed, Edith,’ said Edgar reprovingly. ‘Not now. Not after you have seen all the changes that are going on these days. Will we expect you down for supper tonight? Surely you will dress and come down for a little while and tomorrow you will feel yourself again. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the gaps in the cupboards and the open space on the top landing. We have heard you opening and shutting the drawers all morning.’
‘I feel a different person – I admit it,’ Edith replied as she walked away, ‘– different, but not absolutely better yet. You certainly cannot hurry an illness like mine, Edgar. In a day or so. One more day, perhaps, will make all the difference. It depends on so many things.’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the things as she looked back from her bedroom. Calmly she stared through the other doors and at the heavy brass lamp on which a nymph, still smiling, writhed in an effort to hold up the fringed parchment shade, and beyond that to a massive wardrobe with its magnificent false top, and at the bursting trunks wedged so tightly under the beds that the mattresses above had grown hideously deformed over the years. Finally she lifted her head and gazed, without hatred, up the steep stairs towards the attic. They noticed then what they had never seen before – the extraordinary determination of her chin, so like the chins in all the framed photos of the house, but now to be seen jutting out with a witch-like ruthlessness which outdid all the rest.
‘Sell or burn.’ She murmured these words, as she gently closed the door behind her. Less than a week ago it would have seemed as though the devil himself had spoken, but now they stood around savouring them, listening for more. But there was silence in the house, except for the sly creaking of the bed as Edith climbed into it again.
The auctioneer’s men started to work early the next afternoon. The gaps in corridors and cupboards widened behind them as they tramped about, and great spaces opened out in the rooms whose surfaces had already been smoothed of ornament. They worked slowly and cautiously, half expecting that the inmates of the house, who stood about crossing items off lists, would change their minds, or stampede to the front steps to say a last goodbye. But there was no interruption, and when they came to the attic they had the place to themselves.
Downstairs, the family – all five of them – were sitting round the table in the dining-room. There was nothing on the table, and they sat silently in the fading light, looking before them and listening as intently as people at a séance, waiting for the vibrations to start. The first indication of movement in the attic was the faint smell of dust which sifted down to them from three floors above – a familiar enough smell, but one which this evening gave to their nostrils a sensation lively as the tingle of snuff. Then they knew that the soft quilt of stuff on top was being gradually moved. It was not much yet, but they could feel it slowly lifting from them, as though a heavy swathe of hair was being lifted up and cut from their aching heads. Next they heard the grinding of things being forced painfully from the positions they had held for years, and the formidable thud and rattle as they were dragged down from stair to stair on to the landing below. It seemed as though the whole house was splitting from the top; and automatically the family below raised their hands to their heads. When they removed them again the noise overhead had stopped. Up there was silence and emptiness. Still the grinding and thudding went on in the corridor beside them, but a pressure had been removed from the top of their skulls and from the nerves at the back of their necks. It was even easier to hold up their heads, they discovered, and they lifted them quickly now to watch Edith who had got up from the table and was whipping off the photos from the mantelpiece and windowsill, from desks and bookcases and the tops of china-cupboards. In a few seconds the eyes which had not wavered for years – eyes grave, wistful, stern and piercing, but all terrible in their watchfulness – and disappeared. The photos, in a neat pile with faces down, had been placed in a corner of the sideboard. It was as easy as that to be rid of onlookers. The people round the table allowed themselves to smile at the audacity of this idea, but nevertheless a conspirator’s brightness shone from their own eyes as they glanced about.
Though relieved of the pressure in their chests and heads, they slept badly that night. Like people unused to a rarefied atmosphere, they were restless and their nerves were on edge; and after twelve o’clock the wind began. At first it was only a breeze from the open windows – a welcome fluttering of curtains and loose papers breaking the stillness. In half an hour the wind had risen to a hysterical note, and gusts of rain, sharp as nails, struck tiles and windows and swept through the chips of gravel on the path, grinding them together with a sound like pebbles grinding on the shore. In the early hours of the morning, when the gale was at its height, the house, without its ballast, shook like a hollow ship at sea, and from all parts came a drumming, a rattling and a banging as though doors and windows had been suddenly prised open to let the furies in. But nobody got up to investigate. As though by a mutual agreement from they day before, they lay rigid the whole night through – letting the house rip.
In the morning Edith was up first. The others, waking slowly from their first, deep sleep, heard her voice calling to them from overhead, and giving themselves time for only a glance at the flooded garden, they dressed and went up to find her. She stood in a corner of the empty attic, surrounded by all the buckets and basins she had collected together and listening with interest to the variation of notes struck from them by the rapid drops of water falling from the roof. Craters and grey rings of damp covered the celling and the floor was thick with drifts of plaster which had blown far and wide, so that even the webs in distant corners were hung with a fine white dust.
‘But there is more to see down below,’ said Edith, after they had listened to a full range of musical notes for some time. Following her down through the house, they were soon aware that, in the attic, they had only seen where the softening-up had taken place – a crumbling at the top which had convulsed the body of the building with more spectacular results.
The house had plainly given up. It had allowed the screws to loosen and the hinges to crack, and let the watery blisters rise under the face of paint. Tiles, sticking grimly to the roof through the storms of years, had been lifted in a matter of minutes, like slices of bread off a board. The glass lay everywhere. Long splinters were piled under the broken windows, and shining crumbs of it, fine as sugar, crunched under their feet in odd corners as they moved about. Throughout the morning they came on the fragments inside old shoes or in the folds of newspapers. They cut their fingers on it in the fringes of rugs and down the sides of armchairs. In every fireplace a heap of soot had fallen and lay, thickly quilting hearths and rugs and thinning out to sift with the leaves and plaster around passages where the cold wind still blew. It was difficult, they discovered, to get out of their own front door. Pushing against a bank of sodden leaves and twigs, they came face to face with a great, jagged branch which had fallen against the steps, and was still quivering and clawing at the
