The woman laughed at that. “What? No, she’ll see us all out, I’ve no doubt of that. I just mean—she’d talk about this place sometimes, and I got curious.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her—I suspected I knew but I wanted to be certain.
“Sue. Sue Rice. Going to be Sue Jones soon—that’s another part of why I’m here, as well as the sale. It just feels…I don’t know, there’s sort of a chapter closing?”
“That makes sense,” I told her, though I wasn’t sure it did really. As I say, I’ve never been one for sentiment.
“So who’re you?”
It was a reasonable thing to ask and to this day I’m not quite sure why I lied, but I did.
“Jane,” I said. “Jane Loris. I used to be housekeeper here, and I’m helping the family put the place in order.”
It was a silly deception, and honestly I think it speaks rather poorly of Susan that she didn’t see through it. I neither talk nor dress like a housekeeper and I never have.
“When was your mother here?” I asked, as casually as I could, which, though I say it myself, was extremely casually. “I might remember her.”
“The fifties, I think?” She couldn’t be more specific. “Her name was Doris—it would have been Doris Cooper then.”
My intent, I think, had been to say something cuttingly anodyne.Oh yes, I recall, pleasant girl, good teethor similar. But hearing her name—even though I never really used it, she was alwaysthe nymphas far as I was concerned—silenced me and I stood there with my lips going dry and my eyes on the edge of betraying me. “She was a good girl,” I said. Which was true. “Was there anything in particular she talked about?”
“Just that she’d been happy here,” Susan said. “And that Sir Arthur had been a kind man. She took me to his funeral, I think, but I don’t remember it.”
I nodded, though I was fast losing interest. “Yes, he’s much missed.”
An awkward silence fell between us, and I was beginning to think that Mr. Jones was welcome to young Susan. She might have superficially resembled her mother, but she wasn’t anything like as interesting.
“She mentioned you, too, I think,” she added. “I forget the name, but she said the housekeeper had been good to her.”
I confess that one burned. “How sweet.” For a moment, it seemed she was about to go, and while I didn’t think we would everbe bosom companions, I wasn’t quite ready for her to leave just yet, so I asked her if she’d like a tour.
She said she would.
And so I led my nymph’s youngest daughter around the house I’d grown up in. The house her mother, in many ways, had grown up in. Where she’d spent most of her girlhood. Where she’d made lifelong friends. Where she’d had her first kiss and, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, her first orgasm. Hell, for all I know her last as well. Then again, maybe I’m flattering myself.
I showed her the public rooms, the ones anybody was allowed in because that was always part of the deal with places like Patchley, at least in the postwar years: families like mine got to live there and in return families like yours got to poke around and look at things and bother us. I’m not sure who got the better side of the bargain, if I’m honest.
But there were only so many parlours and galleries a person could pretend to care about. Then I showed her the family’s rooms, including my own. Including, and I’m not too proud to admit that this thrilled me just a little, the bed where all those many years ago I had—to borrow a phrase that I believe is increasingly common these days—fucked her mother.
I elided that detail, of course. But I said it was the young mistress’s room and asked idly if Doris had ever said anything about her. Which is to say, in case you’re not keeping up with the complexities of the narrative, about me.
She hadn’t.
At last I took Susan down to the servants’ quarters. Honestly it wasn’t somewhere I went much, the rooms were pokey and frankly the servants didn’t much appreciate the family coming and nosing around their things. I opened a door more or less at random and Susan slipped inside like a thief through a window.
Fortunately, the maid who would have been living there had already gone, although she’d left a cassette copy ofTrue Blueon the nightstand and a stray stocking on the floor. Susan sat down on the bed, picked up the abandoned tape, and stared at it like it held the secrets of the universe.
And maybe it did. They were the same age, I think, Susan and Madonna. Not exactly, but close enough. So here I am in my nineties thinking back thirty years to my sixties remembering a girl of twenty-eight staring at another girl of twenty-eight with her head thrown back on the cover of an album full of songs about true love inspired by a man she would later divorce.
Madonna, I mean. Not Susan. Although I confess I don’t know how her marriage played out. Still it seems apposite somehow.
“So…would she have had a room like this?” she asked me.
“Very much like it, yes.”
For some reason that seemed to strike her harder than anything else. She ran a hand over a mattress that was nowhere near old enough to have actually touched the nymph’s skin, and gazed in something like wonder at the walls of a room her mother may never even have been inside.
Meaning, I think, is very much where we make it.
