“I’m quite sure I’m not, Judith. Really, I will be fine—it’s just that I didn’t eat any breakfast.”
“That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me, Jude, I’m sure she will be fit as a fiddle after a cup of sweet tea and a piece of toast,” said Greg, looking desperate to escape.
? ? ?
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Marion lay on the sofa watching a film about two young gymnasts who were molested by their coach, then went on to win Olympic medals after testifying against him in court. She found it hard to get involved in the story; the girls wore rather too much makeup for her liking, and Marion couldn’t help feeling they had perhaps encouraged the coach. She also felt sorry for the coach’s wife, who was pregnant and kept getting harassed by the press all the time during the trial.
Before the film had finished, Marion turned off the TV and lay on the sofa staring at the island of yellow damp that had been mysteriously spreading across the ceiling for the last few years. Her neck was hurting from the angle she had been watching television, and for some reason it was impossible to move the cushions into an arrangement that made her comfortable; eventually she found a position that supported her aching back, but then she needed to go to the toilet. When she returned, the pillows had all moved, and no matter how much she wriggled about, she couldn’t get settled again.
She began to think about the crying noise coming from the cellar. Why had the person been so upset? Were they in pain? Surely if one of them became ill, then John would call a doctor. Perhaps they were missing home, it must be difficult being so far away from one’s family, unable to even make a phone call. It seemed strange that neither Greg nor Judith had heard the crying. Was it possible she had imagined it? Could she be going mad like Great-aunt Phyllis, her grandmother’s sister, who had spent the last years of her life in a mental asylum?
Mother said Phyllis had been quite a normal sort of person to begin with. She had worked as a store detective for years at Boots and in her spare time she liked to go ballroom dancing and had even won prizes. Then she started going funny in her midforties. She would accuse people of trying to steal things in the street. She once accused a man of pinching his own Jack Russell and then tried to make a citizen’s arrest—grabbing him under the arm and attempting to drag him to the police station. When she and John were children, they had been taken to see her in the institution. Marion remembered her as a silver-haired skeleton strapped up in a highchair, screaming like a baby for her jam pudding.
Then it occurred to her how close they were, just a few feet below, separated by floorboards and carpet. Living and breathing, their heads just as crammed with thoughts and feelings as her own. The idea of them hearing her movements and thinking about her gave Marion this peculiar itchiness beneath the surface of her skin. It was impossible to imagine how their lives could be anything but awful, yet what could she do about it? And if she was powerless to help, wasn’t it better not to know what things were really like down there? Compassion for the visitors struggled with the desire for ignorance, producing in Marion a paralyzing anxiety that she could only relieve by striking her temples with her knuckles as if physically expelling the verminous thoughts from her head.
HOUSE OF WAX
The everything-at-stake anxiety that filled the Zetland household during the time John was studying for his entrance exams to Oxford University was similar to that of a country on the verge of war. Marion was forced to become even more silent and invisible than usual; now she had not only Mother’s nerves to worry about, but also the possibility of disturbing the peace needed for her brother to absorb the huge quantities of knowledge demanded by The Exams.
The Exams: in her imagination, they were old and terrible gods that could make someone’s greatest dreams come true or doom them to a life of misery. John carried a book with him at all times, poring over heavy tomes about science or history in the bath or at meals. If the exam gods looked down and saw him wasting a single moment of revision time watching telly or reading a comic, they would punish him with failure, and since there was no hope of Marion achieving anything, his failure meant failure for the entire Zetland name.
In the evening after school he sat at his desk surrounded by textbooks. These dry manuals with their big sums and long words frightened Marion. She felt sure if she even tried to put all that information into her own weak brain, like dangerous chemicals stored in the wrong containers, they might cause it to explode.
Following Physics Part 1, his first exam, he came home with a red face and his shirt soaked through with sweat.
“How did it go?” Marion asked. She admired her brother with the asthmatic fervor other girls felt for movie stars and pop singers.
Instead of answering, he threw his leather book bag down on the floor and stomped upstairs.
“Marion, go and see if he’s all right,” Mother instructed her, and she followed her brother upstairs fearfully.
“Well, that’s sodding that, then,” he exclaimed, then threw himself on his bed so the springs twanged like a banjo. “I buggered it up. I’m done for. I’ll have to go to bloody Durham instead with all the other Oxbridge rejects.”
“But you revised absolutely everything that could possibly be on the exam. You did your best and you couldn’t have done more. I’m sure it will be all right,” said Marion, trying to soothe him.
“How do you bloody well know?” he snarled, making her back away. “Did you mark my question on the Doppler effect? Do you even know what the Doppler effect is?”
Of course she did not, so she went up to her hot attic room and prayed for him. “Please, God, let John go to Oxford. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. You can make me a cripple if you like; I really don’t mind. In fact, I would probably get fussed over more if I was in a wheelchair.” Then she regretted thinking the last bit, as it made her becoming a cripple not so much of a sacrifice.