Their elder sister now began to search the place methodically from top to bottom, as though her own life depended on it. She would disappear early in the day, to be found hours later, moving about on her knees in some dark corner, or lying flat on her back, prodding and knocking on a low slant of roof above her head; or they would hear her in some distant part of the house, stamping slowly about in a circle, as though engaged in some ritual dance of her own. There were times when they wondered whether she might be searching for hidden treasure, known only to herself, or thumping the walls to find some secret cupboard where the family fortune lay. Most of the time, however, they took little notice and seldom mentioned it amongst themselves. The possibilities in human nature had only lately been opened up to them, and it was a discovery which, given time and their usual routine, they hoped would one day be completely forgotten as though it had never been made.
Meantime Edith appeared to have lost interest in the damage in the house. She passed by the wastes of damp, the cracking plaster and broken windows many times every day, with scarcely a glance, and made no comment when, after six days, slater and plasterer had failed to turn up. Nor did she comment on the limitations of her three brothers who stood about much of the time with their loose, clean hands at their sides or deep in the pockets of jackets which they had never removed. She had nothing to say about all this because she had better things to hope for. She was hoping in fact for bigger and deeper damage – damage long-standing, spectacular and terrible to cure. Dry rot was her aim.
She found what she was looking for one evening in a small unused bedroom downstairs, which until lately had contained a chest-of-drawers, a bed, and a marble washstand with ewers. There was nothing here now except one cane chair against the wall and a picture over the fireplace. Where the furniture had been, pale shapes, complete with knobs and spirals, were traced on the wallpaper, and above them, one long rectangular strip where a school photo had hung, keeping in living memory for over sixty years two hundred boys in striped blazers and tabbed socks. The remaining picture was a sombre reproduction in brown and white, but its subject was a garden in midsummer, where a family of young men and women were giving a tea party to their friends. There was nothing sombre about these people; they were obviously a frolicking crowd with generous and careless habits. Fruit of all kinds had been allowed to spill from baskets into the grass where tame birds pecked at it. A puppy was lapping up the milk running from a jug which had been knocked over in the midst of some game, or perhaps by the foot of the girl in a white dress who was swinging in a hammock above. Behind her in the distance could be seen an imposing house, not unlike their own, and at the gate stood an eager young man, identical with the other men in the picture, but showing by his anxious face and his untidy necktie that he had seen the world and found it wanting, and was now only too thankful to be back. As she stared at this picture – A Homecoming – Edith stamped mechanically but strenuously at the floorboards beneath it.
She did not need to stamp long. After a minute her foot went softly through the crumbling wood and a long piece of boarding fell in, covered on its inner side with a thick web of greyish-white strands, blotched here and there with blue and yellow patches. Edith fell on her knees and peered down into the area which had suddenly split open under her eyes. It was a place of primeval dampness and darkness, smelling of must and decay, but seeming, at first sight, to be nothing more than a disagreeable hollow under the floor. As she became accustomed to the darkness, however, she saw that what she stared into was not an empty hole but a world, well-established and powerful, where a secret growth had been going on, over months or years, spreading insidiously about the roots of the house. Here and there, springing out of the darkness, white blotches could be seen, stuck like tufts of cotton wool to the rotting wood, and between the black cracks spongey, yellowing mushrooms grew out. Further down, spread widely over the level places, was a layer of poisonous-looking red powder. Only one corner had been opened up, but Edith knew she knelt over a place where life had spawned and spread in the darkness over a vast area, wider and deeper than anything she had imagined during her rapping and stamping of the past week.
‘This, at any rate, had nothing to do with us,’ said Edith, when she had summoned the family together. ‘The place will die of it sooner or later, if nothing is done. No doubt something will be done. But not by us. We brought it safely through its choked drains and its damp spots. We patched it up where it was thin. Pruned it down where it bulged. We can’t forget the money spent to give it space to expand at the back, the cost of the paint it soaked up, year after year, to prevent the rust from getting it! But the cure of this is beyond us. We have our own health to think of. We are not surgeons or nurses to stand by at operations of this scale! Let it go to somebody else. As for us, there is nothing else for it – we must get out and stay out!’
As they stepped forward, one after the other, to look down into the opening, they breathed an air which smelt not only of decay, but also of certain freedom. This time they saw there was nothing more for them to do. Under these boards conscience could be finally buried. They would pack up and leave the place forever.
On a dark morning in the middle of November, they stood together for the last time outside the front door of the house.
‘We have everything to look forward to!’ exclaimed Edith after a long silence, while they braced themselves for the final departure. It was true, at any rate, that they were looking straight in front of them now – down the stony drive, and beyond it to the bleak stretches of empty fields, already beginning to darken under the rain. It was not, after all, the whole world which was before them, but a small hotel nearby, from where they would carry on the long-drawn-out negotiations over the head of the house. California and the decks of the ocean liners were as far off as they had ever been, and it was too late to group themselves, as their relations had done many times before them, for an exuberant send-off photo on the front steps of the house. The men required every scrap of jauntiness still left in them simply to carry the luggage down to the gates, and the women, worn out with their own displays of excitement and enthusiasm, had let their faces fall again, and now longed only to settle as soon as possible under some other roof.
They did not look back when they came to the gates, and when they were beyond them they did not immediately shake the dust of the place from their feet, for nothing as soft as dust had been under them. But the three men put down their cases and sat down outside to remove, for the last time, the cruel pieces of gravel which had lodged in the heels of their shoes. This done, and walking with greater confidence and dignity, they passed out of sight of the house forever.
‘I FIND IT strange, Mr Abson, that your face doesn’t change much at the things I’ve been telling you. But you do listen, don’t you?’
‘I listen, Mrs Imrie. I find what you say very interesting.’
‘“Interesting”! But you do feel what I’m saying to you? About the little puffs of smoke between the tiles … the dog howling at the back?’
Abson was thoughtful for a few minutes, his round, black eyebrows raised, melancholy eyes fixed on the floor.
‘Later, Mrs Imrie. Things come over me later. When I’ve had time.’
‘When you’ve had time? But you have lots of time, Mr Abson. Who’s disturbing us? You’re a person of feeling, aren’t you? A person would need to be inhuman not to respond to what I’ve just told you.’
‘That’s how I’m made, Mrs Imrie.’
‘How? Not inhuman, I hope?’
‘I mean I go over things later.’
‘Later? How late?’
‘Indeed I am not!’ exclaimed a girl who had just opened the door. ‘It’s all your crazy clocks running on again!’
‘I’m not referring to you, Brenda,’ said her mother. ‘I’m talking to Mr Abson here who feels everything later than other people.’
The