teaser tuesday: a castle in putney
This is a relic from the novel I had to abandon in favour of the current work-in-progress. I hope to return to it one day if I have a publisher who can indulge me (or if I don’t); for the moment, it’s relegated to my free time. I’ll return to my Elizabethan adventure next week.
The novel is called A Castle in Putney, set in the present day, and follows the adventures of Clara Stafford and her unlikely family in and around her eponymous home. In this scene, her brother and sister - four and eight - have just come in from an afternoon playing in the mud, and Clara is reluctantly conscripted into giving them a bath.
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1996
“Should I put them in the washer?” the now-nude Henry asks, holding up his clothes.
“Yes, into the washer,” Suzanne says, “and into the bath with you.” She goes into the kitchen and calls for Clara.
But Clara has gone into her bedroom and closed the door: she is fifteen and wants to be alone. She’s done her bit, played with the children. Now she pulls out The Liar and immerses herself in the life of public schoolboys.
Eleanor and Henry were born after Suzanne finished her doctoral dissertation, which is why they are called Eleanor and Henry, after the twelfth-century king and queen of infamous memory. Clara is just Clara, and she feels cheated. She’s never asked after the origins of her own name, but she knows enough about her parents to know that she couldn’t have been named after Clara in The Nutcracker. Like wine, opera, and cooking, Clara’s parents tried ballet and found that they couldn’t appreciate it enough. Books, newspapers, Suzanne’s covert cigarettes, and the mounds: that is where all the clues are.
Clara was born before the dissertation had even begun.
She can hear Henry fiddling with the faucets in the bathroom down the hall and knows that disaster will strike soon. She listens for sound on the stairs, footfalls in the vast corridor, but hears nothing. No, not nothing: Henry has got the water started, and Clara hears a visceral blast that ricochets off the sides of the tub; she hears Henry’s scream of pleasure. Hissing a sigh through her teeth, she throws down her book and crashes out of her bedroom.
“Henry!” she shouts over the din of the water as she walks down the corridor. “Henry!” The corridor is a long one, and the water that courses through the Byzantine pipes when a toilet is flushed or a tap is turned on can be heard everywhere. It’s a castle, after all. A real castle, with turrets and all. Clara wanted a turret for her own, but her parents were worried. When you’re older, they kept saying, until Clara gave up. “You idiot,” she mutters, about Henry, as she opens the bathroom door.
“I did it I did it!” Henry crows over the water.
“You sure did,” Clara says, leaning over him to turn the water off. “Feel clean yet?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” says Henry, earnestly, looking down at himself.
Clara inspects him. He is, really, only dirty where his clothes didn’t cover him sufficiently: around his ankles; his hands (and, by extension, the taps, Clara observes); his face; his forearms. Clara swishes her hand around in the water, which hasn’t had the chance to heat up. “Are you cold, Henry?”
“No,” says Henry.
She turns the hot tap on anyway. “Shall we clean you off with the poof?” By poof Clara means her bath lily, which she uses for Henry’s baths because she likes him, and because she’s long forgotten how to use ordinary washcloths. He screams with glee, and she takes it down, using (again) her own body wash, which smells of nutmeg, to get the mud off her small brother. She will scrub his back and his arms and his feet and his armpits, but she hands the poof to him for his chest and his private parts. “Do your bits,” she says, and he does.
Eleanor bangs the door open. Clara sees that she, too, has no clothes on. “I have to pee,” she says, and makes for the toilet.
“We have a lot of bathrooms,” Clara mutters, watching Henry again.
“I should have a bath too,” Eleanor announces from the toilet, her legs swishing back and forth.
“You’re not dirty, Eleanor,” Clara says.
Eleanor hops off the toilet, flushes it, and makes her way to the enormous free-standing tub. Watching Clara narrowly, she climbs in.
“Mom!” Clara hollers. Henry has no problem with the intrusion of his sister into his ablutions: he scoots forward and Eleanor sits behind him. A great splash hits Clara in the face. “Mom!” she bellows again.
“I need to wash,” Eleanor says, and Henry, obligingly, hands her the bath lily.
“No!” Clara says, before she can stop herself, but Eleanor has already found the body wash. She dollops some generously onto the poof and begins primly rubbing herself. Henry, finished, has begun splashing, for something to do. Clara looks mournfully at the almost-empty bottle. She snatches it away and puts it up into the caddy by the shower, where Eleanor can’t reach it. Nutmeg fumes fill the bathroom and Clara thinks, for a moment, that she’s going to be sick.
It’s Arthur who shows up to rescue Clara. Clara can’t help herself: “Where’s Mom?” she asks.
“Downstairs,” Arthur says. “Now, what have we got here?”
He’s lucky he can’t smell. The nutmeg and steam fill the air until Clara, dripping, stands up to leave. Arthur is already on his knees by the tub. “Rinse, rinse, rinse,” he says, pouring water over Eleanor, who squeals. “Done rinsing?”
They both nod, and Arthur scoops them out of the tub, one on each side of him. “Grab the towels, Clara,” he says, and she does, throwing them over her two siblings like blankets over camels as they scream and kick with laughter in their father’s arms. Arthur carries them gamely through the bathroom door and down the hall. Clara looks around the bathroom, which is now quite as wet as the mounds and the grass and the footpaths outside. The tub is still full of grey water: her father never quite gets it right. Her mother will be horrified when she sees it. Clara tries, very hard, to turn on her heel and go back to her bedroom, back to her book, but finds that she can’t. She pulls the plug, which slurps and gurgles, and then grabs a towel and begins mopping the floor.
Suzanne, she knows, will still be angry that Clara used one of the good towels for a chore like this. That Clara doesn’t care about.
