He was there on a whim. He had lived close to the house for most of his life, and yet he had never once set foot through its doors. History, he told himself, was safer when it stayed inside a book.
He paid his entrance fee at the strange wooden hut just past the main gates and drove slowly through the parkland, watching out, as the signs instructed, for stray deer.
Parking the car on a handbrake-worrying slope, Martin walked up to the house. A young woman, a girl who could have been one of last year’s GCSE drop-outs, took more money from him at the door and handed him a brochure. Martin felt curiously gauche as he took the pamphlet from her and began studying the layout of the house. He decided to take the path of least resistance and started to walk up the stairs facing him to the upper floors of the house, simply because they were there.
In each of the rooms he entered there was a guide standing at a strategic point. Martin found them strangely off-putting. These guides were mostly women of a certain age, and Martin imagined that they smelled of face powder and ancient lipstick, like his grandmother and her sisters had. Then Martin remembered that he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and most of the women standing there in their National Trust uniforms were actually his mother’s age. In which case, he told himself, they would smell of fabric softener and Opium.
Each one looked as though she had been told to behave like a Guardsman outside
Because he hadn’t been to one of these places since he was a bored teenager on a family trip, Martin wasn’t sure what to do. He decided to follow the general trend and wandered from room to room, looking at the meaningless pieces of antique furniture. He had the feeling he should have shelled out on a proper guide book.
After a few minutes’ wandering, Martin found himself in a book-lined room which he guessed was the library. For all he knew it could have been the salon. He had given up looking at the brochure three rooms ago, since all the rooms looked alike.
He looked around at the cracked and decrepit bindings facing out from the bookshelves. In the middle of the central wall, in between the floor to ceiling bookcases, was a door. There was something about it that drew his eye. It seemed to be ajar, but he couldn’t see what was on the other side. Martin was a curious man and he exhibited his curiosity very practically. He stepped over the velvet rope, intended to keep him from handling the books and sitting on the furniture, and walked confidently up to the door. In his determination to see if the door opened and acted like one of the hidden shortcuts at IKEA he was oblivious to whether this was acceptable stately home etiquette.
As he got to the door, he realised that it wasn’t ajar at all. It was a trompe l’oeuille. He inspected the painting that seemed so real it had tricked his eyes, and then he put his hand onto the doorknob. It was large and round and brass. It felt good in his hand. He turned it and pulled towards him, but the door didn’t move. He checked the hinges, to reassure himself that the door would move towards him and not the other way. There were no hinges to be seen, so he turned the handle again and pushed. Again it didn’t budge. The door, it seemed, was locked.
Martin was suddenly overcome with desire; a desire to see what lay beyond this door that had invited him over for a closer look. He crouched down and positioned his eye at the keyhole. Beyond the wooden barrier was another room with more furniture; something that looked like a piano; some chairs; he could only see slices of the objects, though. The field of vision through the keyhole was narrow.
Suddenly something else appeared within his immediate sight-line. It was clear green, like a marble; a piece of glass manhandled by the ocean. Then it moved and he realised that it was an eye that was looking back at him through the keyhole.
He pulled back and tried to work out how an eye looking back at him through a keyhole could seem so clear and so alien.
“Are you looking for something?” a voice said on the other side of the door.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, Are you looking for something?” the voice said again.
“Erm, not exactly, no,” he replied.
The door opened and a woman looked at him, laughing at his still crouched form.
“It’s just a hobby of yours, then, is it? Peering through keyholes?”
He straightened his back. She was perfect. One of those arty women with glossy dark hair cut into an angular Louise Brooks bob. Even her clothes had something of the 1920s about them. Her eyes, a piercing green against the whiteness of her skin, seemed to look right into him. Her face was impish, its features neat. The smile that curved her lips chased laughter up into her eyes.
“I just wondered why the door was locked,” Martin mumbled, feeling sheepish, incapable of brazening it out. “Wanted to see what was on the other side.”
He couldn’t look at her; her gaze was too much to bear. He looked instead at the carpet. The woman stepped through the open doorway, then pulled the door closed behind her again and locked it with a large and gilded key. Her shoes were neat and Martin could have bitten the slender ankles that rose from them.
“The withdrawing room’s on the other side,” she said, forcing Martin to look at her again. She smiled. “You get to it eventually. It’s on the other side of the house and you have to walk through all the other rooms first.”
She was already walking away from him before she finished speaking. Her pace was fast and purposeful. Martin set off in pursuit, but he wasn’t fast enough. She reached the end of the room ahead of him, turned left and disappeared through a door marked Staff Only.
He paused at the door through which only members of staff could pass as though he were lost in thought. After a moment or two of distraction he moved on, making his way round the circuit of rooms, gazing abstractedly at the furnishings and the rare hand painted Chinese wallpapers.
She had asked him if he was looking for something. He wondered what it was that had made him walk in among the furniture in what he thought was the library, but which could have been the blue room, or even the salon, and put his eye to that tantalising keyhole.
He stopped. What had she been doing holding her eye to the keyhole as well?
Looking down on the scene from above, peeling away the ceiling, he saw the two of them, crouched on either side of the door, one eye to each side of the keyhole, looking for something. Or looking for nothing. Perhaps just looking for the sake of it.
Looking, all the same. And looking at each other, as it turned out.
Looking down on the scene as he did, from inside his mind’s eye, he didn’t see it right. He had it wrong.
Martin pictured the woman crouched in a mirror position to his own, the pair of them looking at each other but not knowing it until her eye moved. Although, her voice had held no hint of surprise when she had asked if he were looking for something. He blushed, standing there, still paused in the corridor as people tried to make their way around him on their conveyor belt tour of the house. He blushed because he realised in that moment that she must have been looking at him all along, and she must have realised that he didn’t know she was there.
He blushed and wanted to kiss her.
“Now where did that come from?” he wondered.
“Are you alright, sir?”
He turned to look behind him, to find out who had spoken at his shoulder. It was one of the official guides.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“I wondered whether you were alright. Whether you needed any help. You have been standing there for a while now.”
The woman smiled at him encouragingly in her bottle green sweatshirt and her neat, pleated skirt. He looked at her shoes. They were neat and kittenish for a woman her age. A woman his mother’s age.
“I’m fine,” he said, smiling back. “I was just thinking. Sorry.”
The woman continued to smile at him and put her head on one side the better to crinkle her eyes indulgently at him. Then she walked past him and on along the corridor, following the shuffling caravan of visitors. He had been right. She smelled of fabric softener.
Then he started.
“There is one thing,” Martin called after her.
The woman paused and turned to look back at him, down along the corridor. She didn’t move, so he walked towards her. She smiled as he approached.
“Yes?” she said, once he was close enough for her not to have to raise her voice.
“There was a woman, a member of staff I think. She came through the door from the withdrawing room and then went off through that door there,” he gestured to the door marked Staff Only, “does she work here?”
“I hope she does, if she went through that door,” the woman replied, her smile hardening, less indulgent now.
“Do you know her name? I mean, I’d like to speak to her, to ask her a question,” he was blushing again. “A question about the withdrawing room.”
“I can answer your question about the withdrawing room.”
The woman looked at him, rigidly welcoming his question. He let the silence stretch on. He wanted her jaw to ache, to see how long she could hold the customer care grimace in place.
It didn’t waver.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll write in or something.”
The woman gave him a curiously anachronistic nod, as though she were a gentlewoman in a period drama, and continued her perambulation of the rooms.
Again he pictured the two of them, the green-eyed woman and him, looking at each other through that keyhole. He watched as though he were an external observer. He had the impression that she was taller than he was. It was her eye that made him think that. The shine in it, the sparkle, hinted at the purer air of high altitude.
He couldn’t have described her to anyone. He’d barely seen her. Dark hair; 1920s clothes; the clarity and the greenness of her eye was what had caught his attention.
He continued through the house and eventually reached the withdrawing room. He half expected to see her there, still paused in front of the door, still bent at the waist with her eye to the keyhole, looking at him who didn’t yet know that he was looking at her. He wished that he could freeze time and step out of it so that he could see exactly what she had been doing on this other side of the door.
He walked in among the furniture, as he had done on the far side, confident enough as he crossed another red velvet rope that signified No Entry to again not be noticed. He walked up to the door and bent down to put his eye to this side of the keyhole.
He heard a giggle. He thought he saw the movement of someone pulling their face away from the door. He stood up and tried the handle, thinking he would pull open the door and surprise her there, but the door was locked.
He put both hands against the panelling and leaned his face as close to the wood as he could.
“Is it you?” he whispered.
He thought he heard her whisper back, “Yes. Is it you?”
“It’s me,” he whispered again.
“Sir, why are you whispering to the door?”
He jolted and turned around, almost whiplashing himself. It was the same guide as before, the one with the kittenish shoes.
“Sir, visitors shouldn’t walk among the exhibits. Would you please return to the designated route?”
“I thought I - ”
“Sir?”
“Never mind.” He moved away from the door, back through the careworn furniture to the official pathway through the house. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d seen someone go through that way earlier.”
The guide looked at him, apparently taken aback.
“That’s impossible, sir,” she said. “That door’s been locked since 1923 and nobody knows where the key is.”
“But I saw someone, a woman, she was looking through the keyhole at me. She opened the door and came through, then locked it after her.”
“Which room were you in, sir?”
“The blue room. Or maybe the pink. I don’t know. There were books. It might have been the library.” Martin realised he was babbling. “Anyway,” he continued, “I asked her what the room was that she had come from, and she said the withdrawing room.”
They were standing now on the designated route, close to one of the tall windows that looked over the ha-ha and the landscaped gardens to the rear. The guide was frowning at him.
“Are you sure sir? That door doesn’t have a key and it hasn’t been opened since - ”
“Since 1923, yes you said.”
“What did she look like, this woman?” the guide asked him.
Martin shrugged. “I don’t know. Louise Brooks maybe. All I know is that I looked through the keyhole, to see what was on the other side, and her eye was looking back at me.”
“You make a habit of wandering where you shouldn’t to look through keyholes do you, sir?” The guide was trying to hide a smile.
Martin laughed in response. “I’m curious,” he said. “What can I say?”
He looked back at the door, at the furniture between them and it.
“That is the withdrawing room, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. At least, it was a withdrawing room at one point in the life of the house. We have it set up as a music room now. Do you see the spinet over there? It’s a very rare example of the instrument.”
“So it’s not the withdrawing room?”
“Well, technically, no it’s not.”
“So whoever came through the door was lying to me?”
“But nobody could have gone through the door, sir. The door is locked.”
“Since 1923, I know. Except,” he paused and looked at the guide, “I definitely saw someone else’s eye on the other side of the keyhole and then she came through the door and she locked it after her. She told me I would get to the room if I carried on through the house, then she disappeared through a door marked Staff Only.”
The guide turned down the corners of her mouth and shook her head. She wanted Martin to know that there was nothing else she could say. They stood and looked at each other for a moment more and then she moved off, in the opposite direction to the general flow of traffic, her shoes tapping on the parquet flooring.
Martin turned to look again at the door. As he stood there trying to puzzle out what he knew he had seen, the door opened and the same green eyed woman came through it.
“Hello,” she said as she locked the door behind her. “Fancy seeing you here. Have you found what you were looking for yet?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t think I was looking for anything, and a guide just told me that it wasn’t possible for anyone to go through that door because it’s been - ”
“Locked since 1923, I know.” She grinned. “It hasn’t really been locked all that time. Everyone thinks that the key is lost, but actually,” she held up the key, then slipped it into a pocket on the front of her dress, “I have the only key in the place.”
She’d crossed the room by now and was standing next to him. He was right, she was taller than he was. Light from the afternoon sun came through the window and made her eyes shine like emeralds.
“You said this was the withdrawing room,” he said.
“It is. This is a mock up of a music room. Every home should have one.” She smiled again, then, “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re enjoying your visit. I’d best get back to my work.”
And then she was off again. He watched her as she walked away from him.
Her eyes really were a perfectly clear green.
This time he chased after her.
“Wait!” he shouted. Another visitor looked at him disapprovingly. He pulled a face at her and continued chasing after the woman.
“Miss, wait!” he shouted again.
The woman stopped and turned slightly to look back at him. She was smiling.
“Listen,” Martin was panting. He tried to control his breathing. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had to run. “Listen,” he said again.
She put her hand on his arm. Through the layers of his jacket, his jumper and his shirt, he could feel that it was cool. “Take your time,” she said. “Get your breath back.”
Martin bent at his waist, putting his hands on his thighs to support his upper body weight.
“God, I’m out of condition,” he wheezed.
“I bet you smoke as well,” the woman said dryly.
Martin looked up at her and laughed. “Actually, I don’t,” he said. “But I might as well, for all the good abstinence is doing me.”
“Are you okay now?” she asked as he straightened up and looked at her.
“Better,” he replied.
“You were saying, then?”
“I was saying?”
“Listen, was what you said.”
“Oh yeah. Listen, can I take you for a coffee or some lunch or something?”
“Are you propositioning me?”
Martin tried not to look embarrassed, but failed. “No,” he said, “of course not!”
“Shame,” the woman told him, mischief filling her eyes. She laughed once, and her hair shook, the glossy shafts of blackness falling to and fro across each other before settling back into perfection. “Most men can’t resist.”
They were standing by another window. The angle of the sun came through the glass and caused the flecks of green in her eyes to sparkle. On impulse, Martin took her hand.
The woman squeezed his hand and said, “Can I show you something?”
Martin felt perplexed, and almost drew his hand away from hers. At the first movements of the bones and tendons in his fingers she held onto his hand with a slight increase of pressure.
“What do you mean?” Martin asked her, allowing his hand to stay where it was, relaxing again into the mutual grip of the thing.
With a deft movement, the woman interlaced her fingers with his and began to walk back through the house, the way he had come, the way she had kept avoiding by slipping to and fro through that eternally locked but unlocked door. Martin had no choice but to go with her.
“I mean,” she said, pausing before the door marked Staff Only, “I want to show you something. Something I’ve been working on. Daddy doesn’t know.”
Martin frowned. He didn’t remember reading anything about the family still being around; certainly not still connected with the house; but he supposed it wasn’t out of the realms of possibility for the daughter of a former owner to be taken on to help look after the place.
She had opened the door and was leading him down a narrow corridor. They walked in silence. She had the purposeful gait of someone doing something she shouldn’t; knowingly marching him to his fate before anyone could stop her. Martin had the good sense not to try to make conversation.
The corridor was white. Modern plasterboard walls ran along their left, with occasional doors that led, Martin assumed, into offices for the curatorial staff. He hoped, for the curators’ sakes, that there were windows on the other side of the offices.
The woman stopped at the end of the corridor and turned to him. There was a door behind her, another of the house’s original doors. She had her hand on the door knob; was about to open it to reveal the surprise.
“Close your eyes,” she said.
Martin obeyed.
He felt rather than heard the door open. There was something like a gust of wind, or a breeze, that passed across his face. The woman had let go of his hand and left him standing there, eyes closed, waiting for her next instruction.
“Can I help you?” a voice said.
Martin opened his eyes. Standing in front of him, door thrown open to reveal an office behind her, was a woman whose staff badge said Julia. She was looking at him as though she wanted to appear brave.
Martin opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say.
“How did you get in here?” Julia, asked him.
Martin was still standing there open mouthed, incapable of speech.
“I…” he managed to get out.
“This area is Staff Only,” she said, enunciating the capitalisation. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“Where did she go?” Martin finally managed to blurt out.
“What?”
“The woman who brought me through here. Is she in there?” He tried to see into the room behind Julia, then realised that there was no more room to see. Her desk and a pair of filing cabinets filled the space.
“What woman?” Julia said, relaxing and leaning against the door frame. She folded her arms and looked at him with curiosity. Her green eyes cut straight to the quick of him.
Martin blushed under her gaze. He felt as though he were fifteen years old, trying to describe the girl at school that he fancied.
“She brought me in here,” he said, helplessly.
“I’m the only one here,” Julia told him. “What do you say to that?”
Martin’s posture was beginning to take on the question “Am I in trouble?”
Julia remained silent. She carried on leaning in the doorway, looking at Martin, trying to suss him out.
“I don’t know,” Martin said eventually.
Julia laughed. “I think you’d better go,” she told him, standing up and preparing to return to the quiet of her office. “You really shouldn’t be here.”
“Sorry,” Martin said. “Of course. I’ll go now.”
Julia smiled at him. She didn’t know why, but something about him made her want to ruffle his hair, or take care of him, or something.
“Maybe you’ll come again,” she said, without knowing why.
Martin smiled back at her. “Maybe,” he agreed.
She closed the door, still smiling, and Martin turned to walk back down the corridor and out through the door where he had come in with the strange green-eyed woman. Julia had unsettled him slightly, but he didn’t know how.
The kitten-shoed guide was waiting outside the door as Martin emerged. Martin started, instantly feeling guilty, but the woman didn’t speak.
“Hello again,” Martin said.
“You do get around, don’t you?” she responded.
Martin smiled. He wanted to laugh, but stifled it. He was thinking of Julia; thinking he might come back again. Soon, he thought. He looked at the guide and smiled. She reminded him of someone. The sparkle in her eyes, the steadiness of her gaze.
Nothing more was said between them. Martin nodded his head briefly, by way of goodbye, then made his way back through the house to the exit.
The guide followed slowly in the same direction, her shoes tapping out a sedate rhythm on the flooring; more sedate than when her grandmother would skitter through the house wearing them. She reached her post in the music room, by the wall where the portrait of her grandmother hung. She looked at the picture, at the tall woman with the 1920s clothes and the emerald green eyes, poised and posed beside a window looking out onto a ha-ha and a perfectly landscaped garden. The guide winked at her grandmother’s portrait.
“You picked well,” she told her, silently.
Feeling a presence at her shoulder, the guide in her grandmother’s kittenish shoes looked away from the original Julia, captured in the frame, and turned to see the replica standing there, with the same window behind her, the same view outside.
“Hello, mum,” Julia said. “Are you ready for some lunch?”
“Yes, dear,” her mother replied.
They walked back together to the door marked Staff Only. Julia opened the door and let her mum go through first. As her mother walked past, Julia spoke. She tried to make it sound as though the question was idle, but her mother knew the sound of false disinterest when she heard it.
“Mum,” Julia said. “Did you notice a strange man visiting the house today?”
Her mother smiled but didn’t turn around.
“Yes, dear,” was all she said.
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