ESSAY
On the very day I brought the model home into
the hall of the real thing, my husband told me he
wanted to SELL THE HOUSE.
house with its patchwork walls and mullioned windows with stone lintels like
huge eyebrows over every one, its stone slate roofs and all-round crazy Elizabethan
Jacobean architecture.
I started off dead wrong by using a single huge lump of clay huge and as
I worked carving and cutting and chiselling copying every nook and cranny
everyone knew that even if the thing didnt soon collapse like a chocolate cake in
the sun, it could not be fired successfully. It was too massive, too solid, too long,
to bear its own weight and was naturally full of air bubbles which would cause it
to explode in the kiln. I should have been working with slabs of clay and sticking
them together to make the walls but by the time I knew this it was too late and
I was well into the big solid business.
I glared at well-meaners in the class and at my teacher and kept right on working:
I outlined every window, every slate on the rooves, the very ivy on the old gnarled
walls. When Id finished in the late evenings Id damp the thing down, mummify
it in plastic and drive home thinking about when I could get back to it. Obsessive.
It took me a year to finish it (and clay doesnt like to be kept hanging around).
I deliberately wasnt there when it went into the kiln, nor when they opened it.
To everyone in the studios amazement, the house emerged intact gnarly,
ancient, weather-beaten. I didnt burst into tears when I saw it. Pure control.
I know magic when I see it. Id managed to make a finished shrine of what I knew
one day I would lose: my past is this house. I loved it so much.
On the very day I brought the model home into the hall of the real thing, my
husband told me he wanted to sell the house. I realised at some deep level that
when I had started to build the simulacrum a year before, I had divined that he
was going to do this. He maintained that he had not thought of doing so back
then. Perhaps my apprehensions sparked it all off whatever ... in a long marriage
there is a lot of sinusoidal communication. But when I finally left the house the
model became for me like the house of the dead that the Egyptians put in their
tombs to help them or house them in their journey to the afterlife. In a way I never
got over its loss.
The man who built it in 1588, Thomas Banks, was a wool merchant in the rich
Cotswolds with ideas of grandeur. His new fashionable mansion rose out of its
swards like an organic growth, as though it had roots. It had peaks and valleys,
high chimneys and gables and porches. Now lichens that look like vegetable
graffiti and mosses and ivies cling to the rosy and umber walls. To open the
massive studded oak front door took both hands and considerable weight, and the
sound effects were those of a Boris Karloff movie. Over the centuries the house
was added to a big Georgian drawing room at the back and larders, kitchen
quarters, but the integrity of the front has remained untouched for nearly 450
years. When one entered certain small rooms it was like opening a casket and
40 November 2020 THE GLOSS MAGAZINE
breaching the sweet exhalation of layers of old scented air.
But one room was not so sweet a big room on the first f loor with an enormous
fireplace. It had been the previous owners study and the walls must surely have
been panelled but this had been removed to show the old brick and stonework,
strangely raw and cold and painted red.
We painted it a light colour and made it our best guest room. My mother-in-law
gave us large hideous furniture for it, including a double-doored oak wardrobe,
with 1604 engraved along the top lintel. No matter how firmly you closed its doors
and lodged them shut they would swing open to reveal an interior big enough for
at least three people to hide in. In an effort to tame this wooden brute I had it lined
in a pretty fabric but when the door swung open on the vast f lowery interior it was
like hearing a falsetto voice emerge from a wrestler.
The first person to stay in the room after wed decorated it was Jean Shrimpton.
For those of you born yesterday she was the most ravishing and beautiful woman
and a down-to-earth person, for all she was the most famous model of the times.
When I came down in the morning I found her asleep on a sofa. Something dark
and large, amorphous and frightening had slithered into the bed alongside her and
she could not move. She had been terrified. Only towards dawn had she finally
been able to get out of the room. I ran up the room.
The doors to the wardrobe had swung open.
I dont know why I allowed it why was I so sanguine about what I had been
told but the next person to stay in the room was one of my sisters. She came down
early in the morning shaken and white-faced the same thing had happened.
A dark horror had insinuated itself alongside her in the bed and lain there
unmoving and dreadfully heavy and paralysing her with fright.
The doors to the wardrobe were open.
I thought, I suppose, that it surely couldnt happen to a married couple and
so when Johnny and Kate came to stay I told them about these events far from
being frightened they were both fascinated and intrigued. The next morning was
a different story. The Thing had crawled between her and John and she could not
even move an arm to reach across it to ask her husband for help. She lay awake
staring at the ceiling unable to move and terrified until, exhausted, she was
suddenly free and able to awaken John.
Of course the doors to the wardrobe were open.
I loved the house in spite of its ghost and I never went near the wardrobe, never
used the room again, never opened its door and when I look at the model on my
trunk I avoid looking at the windows of the room in case I see a creature scrabbling
at the glass.
I had it lined in a pretty fabric but when the
door swung open on the VAST FLOWERY
INTERIOR it was like hearing a falsetto voice
emerge from a wrestler.
THE JOY IN SMALL THINGS / MOOD-BOOSTING COLOUR / FESTIVE PREP / PARK BENCH SOCIAL LIFE / LITTLE LUXURIES / DARK FLORALS MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2020 .ie www.thegloss with THE IRISH TIMES & DEAREST NEAREST THIS IS OUR SOCIAL BUBBLE
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