The Trespass Read Free Page B

on the table, ticking monotonously, was always there in the background, a dull, unvarying sound measuring the days. And the nights.
    It was very late now: she heard a clock chime from the direction of Oxford Street, then she heard the nightcart clattering over the cobblestones in the mews. While their Aunt Julia was staying, just after the new water closet had been installed next to the dining room and unaccustomed water had flowed downwards, the old cesspit under this house had overflowed: a catastrophe of odour and discharging drains and questionable mud that nobody in Bryanston Square, not even the ladies, could ignore, although naturally they pretended to do so. Workmen were called in, the ladies did not of course acquaint themselves with the details and took an extended trip to Brighton until the work was completed. The night-men still came to the house in the night; what they did there in the darkness Harriet did not know.
    Someone passed along the Square singing rather unsteadily:
    Be it ever so humble
    There’s no place like home.
    and then the voice faded into the distance. Harriet suddenly got up, went to the window and opened it, trying to find some breeze, some freshness in the still, warm night.
    ( I am there, Mary had said as she kissed her goodnight, I am always there. )
    There was an oak tree in the Square. The tree was stunted, it was true, covered in specks of black soot, unable to reach properly upwards to clearer air, but an oak tree with green leaves in the middle of London nevertheless and Harriet thought of it as her own. Her room was the corner room; it looked out not only over the Square but also over the mews where the horses were kept and the grooms lived and the servants came and went: a bustling lane full of life and voices and the whinnying of horses and the sharp sound of their shoes on the cobblestones. The servants kept all the windows of the house fast shut almost always, to try to keep out the black dirt, and the eternal sounds, and the worst of the malodours of the city. But the black soot still found its way inside the windows, like the smells, and the sounds, of London. This was the only house Harriet remembered: she had known the sounds and the smells all her life, they were part of her. By these things she measured her days.
    Early in the morning she would hear the clanking pails of the milk carriers from the farms and the calls of the costermongers on their way to Covent Garden. Then she would hear the servants going downstairs to light the fires and heat the water. (Lately, since she got back from Norfolk, it seemed there were always servants, everywhere in the dark, heavy house. She felt sometimes spied on, trapped; often now she would come across a footman, or a maid she had never seen before, just in the next bend of the staircase, just inside a door.) Then, after the servants, the horses would begin to pass by in the street, and the rumble of carriage wheels became louder, and all the morning clocks would chime and church bells would be rung. Before too long, in among the calls and the carriage wheels and the bells, a barrel organ would start up, or a violin: ‘Home, Sweet Home’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ would be heard over and over again, wafting along from the corner, breaking off sometimes in the middle of a bar and then starting up again, faster and faster, driving many inhabitants of the Square to distraction. Then somebody would send a footman down to the street to shout, or to pay the musician to go somewhere else and play his tune. (Mary sometimes said, laughing, that the street musicians made their living not from playing but from not playing the music.) The Square would remain music-free until another music-maker set up somewhere, not far away. Sometimes it was a German band with tubas and cornets, playing a mixture of polkas and hymns.
    And sometimes, in the early evening, a gull would cry over, surprising the city dwellers, reminding them that their river led