(Also, the tub isn’t so clean. Stains like cobwebs, loose hairs.)
A night of exhausting dreams! Shaking her head to clear it.
Why has she come here? Where exactly is this?
Back in the bedroom, dressing with childish haste. You fear being surprised when you are not fully dressed. Bare feet! Impossible to run with bare feet . . .
Clare’s fingers move numbly. There is a strange disconnect between her brain and her fingers, her limbs. The way she has felt occasionally in the past after having taken a drug to help her sleep—not a powerful barbiturate, only just Benadryl—but the morning-after effects were unpleasant. Of course—you know you were poisoned. Last night.
Breathing through her mouth, trying not to panic. Out of her suitcase (which looks as if it has been shaken, its contents jumbled) she manages to pull clean underwear, clothes. The great-aunts! They want to remove me from their sister’s will before probate court, they want my inheritance. Driving to Cardiff the previous day, Clare wore a sweater, jeans, her usual running shoes. But she has brought more formal clothes to wear to her appointment with Lucius Fischer this morning.
“Lucius. He will be my friend.”
Clare’s fingers are so numb; it requires many minutes for her to dress herself properly. Even then, she has forgotten her hair—stares at her reflection in a bureau mirror—a stunned Medusa.
Shame!—under ordinary circumstances she would have taken a shower, washed or at least thoroughly wetted her hair and combed it out. Too late now.
Hair like a wild scribbling. Dilated eyes, registering bafflement.
No escape except down the stairs. Drawn by friendly-seeming voices. Clare enters a room, a breakfast room, shading her eyes against sunlight from a wall of windows. Her mouth is very dry. Her eyes feel oversized, exposed. The great-aunts turn to their guest, smiling eagerly. Elspeth’s preposterous flamelike hair lifts from her pale-powdered face; Morag’s muscular fireplug body roots her firmly to the floor. It seems that they have been speaking of Clare to someone, but who this is, a third party at the farther end of the breakfast table, Clare can’t determine. The elderly sisters’ eyes are bright-glittering in a way that discomforts Clare.
“Breakfast is porridge—”
“—prepared the proper Scots way, with steel-cut oats.”
“—a dash of milk—”
“—brown sugar—”
“—raisins. Hurry!”
Clare is urged to sit at the closer end of a long table covered in a mustard-yellow plastic tablecloth.
Porridge! Clare has not eaten porridge for many years. She remembers liking it as a child; more recently, not so much. The great-aunts have prepared a particularly thick, gluey oatmeal, already beginning to congeal around the edges of Clare’s bowl. She picks up her spoon: it’s the tarnished silver “baby spoon” of the previous day.
Clare is determined to eat the breakfast her great-aunts have prepared for her, as if to demonstrate to the elderly women that she is grateful for their hospitality, their kindness. She does not dislike them, and she does not fear them—that would be absurd.
Though she sees, in her bowl, that the raisins seem to be moving in the gray-gluey porridge.
“She doesn’t care for our porridge, Morag!” cries the great-aunt with the tangerine-colored hair.
“She doesn’t care for your porridge, Elspeth!” cries the great-aunt with the twisted spine.
Embarrassed, Clare grips her baby spoon harder. Of course the raisins are not moving. Steel-cut oatmeal with a dash of hot milk is her favorite breakfast.
“Now you’ve embarrassed our dear niece—she feels she must eat.”
“Well, she needs to eat. She’s a growing girl—and growing girls must eat.”
As Clare struggles to lift the tarnished baby spoon to her mouth, to chew, to swallow a gluey clot of porridge, avoiding the raisins, the great-aunts hover close about her, fussing and fluttering. Is there something sinister about them, or are they simply concerned for Clare, fascinated by her, as one might (plausibly) be fascinated by a stranger who has turned up in the guise of a relative?—a beneficiary?
Clare has prepared a crucial question to ask the great-aunts: Why was she given away for adoption when the Donegal family is clearly well-to-do? Didn’t anyone in the family want her?
But—how does she dare ask such a question? Her voice cracks when she begins to speak. Her throat closes up.
The damned porridge is as thick as taffy! Pouring hot milk into it hardly helps.
“Is it too hot, dear? Or—”
“Not hot enough?”
The sisters’ solicitude seems genuine. Clare wonders if they have ever had a houseguest before in their lives.
Elspeth is wearing a taupe silken dressing gown with a wide sash. It might be a ball gown of some antiquated sort or a costume appropriate for a festive occasion; bizarrely, the top slips open if she moves carelessly, revealing a bony upper chest. Also, Elspeth has powdered her face lavishly, so that she resembles a ghostly clown; her arched eyebrows, which had seemed to Clare glamorous the previous evening, have been shakily penciled onto her face this morning, as her red-orange lipstick has been applied with a shaky hand. The pug-faced, squat-bodied Morag, hair disheveled and uncombed, appears to be wearing practical flannel pajamas beneath a dressing gown of some coarse material, like denim. Her eyes are gleeful, fixed upon Clare.
“We don’t like our porridge,” Morag says slyly. “It isn’t porridge of the quality they serve at the Ritz.”
“Well, it would be more palatable for our guest if it were hot, at least. Someone has let it get cold and congealed . . .”
“Someone turned off the burner on the stove.”
“Someone has to be vigilant, or we’d have the fire truck rushing up the street to our house—again.”
Clare smiles uncertainly. She has given up on her oatmeal but continues to hold the dainty little spoon so that her elderly relatives won’t suspect her of disliking their food.
Taking time now to notice the fourth figure in the room—a man—of indeterminate age—neither old nor young, neither smiling nor frowning, seemingly indifferent to Clare as well as to the chattering great-aunts, leaning forward at the table, on his elbows, wielding a spoon in his left hand while his right hand rests on the tabletop, the fingers as stiff as claws.
Astonishing. This person, a stranger, seems to Clare somehow familiar—his features resemble her own, obliquely: something about the set of the eyes, the nose . . .
He has a pronounced widow’s peak, dark hair threaded with silver, a sharp-boned face. He is not very friendly. Yet observing Clare through half-shut eyes, covertly. Beside his porridge bowl, a newspaper folded lengthwise.