The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Morbid?’

  ‘Not morbid so much as – well, desolate. It was about a star dying and turning into a black hole and leaving the other stars feeling bereft and lonely. And then yesterday, I caught her carrying a mouse in her satchel. A dead mouse. She’d found it on the playing fields and said she wanted to take it home and bury it.’

  ‘That does tend to support your hypothesis,’ said Eileen. She was prone, occasionally, to these rather dry formulations. Now she looked at her watch and rose to her feet: it was almost time for morning assembly. ‘Well, Sarah, I shall be writing to Ms Hill this afternoon, to tell her that I’ve looked into her complaint and I’m satisfied that my staff behaved properly on this occasion.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’d have been very surprised to find otherwise, in your case.’ She smiled warmly. ‘At the same time, it might be a good idea if you tried to patch things up with her yourself. Especially if it gives you a chance to satisfy our mutual curiosity about the family.’

  ‘You mean…’ Sarah decided to risk an irreverence: ‘You mean I should turn up at the house and have a nose around?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Eileen, and ushered Sarah into the corridor, already thronged by children making their shrill, erratic way towards the assembly hall.

  ∗

  Sarah had arrived at Rebecca Hill’s house that evening armed with prejudices: class prejudices, mainly, because it had never occurred to her that a woman who adopted (in her view) such a cavalier approach to childcare would be so prosperous. She had braced herself for something like squalor, and instead was confronted by all the hallmarks of middle-class taste. As she waited, alone, in Rebecca’s sitting-room, her initial surprise quickly gave way to self-reproach; following which, another, even more unexpected sensation began to steal over her. She realized that she was beginning to feel at home – more thoroughly at home than she had ever felt in her own house, since Anthony walked out – and couldn’t understand why. She had, after all, only been sitting there for a few minutes, waiting for Rebecca to reappear with the wine that had been frostily, grudgingly offered once Sarah had introduced herself and the shock of her appearance on the doorstep had been assimilated. Surely it was absurd to be feeling so very much at home in a stranger’s house, within such a short space of time, when that stranger appeared to be in a substantially higher income bracket than herself, and when she was anticipating, besides, an extremely difficult conversation. None the less, there was something about the furnishings, the paintwork, the pictures on the walls, the play of light from the French windows on to the carpet, the rows of hardback books, the vases of gypsophila and delphinium, which instilled in Sarah a blanketing, if inexplicable, sense of familiarity and reassurance. She even wondered, for a moment, if she was experiencing déjà vu, or if she might have seen this room years ago in one of her all-too-vivid dreams. But she thought not. The explanation for her strange, pleasurable sense of homecoming (there was no other word for it) lay somewhere deeper.

  ‘It’s only from Sainsbury’s, I’m afraid,’ said Rebecca, presenting her, in an offhand way, with a glass of greenish-yellow Australian wine. ‘Alison’s upstairs doing her homework. I could ask her down, but perhaps we’d better thrash this out by ourselves.’

  Sarah was alarmed at the thought of thrashing anything out with this woman. She had already noticed the collection of legal textbooks on the shelves and had guessed that Rebecca must be a barrister. She took three rapid, nervous sips of the wine.

  ‘Why exactly are you here?’ Rebecca now asked, bluntly. ‘I made my complaint to your headmistress this morning. I would have thought the matter rests with her.’

  Sarah half-laughed, half-gasped at the audacity of this gambit. ‘Well, she doesn’t seem to think so, and to be honest neither do I. We’re rather more concerned about the fact that I found your daughter sitting in Finsbury Park yesterday afternoon, locked out of her house, with nowhere safe to go for nearly four hours.’

  Rebecca sighed. ‘Look, I’m as upset about that as anybody. It should never have happened. I had to be out of London on a case, and Alison told me that she was going to be watching the sports until after five o’clock. I thought she could walk home with some of her friends, and let herself in. Then the silly girl goes and loses her key.’ In an undertone, as if to herself, she added: ‘Much as she seems to lose everything at the moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sarah, ‘but that isn’t good enough. For one thing I’m not sure that Alison has any friends at school, to be honest. She doesn’t seem to be very good at making them. And it doesn’t surprise me that she loses things all the time, because she’s obviously going through a very unhappy and vulnerable period.’

  ‘Putting aside the pop psychology,’ said Rebecca crisply, ‘I’d love to know how that fits in with your decision to make her sit through a film which sounds violent and unpleasant enough to upset any girl of her age.’

  Her voice had risen in both pitch and volume. Sarah had no wish for the confrontation to grow so heated, so early.

  ‘This isn’t – or shouldn’t be – about blame,’ she said. ‘We’re both interested in Alison’s welfare, so let’s not forget that we’re on the same side really. Having said that –’ and here she allowed a steelier note to insinuate itself ‘– I need an assurance from you that this isn’t going to happen again. Otherwise I’m going to have to report it.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ This was agreed testily, without grace, and Rebecca immediately followed it up with: ‘And I’d like you to think a little more carefully before inflicting any more… unsuitable entertainments on my daughter.’

  Sarah left a short silence, which seemed to her a more than adequate response. Then she asked: ‘Is Alison’s father at home tonight?’

  ‘Alison’s father doesn’t live here,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Ah. What does your husband do, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘I don’t have a husband.’

  ‘Your partner, then.’

  ‘My partner,’ said Rebecca, placing a neutral stress on the word, ‘is dead.’

  It was exactly what Sarah had been expecting to hear. Even so, the words were shocking: both in their finality and in the quiet, almost emotionless candour with which they had been spoken. She bowed her head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well… there you go.’ Rebecca drank deeply from her wine.

  ‘I suppose that explains… one or two things…’ Sarah looked up. ‘Did you see that poem she wrote for her homework? The one about stars?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose – I suppose in a way Alison might have written that about her father.’

  Rebecca flashed her a sharp look: scathing, impatient. ‘Alison’s father isn’t dead.’

  ‘No? But I thought you said…’

  ‘I said her father didn’t live here. He’s very much alive, all the same. He’s my brother, in fact.’

  Sarah was having difficulty taking all of this in. ‘Your brother? But in that case – I mean, how…?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You haven’t stumbled upon a case of incest: one more thing to be reported to the social services. You see, I’m not Alison’s biological mother. Technically speaking, I’m her aunt.’

  ‘Her aunt. Right. So who – who is her biological mother?’

  ‘My partner. “Who, as I told you, is now dead.’

  Sarah willed her brain into faster motion. She couldn’t understand why she had begun to feel so sluggish, so inept.

  ‘She was a woman, then: your partner.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rebecca stood up and looked out of the French windows. ‘I’m not absolutely convinced that this is any of your business, you know.’

  ‘No. No, you’re right. It isn’t.’

  ‘Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of person who’s going to take a very enlightened view of these matters.’

  Sarah ig
nored this; or rather, it failed to reach her. ‘How long were you together?’ she asked.

  ‘It would have been eleven years this August. She died almost a year ago.’

  Neither of them spoke for a while, and when Rebecca sat down again Sarah thought she could sense a softening, a perceptible easing of her tension. It occurred to her that perhaps there had been very few people with whom Rebecca could have shared these painful confidences, over the last few months. When she asked the next question her voice was tentative, gentle, as if she was offering up a fragile gift.

  ‘And how did she die?’

  ‘Messily,’ said Rebecca. But this was her last stab at bravado. Abruptly the mask slipped, her face collapsed in upon itself, and then there was nothing but misery, shameless and uncompromising. ‘She took her own life.’ Still, however, she would not allow herself to cry.

  Sarah said nothing at first. She could not bring herself to ask any more. She knew that the rest would come anyway.

  ‘The newspapers have got a name for it,’ Rebecca continued, brokenly. ‘“Yuppie burn-out”. It’s a syndrome, apparently. You work your rocks off in the City for ten years, you make pots of money, and then one day you look at your life and can’t remember what any of it was for. She was a textbook case. Driving around South London late one Friday night – God knows what she was doing in South London – she finds a nice long cul-de-sac with a brick wall at the end, revs up to ninety miles an hour, and drives straight into it. Writes off the company BMW. Writes herself off into the bargain.’

  ‘That’s… that’s dreadful,’ said Sarah, cringing at the inadequacy of her own words. ‘I can’t imagine anything like that. I mean, I can’t imagine anything like… having to be told that.’

  ‘It wasn’t so hot.’ Rebecca stirred herself, smiled a tough smile. ‘I think I’m going to have another glass of wine, at this point. D’you want some?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  ‘I might as well bring the bottle.’

  She was away for some minutes: long enough for the realization to creep up on Sarah slowly, biding its time, pacing itself, so that the thunderclap, when it came, would be all the more brutal, all the more devastating. It started with the return of that odd sense of familiarity: general at first, to do with shapes and textures and colours, before the real specifics began to announce themselves. Then, initially, it was the books. Her eyes were drawn to the row of novels by Rosamond Lehmann: hardbacks, first editions, unmistakably, their original dust-jackets protected by plastic wrappers, but missing one title: Invitation to the Waltz. Yes, she had always said that one would be hard to find… And as this thought broke in upon her, everything else followed at once, the whole impossible truth of it made suddenly clear, the world turned upside down in one infinitesimal movement… The African figurine on the mantelpiece, souvenir of a family trip to Ghana… The tiny framed photograph on the bookcase, arms around Rebecca, beaming blissfully, the happy couple… And just outside Sarah’s field of vision, the sight of it not yet to be trusted, but irrevocably there: another book, the book, that well-remembered green spine… These were hers. These were her things. This had been her house, her room…

  Rebecca came back with the bottle. Sarah could just about see her through the mist.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Her name: it was Veronica, wasn’t it?’

  And everything else was blank, until she recovered and found herself on the sofa, sobbing uncontrollably, Rebecca’s taut arms holding her in an awkward, uncomprehending embrace. It seemed for a while that she would never be able to stop crying, and the explanation she offered Rebecca through her tears must have been wildly incoherent, for she had to repeat it, again and again, and there were gaps in the explanation, there were intervals, when Sarah had to go into the toilet to pull herself together, for instance, and when Alison appeared, drawn by the noises and the voices, and Rebecca had to take her upstairs and put her to bed.

  As the evening drew on, things became calmer. When the light began to the down outside, Rebecca brought in candles and placed them around the room. She opened the second bottle of wine, and they started to talk about Veronica.

  What seemed most incredible, to Sarah, was that in all the years Rebecca and Veronica had spent together, her name had never once been mentioned.

  ‘But that was how she was, in a way,’ Rebecca insisted. ‘Absolutist: don’t you think? I mean, when she was going out with you, did she ever talk about any of her previous girlfriends?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘She never dwelt on things. She was less tied down by the past than anyone I’ve ever known. I tried to be like that, as well, when I was with her. It’s only now, really, that I’ve started to wonder whether it’s actually any kind of way to live your life.’

  ‘Well… You knew her much better than I ever did, obviously. In fact I hardly knew her at all. We were only together for… well, for about nine months. You must think it’s very odd, in a way – you must wonder why I’m so upset about this.’

  ‘No. No, not at all.’ Their eyes met, briefly, but Rebecca was quick to look away, and flicked back a short lock of her auburn hair in a rather self-dramatizing gesture. ‘Why did you split up, anyway? Was it mutual?’

  ‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘No, it was my fault, entirely. It’s funny, isn’t it, still to be talking of faults at this kind of distance? But it was stupid to split up with her: that’s what I think now. It wasn’t even for personal reasons. It was… political, almost. Something to do with the spirit of the age…’

  ‘The Zeitgeist: Ronnie’s favourite word.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah, surprising herself with a smile. ‘Yes, it was one of her favourites. I used to make fun of her at the time, but in a way I was the one who was… too solemn about all that sort of thing. Everybody gets it wrong about the nineteen-eighties, don’t they? They think it was all about money, and maybe it was, for some people, but for the people I used to hang about with, the students and people like that, there was a different set of values, just as severe, just as intolerant, really. We were so obsessed with politics all the time: gender politics, literary politics, film politics… there was even that phrase, wasn’t there, that awful phrase, “political lesbian”.’

  ‘And is that how you used to think of yourself?’

  ‘On the surface, maybe. God, I probably even described myself that way to some people. And yes, we were reading our Julia Kristeva and our Andrea Dworkin and we never passed up an opportunity to complain about patriarchy, but… you know, that wasn’t the real reason. I can’t even remember how it all started, now. I just remember that I really liked Veronica… I thought she was just a lovely and fascinating person. Which made it all the more ridiculous that it was my political puritanism that split us up, in the end. I couldn’t cope with the idea of her going to work in a bank. I saw it as a personal insult, an affront to all the things we stood for, as a couple… She was supposed to be starting this theatre group, you see. That was always going to be the plan.’

  ‘She was still talking about that. She never stopped talking about it.’ Rebecca’s hazel eyes glowed with the reflected candlelight; these recollections were warming her. ‘It was one of the things that kept her going.’

  ‘Did she not like working in the City, then? I never thought she’d be able to stick at it, somehow.’

  ‘She must have liked it a bit – or part of her must have liked it. I’m sure the work excited her, even though she despised it too. I think she enjoyed it on the level of a highly abstract, highly intellectual game, but probably knew – certainly knew, I suppose, considering what she did in the end – that this was a fiction, and that she’d lost something by trying to sustain it for so long: lost something of herself. And of course, she hated all of the people she had to work with – that goes without saying. I noticed that right at the beginning. We met at a ghastly office party – I was acting for her firm at the time – and we clo
cked each other at once, got chatting, realized we’d found kindred spirits, left early, and… that was that. It all followed from there.’

  ‘And Alison? You must – I mean, Veronica must have had her really soon afterwards. Which amazes me, because she never, never said anything about wanting children, or even liking them.’

  ‘Yes, it was a very sudden decision. She knew the dangers, you see, of doing that job: she knew what it was going to cost her. And Alison was a sort of insurance policy against that. She thought – we thought – that if we had a child, then we’d be less likely to lose sight of – the fundamentals, if you like. Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘So, first of all we had to find a donor, which didn’t turn out to be very difficult. My brother helped us out there. But things seemed to go wrong after that. It was a terrible birth – twenty-four hours in the delivery room, very nearly a Caesarean – and then Ronnie went into a major depression which lasted… lasted for years, in effect. It’s a miracle she didn’t lose her job in that time.’

  ‘Poor Veronica… I can see it now, as well: the resemblance. It’s been staring me in the face all this time. Just the other day I started thinking about her, for no apparent reason, but now I know why: because I’d noticed something about Alison recently – something about her mouth…’

  ‘They were alike in lots of ways. Which was ironic, sadly, because Ronnie never took to Alison, never seemed to bond with her at all. I did all the childcare, saw her through the nursery, got her into primary school; played with her, read to her; slept with her, most nights. I thought this was the right thing to do – and it was, in a way, the only thing to do: I mean, somebody had to be giving the child some attention – but I never noticed the effect it was having on the two of us; how edgy she was becoming, how remote. Everything had gone very stale, very suddenly. So we started trying the usual sorts of tricks – we moved to this house a couple of years ago, thinking it would give us a new start, maybe, but… well, it was too late by then.’