by Diane Janes
As soon as she turned into Green Lane, she could see what the woman in the estate agents’ office had meant by ‘considerable interest’: there were far more parked cars than was usual for the time of day, and before Wendy had reached the gate herself, three lots of viewers had entered ahead of her. She arrived simultaneously with a couple who’d approached from the opposite direction. The woman was slim and pretty, huddled in a coat with a fake fur collar. Her companion was an older man in a heavy, dark overcoat. He held the gate open for both women, but once they were on the drive Wendy paused politely, allowing them to go ahead of her; she wanted to savour the moment.
Now that she was finally standing on the drive, she could see things she had never noticed before. There was a holly bush planted next to the path which ran between the drive and the front door. No need to buy holly at the greengrocers each Christmas, she thought, and there were some laurels – badly in need of attention – at the further side of the garden. More Christmas evergreens.
The front door was wide open, allowing all-comers to walk straight into the narrow, panelled hall, which was dark after the brightness of the winter afternoon. The man who’d entered ahead of her flicked a light switch up and down a couple of times, but the electricity had evidently been disconnected. Wendy was forced to pause and allow her eyes to adjust, while she tasted the stale air and listened to the sounds of other people’s footsteps and voices as they echoed against the uncarpeted floors and bounced off the high ceilings. Along with these tastes and sounds came the unmistakable smells of damp and neglect, but finally, most strongly of all, came the strange and overwhelming sensation that the house wanted her.
‘It wants to be loved.’
Oh, for goodness’ sake, had she spoken out loud? Fortunately, everyone else had already moved on from the hall and her own entrance seemed to mark a lull in arrivals.
Three or four steps took her to the point where the panelling ended and the hall broadened out to double its initial width, with doors opening to the right and left, a staircase ascending immediately ahead of her, and to the right of the staircase a passage continued towards the rear of the house. As she hesitated, deciding where to begin, she noticed that the open door to her right had a paler patch of wallpaper alongside it, suggesting the ghost of a low, narrow doorway, suitable for a slender child. It was the outline of a clock. Wendy pictured it standing there, marking the minutes, hours, days, years. She smiled, satisfied by her powers of observation. It was like finding a clue.
She chose the doorway on her left, noticing as she entered the room and walked across the bare floorboards that her feet seemed to be making less noise than anyone else’s, as if hers was not such a great intrusion. The room was empty. The wallpaper had faded to an indistinct pattern of yellows and browns and someone had pulled off a strip, revealing that the back of the paper was grey with mould. The plaster behind it had crumbled to expose the brickwork. Aged wiring hung from a central point in the ceiling, where a light fitting should have been, and the fireplace was filled with crumpled newspapers and lumps of dirt. In spite of this, she could see that the room had once been beautiful. It felt light and spacious, and around the perimeter of the ceiling there was a plaster border of intertwined leaves and flowers. Her reverie was interrupted by a trio of viewers who entered the room, talking loudly.
‘It’s difficult to say,’ said one of the women.
They walked past Wendy as if she was not there. It’s as if I’m part of it, she thought. As if I belong here and they don’t.
She left the newcomers without acknowledgement and crossed the hall to look inside the other front room. This was a slightly larger room than the first and in a marginally better state. It was still possible to discern a pattern of roses on the wallpaper. Wendy remembered that this was the room from which she had sometimes seen a light shining: the room which had still been in use, when the rest of the house had perhaps been all but abandoned. There was nothing left to provide clues of its former occupant now, except that a fire was laid in the grate. A little layer of coal, a few pieces of kindling, neatly placed, only waiting for a match. Someone had laid the fire, expecting to light it, but fate had intervened. It was like the previous owner leaving a small gift for the new occupants. Welcome to your new home …
It was very easy to mentally kindle that fire, furnish the room with comfy chairs and a fireside rug, see the younger kids lying around in their pyjamas, staying up to watch Saturday night telly, their older sister, Tara, affecting teenage sophistication but enjoying The Generation Game as much as anyone, and herself with Bruce’s arm draped around her shoulders as they sat, side by side, on the sofa. Just visualising it all took the winter chill from the room.
Returning to the hall, she noticed that the passage leading to the back of the house had a slate floor. It was illuminated by a window at its furthest end, but the daylight was being obstructed by a plump woman who was standing in front of the window, addressing an unseen third party. ‘You’re surely not going down there, are you, Jack?’
Jack was evidently standing out of sight, where the passage made a right angle turn to run along the back of the house. ‘I certainly am.’
‘There’ll be nothing to see down there.’ Even as she protested, the woman sounded resigned. Wendy didn’t catch the unseen Jack’s reply.
‘Honest to God.’ The woman turned her attention to Wendy. ‘Men. They’re nowt but little kids, the lot of them.’ She adopted an expression of shared conspiracy. ‘Fancy going down the cellar!’
Wendy smiled, uncertain how to respond.
‘It’s in a right state, isn’t it?’ the woman added, making a movement with her head to encompass the property as a whole. ‘It’ll take a mint of money to put it right.’
Wendy nodded.
‘He loves anything like this, our Jack does. Old houses, traction engines, the lot.’
‘It’s a beautiful old house.’
The woman gave Wendy an odd look. ‘All right if you like that sort of thing, I suppose. Did you want to come by, pet, or are you going in there?’
‘In there’ was a door at the end of the passage on the right-hand side. It led to what had once been a big, old-fashioned kitchen. Wendy entered to find the room already occupied. A small boy was looking out of the window into a cobbled back yard. Following his gaze, Wendy saw the back garden was screened from the kitchen by a range of single-storey outbuildings, whose roofs had mostly fallen in.
‘There’d be room to stable Femo,’ the little boy said in a high, piping voice.
‘I hardly think that Daddy will buy it on the strength of that, darling.’ The boy’s mother was sizing up the ancient cooking range which occupied part of the wall opposite the window.
She doesn’t like it, Wendy thought. Why did no one else seem to get it? Couldn’t anyone else sense its yearning? All The Ashes needed was someone to love it properly.
Two more women entered the room, obviously curiousity viewers like herself.
‘Eee, will you look at that!’ exclaimed the younger of the pair, pointing at the range.
Two men arrived immediately after them and began poking about in a big built-in cupboard. ‘It’s a wonder it’s never burned down with the state of this wiring,’ one of them said.
‘You’d have thought she’d have had that seen to, if it were dangerous,’ the older woman said. Wendy wasn’t sure if the two pairs were together, but the situation made for conversations between strangers.
‘Dangerous?’ This from the same man as before. ‘It’s bloody lethal!’
‘You know these old ones,’ the younger woman put in. ‘They don’t realize. They think things last forever.’
‘Still,’ her companion said. ‘I’m surprised at Mrs Duncan. It’s not as if she were short of a penny or two. I mean, just look at the place. It’s not what I was expecting.’
‘Did you know her then?’ asked the man, who had not yet spoken.
‘Well … by sight, you know. Not really to
speak to. I’ve lived in Green Lane since 1938 and she’s been here all that time.’
The other woman glanced at her watch, as if sensing the possibility of a delay. ‘We’d better get going,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen upstairs yet and I need to be back home for our Gary.’
‘Our mam used to say she was never right after …’
Wendy did not hear the rest, for the women were gone, their places taken by the couple who had arrived at the gate when she did. She tried to ignore the other viewers and concentrate on taking in the room, committing it to memory, because she would probably never see it again. There were windows on three elevations in the kitchen. One faced across the courtyard towards the outbuildings, which even the estate agents’ handout had described, in a rare rush of candour, as ‘semi-derelict’; another looked out to the side, where a stout fence and a shield of trees and shrubs separated the plot from its immediate neighbour; and finally there was a narrow window which looked up the drive towards the road. Wendy had not realized that the rear of the house was slightly wider than the front. Until today that window had always been hidden by the tall double gates which stood partway along the drive, but now they had been opened and this enabled anyone standing in the kitchen to keep an eye out for someone entering the property from the road. Wendy imagined herself looking out for Bruce … putting the kettle on, or pouring him a drink, as she saw his car pull into the drive.
When she left the kitchen, she found her progress along the rear passage was still blocked by the same woman who had spoken to her before. The man called Jack was just returning from his exploration of the cellar, torch in hand.
‘Thank goodness for that. I thought you was gone for good,’ his wife chided, holding the door open for him as he emerged.
Jack exchanged a smile with Wendy as he stepped up from the wooden stairs and closed the cellar door behind him.
‘Where to next?’ His wife consulted the agents’ particulars which she held in her hand. ‘Utility room and storeroom?’
‘This must be the store.’ Jack stepped through an opening next to the cellar door and flashed his torch around the darkened space. Wendy peered in from the doorway, grateful to have fallen in with Jack and his torch at just the right moment. The space was lined from floor to ceiling with dusty wooden shelves, though this still left sufficient space for several people to cram inside, should they choose to.
‘I wonder why they’ve boarded up this window?’ Jack mused, shining the torch directly ahead of him.
‘Come on out of there,’ said his wife. ‘Poking about in that dusty hole.’
Jack ignored her, advancing further into the storeroom while Wendy retreated into the passage. This ended in what the estate agents described as a utility room, though it had clearly seen recent use as a kitchen. There was a big ceramic sink under the window, large enough to bath a small child, its lower plumbing on show and lagged in old sacking. To one side of that was an ancient gas cooker, and at right angles to the cooker was a freestanding two-tier kitchen cupboard of the variety favoured by her own mother in the 1950s. One of the bottom doors was missing and the patterned Perspex of the upper cupboards was cracked and dirty. Wendy experienced a sudden sense of desolation, picturing a lonely old lady who had not been short of a penny or two, cooking her solitary meal in her big, empty house. The outside door opened at that moment, admitting the little boy with the high-pitched voice and his mother. The woman wrinkled her nose. ‘Pretty squalid, isn’t it?’ she remarked as she passed through.
‘It must have been lovely, once.’
The woman made a dismissive noise as she headed back to the main part of the house. Wendy followed, electing to leave the yard and back garden until the end. She walked along the passage, made the right-angle turn at the kitchen and so returned to the widest part of the hall, where she encountered Jack and his wife again. He was backing out of a closed door – smaller than the norm – which stood between the first room she’d explored and the foot of the stairs.
‘Big walk-in cupboard,’ he informed her. ‘It backs on to the storeroom. If you took down the back wall of this cupboard, it would lead you straight into it. Open it up, get rid of all them shelves, and it would make a nice little study for somebody, that would.’
Wendy nodded, noticing as she did that his wife was starting to look impatient. She sidestepped the wife and began to climb the stairs. The bannister was smooth and solid, the dust already polished from it by the passage of numerous hands. A tall, arched window faced her on the half landing, where she was confronted with another choice: to mount the trio of stairs to her left, which led into a short corridor, or to follow the main staircase as it turned back on itself in order to gain the upper landing. She decided on the latter. The upper landing was almost square and offered five doors to choose from, one of which was slightly smaller and evidently led to the attic. All four bedrooms were large – certainly bigger than any of their bedrooms in Jasmine Close. As she explored each in turn, Wendy inwardly named them: Katie’s, Tara’s and Jamie’s. ‘Our room’ was the biggest of all. It had a cast-iron fireplace and its window overlooked the front garden, which by a trick of the light took on a much better appearance when viewed from above. The grass appeared shorter, the shrubs tamer, the weeds less profuse. While she was contemplating this illusion, she was joined by a trio she had not seen before, two women and a man, who was saying, ‘Derek would know the cost better.’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s suitable at all,’ said the shorter of the women. ‘I was expecting six bedrooms.’
‘There’s really only four,’ the other woman agreed. ‘You can’t count those two little rooms at the end of the passage, where the slaveys slept.’
‘Couldn’t you run a partition through this room?’ asked the man, indicating the largest bedroom.
‘What about the window? That would complicate things,’ said the taller lady, apparently oblivious to Wendy’s meek, ‘Excuse me,’ as she tried to squeeze past them and on to the landing.
‘It would probably make two decent singles, I grant you,’ the man mused, while Wendy felt tempted to shove him down the stairs. To even consider the idea of destroying the symmetry of that lovely room!
She managed to escape them and attempted to explore the attic, but this proved impossible: a flight of steep, narrow stairs ascended into complete darkness. With the electricity disconnected and no torch, it was an impossible task. She did not mind all that much. She had always been slightly spooked by the thought of attics. The moment anyone in a film went up to the attic, you just knew something bad was going to happen. Not here, of course. Not in a lovely, friendly house like this. Instead she descended to the half landing, where she found the bathroom. The plain white bath, basin and toilet were grimly old fashioned and set against chest-high, once-white wooden panelling. In one corner the greying paper was coming away from the ceiling. It was easily big enough to install a shower cubicle as well as a bathtub, she thought. Beyond the bathroom, the passage ended in a door and, when she reached it, Wendy could see at once what the women in the bedroom had been talking about. These had indeed once been the servants’ rooms, one leading directly into another. Though both rooms were about twelve feet wide, the roof sloped up from floor level on each side, making the effective space much smaller. An icy draught was penetrating a gap where one of the skylights in the sloping roof no longer fitted snugly. She realized that she must be in the small wing which extended out above one side of the outbuildings that formed the rear courtyard.
After the few seconds it took to glance around the servants’ quarters, Wendy made her way back to the stairs. The people who had discussed the possibility of vandalizing ‘our bedroom’ were gone. As she paused on the half landing, the sunshine flooding in through the arched window seemed to grow brighter. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine Katie and Jamie, racing up and down the stairs, playing hide-and-seek, bobbing in and out of the numerous doorways. It couldn’t happen, of course. Even though
it had always been her special house, it was only a dream. It could never actually be her house. She descended the stairs slowly, enjoying the solid feel of the balustrade, taking in the plasterwork around the light fittings, noticing the paler patches where pictures had once hung. After standing aside to make room for yet more new arrivals, she made her way out of the front door, along the garden path and down the drive towards the rear of the house, which brought her to the yard she had seen from the kitchen window. It was enclosed on two sides by the house and on the third by the semi-ruinous brick-built sheds. The fourth side of the square, where the drive ended, was protected from the neighbouring garden by a sturdy six-foot wooden fence, which appeared to be in better and more solid repair than almost anything else she had seen so far.
The outbuildings didn’t occupy her for long. The one nearest the drive still had most of its roof intact and contained a small amount of kindling in an old log basket and a part-used sack of coal. The second and third in the row had lost pretty much all of their roofs. The section of the building which stood beneath the servants’ bedrooms had a pair of arched double doors, wedged open but leaning dangerously. Peering beyond them, Wendy could make out a couple of wooden stalls. The little boy had been right about the existence of stabling.
The entrance to the back garden ought to have been as wide as the drive, but the contents of what had once been a border producing vegetables or flowers had rioted unchecked until, even in winter, only a narrow track of flattened grass was left between the miniature jungle and the wall of the outbuildings. Wendy worked her way along for a few yards, taking care to avoid the treacherous, slippery patches of mud, where multiple feet had already trodden that day. It reminded her of a fairy tale, where the traveller struggles through the wilderness until he or she can enter the hidden garden, which always turns out to be a magical, secret place, but when she reached the point where the garden should have opened out to the full width of the plot, she was disappointed to find that she could go no further. The garden at the front had merely been neglected. The area behind the outbuildings had obviously been allowed to run wild for years. It wasn’t even possible to see how far the garden extended – though it was clearly a large area. A confusion of trees and bushes, dead brown stalks, and mouldering, indistinguishable hummocks all struggled to catch a glimpse of the sky from beneath cloaks of ivy and convolvulus. A blackbird startled her, screeching as it flew from one branch to another. She had no alternative but to admit defeat and edge back the way she had come, only to find that the courtyard was becoming quite crowded.