The Pre-War House and Other Stories

by Alison Moore

  It has been this way for forty years, and it has been just fine, he thinks, so why go making trouble now, why go making all that mess? Has she even looked in that drawer, he wonders – the drawer in which she keeps the recipes she now makes from memory, and the forty-year-old keepsakes, and the faded love letters – in all that time?

  And it is just as long since he last took the back off the radio. It has lasted remarkably well. It is simple to fix, as it happens: one deft turn and it is mended; a good clean and polish with a soft cloth and it is restored to its former glory. He puts the two halves of the case together again, snaps them shut, and tests it. It is as good as new. It looks the way it looked when Dorothy returned to the shop at the end of the week, stepping through the doorway and walking towards the counter, her heels loud on the bare floorboards. It looks the way it looked as she turned it over in her hands, admiring his work, as she turned the dial through the stations, found Gene Pitney and lingered there, asking what time he finished work.

  He puts on the kettle and rinses out the Duchess teacup.

  They went to a café and had a pot of tea. He had a scone and Dorothy had a tiramisu. Sinking the prongs of her fork into her dessert, she said, ‘Italian cakes . . .’ and as her lips closed over the first bite, her face said exquisite. Between mouthfuls, licking her lips, she said, ‘I’d love to go to Italy.’

  He puts the radio under his arm and goes upstairs, climbing slowly to keep the tea steady in its cup, his socks deathly quiet on the stair carpet. He opens the bedroom door and puts the tea down on Dorothy’s bedside table.

  ‘When you write to my brother,’ she says, ‘tell him we’ll come and visit in the summer.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ he says, ‘about making your tiramisu.’

  Dorothy smiles. ‘It’s a nice thought, Wilfred,’ she says, ‘but I’m not sure I have the appetite for it, and you’d just make a mess. And anyway, I don’t think I have the recipe any more.’

  He watches her, trying to see in her unfocused eyes, in her unchanged expression, whether she has forgotten all these things she has kept in the big bottom drawer which sticks, but he can’t tell.

  ‘All as it should be?’ she asks him.

  He reaches out with a dishpan hand and cups the side of her head, her skull and her warmth in the palm of his hand, his thumb stroking her temple. He takes the radio from under his arm, turns it on and tunes it to Dorothy’s favourite station. She smiles. ‘All as it should be,’ he says.

  ‘When I’m better,’ says Dorothy, ‘we should go on a proper holiday. I’ve always wanted to see Italy.’

  Wilfred sits down on the edge of the bed, picks up the teacup and puts it in Dorothy’s waiting hands. ‘Yes,’ he says, but the romance countries don’t appeal to him.

  ‘This is the wonderful Gene Pitney,’ says the DJ, ‘with a song from 1967, for a very special lady.’ Dorothy turns her head towards the radio. The DJ says, ‘Fiona, this is for you.’ She looks away, her failing eyesight sliding over Wilfred’s face. She smiles again, and lifts the teacup towards her mouth. ‘You’re not one of the world’s great romantics,’ she says, finding the rim, touching her lips to what is left of the gilt.

  He has never wanted anyone but Dorothy. But he has never asked for her favourite song to be played on the radio. He has never taken her to Italy. He is not the sort of man who brings home flowers. And he has never written a love letter in his life.

  Sometimes You Think You Are Alone

  As soon as you wake up, you want to run. Your body craves the endorphins, the endogenous morphine. They experimented on mice, making them want to run and then taking their treadmill away. When they looked at what this did to the mice, to their brains, they found that the mice were suffering from the same symptoms as an addict withdrawing from drugs.

  You leave your house at dawn. You run while the streetlamps are still lit, and the odd car which goes by has its headlights on. You run in the same top you slept in, with something fluorescent over it to keep you safe. Most of the houses past which you run are still in darkness. The occasional light goes on behind a still-drawn curtain or blind. The milkman might have begun his rounds but as soon as you can you turn off the road and get onto the dirt track. It is possible that no one at all will see you go by.

  You run the same route every day, in all weathers. You know how it feels to run when the ground is hard – dry and dusty or frozen over. You know how it feels to run in the rain, when the dirt track is slippery and the potholes have become puddles and you return home mud-spattered and sodden. You must know every inch of it by now. You could probably run the course blindfolded.

  On either side of the dirt track, there are fields. Sometimes there are cows which watch you go by, and sometimes they don’t bother looking up. Sometimes there are sheep, and sometimes there’s just fleece caught on the barbed wire fence.

  While you run, you listen to music, always the same C60 tape, a compilation your boyfriend made for you, before he left you. The first side of the tape takes you as far as the woods.

  You can see the woods from the back of your house, the dark shape of them in the distance. In the evening, you sometimes come to your bedroom window to watch the sun go down behind the trees.

  As you enter the woods, you turn the tape over and listen to the B-side. By this time you are high on the endorphins, opioids preventing pain signals from reaching the brain. It is the endorphins which keep you running when you would think that you no longer could. You pass the warden’s lodge, and the rhododendron bushes in which children make dens. You skirt one end of the old quarry, nearing the bird hides and taking the path which leads you back onto the dirt track, where your tape runs out again.

  At the end of the track, the point at which you turned off the road, you stop, exhausted, breathing hard. You must stretch your muscles so as to avoid pain later.

  You have come to expect to see a man who walks his dog there before breakfast. At first the two of you were just on nodding terms, but then you began to remove your earphones and say hello to him. You found that both the man and his dog were friendly. Now the man asks after your mother while you pet his dog.

  By the time you are back on the road, walking home, it is light and people are up and about. You see them coming out onto their doorsteps in their dressing gowns, fetching in milk, or already dressed for work, going to their cars. You don’t know their names and they don’t know yours. They are your neighbours but you have never spoken to any of them.

  When you get inside your house, you go for a shower. You stand under the shower for a long time. You use products which you think are animal friendly. You don’t spend long in front of the mirror or getting dressed. You wear the same outfit for days, thinking no one notices.

  You skip breakfast, even though you must be hungry. You must feel hungry most of the time. You don’t even have coffee.

  You go to work on the bus because you can’t drive. You work in an office in town, in an ugly building. I forget what you do there. It is nothing important.

  At lunchtime, you sit in the park and feed your sandwiches to the pigeons. You read a book. You always have a book in your bag. You read while you’re waiting at the bus stop and on the bus so that no one will talk to you. ‘You’re never alone with a book,’ you say, but you are.

  In the evenings, you tend to stay in. You watch a lot of television – you like talent shows. You have an insatiable appetite for show tunes. You used to sing but your father discouraged you. Now your father is dead and you have toyed with the idea of entering one of these contests, but you never have.

  You eat a bowl of cereal in front of the television. You like the sugary sort they make for children, with cartoon characters on the packet. You eat a lot of cereal, and cheese. You will try different sorts of cheese but you prefer cheddar. You ought to eat more fruit, and red meat.

  You go to bed early so that you can get up as
soon as it is light and go running in the woods. Sometimes it takes you a while to get to sleep though, and sometimes you wake with a start in the middle of the night. You have bad dreams.

  When you open your eyes, it will be dark. You will try to move your head but it will hurt.

  You don’t go out much. You rarely drink because you don’t want a hangover and you don’t care for the taste of alcohol anyway. But because you don’t drink often, when you do it really hurts.

  On your rare evenings out, with people you think of as your friends, you go to bars where you are given telephone numbers which you won’t call.

  It is a long time since your boyfriend left but you have been slow to move on. He wasn’t right for you but you have trouble seeing it.

  You always read the lonely hearts ads in the local paper. You read them all – the women seeking men and women, the men seeking women and men – but you’ve never answered one.

  But last night you went out and you weren’t with a friend. For the first time in years, you were out on a date. You went to a restaurant you’d never been to before. You arrived five minutes early and found a bottle of wine already open on the table, waiting for you.

  ‘It’s been breathing,’ I said, filling your glass.

  ‘I’ve never tried rosé,’ you said, reading the label before taking a sip. You said something complimentary, something banal. You straightened your cutlery and every little thing on the table. You said, ‘I never go on dates.’

  I noticed that you had plucked your eyebrows. You’d dressed smartly but your outfit was one you wear for work. It was nothing special and I was disappointed in you.

  While we were talking, you kept looking elsewhere, at the staff and at the other customers and at the door. I found it rude. You weren’t always paying attention to what I was saying.

  It seemed to me that you did not like the wine but you said that you did, and you accepted another glass.

  When you drink, you don’t get up as soon as it is light and go running, and then you regret it.

  When you open your eyes and find that you can barely move, you will have to remember what has happened.

  Sometimes, when you wake with a start before it is light, you wonder if you heard something; you think that maybe something you heard woke you up. You listen, considering the possibility that there is someone else in the house. You don’t get up to look though; you don’t even turn on the light. Sometimes you hear nothing and go back to sleep. Sometimes you hear the garden gate banging and you think, ‘It was only the gate.’ You don’t care that your gate is wide open. You keep your front door locked but you don’t always secure your back door. You go to bed leaving windows ajar. You are lazy like that. Or, sitting up in bed, listening to the night, you hear a dog barking. ‘It was just a dog,’ you think, and you turn over, pulling your double duvet up over your shoulder and closing your eyes again. ‘It’s all that cheese,’ you think, and you go back to sleep.

  ‘It must be all the cheese!’ you said, cutting a wedge of cheddar to put on a digestive biscuit. ‘I eat way too much cheese!’ You were laughing about how much you like cheese, laughing at yourself telling me that you eat too much cheese even as you were cutting yourself some more, but it wasn’t really funny. You laugh a lot, but you’re not a funny person. You have an irritating, nervous laugh.

  You declined coffee, telling me that you avoid caffeine because it is basically a drug, and then you picked up your wine glass, so that was quite funny.

  When you open your eyes, you might feel sick. You will probably be thirsty. You will be cold. This is normal.

  As I helped you into your coat, you talked about your father, who never liked your boyfriend or your having a boyfriend at all. Now this boyfriend has left you and your father is dead anyway.

  Sometimes you think you are alone, but you are not.

  You told me how you felt numb when your father died, and I understand. People experience pain in different ways. Some feel pain right away while for others it comes later, after the initial shock.

  When you open your eyes and remember what has happened, you will wish that you had not been out drinking. You will want it to be dawn and to be running in the woods.

  I only had one glass of rosé, which I’d poured for myself before you arrived. I don’t drink much alcohol. I like to drive.

  You heard me joking with someone as I was getting you into the car. You tried to say something but your tongue wouldn’t work. We were as close to your house as mine but I took us to mine. You were asleep even before we’d set off.

  I’m a careful driver but your head kept banging against the side window, and the marks on the side of your neck are from where the strap was cutting into you. You wet yourself but you were sitting on a waterproof sheet which I’d put on the passenger seat just in case.

  You stirred when we arrived, while I was getting you out. You tried again to talk – you seemed concerned about having lost one of your shoes. When we got inside, you reacted to the smell.

  ‘It’s dog meat,’ I said.

  I carried you into the living room and put you in a plastic-covered armchair. Your mobile rang in your pocket and you seemed to be trying to lift your hand to take it out, to see who was calling you, but you couldn’t.

  I’ve turned your mobile off now. You won’t be asleep for much longer but I don’t want the phone to be what wakes you.

  When you open your eyes, it will be dark. You will wonder where you are. You might hear the dog barking and recognise the sound. You will hear my voice, or at least the sound of my breathing or the smallest of movements. You will know that you are not alone.

  A Small Window

  Valda has not yet had her breakfast. She has not even had a cup of tea. She always used to say to John on waking that she was dying for a cuppa. She had learnt all these wonderful phrases. ‘I could kill,’ she used to say, for this or that.

  But her mother discouraged her from using these ‘extravagant expressions’. ‘You are not starving,’ she would say to Valda. ‘You are only hungry.’

  Valda has readied her teacup. While the kettle boils, she goes to fetch the laundry to put into the machine. She comes out of the kitchen and goes to the stairs, at the foot of which there is a small, round window through which she can see the sea.

  This view was one of her favourite things about the house when she first saw it. She remembers stepping in off the street, the estate agent closing the front door behind her, shutting away the busy road. The hallway was dark, but at the far end she could see a circle of light, and when she reached this window at the back of the house she saw through it the white sky and the grey sea and the stony beach, and the house seemed like the wardrobe through which one reached Narnia.

  John had liked the house too, although he had been concerned about its proximity to the sea. He mentioned global warming and rising sea levels. And it had been necessary for Valda to explain to her mother over the phone that their house on the beach was really just at the edge of the beach and that they would not be marooned when the tide came in. ‘The sea will not come to our door,’ she told her mother, but her mother did not sound convinced.

  John lives in a city now, in the Midlands.

  Valda looks through this window many times each day. She never opens it though, to hear the pounding of the waves or the sound of the pebbles being drawn away. She doesn’t have the key anyway. She doesn’t know where all the keys have gone.

  There is hardly anyone out there, on the beach. But she could not say, ‘It is deserted,’ because she can see a dark figure in the distance, someone walking beneath the cliff, coming this way, carrying something under one arm. And she can see a dog. There is a woman who regularly walks her dog along the beach, and who, if she sees Valda through the small window, always waves. Valda squints in the direction of this approaching figure.

  It is too early for the hol
idaymakers, who will not arrive on the beach until midmorning. The lifeguards will appear then too, planting their red and yellow flags so that people will know where to swim; they will know where it is safe.

  Valda turns away from the window and climbs the stairs. The laundry basket on the landing is only half full. Before taking it down to the kitchen, she goes into her bedroom to look for anything which might need washing. She can’t put in her nightie because she is still wearing it.

  She goes into the bathroom and brings out a damp hand towel. On the other side of the bathroom, there is another bedroom, but it is empty. There is no bed in there with covers to straighten or change, no clothes on the floor to pick up, no drawers into which to tidy things away. They were going to paint the walls, but then John left. She has never been sure whether the cartoon people on the wallpaper are deep-sea divers or astronauts. Each one is wearing a helmet, a circular opening or window at the front framing a round face. They are floating on a dark-blue background which could be the sky where it becomes space, or which could be the sea, deep down. They seem stranded, she thinks, but they are smiling.

  She carries the laundry basket downstairs and pauses again by the window. She can see now that it is a young boy approaching beneath the cliff, and that what he has with him is a surfboard.