In My House

by Alex Hourston

  I was not resolutely old school – I searched the Internet as well – but there was no satisfaction in that. It made me afraid, the endlessness of it. I could search for ever and never be done. I felt that I could drown down there.

  I told myself calm. That I understood the news cycle and logic declared my story dead. Just that one brief illumination. London only. A mere day’s opportunity to read.

  He would not have seen it. It was not Chris who called. There was nothing there.

  Just my fright. My own neurosis. I am prone to compulsions, I know, but I always defeat them in the end.

  16

  A month on. I let myself in with a bag of corner-shop things I didn’t need and heard her singing, competing with the Hoover – one of her favourites by a group of good-looking boys she had showed me in a magazine.

  We had agreed that she should visit Tuesdays and Fridays, for two to three hours depending on need. I liked to go out and do my chores while she worked, knowing that I left life behind me in my home. I encouraged her to change the station from Radio 4 to something she preferred and enjoyed the blurt of music when I next came to listen. I recognised the songs over time, and began to hear them everywhere. Did I like them? Not exactly, but they did something pleasant to my mood.

  I crept through the hall, so that she wouldn’t stop, but she met me in the doorway to the kitchen, the smell of lemon, fake pine and bleach behind her.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  ‘I’ve got no money, Anja. I’m sorry. I went, but the machine was broken.’

  ‘No problem. Pay me next week? Or I can call in some other time?’

  ‘I could drop it to you, if that’s any easier?’ I said.

  ‘Next week is good. I wanna save it anyway.’

  I went back through to the hall to take off my outdoor things. She followed me.

  ‘Do you want a sugar? Is it OK if I have a cup too?’

  ‘Of course, you don’t have to ask. Yes, a sugar, please.’ I add a spoon, sometimes two, if I have just come in.

  She brought in the mugs and sat next to me on the sofa; dropped her slippers from her feet and crossed her legs beneath her, swift and limber. She pivoted, and I felt her gaze on the side of my head. I faced forwards, in the usual way, sipping the scalding tea from a thick-rimmed mug I’d never used.

  ‘I’m done now. I took all the pictures down and cleaned them with the spray, you see?’

  ‘Oh, great. That’s a job needed doing. Thanks, Anja,’ I said.

  ‘That is a photo of your daughter over there? I think she has your chin.’

  I looked to where she pointed, at an old 5"× 7" in an easel frame which no longer balanced. It had lived the past few years against the wall but Anja must have mended it, for now it was established at the lip of the shelf with its neighbours (a wooden box of matches, a collection of ghastly crystal animals, a china shepherdess and sheep, of all things) pushed behind. It was strange to see it there, prominent again.

  ‘You found something then? In her and me? Not everybody can.’

  ‘It’s the same, for sure. Can I look?’

  She went across and picked it up – a horrid item – a latticework of three over-polished woods. It came apart in her hand, split into its components: frame, glass, the photo and its thickened cardboard backing.

  ‘Oops,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry. The glue must have gone. I’ll fix it.’

  I reached to take the bits from her but she pretended not to see. She looked down into Rose’s face.

  ‘How old is she here? Six?’

  Thereabouts, in a stiff posed shot. An unmoulded face, but already that hair that lay in a solid chunk, her eyes a matching shade of dark that made her seem designed. She looked like a child plucked from the wild, an unguardedness she was just about to lose. I think that’s why I’d liked the shot, though it hadn’t captured much of her. I displayed it the same day it was developed, put aside as I rushed through the rest in that greedy way we used to, back when photographs came in waxy packets and each one was a surprise.

  Anja stroked the picture with a mucky thumb. I moved behind her.

  It was my chin all right. Short and sharpened, and it stayed with her as she grew. The rest was entirely her own, her features surfacing eerily year by year. A face that pre-empted personality; dreamy and melancholy. Everything too close to the surface. Purple under the eyes. Stars of red that outlived each knock. Little twitches. A sensitive child. She hardened into something different.

  I sat back down.

  ‘Are there more?’ Anja asked, looking in extravagant sweeps around the room, though we both knew there were not.

  ‘Upstairs somewhere. A couple of old albums. I’ll show you sometime,’ I said.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘Rose. Rose Frances Benson.’

  ‘Rose! That’s beautiful.’

  She loved it too. I’d pick up a scrap to write a list and find that she’d got there first; inscribed herself across its surface with a brand new cursive every time. I know too little of children to say if they are all like this. I don’t remember it myself – we used to try on the surnames of boys we liked, that I much I recall – but had no particular interest in ours, or rather our father’s. Are names, after all, ever really our own?

  ‘And Frances, after my aunt.’

  I’d written to Frannie to tell her so and she sent back a nice letter that I still have somewhere. I’ve loved no one more, nor ever felt as wholly loved as by Aunty Fran. She could speak it all in a look or gesture, and make it seem our secret. But there was nothing of that in her note.

  ‘She is your only aunt?’ Anja asked.

  ‘No. There’s Bet as well.’

  Bet, with her huge chest that I loved, laid my head on, couldn’t drag my eyes from, forever kicking off her shoes and stretching out those naked feet that made me blush with their humps of bunion and thick peeling nails. A seaside habit; the sea ran through us all.

  ‘Bet. Bettie. Yes. Very English! I am thinking of names for my baby. What was your mother called?’

  ‘Helen,’ I said.

  Not as beautiful as the name demands, but as haughty. I got my tut from her.

  ‘So, if she is a girl, I am thinking maybe Liljana. A flower, like your Rose. It has lots of meanings where I come from.’

  The photo and fragments of frame lay on her lap. She shifted, and one part slipped off.

  ‘That’s lovely. I like it,’ I said, which was true, though not the flower itself. Its perfume is too rich and the stamens stain your clothes and poison cats.

  ‘So does she live close by? Rose?’

  She moved off, running a finger along the surface of the shelf and checking it for dust.

  ‘No. Not really. In London though. But not this side.’

  ‘So that is not so bad. There is the Tube.’

  ‘Yes. There is. Yes.’

  ‘And she has children, now, too?’

  ‘She does, a boy.’ I had seen that child once, and almost had to beg for it.

  ‘So you are a grandma! You can tell me what to do when my baby comes!’

  Holding the child in my arms had not been as I expected. I felt frightened and unsure; had a sense of the world’s instability. Nothing like when I first held my own daughter and she made me strong. I think Rose must have seen some of this for she quickly took him back.

  ‘Oh. I’m not much of an expert. But of course. If you’re. I’m happy to help.’

  His smell though, of warm skin and milk.

  ‘So what is she like, Rose? Is she like you?’

  A question a mother always asks herself, less in arrogance, rather guilt. In search of inherited flaws, or damage done.

  ‘She. In some ways. Now, perhaps. She didn’t used to be so much. She knows her own mind.’

  ‘This is good! If I have a daughter I hope that she will be strong.’

  Anja stopped her circuits.

  ‘Do you mi
nd, Maggie? Can I ask you? You were alone some of the time with Rose? I wondered. I don’t see a man around.’

  She crouched before me and rested there, low, broad-legged.

  ‘Yes, Anja. Most of the time.’

  ‘And was it hard?’

  ‘Easier than being with the father.’

  She made a gesture of acknowledgement with her shoulders and her brows.

  ‘And this is why only one child?’ she said.

  I didn’t reply and she saw that she had gone too far. Traffic honked a few roads away and the letterbox went.

  ‘And does Rose see him at all? Her father?’

  ‘No. She doesn’t.’

  ‘And did this make problems?’

  ‘It did. She wanted to see him. She couldn’t understand.’

  Anja was off again in her swift way of moving. She stopped at the bay windows. The top of someone’s head passed the length of my hedge.

  I wondered what she would tell her child about its own father. No doubt fall back on the standard script.

  ‘He was not ready’, or ‘We could not be together’.

  The kindest version, this, though none of it absolved the child.

  ‘He was not a good person’ – sinister, and alarming from the genetic point of view.

  ‘I didn’t even know him’ tended not to endear.

  There is ‘He is dead’, of course, though I found I myself couldn’t take that step.

  Unless she chose to tell the truth, but I assumed that would be unsayable.

  ‘Look, Anja. You’re a long way off that. You’re doing everything you can. You can’t do any more.’

  She came towards me with a grown-up face.

  ‘I was only there six months, you know. In Milan, where he took us. I am still strong.’

  ‘You are, Anja. You are. I can see that. You got away. That in itself is quite a feat. And you will make a tremendous mother. I feel sure you will.’

  ‘I can lie if I have to,’ she said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger and snapping off dead ends.

  ‘Yes. You’ll do what it takes.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thanks, Maggie. You are a great help to me.’

  The old look was back, dreamy and removed.

  ‘Oh. Well. I don’t know about that. If I had my time again and so on.’

  I didn’t think she understood but she patted my arm, put her slippers in her bag. She left, the smell of her strong sweet perfume on my coat where hers had lain.

  17

  Dear Mum

  I’m writing this because when I try and speak to you and you just close down, it makes me so angry that it is impossible for me to put my thoughts across. Yes, I want to know about my father, but this is about so much more than that now. When I see how completely you can withhold from me and sit there while I plead, my whole idea of you as my mother and a person is smashed up, Mum, to be honest. I am heartbroken and disbelieving that you would be so cold and stubborn towards me when it always felt like we were together in things, the two of us. I just don’t know how to get past or over this.

  Rosie

  As soon as Anja left, I went up, the old stuff out before I had the time to think.

  Fifteen here. Full of melodrama. Gone to the bother of using her writing set. Purple ink on matching paper, which I had bought, initially, for a birthday, and replenished from the stationers a bus ride away.

  How grown up it seemed, when she first took it up – declared she’d write on nothing else. My signature style, she said, constructing her identity, block by block, in plain sight. I took pleasure in it, in having started something that took root.

  I would have loved the idea too, as a girl, had I read it in a book; something so fine as a heroine who wrote only on paper thin enough to see through and with a real ink pen. The ritual of the cartridge change; ducking down the ball into its barrel of colour. My mother would have rolled her eyes.

  Rose kept these things in the top drawer of a red-spotted box of coated cardboard bought for the job. Paper to be used for thank-you notes and daily letters to Alex (female) and Sarah, best friends from girlhood and still now, I imagine. Then Philip, her first, who emerged about that time, putting thoughts down on paper for him that were easier to write than speak. In the bottom went letters received – unguarded – Rosie safe in the surety that her privacy would never be breached.

  And one day, she went to that drawer, pulled out a sheet in anger and distress to write to me, her mother, whom she could no longer find a way to reach.

  I could have taken it from a page ripped from an exercise book, written with the pull and splat of a biro. It was the purple that made me cry, not the words – I had readied myself for those – but their method of delivery, a last token of her childhood. I suppose that was why I kept it, this and only this, for there had been plenty more.

  I didn’t cry, when I looked at it. It felt precious to me, instead, like a love letter, but I put that down to its decay. When I pulled it from its envelope, after Anja went, I was left with a dusting of mauve on my hands. Soon it would be gone altogether but that would change nothing. She was right, Rose. She couldn’t get past, or over it. After a while she stopped asking but had begun, by then, to leave me in stages.

  When she got to sixteen she left the school that I had chosen for her and enrolled in a nearby college – substandard – though she got the grades she needed, which felt like spite at the time but was more likely good sense. I had long lost the right to be proud of her; her achievements and attributes were her own.

  Next came university in a far-off northern town that I never visited and from which she never really returned, though she came back to Queen’s Park now and again. I knew this because I saw her once with Sarah, her old friend, smoking outside a pub one August afternoon in what must have been the holidays of her second year. They had both had their noses pierced, horrible, but they looked like what they were – middle-class girls playing at it. I didn’t dare approach.

  Instead I spent an uneasy evening wondering if she was staying the night in the big house three roads back, where Sarah’s family lived a life beyond implausible in its perfection. A neat counterpoint to our careful little twosome in its depth and breadth; a rebuke almost, though the right-thinking parents would have been horrified at that. Five children – two girls, three boys – all beautiful, talented and kind. The father a lawyer of the good-guy type, the mother an ex-journalist who took a slot on Radio 4 instead when the children came. Yes, really. State-school educated and two, at least, up at Cambridge.

  Their happiness spilt out of the huge sash windows of their three-storey home, all faded kilims and artefacts from foreign travel. They lived directly behind us and, aged about nine, Rosie said that when she bounced high on their trampoline she thought she could see our chimney, was it red?

  She loved it there and who could blame her, but came home quiet. I made her hot chocolate and laid a blanket over her knees. Put a radio on in every room to make the house seem occupied.

  The summer that I saw her was a hot one, the rest of which I spent in my back garden imagining that it was the Gaters’ well-bred voices that reached me and their roasting meat I smelt and wondered if she was back there too.

  I liked the mother, Lydia; had been dragged to a couple of their infamous Christmas parties across the years, but when I saw her crossing the park that October, looking exhausted, everyone safely back at college, I swear she dipped her head.

  I waited for something bad to happen to that family, but it never did, at least as far as I know, and not that I would have wished it on them. Haven’t seen any of them for years, although the clan will have grown, spread, accrued. And I came to discover that wanting and trying will only take you so far and I’ve never been one to beg. I gave up, in the end, simply to ensure my own survival. Stopped with the regular entreaties, and soon after received a note – a bitter page – citing the new depths of my betrayal. In doing what I thought she had asked – leaving
her alone – I gave her the means to hate me more. That was six years ago.

  Things were such with Rose that she would speak to me if I called, but never made her own approach.

  I had not met her partner, and their child only once, whom she had too young, younger even than me, named Sam.

  She dropped me a card when he was born and cashed the cheque that I sent her by return.

  I chose not to take her letter back up to the drawer. Instead, the spare room; a place I rarely visited. Back it went, shedding more of itself on the way.

  18

  Paul and Maureen came by, though they didn’t stop for long, heating up in the hall in their outdoor clothes.

  Peter is feeling better; an adjustment to his medicines and some sessions that the two of them attend. Maureen’s daughter Lauren has come to stay, with Lola and Jack – more trouble with her husband. Mo told me all this in a rush, with relish, her pleasure at being called upon burning through her veil of concern.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘Indefinite,’ she said, with a loaded look.

  She wants to throw a lunch, for us all, a get-together, the weekend after next.

  ‘And Peter and Paul have said they’ll come.’

  A lunch for Lauren, her daughter, who’s had it tough. There was nothing to say but yes. They shared a tight pleased glance and I saw that they had been expecting me to refuse. I have been walking less the last couple of weeks. The rain, but Anja too.

  Anja’s started at Paul’s and he thinks she’s smashing; he told me so, there on the doorstep. A magnificent cleaner, which was true – I had found myself upping my game to keep pace – and a lovely girl to boot. Peter seems to like her. Fresh blood, Paul says. He hears them chatting. A welcome distraction. And what a great laugh. ‘I know!’ I replied, but I didn’t, I couldn’t think when I’d heard it.

  And she was upstairs all the while, and I wondered if she was listening. There was no sound from above and I had no sense of where she might be. Wherever it was, she was still; one move and the house would have given her away.