In My House

by Alex Hourston

  It got dark though at one stage, I can’t deny it, and it was Chris who saw and pulled me out; one swift hard yank.

  ‘Are you not happy?’ he asked, from the upright chair he favoured. ‘You seem to be drinking a lot. And this. I mean, what is all that?’

  He had paused from his crossword and with an up and down swipe of his pen, drew attention to a pile of magazines stacked beside me as I lay on the settee. The weeklies that my mum sent when she’d finished with them, plus old swollen novels picked up from car-boot sales, all wrapped in used brown paper that she ironed flat under scraps of worn-out sheet. Women’s stories; pulpy tales of sacrifice, graft and redemption, that I lived in as I read, and forgot completely when I was done. I dropped them off at Oxfam in batches, and the great shelf of bust on the woman behind the counter, dressed in discontinued shades, somehow made me sad. She showed me I was lonely.

  ‘Can you at least sit, Maggie, when I’m talking to you?’ he said, but I looked straight ahead at my toenails, signature red, propped up on the sofa’s arm and then at the cobbled ceiling above me. I stretched my hand high and imagined my arm lengthening up and up and the blistered feel of the paper beneath my fingertips; popping each bump like bubble wrap. He got the doctor in, and different pills. Told me when it was time to stop and suggested a host of new interests. Bridge, which I almost liked, a cooking course – abandoned, exercise of various sorts. Even drawing. He was shockingly middle class.

  It was the piano that stuck. The first one that I ever touched was in the hall of his parents’ house. We stayed there the Christmas I was pregnant and on the night of Christmas Eve I left the stifling sitting room and sat at it, the keys cold and textureless, almost liquid beneath my fingers. I didn’t dare make a sound, pressed just enough to feel the first spongy give. Michael came out, his brother: ‘Do you play?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Nor me. God, my mother’s a bitch.’

  She had been asking about his work, his weight, his drinking.

  ‘Don’t say a thing. You know the Chinese believe that if a pregnant woman speaks ill of someone, her child will look like that person?’

  ‘Oh god. All right. Not a word.’

  Michael had a Chinese wife so beautiful and kind that even I wondered what we’d missed. It infuriated the family, that piece of luck; a violation of the way things should be. She left him later, and everyone relaxed. Chris came out, said: ‘Great idea!’ and played a piece straight through from memory.

  And Chris remembered it, the following year, when I was ill. That moment of interest. We hired a piano first, to try, and when I liked it, his mother gave us hers – huge, polished, barely movable.

  It was delivered to our house in a van. A good twenty minutes with the back open, the instrument shrouded and the men sitting on the pavement, drinking tea with Chris and deciding how to get it in. He was good with trade, neither spoke down nor lowered himself. Entirely comfortable in his privilege. They set up ramps of planks brought along for the task and off it came, still draped in cotton, though anyone could see it for what it was.

  Me cringing in the hall, full of shame.

  Halfway up the steps and the sheet caught on a nail knocked into the front door to hold a wreath. The piano was exposed with a flourish. I have to admit, it looked like show. I panicked and slammed the door, which can’t have helped.

  The three men carried it, gingerly, into the hall. Back and forwards, a final tip and with a run of notes, it was settled in the lounge, which it filled, people forever stepping round it.

  And from that day, anyone who missed its arrival could view the instrument from the pavement. I wasn’t much liked by that point and the piano, I think, was the final straw. People took it personally. I had to buy nets in the end.

  I tried to teach myself from books, at first, but it was Chris, again, who found someone. Ben, even younger than me, a music teacher from a nearby school for boys. The first creative person I’d ever met. I looked away, at first, when he played, embarrassed by his emotion.

  He told me I had a pianist’s hands, which was true, though I knew the compliment as fingers fit for diamonds.

  Twice a week he came, when school was done, in teacher’s clothes, grey trousers and a white shirt, his jacket on the back of his chair and his tie stuffed into his bag. The baby at my feet in her basket. Hours used, and I like to think it made my daughter musical.

  I wondered, should I buy a piano? For something to do? There was more of me again, and that can be exhausting.

  Still a while until Anja was due and I decided to walk it off. Struck a brisk pace, despite the rain which fell hard and slanted. It seemed to subside and I lifted my face, breathing in long and deep. An eddy of swollen raindrops drenched me. I shook my head and moisture seeped beneath my collar. It did not help; I got home angry.

  There she was, waiting; pathetic in the wet. Crammed into the porch, behind thick ropes of water where the guttering had gone.

  ‘Oh god, I’m sorry. How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty minutes. It’s OK!’

  Her nose, her hair, her eyelashes dripped. She seemed to think it funny.

  ‘Did we change the time? Sorry, I totally lost track.’

  I stepped up next to her, a twist of cold rain finding its way straight down my front. I tried to unzip a breast pocket for the key and elbowed her as I did. It was like standing behind a waterfall. The rain on the stone banged and clattered, a harsh metallic sound, and the air was full of an ozone smell of burnt-out electrics.

  We got in and she steamed like a horse.

  ‘Where’s your coat?’ I asked, but she didn’t reply.

  I could read ‘Don’t worry, be happy!’ on the top beneath her sodden anorak, and when she took off her shoes – canvas trainers, in this weather – her socks showed damp at the toes and heels.

  ‘Give it all here,’ I said and she cackled as she did it. ‘I’ll put them in the airing cupboard. Come upstairs.’

  I chucked her stuff in the bath and took her through to the spare room. It smelt of baked air and new carpet.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s something under here that’s any good,’ I said.

  I knelt by the bed and lifted the valance, disturbing dusty strings of lint and desiccated insects. I reached for a handle, blind, and yanked out the huge shallow rectangle of rough white plastic.

  ‘Some of Rose’s old things. I thought they might be useful,’ I said.

  I pulled the zip three sides of the bag and flipped back the lid.

  ‘Go ahead. Take what you want,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks, Mags, that’s really kind.’

  She waited until I stood, and riffled through, fast and expert.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Hold on. Wait there a sec.’

  I took the steps to the office. She had been in, cleaning; had left a spray on the desk. I opened the top drawer.

  Two sets of keys lived there, in small square envelopes of the sort that used to carry payslips. Always on the top, alongside my passport and the paperwork ordered in ascending size. Not that time.

  I dug around repeatedly then lifted the whole lot out. The envelopes slipped easily to the floor from somewhere within the pile, and I felt a relief at things being where they should.

  ‘Here you go,’ I said, when I got back to her. ‘These are for you. Now you can come and go as you please.’

  ‘Oh, if you don’t mind. That’s great! I’ll make sure I don’t lose them!’ she said.

  She stood for another of her hugs. Too tight, this time; I felt her breasts pushed hard against me through her flimsy top. It almost hurt and I wanted to push her away but didn’t dare. I was limp in her arms until she let me go.

  She left the room with a black roll-neck I’d never seen. The rest of the clothes were shoved back roughly, the last inches of zip gaping open, bulging insides. The radio downstairs went on, over, and up. Her own tuneless song began.

  I took eve
rything out and started again. When it was all done nicely, I went down for the Hoover. If you suck out the air before you seal, you can preserve the things inside for ever.

  22

  Maureen’s party, later, and the need to be there by midday gave the morning an edge, though I know how bad that sounds.

  I stood at my wardrobe.

  It had been a long time since I dressed up and I wondered if I could reconnect with that pleasure. I used to love, adore clothes, even as a child, forever trying things on, folding, rearranging. Vanity, yes, but also in appreciation of their power. The perfect outfit can make things happen, of that I have no doubt.

  My colours are blues, greys and black. Red, here and there – a mute red, mind. Pink – the darker end – though I might be too old for that now. Yellow in the summer but nothing approaching mustard. I know this; any woman with a sense of herself understands what suits her.

  One of my last (and favourite) memories of my marriage is a Colour Me Beautiful party in Jan of Jan and Ian’s front room. The worst-dressed woman I ever saw sat next to a gin and Dubonnet, cheese straws criss-crossed on a napkin, saying things like ‘unique colouring’, ‘personal palettes’ and ‘wow factor’. When Jan came to find me in the kitchen later (a drop in volume next door warned me of her approach), drinking my gin (neat, by the fridge, like it might save me), I said, ‘Just fuck off, Jan, why don’t you?’, which she did, and called Chris, who came and drove me home in silence. Not eloquent or clever, but it did the job and was magnificent in the response that it drew, a sort of retraction of the skin all over her face. She would probably pay for it nowadays.

  ‘It’s quite all right, Maggie, just a surprise, that’s all. I don’t think I’ve ever been sworn at before,’ she told me, next day, when I went round to say sorry.

  ‘Well, it won’t happen again,’ I said.

  ‘No, it won’t. First times don’t. No harm done.’

  If you squinted, the wardrobe into which I looked could have been mine from any one of the past four decades. Closer though, and that illusion receded. It was the smell, most of all. Damp and dust – essence of underuse. It would have to be jeans, that went without saying. The question hung over the top.

  I thought of a blouse; new, or rather never worn. A burnt sunset with a shallow boat neck and a beautiful drape that I bought tipsy after a Christmas lunch with Nancy as ‘most accurate transcriptionist of the year’, straight out of the window of a shop in South Molton Street. I couldn’t see it on the rail and thought maybe I’d left it on the train.

  I sped through the hangers, setting them swinging with their anxious clatter, until something slipped to the floor and when I went to pick it up, found my top, puddled at the back. I shook it out and brought it close. It exhaled sun and peach and freesia over a darker blend of chocolate, vanilla, plum. Cheap and blunt, fingerprint distinct. It could only be Anja.

  I held the blouse before me. It must have been too small for her, her back was broad and her shoulders muscled. At the armpits I saw a pinching, a splay of wrinkles pleating the thick silk. I turned it inside-out and where the sleeves were stitched to the body, the seams wore a dusting of old deodorant.

  I dropped it; I felt disgust. I put my head into the wardrobe and breathed in deep, the tickle of my garments on my cheek. Only that one then, it seemed, though I paused at a few.

  I took a shower, and stepped out vulnerable, into altered space.

  I pulled out drawers, I searched for clues. Clumsy in my towel.

  I stood before the mirror and saw the ghost of her in my glass. I knew the way she looked at herself, pivoting slowly, one side and the next. Focused, unashamed.

  ‘Checking for your best side?’ I said once, from the sofa, embarrassed to bear witness. Forced to speak.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Everybody has one.’

  I’d seen her trying on faces, dreaming of an audience I couldn’t imagine. I had thought, do I recognise her? Do I know this girl at all?

  I crept through my home, feeling for her presence. In the bathroom, a green-ringed cup from one of her teas. A matted hairband on the floor, another by the fridge. The carpet on the stair darkened by her heavy tread.

  She was all over, of course, and with my permission. At my request. I paid her to get into corners, root things out, spot stains. She was comfortable in the places that no one else would go, not even Rose, when she had been around; my flesh, my blood.

  The bathroom cabinet with the pills I no longer swallowed, the drawer that housed my underwear.

  ‘I can help with that!’ Anja offered, one day, as I pulled clothes from the machine.

  ‘I’ve started,’ I said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  But another afternoon, when I got in, the drum had been emptied. I thought of telling her no, but heard the slight in it.

  Maybe I’d issued an invitation outside my knowledge. I had long forgotten the rules of proximity, and it is different, of course, for the young. It is always hard to share, I told myself, and I am out of practice. These things take time. The blouse would wash.

  I found a discarded make-up bag and plundered its contents. I tweezered my eyebrows and moisturised my face. One upward comb of mascara and a blink on a tissue. Vaseline on my lips and, on a whim, across my brows. I wiped that off. Chose a collarless shirt in grey, just heavier than sheer.

  I glanced once more in the mirror in the hall, and saw myself, a blue-eyed brunette on her way to a lunch. Buster noticed the change and padded nervously. I took a bottle from the rack and the chocolates Anja brought that very first time.

  My coat, a smarter one from the wardrobe, had one pocket pulled out when I came to put it on. Unusual, for me, that haste, that lack of care, but not unheard of. Perhaps the work of the dog, in search of some reward.

  23

  I pushed open the gate and saw Peter and Paul in the window. They stood hinged, as usual, but too fixed to be comfortable. I rang the button doorbell with its harsh old-fashioned buzz, and Mo was there before I’d dropped my arm.

  ‘Hi, Mags. Come in. Thanks for coming. Lovely. I’ll take those.’

  A new Maureen, in hostess mode. She had made an effort, in bootcut trousers of an unkind fit. The stretch across her bottom had thinned the material to expose a webbing of white elastic. From a distance the effect was of one long panel of shine. Her top I’d call tomato, with a prominent batwing sleeve. Fat pearls in her ears, too big to be real, and a broad-heeled black-patent court. She looked overheated, poor thing.

  I followed her into the sitting room wondering what I’d learn of my friends that day. She had too much furniture, Mo, but had pushed it all to the side to leave a vacancy in the middle that no one wanted to fill.

  ‘I thought I’d ask Anja,’ she said, as we came into view of her guests. ‘Well, I got the boys to,’ she added, and pointed.

  She sat, in her slippers, at one end of the sofa, her hands folded on her lap like someone’s foreign exchange student. Her eyes rolled dumbly from face to face, content, but absent. Nothing of the girl I’d just imagined, thumbing through my things either in insolence or intimacy. She noticed me and crossed the carpet – Chinese, cream, an inch or more thick. She kissed me, three kisses, right, left and right. Always that way, with Anja; she had told me so when I mentioned once how hard it was to keep track of people’s greetings these days.

  ‘Hey, Maggie. How are you? You look nice!’

  Like me, she had dressed up, in a pink hooded top with something written across it in silver, too abstract for me to read, and a generous slick of glittered lip balm. The effect was one of youth, and playfulness. No artifice in it. My idea of her earlier was baffling.

  I thought she was about to speak but then Paul was there, and so I went to him, two kisses – that was Paul – and on to Peter, who waited at a distance, amused at the jumble of welcomes and my confusion. There was a squeeze at the end of his hug which reminded me how much I liked this man. Anja tucked herself back into her corner of sofa. Lauren sat
at the other end, gripping hard on its arm. Someone put a glass in my hand and I took a long, welcome drink.

  ‘Hello, Maggie. Long time no see.’

  Lauren peered up at me with an appraising look and no intention of moving.

  ‘Oh, hello down there, Lauren. I didn’t notice you. How are things?’

  ‘Oh well. You know,’ she said.

  She dropped her eyes, raised her brows and thinned her lips as if it were all my fault.

  How funny, I thought, such a sharp little shaving of Maureen – the bit that sniffed and judged – but none of her generosity. Mo had mellowed across time, a lifetime in the city kept her adapting, but Lauren lived in a small gated estate in Caterham and her views had narrowed and set. She wouldn’t change now, unless something huge happened. I’d met her before and thought her a pain, but never seen this hard edge of challenge.

  She wasn’t speaking, but held the focus of the room with her distaste. Maureen watched from the doorway and Paul looked around aimlessly. Something by the Carpenters started in the kitchen, the radio up loud to establish the notion of fun. Maureen glanced back to it, embarrassed by this exposure of her efforts. So I sat between the two women, felt the brief touch of Anja’s leg against mine.

  ‘Oh dear, Lauren. Been a bit tough going for you lately, has it?’

  ‘So Mum’s told you. Well, yeah. It has, to be honest,’ she said.

  She began to talk, and our party jerked back into action.

  Maureen came to me with the bottle, out of thanks.

  It was the usual stuff a woman complains of in a man. She talked in great loops that left no space for comment, pausing only to snatch a glance at Peter, angered by him in some way; his self-sufficiency perhaps. He sat alone propped on the windowsill and drank his wine with consideration and an easy look.