The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  The front door was unlocked. Kit stepped into a square hall, wood panelled, with a chequerboard floor. A high skylight left the hall dusky where she stood but bright overhead, giving the impression that she had stepped a little way into the ground. Her reflection wavered in the mirrored hall table. Beyond it on both sides doors opened into wide, bay-windowed rooms crowded with armchairs, chaise longues, nesting tables, intricate decorative boxes, tapestried firescreens, sideboards, glass-fronted cabinets. The blinds were drawn in these rooms. The half-light gave them an underwater look. The tasselled curtains, the silver candlesticks, even the furniture seemed suspended in a watery dimness. On one mantel, in silver stands, Kit found two hollowed-out cattle horns: their outsides polished and intricately carved, their insides scratched with names, of cattle or people she could not tell. Inside each, at the tip, she found rust-coloured strands. After she touched them, she realised these were the dried-out residue of veins.

  These rooms were everywhere crowded and vacant. To walk through them was to realise how entirely the house in which she lived was her mother’s house. The phone by a single white armchair overlooking the courtyard, a stack of hardcover books under the curve of an arc lamp: everything spoke of deliberate habits, of willed good taste. What was strange for her here was to be noticing so much: evidence that made no pattern, told her nothing. Her mother could not have been young here; no one had ever been young here. It reminded her most of the heritage house that her class had visited on a school excursion. They had filed along the hall. Held back by velvet rope they had peered into rooms: stagey, silent, flat as pictures. Here, though, she had stepped over the rope. At any moment, she was expecting someone to accuse her. She picked up glass paperweights, each with its swallowed treasure, with a nervy self-consciousness.

  Still no noise. Threading back to the entrance hall she took her bearings again. Directly in front of her, across from the front door, a square arch hung with crimson curtains opened into a long room, its ceiling and corners lost in shadows. Were those tapestries on the walls? The floor was polished stone, overlaid with cowskins and Persian rugs. On both sides of the arch a passage led away, measured out with family photos and smoky-looking oil paintings of horses and dogs. To her left, the passage had a surprising number of doors. Her bedroom was that way; she could not remember now which door it was. Going in the other direction, following the other passage around a corner, she came to the dining room; a room too narrow for its table, its chairs with legs like solid calves. Here, all the furniture had been painted black. The floor-length curtains were brown: impossible to remember that the sea was out there, beyond that dune.

  ‘We used to have all our meals here,’ said Patrick, behind her, ‘when Audrey’s parents were alive.’

  Surprise prompted a cartoonish gesture. Turning to face him, she had her hand across her mouth.

  His smile was washed-out, a courtesy. ‘Treen said you were looking around the house.’ Barefoot, his hair immaculate, he had pulled a stained moss-coloured cashmere jumper over his striped cotton pyjamas.

  He ran the tips of his fingers over the sideboard. ‘They painted all this furniture black when Prince Albert died.’ He leant towards her confidingly. ‘It’s haunted, you know.’ He nodded twice, smiling, eyebrows raised. ‘I’ll show you.’

  He padded ahead of Kit down the hall. ‘Eighteen sixty-nine,’ he called back. ‘Man called Winters built it. Not a nice man. Got a girl pregnant. She came and told him. He got his men to beat her.’

  Near the front door he stopped. ‘Your mother used to see her waiting there, by the coat stand.’ He pointed. His gesture flashed in the hall mirror. He bent to peer into Kit’s face, his fogged pupils swivelling in their lids. ‘Used to frighten her,’ he said. Looking right at Kit, he laughed—a single quick laugh. At once he sucked his teeth back in.

  She touched her cheek; she had felt the laugh almost as a blow. The quiet of the house, now, was against her. There under the coat hooks she felt a gathered antagonism, an intensity of air. She was unnaturally aware of her grandfather, the satisfaction he took in her fear, which built something exaggerated into it, as if she were acting it in a play. At the same time what she did feel, which was inward, was an expectation of later, of dark in her room: sleeplessness putting its taproot down.

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Waiting. Just waiting. No, you don’t want to be frightened of that poor girl. She wouldn’t harm you. Alice, her name was.’ He straightened. With instinctive fastidiousness he lifted away from any excess of feeling. ‘You have your mother’s nerves. She was always very silly about it. Wouldn’t sleep and so on.’ He ran his palms slowly one over the other; he washed his hands in air.

  ‘But…you know the ghost’s name?’

  ‘Oh! We looked it all up. Court papers. Winters got off, obliged to leave the district of course. Frightened for his life, he was.’

  ‘That was Audrey’s dad?’

  ‘No, no!’ he cried coquettishly. ‘We’re not responsible for him! No, the ghost came with the house. Admiral Kelty bought it for the family. Your grandmother’s grandfather. Now, to you that makes him…’ He broke off: he stared glassily at her with one finger raised in air. Possibly this was the same story he had told her last night. Kit remembered nothing he had said then, only how he had looked talking, head tilted sideways, his mouth opening and closing as he followed the trail of his thought. After a moment, he resumed: ‘Got a good deal too, I should think. Bought it for his sister on condition she leave it to his son. Edith was a spinster, you know, very down-to-earth woman. I see a lot of your aunt in her.’ With one finger, he tapped on the glass of a photograph in the hall. ‘Here she is.’

  Kit saw a long jaw, thin lips pressed together: an expression that suited the brown tones of the photograph. Hair parted in the middle—the part wide—and combed very flat, drawn into a bun at the back of her neck. The enormous bosom was upholstered: the body like furniture, solid as the chair she sat so straight-backed on. The toes of her black boots, appearing from the hem of her skirt, seemed hardly attached: Kit could not imagine the monument walking.

  ‘Well of course she lived so long the son moved in. George, his name was. Married late, wife half his age. Pretty thing,’ he said; ‘No family to speak of…’ Kit saw that there was someone else at the back of the photograph: a woman resting her hands on the high back of the chair. ‘Four children, they had. Two died—sad story. The boy in the war. Army people, you know. Then the daughter—died of the flu. Children did in those days.’

  ‘We studied it at school—’ Kit started.

  ‘It was Katie who left the house to your grandmother. Absolutely doted on her. Audrey was born the year the first daughter died, you see, almost the same month. Audrey’s brother was always very angry about it, thought it was unfair—’ He raised his hands and left them drop. He looked at her—past her—with limpid fatalism. ‘These things are.’

  The two of them stood looking at the photograph—helplessly, it seemed. Kit could think of nothing to ask, or say. Her grandfather’s stories were like wind-up mechanisms: they went a certain way and then stopped entirely. She looked back at that place by the front door where her mother had seen a ghost and the ghost was more present than the child her mother had been. Her mother, shaking her clothes out and folding them on the bed, had never been afraid.

  With a jerk of one hand, Patrick started himself into movement again. ‘Breakfast,’ he remembered. He gestured for Kit to go ahead of him down the hall.

  Kit’s place was already set with buttered toast. Drinking tea, Audrey watched Kit over the top of her cup. Her eyes, with their discoloured cataracts, had more intensity for seeming unseeing. ‘You slept badly,’ she said. ‘You went through the house.’

  ‘The light came in—’

  ‘I liked houses at your age. Not many do. This house will come to you, of course, which makes a difference.’

  Kit opened her mouth and realised there was nothing she could say that wo
uld not sound false. Audrey threw everything off-key. If she was watchful, she was also self-absorbed to the point where everything she said had a purpose.

  ‘Though Treen must always have a place,’ Audrey continued.

  Treen glanced up from the newspaper with a fixed smile, a look of dutiful attention that did not touch her eyes. She was dressed still in a cotton nightie, its collar edged in polyester lace.

  ‘What else do you like doing?’ Audrey asked. ‘There’s the sea. Your mother always liked the sea.’

  ‘We live near the beach…’ Kit started.

  Audrey frowned. ‘I never think of the sea in cities. They tell me there are buildings here on the foreshore, now.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t go there these days. It used to seem a long way. The hill.’

  ‘It’s not far,’ broke in Treen. ‘There’s a path from the garden, over the dune.’

  ‘Is your father coming back?’ broke in Audrey.

  ‘Audrey,’ murmured Patrick, not looking up from his paper.

  ‘She doesn’t mind,’ said Audrey, still fixing Kit with her seeing, unseeing eyes.

  ‘I think they’re still deciding.’ Unexpectedly, Kit’s eyes burned. Having woken too early, she had been facing them with a dry, nervous energy. Now the sharp edge of unhappiness caught her by surprise.

  ‘She doesn’t tell you anything either,’ her grandmother concluded.

  Treen folded the newspaper, put it in her bag, and started clearing plates. ‘I thought I’d take the car into town for a service. Why don’t you come with me, have a look around.’

  Kit stood up at once. ‘I’ll wash up.’

  ‘No, you get ready.’ Treen glanced at her watch. ‘We should leave at eight.’

  ‘You’re not working at the doctor’s?’

  ‘Maria’s filling in for me. I thought, Kit’s first days…’

  Kit walked into the hall, feeling their eyes on her back.

  She had her own bathroom, next to her bedroom, though she had to step out into the hall to get to it. The shower water was the colour of weak tea and smelt of earth. When she dried herself her skin felt slippery, as though the water had left some residue. The mirror in the bathroom was the size of a postcard and set in a filigree silver frame. She still had half an hour. Returning to her room, she climbed onto the bed. Out of Audrey’s range, she felt sapped and aimless. Already, the day’s heat had stripped colour from the garden; the mirror on the dressing table shone more brightly than the window. In one corner, the wallpaper sagged loose. Was it really all going to be hers? Audrey’s remark had silenced Kit at first with the thought of all the deaths—of faces at the table—her cold phrase had comprehended. Now, the things in the room looked different: uglier and less remote. Here they were and here they would be, waiting for her. The seven days stretched ahead of her. What might have been curiosity—what had happened between her mother and these people?—sharpened into self-pity. Turning onto her stomach, she pressed her face into the pillow and started to cry. It was no relief. The room was not yet enough her own. She sensed the wardrobe and the bright mirror watching her as if with an amused contempt.

  Chapter Five

  Peter slipped off his shoes. They were both too conscious of what it meant, his coming to the house. Stepping forward, Anna closed the door, cutting short the sweep of headlights, the warm-sounding rush of a passing car. He stood in his socked feet inside the house and what she felt was how much of her home he stood outside of still. Brick, painted walls, floorboards and glass: now he was here, and all that she had come to think of as belonging to the house itself she had to acknowledge lived in her only. Now he was here, here—she realised the meaning of her betrayal. Her own movements about the house felt strange to her. On her own she could find the light switches in the dark; she would have had to concentrate to be able to tell him where those switches were. She was suddenly conscious of the walls, their concealed infrastructure of struts and pipes, wires fed out to the power grid.

  ‘So this is where you live.’

  Contained excitement gave an electric quality to his smallest gestures. She saw that he was only by an effort holding himself from staring: he wanted, above all, to be natural. When he walked behind her down the hall the softness of his footsteps made her more conscious of the flaring out of his attention. In the kitchen, he set his tennis bag on the bench.

  ‘You brought your alibi.’

  His face tightened. He hated her talking aloud—in daylight, as it were—of their subterfuges. His colleagues had all been going out for dinner. From the tennis bag he drew a bottle of champagne. Stepping behind her, he started opening and closing cupboard doors. His desire to be settled was driving him to assume familiarity with the house. If she had paid attention to where he looked, she thought, she would have known where he and Clare kept their champagne flutes.

  ‘They’re in the sideboard.’ With her knife, she gestured across the room.

  That morning, closing the front door behind her, Anna had known at once that she did not want him here. The house had been exactly as she and Kit had left it. Usually she came home to find Kit’s trail through the house—her blazer on the side of the sofa, cushions on the floor, a magazine on the table—and without conscious thought registered what Kit had done, where in the house she had been. That morning, dropping her suitcase on the floor, she had gone straight to Kit’s room and stared around her. Starting to call, she had put her phone away and dropped onto the bed, feeling that she could not bear to hear Kit’s reproachful politeness, distance even in her voice.

  Ordinarily, Anna worked in the kitchen with concentrated ease, her gestures so much a matter of habit they continued apart from the fitful pressure of her thought. Only now in her hands the knife was blunt. She stood in the blaze of downlights, isolated by a dream-like fatalistic dread. It was wrong to have him here, where her everyday haunted all they did, where Kit was always about to walk in, was halfway down the stairs. Holding onto her knife, Anna felt that she was standing in some elaborately prepared film set, an exact reproduction of her kitchen and living room: a setting in which their performance was designed to create the illusion that there were rooms around and over this one, alike full of pictures and furnishings. The kitchen lighting, seeming brighter than usual, confirmed this impression; the sound of her knife, striking down on the cutting board, made the board sound hollow. All they did, everything echoed hollowly in thought. They lacked their audience—Anna thought of last night’s insinuating waiter, Stephanie Edward’s face afloat in the nightclub’s bathroom mirror.

  Estranged from her own house, Anna felt estranged from Peter also—this man who, having taken off his suit jacket and tie and placed them on the back of one of her dining chairs, now stood at the sideboard stripping the seal from a bottle of Moët which he must have bought on the way here, asking the taxi to wait. She watched his hands as he worked free the cork and poured out the champagne with a disciplined slowness that was rare in his gestures and much more like his talk. He passed her glass with a magician’s flourish and stood ready for them to toast each other. He could not conceal his air of victory. Here he was in what fashion magazines would have called her ‘private space’.

  The drink anyway took the edge off her daylong headache. Watching him move around the room she could not keep off the suspicion that he was eyeing his future armchair. She was discovering in herself reserves of feeling for the place itself. She could not stop watching his hands, feeling with an inward shock his touch on things. The Benwell ceramics, the Eames chair, the little Klippel bronze: but the voice in her head sounded familiar. She recognised her mother’s voice—all those dinners when Audrey had sat listing the goods that Anna’s uncle had carelessly lost or sold. Anna put down the knife.

  The courtyard showed flickeringly behind the room’s reflection in glass. In that reflection, the kitchen lights floated well beyond the courtyard wall. Peter had stopped in front of the sideboard with the champagne bottle
still in his hand. He might have been numbering the brushstrokes of the Petyarre, which, impasto yellow, gathered to itself the day’s last light. Anna left the meat on the cutting board. She burrowed her hand, still cold from rinsing, against the small of his back.

  ‘I never understand how they do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Make it look like something, when up close it just looks like blobs of paint.’

  She walked her fingers in air, parodying the childishness of his question. ‘They step forwards and back.’

  They knew each other too well to believe in this ease for long. This moment, though, it was saving: it took them back to the beginning. Here they were still, the morning after that dinner party when he had walked into the gallery: a dealer and a buyer who had wanted not only to like the work but to know why it was proper to like it.

  Moodily, he picked an ornament from the sideboard and turned it over. ‘I do want to look at everything, though.’

  ‘Well, but that belonged to Matt’s grandmother.’

  Stepping back, she slid the glass doors open. She had spent the day indoors. Now, stepping into the massed heat of the courtyard, she had to take account that it had been a day: those hours had taken place, after all, inside this grid of trams and trains and peak-hour traffic. Even now, she could hear cars. It never was silent here; the courtyard’s high walls made every sound reverberate like an echo. It was a relief to move around the courtyard lighting the candles set on the wide brick edges of the garden beds. Their small flames brought the dark closer.