The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  ‘So stupid. How could I have forgotten?’ said Treen, fumbling for the lever and jerking her seat forward. Without speaking, Scott placed the shopping bags in the car at Kit’s feet and closed the door. Kit looked back at him through the window. Hand raised, palm towards her, he was saying something she could not hear.

  Part II

  Chapter Nine

  Audrey’s room was at the end of the passage. Opening the door, Kit came up against the side of a grey metal filing cabinet. She had to step out of its way to close the door. Every morning, propped up in bed in the lamp-lit room, Audrey confided the history of the house into a tape recorder. The library had given the name of someone who could type up the tapes for a small fee. Ordinarily it was Treen’s job to sort these notes into the filing cabinets. There were three of these spaced out along the wall, the last blocking a window. All the blinds were down; the lamp was on. The room’s concentrated airlessness brought out the synthetic sweet smell of medication. Audrey was sitting up in bed on an oversized pillow. Her rose-printed nightie emerged hugely from the quilt.

  ‘I hope they fed you last night.’

  ‘Yes…’ The effort of speaking stopped Kit where she was, halfway between door and bed. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Still fat and old.’ Audrey relaxed her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. ‘I confused my medication.’

  ‘Treen said, heart problems.’

  ‘I expect you know all about it. I would not have, at your age.’

  ‘Well, it was a class in science.’

  ‘They told me you were clever. Are you a reader?’

  ‘Sometimes. For school.’

  Treen knocked and without waiting stepped into the room. ‘Everything alright?’

  Audrey closed her eyes. She might have become her own effigy, hands crossed on her chest. With a little fussy sound, Treen went to open the blinds. Morning came into the room in shafts, pale-grey from the window’s dust. The open blinds did not so much let in the garden as show how far off it was. Kit felt what it was to be old. The room was full of days indoors: loose scraps of paper on the filing boxes; Reader’s Digests stacked on the floor; knick-knacks and pill bottles on the bedside table. In this room morning itself was out of place.

  Treen glanced between Kit and Audrey. ‘Well! These all need filing.’ She set a stack of papers down on the rug. ‘I spread them out.’ She gestured at the filing cabinets. ‘The drawers are labelled. I use this list, too.’ Treen handed Kit a yellowing page marked down one margin with her careful handwriting: House, design of, early history of, unusual features of, haunting of, 20th C. history of; Furniture, proper care of, makers of, the purchasing of…Family, English history of, settlement of, military service of, first generation of…

  Treen went on with determined brightness, ‘I make my piles first. Then I fit them into their folders.’ She pulled open one of the drawers. Some of the folders were empty, others stuffed so full they dragged off their casters, spilling pages and newspaper obituaries soon to be creased and lost under the other files. ‘I’ll be in the garden. If you need me.’

  The air seemed to solidify after she left.

  ‘Your mother was always reading. Cooped up in her room. Treen was more outdoorsy—more of a people person.’ Audrey stared out at the garden, which, if it shut in the view, was still part of the vast machinery of the heat. Out there the sun in its white glare had emptied other colours out. ‘Yes, things would have been different for Treen if she’d managed to have that baby. That was it for her. Came back.’

  Audrey moved her hands as if to dismiss, once and for all, the garden. ‘Sit here,’ she said, patting the bed. ‘Where I can see you.’

  She heaved sideways and stared at Kit. Her flesh, seen this close, gave up its appearance of solidity. It seemed to be multiplying by its own force, straining outwards against her skin. Only her eyes, in their deep sockets, looked—not so much noticing as consuming Kit’s freckles, her twisting hands.

  Audrey was so long-sighted that her eyes—whites floating over sunken brown rims—went out of focus, as though she saw, at the back of you, blank depths. Meeting that look, Kit had a sense of tipping slowly backwards. Shyness, its exaggeration of feeling, gave character to all she saw. Those shadows the iron lace cast across the rug of enormous roses: she felt them imprint themselves in her; she would remember them for years. Audrey lapsed back against the pillows. On the bed, a porcelain cup and saucer rattled on the tray.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t come here.’

  ‘She’s busy with the opening.’

  ‘No. She doesn’t come. Angry with us, I don’t know why. Not smart enough for her.’

  Out the window, Kit saw Patrick walking between the tea-tree, straight-backed, fastidious, adrift. While she watched he stopped, arms upstretched, palms forward over his head. He held himself so still Kit thought he’d put his back out. Then he bowed from the waist and reached towards his toes…It was mysterious, how people could always sense somebody watching them. Standing straight again, he turned towards the window the blank look of a crane.

  ‘She always seemed happy enough. Then off she went. England. We only heard from her when she wanted money. In the end we said no.’ Her body shook with embittered laughter. ‘Never forgiven us.’

  Audrey patted her hand across the quilt and found Kit’s hand. ‘She sent you though.’ Her touch was unexpectedly powdery and dry. ‘I expect he’s rich, is he?’ Pressing Kit’s hand, looking at the ceiling, Audrey followed her own thought. ‘She needs money. Not like that. Just…to feel herself.’

  ‘I think the gallery does okay.’

  Audrey pushed the remark away with both hands. ‘She can have no expectations here. Treen looks after us.’ Audrey took Kit’s wrist in her hand. ‘No, the house will come to you.’ She was speaking thoughts turned dream-like with repetition. ‘She’ll tell you to sell it. But you like it here. You went round looking.’

  Kit saw at last what she could say. ‘It’s a beautiful house.’

  There was a pause. Kit glanced round, fearing that she had struck a false note. Audrey’s head had slumped on the pillow. Her mouth, sagging, showed her false teeth slipped sideways against her gums. It was the first time that Kit had sat beside somebody so old asleep. More than her weight, the passivity of Audrey’s body appalled her; it had become so simply a thing to be looked at. Kit felt the force of her grandmother’s will, which could command it. Talking with her grandmother was dreadful. At every moment, Kit wanted to get away. Now, though, she gazed at the garden with a feeling of letdown. What next? she asked herself, with Audrey’s sense of fatalism and importance. Morning light shone into the vacancy.

  Kit managed to get down from the bed without rattling the tea tray. She sat beside the stack of paper. Treen had given her a pair of scissors to cut paragraphs apart and a stick of glue to paste them onto sheets, on which she had written headings in red capitals. Kit read, ‘A senior constable drove over the lawn in front of my parents, which showed that he was not of their class. Nonetheless they greeted him with perfect manners and did not remark…’

  Her grandmother slept noisily. In that shut-off room her breathing stood in for time itself. Every so often, unpredictably, she fell silent. Kit found herself stopped, scissors halfway across the paper, until with a sputtering gasp, like the striking of a match, breath caught again in her grandmother’s throat. Kit read: ‘The makers of this clock went out of business in 1784 and the original case was destroyed in a sailing ship on the way here from England. The present cedar case was made before 1870 here by a questionable Carpenter.’ ‘(Probably Walter Nichols, former convict)’ her grandfather had added in red ink. After a while Kit forgot her strangeness. All the furniture was oversized; the ceiling was high. Cross-legged, she entered again into the underworld of childhood. She had forgotten this viewpoint, the shadows under chairs and beds, the closeness to patterns on the rug. It was comforting to be hearing again the practical sound of scissors. She read, ‘In
the cedar trunk that my uncle took to the Kings School (he died in 1916, only a child) we keep the dress clothes of the 1920s, which as children we used for dress-ups, cedar being a deterrent to moths…’ She pasted this onto the sheet marked Family, early history of, and then wondered whether she should have pasted it onto Furniture, proper care of. ‘A story of haunting which we were told as children was that the ghost of a young woman stood in the hall by the front door…’ Reading, Kit was standing again in the hall with her grandfather where the light coming out of the mirror gave a peculiar cold glassiness to the air and was what fear looked like. But the typed words she was reading had come from the mouth of her grandmother—from that body behind her breathing on the bed. That body had belonged to a child once, frightened in the hall. She read, ‘It is sometimes difficult looking back in memory to fit the pictures that fill the mind into the time in which they happened…’

  Kit imagined her grandmother—lighter, a ghost of thought— stepping from room to room through the sleeping house, opening trunks and cabinets, wardrobes and sideboards, lifting each fact— spoons, forks, knives, books in their shelves, clocks, chairs and beds, curios and mementoes—out of a smell of damp, infestations of silverfish and moths, and setting it in the unshadowed light of the page. In one folder Kit came upon the family tree, her name and birth-date handwritten in blue ink on the browning parchment. In this, she seemed to meet some other existence. Till now, family had taken meaning from the rooms of her parents’ house: their bedrooms and their meals together, their places on the sofa. Now she saw on the typed sheet lineage and years: family as a mechanism working its way through names. Her birth-date had a hyphen after it— she saw herself not exactly from outside but from the long perspective of History. The feeling was so new that she felt startled and almost guilty when Treen knocked and put her head around the door.

  ‘That was Carol on the phone. They’re going down the front beach for a coffee.’ Treen’s face looked windswept. After a moment, Kit saw that she had put on lipstick and brushed her hair.

  Chapter Ten

  Treen parked in the shade of some pine trees near the bowling club. They walked downhill past a playground set on the edge of a cliff: swings and a climbing frame and then, through its wire fence, an immense view of the sea. The beach itself was out of sight. Some kids were making a café in the shade under the climbing frame while their father sat reading a newspaper on the seat. Kit followed Treen across the road, past a shop where the window featured a headless mannequin dressed in navy ruched bathers—the sort that made sense of the phrase ‘bathing suit’. In the noon heat, among people trailing up and down the footpath, past unfamiliar shops, Kit felt at a loss. Those hours on the floor of Audrey’s room had been stopped hours. Following Treen out of the house, Kit had been surprised by how far the day had gone ahead of her: gravel burning up through the soles of her sandals, the air vibrating with heat. She recalled the sunstruck roads they had driven down: weatherboard houses, curtains drawn against the heat, vacant except for two boys trudging home with surfboards under their arms and a man pushing a pram. Even from inside the car, they’d heard the baby’s wail. Passing the pharmacy, Kit was tricked by the lifesize cardboard cutout of a man with radiant white hair and teeth—advertising what? she wondered. At his feet someone had set buckets and spades on spills of real sand.

  ‘Don’t let me forget Dad’s paper,’ said Treen.

  From the bright footpath the General Store was a grey cave. Kit waited outside by a metal basket of thongs, a basket of frayed romance novels, and a postcard stand. One postcard of a black swan had the words ‘Wish you were here’ splayed across it in home-computer font. Other postcards were glossy: a local’s photographs glued to a piece of card: deliberately picturesque shots of a pier at sunset, a shell in close-up. Idly Kit thought of sending one to her father—though, what would she write on it?

  Carol and Miranda were at the table already. With them was a boy Kit’s age sprawled sideways in his metal chair, which looked toy-sized under him. The café’s outside tables were set too close. Umbrellas, planted in a hole in the centre of each table, made a rickety overlapping roof, creating in their shade a hothouse effect of sweat and thickened light.

  Carol held up her arm, waved, and leant across to say something in Miranda’s ear. Without changing expression Miranda raised her palm.

  Seeing Carol and Miranda side by side, it was possible to make out Miranda’s features in Carol’s face, though Carol’s face had swollen and widened around them. Carol’s body appeared as a set of glossy surfaces: red shellac nails, gold bracelets, bronzer striped across her cheeks. Her cotton shirt was startlingly white against her tan. The impression was of discipline. Kit could not look at her without feeling defiant and half-ashamed.

  Carol said: ‘This is Miranda’s young man. Will, his name is.’ The boy glanced up without speaking. Concentrating on his phone, abstractedly jigging one foot up and down, he looked at once bored and agitated, as though they had already been waiting too long. His face—pale, freckled, fine-boned—was pinched tight around the eyes. He wore board shorts, thongs, a T-shirt: surfer clothes, but his dark hair stuck up in tufts, exaggerating his look of wary intensity.

  Waitresses, tired of sidling between chairs, had given up: the tables were strewn with used coffee cups and plates. Carol pulled a serviette from the open-sided metal box and wiped a spill of milk from the table in front of her. At once the air over the table blurred with flies, blundering in small circles and settling on the table again, quivering over sugar spills and smears of butter.

  Straightening her back, Carol looked across at Treen with the sort of smile that made Kit notice her lipstick. ‘Now how is your poor mother?’

  ‘It was a sleeping pill. She slept all afternoon and sat up wideawake at three in the morning.’ Thinking of sleep made Treen yawn hugely, covering her mouth, making a high involuntary sound. Embarrassed, Kit glanced across at Miranda. If she was listening, it did not show on her face. Tilted back in her chair, eyes half-closed, she had settled into the heat.

  Carol clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘And you got up with her.’ She turned to Kit. ‘Your auntie’s a saint. An absolute saint.’

  It was possible to guess where Carol’s attention would turn by seeing who had drawn back, lapsed into private thought. Her talk at once went there, caught that person up. Straight-backed in her chair, she turned her attention from one to the other with thwarted efficiency. Not hostile, she would tell all this afterwards over the phone to her friends. Now she was stretching out a hand to command the waitress returning to the kitchen. ‘We might order, Phoebe. When you’re ready.’

  The waitress stopped mid-step, turned her face towards them— her eyes did not change focus—and pulled out her order pad. She had a plump, cushiony face: her long ponytail, though it pulled the skin of her forehead back, left fleshy pouches under her eyes. She looked first at Miranda, who ordered a skinny latte.

  The boy, Will, setting his phone on the table, glanced frowning at Kit and Treen, as though they had that moment sat down. ‘Just a regular coffee,’ he said. Now that he had put his phone down his body was full of movement. He kept jigging his foot. He played his fingers against the palm of his other hand.

  ‘He means a full-cream flat white,’ said Miranda. Tender, superior, she was like a mother explaining her child. She glanced across at him, her look shy, almost secretive, and questioning. For the first time Kit noticed her eyes: long, grey-green, with dense stubby black lashes. The next instant she pulled her hair over one shoulder, lifted her chin. At once what Kit noticed was the arc of her eyebrows, pin’s head freckles along the top of her cheekbone, uncoloured fine hair along the edge of her jaw and down the side of her neck on the paler skin exposed where she had pulled aside her hair. She had a way of holding herself perfectly still behind the surface of her face.

  As soon as they had ordered Carol smiled up at the waitress. ‘Now I think our table needs a bit of a wipe, don’t you,
dear?’ When the waitress was almost out of earshot, she leaned in. ‘Bit slow, that one. She in your year Miranda?’

  ‘Year below.’ Miranda stretched out her legs, tipped her head back. ‘God! I’m so glad I decided not to work here.’

  The heat of the day expanded into their pause. Kit, who had refused her mother’s help with packing, unstuck her jeans from the seat. In this light, her black T-shirt was the colour of rust. Only Miranda, staring over Kit’s shoulder, made Kit remember the sea: that distance opening at her back. Two surfers, coming out of the cafe with the slouching walk that came of years in thongs, caught sight of Miranda. Kit watched their expressions change: at first startled then furtive. Turning away, they muttered something to each other and laughed. Only a sudden rigidity in Miranda’s pose showed that she had noticed them.

  ‘So what are your plans for the holidays, Will?’ An edge to Carol’s voice suggested that, if it was her job to keep the show moving, they needn’t make it so hard.

  ‘Surfing, I guess.’

  ‘Didn’t your brother do well!’ Carol persisted. ‘Off to uni, is he?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty good.’

  Some metal entered Carol’s smile. A different waitress brought their drinks, spilling the coffees as she unloaded the tray. Carol watched her dab at the spill with a dishcloth.

  She turned to Kit. ‘Now wasn’t it nice you could be here for that art class.’ Setting down her cup, turning to Treen, Carol confided: ‘That new time doesn’t really suit. Still, I thought we’d make an effort, support Scott.’