The Life of Houses (2 page)

Now, involuntarily, Anna imagined Peter and his wife, the two of them in their car together driving home from all their years of Sunday lunches. The hurt was physical: she had to catch her breath. She said: ‘I wouldn't go with you.'

He said nothing; he looked at her hand on the table.

She said, ‘You mean: they wouldn't have me.'

In a high voice he said: ‘It may be the end of our Sunday lunches.

‘You haven't told them—'

‘Not yet.' He looked across the room to their reflection in the mirror. Following his gaze, she saw the two of them in glass: shapes cut from the unstill green of the leaves. Turning from the mirror at the same instant, they saw each other with distance still in their eyes. Forcing a lightness, he said, ‘I suppose your parents won't notice.'

‘So long as you don't mind them calling you Matt.'

‘I won't mind anything.' He looked away, down into the street. She saw his face in profile, thrown into relief by the light behind it. ‘Why, though?' he said suddenly. ‘Your parents…'

She looked across the table at him. It was not possible to tell him, to recreate in this place, how it had been. She could hardly believe now that it had been as she remembered, a feeling of dread
bound up even now with the memory of waiting with Treen at the end of the drive. It had been a superstition she and her sister had never discussed: they had always waited for the school bus to turn the corner before they started up to the house. In her memory it was always summer, that sudden quiet after the bus had left filling with insect sounds as they walked over the gravel. They were always walking out of wide sunlight into the permanent indoorness of the house. Always their father stood waiting in a front room, stepping out into the hall to meet them with his dazed formal look. Days when their mother would not have gone outside, whole days when she stayed in bed with one of her
Reader's Digest
conspiracies: the Bermuda triangle, Admiral Byrd, the moon landing.

‘Oh! They have this grudge against the whole world,' she said. ‘I suppose to that extent they've noticed they're obsolete; only it takes the form of hating the postman for letting the corners of an envelope get wet.'

She had been speaking with a brittle edge; she had meant to be amusing. Looking up, she was surprised to see Peter's eyes dark with feeling. And my daughter is there, she told herself. Had they made her go around the house at six closing the blinds? Circular crocheted handles hung on woven string, only the exact angle and flick would make those blinds stay down. Summer and winter, the blinds down at six. It struck Anna that if she could just see what Kit saw there, she would at last know the truth of it; she would know how it had really been, free from the exaggerations and distortions of her memory. In the same instant she thought: let that girl find it out: how easy, how free of humiliation, her own life has been.

She said, ‘You think I exaggerate, which makes it impossible to explain. They never think anything. They never notice anything. They're rude the whole time—they're so frightened of making a fuss. Do you know, that whole week we were there they didn't once ask about London. The only way they even acknowledged I had a gallery was to make me go round valuing their horrible landscapes. The highlight of the week was telling them the eighteenth-century map they had thought so valuable was a fake.'

Peter tightened the skin around his right eye, a habit he had whenever someone's answer didn't suffice. Sceptical, precise—the law had made him careful even in thought. Characteristic of him to pause, frowning, in the middle of a sentence, trying to find the exact word. Yes, impossible to explain to him how it had been, the atmosphere of that house, at once overwrought and passive. The laziness of rubbish collectors, the rudeness of summer holidaymakers, the corruption of their local council, ticketed parking: for her parents these were not single annoyances: they opened into an entire rejection of what went on outside their property. Always formal with each other, her parents' only intimacy was a shared obsession with the past.

She said, ‘Their trouble is they
were
rich. My grandfather must have been spectacularly incompetent, though when I knew him it was hard to see him as spectacularly anything, sinking into his armchair all afternoon. I have an uncle who inherited some property and promptly sold it off. I've never met him, no one has spoken to him since. It isn't property for them; it's history, so long as you take history to be a sort of borrowed self-importance. Have I really never
told you how my parents met? He came to the house with an interest in early Australian cedar furniture. He was a Jesuit; he gave it up—
For love
,' she added, falsetto.

‘All our furniture was Ikea.'

She touched his cheek. ‘No, we grew up in a long dream. Really, I had no idea of other people. I arrived in London—I'm embarrassed even to remember. Amy would ask me about someone who'd come into the gallery and I'd say, “Oh yes, very nice.” Then she'd tell me their background and what they'd lied about and who they'd married and why they'd married them and how much their watch had cost.'

She saw him looking at her. ‘You're thinking how much nicer I must have been back then. Actually, no. That sort of dreamer is absolutely ruthless.'

Anna thought of her daughter's hands as she had seen them last, folded on a bare knee, she and Kit sitting side by side on a bench at that filthy station. With their slackness, their long tapering fingers, her daughter's hands had reminded Anna of the hands in Byzantine icons. In truth, Anna felt an icon worshipper's devotion to the physical fact of Kit: that colourless fuzz along the edge of her cheeks, the vertebrae rising against the skin at the back of her neck— these provoked a craving tenderness. But her comments phrased like questions, her way of hovering at the edge of conversations, made Anna set her jaw. What could be more demanding than all that hopeful reticence, that palpable and doomed wish to please?

‘So now Kit—'

‘Now Kit's there. Yes.'

‘Have you told her about us?'

‘She can't stand being in the house with me—'

‘She must suspect. It might help her to have it clear.'

‘She's fifteen. She doesn't even see anybody else. She went to France last year for three weeks with the school and came back with a hundred photographs, all of churches. No, it is really impossible to realise how young she is. She worries whether shop assistants like her. Trying to have a conversation with her—you might as well be waving flags.'

She looked away at the next table, its cloth phosphorescent in the gathering dusk. At the back of the room the men finding seats had to be lawyers, she thought. The two women in the group were also wearing dark grey suits. The men called across the table to each other: the nervous charge of a group at the beginning of some willed celebration. They were choosing wine: extravagance was part of the ritual: a stocky, grey-haired man at one end of the table had the drinks list. Anna suddenly imagined them in groups of two and three veering along a dark footpath at 3am. By then the women, however much they might dislike each other, would have shared a taxi home.

‘Friends of yours?' she asked.

He twisted in his chair. The first instant, he grinned: an expression of embarrassed conspiracy, quickly suppressed. Not his workmates but they could have been; not his dinner but it could have been. Turning back to Anna, he shook his head. This picture of the life he had apart from her made Anna push her chair back and set off across the room. Couples had been coming in without her noticing. One was young: the girl had had her hair done specially, though with
her profile that chignon had been a mistake. The father of one of Anna's school friends had categorised women as ‘girlfriend-' or ‘wifematerial'. A padding, complacent man…

Anna was not so much walking as steering across the room. Tables and corners kept looming up. Not that she was drunk, she thought, so much as caught up in the atmosphere their talk had made. She had been telling Peter the truth; though what she felt at the same time, and vertiginously, was that she could have been telling lies. This was why she and Matt had stopped going out for dinner, why hosts sat married couples apart at dinner parties: they had lost the ability to make themselves up in words, like characters in a book. The floorboard that sounded in the hall, the gate that needed to be lifted to the latch: talk had come to seem false against the tacit intimacy of their years together in the same house. Was that what I did wrong, she asked herself. Trust to that intimacy too much? The night after Kit flew off to France, she and Matt had sat down to dinner together. She could still remember the texture of that failure: not just how little they said but how little had seemed sayable. Years of unfelt action massed in them still: making Kit's lunch, shouting upstairs to her to get in the shower, clearing the breakfast things, remembering Kit's tennis racquet.

In the bathroom's rococo mirror Anna saw her face hovering oddly separate from thought. Eyeliner smudged under one eye… She ran her wrists under the cold tap, steadying one hip against the bench. In the too-yellow mirror she fixed her hair, redid her face. When she came back into the room Peter was sitting very
still, staring at his hands with a slight frown as if thinking some problem through. She thought, I'll remember him like that. It was night outside—night had fallen while she was gone from the room. Behind him now the window indistinctly reflected their table: a structure of shadows, in which the white napery gleamed. Through the window's reflection, Christmas lights: they were hung from wires over the street. Beneath them on the street, a white horse was pulling a carriage up the hill, traffic banking behind it. The sound of the horse's shod hooves came dulled like echoes through the double-glazed glass. In the carriage, a middle-aged couple was glancing back at the cars behind them, their flushed embarrassment a version of delight.

‘The deliberate happiness of tourists,' she said. ‘Finally getting enough attention.'

He laughed. This was their ease: her placid malice, the banter that modulated into contempt. ‘I've got you something.' He set a navy box on the table. She knew he meant this gift to signal the event: his week in Melbourne, his advance into her house. Only this ceremoniousness marked him off from the social world that he inhabited, otherwise, like a native. A scholarship student at school, he had fallen in with the boys who spent their summers at family beach houses and their winters in the snow: an unassuming and, finally, inevitable guest. His clothes must have been a problem, she thought. Doubtless his success had depended on a readiness to disarm mockery by first mocking himself. What he had not managed to subdue, she thought, was this desire to mark occasions. He lacked the unconsciousness which, more than anything,
marked the bounds of that inherited world, which had no end and no beginning for those who lived in it: it was outside history; it was how they knew each other.

Now he said: ‘You're annoyed that I bring you a present every time.'

She had hurt him; she felt the dissatisfaction that was her version of regret. Reaching across the table, she pressed her fingers to his cheek. ‘I'll open it at the hotel. Not here.'

The waiter brought their food and they started to eat.

Chapter Two

T
he drive was narrow: the headlights flared on small scrub— small-leaved, sparse, repeating scrub. Though they had slowed, turning off the highway, the blurred sound of gravel made their speed more intimate. Kit was all at once conscious of the two of them side by side. Her aunt drove crouched over the wheel, the seat jammed so far forwards that her face took a greenish pallor from the dashboard lights. She was still wearing the red straw hat that she had put on to help Kit recognise her at the station; though, as it had turned out, they had been the only two there.

A bitumen platform propped on the railway embankment— stepping off the train, bag in hand, Kit had felt almost frighteningly exposed. She had come without expectation; she could not have imagined this. So much sky: on all sides, marshy paddocks going out flat to the horizon, paddocks not desolate but vacant. How long had Treen been standing on the platform with that fixed, deliberate smile? The two of them had paused, facing each other, while behind Kit the train, with a complaining grind of metal against metal, heaved itself off. At the sound of its whistle Treen's arm had jerked up. Stepping towards each other, neither of them had known whether they ought to hug. Making an effort, Treen had wrapped an arm around her niece's shoulders, patted her twice. Up close she smelt of face powder.
She was dressed as though, in choosing what to wear, she had been solving a series of separate problems: for smartness, a pressed blue Liberty shirt; for practicality: blue jeans; for comfort: white sneakers. Only as they walked to the car Treen's red hat, catching the light, flashed out the strangeness of their meeting; flashed out, also, some ambition for drama out of scale with how she dressed—they were never likely to have needed the hat.

The car passed over a cattle grid onto cleared ground. Then the house: a dark mass against dusk-coloured hill and sky. The drive was circular: the headlights, swinging across the house, lit up in sequence the corner of a high verandah, wrought-iron balustrades, concrete steps, so that when the car stopped Kit imagined the house beside them settling back into its own shape in the dark.

Treen said, ‘Do you remember any of it?'

‘Not really.' As soon as she spoke, Kit remembered stepping out from a room where she had been sleeping into an unlit hall. The door handle had been at eye level—ceramic, with a painted wreath of blue roses. Light from her room had angled across dark floorboards, a strip of carpet, and met absolute darkness. The memory still held a sense of terror: the house grown vast, dark halls opening endlessly out. She had no memory of her aunt at all.