The Life of Houses (10 page)

Scott caught her wrist in one hand. ‘You're thinking too much.' Turning her hand over, he prised the pencil from her grasp. ‘Here, look. This is you.' Bunching his shoulder up, wrinkling up his face, he jabbed his wrist back and forth over the paper. ‘You're drawing with your knuckles. Now look…' He took a step back. Standing at an angle to the canvas, with the pencil balanced between his thumb and his first two fingers, his arm looped up and down marking a loose figure on the paper. ‘From the shoulder. See? I'm relaxed, I'm feeling the line.' With his arm still working, he called: ‘Do you see, Carol? You see the difference?'

He stepped back. ‘Treen's got it. No, keep going, Treen. Everybody watching Treen for a minute. See? We're not hunching our shoulder; we're not worrying; our elbow's loose.'

Kit had a frozen sense of them all: Carol watching with a set, tolerant smile, Miranda, with head tilted, wrinkling her forehead slightly—Kit guessed she was noticing Treen's clothes. Only the model did not move her eyes but stood isolated, remote in her indifference.

Scott stepped into the middle of the circle, clapped his hands once. ‘Next pose.'

‘Oh!' Treen stood with one hand across her mouth. ‘I've just…I forgot Mum's medicine.'

‘For her heart?' Carol stepped forward. ‘Call your father.'

Treen was already over by the chairs digging through her bag. She held the phone at arm's length while she stabbed out the number. They stood watching in silence while the phone rang.

‘Dad! Yes, we've been held up…I know, I forgot to put it out. You have? Which one?
Which?
No, it's alright. She'll be fine. I'll come. I'm on my way.' She hung up and looked starkly at them. ‘He's given her the wrong one.'

Carol hurried over to get her own phone out of her bag and stood holding it in her two hands.

‘Just a sleeping pill,' said Treen. ‘She'll need propping up, is all…' She clutched her bag with two hands to her stomach.

‘Scott, I am sorry.' She smiled ruefully at the model as she said this, and at Kit. Then, with a mechanical jerk she started for the door.

‘Your shopping!' called Carol. ‘Miranda, take it to her!'

But it was Scott who picked up the shopping. Together, he and Kit pushed out after Treen into daylight. She was already shouldering up the road.

‘My God! Where's she parked?'

‘It's at the service place.'

They waited on the concrete while Treen sorted out payment. The wind, catching in the shopping bags, made a tearing sound.
The men were still there. This time they had a red ute cranked over their heads. Throwing out a few words from time to time, they worked away at it: unhurried, at ease. At a shout from the receptionist one of them came across, took the keys from Treen, brought the car round and left it with the door open and the engine running, all without noticing them, without changing expression at all.

‘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

A
udrey'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 Digest
s 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

T
reen 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.