The Life of Houses (4 page)

Impossible to imagine that her mother had ever been young. Kit pictured her mother seated at the dressing table, leaning in and lifting her chin as she ran mascara through her lashes, sitting up and looking coolly back at the glass. Treen's memories, her eagerness, embarrassed Kit. It made her think of the artists who clustered around her mother at gallery openings. Always one of them crouched down and asked Kit babyish questions, glancing at Anna as they laughed. Anna ignored them all. Greeting clients, she held two fingers on their inside wrist, as if taking their pulse, and then stepped back from them with a vague air. The more distracted she looked the more, Kit knew, she was moving with purpose. Those flattering artists had developed in Kit an instinct she would never lose: to her, Treen's enthusiasm for her mother was a confession of failure.

She tried to find her mother's features in Treen's face: the same high cheekbones and deep eye-sockets, the same long nose, its ridge as though someone had pinched the soft bone upwards—but Treen's face was old: the skin wrinkled down the side of her cheeks and
gathered at her jaw; there were knotted strings in her neck, which the loose skin sagged against. Even at the base of her neck, her skin was marred with tea-coloured freckles. Anna's skin, though, had the pale gloss of scar tissue. She wouldn't even cross the road without putting on a hat. And though her eyes were like Treen's, an indistinct colour, the shadows under them were grey and lustrous.

‘You might be her, standing there,' said her aunt. At once a blind came down over her expression. She pushed herself up with two hands off the bed. ‘You'll be tired, though,' she said. ‘Train trips are tiring.'

At the word ‘tired' Kit's mind glazed. She closed her eyes. Through the window behind her she heard the sea: a hollow continuous roar. With her eyes closed, the sound of the sea made the garden rise around her in the room: shapes in the dark, and her body felt asleep already.

‘Should I say goodnight to Audrey?'

‘They'll have gone off by now,' said Treen. ‘I should help Mum change.' She stayed where she was. ‘You can always wake me if you're frightened. My room's just across the hall.'

When her aunt had gone at last, Kit turned to face the dressing table. She saw at once the point of Treen's remark. Yellowish skin, features too big for her face: her expression, split across three mirrors, looked frightened. Lifting up her hair, she saw for the first time that bluish-pale hollow at the back of her neck, which other people saw all the time.

Chapter Three

B
ehind them Princes Bridge was crowded with men and women in suits hurrying to the city. Though the sea was close, behind the converted warehouses and highrise apartments, the river, unhurried here, low-banked and wide, had none of the sea's glamour. The dress that Anna had packed to wear was too formal for this morning brightness, the river's variable light. Wearing it, she was conscious still of getting ready in the hotel bathroom. On her skin, she felt the seediness of hotels, even expensive ones—the impersonality which forces guests always to be intimate. Why did anyone like marble, the clink of glass set down on it? But then, what had become of her that simply getting ready in a different bathroom could make her feel so off-key? Not the face that she built again in the mirror—she could do that anywhere, and in the dark—but the shape of the movements themselves: how far to the drawer, to the tap, to the towel, movements each with their accompanying small sound. Even now she was waiting for the small click of a closing drawer. In truth, she thought, in the privacy of her own bathroom she was like those people who practice tai chi in the park, except that her tai chi was miniature: performed on the field of her face. Right now she wanted nothing more than to go to her own house and shower and start the day again.

He said: ‘And you're certain she saw?'

‘I told you: we stood doing our lipstick in the same mirror.'

Anna chafed her hands on the stone parapet. The gesture had been involuntary. Only the fact that it slightly hurt made her notice what she'd done—that and the flesh warmth of the stone. The sort of gesture an actor would use, she thought—here she was in her life like that tourist she'd overheard on the way here saying ‘There's the postcard,' as they passed the Cathedral.

Peter said: ‘Well but she could have thought—'

‘Her face in the mirror. Like a dissipated doll. No, if she'd thought it was nothing she'd have asked after Matt.'

She heard him draw in breath. Under level eyelids, she knew, he was taking account of that life of hers in which he played no part. ‘They know each other?' he said carefully.

‘Only they see each other every morning at school. She's all over him, as a matter of fact.'

He had been looking down at his hands, pressing his thumbs one over the other. Now he twisted his head sideways to study Anna.

‘What did you talk about?'

‘School holiday plans.' Anna's voice went up a pitch: ‘They've taken a place at the beach. She's going to look out for Kit if they take the ferry across.'

With an impatient gesture of her hands, she stepped back from the voice she'd put on. The crowd was there, at her back. Hemmed in, she stared down at some tourists stepping from the quay onto a flat-bottomed cruise-boat. She loathed the jaunty riverboats, the lycra bike-riders, that girl down there, who looked as though she'd
read Chanel's advice in
Grazia
—‘Take one thing off before you leave the house'—and taken off her skirt. She found she could not exorcise except by this vast contempt last night's humiliation: the sly glee on that bitch's face.

In all this, Peter was the one person she could stand. But then, how many times had they even spent a morning together? One of them had always been dressing in the dark, stepping from a hotel lobby into night and a taxi home. Two mornings, they had had: enough, she thought, to say that mornings didn't suit affairs. Breakfast in bed looking their worst, eating where they'd slept—it brought back to her how her body had felt in adolescence, the claustrophobia of close-packed cells.

She had woken early in the hotel's upholstered silence and imagined her own house uninhabited, its curtains open, moonlight marking the shadow of the window frame on her bedroom floor. Half asleep still, the image had held for her a dream's power: the house less a place than a cluster of habits belonging to left and right, upstairs and down: the place where she became free of her bag, where she stood with a knife in her hand, where she sat down with a drink. Dry-mouthed in that hotel room, its air-conditioning, its soft light, she had felt an isolation as sudden as terror. Turning her head on the pillow she had discovered the sharp corner of a headache. That headache she had still…

She said, ‘If we'd just gone straight back to the hotel after dinner—'

‘You wanted a drink.'

‘I'd drunk too much. You were sober.'

He straightened. ‘You're not making too much of this? What did she see, after all—'

‘The sofa—'

He shrugged. ‘It's not like you to worry what someone like that thinks.'

He never felt pity without impatience. She pressed her ring fingers against the inner edge of her eye sockets. She said, ‘I was in the bathroom this morning, exfoliating, and I suddenly realised—I keep thinking I'm getting down to younger skin but that's not right. There are only older skins behind my face.'

He laughed. ‘I got you up too early.' Resting one hand on her shoulder, he massaged the base of her neck.

‘Not here.'

He dropped his hand. A riverboat slid out from under the bridge beneath them. They stood watching the boat open distance out. Some children were running along the deck waving flags.

‘And if this woman does tell, it couldn't be,' he said, ‘quite a good thing?'

A businessman passing behind Anna bumped his briefcase into the back of her knees. She cried out as if it had hurt, with an exaggerated movement of her hands. ‘Can we walk?'

Turning, falling in step with the crowd, they fell in at once with its anonymity. Peter walked without swinging his briefcase, keeping his upper body very still. At the lights, waiting to cross, still they said nothing—the two of them watching traffic signals with abstracted intensity. Only when they had crossed the road, climbed steps—the crowd breaking apart across the uneven paving of the city square— he said: ‘I've given Clare the house.'

‘That's nice of you.'

He kept on. ‘There's a rental flat I have to sell. Then she'll have the house, paid off.'

‘And that's it? You start again—'

‘I start again,' he echoed.

The remoteness of his voice made her look up. Coming into the square they had climbed away from the river. Now behind him the scene opened out. There was the river, curving through parkland. At this distance, it had a surface of scratched glass. Anna remembered his face as she had seen it that morning in their hotel room. Leaning over him, she had registered it as a physical fact: small-pored dry papery skin, stubble greyer along the jawline. How strange it had seemed that she could touch it. This was the face that rose in her mind in the weeks when she did not see him. Now she pressed one finger against his cheek. ‘But you can't expect me to be happy about this.'

He stopped abruptly. ‘I do. I do expect that.' She saw that he had given away the house gladly, with a mental flourish. Though in small matters he could be touchy, over-sensitive, still his success—he was already a partner—had released in him no ease. If anything, the law had brought a moral dimension to the long disciplining of his will. Never possibly a crusader, he had nonetheless this almost chivalric devotion to justice.

Anna said, ‘How dignified you look, staring off like that.'

He set his briefcase down on the cobblestones. ‘This isn't real to you. If someone seeing us together can frighten you so much.'

She could not speak. She fixed her eyes on the river, its saving indifference. She said, ‘You talk about custody of your dog.'

‘Benji?' His head flinched sideways. ‘Clare's keeping Benji.' He looked at his watch. ‘I can't be late today.'

He was going to walk away up the street. The anger she had felt, which she had been almost glad to feel, abruptly fell away, leaving her with vacant dismay. Though all morning she had longed for solitude, now, this moment before they pressed their cheeks together, mothwing-like, she felt stricken, full of small delays of tenderness, as though only this anticipation of parting, a foretaste of remorse, allowed her feeling to achieve its true dimensions.

He took a step and turned. ‘You know I won't get to you till eight tonight. Client meeting.'

‘You said.'

The crowd around him had broken into individual faces. A woman, freckled, stark-faced under yellow curls, stepped past them both and turned to stare. That instant, Anna pictured the two of them as they were printed on that stranger's retina: two figures reduced and facing each other.

‘Peter…' But he had stepped already into that blank of time between their meetings.

Chapter Four

W
hat time was it? Greyish morning light swayed on the far wall. Kit could hear nothing from the house. The room surprised her with its ugly but reasonable daylight proportions. She had fallen asleep as soon as she lay down, only to wake later with a sense of vertigo in utter darkness. That moment, she could not have guessed where the ceiling was, or the floor. She had stretched one hand out, guessingly, into a dark that was not empty but pricklingly alive, made of points turning about themselves. Her hand fumbling around had touched nothing, gone into a void…The next moment, she had touched the wall behind her pillow.

Now, light had returned the room to itself. From the height of her bed she could see beyond the verandah a faded garden of tea-tree and tussock grass. It was early, she decided, the sky uncoloured: it would be hot later. Hunger, which had started as an ache, now made its own almost painless delirium. Light-headed, restless, she fought free of the bed. Did they have breakfast together? She felt at once the queasy anxiety bound up with the business of other people.

The window swung outwards on hinges. As soon as she had opened it, she heard the sea's single onrush break into separate waves. The day was ahead of her, a blank. How strange she felt. Beyond
the garden, a dune appeared to float in air still hazed with night's sea-dampness. In the last months at home, conscious always of the question, ‘What are you doing?'—worse, of the thought, ‘What
is
she doing?'—all that she did had worked to thwart attention. She had never read so much in her room with the door shut. She had never consumed so much television. Now, solitude made a vacancy; at once forlorn and exhilarated, she could not remember what she had ever done. She checked the time on her phone. Not much after five o'clock. Had she ever been awake this early? She thought about calling her father. What time was it in London?

On an impulse of defiance—at the same time, planning to tell anyone who might see her that she needed phone reception—she climbed through the window and stepped onto the verandah. The tiles were cold under her feet. Bare concrete steps led down into the garden. This part, edged with tea-tree, formed a sort of stage. On its far side rock-strewn, scattered with scratchy bushes, the land dropped and then rose again almost at once into a dune so dense with tea-tree it resembled a stopped grey sea.

Propped on an uncomfortable bluestone seat at the centre of this stage, Kit felt like the picture of somebody enjoying a view. Near her feet stone urns held the stems of dead geraniums. She felt too aimless, too expectant, to stay still long. The sharp edge of the seat was pressing into her thigh. She got up and followed a gravel path around the house, stepping from weed to weed, flinching over the sharp stones. Everything, like her pale toes, felt newly exposed. Her mother had been a child here. Again in her mind, she tested what Treen had said last night. It was like glimpsing her mother
through a camera lens: not young—impossible to think of her as young—but distant and reduced.