The Life of Houses (6 page)

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.

‘We're eating out here.'

He brought her glass. ‘We are planning to eat, then? Only it's after nine.'

‘There are just the steaks to cook.' But she had dropped into one of the cane chairs. Tilting her glass, she watched a candle's light in it. ‘I spent the whole day looking through Kit's photo albums.'

‘How many can she have?'

‘It was a school project. They pander to it, this love of the past children have long before they have any past of their own.'

That day, falling asleep in Kit's bed, she had woken into another hour—it might have been another world. Through Kit's window, she had seen nothing but sky: the glassy blue of high summer, which looks permanent. The whole question of what she would do had become unreal.

He crouched awkwardly beside her, resting his elbow on the arm of her chair. Turning over her hand, he traced from her palm to her fingertips.

‘Did you find anything?'

‘More than you'd think. She'd arranged them—it took me ages to work it out—by how the scene was.'

‘How the scene was?' He tugged at her fingers, loosely now in his hand.

‘Just—how we looked at each other. All the ones where I was looking at her. The ones where she was looking at me. And with Matt—'

‘But…that was the project?'

Anna was so often irritated that she had disciplined her gestures. Now, she just perceptibly shrugged. ‘Or, how abstract teenagers are. All the same, it was effective. There we all were, at the end of a telescope.'

Matt had always hated photographs. He was the only person Anna knew who would refuse, point blank, to take tourists' photographs for them. In photo after photo of Kit's he stared back. His whole face slightly skewed, one nostril cut higher than the other, one cheekbone slanted up—it had been one of their jokes, how arrogance was built into his face. Poring over the albums, Anna felt as though he was looking directly at her out of years.

Peter shifted his weight onto the other heel, then stood up and dragged the other chair across. ‘You spent the whole day in Kit's room?'

‘Of course she'd promised to get everything tidy before she left. She'd lined all her shoes up in front of the wardrobe. The cleaner's always at me about her mess so I thought, “Well, I'll put them away.” Only when I opened the doors…She'd just been shoving things in, not even on hangers. Filthy T-shirts and jumpers, all her skirts
lumped on the bottom of the wardrobe. You know how forlorn dirty clothes look. I was shaking with anger, on my knees sorting through them: a pile for dry cleaning, a pile for throwing out.'

‘She doesn't mind you throwing her clothes out?' He spoke of Kit always with this careful reticence.

‘At her age I would have loved to have clothes like that. Anyway, in all that mess I find her school shoes. She'd been painting them with white dots. That's what they do, you know—I could see her secretly working away. Only she'd stopped. Given up half-way.'

‘She got bored of it?'

‘She told me she lost them. The thing is, I can remember doing that with my school shoes.'

‘The lie upset you?'

She shrugged. ‘Hardly a lie.' It was the sort of thing she could have told Matt. Tilting her glass across the candlelight, she watched the small bubbles file upwards.

He shifted sideways in his chair. ‘You've spoken to her?'

‘She called the gallery. She spoke to Cass. Something about the house being haunted.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I told you—I wasn't there. Anyway, what should I have said? I think it's haunted too.' Ignoring his look, she brought her glass again into the light. With a sense of marking out territory she added, ‘Why didn't Clare want children?'

Even watching her glass, she felt feeling flare in him: a piece of paper catching in a candle flame. Carefully, he set his own glass down, balancing it on the uneven brick and mortar of the garden wall.

‘We couldn't. I couldn't…'

The last phrase was scrupulous. Glancing at his face, she saw that it was not for her that he had added it. The scruple was for Clare: he would not blunt for himself the knowledge of his betrayal. With one hand, he drummed on the arm of his chair.

‘You told me she didn't want children.'

‘Yes.' He looked at her, his face without expression. ‘Our first night.'

There was a pause when she heard the low whirr of the candle flames. She could feel her thoughts rearranging. ‘So—' she said, and stopped.
She stuck by you
: the phrase came italicised into Anna's mind: the catch-cry of his set. ‘How old is she?'

‘Thirty-two. Thirty-three,' he corrected, priggishly.

‘So she'll marry some old flame and have twins.'

Her flippancy brought to his face an animal expression of pain.

‘I hope so.'

She saw then how he took refuge in his idea of Clare. Clare was the idol they would always carry: the thing of honour that he had sacrificed. She said slowly, ‘For her the worst of it is that I have a daughter.'

‘Can we leave Kit out of this?'

‘You're the one who asks about her.'

‘She's your daughter.'

‘No, I quite see why you didn't tell me. You stop Clare getting a child and then you get one for yourself.'

‘I don't
get
Kit.' Scraping his chair back, he got up and stood in front of her, staring down. On the ivy-covered wall behind him, leaf-shadows jigged grotesquely.

‘That's not what Clare thinks.'

At the thought of Clare his brittle mood snapped. Vaguely he passed a hand across his forehead, pushing back his hair. He turned his head and gazed into the kitchen. Following his eyes, she saw the kitchen bench with light pouring down on it, the room stilled and reduced by seeing it through glass. She felt almost frightened. What she saw was not where she lived: to live in it was not to see it all at once, like this.

He said, ‘I'll cook the steaks.'

Stepping inside, he stepped immediately into the world behind glass. She watched him pass the long rectangles of the window frames. The glass was reflecting him back to himself: he had forgotten that she could see him. Standing in front of the cutting board, he looked into his glass; he drained it off without pleasure. The strain of these last months showed in the blankness of his face as he set the glass down. In that single gesture, she saw how much suffering he had kept from her: she saw at once his discipline and his ambition. She had an increasing sense of his power: how remarkable the concentration that had manufactured the inwardness of their last months together. The fact was they had both gone so far out of their own lives that it had made them ruthless. Watching him, she felt not pity but something more intractable. She said to herself: I am middle-aged. In thought, she was turning again the pages of Kit's albums; it seemed to her that all her tenderness was stored up in those bright photographs. Tilting her chair back, she looked up at the square of sky: a reddish haze of reflected light. All around her, a prickling sound of insects in the ivy. She thought, what I wanted was
to get away. Now there he is in the house standing over the stovetop. Any moment he will start opening the cupboard doors. He will come out smiling with our two plates. She thought: But Kit is there now, in the room where at night the sea comes up to the window. She has gone back to where I was. Children have hours that lead nowhere. They have hours and hours. I used to spend whole afternoons on that bed, bored beyond anything. Now all my hours are small: they have afterwards always. When I am bored, it is small boredom; back then it was touching time itself. I will not tell Matt and he will come home and it will make no difference. Or I will tell Matt and it will be terrible: years will have ended. Still the same thing will go on. Peter will come home and cook the steaks…She thought, I could say the most terrible things to him, unforgivable things, and it would change nothing. She got up and went inside to help him find the plates.

Chapter Six

T
he garage was out the back of the petrol station. What her aunt called the office was a single room set down on concrete, its painted metal walls no thicker than its window frames. Kit waited outside, sitting on a broken-off concrete kerb, while Treen sorted out the paperwork. Already the concrete was warm. Over by the pumps light shimmered off an oil stain. Someone had set two terracotta pots by the door, filled now with shrunken stems and stubbed-out cigarettes. A smell of petrol hung over everything, left a taste at the back of her throat.

The man who had taken Treen's keys jerked the seat of the car back and put the window down. Driving with his elbow out, he revved and casually swung her car in behind the rest: cars parked frontto-back so close they almost touched. Slamming the door he went with a quick slouching walk into the shed and under a car cranked high on the stand. In the dimness there, he and another man said a few words. To Kit there was something mysterious about the way they stood together side by side studying the underside of the car: they had a physical ease with each other, with the machines around them. One of the men, sensing her eyes on them perhaps, glanced over his shoulder at Kit, turned back and spoke in the other man's ear. The other man looked across and shook his head, laughing.

Kit felt a prickling up the sides of her neck, the stinging humiliation of having them reject an offer that she hadn't made. These men who assumed the right to make judgements—it seemed to her the strangest thing, how it had never crossed their minds to wonder how they'd be judged themselves. What would it feel like, she wondered, to be so certain? She got up and went into the office. There, in a sort of rapt silence, Treen stood watching a white-haired receptionist who was staring at her computer screen with a fixed expression—of concentration or bewilderment it was hard to say. Kit sat on the single plastic chair.