The Life of Houses (7 page)

‘One o'clock is the earliest we can do.' With one hand the receptionist held down a page of the calendar, which kept guttering in the breeze from an electric fan. December showed a woman in a bikini and make-up throwing her hair back and laughing while she rolled a car tyre along the road ahead of lines of traffic.

‘Unless you want to come back on Wednesday. Wednesday's pretty free.'

‘No, I'm at the helpline on Wednesdays,' said Treen. ‘We'll leave it as is.' Her smile comprehended Kit. ‘We'll have a morning in town.' Resolutely she set the strap of her handbag over her shoulder.

Kit followed her out, over the concrete of the petrol station onto the footpath around the corner where a shop's awning made some shade. At once they stopped. ‘Well,' said Treen, and looked at her watch.

They had stopped outside a hair salon. ‘Passer's by welcome' read a sign taped to the inside glass. The salon was deserted: a row of chairs facing a wall of mirrors. The linoleum gleamed. Somewhere nearby, somebody was mowing grass. Next to the beauty salon,
weatherboard houses had signboards by their gates.
Chinese medicine acupuncture massage
had a cobwebby wind chime by the door. In the window of
Tax Accountant Conveyancing and Wills
a cat, lying in the sun between the curtain and the glass, raised its head and fixed on them its green affronted stare. Kit thought: a morning here, with Treen. Everything vacant, shut up in itself: mornings in those front rooms. A few blocks down she saw tables on the street, umbrellas. Beyond that, where the other side of the hill should have been, was the sea. From where they stood, it appeared to be stacked up, the colour of crushed tinfoil, and dazzling.

‘We should have a look at the bay,' said Treen, and then, as they started downhill, ‘Your mother knows you got here alright?'

‘I left a message.'

‘How is Anna?' Treen asked and then sighed, moved her hands. ‘All this about our parents never coming to see her. You've seen how they are. They're too old. What can I do?'

‘She's got the opening,' said Kit.

After that they walked without speaking. The fruit store's box of cheap bananas filled the air with sweet repellent smell. A feeling of estrangement took hold of Kit. The footpath set down on sand, the gift store windows crowded with porcelain figurines, candlestick holders, hand-creams, decorative tea-towels: there seemed no reason for any of it to be here and not in another place, somewhere entirely different. They crossed by the post office, a high brick building with a turret above a wall of post-office boxes. A woman in a beige suit, fine blonde hair rolled up on her head, was opening one of the little brass doors with a key. The woman darted a look at Kit, her shrunken face
tight with suspicion, colourless eyebrows pulled down under arches she'd drawn with a dark pencil.

‘There's Scott,' said Treen.

She had caught sight of a man seated on his own at the outdoor table of a café, staring at a woman reading the paper. He held the top part of his body still while his hand darted back and forth over a sketchbook hidden on his lap.

‘A great friend of your mother's,' said Treen. She stopped by him.

He pushed his chair back and stood up. Not much taller than Kit, his long arms and barrel chest belonged to a taller person. He clasped Treen's hands. With ceremonial slowness he kissed her on both cheeks.

‘You heard?' His voice started unexpectedly low in his chest.

‘I saw the paper.'

‘Sickening. I can't—' He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and turned to Kit. She saw wet lower lids, watery pale eyes.

‘This is Anna's daughter,' said Treen.

‘Anna's daughter,' he repeated, as if to himself. He stood so close Kit could smell the aftershave he wore: a greenish smell not really like pine. A wide face: the short nose, the mouth with its bulging lower lip, looked carved from a single piece of wood. Bald on top, he shaved the rest, leaving a transparent fuzz. He had the thick tough skin of a perpetual sunbaker: even the top of his head was tanned and showed pinkish-brown blotches unevenly edged like continents on a globe. A jade amulet nestled among the sand-coloured tight curls of hair on his chest. His eyes slid over Kit, making her aware in turn of her forehead, the scab on her cheek where she'd scratched
a pimple, the skin above her singlet, the inside curve of her arm.

At home when Kit passed the fruit shop at the end of her street the men who worked there stopped talking: a pause like an indrawn breath, laughter and talk breaking out as she walked away: impossible to walk without feeling conscious of their eyes on her back. Scott's look was not like that. If anything dissatisfied, passionless, it made her no more than a chair or table.

‘You could be her,' he said. He looked back at Treen: ‘Anna's here?'

Treen put on her pious face. ‘She couldn't get away.'

He said nothing to this. After a pause he laughed. ‘My God!

Anna's daughter.'

‘Scott's our artist,' said Treen.

Kit stepped back with a sense that she wanted air. She did not for a moment believe that she looked like her mother—that her mother had ever looked like her. She saw that he'd closed his sketchbook before he stood up.

‘What were you drawing?'

He leant towards her. ‘Strangers' faces,' he said, his voice conspiratorial. He nodded toward the woman at the next table, absorbed in her newspaper still.

‘They don't mind?'

‘They don't notice. Some do, they get angry. They think I'm stealing their souls.' The last phrase he said in a thin high voice. ‘As if their faces were private property on the street.' He spoke with mocking astonishment. Kit found herself smiling though in truth she was shocked that any stranger had the right to make and keep a picture of her face.

‘Have you heard anything?' said Treen. ‘When the funeral…'

Scott stopped, one hand still raised in its gesture. Talking to Kit, he had forgotten Treen momentarily and yet so utterly that the shock of what she said ran through his body. For the first time the woman at the next table glanced around. After another moment Scott breathed out. ‘I've been looking at his photographs all morning. You must see them. Come up.'

Treen turned to Kit. ‘Would you mind?'

Scott had already gone ahead. There was a toyshop on the ground floor. Alongside it, a flight of stairs went up the outside of the building. Someone had cut a door into the wall there. The stairs, of soft half-rotted wood, made noises as Kit climbed. Improvised, haphazard— Conscious of Scott watching her, waiting for her on a deck the size of a landing, inwardly she despised her conciliatory smile. She was being Anna's daughter for them. Not mine, she wanted to say: all this has nothing to do with me.

Scott held the door open with elaborate courtesy. Kit stopped inside the room: easels, paint all over the table, stacked canvases, clothes and rags piled in the corner; the smell of turpentine: a room identical to all the rooms she'd had to wait in while her mother talked to one artist or another. The feeling of recognition was strange, as though she had stepped not into a room but back into her childhood: here, Scott and Treen were out of place.

He walked to his table. ‘So much life in them,' he said. Photographs were spread out there and in neat rows on the floor. From behind, his neck and head made a column.

‘Such a waste,' breathed Treen, beside him. She had brushed out
only the front of her hair. It kinked in at the back where she had slept. ‘I can't understand it.'

‘That father,' said Scott. ‘I can't—' He picked up one of the photographs. ‘I'm going to put these in a show. And his paintings.'

‘Well…' said Treen. And then, ‘Poor Rosemary.'

Their grief together was strange. It closed them in. She had no reason to be here, except that they had brought her. Now, seeing them turn their backs, she felt herself to be nowhere. Her hand on the arm of her chair, that freckle on the back of it: she remembered primary school, holding her two hands up to her face. That freckle had meant her right hand. This body, her own, but she was not here: her body, not her, was in the room, with them. Something had happened; somebody had died. She had not thought that Treen could have secrets. Treen, in her blue linen shirt, her ironed jeans: there was something grotesque about it; something rapturous about the way they bent their heads together. Their way of ignoring so much made Kit notice more: the creaking sound of some loose join in the decking; and that lasting roar: it was the wind, not the sea, she could hear. Thinly from the toy shop below came the sound of women talking.

Treen remembered and looked back at Kit. Her eyes, still blind with feeling, showed their blueness. Hands out, she came across the room. She crouched stiffly by Kit's chair, so close Kit could see small veins threading the skin under her nostrils. ‘I'm sorry,' Treen said. ‘Your first morning here. I wasn't going to mention. Only one of our young men…' She gestured back: ‘So talented.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘Oh…' Treen looked dazedly at the door. ‘Crash. A car crash.' She took hold of Kit's hands. ‘I haven't told them at the house yet. Dad gets so upset.'

So much raw feeling: Kit had to work hard not to pull away her hands. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Scott watching. It was a stranger who had died. Kit's shock was nerveless. What she mostly felt was guilt that she did not feel more. She pictured again on Treen's head that unnecessary hat.

‘I won't say anything.'

‘Thank you dear.' Treen stood upright, found a handkerchief in her sleeve, blew her nose. Standing, she rocked back on her heels. She stood immense—a statue. Some confused sense of ritual made Kit feel that she, too, should get up from her chair. Standing, she wished she had stayed where she was. The two of them looked back at Scott.

‘Your aunt's upset,' he said. ‘We all are. When you're our age you'll understand, such waste…' He touched Treen's arm just above the elbow. ‘We feel the years he hasn't had.' He bent down to look at one of the photographs. ‘I'm so angry with him,' he said in a low voice. ‘Isn't that terrible. I'm angry with him! His father too, of course.'

Treen raised her arms and let them drop. ‘I don't know how I'll tell them.'

Kit stepped around them both to look at the dead boy's photographs. They were close-ups of grass stalks, black and white with colour tints—ordinary. Only the thought of the boy's death made them frightening, the way the stalks filled the foreground.

Behind her, the two of them were talking about an art class. She heard Scott say: ‘But do come today. Bring her with you.'

He had dismissed them. Saying goodbye, he bent over her hand, brought his heels together—an oddly formal gesture. The door shut. Cast into the weird glare of midday, Kit and Treen glanced uncertainly down the street. A dry inland wind was making the flags outside the ice cream shop lift and subside. Treen tucked her glasses back into her handbag and clipped it shut.

‘The woman said one for the car.'

Kit had forgotten about the car. Scott had made himself the day's event. That was what he could do, she saw already. Leaving him, they had stepped into a blank. Treen opened her handbag again and peered into it. She took out an ironed, folded handkerchief and patted at her nose.

‘Don't tell me I've forgotten the shopping list.' She looked back at the closed door. ‘Listen, it's so hot.'

The teashop was air-conditioned. They sat at a table by the window, the street hidden by half-curtains of tea-coloured lace. Between them on the table, a white ceramic teardrop vase held a yellowing plastic rose.

‘He was a great friend of your mother's. They were always together. Not in that way, I don't think, but they were…' Treen pushed the centre of her top lip down before taking a sip of tea. Thoughtfully, she chewed on her scone. She had dropped back into her own existence, a vagueness like depths of water.

‘What were the classes?'

‘What's that?' Treen roused. A crumb at the edge of her mouth was about to fall. ‘Oh! Life drawing.'

‘Did he mean I should come?'

‘Well, you could.' She spread cream over her second scone. ‘It's a lot of old ladies. And the models…'

‘Oh! I know what life drawing is.'

‘You might enjoy it, then.' Treen frowned at the scone held halfway to her mouth. ‘Only I thought, your first day…' Kit could see Treen rearranging her thoughts, like chairs. ‘Of course, if you'd like to. Scott did seem a little…' Treen ducked her head and started searching again through her handbag.

‘A little what?' Kit said. Treen's baffled mildness woke in her a new sense of her own power. Seeing Scott's face in her mind as she had seen it then—so close she could count the pale eyelashes—she wished that she had been ruder, that she had said something.

‘The thing is,' murmured Treen, ‘I so clearly remember tucking it in here before we left.' Eyes glazed, Treen looked back through the morning. ‘Unless we stopped somewhere?'

‘He seemed a little
what
?'

‘What's that, dear?'

‘Scott. You were saying something.'

‘Oh! I think I was saying I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you came along.'

Chapter Seven

A
nna closed the gate and stopped. Night had made the street a single fact. The lights were out in all the houses; the houses had drawn back. The road, which in daytime they would not have noticed, had come into its own: its white line had the force of a vanishing point. Without discussing it, the two of them left the footpath and walked along the centre of the road. She was so tired that she had gone past tiredness into that state, like dreaming, when everything she saw hung before her eyes, separate and without background. His leather-soled shoes struck hollow sounds from the bitumen.