The Life of Houses (8 page)

‘What time is it?'

‘After midnight.' He answered without looking at his watch.

She said, ‘I don't think I've walked like this, just walked at night, since Kit was born.'

There was something festive about the trees at night. Their trunks had disappeared into the darkness. The streetlights shone up through leaves that appeared to float in air, ornate mysterious structures, so that walking along the road between them she felt as though she was taking part in some ritual. She thought: ownership, memory, even expectation make no claim here: we are alone as adults never are. She took hold of his arm. Through the material of his shirt
his flesh, warm and separate, seemed to give off an electric force.

She said, ‘I see why they scream and break things.'

‘They?'

‘Teenagers. Disturbing my peace at 3am.'

He nodded. He was following, along the painted line of the road, his own thoughts. His face, whenever they stepped under a streetlight, looked pinched with exhaustion. So long as they were under the streetlight his face looked close. Stepping into the dark again his face seemed to draw back; the street itself drew back and made one darkness. They went from dark to light, dark to light, until it seemed to Anna that they were walking on the spot while the light swung over them from an imaginary lighthouse at the end of the street.

They crossed onto the gravel path that edged the gardens, the wrought iron boundary fence rising like strange foliage beside them in the dark. On the other side a possum, watching them, dropped its tail and sprang into the shrubbery.

They were heading to the beach. Not speaking, not looking at each other, they might have been sleepwalkers. The gardens were full of shadow and shifting leaf sounds: a secret existence alongside them, which composed their togetherness. Anna thought: two people side by side are not apart if they are listening. She only realised how far they had depended on that fenced-in unquiet darkness when they came to Beach Road, which never was calm; where the cars, rushing into their headlights, made her conscious of exhaustion, vacancy.

They went down concrete steps to the sand. To their right, at the end of a long curve, the city rose unreally over the bay. From this
distance it looked as though the buildings themselves, concrete and stone, gave off a reddish haze. The beach, its thick sand pitted with the day's footsteps, seemed more manufactured than those glowing outcrops. He bent to take off his shoes.

‘Needles,' she said.

Without comment, without looking at her, he straightened up, plunged away down the sand. Beyond him the sea was almost black, its surface oily with light. Small waves ran reflections of light up the beach. Out of nowhere she remembered sitting at the restaurant the previous night, drinking in solitude. Here was the sound that had been missing then: these waves sounded less like waves than like dry leaves turning over.

Without turning his head he said, ‘I can't keep doing this.'

‘I know.' She remembered how he had laid his shaver and shaving cream, his toothpaste and toothbrush, in a neat row by the hotel basin. Loneliness had released in him an implacable humility. These last weeks, exiled to a Sydney hotel, the friends who had supported him most had been the ones he liked least.

He said: ‘I've asked about a transfer.'

‘When?'

‘Last week. They said they'd look around.'

‘But, when will they tell you?' What she should have felt was gratification, a sense of the future widening out. She dug her fingers into the sand. Damp-cold, it felt greasy.

Along the beach a wooden jetty extended out under old-fashioned lights. They seemed to pour down bright swirling dust, the light they gave off only like light where it touched on water. It looked to Anna
unbearably lonely. A few dinghies, moored alongside the jetty, made metallic sounds.

He said: ‘I thought you'd be pleased.'

‘But you know you can't stay in the house with Kit.'

‘They're looking for an apartment for me.' He glanced at her and added: ‘It's all right. A client asked for me to move here.'

Behind them on the footpath a couple passed. The girl's laugh— mocking, raucous—broke up the overwarm stillness of the street. She is laughing at us, Anna thought. How desolate we must look: a middle-aged couple, the man in a business suit, sitting out on a beach after midnight.

A passing car sent their shadows sweeping across the sand in front of them like a clock being wound. Peter stretched out his legs and drew them in again. Usually he took any discomfort as an affront: he would not tolerate a cold coffee, a seat in the draught of a door.

She took hold of his arm. ‘But I am pleased,' she said.

A wave ran high up the sand—a cargo ship perhaps, silently crossing the bay. Did they cross the bay at night? She thought of it out there, sliding through black water.

‘We came here,' she said. ‘Matt and I, straight off the plane. Our first afternoon.' Steel-coloured, greasy-looking in the rain, the sea, matching their jetlag, had released in them a sort of delirium. ‘It was pouring.' The beach deserted, beer cans and faded ice-cream wrappers sinking into the wet sand…Under that grey sky, with freighters sliding across the horizon, the holiday park by the sea that Matt had been dreading had shown itself as an industrial wasteland.

She said, ‘It's why we bought the house. Nobody lived here then.'

‘What I have never understood is why you came back. Why you didn't stay in London.'

‘Benno sent us.'

‘Benno?' he echoed incredulously.

‘Matt's father. It was his idea, setting up here. He kept wanting Amy to get him a Rover Thomas. In the end Amy said: “Well, Anna's Australian.”'

‘So you and Matt—'

‘I was working for his father, yes.'

‘You got the picture for him?'

‘By the time I got it back to London it was worth three times what he'd paid for it. They had me round for dinner and he said why not set up a gallery here. Why not?'

‘That was it. A dinner?'

‘He made it sound spontaneous. I found out later he'd done the business plan. He's one of those bankers—he manages to be very good at collecting art without understanding it at all. He just always knows where the money's going. He bought up in Notting Hill when it was still bedsits. That's when he met Matt's mother. Hanging out with artists half his age and the whole time they were off their heads he was noticing the real estate.'

‘And he sent Matt with you?'

‘He sent Matt with me,' she echoed. ‘Keeping an eye on me, I suppose, though it was meant to be Matt's year off after university. It never crossed his mind Matt would stay. He didn't think it was the kind of place you
could
stay.'

‘He must have thought the two of you—'

‘Yes, but not…' She pushed sand away under her hands. ‘The way my mother used to speak about tradesmen—you know,
A little man to fix the plumbing
.'

‘You showed him,' Peter said, in a high, ironic voice. More coldly he added, ‘What a lot of arranging you all did.'

‘I can be at a tram stop and before I know it I've registered the price of everyone's shoes. Matt was possible but it wasn't just that. We…' She suddenly saw again what she had not remembered for years: Matt's face that first afternoon when they had stepped out of the taxi into the rain: a striated brightness, against which his face had seemed startlingly close. It had been the surprise of the rain, perhaps: they had looked at each other so directly she had seen her own reflection in the pupils of his eyes.

Peter looked along the beach at the city rising over the dark water. ‘What I don't understand is, why you didn't go back with him.' He picked up her hand. Not looking at it, he explored with his fingers the lines of her palm. ‘He didn't ask you,' he went on dreamily. ‘Or he did, but he was going to go anyway, whatever you said. He hurt your feelings.'

‘Don't…' What she wanted—what she had ever wanted—seemed the least of it. That moment, she saw how unreal all this time since Matt left had been. It had been afterwards, simply. The dread she felt was something she remembered from dreams, when whatever she did was from the beginning too late, too slow. She found herself thinking of Peter's dog, of Peter's formal, considerate settlement with Clare. Impossible to go back to the beginning…

The day they had discovered she was pregnant Matt had said that
he ‘wasn't an optimiser'. He had meant it as reassurance. She was enough. He never had allowed the sort of talk that indulged self-regard. From the first, that refusal of his had built itself into their relationship. It had been their arrogance, she thought now: a feeling that if they spoke of feeling they would be like all the rest, wanting reassurance all their lives.

She said, ‘Matt refuses to smile when he meets people. He thinks it's like dogs rolling over, watching strangers smile at each other.'

‘You never smile.'

‘I learnt that from him. It was Matt who said I shouldn't sell to just anyone.'

‘His father was rich.'

‘His mother wasn't. Matt's father was brutal to her. Twentyone when she married him and even then he was sleeping with his secretary. Somehow he'd convinced himself she wouldn't mind. He left her with a dreary apartment in Notting Hill and the Warhol he'd given her when Matt was born. And he still carries on as though she treated him badly.'

How far away Matt sounded when she talked of him like this. It was true, what she said, but it felt like a lie. It was a lie. Matt was the shape in their bed in the dark, he was the one who made coffee in the morning. His voice called out from the study when she walked in the door. The smell of seaweed and petrol, the grey sand marked with shadowy black footprints—all she saw seemed built out of feeling without substance. I am asleep, she thought, hearing a wave with a sucking sound retreat down the sand.

The couple passing along the street had gone up into one of the
apartments overlooking the road. Anna could still hear that laugh. Sudden, abandoned, frightening. Young, she thought suddenly.
Young
. It seemed almost impossible that this was the same hour where Kit was.

The years when Kit was at primary school Anna had known at each moment where she was, the way she would know without conscious thought where a window was in a room. These days, whenever Kit was asleep in her own bed Anna felt something right itself in her. She had come to realise it would be part of her always: this atonal feeling whenever Kit was somewhere she did not know. Trying again to picture Kit at Sea House, Anna felt the house build itself around her as it had been when she was growing up in it: the queasy familiarity of mealtimes, the unfree defiance of her bedroom with a slammed door. But that place was years ago. Kit could not be there.

‘I drove Matt to the airport,' she said. ‘We were early. We checked in his luggage and still had an hour in the lounge. There we were, looking across at each other. The little armchairs in clusters, the stunned light they have in those places. I felt as though I'd forgotten how to live. He went away through the doors and I drove home and the house felt as though it was somebody else's house. The light was strange and I felt sick—you know that fake brightness things have after fever? For one thing, I'm never home in the middle of the day, or only when I'm not well. I sat there, at his desk. He'd packed up everything and it didn't feel as though he'd gone. It felt as though he'd never been.'

‘How much?' Not believing her blank look Peter went on, deliberately brutal: ‘To buy him out. Matt's father.'

‘I've no idea.' She heard him take in breath. It was like Peter to keep insisting on practicalities with the sea sliding up to their feet in the dark. ‘I should have thought of that before. But thinking wasn't what we were doing.'

He said nothing. Glancing up, she saw him pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. The nakedness was dreadful—his face all lines.

‘You haven't even told Matt about us.'

‘I will…'

Closing her eyes, hearing the small waves exhaust themselves, it seemed to Anna that she was in a position so false it made its own logic. She could have foreseen how her betrayal would cause her to lose faith in herself. What she could not have foreseen was how she would forfeit, even before this, her faith in other people—even Matt. Peter had shown from the start a sort of compassionate chivalry. For him, she was the one betrayed. His assumption had been so much a part of their beginning she had almost forgotten that it was not, so far as she knew, true. Perhaps Matt really had gone back to have time with his mother. Perhaps only her own ornate dishonesties had made her incapable of believing that simple truth.

‘It's what we've done,' she cried out. ‘We've lied so much we can't see what anything is.'

Peter took his phone from his pocket. He held it out at arm's length, its screen turned towards her. ‘It's afternoon there.' She bent her head to look at the phone in his hand: a little neat thing; and she was suddenly conscious of satellites advancing through the overhead dark. She pictured, as if from that distance, the two of them side by
side on sand as leached and pockmarked as moon images. What had they ever talked about? All their unmeaning talk…

She said, ‘We're never anywhere. One is a dream or the other. This is real and then I go home and you're nowhere. You're saying it's simple but that's what we haven't been.'

He stood up, brushed some sand off his phone and slid it into his pocket. She kept sitting. Something, she thought, was final. Colourlessly he said, ‘I have to work tomorrow.'

Chapter Eight

T
reen at last discovered her shopping list, folded in her shirt pocket all along. The two of them
just popped
into the supermarket. Kit heard her aunt's phrase with a flicker of mockery: her mother was vicious about people who spoke in what she called the diminutive tense. But the next moment, watching Treen step into the supermarket with her shopping list out in front of her like a map, Kit disliked herself. There was something unassailable about Treen—perhaps just that she didn't try to be impressive.