The Pre-War House and Other Stories

by Alison Moore

  We watched them go, and even when they were long gone, it seemed as if the black fumes still hung in the air, and the sound of the engine still throbbed in our ears, and the sensation of her passing fingertips still lingered in my hair, at the roots.

  My grandmother made dinner, a salad with cold cuts. We ate with the door and the windows open, until the kitchen filled with flies, and then with the door and the windows closed, despite the heat, the closeness, and the flies which were already in.

  My mother came home in the small hours. The motorbike lingered in our driveway, disturbing us, polluting the clear, night air. When her friend rode away, my mother came in, through the kitchen door – I heard the squeal of her key turning in the lock, the creak of the stairs, the throb of the water pipes, the complaining of the ageing house woken in the middle of the night. I heard my father’s voice, my mother’s name (‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘Barbara, Barbara . . .’). And then there was silence, and I held my breath.

  My mother’s friend appeared every few weeks after that, and took her away for the day and sometimes overnight, and it seems to me we spent that whole summer just waiting for his motorbike to appear, just waiting for her to leave.

  In the winter, ice forms inside the pipes and sometimes they burst.

  There is a programme on the radio about the history of quarantine, about ships anchored and isolated to prevent the spread of the plague – forty days and forty nights of confinement, floating, away from the world, just waiting. Or cholera, and I imagine the waiting, with a parasite deep in the intestines, with an eye on the bowels, the waiting and watching.

  My father stood at the kitchen sink, frowning at the summer’s flies which lay dying or dead on the windowsill, frowning at the things on the draining board which had been washed up but were not clean – one of the good teacups with the rose-pink stain of my mother’s lipstick on the rim, and a dirty tumbler which he held up to the light, peering at the greasy fingerprints on the glass.

  The lawn was littered with fallen leaves, our gutters clogged with decomposing debris. That year, the snow came early, and any leaves which hadn’t been raked up lay beneath it, freezing.

  My mother left, with her belongings, everything she wanted, in one small suitcase. She took her modern vase, and she left us; she left her barberry bush, and her footprints in the snow on the driveway, walking away. Where her footsteps stopped, there was a motorbike track, and oil in the snow.

  My father cut down the barberry bush, cut it right down to the ground.

  If we went out, walking briskly, he eyed the frontages of the neighbours’ houses, the paintwork as dingy as decaying teeth, net curtains yellowing like jaundiced eyes, weeds flourishing in the overgrown lawns and sprouting through the cracks in the paths. He eyed the dog mess burning holes in the snow on the pavement, and the greying slush in the gutters, the street soiled beneath his feet, defaced.

  When the gossiping neighbours saw us they snapped shut their mouths, cutting off the ends of their sentences, the unspoken scraps squirming on their tongues like halved earthworms in the dirt.

  My father came home and shut the front door with one shoulder against it, and locked it, as if the outside world were a cupboard full of so much crap.

  He ignored the phone when it rang. He stood in the hallway looking at it, and didn’t pick it up. Perhaps he thought it might be my mother, asking to come home. Perhaps he was afraid that it was not.

  I tried to find some trace of her, but I found none, not even a cheap romance in my grandmother’s bookcase, or a mug with a joke on it at the back of the kitchen cupboard; not even the colour of her mouth on the side of an old teacup, or the smell of her in the drawers where her clothes had been or in the bathroom cabinet where she had kept her toiletries.

  My grandmother made supper, and we all ate together at the little kitchen table, while fresh snow settled, and the pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.

  I step out of the back door and walk down to the end of the garden, leaving my footprints in the snow on the lawn, treading carefully on the icy path.

  There is a spent firework and evidence of cats in the vegetable patch. The barberry bush has grown back; it is almost up to my shoulders. There is something here of my mother’s after all, something she left behind, something she may or may not have wanted.

  ‘Not long now,’ says the next door neighbour, who has followed me down to the end of the garden on his side, and is leaning on the fence.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘not long now.’ I want him to go away, but he stays where he is, looking at me.

  ‘Sorry to hear about your father passing away.’ Passing away, he says, the euphemism as light and clean as falling snow.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘My wife and I used to call on him,’ he says. ‘We were sure he was in, but he never answered the door. He used to keep his curtains closed, during the day.’

  The insinuation hangs between us. He stands there, with his arms dangling over the fence like the branches of his apple tree, dropping unwanted fruit into my father’s garden where it rots, attracting wasps.

  ‘He never got over it, did he?’ he says. ‘He was never quite right after that.’

  I turn away. Beneath the barberry bush, in the lee of the wall, the ground is bare, snowless, and stray flowers have taken root in the cold earth. They have a strong smell, these wild plants, and even when I walk away, back up to the house, the scent follows me.

  When the snow melted, autumn’s dead and unraked leaves were still there underneath, rotting on the lawn, and the oil stains remained on the driveway.

  My father raked up the stray leaves. I watched him from the house, pulling his rake across his thawing lawn, and standing, staring at the grass beneath his feet, as if it were not just grass, as if this were not his perfect lawn, as if it were something strange. I watched him go down to his shed and return with a spade. Its clean metal caught the cold sunlight, its glint dazzling me. In the chill of that pre-spring day, he touched the sharp edge of his spade to his perfect lawn, raised his foot and stamped on the tread, driving the head into the ground. He lifted metres of turf, turned over tons of earth, digging out the bluebell bulbs one by one. It took him days. He turned the lawn into mud; it must have been almost as it was when my great-grandfather first stood there, wondering where to begin. At night, the garden was a strange barren moonscape. The discarded bulbs lay in buckets, their roots drying, their shoots wilting.

  When he was done, when he was certain that every last bulb was out, that nothing remained, he levelled the earth and replaced the turf and made his lawn immaculate again. He stood back, resting his spade and his aching body, the light going, his sweat turning cold.

  But he left alone that part of the garden which my mother once took for herself; he didn’t go digging there, removing the turf and turning over the earth beneath the end wall. That shady patch he just kept as neat as he could, keeping the grass clipped short and that resilient barberry bush cut down to the ground.

  In the spring, cabbage maggots hatched from their overwintering cocoons and laid eggs in my father’s vegetable patch, and he pored through the soil, hunting out these nests and crushing the small, white eggs. Slug eggs laid in the autumn hatched, and he found holes in the leaves of new plants, seedlings ruined. He buried beer traps in the ground, jars in which to drown the slugs which ate their way through his garden at night. I stood nearby, watching, and he turned to me and said, ‘We used to drown kittens, the unwanted litters of cats on heat.’

  Bluebells still come up, every spring. They are not yet out this year, but the bulbs are down there, deep in the earth, their green shoots aching for the daylight.

  And there are eggs, buried in the soil, waiting for warmer weather, when they will hatch.

  My grandmother sat in her armchair keeping her hands busy with knitting, keeping her tongue busy with boiled sweets. When she wasn
’t knitting, her hands trembled, and when she wasn’t sucking on sweets, her tongue loosened.

  She always gave up sweets for the forty days of Lent. It made her feel good, she said; it made her feel clean.

  ‘Your father too,’ she said. ‘He won’t have sweets now until Easter.’ We were sitting in the living room and she had her knitting basket out. She was unpicking an old blue jumper for the wool. Taking her little scissors to where it had been bound off, and cutting through, she said, ‘Your mother, on the other hand, she just ate whatever she liked; she never gave up anything.’ She pulled at the neat rows of stitching, pulling the wool loose. ‘Always did just as she pleased,’ she said. ‘And what your father gave up for her. When your father met your mother, he was engaged to a lovely girl.’

  While she talked, I gathered up the unravelling wool, balling it, trying to keep it neat. My grandmother unpicked a white button at the neck, and I realised that this was my mother’s blue jumper, losing its shape and coming apart in her hands.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘all done,’ and we sat there holding my mother’s jumper, which was just a ball of second-hand wool in my hands, and a loose button placed in a box in my grandmother’s knitting basket, beside her sharp little scissors.

  It is the first day of Lent today. I don’t know what I would give up. I have never drunk much, though sometimes I still find the reek in my nostrils. I don’t smoke, though as I say, sometimes I do like the smell – but I have seen the pictures of lungs coated with tar, stained black, suffocating; I have seen the yellowing skin.

  I could give up the sugar I take in my tea, but I won’t. I drop a sugar cube into the cup, into the hot tea, and stir it until it dissolves.

  ‘Stop looking at me,’ said Susan.

  ‘I wasn’t looking at you,’ I said, ‘I was looking out of the window.’

  We were in our bedroom, lying on our beds. Susan’s bed was right underneath the window, and mine was opposite. I had been looking out of the window, at Sunday’s steady rainfall, but I had also been looking at her. Not having a picture of our mother – the few there had been having gone –I sometimes tried to catch a glimpse of her by looking at my sister.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, wafting her hand, as if she could feel my eyes crawling over her face. She turned onto her side, away from me, and as she turned I saw a red mark, a bruise on her neck, blood vessels burst beneath her skin, a love-bite. And then, with her face to the wall, she said, ‘Your eyes are weird.’

  The rain hammered down outside.

  She wanted her own bedroom; she said so all the time, even though there was no spare room, and even though I always left when she wanted the room to herself, and sat downstairs while her friends sat on my bed and touched and used my things. When they left, when I returned to my room, I found my bedding crumpled, and the shape of someone’s bottom or evidence of feet on my pillow; I found brown curls of tobacco on the covers of my books, and the corners of pages, neat little rectangles, torn out, and the air smelt like my father’s bonfires, his piles of burning leaves.

  I run the vacuum cleaner into my father’s bedroom, sucking dust from the spaces between the bare floorboards.

  I hoover through into our old bedroom, pushing the nose of the vacuum cleaner underneath my sister’s bed, and it strains into the empty corners like a bloodhound on a leash, recognising a scent which is scarcely there. Her bare mattress sags in the middle, the broken springs forming a hollow which remembers the shape of her, the weight of her.

  There was blood on my pyjama bottoms, on the yellow cotton bed sheet, on the mattress underneath.

  My grandmother told me not to wash my hair or have a bath for a week. I was unclean, like an Old Testament woman who was not allowed to touch food because she would contaminate it, the bread and butter and fruit she touched spoiling, the meat rotting and the wine turning to vinegar.

  I was a young woman now, she said, and must be careful. She said this to my sister too, ‘You have to be careful.’

  I studied my face in the mirror, looking for my mother but not finding her, looking for my father, but my bones were not his. I peered, looking for eyebrows which met in the middle, looking at my weird eyes staring back.

  I ate more, eating between meals, a habit of which my father disapproved; it showed a lack of discipline. He found me in the kitchen, and looked at me as if I were a pest he had found in his cupboards, getting at his food.

  I clean the kitchen floor, scrubbing at the tiles which are not really dirty, scrubbing away footprints which aren’t there.

  I pour my bucket of water down the drain by the back door, empty the vacuum cleaner’s dust bag, and take the rubbish out down the side of the house to the dustbin at the front.

  I wash my hands with the foul tar soap and put the kettle on. In the bare kitchen, I sit down at the small table and eat my sandwiches, and the bread and butter and tomatoes do not spoil at my touch and the meat does not rot, and the water comes to a furious boil in the corner.

  Most of the time, my father was out, at work or in the garden; or he was busy in some quiet part of the house, cleaning or writing in his notebooks; or he was sleeping.

  Sometimes he slept during the day when he was supposed to be at work. And sometimes he stayed awake at night – I heard him downstairs, in the kitchen, looking for mice, or saw him standing in the garden, down by the end wall, in the moonlight.

  Either way, we hardly saw him, apart from at mealtimes, when he looked at my sister and me the same way he looked at his vegetable patch in the spring, as if there might be something unpleasant in there, some unwanted interloper; the same way he looked at the skins of the vegetables on his plate, as if they were unclean.

  ‘You,’ he said, over dinner, ‘do not have good bones.’ It was not clear whether he meant me or Susan or both of us. We all kept eating. ‘You,’ he continued, pointing his knife at my sister, ‘are all Barbara. You,’ he said, pivoting the knife slowly like a sniper’s rifle, turning the blade towards me, ‘I don’t know.’

  I read his notebooks, and saw what he had done to my mother. He had removed the darker shades and the grey from her hair; he had grown her blond hair long again, pinning it neatly on top of her head. He had stitched up the tear in her skirt. And he had removed her child. He had made her as she used to be; he had made her young and smart and childless, and still in love with him.

  He discarded things which belonged to my sister and me, as if we were no longer there. Our belongings went missing and turned up in the dustbin. We found our wardrobes empty, the hangers bare, our clothes put out on the front step for charity, waiting to be taken away. We brought these things inside again, put them back where they belonged, and if my father looked he would find them still there, returning and returning like the endlessly blooming bluebells and the endlessly breeding insects.

  Sitting at the kitchen table marking essays, one-thousand-word assignments summarising the conclusion of one war and the beginnings of the next, I watch the stretched-tight skin of my distended belly pulsating, the baby moving inside me. The rhythmic kicks, or maybe hiccups, feel and look like an enormous heart beating in my stomach. Now and again, something comes to the surface, the shape of an elbow or a knee beneath my skin, pushing up inside me.

  I remember the nausea, like seasickness, the barely-there watery vomit spat into the toilet bowl, my bare knees on the cold linoleum.

  I have heard a heartbeat, beating fast like a bird or a mouse.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Susan stood in the bedroom doorway. There was a boy behind her, on the landing. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy. And I was here first.’ I was reading, something for school. I could have read downstairs, and there was nobody down there – our father was out and our grandmother was quiet, probably napping, in her attic room – but I didn’t like the boy my sister was with. I had met him in the kitc
hen once – he came in through the back door, bringing with him a cloying smell of weed. I didn’t like his lingering, clinging look, his long fingers stroking the roll-up he was making, bits of tobacco dropping onto the kitchen floor.

  ‘All right then,’ she said, and went back out onto the landing, pulling the door to behind her. I listened for the sound of their footsteps on the stairs, my sister and this boy going down to the kitchen or the living room, but instead I heard the sound of my father’s bedroom door opening, and closing.

  I sat on my bed, staring at my book, reading the same page over and over again to the heartbeat thump of the headboard against the wall.

  After about an hour, they came out and went downstairs. They had picked up their clothes and their cigarettes; they had made the bed. They had left the room just as it was, except perhaps for the stray brown curls on the bedding, and that pervading smell of smoke.

  It is late now. I open the back door for some night air before locking up. There is a full moon, hanging heavy and milky in the dark sky. It lights the snow on the lawn and the ice on the path and the high, white walls of this pre-war house.

  In the snow I see my footprints, and a bluebell, the tips of its strong, green leaves just poking through, emerging into the cold night. I imagine my father standing over his lawn, amazed to see them still coming through after all that.

  I’m blooming, apparently. You’re blooming, they say, as if I am a seasonal shrub.