The House of Memories

by Monica McInerney

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek of Hello From the Gillespies

  Reading Group Notes

  Monica McInerney is the author of the internationally bestselling novels A Taste for It, Upside Down Inside Out, Spin the Bottle, The Alphabet Sisters, Family Baggage, Those Faraday Girls, At Home with the Templetons, Lola’s Secret and the short story collection All Together Now. Those Faraday Girls was the winner of the General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2008 Australian Book Industry Awards. In 2006 Monica was the ambassador for the Australian Government initiative Books Alive with her novella Odd One Out. She grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley of South Australia and has been living between Australia and Ireland for twenty years. Monica and her Irish husband currently live in Dublin. For further information please visit monicamcinerney.com

  PRAISE FOR MONICA MCINERNEY’S BESTSELLERS

  ‘One of those rare books you could recommend to anyone and know that they’ll love it.’

  AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

  ‘A modern masterpiece … a wonderful, bittersweet tale that will capture your heart and imagination.’

  ULSTER TATLER, IRELAND

  ‘McInerney’s bewitching multigenerational saga lavishly and lovingly explores the resiliency and fragility of family bonds.’

  BOOKLIST, USA

  ‘Tender and well-observed … have the hankies ready for this.’

  IRISH INDEPENDENT

  ‘Effervescent … overflows with good humour and laughter.’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘A big book about a big-hearted family … an affectionate, funny, teary book about grief, love, lies and revelations.’

  SUNDAY AGE

  ‘If you need more proof what a superior storyteller this South Australian-raised author is, here it is.’

  WEST AUSTRALIAN

  ‘McInerney brings humor and insight to issues of sibling rivalry, family secrecy and romantic betrayal.’

  BOSTON GLOBE

  ‘A heartwarming, romantic and funny story about love, family and relationships.’

  IRISH INDEPENDENT

  ‘McInerney brings Maeve Binchy readily to mind.’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘This is comfort reading – warm buttered toast with Irish honey spread right to the crusts.’

  THE ADVERTISER

  ‘An exquisite novel, which combines well-crafted characters with a captivating story … McInerney’s latest offering is guaranteed to enthral her legions of adoring fans.’

  ULSTER TATLER, IRELAND

  ‘A lovely, warm-hearted story with likeable, human characters and a wonderful, wonderful ending.’

  NEWCASTLE HERALD

  ‘You’ll be laughing out loud one minute and crying the next.’

  COSMOPOLITAN

  ‘A charming and exciting family drama, full of surprises.’

  EVENING HERALD, IRELAND

  Also by Monica McInerney

  A Taste for It

  Upside Down Inside Out

  Spin the Bottle

  The Alphabet Sisters

  Family Baggage

  Those Faraday Girls

  All Together Now

  At Home with the Templetons

  Lola’s Secret

  For my nieces and nephews, with lots of love

  Chapter One

  The first time I met my uncle Lucas I tried to steal something from him. It’s ironic, really, considering what he would ask me to do twenty-six years later.

  I was seven, on a visit to London with my mother and my father, Lucas’s younger brother. We’d been travelling through my father’s native England on holiday from our home in Australia. I was too young to realise the trip was a last-ditch effort to keep my parents’ marriage afloat. Perhaps I should have guessed. Since we’d flown from Melbourne airport two weeks earlier, they hadn’t stopped fighting.

  Lucas lived in a three-storey terrace house in west London, not far from Paddington Station, two blocks in from the Bayswater Road and close to Hyde Park. Not that I knew any of those landmarks then. I remember wondering who had to mow all the grass I could see through the park gates, and thinking the houses looked like wedding cakes. I also remember running up and down the steps outside Lucas’s house while we waited for him to answer our knock.

  I was an only child at that stage, and was used to adult attention, but I was also used to living in the shadow of my parents’ arguments. I think they were fighting when Lucas opened the door. Not physically, just the usual exchange of well-crafted, well-spoken insults. I remember Lucas running a hand through his thick mop of brown curls and saying in his lovely deep voice, ‘Still at it, you two?’ before getting down on his haunches, looking me right in the eye and saying with a big smile, ‘Hello. You must be Arabella.’

  ‘Ella,’ I said firmly. Even at that age, I hated my full name.

  ‘Ella,’ he said. ‘Much nicer. Do you know what that is backwards?’

  I nodded. ‘Alle.’

  He held out his hand. ‘Hello, Alle. I’m Sacul.’

  We followed him in, Dad and Lucas already in conversation, my mother trailing behind and complaining about her aching feet, caused by the high heels she’d insisted on wearing, though we were having a sightseeing-around-London-on-foot day. That might have been what she and my father were fighting about on the doorstep. Or it could have been any of a thousand other things. I was ignoring the adults by now, in any case. I was too busy looking around.

  My parents had been here the previous year, visiting Lucas while on one of my father’s many business trips abroad. I’d not gone on that trip, remaining in Australia in the care of a family friend. My father worked in the mining industry – as an accountant, not underground – often travelling to the various locations owned by his multinational employer. Sometimes during school holidays Mum and I travelled with him. So I was used to staying in big hotels and luxurious apartments. But no place I’d seen compared to this house.

  It wasn’t the high ceilings, the long hall, the staircase, the many doors, the fabric wallpaper or the books everywhere that grabbed my attenti
on. It was the mess. The place was filthy. Not only that, there wasn’t a bare surface to be seen. Boxes overflowing with paper littered the hallway, producing a kind of maze effect. One long wall was lined with bookshelves reaching from floor to ceiling. Each shelf was so jammed it would have been difficult to slide in a pamphlet, let alone another book. Perhaps it smelt musty and unclean in reality, but in my memory it smelt of paper and old books and even wood smoke. A barbecue? I wondered. No. I could see there was an open fire in a room off the hallway. A fire in summertime!

  Just before Uncle Lucas ushered my parents into what he jokingly called the withdrawing room, he turned and handed me the key of freedom.

  ‘Go wherever you like, Ella. Touch whatever you want. Just try not to break anything.’

  I took off. He barely had time to offer my parents a cup of tea before I was back.

  ‘There’s someone in that room,’ I said, pointing across the hallway.

  ‘Male? Red hair? Glasses?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s Bill. One of my students.’

  ‘Is this a school?’ I asked. ‘Are you a teacher?’

  ‘Two excellent questions, Ella. No, not exactly. And no, not exactly.’

  My father explained it more later, on the way back to our hotel in a taxi. (My mother had complained so much about her feet that we’d given up the plan to go walking and sightseeing.) Lucas was the brainbox of the family, my father told me. Honours in history at Cambridge. Groundbreaking research since. He was working on a new academic study, but in the meantime, he’d also thrown open his house to bright but impoverished students to live and study in.

  ‘His house?’ my mother sniffed. ‘It should have been your house too.’

  ‘His godfather left it to him, Meredith, not me, as I’ve told you a thousand times. And as I’ve also told you, I never wanted it, or needed it.’

  ‘It’s not about needing it. It’s the principle. It should have been divided between you. But no, you just let him have it. Because your problem is you’ll do anything to avoid confrontation.’

  My father ignored her and looked out the window.

  ‘It’s the waste of it that gets me,’ my mother continued. ‘He’s sitting on a real estate fortune, and what does he turn it into? A commune for pointy-heads.’

  I didn’t know any of this as I first walked around the house that morning. All I got was a little jolt of excitement each time I opened a door to discover a student in a room. There was one in the kitchen, one in the front room, two upstairs and one on a kind of balcony at the back of the house, overlooking a small, overgrown garden. I counted five students, male and female, all either reading or scribbling or, in one case, measuring out liquid from one glass jar into another in the bathroom. If my memory serves me right, that particular student went on to work for NASA. All of them pretty much ignored me.

  ‘I’m Lucas’s niece,’ I said each time.

  ‘Hi, niece,’ was about as interactive as one of them got.

  I did as I’d been told and roamed everywhere, through all three storeys. At the very top of the house I found the best room of all. It was a converted attic, with a sloping roof, bookshelves everywhere, and a kind of alcove in the corner where I could see an unmade bed, a lamp and more books. On the floor, a pile of notebooks with Lucas’s name scrawled on the covers confirmed that this was his part of the house. In the centre of the room, not pushed against the wall like my father’s desk was in our Melbourne home, was his desk. It was as large as a dining table. And it was – like the rest of the house – covered in stuff: bundles of paper, folders, boxes, books. And more books. Every surface in the room was covered in books. And in any of the gaps left, there were foxes. Dozens of foxes.

  My full name back then was Arabella Louisa Fox. Mum and Dad were Meredith and Richard Fox. Which meant, of course, that my uncle was Lucas Fox. He must love his surname as much as I do, I remember thinking. I ignored the books and started counting the foxes. There were seven framed paintings of foxes on the sloping walls. Five little statues of foxes on top of the cupboards and tucked into the bookshelves. A fox pattern on a lampshade. What looked like a candle holder with a brass fox at the base. And on the desk, right at my eye level, was a real fox. A real, baby fox.

  There wasn’t much light in the attic. None of the lamps was on, and the overhead light was turned off. The only light came in through the roof window. It seemed to shine directly on the golden-brown fur of the baby fox, highlighting the glorious reds of its tail, sending a spotlight onto its little face and a gleam into its small, bright eyes. Eyes that were looking right at me.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I remember saying, edging towards it. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  I reached out and patted it gingerly, waiting for the snap of teeth, even while I hoped for a kind of purring sound. Did foxes purr? I wondered. The second I touched it I knew that it wasn’t real. Or at least, it was real, it had been alive, but it wasn’t any more. Its head was cold and still. Its back cold and hard. I ran my fingers along the fur. Several strands came off. I looked into its eyes. And whether it was because I was tired, or because my mum and dad fighting had left me jittery as it always did, I don’t know; suddenly that small dead fox on the desk made me sadder than I had ever been in my life.

  ‘You poor little thing,’ I whispered to it. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  There was a piece of material on the floor, a length of curtain or an old dust sheet. I picked it up. I wrapped the baby fox in it. I put the bundle under my arm. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it, or how I’d slip out of the house without my parents and uncle noticing. It was summer and I was in a light dress, so I couldn’t even hide it under my coat. But I just remember feeling so protective and so sad, all at once. I was on a mission now. I was Ella Fox, Fox Rescuer.

  I heard raised voices as I came down the stairs. My mother, then my father asking her to please mind her own business, then Lucas saying something I couldn’t hear, then my mother again. I’d thought this was a friendly visit. Perhaps it had started that way. I didn’t stand there, as I often did at home, eavesdropping. I slipped out through the front door. I wasn’t running away, not really. I think I only wanted to give the little fox some fresh air, a brief taste of freedom.

  But Uncle Lucas didn’t know that as he looked out the front window. All he saw was his seven-year-old niece heading down his steps with a fabric-wrapped bundle under her left arm, the tail of a fox sticking out of it.

  Afterwards, Mum told me they’d thought it was very funny.

  ‘You certainly broke the tension, Ella,’ she’d said.

  Lucas appeared at the front door just as I reached the bottom step. ‘Ella?’ I stopped at the sudden sound of his voice, low and calm. ‘Are you stealing my fox?’

  ‘No, not exactly,’ I said, unconsciously echoing his own words from earlier.

  ‘No? Then what, exactly?’

  ‘It looked lonely up there,’ I said. ‘I was taking it for a walk.’

  My father appeared beside his brother. ‘It’s dead, Ella. It’s a stuffed fox.’

  ‘It looked lonely,’ I repeated.

  ‘Inside, Ella. Now,’ my mother said, appearing at Lucas’s other side. ‘Give Lucas back his fox.’

  There was no more fuss made than that. In retrospect, they probably wanted to get back to their argument. I returned the fox to its home in the attic and patted it goodbye. I was about to kiss its little snout too, but then I caught sight of its tiny sharp teeth. I still felt sorry for it, but it had also started to give me the creeps.

  We said goodbye to Uncle Lucas soon after.

  ‘Well, that was pointless,’ I remember my mother saying as our taxi pulled away.

  ‘What was pointless?’ I asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ my parents said as one.

  I thought they meant Lucas was pointless, and I didn’t think that was nice. ‘I liked him,’ I said, turning to gaze out the window, more wedding-cake houses on
one side, the big park on the other. ‘Him and his foxes.’

  A month later, back home in Australia, I’d received a parcel in the mail, postmarked Paddington, London. Inside was a letter from Uncle Lucas, complete with a footnote.

  My dear FLN*

  I’m so sorry I couldn’t let you keep the fox that day. It’s very precious to me. But I hope this little one will give you some pleasure. It’s also a bit easier to smuggle out of people’s houses.

  Love from your London uncle,

  Lucas

  *Fox-Liberating Niece

  It was a tiny gold fox on a key ring, just an inch long, but beautifully made, the detail of the fur and the fox’s features delicately done. I called it Foxy. Foxy the Fox. At first I carried it in my pocket as a good-luck charm, whispering to it whenever I was upset or if Mum told me off about something. Once I was old enough to have keys, it turned back into a key ring. Over the years, it had held keys for many houses, in different cities of Australia, in London and in Bath. The last time I had seen it was in Canberra nearly two years ago. I’d left it, with the apartment keys, on the kitchen table beside my farewell note to Aidan —

  Stop!

  Change your thoughts.

  Look forward.

  It’s always easier said than done. I’ve tried everything in the past twenty months – snapping an elastic band around my wrist, inhaling essential oils, meditation. I tried concentrating on my surroundings now instead, a suggestion I’d recently read in a book on managing difficult memories. Focus. Notice. Distract. Observe. I mentally listed everything I could see around me, forcing myself to take note of my surroundings, to be fully aware of where I was and what I was doing at this exact moment.

  I was on the Heathrow Express. I had just flown twenty-two hours from Australia to London. My handbag was on my lap. The seat in front of me had a blue fabric cover. The carriage was packed with fellow travellers, some with eyes shut, others yawning, each of us recovering from our flights in different ways. I looked over at the luggage rack, checking if my red case was still there. It was. I stared up at the small TV screen on the far wall of the carriage. It flickered from the news headlines to a weather update. The forecast for London was a cold, breezy February day. The ticket collector appeared beside me. Good, another distraction. I handed my ticket across, watched him briskly stamp it and then move on to the next passenger. I turned back to the TV. ‘We are now approaching London Paddington,’ a bright English-accented presenter announced on-screen. ‘Thank you for travelling with Heathrow Express.’