The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  ‘So now Kit—’

  ‘Now Kit’s there. Yes.’

  ‘Have you told her about us?’

  ‘She can’t stand being in the house with me—’

  ‘She must suspect. It might help her to have it clear.’

  ‘She’s fifteen. She doesn’t even see anybody else. She went to France last year for three weeks with the school and came back with a hundred photographs, all of churches. No, it is really impossible to realise how young she is. She worries whether shop assistants like her. Trying to have a conversation with her—you might as well be waving flags.’

  She looked away at the next table, its cloth phosphorescent in the gathering dusk. At the back of the room the men finding seats had to be lawyers, she thought. The two women in the group were also wearing dark grey suits. The men called across the table to each other: the nervous charge of a group at the beginning of some willed celebration. They were choosing wine: extravagance was part of the ritual: a stocky, grey-haired man at one end of the table had the drinks list. Anna suddenly imagined them in groups of two and three veering along a dark footpath at 3am. By then the women, however much they might dislike each other, would have shared a taxi home.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ she asked.

  He twisted in his chair. The first instant, he grinned: an expression of embarrassed conspiracy, quickly suppressed. Not his workmates but they could have been; not his dinner but it could have been. Turning back to Anna, he shook his head. This picture of the life he had apart from her made Anna push her chair back and set off across the room. Couples had been coming in without her noticing. One was young: the girl had had her hair done specially, though with her profile that chignon had been a mistake. The father of one of Anna’s school friends had categorised women as ‘girlfriend-’ or ‘wifematerial’. A padding, complacent man…

  Anna was not so much walking as steering across the room. Tables and corners kept looming up. Not that she was drunk, she thought, so much as caught up in the atmosphere their talk had made. She had been telling Peter the truth; though what she felt at the same time, and vertiginously, was that she could have been telling lies. This was why she and Matt had stopped going out for dinner, why hosts sat married couples apart at dinner parties: they had lost the ability to make themselves up in words, like characters in a book. The floorboard that sounded in the hall, the gate that needed to be lifted to the latch: talk had come to seem false against the tacit intimacy of their years together in the same house. Was that what I did wrong, she asked herself. Trust to that intimacy too much? The night after Kit flew off to France, she and Matt had sat down to dinner together. She could still remember the texture of that failure: not just how little they said but how little had seemed sayable. Years of unfelt action massed in them still: making Kit’s lunch, shouting upstairs to her to get in the shower, clearing the breakfast things, remembering Kit’s tennis racquet.

  In the bathroom’s rococo mirror Anna saw her face hovering oddly separate from thought. Eyeliner smudged under one eye… She ran her wrists under the cold tap, steadying one hip against the bench. In the too-yellow mirror she fixed her hair, redid her face. When she came back into the room Peter was sitting very still, staring at his hands with a slight frown as if thinking some problem through. She thought, I’ll remember him like that. It was night outside—night had fallen while she was gone from the room. Behind him now the window indistinctly reflected their table: a structure of shadows, in which the white napery gleamed. Through the window’s reflection, Christmas lights: they were hung from wires over the street. Beneath them on the street, a white horse was pulling a carriage up the hill, traffic banking behind it. The sound of the horse’s shod hooves came dulled like echoes through the double-glazed glass. In the carriage, a middle-aged couple was glancing back at the cars behind them, their flushed embarrassment a version of delight.

  ‘The deliberate happiness of tourists,’ she said. ‘Finally getting enough attention.’

  He laughed. This was their ease: her placid malice, the banter that modulated into contempt. ‘I’ve got you something.’ He set a navy box on the table. She knew he meant this gift to signal the event: his week in Melbourne, his advance into her house. Only this ceremoniousness marked him off from the social world that he inhabited, otherwise, like a native. A scholarship student at school, he had fallen in with the boys who spent their summers at family beach houses and their winters in the snow: an unassuming and, finally, inevitable guest. His clothes must have been a problem, she thought. Doubtless his success had depended on a readiness to disarm mockery by first mocking himself. What he had not managed to subdue, she thought, was this desire to mark occasions. He lacked the unconsciousness which, more than anything, marked the bounds of that inherited world, which had no end and no beginning for those who lived in it: it was outside history; it was how they knew each other.

  Now he said: ‘You’re annoyed that I bring you a present every time.’

  She had hurt him; she felt the dissatisfaction that was her version of regret. Reaching across the table, she pressed her fingers to his cheek. ‘I’ll open it at the hotel. Not here.’

  The waiter brought their food and they started to eat.

  Chapter Two

  The drive was narrow: the headlights flared on small scrub— small-leaved, sparse, repeating scrub. Though they had slowed, turning off the highway, the blurred sound of gravel made their speed more intimate. Kit was all at once conscious of the two of them side by side. Her aunt drove crouched over the wheel, the seat jammed so far forwards that her face took a greenish pallor from the dashboard lights. She was still wearing the red straw hat that she had put on to help Kit recognise her at the station; though, as it had turned out, they had been the only two there.

  A bitumen platform propped on the railway embankment— stepping off the train, bag in hand, Kit had felt almost frighteningly exposed. She had come without expectation; she could not have imagined this. So much sky: on all sides, marshy paddocks going out flat to the horizon, paddocks not desolate but vacant. How long had Treen been standing on the platform with that fixed, deliberate smile? The two of them had paused, facing each other, while behind Kit the train, with a complaining grind of metal against metal, heaved itself off. At the sound of its whistle Treen’s arm had jerked up. Stepping towards each other, neither of them had known whether they ought to hug. Making an effort, Treen had wrapped an arm around her niece’s shoulders, patted her twice. Up close she smelt of face powder. She was dressed as though, in choosing what to wear, she had been solving a series of separate problems: for smartness, a pressed blue Liberty shirt; for practicality: blue jeans; for comfort: white sneakers. Only as they walked to the car Treen’s red hat, catching the light, flashed out the strangeness of their meeting; flashed out, also, some ambition for drama out of scale with how she dressed—they were never likely to have needed the hat.

  The car passed over a cattle grid onto cleared ground. Then the house: a dark mass against dusk-coloured hill and sky. The drive was circular: the headlights, swinging across the house, lit up in sequence the corner of a high verandah, wrought-iron balustrades, concrete steps, so that when the car stopped Kit imagined the house beside them settling back into its own shape in the dark.

  Treen said, ‘Do you remember any of it?’

  ‘Not really.’ As soon as she spoke, Kit remembered stepping out from a room where she had been sleeping into an unlit hall. The door handle had been at eye level—ceramic, with a painted wreath of blue roses. Light from her room had angled across dark floorboards, a strip of carpet, and met absolute darkness. The memory still held a sense of terror: the house grown vast, dark halls opening endlessly out. She had no memory of her aunt at all.

  ‘You were a funny little thing. Always wanting us to read you stories.’

  The night was less dark with the headlights off. They sat listening to the engine tick. Kit thought, ‘This is where she grew up’, but the house kept the unreality of
her mother’s childhood. Those hours on the train had settled Kit into the fake calm of travel. It had been enough then to sit watching. She had come past the backs of houses, railway sidings stacked with rusting bits of track, warehouses on concrete acres. At last the rust-weed verge had opened into paddocks so flat they had an inside-out look… The train was going on still, away into the dark. In thought Kit heard its hollow whistle, saw it sliding away from the station. She had no expectation her phone would work here: she had come far out of range. What she would have liked was to keep driving, watching the night country pour past. Palely through Treen’s window now she could see the steps leading up to the verandah. At school she had only to say, ‘I’m staying at the beach with my grandparents’. She had said the same thing to herself. She had not thought of walking up concrete steps in the dark. In her mind, she had never been coming here, only escaping the forced closeness of home. What her father had taken with him when he went back to his mother in England was their routine: the habits so familiar as to be unnoticeable, which had built something tacit even into those activities that a family later recalls as proof of its togetherness. Now it was all deliberate: to have breakfast together, to have breakfast apart; to eat with the radio on, to turn it off.

  Treen said, ‘They will have eaten. They never hold dinner.’

  Somewhere a door shut. A light, torchlight, zigzagged around a corner of the house. In one movement, Treen undid her seatbelt and hoisted herself from the car. The torchlight skittered over sand patched with tussock grass: pale, black-shadowed in its glare. Behind the torch her grandfather was shifting edges of light: the cuff of a shirt, a halo of bright hair, bluish long-toed feet in leather sandals. Kit’s grandfather shone his torch through her window. ‘We’ll get your bags later.’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ Treen slammed the boot.

  Kit stepped out. At once, she could hear the sea: a low, confiding sound that seemed to come from all directions. Her grandfather— was she supposed to call him Patrick?—held his fingertip against her elbow. His touch was oddly light, his mind withdrawn from it. He was straight-backed, thin. His profile in the dark, his jerky, careful walk, connected him in Kit’s mind with the shadows his torch stretched out around them. She thought: I have been here before, seen all this before; she could not remember any of it. Her aunt could remember her being here, though. Kit was stepping back into her forgotten childhood—the dark tree at the corner of the house loomed up out of her past.

  ‘Your grandmother thought you must have missed the train.’

  ‘Train was late,’ called back Treen.

  Patrick held the screen door open. The light from the kitchen showed the long grey neck hairs that curled over the starched collar of his shirt and were noticeable because in every other respect he had a precise, fastidious look. Across his nose and along his cheekbones his skin was so thin it seemed almost to show the bones through. It did show a net of fine red veins. His beaky nose, his way of holding his chin, gave him a look of conscious dignity.

  ‘Last time you were here, you said, “Where are the lights?” Never seen the dark before.’ He produced the memory like a witticism.

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Kit stepped inside.

  She would not have said that she had been imagining the inside of the house while she was following her grandfather along the path but now this too small, bright room, a box fixed to the old house: it was all wrong. The kitchen had too many details, was all details: fake ivory handles on the cupboard doors; the linoleum floor with its faded geometric pattern swelling into air bubbles under the fridge. Her mother was not here, had never been here. There was a smell of overcooked broccoli. Fluorescent strip lights made the ceiling and walls a matching greenish yellow. These were lights that belonged to public places: airports and hospitals: places where no one lived.

  Her grandfather shut the screen door. Now they were all inside. The kitchen was so small Treen must have had to push in chairs to fit Kit’s bag between the bench and table. In the corner a door opened into a dark hall.

  Her grandmother was sitting with her back to the door. Around her on the kitchen table were close-typed loose papers. She and Treen had been talking. They stopped as soon as Kit came in. Pressing her palms flat on the table, Audrey heaved up.

  ‘We thought you’d missed the train.’ When she spoke her jaw pressed ruffles into the soft flesh of her neck.

  The businessman who caught Kit’s morning tram was as fat as Audrey but his flesh seemed always to be melting downwards. Audrey’s flesh was solid, massive: she was inside it; it walled her in. Her dress, patterned in green and brown flowers, was sleeveless; the flesh of her arms, dimpled and startlingly white, puckered over the elbows. Her hair, not white but steel grey, she had pulled into two plaits wound around her head with haphazard pins. Her eyes were brown, certain, unembarrassed. She took Kit’s hand, held it without pressure while she studied Kit’s face. Hand lightly held, Kit listened to her grandmother’s breathing: its in-gasp, sounding desperate, seemed to happen independently of her grandmother, who was hypnotically calm.

  Letting go of Kit’s hand she said: ‘Your mother decided not to come.’

  ‘She’s busy with the opening. She said to say hello…’ Kit was conscious of wearing an ingratiating half-smile. It was arriving at night, perhaps, which made her feel this was happening nowhere. At that moment she could not have named in herself a single characteristic outside the desire to please.

  ‘She said to say hello. To her own mother.’ Audrey’s pale, plump hands settled like moths on the table. ‘And your father. Where’s he?’

  ‘Audrey…’ Patrick warned.

  ‘He’s in England, seeing my grandmother. My other grandmother.’

  ‘Do try to eat something,’ said Patrick. ‘Despite this terrible heat.’ He was propped behind a chair, waiting for Kit to sit down. His impassive politeness, his withdrawn and deliberate courtesy, left only his looks to impress themselves: an immaculate profile, his white hair lifted back from his forehead in soft waves.

  Treen set down two plates: beef with beans and roast potatoes.

  Anna had twice promised to call Treen to explain that Kit didn’t eat meat. Kit looked at her plate. I should tell them at once, she thought. Despising herself, she started cutting her beans. They had been frozen and tasted faintly of dishwashing liquid. Cold fat speckled the potatoes’ gill-cut tops. She cut the meat into fragments which she pushed around her plate, testing whether she could hide them in the gravy. In the misery of her hunger, she sucked some gravy off her fork. The taste of it filled her mouth.

  ‘Your mother was in one of those magazines.’ Audrey nodded at a clipping stuck on the fridge. ‘We never take them. Only, the woman at the newsagency showed Treen. Then she had to buy it.’

  It was the Women’s Weekly article. Anna—toy-sized, oblivious— smiled from the torn-off page. Kit might have been looking back at her through the years. The article had annoyed her mother, Kit remembered, or perhaps only the photo, which had caught her smiling. Looking up with her grandparents obediently at the clipping, Kit became aware of how much they left out. Their silence gave the photo too much importance. For Anna the whole thing had been a bore, even a mistake: ‘Women’s Meekly’, she had called it. Looking away from the discoloured newspaper article, for the first time Kit felt something like tenderness for her mother: she called to mind the massed small details of the day when that photograph had been taken.

  ‘You know what she says in that? Says she has no parents. She created herself, apparently.’

  ‘She means artistically, Mum.’

  ‘Oh! Artistically.’ Audrey made a face.

  Patrick leant forwards from the waist. ‘It’s got quite a history, this house,’ he said. ‘Has your mother told you much about it?’ Kit shook her head. He began a story involving a land grant, convicts. Trying to listen, Kit had in place of thought a sequence of flickering impressions: that softer indent at the middle of his lower lip, which he pinched between
his thumb and forefinger; the damp inner flesh his drooping eyelids showed. At the station her mother had said, ‘You’ll see the house, at least’. From where she sat Kit could see both doors: the screen door out into flocked dark, the door beside her, open to the rest of the house. More than anything, she wanted to be out in that night, its impersonal coolness. She eased her legs— sweat under her knees—and felt the sticky weight of her thighs. The trouble, she thought, is I don’t know what’s normal. Probably other people see their grandparents every week. This too-bright room— she remembered how the train had stopped at a station where no one was. Two girls in evening dress had got off there. High heels sounding unevenly, the girls had passed without talking through the wrought-iron gate at the side of the platform. A pause, after the train engine sounded more noisily, before the train took off.

  Fixing her eyes on a silver and cut crystal saltcellar, incongruous on the formica table, Kit was conscious of her grandmother, motionless in her chair at the end of the table. Her chair was mahogany, oversized; the others, rickety metal and plastic, matched the table. From her throne-like chair she watched, sucking on her teeth. Kit’s grandfather, talking on, was less present. He reminded Kit of one of the hand-drawn illustrations in Vogue, decorative calligraphy and watercolour, consciously obsolete.

  Treen was working through the food on her plate, sawing off a piece of meat with her blunt knife, adding a piece of potato to the piece of meat on her fork, a snip of a bean, tapping a little gravy onto it, raising it to her mouth: all with the same mechanical movement. She pushed her lips out, frowning abstractedly, when she was thinking. Her lipstick had worn off; her lips were edged all along with short vertical lines that looked kind. Her flesh had swollen and appeared sore around the diamond ring she wore on her right hand. Finishing dinner, she noticed her glass of water and drank it down. She pushed back her chair and started washing up the dishes that they had left for her in a greasy stack beside the sink. She washed up without gloves, the hot water turning her hands and forearms salmon-pink. The baking trays to her left, the plates and saucepans stacked in the draining board to her right: Treen’s face, flushed from the steam, looked as blank as these, reflected in the dark-backed glass.