The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

  ‘We’re eating out here.’

  He brought her glass. ‘We are planning to eat, then? Only it’s after nine.’

  ‘There are just the steaks to cook.’ But she had dropped into one of the cane chairs. Tilting her glass, she watched a candle’s light in it. ‘I spent the whole day looking through Kit’s photo albums.’

  ‘How many can she have?’

  ‘It was a school project. They pander to it, this love of the past children have long before they have any past of their own.’

  That day, falling asleep in Kit’s bed, she had woken into another hour—it might have been another world. Through Kit’s window, she had seen nothing but sky: the glassy blue of high summer, which looks permanent. The whole question of what she would do had become unreal.

  He crouched awkwardly beside her, resting his elbow on the arm of her chair. Turning over her hand, he traced from her palm to her fingertips.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘More than you’d think. She’d arranged them—it took me ages to work it out—by how the scene was.’

  ‘How the scene was?’ He tugged at her fingers, loosely now in his hand.

  ‘Just—how we looked at each other. All the ones where I was looking at her. The ones where she was looking at me. And with Matt—’

  ‘But…that was the project?’

  Anna was so often irritated that she had disciplined her gestures. Now, she just perceptibly shrugged. ‘Or, how abstract teenagers are. All the same, it was effective. There we all were, at the end of a telescope.’

  Matt had always hated photographs. He was the only person Anna knew who would refuse, point blank, to take tourists’ photographs for them. In photo after photo of Kit’s he stared back. His whole face slightly skewed, one nostril cut higher than the other, one cheekbone slanted up—it had been one of their jokes, how arrogance was built into his face. Poring over the albums, Anna felt as though he was looking directly at her out of years.

  Peter shifted his weight onto the other heel, then stood up and dragged the other chair across. ‘You spent the whole day in Kit’s room?’

  ‘Of course she’d promised to get everything tidy before she left. She’d lined all her shoes up in front of the wardrobe. The cleaner’s always at me about her mess so I thought, “Well, I’ll put them away.” Only when I opened the doors…She’d just been shoving things in, not even on hangers. Filthy T-shirts and jumpers, all her skirts lumped on the bottom of the wardrobe. You know how forlorn dirty clothes look. I was shaking with anger, on my knees sorting through them: a pile for dry cleaning, a pile for throwing out.’

  ‘She doesn’t mind you throwing her clothes out?’ He spoke of Kit always with this careful reticence.

  ‘At her age I would have loved to have clothes like that. Anyway, in all that mess I find her school shoes. She’d been painting them with white dots. That’s what they do, you know—I could see her secretly working away. Only she’d stopped. Given up half-way.’

  ‘She got bored of it?’

  ‘She told me she lost them. The thing is, I can remember doing that with my school shoes.’

  ‘The lie upset you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Hardly a lie.’ It was the sort of thing she could have told Matt. Tilting her glass across the candlelight, she watched the small bubbles file upwards.

  He shifted sideways in his chair. ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

  ‘She called the gallery. She spoke to Cass. Something about the house being haunted.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told you—I wasn’t there. Anyway, what should I have said? I think it’s haunted too.’ Ignoring his look, she brought her glass again into the light. With a sense of marking out territory she added, ‘Why didn’t Clare want children?’

  Even watching her glass, she felt feeling flare in him: a piece of paper catching in a candle flame. Carefully, he set his own glass down, balancing it on the uneven brick and mortar of the garden wall.

  ‘We couldn’t. I couldn’t…’

  The last phrase was scrupulous. Glancing at his face, she saw that it was not for her that he had added it. The scruple was for Clare: he would not blunt for himself the knowledge of his betrayal. With one hand, he drummed on the arm of his chair.

  ‘You told me she didn’t want children.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her, his face without expression. ‘Our first night.’

  There was a pause when she heard the low whirr of the candle flames. She could feel her thoughts rearranging. ‘So—’ she said, and stopped. She stuck by you: the phrase came italicised into Anna’s mind: the catch-cry of his set. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Thirty-two. Thirty-three,’ he corrected, priggishly.

  ‘So she’ll marry some old flame and have twins.’

  Her flippancy brought to his face an animal expression of pain.

  ‘I hope so.’

  She saw then how he took refuge in his idea of Clare. Clare was the idol they would always carry: the thing of honour that he had sacrificed. She said slowly, ‘For her the worst of it is that I have a daughter.’

  ‘Can we leave Kit out of this?’

  ‘You’re the one who asks about her.’

  ‘She’s your daughter.’

  ‘No, I quite see why you didn’t tell me. You stop Clare getting a child and then you get one for yourself.’

  ‘I don’t get Kit.’ Scraping his chair back, he got up and stood in front of her, staring down. On the ivy-covered wall behind him, leaf-shadows jigged grotesquely.

  ‘That’s not what Clare thinks.’

  At the thought of Clare his brittle mood snapped. Vaguely he passed a hand across his forehead, pushing back his hair. He turned his head and gazed into the kitchen. Following his eyes, she saw the kitchen bench with light pouring down on it, the room stilled and reduced by seeing it through glass. She felt almost frightened. What she saw was not where she lived: to live in it was not to see it all at once, like this.

  He said, ‘I’ll cook the steaks.’

  Stepping inside, he stepped immediately into the world behind glass. She watched him pass the long rectangles of the window frames. The glass was reflecting him back to himself: he had forgotten that she could see him. Standing in front of the cutting board, he looked into his glass; he drained it off without pleasure. The strain of these last months showed in the blankness of his face as he set the glass down. In that single gesture, she saw how much suffering he had kept from her: she saw at once his discipline and his ambition. She had an increasing sense of his power: how remarkable the concentration that had manufactured the inwardness of their last months together. The fact was they had both gone so far out of their own lives that it had made them ruthless. Watching him, she felt not pity but something more intractable. She said to herself: I am middle-aged. In thought, she was turning again the pages of Kit’s albums; it seemed to her that all her tenderness was stored up in those bright photographs. Tilting her chair back, she looked up at the square of sky: a reddish haze of reflected light. All around her, a prickling sound of insects in the ivy. She thought, what I wanted was to get away. Now there he is in the house standing over the stovetop. Any moment he will start opening the cupboard doors. He will come out smiling with our two plates. She thought: But Kit is there now, in the room where at night the sea comes up to the window. She has gone back to where I was. Children have hours that lead nowhere. They have hours and hours. I used to spend whole afternoons on that bed, bored beyond anything. Now all my hours are small: they have afterwards always. When I am bored, it is small boredom; back then it was touching time itself. I will not tell Matt and he will come home and it will make no difference. Or I will tell Matt and it will be terrible: years will have ended. Still the same thing will go on. Peter will come home and cook the steaks…She thought, I could say the most terrible things to him, unforgivable things, and it would change nothing. She got up and went inside to help him find the plates.

  Chapte
r Six

  The garage was out the back of the petrol station. What her aunt called the office was a single room set down on concrete, its painted metal walls no thicker than its window frames. Kit waited outside, sitting on a broken-off concrete kerb, while Treen sorted out the paperwork. Already the concrete was warm. Over by the pumps light shimmered off an oil stain. Someone had set two terracotta pots by the door, filled now with shrunken stems and stubbed-out cigarettes. A smell of petrol hung over everything, left a taste at the back of her throat.

  The man who had taken Treen’s keys jerked the seat of the car back and put the window down. Driving with his elbow out, he revved and casually swung her car in behind the rest: cars parked frontto-back so close they almost touched. Slamming the door he went with a quick slouching walk into the shed and under a car cranked high on the stand. In the dimness there, he and another man said a few words. To Kit there was something mysterious about the way they stood together side by side studying the underside of the car: they had a physical ease with each other, with the machines around them. One of the men, sensing her eyes on them perhaps, glanced over his shoulder at Kit, turned back and spoke in the other man’s ear. The other man looked across and shook his head, laughing.

  Kit felt a prickling up the sides of her neck, the stinging humiliation of having them reject an offer that she hadn’t made. These men who assumed the right to make judgements—it seemed to her the strangest thing, how it had never crossed their minds to wonder how they’d be judged themselves. What would it feel like, she wondered, to be so certain? She got up and went into the office. There, in a sort of rapt silence, Treen stood watching a white-haired receptionist who was staring at her computer screen with a fixed expression—of concentration or bewilderment it was hard to say. Kit sat on the single plastic chair.

  ‘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.