The Life of Houses (19 page)

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘Take some money, though. While I think of it. Get yourself some lunch.'

‘Are you going to the house with Treen?'

‘I said I would. It'd be nice if you came.'

‘I'd rather stay here.'

‘Well. We won't be long.'

They started walking again. Some failure in their talk made Anna see her father's face as she had not seen it for years—his timid, dismayed expression whenever she had looked directly at him. The morning she'd walked into the study and announced she'd got a scholarship to art school: ‘Oh yes,' he'd said. ‘I used to do a little painting myself.' Anna pictured herself in the scene: agitated, defiant. Now she wondered: what had she expected? Why had it mattered so much to her back then what he would say? She thought: if he dies the person I was at that moment will go out of existence…
They came into the foyer. Across the room, a man in a dark suit stood up. The fold-down chair he'd been sitting on shut with a thud. Behind him, the glass was bright. With the light behind him he was a dark shape, which let her keep not believing it, though from the first jolt of disbelief she had known who it was. He took a step towards them, hesitated, and then started across with both hands out.

Anna halted out of arm's reach. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I left messages.'

‘I've had my phone off.'

‘How is your father?'

‘He's on life support,' she said. His eyes slid past her to Kit. She took hold of Kit's shoulder. ‘This is my daughter. Kit, Peter Harding.'

Kit said to him: ‘You're the one who kept calling.'

Anna watched Kit's eyes slide from his face down to his shoes and back to his face again. What did Peter look like, she asked herself, seeing him this instant through Kit's eyes. A summer weekend and there he is in his pin-striped suit, his polished shoes. The hotel dry cleaner had been doing his shirt; its collar was stiff and intensely white. Anna's eyes went up to his face: fastidious, pale, so tired the skin looked sore under his eyes.

He was watching Kit with an expression of wary patience. ‘I was worried about your mother,' he said.

Anna had her hand on Kit's shoulder still—touch, but what she discovered in it was their separateness. She saw the three of them facing each other in this desolate bright room, its row of empty chairs. She touched Kit's cheek, its surprising warmth. It's what
they cannot imagine, she thought: there is an afterwards always. How tired she felt…

She said, ‘I'm just going with Treen to get Mum's things. The hospital has some flat for us to stay in tonight.'

‘My flight's not till Monday. So I thought—I'm booked at the motel.'

‘Mum, your phone's ringing.'

‘That's alright.'

‘It'll be Dad calling back.'

Peter said, ‘You can answer it.'

Anna took the phone out of her bag. ‘It was Treen. Listen, I have to get back.'

With self-conscious formality he walked out into the sunlight. They watched him go between parked cars, head bent against the glare. Heat, and the glass, made the scene far off. At the edge of the footpath he stopped, looked away down the road. That road, Anna thought, and then the next, and then the freeway…She saw in thought what she had seen that morning: grey light widening over paddocks vacant under so much sky, something washed about the morning light. Saltbush edged the road. In one paddock a single dead tree stood stripped and bleached, its fallen branches cleared away. He'll go back to his motel, she thought. She saw him in his suit on the bed, computer on his knees, working, impervious to the ugly room, the sea at the end of the street. She thought: he keeps his life.

‘Why did he come?' said Kit.

‘He told you. He was worried about me.'

‘What? Is he in love with you or something?' A neutral voice, behind which lay resources of contempt.

‘Oh! Probably.'

‘Does Dad know?'

‘Dad's not worried.'

Kit said nothing. In the pause, Anna heard her own words again. Unexpectedly tears started in her eyes: shameful, self-pitying tears.
He
did this, she thought. That instant, she did not know whether she meant Matt, or Peter. With the back of her hand, she struck the tears off. Peter had come here. That was not love. He was relentless, insisting on himself. But she remembered how he had stood up, hesitating before he came towards them; she saw his tired, tentative, hopeful face.

The ding of the lift made Anna twist around. People were coming out: an old couple and their grandchild. The child's balloon had ‘It's a girl!' on it. So children are born here too, thought Anna. Going through the glass doors, the grandmother bent to take the child's hand. Something in that act struck at her. How far off it seemed, that simple tenderness.

Chapter Nineteen

S
o they had put Kit in her old room. The room itself was unchanged. Sunlight came dust-hazed through the sides of the curtains. That was Kit's T-shirt discarded on the rug. Automatically Anna folded it and set it on the end of the bed. There, within arm's reach, a dint in the bedcovers where Kit had slept…

Anna pulled back the curtains. Suddenly
that
view, so familiar that seeing it again was less like seeing it than rediscovering it within herself:
that
uneven curve against the thin pale blue summer morning sky. She opened the window. In the city the sea was wrong because it did not smell like this, this salt-dry smell of the garden. She thought of how the sea had looked that night with Peter: oily, climbing in small waves up the sand. That night was dream-like, more than life-size. She looked back at it almost frightened. What had they said?

And he is here, in this place. I could call him now, this instant, and he would come. He would walk into this room. Aloud, she said: ‘I can't
think
.' She touched her hand to the window frame. Treen was packing suitcases—suitcases they had discovered at last under Audrey's bed, coated in dust so thick it had formed clots. It was past belief, it was a sort of madness, the state this house was in: Audrey's room reeking of urine, everywhere the smell of dust and mice,
termites in the verandah posts. Anna could still feel under her finger the crumbling wood, so eaten out it gave way like icing sugar. That whole verandah was held up by paint. But when Anna had taken Treen's hand, made her feel the rot for herself, Treen had pushed her upper lip down and refused to speak. It was an expression that Anna remembered from childhood. Treen's vagueness always had been a form of obstinacy, she thought now: a way of resisting facts. Better the house be sold than go to ruin. With a sudden weightless feeling she pictured bulldozers going through it: a cleared space, torn ground. But even to her, the picture was like a child's tantrum: impotent defiance. This house,
could
it be destroyed?

Cautiously, like pressing a bruise, she tested what she felt, being back. In one way, the house was exactly as she remembered it, everything in the same place; and yet it was not as it had ever seemed. The house was keeping itself back from her. Following Treen through the door she had turned without thinking to the front room in which their father had waited for them to come home. In some lights they used to see—perhaps only imagine— his pale cautious face at the window, watching as they came up the drive. This time only the blank of the room had met her. That first instant, she had seen that the furniture in there was beautiful: museum quality, those little cedar chairs and the desk, its drawers with the walnut inlay. The early lithographs of the harbour—those, too, were rare. All this had come into fashion since she was last here. Following Treen down the hall she had found herself imagining the show she could put together, seeing the objects around her in the gallery's clean clear light.

She popped a bubble of paint on the window ledge and peeled the splintery paint back. Out there, heat shimmered on the dune. How quickly she had stopped hearing the sound of the sea. She was here, at the window. At the same time, she was stepping under tea-tree at the back of the garden, ducking her head under flickering light, following the path uphill until it came out at the top of the dune where suddenly the sea filled half the sky and seemed wider than it. Anna thought: But I was happy here. The feeling took her by surprise. She thought of those afternoons in winter when she and Treen had climbed out this window and up over the dune to the washed, wide beach, the grey exultant wind, when they had walked around the point to Main Street and sat in the window of the bakery licking the icing off their coffee scrolls. She remembered the exact look of the bakery window, its corners filled with pin's head drops of steam; outside the pine trees had appeared remote and somehow historic through the BAKERY sign painted on the window, a sign readable backwards from where they sat. They had worn scratchy machine-knitted jumpers, she remembered, and jeans tucked into their socks.

Now Treen was working away somewhere behind her in the house. Anna would have felt worse about standing idle at the window if Treen had not made clear, with an irritated movement of her hands, how much she'd rather Anna got out of the way and left her to get on with it. Treen always had been the capable one, back then. What puzzled Anna, what that gesture had made clear, was that for Treen nothing had changed. Anna was still the difficult younger sister Treen was bound to accommodate and endure. Wakes, Mitchy, Coops:
in Treen's set at school, girls and boys alike had given each other nicknames: the first syllable of their last name with an s, a, y, or an o added to the end of it. Stevo, she remembered. Clarkey. Sensible, companionable, unobsessive people. If Anna, who had been none of those things, had got through school unscathed, it was only because she had been known as Treen's sister.

And Treen had kept in touch with them all, judging by the messages on her phone. ‘Oh yes,' she'd answered Anna's question with a sort of amused incredulity, as though it could hardly be otherwise. ‘Oh yes.' And Anna, who for years had not thought of Treen without guilt and resentful pity, realised that she had no idea how Treen herself regarded the life that she had here. Was it possible that she stayed on with the same ease, still seeing people she knew from school, as though everything else they'd done—moved away, married, bought farms and businesses, raised children—hadn't taken them away from her at all? If Anna were to ask Treen today what had finally happened with the doctor she'd followed to Darwin, and Brisbane, and finally Toronto, Treen would only smile deprecatingly and say that she couldn't remember, it was all so long ago. And perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was only Anna who wanted some crisis that could explain the choices that Treen had made, if they had even been choices at all.

Without warning, Anna remembered the ghost. A soft-edged pale shape, yes, but less a shape than a presence, watchful, malevolent, opposed. From time to time at dinner parties over the years Anna had told the story of how as a child she had seen a ghost in the house she'd grown up in. Now, in her old room, suddenly the memory
was not quaint. From where she stood at the window, Anna felt the house build itself around that fear. The whole of her childhood was around her still. She felt again the force of the rules she'd made: the wardrobe doors had to be closed, the door to her room ajar; a foot or hand out of the bedcover made her vulnerable. She stood there looking out at daylight, conscious of the heavy furniture at her back, and felt again the terror that had always waited for her here in the dark. It had not had any shape, or name. It had been the dark simply: patient, unkind, immense.

‘Tea?' Treen said from the doorway.

‘You gave me a fright.' Anna shut the window. On the way out of the room she collected Kit's T-shirt from the end of the bed. She held it against her chest.

‘Are you cold?' said Treen. Anna shook her head. ‘The house never really heats up, even in summer.' In the same polite and formal voice she went on, ‘You won't have seen the new kitchen.' She stepped through the old doorway into the cheap, bright room.

‘What have you done?' Anna felt her mind refuse this—this trick, she would have said, as though the old, dim kitchen were still there behind this ugly new one. She pictured the small window over the sink, with cotton curtains strung from a wire; in the corner, the green enamel stove set into the wall beside the hotplates. The wall of that alcove had been tiled pale green, with a subdued gleam like the inside of a shell.

‘That old Kookaburra stove,' Treen said, switching on the electric kettle and getting down two cups. ‘We couldn't cook a roast in it.' She peered into the old plastic biscuit barrel. ‘These should be
alright,' she said, shaking some out into a little bowl: the same biscuits they had always had, flat as cardboard and coated with stock-cubeflavoured dust. Anna had a vertiginous sense of Treen, week after week, pouring packet after packet of biscuits into that barrel. ‘Little Ian who lived up the road did a deal for us. Do you remember him?'

‘What?'

‘Ian. Round metal glasses, used to ride everywhere on that bike with a flag at the back of it.'

‘No.'

‘He does kitchens now.'

Anna went to the fridge for milk.

‘Milk in your tea now!' exclaimed Treen, with only half-feigned shock.

‘It doesn't stain your teeth as much.' The fridge, crowded with small bowls full of leftovers, gave off a sour-sweet smell. ‘You need to throw all this stuff out.'

‘We'll leave it,' said Treen. ‘The bins don't go out till Friday.'

Closing the fridge, Anna caught sight of the magazine article. ‘My God! What's that doing here?' She stared at the yellowed photograph with dismayed recognition: that craven placating smile.

‘Leave it!' cried Treen, pushing back her chair. She picked the article out of Anna's hand and smoothed it flat on the table. ‘They're proud of it.' She stuck it back on the fridge. ‘It's the only photo we have.'