The Life of Houses (3 page)

‘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 His touch was oddly light, his mind withdrawn from it.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.

‘In the end he had to leave the district.' Her grandfather, after he had finished speaking, kept staring at her. His eyes, veiny, with numbcoloured cataracts, looked like flesh. Kit felt the almost repellent oddness of sight. In the pause, she heard the monotonous whine of the fridge. Her grandfather was waiting for her to say something. She had no memory of what he'd said, only of his uninsistent voice passing from one episode to another. Her grandmother watching, quizzical and remote, set Kit on a blank stage, isolated, painfully conscious of her hands.

Treen let the sink water out. She turned with a smile of steely tolerance, which said that the story of the house was something they had had to go through. This kitchen, the only lit room in so much dark, felt utterly cut off. Having seen her grandparents nowhere else, Kit could not picture them elsewhere—felt, against reason, that they had lived in this kitchen always.

Her aunt, picking up Kit's bag, said: ‘We haven't even shown you your room.'

The air was cooler in the old house and heavy with the smell
of dust and mouse piss. Treen pulled a long string hanging from the hall ceiling to turn on the light. Now the brown-shadowed hall, lit with glass lamps on chains, led past rooms of an almost touchable darkness. Kit had never had what her father called a sense of direction and now was only aware of corners, many doors, an intricacy extending in all directions—an impression exaggerated, perhaps, by the childhood memory that had come back to her in the car. Still, she was not used to old houses: this one had so many walls, so many rooms full of silence. For Kit, the strangeness of this house made it complete, unassailable. It seemed impossible that she would find her way about in it.

‘This is you.' Treen turned on the light and stood aside for Kit to walk in.

It was a room where no one could ever have been comfortable. Its ceiling was higher than the room was wide. Here Kit stood at the wrong end of a telescope: reduced, far off. The furniture, too, was on the wrong scale: mahogany, humourlessly florid. The wooden fourposter bed stood so high it had a step built into one side. This was furniture she would not be able to move an inch. A dressing table dominated the corner by the window. Its three mirrors, passing light back and forth between them, emphasised the inwardness of the room. Only the tattiness of the wallpaper, cream, scattered with faded green roses, only the curtains, sun-bleached past any name for green, recalled the sea; a dissatisfied murmur, an uneasy damp smell haunting the room.

‘What work does she do?'

‘Audrey?' Treen paused. In a neutral tone, she answered, ‘Some
sort of family history. A man from the library in Sydney wrote asking for papers.'

Treen dropped the bag by the dresser and settled onto the bed, stepping her hips back. ‘This was your mother's room. She always slept so badly. In the middle of the night she used to knock on my door and make me come in.' Treen nodded at the dressing table. ‘Then in the morning she'd sit up there, asking me whether this profile was better, or the other. It was one of her magazine theories— that's what Daddy called them. Everyone was prettier on one side than the other. She used to make me iron her hair.'