The Unquiet House (2 page)

Emma could see at once that the house had not been used as a holiday home, or anything else. It didn’t look as if anyone had been there in a long time. Cobwebs laden with dust darkened the corners. The staircase wrapped around the square hall, which was floored with black and white tiles half-covered with grime. She found herself tiptoeing, her steps sounding like an intrusion. She peered into the first room on her left. It was a bright, spacious drawing room with large windows looking onto the front and side of the house, but it was dulled by the drab walls and heavily patterned carpet. It had a cornice like the frills on a wedding cake and a yellowed-looking chandelier. Hairline cracks spidered across the ceiling. There was a smell in here too: musty and unaired.

Emma walked to the side window, noting the cracks in the frames, the blackened wood beneath. The view was of thorny twigs jutting from a flowerbed, the colourless remnants of dead leaves, with a narrow strip of unkempt lawn beyond, and through the trees she’d seen earlier, more of the neighbouring property; it looked broader than she’d first assumed, and taller. It might even have a tower.

She stood there for a moment, sensing the weight and breadth of the house above her. It had six bedrooms.
Six
. A ridiculous
number. She smiled, thinking of how her dad would have fussed around it, noting all the things that needed doing, and then she remembered and her smile faded. She still hadn’t decided what to do with her parents’ place. She was living in a small rented flat in Leeds. While her mother’s illness had dragged on and on she’d imagined that after it took its course, her dad would live there alone and that she would visit more often. It hadn’t worked out that way. The heart attack had taken him within weeks of her mother passing and now their house too lay empty. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sell it. The very idea of cutting those ties had brought on bad dreams in which she simply disappeared, leaving no one to even remember her name. They were dreams from which she’d woken in a cold sweat. Now there was Mire House.

She looked around the room once more. Oddly, she knew the exact shade she would paint it if she were to live here: a soft sage green, traditional yet fresh. It would fit; it would belong.

*

Emma looked across the front lawn and the wall and into the road beyond, the bright metal of her car incongruous outside it all, like a visitor from a different era. The window was clouded with dirt and the carpet was greasy, but even so, she knew that if she were to stay here, this room, on the first floor in the centre of the building, would be hers. It was painted a shade of blue that was a little too dark, but it had a pretty little fireplace that was edged with flowered tiles and it felt like a place in which she could stay. Of course she
wasn’t
staying, but it was nice to imagine waking here to the distant sound of birdsong through the glass, the soft hum of farm traffic somewhere along the road.

She turned to leave and blinked. Her first thought was that that she was seeing things, that the door in front of her had doubled somehow, but then she saw that one of them was a little narrower than the other. She hadn’t noticed the second door, which was set into the same wall as the entrance. She didn’t remember seeing it from the landing on the other side and for a fleeting moment she thought of the stories she’d read when she was young, tales of impossible doors leading to strange and magical lands. She shook her head in amusement. The landing had narrowed in that place, hadn’t it? She stepped forward and opened the door. It swung outwards, revealing only a cupboard. One side was lined with shelves and the other held a single high clothes rail. Something was hanging from it. She leaned in and made out the shape of a man’s three-piece suit, the shoulders of the jacket misshapen against the curve of the hanger. There was a sour, unwashed smell. She thought of Clarence Mitchell. Was it his, saved for some special occasion, perhaps? She had a sudden image of a funeral – the suit was black, after all – and she grimaced.

He didn’t even live here
, she reminded herself, and she closed the door and went to explore the rest of the rooms.

It wasn’t until she entered the master bedroom – the largest one, next to the blue room she was already thinking of as hers – that she saw through the tops of the trees that marked the edge of the garden. When she did, she realised her neighbours were not as she’d expected. She had assumed there would be a house, a farmhouse perhaps, like the one she could now glimpse a little further along the lane, but instead she saw a stone structure with a neat grey-tiled spire. The property next door was not a farm or any such thing: it was a church, and she realised she
could see into the graveyard too, the crooked stones ranked across the rising hillside.

*

She could never have imagined owning anywhere like this. The house was too big for her. It had too many rooms. She would disappear within it. If she was to speak her voice would echo from the empty walls, too loud and too flat, and she knew she wouldn’t like to hear it. But then, she hadn’t spoken. There was no one to speak to. It crossed her mind that perhaps it was only that the house echoed her own emptiness, her
aloneness
, and she shook the thought away.

And yet, the house was beautiful. It was run down and drab and unkempt and unclean, but even so, something in it called to her. She could easily imagine this place filled with life, with parties, the distant laughter of children. Another brief image: herself smiling, calling down the stairs to her own children as they kicked off muddy boots in the hallway, a man behind them, his face a blur. She smiled at herself. She wasn’t even seeing anyone, not just now. But still, it was a shame –
wrong
, even – that somewhere so lovely should be locked up and abandoned. And one day perhaps that
could
be her. For a second she pressed a hand to her belly, smoothing down her top. This place would need a fortune spending on it, a fortune she didn’t have.
Unless she sold her parents’ house
. The thought slotted neatly into her mind as if it was something she’d been planning for years, as if it was natural. But it
wasn’t
natural. It wasn’t anything she’d been able to do. She wasn’t ready.

Emma let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding and a mist rose in front of her face. The heating probably hadn’t been on for a long time; it might not even work. It had been
ridiculous to think of staying here, even for a moment. People her age didn’t have houses like this. It was too much. Her flat was what she needed: somewhere she could never really be alone, in the heart of a city. In a city things were never as silent as this; a silence so deep it would only leave her at the mercy of her own imaginings.

She gathered herself to leave and as she did, she heard the long slow creak of a door. She turned to see that it had swung wide open. The place was draughty, too, then:
perfect
. She half smiled as she headed outside. It was as if the house itself was showing her out.

*

The grass was so soft and giving that Emma sank into it as she walked. It was thick with moss and moisture seeped around her feet with each step. When she looked back she found she had left a trail of perfect footprints, each one still bearing the pattern of the soles of her shoes.

Midges and mire
, she thought as she approached the boundary. This side ended with a wall and when she looked over it she saw a narrow path. It was choked with nettles and there was a hedgerow with dead stunted trees. Insects hung thickly in the air, soundless and weightless, as if this were their source. The scent of stale water was stronger here. So perhaps there was a marsh somewhere close by. She wondered if that was how the house had come by its name.

The trees at the opposite end of the garden were still clinging to their leaves, though most had already turned. Branches clacked as they swayed in the breeze. When she walked under them she could see the church, nestled so deeply into the earth it seemed almost sunken, speared into it by the weight of its
spire. The grounds sloped upward from the boundary wall and she glanced at the hillside covered in gravestones. She pushed away the memories that rose at the sight of them; another graveyard, pulling up in a slow heavy car, the cloying scent of flowers—

She took a deep breath. What did it matter if it was so nearby? It wasn’t as if she was going to stay here. She turned her back on the place and made her way to the car, wiping her feet on the verge before getting in. It was no good, the damp earth ingrained in her shoes was already smearing the mat. She started the engine and looked back at the house. It was still beautiful. It still answered something within her, as if it was responding to some question she’d never thought to ask. It was also too big, too expensive, too irrational. She shook her head, trying not to look back once more as she drove away, but she couldn’t help herself. The house was quiet and its windows were dark.

The city was stirring. Emma could hear the murmur of tyres on the road outside, the louder choking of a bus passing at the top of the street. She opened her eyes. Her room was a smooth white box. She’d been woken late by Jackie and Liam, the Irish couple upstairs. Their voices through the ceiling had been fast and raised, like something mechanical gaining speed and slipping into high gear. Their argument had gone on and on.

She pushed herself up, slotting her legs into the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. The flat was in a narrow red-brick terraced house which had never been meant to be subdivided. Her kitchen had once been a corridor and she shared a landing with Jackie and Liam. She had chosen it because it was close to work and because it had been new – the oven had still been coated in plastic film. The flat had no history, none of the accumulated grime of other people’s lives.

But the past was always there, waiting to make its presence felt. Emma glanced at the table where she’d placed the letter. It had been sent after Clarence Mitchell’s death by his solicitor. She tried to remember if her father had ever told her one single thing about the man. She thought there might have
been something, the hint of some estrangement, but when she tried to recall the details they slipped away from her.

It struck her now that the letter smelled a little like Mire House, like stale, uncirculated air. It was a single sheet of paper, thin and brittle, folded once. He hadn’t used her first name or even ‘Dear’.
Miss Dean
was how he’d addressed her, terse and formal, as if she were some spinster in a Jane Austen novel:

Emma had stared at it, perplexed. It purported to be an explanation and yet it explained nothing; it only raised more questions.
I wish you joy of her?
She wasn’t sure she liked how that sounded. She scanned it again, though she really needed to shower, dress, get to work. She still couldn’t penetrate its meaning.

It occurred to her now to wonder if the mysterious Charles had come to her father’s funeral. Weddings, funerals, christenings – the triumvirate that reunited families. She couldn’t remember him – but then, she didn’t remember much, only black suits and veils and brief glimpses of friends and neighbours with pale faces and dark clothes, sitting in pews, their hands resting on unfamiliar hymn books worn out from the press of hundreds of hands before them. She shook her head. There was no way of remembering and she didn’t want to; a new day was beginning, something to fill with routine tasks and cups of tea and minor pleasantries, and then it would be behind her and she would forget all over again.

She put down the letter and went to the window, pulling back the curtains so hard that the plastic rings rattled against the rail. The fabric was a tasteful grey, the wall white, the view outside drab red brick. In her mind, though, was another window, wide and generous, its curtains dull and fraying from years of use, the view one of silent trees and the merest glimpse of gravestones; a place that was much more quiet and more permanent than this.

It wouldn’t take long, the woman had said, and it felt good to have finally done it. Emma had passed over the keys to her parents’ house and she’d signed a form. The estate agent would take care of everything. It was all right, it was going to happen; the woman had reassured her of that in tones so breezy they would admit of nothing else.

She had started to pack. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone at work, didn’t really need to. She could reach the office from the house in a little over an hour. They wouldn’t even notice she’d gone until she updated her records for the payroll.

It didn’t take long before the flat looked as empty and sterile as when she’d moved in. She could hear shouting in the street outside and the rattle of shutters from the corner shop. The television was on low, a soft burble, and as she listened, a tirade began in the flat above: Jackie’s voice, berating or blaming, going on and on.

She found herself longing for quiet rooms, for grand spaces, for
air
. And then she remembered what Mire House was actually like: the musty smell, the emptiness, nothing around it except the graveyard, nothing for her at all. And the
cold
.