The House of Memories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ella?
    I was in Margaret River, in Western Australia. My contract as a casual worker at one of the largest wineries in the area was up. I’d been offered an extension but I was ready to move. Since it happened, I hadn’t stayed anywhere for long. I’d left Canberra within weeks. I’d moved to Melbourne, then Sydney, before I’d heard about the winery job. I’d been there since.
    I’d like to see you,
Lucas had written.
Please let me buy your airfare.
    I wanted to see Lucas too, but I didn’t need his help with the airfare. I’d saved every cent I’d earned. There was nothing I wanted or needed beyond the basics. I booked my ticket the next day. It felt exactly the right thing to do, after months of feeling like I was living in fog.
    Even flying into London that morning had felt right. Because I thought being here again might help? Because I had loved it once, and had been happy here? I think I hoped that being back would help me or force me to feel something other than despair.
    Come and see me as soon as you get here, would you? Come straight from the airport.
    Lucas wasn’t being mysterious. He was always matter-of-fact like that.
    You do know you are welcome to stay for as long as you need to?
Mi casa es su casa
.
    My house is your house.
He had said that to me many times over the years. To his many student lodgers as well, I knew. Aidan had always laughed at his terrible Spanish pronunciation. Lucas was a genius historian but a bad linguist.
Thank you, Lucas,
I wrote back.
    I walked the short distance from Paddington Station to his street. Twenty-seven years had passed since my first visit to Lucas’s house. He’d been in his mid-thirties then. He was in his early sixties now. Yet he always looked the same to me. I was the one who’d changed most over the years, from that seven-year-old fox-stealing curly-haired child to the thirty-four-year-old woman I now was. I’d been a tall, skinny child. I was still skinny, still taller than average. My dark brown hair had been long until a year ago. I’d cut it two days after I arrived in Margaret River and kept it short since.
    The houses on his street still reminded me of wedding cakes. His blue door was still in need of painting. There was a new door knocker, in the shape of a fox. I only had to knock once. The door opened and there he was, smiling at me. His hair was still a big mop of unruly curls, a Fox family trait. He still wore glasses that could have come from a museum. His baggy, grubby clothes might have belonged to a gardener. Seeing him standing there, so familiar and so solid, I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry.
    “Ella.” He held me tight, waited until my tears slowed, then took a step back. “Come in.”
    If he was my aunt rather than my uncle, it would have been different, I’m sure. It would have been all talk, no silences.
I’m so sad for you, Ella. You poor thing. How can you even begin to get over something like that?
All the words I’d heard from so many people in the past twenty months, heard so many times that I couldn’t hear them anymore. I hadn’t told the people around me in the winery in Margaret River what had happened, why I was there. I didn’t tell them that I was an editor, not a vineyard assistant turned restaurant kitchen hand. I could have got work in my own industry. I’d had many offers after word got around, but I needed everything to change. I couldn’t have any reminders of what my life had once been like.
    Time and again, people who did know what had happened suggested that keeping busy would help the healing process. It’s not true, you know. Nothing helps. Because whatever I do with my body, my brain keeps ticking away, going over and over every second of that day, trying to find a new way of remembering, another way of changing what happened, winding itself into knots. That was—that is—the torture of it. Because it doesn’t matter how many times I examine it, how often I try to rewrite that day