The Life of Houses Read Online Free PDF Page A

Kit, the strangeness of this house made it complete, unassailable. It seemed impossible that she would find her way about in it.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What work does she do?’
    â€˜Audrey?’ Treen paused. In a neutral tone, she answered, ‘Somesort 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.’
    Impossible to imagine that her mother had ever been young. Kit pictured her mother seated at the dressing table, leaning in and lifting her chin as she ran mascara through her lashes, sitting up and looking coolly back at the glass. Treen’s memories, her eagerness, embarrassed Kit. It made her think of the artists who clustered around her mother at gallery openings. Always one of them crouched down and asked Kit babyish questions, glancing at Anna as they laughed. Anna ignored them all. Greeting clients, she held two fingers on their inside wrist, as if taking their pulse, and then stepped back from them with a vague air. The more distracted she looked the more, Kit knew, she was moving with purpose. Those flattering artists had developed in Kit an instinct she would never lose: to her, Treen’s enthusiasm for her mother was a confession of failure.
    She tried to find her mother’s features in Treen’s face: the same high cheekbones and deep eye-sockets, the same long nose, its ridge as though someone had pinched the soft bone upwards—but Treen’s face was old: the skin wrinkled down the side of her cheeks andgathered at her jaw; there were knotted strings in her neck, which the loose skin sagged against. Even at the base of her neck, her skin was marred with tea-coloured freckles. Anna’s skin, though, had the pale gloss of scar tissue. She wouldn’t even cross the road without putting on a hat. And though her eyes were like Treen’s, an indistinct colour, the shadows under them were grey and lustrous.
    â€˜You might be her, standing there,’ said her aunt. At once a blind came down over her expression. She pushed herself up with two hands off the bed. ‘You’ll be tired, though,’ she said. ‘Train trips are tiring.’
    At the word ‘tired’ Kit’s mind glazed. She closed her eyes. Through the window behind her she heard the sea: a hollow continuous roar. With her eyes closed, the sound of the sea made the garden rise around her in the room: shapes in the dark, and her body felt asleep already.
    â€˜Should I say goodnight to Audrey?’
    â€˜They’ll have gone off by now,’ said Treen. ‘I should help Mum change.’ She stayed where she