The Life of Houses Read Online Free PDF

was. ‘You can always wake me if you’re frightened. My room’s just across the hall.’
    When her aunt had gone at last, Kit turned to face the dressing table. She saw at once the point of Treen’s remark. Yellowish skin, features too big for her face: her expression, split across three mirrors, looked frightened. Lifting up her hair, she saw for the first time that bluish-pale hollow at the back of her neck, which other people saw all the time.

Chapter Three
    B ehind them Princes Bridge was crowded with men and women in suits hurrying to the city. Though the sea was close, behind the converted warehouses and highrise apartments, the river, unhurried here, low-banked and wide, had none of the sea’s glamour. The dress that Anna had packed to wear was too formal for this morning brightness, the river’s variable light. Wearing it, she was conscious still of getting ready in the hotel bathroom. On her skin, she felt the seediness of hotels, even expensive ones—the impersonality which forces guests always to be intimate. Why did anyone like marble, the clink of glass set down on it? But then, what had become of her that simply getting ready in a different bathroom could make her feel so off-key? Not the face that she built again in the mirror—she could do that anywhere, and in the dark—but the shape of the movements themselves: how far to the drawer, to the tap, to the towel, movements each with their accompanying small sound. Even now she was waiting for the small click of a closing drawer. In truth, she thought, in the privacy of her own bathroom she was like those people who practice tai chi in the park, except that her tai chi was miniature: performed on the field of her face. Right now she wanted nothing more than to go to her own house and shower and start the day again.
    He said: ‘And you’re certain she saw?’
    â€˜I told you: we stood doing our lipstick in the same mirror.’
    Anna chafed her hands on the stone parapet. The gesture had been involuntary. Only the fact that it slightly hurt made her notice what she’d done—that and the flesh warmth of the stone. The sort of gesture an actor would use, she thought—here she was in her life like that tourist she’d overheard on the way here saying ‘There’s the postcard,’ as they passed the Cathedral.
    Peter said: ‘Well but she could have thought—’
    â€˜Her face in the mirror. Like a dissipated doll. No, if she’d thought it was nothing she’d have asked after Matt.’
    She heard him draw in breath. Under level eyelids, she knew, he was taking account of that life of hers in which he played no part. ‘They know each other?’ he said carefully.
    â€˜Only they see each other every morning at school. She’s all over him, as a matter of fact.’
    He had been looking down at his hands, pressing his thumbs one over the other. Now he twisted his head sideways to study Anna.
    â€˜What did you talk about?’
    â€˜School holiday plans.’ Anna’s voice went up a pitch: ‘They’ve taken a place at the beach. She’s going to look out for Kit if they take the ferry across.’
    With an impatient gesture of her hands, she stepped back from the voice she’d put on. The crowd was there, at her back. Hemmed in, she stared down at some tourists stepping from the quay onto a flat-bottomed cruise-boat. She loathed the jaunty riverboats, the lycra bike-riders, that girl down there, who looked as though she’dread Chanel’s advice in Grazia —‘Take one thing off before you leave the house’—and taken off her skirt. She found she could not exorcise except by this vast contempt last night’s humiliation: the sly glee on that bitch’s face.
    In all this, Peter was the one person she could stand. But then, how many times had they even spent a morning together? One of them had always been dressing in