The Life of Houses Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dark, stepping from a hotel lobby into night and a taxi home. Two mornings, they had had: enough, she thought, to say that mornings didn’t suit affairs. Breakfast in bed looking their worst, eating where they’d slept—it brought back to her how her body had felt in adolescence, the claustrophobia of close-packed cells.
    She had woken early in the hotel’s upholstered silence and imagined her own house uninhabited, its curtains open, moonlight marking the shadow of the window frame on her bedroom floor. Half asleep still, the image had held for her a dream’s power: the house less a place than a cluster of habits belonging to left and right, upstairs and down: the place where she became free of her bag, where she stood with a knife in her hand, where she sat down with a drink. Dry-mouthed in that hotel room, its air-conditioning, its soft light, she had felt an isolation as sudden as terror. Turning her head on the pillow she had discovered the sharp corner of a headache. That headache she had still…
    She said, ‘If we’d just gone straight back to the hotel after dinner—’
    â€˜You wanted a drink.’
    â€˜I’d drunk too much. You were sober.’
    He straightened. ‘You’re not making too much of this? What did she see, after all—’
    â€˜The sofa—’
    He shrugged. ‘It’s not like you to worry what someone like that thinks.’
    He never felt pity without impatience. She pressed her ring fingers against the inner edge of her eye sockets. She said, ‘I was in the bathroom this morning, exfoliating, and I suddenly realised—I keep thinking I’m getting down to younger skin but that’s not right. There are only older skins behind my face.’
    He laughed. ‘I got you up too early.’ Resting one hand on her shoulder, he massaged the base of her neck.
    â€˜Not here.’
    He dropped his hand. A riverboat slid out from under the bridge beneath them. They stood watching the boat open distance out. Some children were running along the deck waving flags.
    â€˜And if this woman does tell, it couldn’t be,’ he said, ‘quite a good thing?’
    A businessman passing behind Anna bumped his briefcase into the back of her knees. She cried out as if it had hurt, with an exaggerated movement of her hands. ‘Can we walk?’
    Turning, falling in step with the crowd, they fell in at once with its anonymity. Peter walked without swinging his briefcase, keeping his upper body very still. At the lights, waiting to cross, still they said nothing—the two of them watching traffic signals with abstracted intensity. Only when they had crossed the road, climbed steps—the crowd breaking apart across the uneven paving of the city square— he said: ‘I’ve given Clare the house.’
    â€˜That’s nice of you.’
    He kept on. ‘There’s a rental flat I have to sell. Then she’ll have the house, paid off.’
    â€˜And that’s it? You start again—’
    â€˜I start again,’ he echoed.
    The remoteness of his voice made her look up. Coming into the square they had climbed away from the river. Now behind him the scene opened out. There was the river, curving through parkland. At this distance, it had a surface of scratched glass. Anna remembered his face as she had seen it that morning in their hotel room. Leaning over him, she had registered it as a physical fact: small-pored dry papery skin, stubble greyer along the jawline. How strange it had seemed that she could touch it. This was the face that rose in her mind in the weeks when she did not see him. Now she pressed one finger against his cheek. ‘But you can’t expect me to be happy about this.’
    He stopped abruptly. ‘I do. I do expect that.’ She saw that he had given away the house gladly, with a mental flourish. Though in small matters he could be touchy, over-sensitive,