The Family Remains(7)
‘Absolutely,’ she replies, ‘just popped it into Google Maps. Getting about is easy these days, isn’t it?’
‘Very true,’ he replies and then regales her with stories of Google Maps getting it wrong and guiding people up dead-end roads and into meadows full of sheep and people’s back gardens. While he talks, they walk slowly towards the house. Lucy tries not to betray her awe and excitement. She’s wearing clothes picked out for her by Henry, her brother. He said, ‘If you’re looking at million-pound houses you need to look like you have a million pounds.’ He’d dragged her up and down Marylebone High Street, in and out of trendy French boutiques, and made her buy a house-hunting wardrobe of soft T-shirts and tailored trousers and sweeping maxi dresses and blazers and bright white trainers with metallic patterns. Then he put her into a salon for three hours with a man called Jed who chopped eight inches off her sun-frazzled hair and streaked the rest of it with strands of vanilla blonde.
Henry had made her have her teeth whitened shortly after she moved in with him. She’d noticed him flinching every time she smiled and eventually said, ‘Is there something wrong with my teeth?’ and he’d said, ‘I suppose it’s easy to lose sight of things like that when you haven’t had regular access to a mirror for so long.’
Such a shit, her big brother. He hid it with a mischievous veneer of dark humour, but she sometimes suspected that the darkness ran much deeper.
She flips up her sunglasses from her nose to her hair and looks at the house in front of her. It’s a four-bedroom former vicarage just outside St Albans. It has an orchard and a wooden swing set and a trampoline and a two-hundred-foot lawned garden with a ramshackle gazebo at the end. It has stone-mullioned windows with gargoyles stationed above. It has a double front door with brass knockers and boot scrapers and built-in benches either side. It’s scruffy and a bit tired. The curtains she can see through the windows are sun-bleached and shredded. But it is essentially one of the most beautiful houses she has ever seen in her life. She maintains a poker face and says, ‘It’s lovely.’
‘It really is,’ he says, sorting through the keys in his hand to find the one that unlocks the front door. ‘Not the sort of place that comes up very often. Are you familiar with the area at all?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘My daughter lives in St Albans, near the centre.’
The words still give her a shiver of pleasure. My daughter. Libby Jones. Serenity Lamb. The daughter she had to leave behind as a baby, and then found again a year ago, when she’d just turned twenty-five. She has soft blonde hair, Libby Jones, and pale blue eyes, and she holds your gaze when you talk to her in a way that makes you feel you can say anything to her and she will absorb it without judgement. She has a London accent: not a cut-glass English accent like Lucy, who went to a school where they made her wear a straw boater and a blouse with a pie-crust collar, but an accent with the edges cut off and flattened, bits missing at the ends of certain words, an accent formed at comprehensive schools and in suburban terraced houses. She has freckles on her arms and wears her hair in a side parting; she tucks it behind her ear every few minutes, and sometimes she touches the tips of her eyelashes with her finger, as if checking that they’re still there. She smells of vanilla. She washes her hands a lot. She likes fruit. Her handwriting is very neat. She is amazing.
‘Oh,’ says Max, now, turning to smile at her. ‘That’s good. She’ll be happy to have Mum up the road, I’m sure.’
The house is empty. The owners have already downsized to a new-build apartment. They’ve left the bare bones of some furniture behind, to create the impression of a much-loved family home, but in effect the spareness of it serves only to highlight the fact that the intense universe which once existed within these four walls has come to an end: children flown, the noise and chaos of a family unit truncated down to two middle-aged people in a flat somewhere, existing quietly in the spaces between visits and phone calls.
‘It is a bit of a doer-upper,’ Max says now, searching for light switches as he goes. ‘The owners did spend quite a lot of money on it when they bought it, but obviously that was over twenty years ago. So, it is a little bit last century, let us say.’
Lucy already knows she’s going to buy it. She knew she was going to buy it the moment she saw the details on the internet. It has an unconventional layout. Lucy was brought up in a house with symmetry at its core: a central hallway with evenly sized rooms that mirrored each other on either side. She does not want symmetry. She wants nooks and crannies and funny little alcoves and unexpected passages leading to rooms that don’t make sense.
Upstairs the bedroom doors still bear the names of the children who once slept behind them. Oliver. Maddy. Milly.
They’re soft names but the damage those children appear to have wrought in their house doesn’t back that up: ripped wallpaper, felt-tip scribbles, something neon green stuck to the cheap carpets underfoot – slime probably.
After a year living in Henry’s immaculate apartment, having to remove her shoes at the front door, having to use special sprays to mop up benign spillages, adopt a coded system of cloths for different surfaces, having to constantly police her children to make sure they aren’t about to drop anything or stain anything or damage anything, she wants this – a house to bash about in, a house to drop slime in, a house to absorb them and their imperfections.