Eleanor knew they needed Zoe. She knew they were lucky to have her. She was – relatively – discreet and tidy, had different working hours, went out a lot. She could barely have intruded less, but Eleanor wanted to ignore her completely, and she couldn’t. The first week she was there, Eleanor found herself irritated by any trace of her at all: foreign salad leaves in the sink, her bicycle in the hall. It was vaguely repulsive, finding bits of a stranger in your house. A hair that was too long, glinting and brash. A Brazil nut caught in the dishwasher, smooth and damp like a tooth.
It made her feel self-conscious too. She hadn’t chosen the strange paint colours or the ancient furniture, but it was still her house – it ought to represent her in some way. She felt embarrassed seeing its eccentricities through Zoe’s eyes. She’d stopped noticing their broken bin lid, but now it looked slovenly or slightly demented. Most of the time she didn’t have the capacity to worry about what Zoe thought of them, but when they crossed paths, she felt exposed, as if Zoe was observing her. She reminded herself that Zoe was unlikely to be interested.
Eleanor knew Richard was more curious about Zoe and she was grateful for it – she was happy to outsource the task of being friendly to him. Occasionally, she wondered if she ought to feel anxious about his interest – it felt almost arrogant or complacent not to and she was constantly reminded to be wary, by magazines, her friends, her mother: ‘Darling, what are you thinking? Asking a young woman to come and live with you. It’s madness.’
‘I don’t think I need to worry about Richard, Mum.’
‘No, perhaps you don’t.’ Her mother had sighed.
But jealousy was something she didn’t really feel any more – perhaps another thing that had been obliterated in childbirth, to make room for the terror and love – and when she’d met Zoe, the night she came to look round the house, she knew straight away Richard didn’t fancy her. She was pretty and slim; she wasn’t thin exactly, but she was rangy, long torso, small breasts. She wore things Eleanor would never have contemplated at any age – loose jeans that hung below her hip bones, rolled just above the ankle. A complicated arrangement of vests, a long cardigan. Her hair was dyed red and there was masses of it, pulled back in an elastic band. Her skin was the kind that was so pale you could see its workings: veins, blood vessels, shadows. She had a stud in her lower lip and her eyeliner was wonky. She was so far out of their range of experience, it would have been like Richard saying he fancied a flamingo.
Richard had insisted that they invite Zoe to have supper with them and they arranged it for her second week in the house. Eleanor didn’t have the energy for it, but she knew Richard was right: they ought to do it. In the end, Isobel wouldn’t settle and Eleanor spent most of the evening upstairs. After she’d got her back to sleep, Eleanor sat on the edge of their bed and found herself folding back, feet still on the floor, too tired to either get up or get on the bed properly. She could hear Richard talking – ‘Writing is like giving birth, Zoe. Editing is infanticide’ – and she closed her eyes and thought she might just pause here a bit longer. She would be surprised if Zoe were enjoying herself, but at least she couldn’t accuse them of not trying.
*
There were other things to worry about. The house was hungry for resources. Richard’s savings account had collapsed in just a couple of months. Even her own savings, which had always seemed quaint and decorative compared to Richard’s, had to be drawn in. Richard promised her they could be replenished – he calculated obsessively, compiling budgets and timetables and year plans. He checked property websites compulsively: ‘It’s gone up in value by thirty thousand – we’ve made thirty thousand already.’ But it couldn’t be translated into anything real. They still had to live there.
She knew Richard had plans for the house. It was a vision Eleanor couldn’t quite access, no matter how many times he asked her what she thought. He drew floor plans and wrote lists and columns of figures at the bottom of the gas bill or on the backs of envelopes. They watched Grand Designs every night. Wallpaper samples arrived in the post.
She couldn’t make herself care. She tried to remember if she ever had – she must have done once. She used to pride herself on her taste and had enjoyed choosing clothes – this wasn’t so different surely: it was still colour, forms, lines. But since Rosie and Isobel, she’d lost her appetite for it and now relied on old clothes, her previous self’s good choices.
She’d enjoyed buying things for their old house and had fought with Richard over the furniture he’d inherited from his family home. His parents instinctively disapproved of anything that hadn’t been validated by history, so everything they owned was dark and solid, heavily upholstered, floral. The pieces Richard saved were hard to accommodate: chairs that were too delicate to sit on, enormous china lamps, endless side tables. She’d wanted things that were clean, minimalist and modern, things Richard’s mother called ‘awfully plain’.
Now the only thing she cared about was ridding the place of the people who’d lived there before. She had never had any contact with them – the sale had been completed through the estate agents and the solicitors – yet she felt unbearably intimate with them. They surrounded her, intractable, from the depressions in the seat of the sofa to the dirty red carpets: little constellations of grease spots in peculiar arrangements that Eleanor couldn’t connect or read. Richard had negotiated with the lawyers that the owners would leave the house part-furnished. He said it was a good thing – they couldn’t fill a four-bedroom house with what they already owned and he didn’t want to have to buy cheap placeholders or rush decisions about colour or style (‘a sofa is a huge commitment, Eleanor’). They got rid of the beds, but he convinced her to keep everything else.
The first day in the house, when Eleanor started to unpack, she’d seen that they’d left behind smaller belongings too. Blankets and quilts remained draped over the armchairs. She found a mousetrap, the dirty rubber tubes of a shower extension. A shower cap in the bath, stained pale brown at the edges. A dress for a doll behind the sofa, grubby pink velour with a white lace collar.
When she went back to the upstairs room, the room with the writing, she noticed that someone had left a row of small objects on top of the suitcase in the corner. It was an idiosyncratic collection: a tiny amber tortoise the size of a thumbnail. A tea cup from a doll’s house. A corner of wallpaper from the hall. A hairnet. A scrap of pale grey fur. She touched it gingerly: it had the sinister softness of real pelt. The spaces between each one were perfectly even: they looked deliberately placed. A neat line of pebbles, also carefully spaced, in size order, sat in front of the suitcase.
Richard told her to just throw away everything she’d found.
‘Can we really though?’ She looked at the quilt. It was an elderly patchwork, with the floral pattern fading to white in patches and grubby brown lines following the fissures of the seams. ‘This is handmade. And this’ – she held up the doll’s dress, gingerly – ‘what if they come back for it?’
‘They can’t. It’s not their house any more.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it.’ She touched the shower cap experimentally with her fingernail. ‘I don’t understand why they would leave all this stuff behind.’
‘They just didn’t want it any more. Stop overanalysing.’
Eleanor knew she was pressing on a bruise – it already felt dangerous to expose too much of her ambivalence towards the house. Richard turned back to his laptop screen, and she turned back to the boxes.
*
A month later, Eleanor was walking back from the corner shop and an open doorway caught her eye. It was a house a few doors down from them, one where the basement had been properly converted into a flat. A woman, Eleanor guessed in her seventies, black fabric stretched tight across her body, stood in the doorway of the basement. Her eyes were locked on a large black cat sitting on the steps leading up to the street.
The woman was gripping a white plastic handle screwed into the side of the doorway and breathing heavily. Eleanor moved tentatively towards the top of the steps.
‘Would you like me to pick the cat up for you?’
The woman nodded. Eleanor took the steps slowly, cautiously, not wanting to scare it.
‘Grab her!’ the woman said. ‘Quick, before she goes out in the road!’
Eleanor wrapped her arms around the cat and lifted it up. It hung there limply, as though its legs had suddenly stopped working. Struggling with its weight, she carried it down the steps and deposited it in the hallway. As she set it down, she had a sudden vision of the woman shutting the door behind her, trapping her inside. She turned round, relieved to see the light from the streetlamps.
‘Bless you, dear,’ the woman said.
Eleanor stepped back outside and held out her hand. ‘I’m Eleanor,’ she said. ‘We’ve just moved into number 52.’
The woman was still gripping the handle. ‘52? Finally got rid of it then, did they?’
‘Oh, did you know them? The previous owners?’
The woman made a face. ‘Not really.’
‘Why, what was wrong with them?’
She glanced quickly back into the house. Eleanor could hear the sound of the television; the woman clearly wanted to return to it. ‘Just not my cup of tea, dear. Not sure they were anyone’s cup of tea, if you know what I mean.’
‘Oh, were they—?’
‘Bless you, dear,’ she said again. ‘Good night.’ The door closed and Eleanor stood still for a minute, before making her way back up to the street.