A CAUTIONARY TALE
‘Well, yes,’ said the house to the journalist, in the manner of interviewees everywhere, ‘it is rather a triumph, after all I’ve been through!’ The journalist, a young woman, couldn’t quite make out the words for the stirring of the ivy on the chimney and the shirring of doves in the dovecote. She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses – and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night? – but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on rescued houses, though to tell the truth she thought all such houses were boring as hell. Let the past look after the past was her motto. She was twenty-three and beautiful and lived in a Bauhaus flat with a composer boyfriend who paid the rent and preferred something new to something old any day.
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ she said, ‘earn our living and leg it back to town.’
But she stood over the photographer carefully enough, to make sure he didn’t miss a mullioned window, thatched outhouse, Jacobean beam or Elizabethan chimney: the things that readers loved to stare at: she was conscientious enough. She meant to get on in the world. She tapped her designer boot on original flagstone and waited while he changed his film, and wondered why she felt uneasy, and what the strange muffled breathing in her ears could mean. That’s how houses speak, halfway between a draught and a creak, when they’ve been brought back to life by the well-intentioned, rescued from decay and demolition. You hear it sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night in an old house, and think the place is haunted. But it’s not, it’s just the house itself speaking.
The journalist found Harriet Simley making coffee in the kitchen. The original built-in dresser had been stripped and polished, finished to the last detail, though only half the floor was tiled, and where it was not the ground was murky and wet. Harriet’s hair fell mousy and flat around a sweet and earnest face.
‘No coffee for me,’ said the journalist. ‘Caffeine’s so bad for one! What a wonderful old oak beam!’ The owners of old houses love to hear their beams praised.
‘Twenty-three feet long,’ said Harriet proudly. ‘Probably the backbone of some beached man o’ war. Fascinating, the interweaving of military history and our forest story! Of course, these days you can’t get a properly seasoned oak beam over twelve feet anywhere in the country. You have to go to Normandy to find them, and it costs you an arm and a leg. And all our capital’s gone. Still, it’s worth it, isn’t it! Bringing old houses back to life!’ The girl nodded politely and wrote it all down, though she’d heard it a hundred times before, up and down the country; of cottages, farmhouses, manors, mansions, long houses: ‘Costs you an arm and a leg. Still, it’s worth it. Bringing old houses back to life!’ Spoken by the half-dead, so far as she could see, but then she was of the Bauhaus, by her very nature.
‘What’s the matter with your hands?’ the journalist asked, and wished she hadn’t.
‘Rheumatoid arthritis, I’m afraid,’ Harriet said. She couldn’t have been more than forty. ‘It was five years before we got the central heating in. Every time we took up a floorboard there’d be some disaster underneath. Well, we got the damp out of the house in the end, but it seems to have got into my hands.’ And she laughed as if it were funny, but the journalist knew it was not. She shuddered and looked at her own city-smooth red-tipped fingers. Harriet’s knuckles stood out on her hands, as if she made a fist against the world, and a deformed fist at that.
‘So dark and gloomy in here,’ the journalist thought and made her excuses and went out again into the sun to look up at the house, but it didn’t warm her: no, the shudder turned into almost a shiver, she didn’t know why. The house spoke to her, but the breeze in the creepers which fronded the upstairs windows distorted the words. Or perhaps the Bauhaus had made her deaf.
‘You should have seen me only thirty years ago!’ said the house. ‘What a ruin. I must have fallen asleep. I woke to find myself a shambles. Chimney through the roof, dry rot in the laundry extension, rabbits living in the walls along with the mice, deathwatch beetle in the minstrels’ gallery, the land drains blocked and water pushing up the kitchen tiles, and so overgrown with ivy I couldn’t even be seen from the road. What woke me? Why, a young couple pushing open the front door – how it creaked; enough to wake the dead. They looked strong, young and healthy. They had a Volvo. They came from the city: they had dogs, cats and babies. They’ll do, I thought; it’s better if they come with their smalls: they’ll see to the essentials first. My previous dwellers? They’d been old, so old, one family through generations: they left in their coffins: there was no strength in them; mine drained away. That’s why I fell asleep, not even bothered to shrug off the ivy. I woke only in the nick of time. Well, I thought, can’t let that happen again. So now I put out my charm and lure the young ones in, the new breed from the city, strong and resourceful. They fall in love with me; they give me all their money: but they have no stamina; I kept the first lot twelve years, then they had to go. Pity. But I tripped a small down the back stairs, to punish it for rattling the stained glass in its bedroom door, and it lay still for months, and the parents neglected me and cursed me so I got rid of them. But I found new dwellers soon enough, tougher, stronger, richer, who did for a time. Oh yes, I’m a success story! Now see, even the press takes an interest in my triumph! Journalists, photographers!’ And the house preened itself in the late summer sun, in the glowing evening light.
‘I say,’ said the photographer to Julian Simley, as he wheel-barrowed a load of red roof-tiles from the yard to the cider house, ‘you should get the ivy off the chimney; it’ll break down the cement.’ The photographer knew a thing or two – he’d just put in an offer for a house in the country himself. An old rectory: a lot to do to it, of course, but he was a dab hand at DIY, and with his new girlfriend working he could afford to spend a bit. A snip, a snip – and worth twice as much, three times, when he was through. Even the surveyor said so.
The house read his mind and sang, ‘When we’re through with you, when we’re through with you: you can call yourself an owner, who are but a slave, you who come and go within our walls, for all old houses are the same and think alike,’ and the photographer smiled admiringly up at the doves in the creeper, as they stirred and whirred, and only the journalist shivered and said, ‘There’s something wrong with my ears. I hear music in them, a creaky kind of music, I don’t like it at all.’
‘Wax’, said the photographer absently, ‘can sound like that.’
Julian Simley said, ‘Christ, is that ivy back again? That’s the last straw,’ which is not what you’re supposed to say when you’re telling the press a success story of restoration, or renovation, in return for a hundred-pound fee, which you desperately need, for reclaimed old brick and groceries. ‘I haven’t the head for heights I had.’
‘You fool, you fool,’ snarled the house, overhearing. ‘You pathetic weak-backed mortal. Let the ivy grow, will you? Turn me into weeds and landscape? Leave me a heap of rubble, would you! Wretched, poverty-stricken creature: grubbing around for money! You and your poor crippled wife, who’d rather fit a dresser handle than tile the kitchen floor! I’ve no more patience with you: I’ve finished with you!’ and as Julian Simley stood on a windowsill to open a mullioned pane so the photographer could get the effect of glancing light he wanted, the sill crumbled and Julian fell and his back clicked and there was his disc slipped again, and he lay on the ground, and Harriet rang for the ambulance, and House & Garden waited with them. It was the least they could do.
‘He should have replaced the sill,’ thought the photographer, ‘I would have done,’ and the house hugged itself to itself in triumph.
‘We can’t manage any longer,’ said Julian to Harriet, as he lay on the ground. ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to sell, even at a loss.’
‘It’s not the money I mind about,’ grieved Harriet. ‘It’s just I love this house so much.’
‘Don’t you think I do,’ said Julian, and gritted his teeth against the stabs of pain which ran up his legs to his back. He thought this time he’d done some extra-complicating damage. ‘But I get the feeling it’s unrequited love.’ The house sniggered.
‘But how will we know the next people will carry on as we have? They’ll cover up the kitchen floor and not let it dry out properly, I know they will.’ Harriet wept. Julian groaned. The ambulance came. The journalist and the photographer drove off.
‘You want to know the secret?’ the house shrieked after them. ‘The secret of my success? It’s chew them up and spit them out! One after the other! And I’ll have you next,’ it screamed at the photographer, who looked back at the house as they circled the drive, and thought, ‘So beautiful! I’ll withdraw the offer on the rectory, and make a bid on this one. I reckon I’ll get it cheap, in the circumstances. That looked like a broken back, not a slipped disc, to me,’ and the house settled back cosily into its excellent, well-drained, sheltered site – the original builders knew what they were doing – and smiled to itself, and whispered to the doves who stirred and whirred their wings in its creepers. ‘Flesh and blood, that’s all. Flesh and blood withers and dies. But a house like me can go on for ever, if it has its wits about it.’