Daniel had described the house as rustic and had apologised for offering it to us for the summer. It’s terribly primitive dear boy, he had said, and smoothed a lapel of his beautiful suit. I am ashamed dear boy. We’d expected a lot of turned and varnished wood, bunches of dried flowers everywhere, and perhaps even an old well in the middle of a garden overgrown with roses. We hadn’t imagined that Daniel’s description was a euphemism for the last stages of decay.
When we began exploring the house we tiptoed and whispered to each other like trespassers. What? Find something? Rennie thought I spoke when I said nothing, and thought I found something — what was he looking for? — when there was nothing to find. Every room we went into was dark and silent. When the shutters were pushed back against the clenched hinges, yellow Tuscan light filled the air, but revealed nothing more sinister than a scattering of mouse-droppings. Under the rotten ceiling of the middle room upstairs, there was a heap of acid-white bird-dropping from the murmurous dove-loft in the roof, and birds peered down at us through the hole in the ceiling, ruffling their wings and shifting uneasily.
Next door in the corner room, the shutters yielded to a push and fell away into the bushes outside. The window-frame sagged suddenly inwards and we stepped back. Rennie looked up at the beams above us that supported the roof. They did not collapse as we watched, but we could see deep cracks running the length of each one. The adze marks of two centuries before could still be seen on the dry wood, so that I imagined the hot sweat running off the backs of men labouring to build this house: It will stand forever, they would have told each other, and slapped each beam, still bleeding sap and they would have gone to their wives at night and held them all the more fervently for thinking they were building something that would last forever. A colossal weight of terracotta tiles bore down on the beams that those men had shaped, weight bearing down year after year and teasing the brittle grain of the wood further and further apart, towards the final collapse that would send clouds of dust and astonished doves into the air. But those adze-men would not have thought about that.
Along the hall, in a big room with a view, Rennie stamped on the floor to see if it would hold, glanced up at the ceiling where only a few flakes of plaster drifted down, and decided that this was the best room to work in. There was a table in the room and he dragged it over to the window for a desk.
— All set for the summer darling, he said, and I felt fear at the idea of this particular stretch of my future, not wanting to think as far ahead as a whole summer.
There were three narrow beds in this room, each with a cover of clear plastic over the mattress. In one of them a family of mice had made a nest in the mattress among the kapok and the springs. It was a cosy home, but exposed like a display under the plastic. Four baby mice, like thick pink maggots, wormed slowly over each other in the centre of the nest while the bigger mice nosed further into the wadding between the springs, enlarging the nest. This happy family seemed to think it was invisible, safe under its plastic, and was not disturbed by the people bending over it.
— Think someone’s watching us like this?
Rennie poked at the plastic over the nest and the mice stopped shifting around each other. They listened, felt the air with their whiskers twitching, perhaps prayed.
— I feel like God, Rennie said.
I fancied the idea of being God, too, and pressed up and down on the mattress so that the nest bounced and the mice scrabbled and clawed over each other’s backs. One of them slipped up out of the nest and slid along between the plastic and the mattress, towards the edge of the bed. Escape! A worthy dream. But like any god I had my cruel streak, and was not ready for escape just yet. I pressed down on the bed and tightened the cover on either side of this bold escaping mouse until its fur flattened and its tiny head struggled against the plastic squeezing down on it. It was a despicable triumph, but it was a triumph, and when the mouse gave up the struggle and lay as if dead I released it. Like any other chastened explorer it turned and crept back the way it had come, back into the nest.
— Great view darling. Better than that foul orange fence at home.
I came to stand beside him at the window to agree about the great view. The badly-shaved cheek of a patchy field of wheat curved down to a wooded valley and a matching field curved up the other side of the house on the opposite hill, where small wild birds were slowly killing themselves in despair. It seemed possible to walk out of this window across the air into the same window across the valley, where the limp flag of a curtain shifted along the wall from time to time. Watching in silence, we waited to see Hugo and Viola appear but they did not and Rennie turned away from the window. He brushed a grey line of cobweb off the front of my shirt and said:
— We’ll be able to afford a view when we go back to London. No more orange fences.
He kicked at a sheet of newspaper beside the table, revealing a small hole in the wall at floor-level and a scattering of mortar.
— Ah. The mice.
He bent down and pushed a finger in, but pulled it out again quickly. I watched the back of his head and wondered if he was remembering warnings from childhood about how dangerous fingers in holes could be.
— Like mascots, coming and going while I work.
He pulled the paper back loosely over the hole and stood looking at it and smiling. When my husband smiled, his orange moustache became twisted and alive under his nose. There were times when I would have liked to rip it off his face.
— As long as they don’t take a fancy to the inside of my pants-leg, of course.
We laughed together at that good joke, because it was only Louise, the lovely wife of Reynold, who was supposed to take a fancy to the inside of her husband’s pants-leg.
Long Italian dusk was darkening from moment to moment now, and our first night in our villa was about to begin. We decided to use only two of the upstairs rooms, and left the others, full of the smell of mould and mouse-droppings, to breathe and crumble quietly behind closed doors. In the back room with the murkily mirrored wardrobe, we swept up the mouse-dirt and made the bed.
We ate a dry meal of leftover sandwiches in the kitchen and could hear the mice beginning to play through the house, and plopping and squeaking scratchily. Going upstairs in the dark I heard Rennie’s heavy boots ahead of me on the stairs and waited for the squelch.
We climbed into the high bed and lay stiffly, feeling the strangeness of the house, or of each other.
— Goodnight darling, Rennie said.
— Goodnight darling, I said back.
He began breathing heavily beside me and the bedclothes stirred regularly over his rounded back. He was a tidy sleeper, so it was hard to be certain when he was really asleep. If I whispered Fire! would he bounce up, fling the bedclothes back, leap to the window? The bed was almost too narrow for a couple, but even so my husband made a space between our bodies. When I slid across to curve myself against his back, he retreated further, to the very edge of the bed. He seemed prepared to fall out of this high bed rather than feel me curved around him. I did not want to have him fall out of our bed, so I slid back to my own side. I listened to the pattering and scratching of the mice through the house and thought about grossly obese women and their reinforced mattresses. I had heard that the tiny husbands of such women were forced to slide to the floor, pad around the bed, and get in on the other side, when their wife felt the urge to turn over in bed. I would not enjoy being such a husband, in danger of suffocation. I would not enjoy being such a wife, either, trapped by fat. In the connubial bed of our London flat, Rennie had liked plenty of space between our bodies, but there, in a bigger bed, it had been less obvious.
Before we could make the bed in this room, we had had to shake a layer of grit off the cover and pillows. Throughout every day and every night, tiny flakes of plaster had come loose from the ceiling and floated down, with grains of sawdust that trickled out of the thousands of pin-point holes that riddled the beams above the bed. Those beams! They looked so strong, so massively rough-hewn, and they were as weak as grass. The light rain of debris would go on falling as we lay under it, and I lay feeling or imagining it falling on my face and on Rennie’s breathing back. How long would it take, lying still, to be smothered completely? Perhaps before that could happen, the whole house would fold in on itself. I thought about the lingering way buildings fall to their knees when subjected to the wrong kind of stress.
The scrabble of claws over tiles carried through the still house like the silly scratch of a watch held to the ear. I fingered myself between my legs and when I closed my eyes I imagined the twitching noses of inquisitive mice, their eyes alert and unblinking in the darkness as they took stock of the intruders. The back of my hand rasped against the sheet, and I heard my breath coming more quickly, until my knees fell away from each other and I was consumed by white pleasure like a bonfire. Back in London I’d known just how to set the bed squeaking and make such a friction in the space between our bodies that I could no longer believe Rennie was asleep. But asleep or not, he seldom turned to me full of lust and the dream of pleasure. He lay on, breathing blamelessly or guiltily, not touching his wife as she writhed beside him. I listened to his steady breathing and wondered if his eyes were wide open on the dark, staring at the grey square of the window, concentrating on keeping his breathing as unhurried as someone lost in peaceful dreams.
I envied the simplicity of his deceit. Mine would have to be more elaborate. I jammed my forefinger up into myself as far as it would go, then held it up to my face, straining to see in the dark, sniffing, finally licking at it tentatively with the tip of my tongue. There was still no sign, no stickiness, no sharp metallic taste. How much longer would Rennie not notice the gap in the rhythm of my months? How much longer did I have, before he would guess at the possibility of a new being embedded in my flesh, swelling on my blood? How sweetly he’d kiss me — That’s wonderful darling — and what a hug he’d give me. How easy it was to imagine the bewilderment — but of course we want to keep it! His eyes would watch me then, watch my every move, and I would never be able to escape.