That house had always smelt slightly of damp sweaters put too soon in drawers, old gymshoes, sand and oilskins. Anna Lewis breathed it even before she put the key in the lock. She knew what the rooms would look like, and how the dust would have arranged itself upon the silent clocks. Nothing changed; the rooms led off a small, square hall, its linoleum floor the colour of dried mud and its walls hung about with ancient anoraks and unravelling straw hats. In the tiny sitting-room was a window seat (made from draped orange boxes fitted neatly into the square bay window), a couple of basket chairs, a battered brown sofa whose cover sagged upon the rush-matting floor, and a cheap, light-oak coffee table, which had been given to Hilda as a wedding present and which had found its way, with countless other family rejects, into the holiday house on the water’s edge.
Behind the sitting-room, the kitchen was cloaked in Formica of a particularly virulent blue, and in mistaken mitigation someone had once painted the woodwork scarlet. The pantry was by the back door. There was an efficient notice pinned to it with rusty drawing pins, which said, ‘before you go – make sure that basic stocks like tea, coffee, sugar and tinned food are replaced. Electricity and water off. Always leave the house as you would like to find it. PLEASE!’ Once, years ago, Anna’s mother had been angered by the second cousins and their friends who had borrowed the cottage, but failed to understand the nature of the place.
It was impossible, thought Anna with the key still poised, even to approach this unprepossessing pile of bricks and mortar without her mind shooting into reverse gear, skittering backwards through time beyond her control. It was like the old pop song which wails that there is ‘always something there to remind me’ – something obvious, like the house and the river, but something intangible too, like a smell which hints at a long-forgotten solution to these fragments.
She turned at the door and called out to the small boy who was struggling down the hill, around the corner of the house and out of her vision.
‘Hurry up, Tom! Don’t you want to see the cottage again?’
‘This bag’s too heavy,’ he complained.
‘Well, leave it there and come on!’
He dropped the nylon hold-all on the path and ran to her anxiously, tossing the fair hair from his eyes.
Laughing, Anna caught him, and covered his eyes with her hands, whispering that he must not look at the view, not yet. She pushed open the door and they walked into the hall, tiptoeing and not speaking – as if to disturb the silence were to miss something. Tom whispered at last, ‘When were we last here, Mum?’
‘Three years ago, when you were four. Do you remember?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes. I … think there used to be a teddy in that room. Was there?’
‘Go and see.’
They walked into the small back bedroom and saw the twin beds with polished bed-ends, the tall chest-of-drawers, the little wall-lights with their dusty parchment shades, and the old brown teddy bear leaning on one of the pillows. Hilda had carried him there the year after their parents had bought the cottage, saying that she felt sorry for the place, empty, in the long months when they were in London. She and Anna had imagined the cold air penetrating the brickwork, the summer flies dying soundlessly on damp sills, and spiders spinning secure webs throughout the winter. A lonely house, the laughter gone. It needed a guardian, they decided, placing the bear upon his throne. All three children left old toys in the cupboards, things they rarely used, to keep company with books their father thought he might read on holiday: old-fashioned anthologies on war economy paper, dog-eared thrillers, and a set of Sir Walter Scott with foxed pages.
Tom snatched the battered bear from the bed, tender as always to small furry objects. Idly, Anna pulled open the middle drawer. The sweaters were still there: navy oiled wool and thick brown double-knit with darned elbows, and the off-white polo-neck she had given her father the Christmas before he died. In one of the small top drawers was an assortment of folded tee-shirts, one broadly striped navy and white, like a matelot’s, the others pale and faded in comparison. Tom came and peered, on tiptoe, into this drawer.
‘Isn’t that Dad’s – that blue and white shirt? Why does everybody leave clothes here – don’t you want them?’
‘Well, when people come here for their holidays and they know they’ll be coming back, they leave some useful bits and pieces to save carrying them next time.’
‘But Dad won’t be coming, will he? So why don’t we take his shirt and give it to him?’
Anna saw the worry in his pale eyes and stroked his head. ‘We’ll do that, darling. We’ve got four lovely weeks here to look forward to, and when Dad phones you, you can ask if he wants that tee-shirt. Anyway, do you want to sleep in here, or in the dorm upstairs?’
He said, ‘Here, near you.’
Anna’s parents, William and Barbara Lewis, had bought the bungalow (for that is what it really was, despite the flight of stairs which led to the attic, giving it claim to the title ‘house’) when Anna was ten, Hilda eight, and their brother Richard twelve. They decided that the plain cottage (which they chose to call it, although Barbara laughed that it was neither old nor pretty enough) standing square on the edge of the river, would be ideal for holidays until the children had grown up and then, improved a little, a good place for retirement. Anna could still recall the quality of her first impression, as the family stood on the shingle beach and stared through the large, open black gates at the squat building, washed pink like so many houses in that area. It was constructed like a child’s drawing, with a little window each side of the front door, two dormers in the grey slate roof and a chimney right in the middle. ‘Well kids, it’s ours,’ their father had chuckled, waving the bunch of keys with the estate agent’s tag still attached; then Anna had walked straight up to the house and all round it, as if to claim it as her own.
Behind (she discovered then with even more delight) a steep path led up through a wild orchard of unpruned plum and apple trees. Every year they produced an abundance of fruit that fell and rotted on the ground because the family had gone. In the winter the grass was starred with clumps of snowdrops and, later, wild daffodils nodded around the gnarled tree-trunks. The orchard was mysterious and beautiful. On a summer evening anyone who walked down that steep path towards the house became indistinct, as the low sunlight filtered through the tattered heads of tall cow-parsley – flickering on the tips of waving grasses and gilding even the plainest human head.
To Anna it had seemed like a Wendy House magically grown, and she heard with disbelief her parents laughing at the hideous colour scheme in the kitchen. They complained that the real yacht’s mast, ‘planted’ in the garden by the previous owner (who presumably thought that a love of boats had to be advertised thus) bordered on vulgarity, and they wondered if they should change the name from ‘Ahoy’ to something less hearty. ‘It’s a lovely name,’ she had protested, dancing a spiky hornpipe around the offending mast. ‘And it’s a super mast too,’ Richard had added, encircling it with his arms as if to protect it from their parents’ notions of acceptable taste.
So the mast and the name had stayed, together with the scarlet woodwork, blue Formica and yellow Belling stove, and the inconvenient, triangular basin in the corner of the narrow bathroom. Barbara Lewis had furnished cheaply, buying old furniture from the woman at the pub, who was amazed that people ‘like that’ should pay five pounds for what she had rejected in favour of black vinyl. Then everything that was not wanted found its way into ‘Ahoy’: odd cups and saucers, a gilt clock, the primary-coloured cushions that had gone out of fashion, some Impressionist prints in mock Old Master frames, and a clumsy little bureau where they kept curling Basildon Bond and information about the tides. There were too many ashtrays and china ornaments. The old barometer in the hall did not work, and the wooden wall clocks remained unwound, as William said that he did not need to be reminded, by their ticking, that the holidays would soon be over.
Indeed Anna’s father used sometimes to shake his head, when returning after a long absence, at the lack of choice, of touch, about their holiday home, and say that he yearned for a pretty Chesterfield, or at least a decent rug. But, thrown together in that way the ugly and rejected things settled beside each other, their colours and shapes fading somehow within that delicate atmosphere, until as the years passed they attained the beauty and inevitability of objects used in a ritual. When Richard, Anna and Hilda grew up, adding their own store of disliked presents or ‘joke’ purchases to the cottage, they had begun to understand how such offerings could become transformed, gaining dignity as part of the pattern.
‘This is where I’m going to sleep. Don’t you think it’s a nice room? Now you can go and look at that view from the window. I think it’s the prettiest sight in the whole world.’
Anna stood with Tom in the front bedroom. It had a square bay window which matched the sitting-room window on the other side of the front door. Faded cotton curtains, with an indeterminate floral pattern in pale blue, drooped to within three inches of the sill. One summer, when Anna was fifteen, her father had painted the dark oak furniture white, lightening the room and throwing the old crimson carpet into relief. A double bed faced the window; on summer mornings you woke early and pulled aside the curtains to see the river spreading its pellucid grey, and the gulls squawking in search of breakfast.
‘It’s so hard to imagine’, thought Anna, glancing at the bed, lying there with John, making love again and again, and watching, that spring, the rain stream down the window whilst we laughed, deep within our warmth … and yet it was true, it was all true.’
‘Your Dad and I came here for a holiday after we were married,’ she said, half to herself.
Tom looked up, interested. ‘Here? Why?’
She had told him before, she knew, but he loved to hear the smallest details of family history repeated again and again. ‘You have a holiday after you’re married, called a honeymoon. Dad wanted ours to be here because he liked it, and we couldn’t afford anywhere else.’
‘Was it before I was born?’
‘Of course, Tom! You have babies after you get married – well, usually. Anyway, we did.’
‘Why?’
She knelt and hugged him. ‘What a funny question. If you’re asking me why people have children the answer is I don’t know. If you’re asking me why we had you, I’ll say because we loved you.’
He frowned. ‘But you didn’t know me then. Mum – did you and Dad love each other then?’
Anna looked into his face and nodded. He was silent, as she expected, his habitual questioning stilled by the vast mystery of what she had just admitted, contrasted with what he knew to be the current truth. He kneaded the teddy bear, holding it in front of him like a shield.
‘Poor little boy,’ thought Anna instinctively, feeling, at the same time, irritated with herself for such automatic sentimentality. She rose to her feet, briskly. ‘Look, we’ve got a lot to do. We’ll get the rest of the stuff from the car – all your toys, remember? Then there’ll just be time for you to run to the village shop along the lane. Or do you want me to come too?’
He shook his head; doing things alone meant growing up.
‘Good boy.’
By six-thirty they were sitting outside on the wall, eating sausages wrapped in slices of bread and watching the pink light on the water.
‘I always used to sit here with my father, you know. It was our favourite thing – to stare at the water and feel peaceful. I love the river.’
Tom agreed, mumbling through the food, but Anna did not hear. ‘It’s as if I’ve always been coming here, ever since before I was born, and the river is a part of me. None of the others felt the same …’
Mouth empty, Tom interrupted. ‘What are we going to do on our holiday? Will we have adventures?’
Gaily, Anna turned to him, ‘Yes, we will. Lots of lovely things are going to happen and we’ll meet people and go on the ferry, and … eat ice-creams.’
‘Is it true?’ she wondered gloomily to herself. ‘The only trouble is, it could all be true, for Tom, if I make the effort. It’s all up to me. Nobody else.’
She sighed.
‘Mum – why is the cottage so dirty? I don’t like it.’
There had been mouse droppings in the frying pan, and Tom had shuddered with distaste, a city child. Now she reached out and patted him, saying that he must not mind such evidence of the tiny lives that were lived on, making ‘Ahoy’ a home when nobody human was there. Mice weren’t dirty, she said, only alive like us. He nodded, the idea suddenly pleasing to him.