Alison Moore: The Pre-War House and Other Stories

‘I thought I’d fucked it up,’ he said, pulling away again, his mum turning to her ironing pile. Going on to explain about ‘a bastard of a question’ he’d been asked, he felt his dad’s hand at the back of his neck, going for his collar. Mark swung around and pushed his dad away, shoving him backwards into the ironing board. His dad, as he lost his balance, snatched at Mark’s shirt, whose little white buttons scattered around them like seeds being sown. His mum steadied the ironing board, but his dad, falling, trying to hold on to something, grabbed the iron’s cord and brought the burning-hot, three-pound appliance down on his head. On the floor, holding a hand to his wound, to the place where it hurt, he said to Mark’s mum, ‘You should have had it aborted.’

Mark’s sister, looking out of the window, puts on a raincoat. Her mum, going with her to the door, says, ‘Give him my love.’ Her dad is sitting in his chair, staring at the TV, at some old programme. He says nothing.

She takes a bus to the park and then walks between waterlogged flowerbeds to the pond. She finds Mark waiting on a damp bench. He smells of chlorine. In one hand he is holding a bag of bread for the ducks. His other hand is empty and she can see the pattern in his skin, a join-the-dots puzzle of pale blemishes in the shape of a smile, the shape of a jaw. Sitting down on that side, she reaches for his hand. Telling him, ‘Mum sends her love,’ she touches his scars.

Maureen, coming out of her back bedroom, closing the door behind her, hears a noise. She stands in the hallway, in the middle of her bungalow, listening, trying to work out where it is coming from, this sound which is a bit like birds scrabbling inside the walls, mice scratching in the loft.

She remembers Jane saying that the police would come round and check the house for weak points, potential entry points, but Maureen thinks she was supposed to arrange this herself — the Neighbourhood Watch leaflet has a number to call — and she hasn’t. Maureen has double glazing throughout now and keeps her windows closed, and she knows she has bolted the front door but the side door might have been left unlocked. She steps from the hallway into the kitchen but sees nothing there, no one at the door, no one at the windows, and the noise has stopped.

She knows Jane worries about her living alone. Maureen does not have any close neighbours to keep an eye on her. If she did not make a point of getting herself out to the shops and to the library for large-print books, and to Jane’s on Sundays, it would be possible to go for weeks without seeing anyone.

Jane lives nearby in a one-bedroom flat which she rarely leaves. She is, thinks Maureen, getting worse. Jane did go to university but soon came back. She tried an office job or two before finding something that she could do from home. She has never been abroad — she does not have a passport. She tried Glastonbury once and Maureen worried dreadfully about her, about strangers and crowds, although sometimes one is safer with plenty of people around. Either way, Jane came home sunburnt but otherwise unharmed, although she did not go again. Jane has to be careful in the sun because of her colouring, which, Maureen has told her, comes from Eddie, whom Jane has never met.

Eddie was unlike the others, who tended to remove their wedding rings before sitting down next to Maureen and offering to buy her a drink. Eddie kept his wedding ring on even when he was in Maureen’s bed. And while most of the men, in the end, talked about nothing but their wives and marriages, Eddie only mentioned his wife to say to Maureen, ‘I won’t leave her, you know.’ This was, thought Maureen, probably because of the baby she sometimes saw sleeping in a pram in Eddie’s front garden.

Maureen fantasised about being married to Eddie. She imagined contented evenings spent together in front of the television, him with the top button of his trousers undone after a big dinner which she had cooked, and her dandling their baby.

When she told him — as he was driving her home — that she was pregnant, he said nothing until he drew up outside the flat she shared with another girl. She got out of the car and then he said, ‘You can’t have it.’

She did not see much of him after that. He stopped calling. When she went to his house, no one came to the door, until finally his wife answered and told her to stop bothering him.

Eddie was a bus conductor but Maureen did not know his routes. In the end, she waited outside the depot until he came out. He was wearing his uniform, with a peaked cap. He did not blank her, as she had worried he might, but he looked beyond her while they talked. She said she missed him. He told her he’d been busy, that he was doing extra shifts because his wife was expecting again. Anyway, he said, it was time he was getting home, and he went on his way without having looked once at the huge pram between them, without even glancing at the baby inside, a girl. Maureen would have preferred a boy.

She knew, as Eddie walked away, that she would have to leave now, put some distance between herself and this small town.

A hundred miles away, she met and moved in with Frank. He was a wonderful father to Jane, changing sodden and long-soiled nappies and remembering feeds when Maureen did not. He was attentive but not a worrier, whereas Maureen was forgetful but anxious. Frank thought that Maureen was over-protective. He objected to Jane being kept indoors most of the time as if she were one of Maureen’s shade-loving plants, and he did not agree with Jane being home-schooled. He said Jane was sheltered, as if this were a bad thing. Maureen kept her safe, unlike some mothers.

Frank knew about Eddie and had always expected him to come looking for Maureen, wanting to see Jane. ‘He won’t come,’ said Maureen, although a part of her always thought he might appear on her doorstep one day. She would not let him in.

Back in the hallway, she sees, through the porthole window in the UPVC front door, a dark shape, a man’s head. Jane said, ‘Keep your hallway light on, to show prowlers there’s somebody in.’ But Maureen has switched the lights off, and the radio.

She had them on — the hallway light and the kitchen light and Radio 2 — at dawn this morning. She wakes early these days despite her sleeping pills, and cannot get off again. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night, hearing things — those little sounds which she can put down to mice or the pipes or the wind, and the not-so-little noises of the boys who bring their motorbikes up here, and people having sex against her front wall. She has tried to talk to the council about it; she has written letters, but nothing has been done. If it gets to be too much, she turns her hearing aid down.

Opening the fridge and looking for milk for her porridge, she found that she was almost out. She put on her coat and left the house, and the streetlights were still on as she headed down the hill towards a supermarket which would be open even at that hour. She did not expect to see many people. At the bottom of the hill, she entered an alleyway. This took her to the main road, which she crossed, entering another alleyway which forked. The fork she took would bring her out just around the corner from the supermarket.

In the alleyway, she passed a man out walking his dog. She said, ‘Good morning,’ but only the dog looked at her. Another man, drunk, chatted away, but only to himself. Perhaps he saw her, but he would not remember her. Maureen, who used to turn heads, these days goes unnoticed, unheard, untouched. She feels like a wife in the soundproof booth on Mr & Mrs .