Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

As she emerged from the alleyway, she saw a young woman sitting on a bench in front of an empty office block. Beside her was a pram, and Maureen stopped to look inside it. Seeing a lovely baby boy, she tried to pay the mother a compliment but the young woman was wearing headphones and did not hear her, paid her no attention.

Maureen went on past the office block and into the supermarket. In the doorway, she passed a security guard who reminded her of Eddie, his red hair curling out from beneath his peaked cap, his gaze elsewhere.

She took a bottle of milk from the fridge and made her way back towards the checkout, pausing at the cosmetics to look at a lipstick in a shade called ‘tea rose pink’. It would go nicely, she thought, with a dress she might wear if Donald came round for dinner.

She has been on her own for a few years now and Jane has been nagging her about finding someone. ‘You need a man about the house,’ she keeps saying. Maureen met Donald at the library. He gave her one of his Neighbourhood Watch leaflets and invited her to a meeting. She said she could not go but he took her number anyway. They have spoken on the phone a few times since then. He likes gardening, Radio 4, a good dinner. She is expecting him to call.

Having paid for her milk at the self-service checkout, she left the shop. The security guard who looked like Eddie had gone. The young woman was there though, still on the bench with the baby in the pram beside her.

Maureen sees the brush now, scrubbing at the little round window in the door. There is a trickle of water coming in underneath, darkening the edge of the mat. Window cleaners, appearing suddenly at her windows, make her nervous. The old one used to come to the door with his bucket, asking for clean water, but this one is self-contained, carrying gallons in his van. He will knock, wanting money, but she will not open the door.

She returns to the back bedroom. It used to be Jane’s room. Now Maureen keeps her shade-loving plants — a begonia and a philodendron — in there. The room gets no direct sunlight and the plants are on a shelf far away from the window but still they are failing to thrive. Maureen closes the curtains.

There is a bucket underneath a leak in the ceiling. By the time she remembers to empty it, though, it is usually overflowing. There is an old armchair in one corner in which she used to sit and bottle-feed Jane and in which she still occasionally takes a nap. Jane took her single bed with her, and other bits of furniture and the posters from the walls, leaving the room rather empty.

Maureen has kept, up in the loft, Jane’s old cot, and cardboard boxes full of baby things, thinking that they would be needed when Jane had children, but that’s unlikely now, at Jane’s age. Maureen has offered many times to look after the baby if Jane had one, has said how nice it would be to have another child in the house.

She can hear the window cleaner knocking on the front door. She waits in the darkened back bedroom until he gives up. After a minute, she hears him leaving in his van.

Maureen goes to the kitchen and puts a pan on the hob. Opening the fridge, she takes out the almost empty bottle of skimmed milk and pours the last of it into the pan. She lights the hob underneath it and looks around for the milk she bought at the shop but she can’t see it anywhere.

The phone rings. It is unlikely to be Jane, who does not like telephones. Maureen lets the answering machine take a message. It is Donald, accepting her invitation to dinner, asking what time, needing to know her address. She does not want him to come now, does not want him in her house, clomping through her rooms, poking around, wanting to see the begonia, the philodendron. She waits for his call to end and then deletes the message. She puts her hand in her pocket, takes out the pink lipstick and drops it into the bin.

She hears the hiss of the milk pan boiling dry. Removing the pan from the hob and taking it to the sink, she notices the cat’s empty bowl. She cannot recall when she last saw the cat. She has not put any food down for days. She goes to fetch a tin from the cupboard but there is nothing in there. She is sure she had some. Things go missing. She has no idea where they end up. Her clothes pegs have wandered, and she used to have more teaspoons.

A bowl of milk might bring the cat in but she cannot remember what she has done with the new bottle.

She left the shop with the bottle in her hand, the refrigerator chill in her fingers. It was almost too cold to carry. The young woman on the bench had her eyes closed. Her head was drooping despite whatever she was listening to through her headphones, noise which Maureen could faintly hear.

Behind the young woman, the empty office block’s mirrored frontage reflected the rising sun. It looked so much like a building on fire that Maureen almost expected to hear an alarm, sirens in the distance, but there was nothing. She paused again to look into the pram, to see the baby dozing beneath the silently blazing windows, and then, without disturbing either of them, went quietly into the alleyway.

The one thing Maureen has not kept is Jane’s pram. It was so big and heavy. She approves of the smaller and lighter modern pram, more easily manoeuvred through the alleyways and up the hill and through the front door which she remembered to lock behind her.

She goes once more into the shade of the back bedroom. Reaching into the pram, she fetches out the milk. The baby’s blanket is cold where the bottle has been resting.

Maureen returns to the kitchen, where the phone is ringing again.

She locks the side door.

From the spare room window, I can see into the back gardens, as far as number twenty, where men are laying new turf.

We, at number two, sometimes used to get number twenty’s letters and it was my job to take them round. Mr Batten’s house was pretty much the same as ours. If you looked, you could see the differences, but when I stood on the doorstep and knocked, it felt like knocking at my own back door, and when Mr Batten answered, it was like there was a strange man standing in our kitchen while I stood outside looking in.

Mr Batten lived alone. He had rabbits, and a grown-up daughter who no longer visited.

At the far end of the street, there is a corner shop, to which my mother sends me for the ingredients she finds she is missing in the middle of baking. I started stopping off at Mr Batten’s to see his rabbits. He always had sweets — fat coils of black liquorice, and chocolate limes with hard, sour shells and softly oozing insides.

He was always there. And then, one day, he wasn’t.

It was the kind of autumn day when the day before had seemed like summer but suddenly you could feel winter coming — there was condensation on the windows — and I, still in a T-shirt, was unprepared.

In the shop, two women stood near the fridge, talking in low voices while I browsed the dairy products. Seeing me, they went quiet, and they looked like the words trapped behind their sealed lips were something horrid and squirmy, like worms wriggling on their tongues. The fridge hummed and my bare arms goosepimpled.

I walked home past number twenty but on the other side of the road. I gave my mother the shopping and she made pastry. I watched her rolling it flat and laying it smoothly over the top of her pie dish and removing the untidy edges with a knife.

I never saw Mr Batten again.

I once took my best friend Donna into the spare room to watch television, forgetting about the unmade sofa bed and the pyjamas on the floor.