Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

He steps onto the stairs, the bottom step, which creaks, and Roger wonders whether there is anyone in the upstairs rooms to hear. He wants to turn back now. He doesn’t want to know, he tells himself, but he keeps on moving, climbing up the gloomy stairs to the landing. He has no idea what he is going to find.

There are three doors. A bathroom, he supposes, and a bedroom or two, perhaps a bedroom and a spare room, the room in which the postman keeps the hoarded mail and the stolen knickers.

He reaches for the nearest doorknob and pauses, steeling himself.

When he turns it, opening the door, he finds a bedroom in darkness. He can discern, though, someone naked, facedown on the bed. Crossing to the window, he draws aside the curtain, but all daylight has gone now. He feels for the light switch, turning on spotlights trained on the bed, finding Victor, Rosemary’s Victor, on a waterproof sheet.

Roger gets close to Victor’s face, which is turned towards him, his cheek against the heavy-duty plastic. When Victor tries to speak, Roger sees how dry his lips are. He has the mouth of a man who is dying in the desert. And then Victor’s eyes swivel towards the door, and Roger looks too and sees the postman in the doorway, his uniform off, a beer bottle in his hand.

When Eleanor leaves her sister’s house, it is dark, which is a relief. She must, she thinks, look frightful. But she has splashed her face with cold water and combed her hair. She has calmed down.

She walks home, goes into her kitchen and puts on the light.

She can at least talk about it with her sister, who understands, of course, because it is her big brother, too, who has gone missing.

It has happened before. He went missing during his first term at university, leaving without a word and returning with a tan the following summer. He ran away on his wedding day and didn’t come home for six months. But he always sends a postcard, a birthday card, a Christmas card. Not this time though; it’s been a year now.

His absence has stirred in their mother a memory of the men who, in her youth, went to France and Belgium and never came back. Their small town, over time, was stripped of men. A whole generation, just gone.

Eleanor looks at the mail, the junk, on her kitchen counter, and throws it away.

She is all right now, she thinks. She will go to bed.

It will strike her, when she is all tucked up, that she has not seen Roger, but she will not get out of bed to call him, to see how he is, to suggest lunch the following day. She will already have taken a sleeping pill, and anyway — she will glance at her digital alarm clock glowing red in the dark — it will be too late.

When the man arrives, Linda invites him inside. She shows him into the living room and offers him a seat on the sofa as she sits down, but he prefers to stand.

She says, ‘I need a door.’

She has looked in B&Q but wants something a bit different. His Yellow Pages advert stood out. She thought he would bring a catalogue from which she could choose the type of wood she wants, the type of handle. She has considered stained-glass panels. But he doesn’t have a catalogue for her to browse through. What he has in his hands, what he opens and places on the table between them, is a display book full of pictures of the astonishingly fine work he once did on a yacht. He shows her pages of gracefully curving and gleaming mahogany chests of drawers and cabinets. She admires his work and he is pleased.

She offers him a cup of tea but he wants water. Colin, keeping out of the way in the kitchen, fills a glass and the kettle.

The yacht man, turning the page, shows Linda various views of exquisite marquetry. She touches the pictures with her fingertips, as if she might be able to feel that smooth, exotic wood.

The sturdy, beech-effect table on which the book lies is not beautiful but it was the practical choice while the kids were young. They have grown up and gone now though. She recently brought down from the loft a lovely side table which she has put in the hallway.

She found it at a flea market. This was before Colin, when she was with Vincent. Her eye was drawn to some engagement and eternity rings, and a table with Queen Anne legs, and she said to Vincent, ‘What do you think?’ But when she looked around, he was elsewhere, looking at a diving helmet. She bought the table anyway. A few years later, she heard that Vincent was living on a marine research vessel in the middle of some ocean.

‘It’s all very nice,’ says Linda, ‘but I just need a door.’

‘I can do a door,’ he says, without looking up from his photographs. He seems disappointed.

He takes measurements in the hallway, but when he leaves he still hasn’t shown her a single front door.

After locking up behind him, Linda returns to the living room. She and Colin have supper in front of the television and go up to bed.

In the morning, she finds the yacht man’s water glass on the table in the hallway, and the mark it has left on the wood.

She won’t call him. She will look again in the Yellow Pages for someone who can make her an ordinary door, something solid, attractive enough, inexpensive. Perhaps she will go back to B&Q. In the meantime, and afterwards, she will — with partial success — try to remove that perfect white circle on the Queen Anne table where the yacht man placed his glass before he left.

There is a factory behind Christine’s house going twenty-four hours a day. In the middle of the night, when she is awake in the otherwise silent house, she can hear the rhythmic clanking of the machines. At other times, she might think that she can’t hear them, but this is only because she is getting used to it. At the back of everything, the noise is still there; it is constant.

She worked in the factory when she was eighteen, in between school and university. There were three shifts a day, and it was not uncommon to work a double. All summer, she heard the machines in her sleep. She still dreams about the factory sometimes.

The machines were alarming — these rows of huge steel contraptions with parts banging up and down and other bits zipping left and right, this going underneath that, and that slamming down. Some sections of the production line were less clankingly noisy but perhaps all the more disquieting, components shooting smoothly down and then up again, leaving behind perfect holes. It was one of these machines which once took a woman’s fingers off. So you had to be careful.

Her dad used to work there as well, and when he retired he found the world too quiet and still. Her parents lived where they had always lived, some miles out of town, just where the farms started. Sometimes you could only hear birds, maybe something in the distance, the buzz of a lawnmower, the bleating of sheep. The sheep made a racket during lambing, and again when the lambs were taken away a few months later. Their bleating then was like the sounding of klaxons. Afterwards, there was hush.

Even the machines in the house, said her father to her mother without having to raise his voice above the sound of the vacuum cleaner, made very little noise. He helped with the housework, loading the dishwasher and the washing machine and setting both running at the same time, but still there was only a gentle background hum which did not even necessitate turning up Classic FM. When it was too quiet, he talked to himself, or to his mother, who was no longer alive. He rediscovered heavy metal, getting out all his old tapes, and he got into Robot Wars , which filled the silence.