Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

On the whole, the only new things which came into the house came with my mother when she married my father in 1977 and in her early twenties that wasn’t very much. She brought some mugs with jokes on, which were put to the back of the crockery cupboard, behind the family china, and nonetheless got broken over the years. She brought some family photographs, and displayed them on the sideboard alongside her in-laws, and my grandmother moved them to the back, these interlopers, who peeked cheerfully, colourfully, through the gaps. She brought her books, and put them in the bookcase in the living room, and my grandmother winced to see the random and vulgar paperbacks which had appeared on her shelves, which she found nestling between her hardback classics.

Before my mother married my father, she was a hostess on long-distance coaches. It wasn’t well paid or glamorous — she didn’t like the old-fashioned uniform or serving tea on bumpy, bendy roads — and she had never been abroad, but she got to travel up and down the country, going to cities and tourist attractions and the seaside.

My father, a passenger on a weekday coach to Bournemouth, on his way to a conference, had watched her walking up and down the aisle, with her slim figure buttoned smartly into her modest uniform, her good legs in polished heels, her long, fair hair neat, pinned up on top of her head. She had served him little disposable cups of warm tea, wobbling a little when the coach went round a roundabout, holding on, and the sunshine through the window had fallen on her face, lighting her clear skin and her blue eyes, and he had smiled, showing his good teeth.

My mother’s skin was as smooth and pale as the bluebell bulbs beneath my father’s lawn, as smooth and pale as the larvae in his vegetable patch.

She shaved her legs in the bath, removing the light brown stubble which sprouted from her follicles. She peered into the bathroom mirror, worrying over her complexion, looking for clogged pores and spots gathering beneath the surface, looking for the bad skin which had plagued her as a girl, looking for wrinkles and crow’s feet, applying concealer and foundation and powder. She had her hair cut short now; she had it done every week, and came home from the hair salon smelling like she had been laundered.

Outside, it was nearly the twenty-first century, but when she stepped through her front door, she said, she could have been my great-grandmother stepping into her hallway sixty years earlier. She closed the door and found herself standing in a pre-war house which was deathly quiet apart from the ticking of that interminable clock. She disliked that house, with its wallpaper which was older than she was, older than my grandmother. She disliked the ancient kitchen with its pre-war china, whose gilt rims were faded from having been sucked at by generations of mouths. She wanted new cupboards and a freezer and a microwave and a mixer tap. She disliked the stillness of the house, and the smell, the smell of vinegar and mothballs — like pickled onions, she said, and death.

She once brought a new vase into the house, something modern she liked. She put it on the mantelpiece in the living room, and my grandmother looked at it and said it didn’t go. It stayed there for a while though, even after my mother found it broken on the hearth and had to glue it.

Early in their marriage, before I was born, my mother took for herself a small patch of the garden, near the end wall, where she planted a barberry bush. She sat out there from time to time, in her little bit of my father’s garden, just looking at the flowers on the barberry bush, or closing her eyes in the sunshine, and my father hovered at a distance, agitated, taking it out on the weeds.

I have brought tea bags and milk and sugar, but not a mug. I unpack one of the newspaper-wrapped china cups from a cardboard box marked ‘kitchen’.

There was mould growing, spores breeding on the overripe fruit in the fridge and in the fruit bowl, clinging to the softening skins; breeding in the bread bin and in the dregs of tea at the bottom of an unwashed cup.

The fridge is empty now, apart from my carton of milk. The bread bin and the fruit bowl and the cups are packed away, apart from the one I am using. The kettle is still out on the worktop.

There is an old bar of tar soap by the sink. Its heavy smell is unpleasant, sickening.

I turn on the tap, and the house trembles.

My sister, said my grandmother, was our mother’s daughter. I had seen photographs of my mother at Susan’s age, and if it hadn’t been for the look of a 1960s photograph and the 1960s fashions I might not have been able to tell them apart. They had the same slight frame, the same small features, the same colouring, the same skin. They had the same tilt of the head and the same way of looking at you out of the same pair of pale blue eyes.

There was not so much of our mother in me. I was younger than my sister but bigger, and darker.

Susan had always been our father’s favourite. His eyes followed her around rooms. He liked to make her laugh, to hear the laugh which was just like our mother’s. And he liked to watch the night sky with her — on clear nights they went up to the attic room, sat in the dark on a bench at the window, and watched the skies through an old telescope. They sat side by side, my sister, looking at the moon and its craters, looking at the planets and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, and my father, scanning the vast, black night.

She was clever, and she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up: she wanted to study tropical diseases, parasites. She told me about worms which burrow through your eyeballs, or into your skin and lay their eggs in you, or which lay their eggs in your wounds and when the larvae hatch they tunnel into your skin to feed, and if they are disturbed they screw themselves in deeper. She told me about parasites which live in your stomach, and tiny, translucent fish in the Amazon which swim up inside you when you wee in the water, which slither up and put out their spines to anchor themselves, and start nibbling. I felt them crawling under my skin and in my stomach, felt them wriggling and chewing inside me, making me squirm.

Sometimes I went up to the attic room to look through the telescope. I went on my own, without asking, and sat on the bench at the open window, squeezing one eye shut and looking through the eyepiece with the other. The images were blurred, distorted by thermals, seen through a heat haze. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at, these distant objects brought astonishingly close to my wide-open eye. I tried not to move or change anything, to stay still, just looking through the eyepiece; I tried to be careful.

But one time, perhaps a leg on the tripod was not fully out, or perhaps my foot moved, but as I sat there in the dark, with my eye pressed to the lens, trying to see the far-away craters of the moon, the telescope toppled, falling away from me, and when it hit the wooden floor there was a sound like something breaking inside. I sat in the dark with screwworms in my heart and flies hatching in my stomach.

I put the telescope up on its feet again and crept away, leaving the telescope broken in the darkness. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened; I never told anyone it was me. When the telescope was found to be damaged, my father didn’t get it mended — or perhaps he tried and found it couldn’t be fixed.

In the attic, in my grandmother’s old room, the windows are closed. I can’t hear the outside world; I can’t hear the traffic or the people going by or the neighbours’ children playing in the snow.

There is a pillow on my grandmother’s stripped-bare bed, and some half-finished knitting on her night-stand, something blue. I can smell her, on the pillow, in the air, in the dust.