Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

The telescope is gone, but the bench is still there at the window. I sit down and look out at the bright day, at the distant sky, and the tree-tops agitated by the soundless wind. I can’t see the moon but it is there, lurking quietly in the daylight.

In the silence, I feel the squirming and fidgeting under my skin, in my belly.

My father worked in an office, inputting medical data and producing charts tracing the spread and control of disease. He liked the precision of statistics, the clean lines of his graphs, the capturing of epidemics and pandemics in two-tone bar charts. He worked beneath shelves full of files, shelves bowed beneath the weight of his archived records.

At home, too, he monitored activity, keeping all kinds of diaries, notebooks in which he wrote regularly. He liked to sit in the quiet corners of that quiet house, bent over his work, filling his notebooks with his small, tight writing.

He had one for the garden, in which he made notes about the various weeds and pests he endeavoured to control, about the Spanish bluebell which ruined his lawn (‘naturally more invasive,’ he noted, ‘than the English bluebell; when cross-pollination takes place, the resulting seed is genetically corrupt’), the blackspot which attacked his roses (‘fungal infestation of the leaves, spreading to the stems and buds; no cure for the infected parts — remove and destroy’), the vine weevil which spoiled the leaves on his strawberries (‘adult vine weevils are female and lay hundreds of eggs in the summer; eggs are brown and diameter is less than 1mm — very difficult to find in the soil’), and the sap-sucking aphid (‘overwintering eggs are laid in crevices, and hatch in the spring’).

He had one in which he documented the things he had seen through his father’s telescope, looking through the attic window with my sister. While Susan was looking at the moon and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, my father was looking for UFOs, looking for flying saucers and aliens, recording anomalies in his notebook, his diary of evidence.

He had a notebook in which he monitored the activities of neighbours who encroached on his territory, whose ivy grew up the walls of his house, clamping sticky feet to his fresh paintwork and climbing up to and under his eaves; whose trees bent over the fence and dropped windfall apples on his path; whose hedges grew too high and blocked the light; whose cats crept into his vegetable patch and left their mess behind, and dug at the soil around his border plants and around the barberry bush; whose children kicked their balls onto his lawn and then came over the fence and through the hedge to fetch them back, and who put eggs through his letterbox so that they broke on his doormat, the viscous innards seeping between the fibres.

And he had one, said my mother, in which he wrote stories. He had never told her this — he kept his jottings to himself — but she had looked, and there, in one of my father’s notebooks, she found stories, and in all of my father’s stories, she found herself — a character who looked just the way she did, dressed the way she did, spoke the way she did; a character whose blonde hair had darkened, whose grey was coming through; a character who was wearing my mother’s blue jumper and the skirt with a tear which she never got round to mending; a character who was saying something my mother had said over breakfast, something banal about the eggs. My mother was furious to find herself there, to find this woman wearing her clothes and copying the things she said and her mannerisms. And in some of the stories, this woman had a daughter who was small and fair and clever, and who adored her father.

I have never kept a diary. I remember what has happened and who did what.

There are too many quiet corners in this quiet house for me. I work with the radio on, switching between stations and turning up the volume, opening windows and chasing the silence out of the emptying rooms.

In the bathroom, there is mildew in the grout between the shower tiles, and there are spiders making webs behind the toilet. I put vinegar on the mildew, but leave the spiders alone.

In some ways, I am my father’s daughter, and in some ways I am not.

My mother had a friend who had a motorbike. He came by in the middle of the day, when my father was at work. You could hear the bike coming down the road, slowing outside our house, and turning in. It was noisy and smelly and the oil tank leaked.

He parked his bike in our driveway, where our father’s car belonged. He took off his helmet and ran his black-leather-gloved hand through his oil-black hair. He walked, with his long-legged stride and his heavy-booted step, up to our house, to our back door, and my mother let him in.

We took our shoes off in the house, but my mother’s friend didn’t; he walked his dirty boots across my father’s scrubbed-clean floor, and sat down at the table. My sister and I, drawn to the kitchen by the sound of the motorbike, hung around, watching him. My mother made coffee, and Susan and I were allowed to stay and have some. When my sister spooned sugar into her cup, our mother’s friend said, ‘You don’t need sugar, you’re sweet enough already,’ and my sister giggled. She thought he was good-looking, although, she said, his eyes were weird, and his eyebrows met in the middle. And then he said the same thing to my mother — ‘You don’t need sugar,’ he said, ‘you’re sweet enough already’ — and she laughed too. I didn’t like the taste of coffee, I just pretended to drink it so that I could stay, and I didn’t take any sugar, and he didn’t say it to me.

After a while, when my sister had finished her coffee and I had barely touched mine — just putting my lips to the rim of the cup, taking just enough to put a nasty taste in my mouth — our mother sent us outside to play. I followed Susan to the driveway, where she sat on the motorbike, first on her own and pretending to ride it, pretending to be him, and then behind me, with her arms around me, pretending to be his pillion passenger, pretending to be his girlfriend.

I liked riding the bike with my sister, but I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him coming to our house when my father was out. I didn’t like his filthy bike standing in our driveway. I didn’t like him sitting in our kitchen, making our mother laugh.

We watched them through the vinegar-clean kitchen window. We saw his hand, olive-skinned and oil-stained, touching our mother’s leg underneath the table, and stroking her cheek as he stood to go.

He left dark stains on the driveway, and on our mother’s pink face, and on her white jeans. She stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing washing-up liquid into the dirty mark on her thigh.

We didn’t know his name, or what he was to our mother, but we knew she’d met him a long time ago, before we were born, before she met our father. And we knew not to tell our father that he visited.

Our mother washed her face and her trousers, and our father tried to clean up the puddle of oil he found on the driveway, but it wouldn’t quite go. He stood over it, troubled by the residue, the remaining stain.

I hear a motorbike. It’s a sound which even now makes me go to the window. I half expect my sister to come running, to see the bike parked in the driveway, to sit on its still-warm seat. I feel her arms around me, holding on.

These motorbikes race by. When I look, it has already gone.

I sit at the kitchen table, sucking at the faded gilt rim of the china cup, drinking sugary tea — I am not yet sweet enough.

We ate in the kitchen, all together at a little Formica-topped table. I sat between my mother, with her perfect complexion and her clean, white jeans and her laundry smell, and my father, who ate slowly and carefully, leaving the skins of anything which had grown in the ground, next to the dirt and the worms. My sister sat next to our grandmother, whose jaw clicked when she ate. It was cramped around that small table, and all our elbows knocked together if we stuck them out too far.