Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

One weekend in the middle of the summer, the motorbike appeared in our driveway again. It was a Saturday and my father was at home. He was in the back garden, mowing stripes into the lawn. I was at the front of the house, sitting on the well-scrubbed doorstep, swatting at the flies and looking at my mother’s friend sitting on his motorbike, the engine running.

The front door opened. I fell inwards a little, and my mother came out. She had to step over me, her heeled sandals and her bare legs clearing me, her hand lightly touching my head, the hem of her skirt and her perfume breezing by. She cut across the corner of the front garden, her heels sinking into the grass, making holes in the lawn, and clicking down the driveway to the motorbike. She climbed up behind her friend and was whisked away, riding pillion without a helmet, her bare knees gripping his hips, the flimsy fabric of her skirt catching the wind they made, as my father appeared at the side of the house, holding nettles in his gloved hands.

We watched them go, and even when they were long gone, it seemed as if the black fumes still hung in the air, and the sound of the engine still throbbed in our ears, and the sensation of her passing fingertips still lingered in my hair, at the roots.

My grandmother made dinner, a salad with cold cuts. We ate with the door and the windows open, until the kitchen filled with flies, and then with the door and the windows closed, despite the heat, the closeness, and the flies which were already in.

My mother came home in the small hours. The motorbike lingered in our driveway, disturbing us, polluting the clear, night air. When her friend rode away, my mother came in, through the kitchen door — I heard the squeal of her key turning in the lock, the creak of the stairs, the throb of the water pipes, the complaining of the ageing house woken in the middle of the night. I heard my father’s voice, my mother’s name (‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘Barbara, Barbara…’). And then there was silence, and I held my breath.

My mother’s friend appeared every few weeks after that, and took her away for the day and sometimes overnight, and it seems to me we spent that whole summer just waiting for his motorbike to appear, just waiting for her to leave.

In the winter, ice forms inside the pipes and sometimes they burst.

There is a programme on the radio about the history of quarantine, about ships anchored and isolated to prevent the spread of the plague — forty days and forty nights of confinement, floating, away from the world, just waiting. Or cholera, and I imagine the waiting, with a parasite deep in the intestines, with an eye on the bowels, the waiting and watching.

My father stood at the kitchen sink, frowning at the summer’s flies which lay dying or dead on the windowsill, frowning at the things on the draining board which had been washed up but were not clean — one of the good teacups with the rose-pink stain of my mother’s lipstick on the rim, and a dirty tumbler which he held up to the light, peering at the greasy fingerprints on the glass.

The lawn was littered with fallen leaves, our gutters clogged with decomposing debris. That year, the snow came early, and any leaves which hadn’t been raked up lay beneath it, freezing.

My mother left, with her belongings, everything she wanted, in one small suitcase. She took her modern vase, and she left us; she left her barberry bush, and her footprints in the snow on the driveway, walking away. Where her footsteps stopped, there was a motorbike track, and oil in the snow.

My father cut down the barberry bush, cut it right down to the ground.

If we went out, walking briskly, he eyed the frontages of the neighbours’ houses, the paintwork as dingy as decaying teeth, net curtains yellowing like jaundiced eyes, weeds flourishing in the overgrown lawns and sprouting through the cracks in the paths. He eyed the dog mess burning holes in the snow on the pavement, and the greying slush in the gutters, the street soiled beneath his feet, defaced.

When the gossiping neighbours saw us they snapped shut their mouths, cutting off the ends of their sentences, the unspoken scraps squirming on their tongues like halved earthworms in the dirt.

My father came home and shut the front door with one shoulder against it, and locked it, as if the outside world were a cupboard full of so much crap.

He ignored the phone when it rang. He stood in the hallway looking at it, and didn’t pick it up. Perhaps he thought it might be my mother, asking to come home. Perhaps he was afraid that it was not.

I tried to find some trace of her, but I found none, not even a cheap romance in my grandmother’s bookcase, or a mug with a joke on it at the back of the kitchen cupboard; not even the colour of her mouth on the side of an old teacup, or the smell of her in the drawers where her clothes had been or in the bathroom cabinet where she had kept her toiletries.

My grandmother made supper, and we all ate together at the little kitchen table, while fresh snow settled, and the pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.

I step out of the back door and walk down to the end of the garden, leaving my footprints in the snow on the lawn, treading carefully on the icy path.

There is a spent firework and evidence of cats in the vegetable patch. The barberry bush has grown back; it is almost up to my shoulders. There is something here of my mother’s after all, something she left behind, something she may or may not have wanted.

‘Not long now,’ says the next door neighbour, who has followed me down to the end of the garden on his side, and is leaning on the fence.

‘No,’ I say, ‘not long now.’ I want him to go away, but he stays where he is, looking at me.

‘Sorry to hear about your father passing away.’ Passing away , he says, the euphemism as light and clean as falling snow.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘My wife and I used to call on him,’ he says. ‘We were sure he was in, but he never answered the door. He used to keep his curtains closed, during the day.’

The insinuation hangs between us. He stands there, with his arms dangling over the fence like the branches of his apple tree, dropping unwanted fruit into my father’s garden where it rots, attracting wasps.

‘He never got over it, did he?’ he says. ‘He was never quite right after that.’

I turn away. Beneath the barberry bush, in the lee of the wall, the ground is bare, snowless, and stray flowers have taken root in the cold earth. They have a strong smell, these wild plants, and even when I walk away, back up to the house, the scent follows me.

When the snow melted, autumn’s dead and unraked leaves were still there underneath, rotting on the lawn, and the oil stains remained on the driveway.

My father raked up the stray leaves. I watched him from the house, pulling his rake across his thawing lawn, and standing, staring at the grass beneath his feet, as if it were not just grass, as if this were not his perfect lawn, as if it were something strange. I watched him go down to his shed and return with a spade. Its clean metal caught the cold sunlight, its glint dazzling me. In the chill of that pre-spring day, he touched the sharp edge of his spade to his perfect lawn, raised his foot and stamped on the tread, driving the head into the ground. He lifted metres of turf, turned over tons of earth, digging out the bluebell bulbs one by one. It took him days. He turned the lawn into mud; it must have been almost as it was when my great-grandfather first stood there, wondering where to begin. At night, the garden was a strange barren moonscape. The discarded bulbs lay in buckets, their roots drying, their shoots wilting.