Eliza
Up on the hill the air was fresher. Up on the hill the small square opened up like a smile. Up on the hill life was easy. Up on the hill stood a house that looked as if it had been built on the piss. This was the house I wanted. I had wanted it ever since the day I first saw it, an autumn day seven years ago when out walking with Gabriel. He and I had met not long before, as I had staggered into the hospital A&E reception area bleeding all over the lino at the exact same minute as Gabriel was passing that exact same part of the reception area. He had taken my elbow to steady me before passing me over to the triage nurse.
(‘Why didn’t you help me yourself?’
‘I’m not an A&E doctor.’
‘So if I’d been lying dying on the road would you have just passed by too?’
‘Of course not. That would be completely different. And I didn’t pass by, I handed you over to the appropriate member of staff. Anyway, if I had treated you I wouldn’t have been able to have a relationship with you. So it was just as well, wasn’t it?’
‘Ah, but you didn’t know that at the time. That you wanted to have a relationship with me.’
‘How do you know I didn’t?’
‘You did?’
‘No. But I do now.’)
Gabriel, with his mind crammed full of matters of life and death was particularly unsuited to that kind of cringe-worthy banter but still he had risen manfully to the challenge, proving, on the way, that love was a true proponent of equality, making fools of us all with no regard to colour, creed, educational attainment or profession.
The second time Gabriel and I met was at the hospital fundraising ball. The tickets had cost a hundred pounds, which was a lot of money for a ceramic restorer to spend on an evening out, but I felt bad for having taken up scarce hospital recourses when my injuries were self-inflicted as near as made no difference. I had also donated a lustreware cup to their raffle. It was not of museum quality but it was pretty and the best piece that I owned and I had thought long and hard before letting it go. In the end I had had to remind myself that the greater the sacrifice the more worthwhile the gift would be. (I’m never sure why it should be so, but it did seem to be the general understanding.) Also I liked thinking how pleased the lucky winner would be with the cup. In the event the man whose raffle ticket won him my cup had turned the gold and pink piece in his hand before passing it, with a laugh and a shake of his head, to his companion.
Then a voice behind me had said, ‘Lucky guy. That’s a beautiful prize.’
That had been Gabriel.
A little later that evening we won the karaoke competition for our rendition of ‘Islands in the Sun’ on account of our having elicited the fewest cat-calls according to the ‘boo-rometer’, and not many days after that, we had come upon the house on the hill.
It had been late October but the sun shone as if it thought it were summer. We had met for breakfast at a café before setting off for a walk on the Heath. As we crossed the road he had taken my hand, more, it has to be said, in the manner of a mother making sure her child didn’t stop to tie her laces in the middle of the traffic than a lover, but either way, his strong warm hand holding mine had sent tingles down my chest to the pit of my stomach.
We had walked to Kenwood House and were returning to his car through the top of the village when I noticed the side street opening up into a small square. ‘Pretty,’ I said, and I pulled him along with me on the detour.
The house was not big, yet it stood back from the square in its own overgrown garden, guarded over by an avuncular mulberry tree. The house itself looked to be Georgian. Judging by its position I thought that it might once have belonged to a larger property that had since been demolished. Perhaps it had been the gardener’s cottage or the coachman’s quarters. Subsidence had given it an apologetic air as it leant towards its larger western neighbour, a tall red-brick, and a ramshackle one-storey brick and glass extension had been added to the eastern wall. The square itself looked like the setting for a television costume drama. Remove the cars, I had thought, and Emma Woodhouse would have felt quite at home wandering across the cobbles on her way to visit an annoying neighbour.
Gabriel put his arm round me. ‘You like it?’
I nodded.
‘Me too.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘In fact, it reminds me of you.’
I looked up at him. ‘Really?’ I smiled. ‘How?’
He tilted his head as he gazed at the house. ‘It’s got so much unfulfilled potential,’ he said finally. ‘All it needs is some TLC to bring it out.’
I decided that I was far too comfortable standing there in the autumn sunshine with his arm round me to worry about whether or not I had been patronised. I sighed, content, and rested my head against his shoulder. Maybe those shoulders were broad enough even for my baggage.
And now I was standing in that same tiny square gazing at that same house, but this time with Beatrice and an estate agent called Neil, and I thought of the time I had stood pretty much where I was standing now, imagining myself living here with Gabriel. What skill, what determination it had taken to loose such a man as he. I understood some of the reasons for why it had ended but not all. I’d never know, for example, what had made me grumpy when all I wanted was to smile. I winced as I remembered the times he had stepped through the door, his face elongated with exhaustion, yet still managing to put on a cheerful face and greet me like he was happy to be home. And I, who had usually been back for an hour at least, who had looked forward to seeing him, who had tidied up and maybe bought some flowers for the kitchen table, who had brushed my hair and re-applied lipstick and sprayed on scent and was ready to hear about his day and tell him about mine, what did I do? Well, more often than not I would find that the intended smile in return slipped into a pout and that all my stories of the day dried up into a dry little shrug and a sentence about the lousy traffic or uninteresting pot or the headache lurking at the back of my eyes.
Truly, I don’t know how that had all happened, why I had felt this need to come down like a scoop of cold water over his lovely head. But I had. I remember him reaching for the bottle of red wine and, finding it empty (we had started trying to make one bottle last two nights), getting up from the table to open a new one.
‘You shouldn’t,’ I said.
‘Why?’ He had sounded like a rebellious teenager. According to his mother, Gabriel had never been rebellious even when he was a teenager so I should have been warned. Instead, a little later, I told him off for dripping water on the floor when washing up – you walk in it and the floor gets all dirty. Then I rewashed the grill pan, sighing loudly as I went.
All in all I had managed to dampen his general enthusiasm nicely, but still he bounced back. We were watching the news and he told me that he had been so encouraged by the reaction to the publication of his paper on the developments of new therapies for Alzheimer’s that although he had had his application for extra funding turned down twice he was going to apply again. ‘They have to agree this time,’ he said, and his eyes shone and he was barely able to sit still as he began listing all the reasons as to why he would be successful.
I have a memory for rhymes. I had felt it was a good idea to quote one of Fontaine’s instructive fables so I did.
‘ “This world is full of shadow-chasers, most easily deceived.
Should I enumerate these racers, I should not be believed.
I send them all to Aesop’s dog,
Which, crossing water on a log,
Espied the meat he bore, below;
To seize its image, let it go;
Plunged in; to reach the shore was glad,
With neither what he hoped, nor what he’d had.” ’
And my husband had listened to me, standing still and silent as the enthusiasm drained from his eyes and his shoulders hunched. That night, for the first time, he had slept wearing pyjamas. Now I know a lot of men do that, sleep in pyjamas. To those men and their partners that was fine, how it was and no questions asked. It didn’t mean a thing. But to us, who had slept side by side for eight years naked as the day we were born (apart from the time the central heating went on the coldest night of the year and he had brought me his cosiest sweatshirt) that wearing of pyjamas had been as significant as if he had gone to work on a little brick wall down the middle of the bed.
‘Shall we go in?’ the estate agent asked me.
I paused by the gate, then I turned to Beatrice and whispered, ‘Now, don’t get carried away. Remember we’re only here so I can tell Uncle Ian I’ve been but that I don’t like it after all.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Beatrice whispered back as I held the gate open for her. ‘I’m here because I’ve never been inside a house with this price tag before.’
I felt it as soon as I stepped inside: the sense of a place at peace with itself, and I found myself smiling without really knowing why.
‘As you can see it’s in need of updating,’ Neil said as we walked though the ground floor.
I felt as defensive as if he’d been talking about me. ‘I think it’s lovely, nevertheless,’ I said. ‘It has lovely bones and that’s what matters.’
‘Updating?’ Beatrice said as we walked upstairs. ‘I think you mean rebuilding. And you’re asking how much for this?’
Neil gave her a slow considerate look over before turning to me. ‘Your mother?’
‘You must be very confident of selling this property,’ Beatrice said.
I ignored them and asked, ‘It’s listed, yes?’
‘Grade two star.’
Beatrice turned to me with a helpful smile. ‘That means you can’t put up a spice-rack without the permission of English Heritage.’
Neil narrowed his eyes at her before saying. ‘Of course, many people feel that it’s a privilege to own an historic building.’
‘Really?’ Beatrice said. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t understand about that sort of thing, working as a museum conservator.’
I frowned at the bickering pair. Like a mother wanting to shield her infant from harsh voices and cross exchanges I wanted to shield the little house from discord. I was sure it was not accustomed to that sort of carry-on.
‘I love it,’ I said.
Neil spun round. ‘Really? I mean, excellent.’
‘ “Ours not to reason why?” ’ Beatrice muttered. She turned to Neil. ‘Admit it, you think she’s out of her mind?’
He shot her a steely glance. ‘Not at all. There are many people who value character over convenience.’
Once Neil was out of earshot Beatrice asked me, ‘I thought you weren’t buying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Of course you’re not. You’ll just phone up that Fairy Godfather of yours and say, “Golly gosh! House Charming is even more gorgeous than I thought it would be so I’ve decided most definitely to decline your generous offer.” ’
‘Shall we go back to the office?’ Neil asked. I hated to dash his hopes but I told him I needed time to think.
Giving me a firm handshake, the kind that speaks of honesty and integrity, he said, ‘I’ll give you a courtesy call tomorrow.’
As we crossed the cobbles we were forced back on to the pavement by a large black car coming round the corner at speed. ‘What the hell?’ I shook my head. The car swung into a tight space in front of Number 12, the house opposite.
‘Meet the neighbours,’ Beatrice said.