17 Alma Road
The fifteenth section...
XV
Walking through the door, his aunt and uncle’s room is the last room in the house left to visit. Coincident with that recognition is the realisation that it is also the room he knows least well, inevitably so given how infrequently he and Maddie were permitted to cross its threshold. Even though this is the case, his memory of it is oddly sharp, perhaps as a result of the monumental furniture Florence and George used to prefer: the large bed, the huge wardrobe in the far corner, the twin sets of drawers either side of a small vanity table. His and hers. And all in oak. No longer obscured by their chattels, the wallpaper on one of the walls — a vivid pattern involving birds-of-paradise and vines — now seems incongruous. If he can still make out the room’s distinct aroma, he is reminded that he had never liked it. Lily-of-the-valley perhaps — or was that merely a default male answer when a fragrance was unknown? Yet it had always been there, this benign smell, presumably soaking itself into the fabric of the walls. The new owners would need to do more than simply open windows to rid themselves of it. Which would, he decides, be something of a shame. To erase the smell entirely might be to take the last of Florence and George out of the place.
In as much as someone might turn over the borders and plant them to a new design, or redecorate the stairwell to remove those rectangular traces of Maddie, so Owen was beginning to feel as if the house — as he had known and loved it — was on borrowed time. If in three or four years he found himself once again standing on the pavement looking over the wall, would it be the new things upon which he would first alight or the absence of the old? Removal of the railings’ rust and their subsequent re-painting would be entirely insignificant, but if the hebe was gone or the arch through the hedge had been butchered or chunks of the lawn turned to gravel, what would that tell him? He tries to picture such a scene and is unable to reconcile it with the fact that he would be standing on the same tree-lined street and be looking at number seventeen. Perhaps under cover of darkness the new owners might have swapped it with number twenty one, the only other house on the road he regarded as remotely similar, for how could this house — their house — be anything other than what it has always been?
“Strange how you can get attached to things,” Maddie says. Perhaps she is over by the window looking down into the front garden. “I mean, it’s only bricks and mortar, wallpaper and carpets, hedges and flowers.”
“Or unattached,” Owen suggests.
“Don’t tell me you don’t care for the place any more.”
“No, not that. You misunderstand. I was thinking about how easy it can be to disassociate yourself from things; people mostly. How, after a relatively short period of time, it’s almost as if they were never there.”
“I hope that’s not aimed in my direction.” She laughs.
“Never,” he says, knowing all too well that Maddie accepts he is beyond such callousness. Isn’t he proving it at this precise moment? “No, I was thinking about other people. And before you accuse me of it, no-one who has ever lived this house.”
“It gets in your bones,” she offers — which seems a strange assertion, considering.
“Or even is your bones. In a way.” Owen wonders about the origin of the metaphor. “If bones are what give you shape and keep you from falling into a heap, then didn’t this house do that for us?”
In the pause which follows he goes to where the wardrobe stood and runs his fingers over the wall.
“That’s unusually non-literal. And perceptive too.”
“You approve then?”
“How could I not?”
He walks to the window imagining Maddie making way for him — but just in case she doesn’t give ground entirely, confines himself to its right-hand side.
“I think I spent more time in here after George died than in all those years we lived here before. What about you?”
“If you recall I wasn’t around that much after uncle died. I was away wrestling demons…”
“Yes. Sorry.” He turns away from the view as if he just seen something he would rather have not, trailing his eyes around the picture rail as a distraction.
“And why was that?” Maddie asked. “I mean, why in here so much?”
“Oh, mainly to help Florence sort a few things out. She did very little of that immediately after George died, and then just as she was working up to it — well, you took our minds off of just about everything else… So perhaps it would have been late 2018, something like that. She’d sift through drawers and we’d talk. Sometimes I’d be the one doing the sifting and she would just sit on the bed and pass judgement.”
“Judgement?”
“On what to do with George’s old clothes. Not that there was very much to decide: which charity shop they should go to, things like that. In the end I don’t think she kept very much.”
“And did you do the same with my things?”
It is a question he had not seen coming, but his answer is ready enough.
“I kept everything. When I cleared the house I put the contents of your room into three of four large boxes. They’re in storage. I didn’t have the strength to go through them.”
“Scaredy-cat.” Maddie laughs. Owen knows she doesn’t mean it. “I do remember one conversation though.”
“Oh?”
“The three of us, soon after he died. She was worried that she’d pushed him too hard.”
“That was in here?” Owen struggles to physically locate the conversation.
“I’m not sure. Probably not. But it was definitely the three of us.”
Owen propels himself back into the kitchen (the most likely setting) the three of them sat around the table, coffee steaming from mugs.