17 Alma Road
The tenth and eleventh sections...
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As Owen walks into the lounge, faint echoes from that conversation dissipate. He glances around the room almost as if he is trying to track down where it went; absorbed by the heavy drapes perhaps, or leaking out behind them and through the ageing sash windows. Because there was always truth at the heart of such exchanges, there was never any malice in them. It was a byproduct of one of the tenets of their upbringing — the primacy of honesty — which allowed accusations about the incontrovertible to be made without any fear or corruption. Florence had been correct: he did not believe in God, and could foresee no circumstance where he would be persuaded otherwise. And after what had happened to Maddie, how could his position have wavered since then?
“Really?” His sister’s voice again, unbidden but there.
“Yes, really. Why should it be any different now? Indeed, why shouldn’t my negative conviction be even stronger?”
“How about because you’re standing there talking to me…?”
Owen looks all the way around the room.
“I’ve assumed that’s simply the onset of madness. Or something hallucinogenic in the air.”
“In the house, more like.”
There is no way he can refute her suggestion. What made him push at the front gate, walk up the path, put the key in the front door? Whether that was inevitable or not — the machinations of fate, a sudden burst of imagination, or the benevolent pull of the place — Owen is unsure. In fact he doesn’t really care. Perhaps there had been a time not so long ago when he would have been inclined to analyse his actions to the ‘nth degree’ (a habit from his profession bleeding into his private life perhaps) but those days are surely resolutely located in the past. He wants to assign his change of attitude — this ‘laissez faire’, for want of a better term — to the moment he lost his job, but cannot help but believe it may have crept up on him earlier than that; indeed, that it might have been partly responsible for his redundancy.
Whether or not the timing of any mental shift matters — and if he is comfortable with today’s undeniably spontaneous actions — what does such a change say about the dialogue with his absent sister? The apprentice auditor who had sat outside that autumn afternoon attempting to defend himself and the decisions he had taken about his career would never have countenanced such psychological frivolity. Yet here he is, a grown man of fifty-eight, wandering an empty house that others of a more romantic persuasion would assert was haunted. If there were to be boundaries where new lines had yet to be drawn, perhaps where tangible reality bled into something else was one of them. Yet in a way Alma Road was haunted of course — but surely only in the sense that it was unlocking memory, providing him with a vehicle to see back into the past. In that sense one could easily argue that Florence and George could still be there. Indeed, that they always would be.
But what of Maddie?
“What of me indeed?”
He smiles at yet another echo. She is more than merely resurrected in his memory. She is somehow there, contemporary; he can talk to her, argue with her; this version of Maddie — who almost as alive to him now as she ever was — is prepared to joust and interrupt and ask difficult questions. When he finds himself wondering whether in some spiritual sense she still needs to be laid to rest, he recognises another boundary which requires a line and so imagines himself — one day — forced to draw one thick and indelible.
“It would be a distraction anyway,” she says.
“What would?”
“Worrying about me when there are more pressing matters to hand.”
“Like ‘next’?” he suggests.
Turning back toward the hall his progress is halted by another intervention.
“It wasn’t just that conversation about God.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Where Florence cross-examined you.” Owen senses Maddie gathering her thoughts. “She used to do the same thing with politics. To both of us. Most often in this room and just when everyone was thinking of going to bed. Do you remember?”
He laughs. “Tried to get at us when we were at our weakest. Not that she was trying to change what we believed in.”
“Really? I always thought she was more concerned about what we didn’t believe in.”
“Indeed.” He searches his memory for a specific instance, but none are immediately forthcoming. “I think I used to annoy her because of what she called my ‘small-c conservatism’.”
It is Maddie’s turn to laugh.
“Yes, she did pester you about that didn’t she? Like an itch she had to scratch from time to time.”
He tries to place his aunt in her favourite place — at the far end of the lounge’s sofa, alongside George — but for some reason is unable to do so.
“And why was that?” he asks, ignoring his inability to conjure her up at this precise moment. “I never really knew. It wasn’t as if she was a raving communist or anything like that.”
“Nor a ‘big-C Conservative’,” Maddie offers.
“Indeed. But it was something she wouldn’t let go; just like she chided you for not being left-wing enough. Do you remember, she had this theory that in order to be a great artist you needed to be politically extreme. It didn’t seem to matter to her whether you were Socialist or Fascist, as long as you occupied some wing or other. On that basis — my lack of artistic pretensions, I mean — I can’t see why she cared about me at all.”
There is a lull during which the dust Owen has disturbed continues to swirl haphazardly about him.
“Perhaps in your case it was a bit like God; being open to other viewpoints,” Maddie suggests.
“Or not feeling strongly enough about any of them. I never really saw the point of politics.” It is a statement which — almost as if he had drawn back the curtains Pip-like to let light into Miss Haversham’s salon — suddenly illuminates a potential source of their aunt’s motivation. “Perhaps that was it,” he follows his own logic. “In a way she didn’t really care what we believed in as long as we believed in something: God, the Devil, Left or Right. Was it as simple as that, her mantra on all those occasions; was she just trying to get us to espouse something outside of ourselves, but something that was ‘important’?”
“Her challenge to us was always to be the best of version of ourselves we could be.”
“And maybe for her that meant believing in things.”
Again the silence.
“What do you think she believed in, Glen?”
Owen thinks for a moment. He wants to be able to ascribe something definitive to his aunt, as if he might choose from a catalogue of such topics and find a few which fitted her glove-like. Unable to do so, he reverts to platitudes.
“Herself. George. This house.”
“And us.” There is more than a trace of regret in Maddie’s voice as the dust continues to gently whorl and Owen begins to make his way back into the hall.