The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [164]
Somehow he couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all later. He wandered up to a small window in the side wall, a shadowy kitchen, a steel sink just in front of him, a door open beyond into a brighter space. The little translucent mill set in the pane span round fitfully when he breathed on it. The feeling he’d had, that the house might still somehow be lived in, left him completely. It was empty, and therefore in a way his; he felt a lurching certainty that he could and should get into it. Then as he stepped back he saw high up under the eaves the badge-shaped red-and-white box of a burglar alarm, Albion Security, which was a challenge he didn’t mean to take up. It looked new and alert and immune to the plea made by the books in his briefcase that he was only here to research the life of a poet. He went round the corner on to the front drive, just a narrow strip in front of the house; the horrible fence, with its creosote smell, concealed him completely from the road. A short brick path ran up to the front door. On the door-frame at chest height was a small oblong box with three circular holes in it, a wire trailing from one of them. So at some stage, before this latest degradation, “Two Acres” had been divided up, three flats, probably—like almost every house in London. Well, there were sixty years unaccounted for, since the day the Sawle family had relinquished the place. Paul wondered dimly how it had been done—new bathrooms, firedoors; his eyes ran over the black gleam of the little upstairs windows; who had got Daphne’s room, had the room where Cecil slept become a living-room, another kitchen?
Paul spent ten minutes at the house, magnetized but baffled, drawn to each window in turn. He looked out all the time for something detachable, and small enough to join the books in his bag. Not a flower-pot, or twig, but something that had been there unquestionably since before the First World War. A rusty horseshoe over the front door had swung sideways on its nail, the luck spilling out—he could reach it easily, but he didn’t like to; he pushed it up straight, but in a second it dropped back again. There were overgrown flower-beds in front of the windows, such as burglars leave footprints in, and he leant in across them. Beneath the visor of his hand he stared into the shadowy spaces, where electric sockets and dark lines and squares on the wallpaper were now the sole decoration. A big room on the garden side with french windows must have been the sitting-room. He could just about imagine Cecil flirting with Daphne in front of the brick fireplace. A square of worn and stained beige carpet covered part of the parquet floor. At the end of the room he could make out a shadowy alcove, under a huge oak beam, and he thought he saw what might have been romantic and even beautiful about it; but when he stepped away, and roamed off through the long grass to take some more photographs, he thought the house looked rather a hulk. He saw now that something had been knocked down—there was a broad black arrow on the brickwork where a roof must have abutted. A new bathroom window had been punched through the wall, out of line with everything else. You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even the romance of decay. He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in 1913—more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully adapted, but the rockery still there, the “glinting spinney” a beautiful wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the ridges of the ropes in their bark. He