Is green.
With frosted glass panels and a big chunky knocker. The bell doesn’t work. Has never worked.
He remembers that first viewing, standing in front of it, expectant, hopeful, hand in hand with Marius.
He remembers, like his first kiss, the first time he put the key in the lock, turning first the wrong way, then the right, fumbling over the not-yet-familiar gesture.
When I tell people what I do, they always want to know if I’ve worked on anything famous. The Ben Jonson Shakespeare. The Austen juvenilia. The Abinger papers.
I have, but these aren’t the projects I cherish.
What I like are diaries and letters, commonplace books and ledgers, calendars, invitations and almanacs: the everyday documents of nobody in particular. Ephemera, it’s called. From the Greek. Like those frail-legged mayflies, with their lace-and-stained-glass wings, who live only for a day.
I wonder, sometimes, if it’s a strange occupation, this semi-obsessive preservation of the transitory. But whereas for some people history is a few loud voices declaiming art and making war across the centuries, for me it’s a whispering chorus of laundry day and grocer’s bills, dress patterns and crop rotations. The price of tallow.
Only that morning, as I was assessing and stabilising several folders of late nineteenth-century letters in preparation for digitisation, I noticed that some of the accompanying envelopes seemed slightly thicker than their fellows. Inside one, I found a handful of pressed flowers. Inside another, some pieces of fabric. Even my phone’s impatient reminders of a waiting message couldn’t break the moment.
Me and these pieces of lives, linked, for a little while at least, in quietness and time.
Then I peeled off my gloves and picked up my phone.
I hadn’t seen the sky darken or heard the rain begin to fall, but all of a sudden it was coming down hard, just streams of grey water on the windows, blurring the view like tears.
The message read: sure u know this sweetie but theres a flood warning for ur area lol love mum x.
Two, nearly three years on, and Marius’s mother still kept in touch, still remembered my birthday, and still gave every indication of loving me. Unlike her son.
She had no idea how much it hurt.
Sometimes, I tried to blame her. If she had raised him with a little more guilt, a little more shame, a greater sense of social and personal obligation, he might never have left me.
What we’d had was good. It would have lasted a lifetime.
The lol wasn’t personal. She’d picked it up as a thing commonly said on social media, and we hadn’t quite realised the magnitude of the problem until Uncle Teddy dead lol, and by then it was too late to do anything.
I wanted to ignore her, but she would worry. So I sent back fine lol, which was probably likely to be true. We—I—lived on a floodplain, but most of the city is floodplain. My friend Grace, who was less romanced by sandstone and dreaming spires than me, once called it England’s cunt. She said it was basically a big wet cleft in the middle of the country—a phrase that has somehow never quite found its way into the poetry or history of the place. But I always thought she meant it affectionately. She was the sort of person who could get away with saying things like that.
The house had flooded twice, once in 1947, and once in 2007, but not since we moved in. We’d known it was a flood risk when we bought the place, but I’d wanted it, and Marius had apparently been willing to indulge me. Since the early days of our relationship, we’d found ways to live together—in cramped student rooms, awkwardly in shared housing with friends, in a flat we’d rented—but this was the first, the only property we’d ever owned.
You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.
From the moment I saw it, I saw us. I saw us in every room: talking, touching, sharing. I saw it all. But as it turned out, I saw only my dreams.
When we broke up, he wanted to sell, but I begged, and he let me buy him out instead. I think it was a weird relief to both of us that there was something I could fight for, since he’d made up his mind I couldn’t fight for him.
Looking back, I don’t know what I was trying to keep. Because all I’ve got are responsibilities and empty spaces.
When I got back to them that evening, I dutifully went to the Environment Agency website and checked for my area. The whole of the southeast was on red-alert status: flood expected, immediate action required.
So I went to bed with a book. Surrounded by the thudding of the rain.
At about ten o’clock, lost in that interminable nowhere-time before you can legitimately go to sleep, I went downstairs to make myself a cup of Horlicks. I’d call it the comfort drink of the single gentleman, but I’ve had a Horlicks habit for as long as I can remember. Based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I’m vaguely under the impression it helps me sleep.
The kitchen and the sunroom are extensions to the original structure. Mine runs parallel to my neighbour’s, so we can see straight through into each other’s houses. Marius would forget and wander around with his shirt off. “It’s all right,” I’d tell him. “She appreciates ornamental young men in their natural habitat.” And I remember, un-faded by time, a streak of viridian on his inner wrist. A curl of purple madder at his throat.
The light was on across the way, so I could see Mrs. Peaberry with her kettle. I waved at her through two panes of glass and a rainstorm.
The truth was, we always said goodnight this way. And good morning just the same. Book-ending each other’s days to stop them collapsing into heaps of jumbled time.
When we’d moved in, she’d welcomed us. When Marius moved out, I sat on her floor and cried. I suppose I could have called any number of our friends, but that was the problem. They were our friends. Even now, when I see them, which isn’t as often as I should, I feel less. Less than I used to be. When I was with him.
She picked up the whiteboard she was meant to keep for emergency numbers, scribbled, and held it up. It was hard to read through the rain, but I thought it said, fuck this weather eh.
I nodded and mimed out, Are you okay?
She shrugged.
I wondered if she was worried. She’d been flooded out in 2007, but her husband had been alive then.
“I’m coming round.” I accidentally spoke the words aloud, my voice so alien in the silence of my kitchen.
She held up a packet of Hobnobs: an octogenarian Eve with an oddly shaped apple, and I pretended—cartoonishly—to come running.
Something strange happens to me sometimes behind my kitchen window. It’s as if my body forgets itself, and tries to make jokes without me.
I pulled my coat over my oh-so stylish tartan lounge trousers and T-shirt combination and hesitated by the half-empty shoe rack. I really didn’t have anything suitable for the weather.
When I was at university, I’d developed a semi-ironic preppy image: chunky scarves, cable-knit jumpers, and tweed. But the irony wore off long before I hit thirty, and now I just look old.
About five years ago, in a charity shop, I spotted a pair of sparkly purple cowboy boots. I think I was hoping to rediscover my irony, or perhaps something else entirely, but I must have lacked conviction because the moment Marius saw them, they weren’t quirky at all. They were just incongruous and trying-too-hard, and I never dared wear them again.
I tugged them on and plunged into the rain. I was outside for less than a minute, but it was still enough to leave me chilled through and dripping apologetically all over Mrs. Peaberry’s hall.
She was waiting for me in her raincoat, with a big yellow sou’wester jammed firmly on her head.
I hid my smile. “You look like . . . whichever of them is the dog in Wallace & Gromit.”
“Gromit.” She unhooked her stick from the radiator. “Now, come along, Edwin.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“To the river.”
“But why?”
“To see what we can see.”
“I really d-don’t think . . .” We were going to end up as newspaper headlines: Pensioner and Homosexual Found Dead in River—Coincidence, Tragedy, or Satanic Ritual Gone Wrong? “It could be dangerous.”
“It will be—” she glinted at me, “—an adventure.”
I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don’t know what they are until someone says them. Once, on a very ordinary day, Marius—in some odd, theatrical humour—had leant across a table in the café in the modern art museum and whispered that he couldn’t wait to get me home so he could ravish me. And I sat there, electric-bright and honey-sweet, staring at my hands, undone in all the ways by a single word. I don’t think he realised, because he never said it again, and I didn’t know how to tell him. Or ask.
I think I also like secret. The way it hinges on its central c, like a box opening.
Or pod, enclosing itself always.
And, of course, adventure gets me too. Not quite in the same way as ravish, but it gets me. It makes me fizz a little. I don’t know how or even when Mrs. P. worked it out, but she’s been exploiting it ever since. Weeding her lawn is an adventure. Replacing a lightbulb is an adventure. Taking her bin out is an adventure. Or perhaps it’s just easier for both of us than admitting she struggles to do these things herself.
Moving at Mrs. P.’s pace, slow but relentless, we battered our way through the rain to the end of the road, navigating the old churchyard in the hazy glow from the last streetlamp. By the time we stumbled onto the footpath, the darkness was a damp fist closing round us.
Living in a city, it’s so easy to forget how absolute the night can be.
Mrs. P. paused, her breath harsh beneath the wind. “I’m sure there’s a river around here somewhere.”
“Just . . . wait a moment. I’ll check.”
I crept forward through a sticky mess of overhanging leaves, the wet gravel crunching beneath the heels of my boots. It was a rather jolly sound, really—defiant percussion within the symphony of rain.
Another step and my boots were full of water, and I was soaked all the way to my knees. A cold, wild shock that made my breath catch and my heart jump.
“I think,” I called out, “I f-found the river. And it’s really not where it’s supposed to be.”
Back at home, adventure concluded, I tugged off my sparkly boots, turned them upside down over the radiator to dry, and peeled out of my soaking pyjama bottoms before I ruined the carpet.
Tried not to think how ridiculous I looked, bare-legged in the hall, with nobody there to laugh and make it mean something.