the basement.
The attic wasn’t properly an attic, at least not as Julia understood attics. One-half of it had been knocked into a single large room. A nursery? There were colored tiles around the fireplace, decorated with images from fairy tales: Cinderella and her slipper, Rose-Red and her bear, Rapunzel letting down her long, long hair. Someone had used the room more recently than that. There was an easel in one corner, and a pile of art books next to it, a dried-out palette sitting on top of the books.
Julia had skirted around the easel without lifting the linen draping over it. Later, of course, she would have to—but she was starting with the rooms downstairs, she had already decided. This was just an exploratory mission, to get the lay of the land.
The other rooms in the attic, small and dormered, were all heaped with detritus from downstairs: old furniture, piles of clothes, steamer trunks, and cardboard boxes. Had no one in the family ever thrown anything away?
Still, it was better than the basement. That was a damp space with large stone sinks, a rusted coal stove, and a series of dark and faceless pantries, all crammed with obsolete kitchen equipment dating from roughly the origins of the house up to decrepit 1950s mix-masters in molding cardboard boxes. The original kitchen must have been down there once. Julia sincerely pitied the poor domestics who had had to work down there. The only windows were well above their heads. Forget light; the ventilation must have been terrible, especially with that old stove belching coal smoke, even in the height of summer.
It really did make one think twice about the good old days.
Still, Julia couldn’t deny the fascination of it all, of sinking her hands into the detritus of the past: cloche hats and crumbling newspapers, buttoned boots and letters that began with phrases straight out of an Edwardian manners manual. By the end of that first week, her days had begun to fall into a pattern. Coffee in the morning, from the surprisingly good stock and sleek coffeemaker Aunt Regina had left behind, and then off to the room of the day, to empty closets and sort drawers into three stacks: throw away, give away, keep/sell?
Many of the throwaways were easy—clothes so moth-eaten that not even the charity shop would want them, shoes with the heels worn down, broken coffeemakers—but the other two categories tended to slide back and forth. The china pug with the horrible bow around its neck could easily go on the giveaway pile, but what about the rosewood sewing box with the hidden compartment on the bottom? Not that Julia sewed, but there was something rather neat about it, and about the stack of ancient magazines from the 1920s and ’30s, a little yellowed but still perfectly readable.
Aside from some treasured pictures and a tattered collection of books from college, there was very little in Julia’s apartment that wasn’t immediately functional. Some of it she blamed on being a consultant for all those years; it didn’t make sense to haul family heirlooms around from posting to posting or to acquire large and bulky souvenirs. She had lived light; her last move had taken ridiculously little time to pack. But now she found herself suddenly seized with unreasoning cupidity. What was she going to do with a rocking horse with a missing tail, or with piles of photo albums filled with sepia pictures of people who had been dead before she was born?
She didn’t know, but she wanted them anyway.
Maybe just a few things, she told herself, and let herself squirrel the photo albums into the keep/sell pile. And the sewing box. She knew enough to know that she had no idea what she was doing; at some point, a real appraiser would have to be called in. But, right now, Julia was finding the whole process oddly restful. She should have felt isolated, but she didn’t, at least, not yet. In the evenings, bone-weary and content, she would take her glass of plonk (four pounds per bottle
The attic wasn’t properly an attic, at least not as Julia understood attics. One-half of it had been knocked into a single large room. A nursery? There were colored tiles around the fireplace, decorated with images from fairy tales: Cinderella and her slipper, Rose-Red and her bear, Rapunzel letting down her long, long hair. Someone had used the room more recently than that. There was an easel in one corner, and a pile of art books next to it, a dried-out palette sitting on top of the books.
Julia had skirted around the easel without lifting the linen draping over it. Later, of course, she would have to—but she was starting with the rooms downstairs, she had already decided. This was just an exploratory mission, to get the lay of the land.
The other rooms in the attic, small and dormered, were all heaped with detritus from downstairs: old furniture, piles of clothes, steamer trunks, and cardboard boxes. Had no one in the family ever thrown anything away?
Still, it was better than the basement. That was a damp space with large stone sinks, a rusted coal stove, and a series of dark and faceless pantries, all crammed with obsolete kitchen equipment dating from roughly the origins of the house up to decrepit 1950s mix-masters in molding cardboard boxes. The original kitchen must have been down there once. Julia sincerely pitied the poor domestics who had had to work down there. The only windows were well above their heads. Forget light; the ventilation must have been terrible, especially with that old stove belching coal smoke, even in the height of summer.
It really did make one think twice about the good old days.
Still, Julia couldn’t deny the fascination of it all, of sinking her hands into the detritus of the past: cloche hats and crumbling newspapers, buttoned boots and letters that began with phrases straight out of an Edwardian manners manual. By the end of that first week, her days had begun to fall into a pattern. Coffee in the morning, from the surprisingly good stock and sleek coffeemaker Aunt Regina had left behind, and then off to the room of the day, to empty closets and sort drawers into three stacks: throw away, give away, keep/sell?
Many of the throwaways were easy—clothes so moth-eaten that not even the charity shop would want them, shoes with the heels worn down, broken coffeemakers—but the other two categories tended to slide back and forth. The china pug with the horrible bow around its neck could easily go on the giveaway pile, but what about the rosewood sewing box with the hidden compartment on the bottom? Not that Julia sewed, but there was something rather neat about it, and about the stack of ancient magazines from the 1920s and ’30s, a little yellowed but still perfectly readable.
Aside from some treasured pictures and a tattered collection of books from college, there was very little in Julia’s apartment that wasn’t immediately functional. Some of it she blamed on being a consultant for all those years; it didn’t make sense to haul family heirlooms around from posting to posting or to acquire large and bulky souvenirs. She had lived light; her last move had taken ridiculously little time to pack. But now she found herself suddenly seized with unreasoning cupidity. What was she going to do with a rocking horse with a missing tail, or with piles of photo albums filled with sepia pictures of people who had been dead before she was born?
She didn’t know, but she wanted them anyway.
Maybe just a few things, she told herself, and let herself squirrel the photo albums into the keep/sell pile. And the sewing box. She knew enough to know that she had no idea what she was doing; at some point, a real appraiser would have to be called in. But, right now, Julia was finding the whole process oddly restful. She should have felt isolated, but she didn’t, at least, not yet. In the evenings, bone-weary and content, she would take her glass of plonk (four pounds per bottle
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