The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton Page A

own force, straining outwards against her skin. Only her eyes, in their deep sockets, looked—not so much noticing as consuming Kit’s freckles, her twisting hands.
    Audrey was so long-sighted that her eyes—whites floating over sunken brown rims—went out of focus, as though she saw, at the back of you, blank depths. Meeting that look, Kit had a sense of tipping slowly backwards. Shyness, its exaggeration of feeling, gave character to all she saw. Those shadows the iron lace cast across the rug of enormous roses: she felt them imprint themselves in her; she would remember them for years. Audrey lapsed back against the pillows. On the bed, a porcelain cup and saucer rattled on the tray.
    â€˜Your mother doesn’t come here.’
    â€˜She’s busy with the opening.’
    â€˜No. She doesn’t come. Angry with us, I don’t know why. Not smart enough for her.’
    Out the window, Kit saw Patrick walking between the tea-tree,straight-backed, fastidious, adrift. While she watched he stopped, arms upstretched, palms forward over his head. He held himself so still Kit thought he’d put his back out. Then he bowed from the waist and reached towards his toes…It was mysterious, how people could always sense somebody watching them. Standing straight again, he turned towards the window the blank look of a crane.
    â€˜She always seemed happy enough. Then off she went. England. We only heard from her when she wanted money. In the end we said no.’ Her body shook with embittered laughter. ‘Never forgiven us.’
    Audrey patted her hand across the quilt and found Kit’s hand. ‘She sent you though.’ Her touch was unexpectedly powdery and dry. ‘I expect he’s rich, is he?’ Pressing Kit’s hand, looking at the ceiling, Audrey followed her own thought. ‘She needs money. Not like that. Just…to feel herself.’
    â€˜I think the gallery does okay.’
    Audrey pushed the remark away with both hands. ‘She can have no expectations here. Treen looks after us.’ Audrey took Kit’s wrist in her hand. ‘No, the house will come to you.’ She was speaking thoughts turned dream-like with repetition. ‘She’ll tell you to sell it. But you like it here. You went round looking.’
    Kit saw at last what she could say. ‘It’s a beautiful house.’
    There was a pause. Kit glanced round, fearing that she had struck a false note. Audrey’s head had slumped on the pillow. Her mouth, sagging, showed her false teeth slipped sideways against her gums. It was the first time that Kit had sat beside somebody so old asleep. More than her weight, the passivity of Audrey’s body appalled her; it had become so simply a thing to be looked at. Kit felt the forceof her grandmother’s will, which could command it. Talking with her grandmother was dreadful. At every moment, Kit wanted to get away. Now, though, she gazed at the garden with a feeling of letdown. What next? she asked herself, with Audrey’s sense of fatalism and importance. Morning light shone into the vacancy.
    Kit managed to get down from the bed without rattling the tea tray. She sat beside the stack of paper. Treen had given her a pair of scissors to cut paragraphs apart and a stick of glue to paste them onto sheets, on which she had written headings in red capitals. Kit read, ‘A senior constable drove over the lawn in front of my parents, which showed that he was not of their class. Nonetheless they greeted him with perfect manners and did not remark…’
    Her grandmother slept noisily. In that shut-off room her breathing stood in for time itself. Every so often, unpredictably, she fell silent. Kit found herself stopped, scissors halfway across the paper, until with a sputtering gasp, like the striking of a match, breath caught again in her grandmother’s throat. Kit read: ‘The makers of this clock went out of business in 1784