The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton Page B

and the original case was destroyed in a sailing ship on the way here from England. The present cedar case was made before 1870 here by a questionable Carpenter.’ ‘(Probably Walter Nichols, former convict)’ her grandfather had added in red ink. After a while Kit forgot her strangeness. All the furniture was oversized; the ceiling was high. Cross-legged, she entered again into the underworld of childhood. She had forgotten this viewpoint, the shadows under chairs and beds, the closeness to patterns on the rug. It was comforting to be hearing again the practical sound of scissors. She read, ‘In the cedar trunk that myuncle took to the Kings School (he died in 1916, only a child) we keep the dress clothes of the 1920s, which as children we used for dress-ups, cedar being a deterrent to moths…’ She pasted this onto the sheet marked Family, early history of, and then wondered whether she should have pasted it onto Furniture, proper care of. ‘A story of haunting which we were told as children was that the ghost of a young woman stood in the hall by the front door…’ Reading, Kit was standing again in the hall with her grandfather where the light coming out of the mirror gave a peculiar cold glassiness to the air and was what fear looked like. But the typed words she was reading had come from the mouth of her grandmother—from that body behind her breathing on the bed. That body had belonged to a child once, frightened in the hall. She read, ‘It is sometimes difficult looking back in memory to fit the pictures that fill the mind into the time in which they happened…’
    Kit imagined her grandmother—lighter, a ghost of thought— stepping from room to room through the sleeping house, opening trunks and cabinets, wardrobes and sideboards, lifting each fact— spoons, forks, knives, books in their shelves, clocks, chairs and beds, curios and mementoes—out of a smell of damp, infestations of silverfish and moths, and setting it in the unshadowed light of the page. In one folder Kit came upon the family tree, her name and birth-date handwritten in blue ink on the browning parchment. In this, she seemed to meet some other existence. Till now, family had taken meaning from the rooms of her parents’ house: their bedrooms and their meals together, their places on the sofa. Now she saw on the typed sheet lineage and years: family as a mechanism workingits way through names. Her birth-date had a hyphen after it— she saw herself not exactly from outside but from the long perspective of History. The feeling was so new that she felt startled and almost guilty when Treen knocked and put her head around the door.
    â€˜That was Carol on the phone. They’re going down the front beach for a coffee.’ Treen’s face looked windswept. After a moment, Kit saw that she had put on lipstick and brushed her hair.

Chapter Ten
    T reen parked in the shade of some pine trees near the bowling club. They walked downhill past a playground set on the edge of a cliff: swings and a climbing frame and then, through its wire fence, an immense view of the sea. The beach itself was out of sight. Some kids were making a café in the shade under the climbing frame while their father sat reading a newspaper on the seat. Kit followed Treen across the road, past a shop where the window featured a headless mannequin dressed in navy ruched bathers—the sort that made sense of the phrase ‘bathing suit’. In the noon heat, among people trailing up and down the footpath, past unfamiliar shops, Kit felt at a loss. Those hours on the floor of Audrey’s room had been stopped hours. Following Treen out of the house, Kit had been surprised by how far the day had gone ahead of her: gravel burning up through the soles of her sandals, the air vibrating with heat. She recalled the sunstruck roads they had driven down: weatherboard houses, curtains drawn against the heat,