Common, page 15
‘If things aren’t the way you would like them to be,’ she said as I went to leave, ‘work it out. But don’t turn your back.’
Minutes after I had finished eating a late lunch, crumbs still on the table, the estate agent rang the doorbell. As he told me his name was David and we shook hands in the doorway, I caught sight of pickle smeared down the length of my index finger. David’s attention was more firmly fixed on the picture of the weasel adjacent to him on the crudely boarded panel.
I said something about a recent accident but decided not to address the sketch of the Mustela, eager to suggest with my lack of acknowledgement that the drawing was perfectly in keeping with my late aunt’s taste and lifestyle.
David replied by offering his sincere condolences on what he referred to as ‘the loss of Mrs Clarke.’
‘Professor,’ I said a little more correctively than I had intended, then, to divert the conversation, hastily mentioned that, a long time ago, he had sold our old family home on the corner of Seymour Road.
After the briefest of pauses in which I suspected he was trying to recall the sale, he said, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’
I didn’t believe he really remembered until he asked, with some alacrity, ‘How is your mother? It was Farnham, wasn’t it, she moved to? Is she still there? Such a lovely town.’ I must admit, I was impressed, although I suppose it was more than likely that, like any professional, he had simply checked his files before coming out to the house. ‘And your father?’ he went on. For a split second he paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with a breezy shake of the head, ‘I can’t seem to remember where he was moving to.’
‘Godalming,’ I said, ‘although he lives in Tiverton now,’ and then I remembered I was no longer sure if that was still the case. It also occurred to me that neither Thomas nor Connie had any clear sense of where I was myself at that moment.
‘And you yourself live in Manchester now, I believe?’ David asked. ‘Is that right? How do you find it?’
‘More affordable,’ I said, only half-joking.
‘I’ve never been myself. North London tends to be my most northerly latitude,’ he said with a laugh, ‘but one always hears good things about it these days. Very up and coming, so I gather.’
I said something inane about the vibrancy of the city and the beauty of the surrounding countryside.
‘Lots of rain, so they say,’ David said with quizzical eyebrows and chinks in his cheeks.
‘Actually, I read somewhere recently that it’s only the eleventh rainiest city in the country. Or something like that.’ I felt strangely defensive of the place.
‘Is that so? Well. There you are. Where are the top ten?’
‘I don’t recall that part of the article.’
‘Do you work for the BBC?’ he asked then.
‘Publishing, actually.’
‘Books?’ he asked eagerly. ‘Fiction?’ It was what most people asked.
‘No, journals. Business and academic.’
‘Ah, yes,’ David said enthusiastically. ‘Very fulfilling, I’m sure.’ He asked about the different subject areas I covered.
We proceeded to walk like two old friends around each room, David frequently remarking upon the generous proportions and what he described as the ‘enviable quality of the light’. I wondered if we were looking at the same house. While the kettle boiled, David glanced into the garden from the kitchen doorway. In the sky I saw Stieglitz clouds, inverted shapes, moving and still, that merged and misted, that became tethering echoes of what I wanted to see, or else alternative screens overlaid on what I pushed, and continued to push, away.
‘It’s a wonderful house,’ David said, ‘although as I’m sure a man such as yourself won’t object to me saying, it would benefit from some basic modernisation to bring it up to the standard most people expect these days. I would recommend, if possible, clearing as much of the house as you can before viewings begin. It can be difficult sometimes for prospective buyers to look beyond the clutter and, as of course you will appreciate, first impressions are pivotal.’
I thought he looked disappointed, in me as much as the state of the place.
‘But it’s a project,’ David added with an energetic tone, ‘with wonderful potential and I don’t think we will have any issues with people recognising that. That’s certainly how I suggest we market it. It’s such a sizeable house; it would make a very fine family home. Wonderful.’
I handed him his tea, offered him a chocolate digestive which was half-protruding from the packet.
David asked when I was hoping to put the house up for sale.
‘Straight away,’ I said.
‘No time like the present,’ he said, with another short laugh. ‘And have you got a figure in mind that, in ideal conditions, you would be looking to secure?’
Sometimes it is important, I know, to project a sense of entitlement when it comes to money. My father taught me this. That may be neither an accurate nor fair assessment of his educational legacy. Either way, there are innumerable masks for greed, one-upmanship, maximisation, being satisfied, consciously or otherwise, only with the very greatest gain.
‘As much as possible,’ I said without blinking. ‘As Poirot suggests in Appointment with Death,’ I went on to David’s complete bewilderment, ‘the importance of money can never be underestimated. And you can’t argue with Poirot.’
None of this was far from the truth. I wanted the money. If nothing else, I thought, it would mean my aunt had bequeathed me a degree of financial independence, so that, without a mortgage of my own any longer, I might be more at liberty to come and go as I pleased, to leave some plain truths taped late one night to Neil’s computer screen, as if, up to that point, indebtedness had been the sole factor holding me back. Money is self-reliance by another name, I told myself without any hesitation, arguably its only name, the foundational condition without which it wouldn’t even be possible to conceive of a life of autonomous values. It isn’t particularly difficult, after all, to recognise the motivation for personal advancement and misdirect it into something else, something good or moral and out of which a new, shining path must inevitably emerge, recasting as it does so everything that has gone before and everything that it is to follow. The simple fact was, I had already imagined the prospect of eating out more than at home, of a new car, and predominantly of a two-bedroom cottage somewhere remote, low-roofed with deep-set, leaded windows that looked out over sweeping skies and heather strewn hills, and through which burbled the gentle sound of running water.
With great composure, David told me I could rest assured that he and his team of staff would do everything in their power to generate the peak purchase price. No stone would be left unturned.
He unzipped the black leather folder he had been clutching under his arm and showed me details of several other similar properties for which they were acting as agent. He went to some pains to point out to me both the quality and the clarity of the design of their particulars. He offered me his valuation. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it went for more than that,’ he said, ‘but a competitive price draws people through the door and, from there, the sky’s the limit.’
I asked about their commission and whether this was negotiable.
‘Our rates are non-negotiable, I’m afraid,’ David said, surprisingly firmly, ‘although I am confident you will find them very competitive in comparison to other agents in the area. And don’t forget,’ he added, ‘unlike the majority of our competitors, we remain a small, family-run business. We pride ourselves on providing that bespoke, personal service, to which I am sure your mother will kindly attest. Your sale is our soul, as we like to say.’ He grinned at me.
‘Before details of the property go live,’ David went on, ‘rest assured that I will personally bring my team of viewing agents to the house, so they can familiarise themselves with the many qualities and fantastic potential of this wonderful home. It might surprise you, but this isn’t a very common practice anymore with some of the larger conglomerates, who tend to use freelance viewing agents, many of whom will never have seen the property before they first show someone around.’
I proffered another biscuit, which he took and held in his hand.
‘I am very confident,’ David added presently, ‘that we can achieve the best possible price in the shortest amount of time.’
‘Ok,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
At that, David shook my hand and, in almost the same instant, produced a contract from his folder which gave them exclusive marketing rights for six months. From his suit jacket pocket, he withdrew a silver ballpoint pen. I signed in several places. With a laser distance measurer, David shone red beams from wall to wall, noting the dimensions as he went, and occasionally exclaiming ‘Yes, Yes,’ as he did so. I left him to it, going out to sit in one of the garden chairs, scratching with my fingernails at lichen on a stone I picked up from the nearest flowerbed.
When we shook hands at the door, I gave David a key to the house. He said again that he would be very surprised if, before long, there weren’t several competing offers on the table far in advance of the asking price. He asked me to pass on his regards to my mother, then climbed into his sleek, black saloon car, driving off with a wave. I stooped down and began to pull up some of the weeds growing through the gravel, a mound of purslane, dandelion, chickweed, sandbur and velvetleaf rising ever higher beside me. Below the bird feeder lay the remains of a small carcass, surrounded by a mass of twisted feathers, part blue, part black. I suspected it had been a bluetit.
During the first lockdown, when the weather was bright and warm, none of us did very much. Most days I spent a scant few hours in the garden shed, working at a foldable camping table surrounded by mounds of gardening equipment, bicycles, and bags of straw and hay. I grew briefly excited about Zoom, then even more so when I discovered the ease with which it was possible to switch off the camera and mute the microphone. Sometimes I logged into Thomas’s Xbox cloud gaming pass. In the birdbox outside, two bluetits came and went, hammering repeatedly with their beaks whenever they were inside. An hour or so after lunch, when the sun moved directly in line with the shed window, I took it as a sign that my working day was done.
We walked together as a family in the afternoons, hoisting the fence panel in the corner of the back garden so, in turn, we could each crouch through and take the shorter route to the fields and horses, grass overrun by thistle and dandelion. Along the mounds that bordered the nearby estate – and that always, a little unnervingly, made me think of recently constructed barrows waiting to be filled – we played Grandma’s footsteps, sneezed into elbows, peered through the open windows of the surrounding houses, occasionally – and from a respectful distance – greeted and spoke, not without warmth, to strangers. Returning home, we flicked for hours between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney +, Apple TV, very seldom iPlayer or ITV. We each agreed that Minecraft was as good and educational a replacement for school as any other.
Claire and I discussed the R number, followed the news, read twitter feeds, opinion pieces. But all of it was abstract, several steps removed, a topic of conversation in which I could participate but not invest. Everything else – the lived realities, what people faced, how they fared, or didn’t, the number of dead, the number that didn’t need to die, the wasted contracts, the nepotism – it was all outside, unreal somehow, connected to us, to me, in only the most roundabout way, as mote, as carbon footprint. I was not unaware of the selfishness. It was enough that to be unbroachable was to be safe.
On Thursday evenings we squeezed onto the porch and clapped, shouting briefly afterwards at our neighbours across the street and giving each other the thumbs up. Once a week I left the house early, driving to the local supermarket to stand in an immovable queue waiting for the doors to open. Rumours passed up and down the line about the arrival time of deliveries of toilet roll, sanitiser, flour, eggs, and pasta. We checked watches, tried to read the shopping list of the person in front, identified customers who might be slower and less decisive, readying ourselves to power ahead of them down the depleting aisles. One man consulted a hand drawn map of the supermarket layout. It was a technique I decided to emulate after a fashion. I placed my phone in my shirt pocket, camera facing outwards, and recorded my progress from fresh fruit and vegetables to milk, cheeses and meats, dried goods, household items, frozen food, breakfast cereals, biscuits, crisps, breads, and drinks, studying the footage intently over the following days.
When Claire caught Covid, she barricaded herself in the bedroom for ten days, leaving the bedsheets and pyjamas on the landing for me to wash each morning. We spoke to each other through Alexa. I told her she had always been an early adopter, sent dinner gong notifications when I was about to leave food outside the bedroom door, the sound of cheering when she couldn’t join us to celebrate the nurses. After using the bathroom, Claire let me know by sending the sound of a toilet flushing. I put on rubber gloves, wellies, mask, and a disposable apron, then scrubbed every surface with bleach. I mopped the floor, vacuumed the patch of carpet between bathroom and bedroom over and over, considered the merits of removing the carpet altogether. After a single use, I disposed of the protective clothing in a double bagged binbag, except the wellies, which I soaked, first one way then the other, in a bucket mixed with water, bicarbonate of soda, and vinegar. I slathered my hands and arms with sanitiser, messaged Claire the all-clear with emojis of a sweaty face, thumbs up and three kisses, told Thomas and Connie they could come in now from the garden. Claire listened to books on Audible for hours at a time, the constant backdrop of the narrator’s voice drifting around the thin floors and walls of the house only to be interrupted sometimes by the violence of her hacking that seemed, for a time, as if it would never end. Sometimes I could hear her engaged in long conversations, although I don’t know with whom. It may simply have been to herself in moments of fever. Chiefly, she told me later, she slept, restlessly, and with nervous dreams. One of Claire’s friends left casseroles on the doorstep, lasagnes, lentil shepherd’s pies, milk, bananas, homemade bread. I lifted the letterbox to thank her.
And throughout much of these early lockdown weeks, while interring myself in the shed under the pretence of the obligations of work, I began to send email after email to my aunt. They began with brevity, short notes simply checking in to see how she was until, as if of its own accord, the exchange became lengthier and almost daily. I talked about our life under the current restrictions, the strange happiness of narrow horizons, confinement as comfort, and a vague, half-stirring sense of guilt the origins of which I struggled to identify. Typically, she replied without reference to anything I had written, sending me instead long analyses of photographs, by Stieglitz, by Kuhn, by Krašovec, photographs with feathered skies and blurry foregrounds. Sometimes she attached grainy JPEGS, over which she had scribbled, drawn arrows and circles, boxes and diagrams, included words such as boundlessness, immeasurability, immensity, Poe, Melville, whiteness, panic, Einfühlung, and mitsein. On a few occasions these words were accompanied by scanned handwritten notes, largely illegible and scrawled on scraps of tracing paper overlaying the photograph so that each was partially obscured and partially visible. In a formless way, I worried retirement wasn’t doing her any favours.
In one photograph, written and sketched over in numerous places so that the image itself was largely obliterated, an old woman stood with her back to the camera, dressed in boots, a headscarf, and a long, dark overcoat. The picture looked over-exposed, although it may only have been the quality of printing and subsequent scanning. The woman was climbing a path that cut into the hillside, carrying in one hand a small suitcase. In the right foreground and in the left centre, rising at a slight angle to the top of the photograph, the branches of the saplings were bare. A few leaves lay like crumpled newspapers at the side of the stony pathway. A little ahead of the woman, the trail vanished from view, leaving my aunt with the impression, she said, that the woman was about to fall over the edge of the hill into the thick white clouds that blanketed the background and that, at their furthest reaches, gave way to the thinnest of snow-tinged skies.
No doubt it is symptomatic of my own lack of imagination, but I couldn’t help imagining the woman as anyone other than my aunt, and I tried without success to work out what it was she might be trying to tell me. I think I was most surprised by the fact that my aunt knew how to do all this with the computer. I replied only tangentially, and most often with inanities: anecdotes about games in the garden, the benefits and drawbacks of working in the shed, the restfulness of a life sequestered, our various attempts at making bread or pasta, the patient labour of jet washing the patio. ‘Perhaps it is the quietude of these days,’ as I can see now that I wrote to my aunt, ‘or the particular extension of leisure, but I can discern within myself something ariose, an ordinance that hangs in the air like earlobes, and into which I wish to burrow.’ My aunt responded with extended reflections on self-containment and the wearing of carapaces. She quoted Ishmael, when he talks about how indefiniteness, carrying in its folds all that cannot be measured, stabs each of us ‘from behind with the thought of annihilation’.
One afternoon in late April, a few weeks before I was informed of my aunt’s death and not long before I received the last of these emails in which my aunt’s mind was preoccupied with the ‘common insignificance of dying’, Claire and I lay together in the garden hammock while inside Thomas and Connie watched Lilo and Stitch for the fifth or sixth time. The spreader bars creaked a little under our weight as we drifted, gently, from side to side, this way, then that. I don’t know that either of us spoke. The bluetits, too, were quiet. The grass, recently mown and fed, was the colour of wet, luminous ivy. I remember being very happy. Claire’s left hand rested across my chest, our legs awkwardly entwined at the ankle. When Thomas and Connie jumped on top of us, half laughing and half squabbling, I went inside to cook pizza, chips, and beans.
