Against one wall, set into a long, white-painted kitchen unit, stood a sink with worktops on each side. A row of glass-fronted cupboards, containing nothing but ice buckets and tumblers, was fixed along the wall above. On either side of the cupboards were two identical doors. Through one he found a large, neglected bathroom with corroded taps and chilly white tiles covering the floor and walls. The other door led into a bare, stone room like a scullery where the pool machinery was installed. Here, on a shelf next to several tubs and bags of chemical-looking cleaners, Michael found what he was looking for: a damp notebook with the words Pool Maintenance Checklist on it, and a colour brochure entitled Enjoy Your Pool. He picked them up, returned to the green and white room, stretched himself out along one of the sofas and began to read.
It turned out to be quite complicated, but with the book in his hand Michael eventually identified the pump, filters, motors and heater. He cleared out the valves and pump head, charged the filters with water, primed the filter pump and checked for leaks. Back outside he re-installed the water surface skimmer baskets and, following the measurements prescribed, gave the water a dose of chlorine. Then he tested and adjusted the alkalinity and calcium levels. He felt like Einstein.
It was while he was hosing down the paving round the pool that he heard a shout from Jean. Looking up, he saw that she was approaching across the grass, moving as fast as she could, and if she had not been holding Charlie she would have been waving her arms. Her hair had shaken free of its clasp and the few clumps of it that Charlie had not managed to grasp in his fists flew out behind her. Her usual serenity had vanished, not a vestige of poise remained; she was jabbering and distraught- only a few jerking steps away, it seemed to Michael, from complete breakdown. Just then Charlie, jiggled almost insensible by the dash across from the house, got enough breath back to start up with a high-pitched, bewildered bleating. Michael dropped the hose, turned off the tap on the wall and strode towards them across the grass. He took Charlie from her a little roughly, which upset him even more. He pulled round from Michael’s arms and stretched back to Jean, wailing louder. His confused eyes scanned the space around and behind, looking for Steph, and then he arched his back and screamed. His brown arms pumped up and down in rage. Jean was shouting incoherently above him, but Michael was too busy struggling to get a better hold of the writhing Charlie and keep his face clear of his waving fists to hear what she was saying.
But how, he was managing to wonder, how had this happened? Two minutes ago he had been calmly working on the pool. He had left Jean a little over two hours ago, baking bread in the kitchen while Charlie gurgled and watched her from his reclining seat, happily flinging his rabbit to the floor from time to time. Steph had been painting upstairs and presumably still was; she would be up a ladder, humming to herself and too far away to hear that once again their peace had been obliterated. How? What had gone wrong this time? Why could they not be left alone?
‘Come on, sit down. Sit here on the grass and tell me what’s the matter,’ he said, in his most coping voice, pulling her down. He set Charlie gently on the grass and Charlie, perhaps bamboozled by being plonked in yet another unexpected location, stopped crying and stared up at the sky instead.
‘What’s up, then?’ Michael was managing to sound calm, but oddly, he realised that he was not just putting on the right voice, it actually was his voice, and he really did feel the way he sounded. Jean needed him to be this way. Whatever the matter was, he would put it right for her.
Jean was rocking to and fro on the grass. ‘I’ve just had a call. From Town and Country, the agency, the house sitting people.’ She raised frantic eyes to Michael. ‘I don’t know what to do! Shelley’s coming. Shelley, she runs the agency, she says she’s on her way. Here! I couldn’t stop her!’ She buried her face in her hands and moaned. Charlie, kicking on the grass, gurgled and gave a short wail.
‘Oh, Christ. Christ, when?’
‘Now! In about an hour. She phoned from the car- she said she wrote and gave me the date and to tell her if there was any problem with it. She said, “Well, Jean, since you didn’t object I assumed it was fine, and now I’ve scheduled it in”!’
‘But did she? Write and give you the date?’
Jean burst into loud sobs. ‘I don’t know! You know what we’re like! We don’t bother with the post anymore, it’s never for us. I ignore it, I just shove it in the library desk, I hardly look at it!’
‘Oh Christ.’ Michael got to his feet and stood looking round wildly.
‘Michael, I tried to stop her, I really did. I said I’d be out, but she just said that’s why she was ringing, to make sure I’d be here. Oh, Michael!’
‘But why? Did you ask her why she’s coming?’
‘I couldn’t! She’s so definite and so, I don’t know, so official. I couldn’t exactly demand to know. I did say, oh you’ve never done that before, visited when I’m doing an assignment, and she said it was a new company policy, it was all in the letter. Oh Michael, I don’t believe her! She knows! She knows, and she’s coming to spoil everything! She’ll ruin everything!’
‘Oh no, she won’t,’ Michael said quietly. He took a few steps away, leaving Jean sitting on the grass. He had to think. Crying softly, Jean collected her hair and twisted it anxiously into a tight bundle at the back of her head. Then she picked Charlie up from the grass and rocked him gently as his little voice creaked in unconvincing half-complaint.
Michael turned away, trying to think, but found himself considering the house, wondering for one wild second if it might be looking back at him. It never changed in itself, but he liked the way it wore the changing colours of the light so transparently, remaining always the same behind them however varying the cloaks of certain times of the day or year. Though the hours and seasons changed, the light this summer must be the same as in summers past, and come the next one after this, it would be no different. In the early afternoon in summertime, the same warming light would glow on these walls, always like this.
Now the sun was slanting across the stone tiles of the roof and glancing off the glass of the upper windows. Light fell and dappled the wall behind the wisteria whose boughs hung in their motionless, frozen writhing as they had done for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the droop of the leaves there was a touch of complacency that flowers would come again next year and every year after that, and that time would bleach the colour from them by such tiny degrees that the blossom would not so much lose its purple as grow graciously towards whiteness, as if acquiring dust. And while the wisteria would flower with or without Michael’s attention, he felt that his admiration was somehow necessary; it was as if he were being shown some important small treasure that lay in the scooped palm of the house, something fragile and elusive in this play of light and shadow on flowers and leaves, of summer sunlight on stone. He must not neglect the privilege.
It seemed that with the same slow, quiet skill of insinuation that bound the wisteria to its walls, this house had woven itself in and among them- Jean, Steph, himself, even Charlie- had gathered them all in towards itself and to one another, and it seemed also that whole centuries of summers and winters were caught in along with them, trapped, stilled, and kept tight in its web. The house seemed to be saying, do not struggle, and do not move from here. Every important thing that ever was, or could be, is here. Like you, it is held in the very stone, it lies under the brushstrokes of the pictures on the walls, it sits on the pages of books and is woven in with every thread. It grows in the garden, is warmed in the sunlight, rests in the darkness. Stay.