After that Michael had never quite rid himself of the feeling that he lived in a form of transport, only temporarily halted, or in a container, just a square vessel with thin walls and different compartments for putting things in. It turned out to be true that everyone’s doors were open. Beth’s were, usually the front and the back. She might be in the back garden hanging out washing or something, and some neighbour would arrive at the front, walk in and call out for her, and stride straight through and out the other side of the house as if the hallway were just a continuation of the pavement and the front path. Or Beth, looking from the sitting room window, would catch sight of somebody walking along and wave and yell, and rush to the door to tell them to come on in for a minute. Even the neighbourhood dogs ran in and out; one Saturday afternoon Michael, sprawled on the carpet watching football on television, suddenly heard behind him a noise like something frying in a very hot pan. He turned round to see a brown dog with an enthusiastic face peeing up against the doorframe, rattling the woodwork and carpet with yellow urine as if the sitting room were just a bus shelter or something. Michael had burst into tears. That particular incident seemed to generate even more droppings-in, callings-out and visits, full of explanations, apologies and finally gales of adult laughter. Never let it be said that Beth and Barry were the kind of people who couldn’t see the funny side.
Barry drove a long distance lorry, and he worked a shift pattern that Michael never got the hang of and that added to his sense of transit. Just when he felt sure that Barry was off working for four days he would walk in, or when Michael expected to find him at home, he would have vanished. Beth would try to explain, using words like earlies, split and doubles, until Michael stopped asking. Beth’s hours were easier to understand, but all day long at school on the days when she was at work Michael would feel wistful and anxious, picturing her in her uniform on the children’s ward. He could see all too clearly a boy just like him but not him, lying motionless on her lap with his head against her body, and it gave him a pain in his chest. He told the teacher about the pain and Beth was summoned to take him home, but after the third or fourth time and a visit to the doctor, Beth said, kindly as always, that it was not to happen again. He was getting to be a big boy, she told him, too big to be jealous. So Michael tried to shrink the feeling in his chest by shrinking into the house-container that he thought of as merely parked on the friendly estate where people’s doors were, alarmingly, always open. From the sitting room, whose huge flat window reached almost to floor level, he watched the traffic of neighbours, children and dogs, and looked out for Beth coming home. He still felt conspicuous, even though he had shrunk himself so much by now that he was almost managing to live in his allocated space without touching the sides.
‘The thing is,’ he said now, ‘we’ve expanded to fit our space. Even our voices are louder. Don’t you know what I mean?’
Jean thought about it. She knew the sounds of the house now. There was the faint rush of water as the washing machine filled or emptied that she could hear upstairs in the nursery, directly above the laundry room. There was the faint gurgle of the water softener, the creak of espadrille soles on the waxed upper floors, the friendly burble of music when someone, usually Steph, left the radio on in the kitchen. (She said that music helped her milk flow, it was well known, the same thing happened to cows.) Also, these days, Jean could spend hours in the house going about her tasks, and though alone, hardly for a moment would she be in any doubt about where the others were or what they were doing. She might hear a distant, mechanical cough and then the whine of the saw, and she would know that Michael was cutting logs at the woodpile behind the far wall of the vegetable garden. She would know that he was breathing in the smell of resin and the faint warm stew of the compost heap a few yards away. Sawdust would be flying in the air around him, and he would look up from time to time and see the world streaked and skewed by the plastic safety goggles, which would be making his face sweat. She might hear the chug of the mower, or the clack of the ladders against a wall and the rustle and snap as he pruned the climbers. From the other side of the house she might hear Steph at the pool chanting a counting game with Charlie, dunking and lifting him in and out of the water, or pulling him about with a lulling sing-song, as he perched, with her hands supporting him, on a massive, duck-shaped float.
Or there might be a very particular silence from the white plastic loungers (another purchase from the garden centre) on the grass in front of the kitchen windows. At such times Steph might be drawing something. She would only draw things she could see, a detail of the roof, a lavender bush, sometimes even an impromptu still life of whatever was to hand: an apple core, sun cream tube, sandal, or empty glass. But most often, she would draw Charlie. She filled page after page with silvery pencilled lines out of which emerged his little buds of toes, the coiled ends of hair slipping behind one ear, his closed eyes, the warm cheeks bulged in sleep, the fanning fingers and pink scoops of fingernails. Sometimes Jean would peep out of the window and see that Steph was dozing along with him, her drawing pad collapsed and pressed against her chest. Then, not wanting to disturb them, Jean would think to herself that it would make no difference if she vacuumed the kitchen tomorrow instead of this minute, or if she blended the herbs and nuts for pesto later on (she had gone from Larousse to the River Cafй by this time).
Sometimes she would hear Michael and Steph going about something together, talking in a continual, contented banter about the score of a croquet game, the amount of fruit to be picked, how slowly Steph read, how fast Michael did. Even, once, she heard them arguing gently about which one of them Charlie resembled more, stopping just short of actually using the words takes after. And then there were the shrieks, the calling out, the yelling from one end of the place to the other when one of them wanted the others for something, doors opening and closing, footsteps.
‘We make more noise,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Because we go about things just as we like. As if nobody is ever going to mind,’ she said, smiling at Charlie.
‘And nobody is,’ Michael said, as if his point had been proved.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Steph said, ‘Charlie’s staying the night.’