The house was not only frightened of us, it was seriously ill. Somebody, Dmitri Shochmann perhaps, overflowing with self-hate, had committed an appalling injury to himself, and the house was recapitulating its previous response. I was about to ask Stamers if the suicide party had been staged here when he sat up and looked around fretfully.
At the same time my ears started to sing. Mysteriously, the air pressure inside the lounge was building up, gusts of old grit whirling out into the hallway towards the exit.
Stamers was on his feet, the seat telescoping back into the wall.
‘Er, Mr Talbot, let’s stroll around the garden, give you the feel of-’
He broke off, face creased in alarm. The ceiling was only five feet above our heads, contracting like a huge white bladder.
‘-explosive decompression,’ Stamers finished automatically, taking my arm. ‘I don’t understand this,’ he muttered as we ran out into the hallway, the air whooshing past us.
I had a shrewd idea what was happening, and sure enough we found Fay peering into the control console, swinging the volume tabs.
Stamers dived past her. We were almost dragged back into the lounge as the ceiling began its outward leg and sucked the air in through the doorway. He reached the emergency panel and switched the house off.
Wide-eyed, he buttoned his shirt. ‘That was close, Mrs Talbot, really close.’ He gave a light hysterical laugh.
As we walked back to the car, the giant spheres resting among the weeds, he said: ‘Well, Mr Talbot, it’s a fine property. A remarkable pedigree for a house only eight years old. An exciting challenge, you know, a new dimension in living.’
I gave him a weak smile. ‘Maybe, but it’s not exactly us, is it?’
We had come to Vermilion Sands for two years, while I opened a law office in downtown Red Beach twenty miles away. Apart from the dust, smog and inflationary prices of real estate in Red Beach, a strong motive for coming out to Vermilion Sands was that any number of potential clients were mouldering away there in the old mansions — forgotten movie queens, lonely impresarios and the like, some of the most litigious people in the world. Once installed, I could make my rounds of the bridge tables and dinner parties, tactfully stimulating a little righteous will-paring and contract-breaking.
However, as we drove down Stellavista on our inspection tour I wondered if we’d find anywhere suitable. Rapidly we went through a mock Assyrian ziggurat (the last owner had suffered from St Vitus’s Dance, and the whole structure still jittered like a galvanized Tower of Pisa), and a converted submarine pen (here the problem had been alcoholism, we could feel the gloom and helplessness come down off those huge damp walls).
Finally Stamers gave up and brought us back to earth. Unfortunately his more conventional properties were little better. The real trouble was that most of Vermilion Sands is composed of early, or primitive-fantastic psychotropic, when the possibilities offered by the new bio-plastic medium rather went to architects’ heads. It was some years before a compromise was reached between the one hundred per cent responsive structive and the rigid non-responsive houses of the past. The first PT houses had so many senso-cells distributed over them, echoing every shift of mood and position of the occupants, that living in one was like inhabiting someone else’s brain.
Unluckily bioplastics need a lot of exercise or they grow rigid and crack, and many people believe that PT buildings are still given unnecessarily subtle memories and are far too sensitive — there’s the apocryphal story of the millionaire of plebian origins who was literally frozen out of a million-dollar mansion he had bought from an aristocratic family. The place had been trained to respond to their habitual rudeness and bad temper, and reacted discordantly when readjusting itself to the millionaire, unintentionally parodying his soft-spoken politeness.
But although the echoes of previous tenants can be intrusive, this naturally has its advantages. Many medium-priced PT homes resonate with the bygone laughter of happy families, the relaxed harmony of a successful marriage. It was something like this that I wanted for Fay and myself. In the previous year our relationship had begun to fade a little, and a really well-integrated house with a healthy set of reflexes — say, those of a prosperous bank president and his devoted spouse — would go a long way towards healing the rifts between us.
Leafing through the brochures when we reached the end of Stellavista I could see that domesticated bank presidents had been in short supply at Vermilion Sands. The pedigrees were either packed with ulcer-ridden, quadri-divorced TV executives, or discreetly blank.
99 Stellavista was in the latter category. As we climbed out of the car and walked up the short drive I searched the pedigree for data on the past tenants, but only the original owner was given: a Miss Emma Slack, psychic orientation unstated.
That it was a woman’s house was obvious. Shaped like an enormous orchid, it was set back on a low concrete dais in the centre of a blue gravel court. The white plastex wings, which carried the lounge on one side and the master bedroom on the other, spanned out across the magnolias on the far side of the drive. Between the two wings, on the first floor, was an open terrace around a heart-shaped swimming pool. The terrace ran back to the central bulb, a three-storey segment containing the chauffeur’s apartment and a vast two-decker kitchen.
The house seemed to be in good condition. The plastex was unscarred, its thin seams running smoothly to the far rim like the veins of a giant leaf.
Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and suspected that the house might be a static conversion — a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes.
‘It’s not bad,’ I admitted, looking across the powder-blue water as Stamers piled on the superlatives. Through the glass bottom of the pool the car parked below loomed like a coloured whale asleep on the ocean bed. ‘This is the sort of thing, all right. But what about switching it on?’
Stamers stepped around me and headed after Fay. ‘You’ll want to see the kitchen first, Mr Talbot. There’s no hurry, let yourself feel at home here.’
The kitchen was fabulous, banks of gleaming control panels and auto units. Everything was recessed and stylized, blending into the overall colour scheme, complex gadgets folding back into self-sealing cabinets. Boiling an egg there would have taken me a couple of days.
‘Quite a plant,’ I commented. Fay wandered around in a daze of delight, automatically fingering the chrome. ‘Looks as if it’s tooled up to produce penicillin.’ I tapped the brochure. ‘But why so cheap? At twenty-five thousand it’s damn nearly being given away.’
Stamers’s eyes brightened. He flashed me a broad conspiratorial smile which indicated that this was my year, my day. Taking me off on a tour of the rumpus room and library, he began to hammer home the merits of the house, extolling his company’s thirty-five-year, easy-purchase plan (they wanted anything except cash — there was no money in that) and the beauty and simplicity of the garden (mostly flexible polyurethane perennials).
Finally, apparently convinced that I was sold, he switched the house on.
I didn’t know then what it was, but something strange had taken place in that house. Emma Slack had certainly been a woman with a powerful and oblique personality. As I walked slowly around the empty lounge, feeling the walls angle and edge away, doorways widen when I approached, curious echoes stirred through the memories embedded in the house. The responses were undefined, but somehow eerie and unsettling, like being continually watched over one’s shoulder, each room adjusting itself to my soft, random footsteps as if they contained the possibility of some explosive burst of passion or temperament.
Inclining my head, I seemed to hear other echoes, delicate and feminine, a graceful swirl of movement reflected in a brief, fluid sweep in one corner, the decorous unfolding of an archway or recess.
Then, abruptly, the mood would invert, and the hollow eeriness return.
Fay touched my arm. ‘Howard, it’s strange.’
I shrugged. ‘Interesting, though. Remember, our own responses will overlay these within a few days.’
Fay shook her head. ‘I couldn’t stand it, Howard. Mr Stamers must have something normal.’
‘Darling, Vermilion Sands is Vermilion Sands. Don’t expect to find the suburban norms. People here were individualists.’
I looked down at Fay. Her small oval face, with its childlike mouth and chin, the fringe of blonde hair and pert nose, seemed lost and anxious.
I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘Okay, sweetie, you’re quite right. Let’s find somewhere we can put our
