‘Ready?’ Jack called from the opposite pavement.
‘For what?’ Morton asked.
‘Go see the house.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘See if anyone’s home,’ Jack said.
Reluctantly, Morton followed, carrying Grace in his arms, with Laura and then George not far behind.
It was with some degree of mortification that Morton watched Jack stride confidently up the fissured concrete drive and press the doorbell. It was something which he never had the audacity to do in his research and, despite harbouring a deep curiosity to know what memories might be evoked by Jack’s seeing the inside of this house, found himself actually hoping that nobody would be home. He drew in an anxious breath as a short middle-aged woman opened the door and peered out. She had the look of a retired secretary with thick-rimmed glasses and pinched features.
‘Hi,’ Jack greeted. ‘This is going to sound a little crazy but I once stayed in this house…back in January 1974, when this place was a guesthouse. I’m over with my family on vacation and I sure would like to show them the place. Would that be possible?’
Morton’s eyes fell to the floor in amazement at Jack’s self-assurance, clearly displaying a trait which he had not inherited.
The lady frowned, then glanced quickly at the strange group of people assembled on her drive. ‘What is it you want to do, exactly?’
‘Just take a look inside—real quick. My room was right there,’ Jack said, stepping back and pointing up at a window directly above them.
The lady seemed to soften. ‘Well, it won’t be the same as it was in the seventies, I can tell you that much.’
Jack laughed. ‘We’ll be two minutes and it’ll make this American a very happy man.’
The lady raised her eyebrows, bewildered at how seeing the inside of her house, with forty years’ worth of changes and redecoration, could make anybody happy. She took one last fleeting glance at the group, evidently satisfied by something—perhaps the presence of a baby or lady of her own age—then stepped back and allowed them to enter.
‘Thank you so much,’ Jack said, leading the way inside.
A sharp tang of frying oil hit Morton as soon as he entered, then he detected other cooking smells—bacon, possibly and onions.
Jack peered around the corner of the first open door. ‘This was Mr and Mrs Dyche’s lounge. We could only use it until nine in the evening, then we had to go to our rooms,’ Jack said with a grin.
The owner smiled slightly, although Morton perceived no genuine interest in her house’s previous incarnation as a guesthouse.
‘Yup, the kitchen is just the same,’ Jack said at the next door. ‘Mrs Dyche would make us breakfast every day—some kind of gritty porridge.’
‘Well,’ the lady said, crossing her arms, ‘it’s not exactly the same; we had a new one fitted in 1994.’
‘Is it okay to go upstairs and see my old room?’ Jack asked, ignoring her rebuttal.
‘I suppose so,’ the lady muttered.
As Morton began to climb the stairs behind Jack, Grace started to wriggle. ‘Down!’ she said, declaring the latest addition to her growing vocabulary. ‘Down!’
‘You can’t get down, Grace. We’re just going upstairs.’
‘No!’ Grace responded, bursting into tears and wriggling more frantically.
‘Do you want me to take her outside?’ Laura offered, lowering her voice and adding, ‘I don’t really need to see the room.’
‘Are you sure?’ Morton asked, wondering whether her reluctance to see the room was because of the implications of what had occurred—possibly there—with Margaret, or whether it was the simpler reason of its not being remotely interesting to see a bedroom where her husband had spent six or seven nights forty years ago.
‘Absolutely,’ she insisted, reaching out.
Morton smiled and handed Grace over to her. ‘Thank you. We won’t be long.’
‘I’ll come too,’ George said.
Morton watched the three of them troop out of the house, then took the remaining steps two at a time until he reached the top. Jack’s voice guided him to a box room at the front of the house. He was standing with his hands on his hips, slowly taking in the room, under the curious gaze of the owner. It was now evidently used for crafting, there being two sewing machines set up on a table to the left, from one of which dangled a garish paisley piece of fabric. On the wall facing the door, framing the window, were dozens of rolls of material, and on the right-hand wall were cabinets with small plastic drawers fronted with obscure labels ‘wooden embellishments’, ‘hessian jute twine’, ‘rainbow sticky paper’, ‘clear washi tape’.
‘So,’ Jack said, stepping fully into the room. ‘The single bed used to be here, running right under the window and over here—’ he pointed to the sewing machines, ‘—there was a wardrobe and chest of drawers. And that was it.’
The house owner maintained a fixed, yet clearly disinterested smile.
Morton edged into the room slightly, as if that might help him picture the room better as it would have been forty years ago, when in fact it was so that he could see how Laura was getting on with Grace outside. Grace was in her arms, calmly watching the passing cars, but there was something going on between Laura and George; their body language—hands flicking about and the way they seemed to be interrupting each other—was sufficient without the accompanying dialogue for Morton to interpret it as an argument. Morton shifted his look to Jack to see if he had registered it. He had not, or at least was pretending so.
‘Right,’ the woman said, clearly bringing the intrusion to a close.
‘Yes,’ Jack agreed. ‘Thank you so much.
