The House That Hated Children

A Proper Home There was a nail sticking out of the hallway wall at almost exactly the height of Benjy's face, and Jamie took it out before he'd finished putting his keys down. It had once held something substantial, judging by the ring of clean wallpaper around it: a mirror, perhaps, or one of those heavy framed prints that people bought for hallways and forgot to look at. He gripped the nail with the claw of the hammer he'd brought in from the van, worked it gently from side to side and dropped it into his pocket. The wall would need filling. Almost every wall in the house would need filling, along with a good deal else, but at least this particular job meant his son wouldn't run face-first into a piece of iron on Friday. Jamie left the hammer on the bare floorboards and went outside for the remaining boxes. The van was half on the kerb, its hazards still ticking, and he had forty minutes before it was due back at the hire place. A folding table, two dining chairs and a dismantled bed were still inside, along with three boxes marked KITCHEN that had somehow ended up underneath a rolled carpet. He'd done enough removals for customers to know that sensible people paid someone else to handle this part. They also bought houses without painting over rotten window frames, an approach Jamie had considered and, apparently, rejected. From the pavement, the property looked respectable if you didn't inspect it closely. Red brick, now darkened in patches by a century of London dirt and weather, a shallow tiled porch, a bay window on each side of the central entrance. Somebody had replaced the original front door in the eighties with a thick, varnished one that aspired to grandeur and had since developed a tendency to scrape across the hall carpet. The upstairs windows were tall and, to Jamie's relief, in considerably better condition than the downstairs ones. There was a short front path and a strip of garden that had once contained roses. It currently contained an enormous shrub with ambitions beyond its roots and a plastic watering can lodged underneath it. He was balancing one end of the folding table against his hip when a woman with a shopping bag slowed outside the gate. 'You bought this one, then?' she asked. She'd noticed it standing empty for a while. Jamie told her the agent had said six months. 'Sounds about right,' she said, shifting the bag to her other hand. 'Lovely place in its day.' He waited for the inevitable warning about the roof or a former owner who owed money to half the street. She studied the overgrown shrub instead, as though trying to remember what had occupied that patch of garden before it. When she finally said he'd have his work cut out, Jamie adjusted the table against his hip and told her he was counting on it. She gave him a doubtful smile and continued towards the shops. He manoeuvred the table through the open front door, turned it on its edge to clear the entrance and carried it into the back kitchen. Once the table was upright, the room began to suggest a place where someone might eat. It was a decent kitchen, large enough for a table and a run of units on two walls, although the cupboard fronts had been covered in a wood-effect film that was peeling at every corner. The sink looked out onto the garden. There was a serviceable gas hob, an elderly electric oven and a patch of freshly painted wall behind the fridge space that made the rest of the room seem grubby by comparison. The first jobs could wait. A house had a way of offering a tradesman twenty possible starting points whenever he stood still. Jamie was trying to get out of the habit of accepting all twenty invitations. He took the remaining furniture in, returned the van, then walked back from the hire depot carrying a carrier bag with a loaf, milk, tea bags and a packet of biscuits. On the way he passed the primary school at the end of the next road. A group of older children had gathered outside the gate, waiting for someone to collect them from an after-school club. It pleased him that the school was so close. He'd measured the walk twice before making the offer on the house, once during the morning traffic and once when the roads were quieter. From here he could get Teresa and Benjy to school without requiring either of them to wake at an absurd hour, and Hannah's place was only ten or twelve minutes away on foot. The children would keep their school, their friends and their familiar routes. He had spent an unreasonable amount of time checking those details, given how little attention he'd initially paid to the condition of the bathroom. His phone vibrated while he was unlocking the front door. Hannah had been shown the Lego pirate ship and couldn't see how it was meant to fit in the overnight bag. Had Jamie really promised Benjy could bring the entire thing? Jamie put down the shopping and replied that he'd said SOME Lego. Hannah came back with Benjy's argument that all the pieces belonged to the same ship. He had to concede there was a certain logic to it. After a moment she asked how the move had gone. Jamie glanced towards the strip of grass where the van had left a pair of tracks and told her everything was inside, the kitchen worked, and the children's beds would be ready by Friday. Teresa wanted to know about a desk, Hannah said. He wrote that there would be one, and then came the reminder about homework. 'I know,' he typed before he could decide whether the reminder had annoyed him or whether he was simply tired. He stood in the hall with the carrier bag cutting into his fingers. The exchange had been civil, which seemed to be the standard they were measuring themselves against at present. Six months ago, they'd still been able to turn a message about homework into an argument about whether Jamie remembered that the children had lives outside school hours. He had remembered. He'd also been late too often, distracted when he arrived, and impatient with questions because he was still thinking about problems from work. By the time he recognised how often it happened, Hannah was tired of pointing it out. He sent one more message promising a photograph when the desk was set up, put the milk in the fridge and went upstairs to see how much assembling he still had to do. The staircase began on the right-hand side of the central hallway, climbed towards the rear of the house and turned back at a half-landing before emerging on the first floor. The oak handrail had been varnished badly at least three times. It was solid, though, and so were the treads beneath the thin runner. Jamie had inspected the staircase with more attention than the surveyor, who had described it as 'serviceable with cosmetic wear'. That was reasonable enough. The runner was worn, but there was no alarming movement in the timber, and he intended to replace it after the children had settled. At the top, four principal bedroom doors opened onto a generous landing. The bathroom occupied the middle section on the left. The front-left room had two tall windows and a slightly higher ceiling than any other bedroom. From there, he could see the pavement, the roofs across the street and the tops of the trees by the school playground. It was the room he'd already set aside for Teresa, although he planned to let her discover that herself. At ten, she had developed an excellent memory for decisions made on her behalf and an even better one for reminding him of them. Across the landing was the front-right bedroom, his own. The rear-left room overlooked the long, untidy garden and would suit Benjy, particularly once Jamie built him shelves along the wall. A smaller room at the back right had been used for storage by the previous owners. Jamie imagined it becoming an office one day, or perhaps a place for guests, although he wasn't sure who might come to stay. The thought made him linger among the stacked paint tins and old curtain poles longer than was useful. He went back downstairs for the bed frames. By six, he'd assembled both children's beds and discovered that the bag labelled BED FIXINGS actually contained spare brackets for a garden bench. The missing bolts turned up in his work trousers, where he'd evidently put them for safekeeping. Teresa's desk consisted for now of a sturdy second-hand table with a scratch across one corner. He positioned it near the front window, checked that it didn't wobble and sent Hannah a photograph. 'Looks good. She'll like the light,' Hannah replied. Jamie found himself waiting for something about the bedspread he'd bought, although she couldn't have known he'd stood in the shop for ages trying to work out what a ten-year-old who'd recently declared pink childish might accept. The blue was probably safe. In any case, Hannah had no obligation to congratulate him for providing their daughter with a bed. At seven, he made himself two slices of toast in the new kitchen and ate standing up because the folding table was covered in screws and instructions. He'd meant to cook something proper, but there were no pans unpacked and he'd bought neither butter nor anything to put on the toast. He ate one slice dry and took the other to the sitting room, where the two dining chairs faced a television that was still in its box. His own furniture looked strangely tentative in the sitting room. At the old house, things had acquired their positions over years. Here, a chair could be moved two feet without anybody noticing. He could choose which end of the table to sit at, leave a cup on a windowsill and expect to find it there later. He'd told himself he would enjoy having those choices. On the first evening, with the television still in its box and no one due home, he couldn't think of much to do with them. At half past seven, Benjy called on Hannah's phone. The picture shook violently, showed a ceiling for a moment and resolved into a close-up of his forehead. He announced that he'd got the pirate ship and that it had thirty-six cannons. Jamie said this seemed excessive for a single vessel, but Benjy explained that it fought everybody, as though that settled the matter. By the time Jamie had asked who was likely to attack it, the camera had dropped to the carpet, showing dozens of coloured pieces arranged in what was apparently a battle plan. Benjy explained which part belonged to the captain, which was for prisoners and where a creature with a name Jamie failed to catch was meant to live. Hannah called from the other side of the room, asking him to tell his father what had happened to the mast. Benjy insisted he'd fixed it. Hannah's version involved finding it in the fruit bowl, and he admitted that had been only until he could do the repair properly. 'Bring what you need for the weekend,' Jamie said, laughing. 'We can build it on your bedroom floor.' 'All the pieces?' Benjy said at once. Jamie told him they were not restarting the negotiation, which earned him a grin before the phone was turned towards Teresa. Teresa was sitting at the dining table with a workbook open and two pens beside it. She'd seen the picture of her new desk. 'Does it come with drawers?' Jamie explained about the set he could fit underneath. That led to an interrogation about whether she'd be able to choose where the drawers went, which he allowed within reason. When she asked what counted as reason, he suggested that discovering them on the stairs would be beyond it. Teresa smiled briefly, then asked about the window. 'You'll get the best light in the house,' Jamie told her. She wanted to know what Benjy had been given, so he explained the garden view. That brought Benjy straight back to the screen to ask whether he would see foxes. Jamie couldn't promise any until he'd met the local wildlife, at which point Benjy began describing a fox at school that had eaten a sandwich. It turned out the sandwich hadn't belonged to him, a distinction he thought ought to remove any responsibility on his part. Teresa retrieved the phone and began checking the schedule. Were they staying until Monday? Yes, Jamie would take them to school. And the next Wednesday? That one too, and every Wednesday after it. She considered this for a moment, glancing down at her workbook as if the dates might be recorded there. Then she asked if he'd bought cereal. Jamie admitted he'd bought bread, and the expression she gave him persuaded him to add cereal to the morning's shopping before she had to say anything else. When the call ended, he sat with the dark phone in his hand. There were other things he'd forgotten: glasses were still packed away, there were no towels upstairs and he hadn't bought spare toothbrushes. He wrote a list on the back of the instructions for Teresa's drawers, putting CEREAL in capitals at the top. Organising two children for five nights out of fourteen ought to be manageable; he'd coordinated jobs involving three trades, impossible budgets and customers who changed their minds twice a day. The paperwork for the arrangement had been difficult enough that he was determined not to lose time with them through avoidable carelessness. At nine he went around checking the house. The back service door had a new lock fitted by the previous owner, though the frame needed attention. The kitchen window closed securely. The upstairs landing had a bulb with an unreliable pull switch, which he added to his list. Before going to bed, he returned to the hall and filled the little hole left by the nail he'd removed that morning. It was barely visible against the old wallpaper. He washed out the scraper and left it on a cloth beside the sink. The house stayed perfectly quiet while he finished unpacking a few more boxes. He turned off the lights one room at a time and went upstairs. The landing needed a decent lamp before Friday; he added it to his list.