The House That Remembers

The key was heavier than it looked, and it was warm. Nora Vance turned it over in her palm as the taxi pulled away down the lane, its engine note thinning until only the wind remained. The solicitor had posted the key in a padded envelope, along with a letter, a map, photocopied so many times the fields had become grey smears, and a card that read Pellam & Rudge, Solicitors, Est. 1881. She had carried the key from Leeds in her coat pocket, through two train changes and a forty-minute wait outside a closed pub in Wrenfield, and it had not once grown cold. She put it down to body heat. She was good at putting things down to something. It was most of what she did for a living. Harrow House stood at the end of a drive that had stopped being a drive some decades ago. Gravel survived in pale islands between knee-high grass, and the two stone gateposts, each topped with a weathered lion that had lost its face, leaned toward each other like old men sharing a secret. Beyond them, the house rose out of a garden that had gone feral. Three storeys of dark brick. A steep slate roof, patched with moss. A crooked tower on the east corner, its top window boarded over, and a long, deep porch whose pillars had begun to bow under the weight of an enormous, dead wisteria. It was ugly, she decided. Magnificently so. It looked like something that had been built to be admired and had spent a hundred years refusing to forgive anyone for not doing so. It was also hers. She read the letter again, standing in the long grass with the wind picking at its corners, though she knew it by heart. Dear Ms Vance. It is my sad duty to inform you of the death of your great-aunt, Miss Winifred Harrow Vance, and of her bequest to you of the property known as Harrow House, together with its contents and the grounds appertaining. Then three paragraphs of legal throat-clearing, and at the bottom, in a different pen, in a hand that had clearly been added by someone with second thoughts: I would strongly advise a prompt sale. Please telephone me before you visit. She had telephoned him once, from the kitchen of her flat in Leeds, with the rent reminder pinned to the fridge. "It's a considerable property," Mr Pellam had said. He had a dry, careful voice, a voice that had spent forty years saying difficult things in a manner that did not sound difficult. "Though in poor repair. The roof alone will want attention. You would be well advised to sell, Ms Vance. I could put you in touch with an agent." "Is it worth anything?" A pause, long enough that she heard a clock ticking somewhere on his end of the line. "The land is worth something. The house, to a developer, perhaps. But I would not describe it as a happy house." "Houses aren't happy or unhappy," Nora had said, with the confidence of a woman who had not yet been inside it. "No," said Mr Pellam. "Quite." That had been three weeks ago. Since then, she had given notice on the flat, sold her desk, and told the two agencies that sent her proofreading work that she would be unavailable until the spring. She had done it all with a kind of sleepwalker's efficiency, and she knew perfectly well why. It was not curiosity about a dead relative she had never met. It was not greed. It was that her mother had died in March, and her partner of six years had moved out in June, and the sum of the two had turned her flat into a place where she could hear herself think, and she had not liked what she heard. A house, a whole house, with rooms and corridors and a roof that needed mending, was somewhere to put herself. She shouldered her rucksack, picked up the heaviest of her two bags, and walked up the drive.