The Home by Penelope Mortimer

Author:Penelope Mortimer [Mortimer, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: identity, women, tragicomedy, marriage, loneliness, wife, mother
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2023-04-02T05:00:00+00:00

13

In her soft, silk-covered bed she had her recurring dream of being in the old, the original, house, which was decomposing, floors rotting, ceilings collapsing, unmanageable chaos everywhere. She couldn’t make up her quarrel with Graham because he wasn’t there—a total conviction of his absence. And yet he was there, telephoning in the bedroom and saying ‘Hullo, sexy’ to someone on the other end of the line. He said that he wasn’t capable of making love to her, Eleanor. She said (knowing it wasn’t true) that she didn’t mind, she just wanted to love him. And she knew he was lying, because his face, so much younger than his real face, was smiling.

In her dream Philip, as a small child, woke up at 3.30 a.m. She tried to get him back to bed, but Graham sat down on the landing with him to play slums. ‘We just have to set out this slum,’ he said, and they had a board with little lead figures, like the Peter Rabbit game of her childhood. She wandered about the house looking for signs of Graham, of his infidelities, but there were none. There was a water tank in the attic on which was painted the word ‘Gravesend’.

Eating her breakfast, which was wheeled in on a trolley by the same, but now white-coated, Italian, she puzzled over the dream for a little and then forgot it. Gravesend presumably had something to do with Graves Avenue, the name of her street: graves, tombs, vaults, catacombs, sepulchres and houses of death. The game of slums was an enigma, unless a slum was the state of her house: the state of her mind? The sun was shining, the toast thin and soft, the coffee quite tolerable. She telephoned Graham, supported by the soft pillows and looking out over the ruffled lake.

He was woken up by the phone, his voice growling with sleep.

‘Can you come a bit earlier, and pick up Philip?’

‘Can I what?’

‘Come a bit earlier and pick up Philip.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wants you to. He wants to show off the Porsche.’

‘What’s the time now?’

‘Nine o’clock.’

‘What time do I have to be there?’

‘It doesn’t matter. About eleven.’

An enormous yawn, which must, surely, wake Nell Partwhistle.

‘All right. See you about eleven-thirty.’

‘All right.’

It was perfectly so: he wasn’t there. A voice spoke, a body would arrive, but he would not be there. He was absent, and had always been absent. Not unlike Kilcannon. She remembered Max Pepper and wondered, with dread, whether he would be up and about. She read the Sunday papers; that is, she dabbled in them, pecked at them like someone with no appetite. Women, it seemed, were still learning how to be perfect women; men were still recounting the trivia of their domestic lives, ordering further bombing of countries from which they had technically withdrawn, battling to save the Welsh language from extinction; both were pronouncing, with varying degrees of wit and readability, on films, plays, books and television programmes which nobody who had not seen that film, play, television programme, or read that particular book, cared about.

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