The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse

Author:Lucie Whitehouse [Whitehouse, Lucie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General/Fiction
Published: 2008-08-04T23:00:00+00:00

I was coming into the New Forest now. Even by its own standards it looked beautiful that morning. I had once heard it described as being like a cathedral, a monument to God on earth, and there was something holy about its goodness. It was just before noon as I drove the long straight road that cleaved it in two. The trees wore their new season's leaves, bright green and highlighted by the rays of sun streaming through them. A pair of ponies cropped the soft grass by the stream at the Balmer Lodge Hotel. The sight of it all lifted my spirits. In the past few days I had begun to breathe more easily. I realised that since the beginning of the year I had felt something like constant claustrophobia, a sense of being surrounded on all sides. There was my job, the strange suffocating atmosphere at Stoneborough and my relationship with Lucas, which on some deep level I think I had always known was wrong. Now despite the hurt of my exclusion by the others, there was at least oxygen again.

By the time I reached their house, an old farm-worker's cottage on the outskirts of Lyndhurst, I was ready to see my parents. I was prepared for their disappointment about Lucas: my new secret happiness with Greg, however tentative still, was an inoculation against it.

Dad heard my car pull up and came round through the side gate from the garden to greet me. I got out of the car and locked the door. He put his arm round my shoulder and squeezed. 'Hello, my darling,' he said, kissing my cheek, his neat grey beard bristling against it. His broad face was smiling, his eyes wide as an owl's. He was in his usual weekend uniform for the spring/summer season, a pair of tired-out corduroy trousers and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a breast pocket. 'You look well,' he said, looking me over and giving my shoulder another squeeze. 'You leave it too long between visits. We like to see you, your mother and I.'

I'd never believed the story that once one had left it one's childhood home started to get smaller. It was undeniably true, though. I had begun to notice the shrinkage when I went away to university but now, perhaps also suffering from comparison to Stoneborough, the house really did look tiny. It was hard to believe that there could be three bedrooms behind that semidetached doll's-house façade. It had been built in the thirties out of red brick and years ago my parents had put in a wisteria, which now covered the front.

'Your mother is planting out her runner beans,' Dad said. 'We'll stop her now and have some coffee.'

She was down at the far end of the thirty-foot garden, kneeling at the base of a bamboo cane and pressing earth around a seedling. She was so absorbed that she didn't hear us approaching over the grass. We gave her a slight shock and, as she looked up, I realised suddenly that she was getting older.

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