Free The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton Page B

wasteland.
    She said, ‘It’s why we bought the house. Nobody lived here then.’
    â€˜What I have never understood is why you came back. Why you didn’t stay in London.’
    â€˜Benno sent us.’
    â€˜Benno?’ he echoed incredulously.
    â€˜Matt’s father. It was his idea, setting up here. He kept wanting Amy to get him a Rover Thomas. In the end Amy said: “Well, Anna’s Australian.”’
    â€˜So you and Matt—’
    â€˜I was working for his father, yes.’
    â€˜You got the picture for him?’
    â€˜By the time I got it back to London it was worth three times what he’d paid for it. They had me round for dinner and he said why not set up a gallery here. Why not?’
    â€˜That was it. A dinner?’
    â€˜He made it sound spontaneous. I found out later he’d done the business plan. He’s one of those bankers—he manages to be very good at collecting art without understanding it at all. He just always knows where the money’s going. He bought up in Notting Hill when it was still bedsits. That’s when he met Matt’s mother. Hanging out with artists half his age and the whole time they were off their heads he was noticing the real estate.’
    â€˜And he sent Matt with you?’
    â€˜He sent Matt with me,’ she echoed. ‘Keeping an eye on me, I suppose, though it was meant to be Matt’s year off after university. It never crossed his mind Matt would stay. He didn’t think it was the kind of place you could stay.’
    â€˜He must have thought the two of you—’
    â€˜Yes, but not…’ She pushed sand away under her hands. ‘The way my mother used to speak about tradesmen—you know, A little man to fix the plumbing .’
    â€˜You showed him,’ Peter said, in a high, ironic voice. More coldly he added, ‘What a lot of arranging you all did.’
    â€˜I can be at a tram stop and before I know it I’ve registered the price of everyone’s shoes. Matt was possible but it wasn’t just that. We…’ She suddenly saw again what she had not remembered for years: Matt’s face that first afternoon when they had stepped out of the taxi into the rain: a striated brightness, against which his face had seemed startlingly close. It had been the surprise of the rain, perhaps: they had looked at each other so directly she had seen her own reflection in the pupils of his eyes.
    Peter looked along the beach at the city rising over the dark water. ‘What I don’t understand is, why you didn’t go back with him.’ He picked up her hand. Not looking at it, he explored with his fingers the lines of her palm. ‘He didn’t ask you,’ he went on dreamily. ‘Or he did, but he was going to go anyway, whatever you said. He hurt your feelings.’
    â€˜Don’t…’ What she wanted—what she had ever wanted—seemed the least of it. That moment, she saw how unreal all this time since Matt left had been. It had been afterwards, simply. The dread she felt was something she remembered from dreams, when whatever she did was from the beginning too late, too slow. She found herself thinking of Peter’s dog, of Peter’s formal, considerate settlement with Clare. Impossible to go back to the beginning…
    The day they had discovered she was pregnant Matt had said thathe ‘wasn’t an optimiser’. He had meant it as reassurance. She was enough. He never had allowed the sort of talk that indulged self-regard. From the first, that refusal of his had built itself into their relationship. It had been their arrogance, she thought now: a feeling that if they spoke of feeling they would be like all the rest, wanting reassurance all their lives.
    She said, ‘Matt refuses to smile when he meets people. He thinks it’s like dogs rolling over, watching strangers smile at each other.’
    â€˜You never