The House That Waited

The bus put her down at the turning by the chapel and drove on without her, and Ada stood in the road with her bag against her leg until she could not hear it any more.

Nine years. She had expected the town to have done something in nine years. Grown, or given up. Instead it sat exactly where she had left it, the same slate roofs stacked down toward the same grey water, as if it had been holding a note and waiting for her to come back and let it stop.

The lane up to the house was longer than she remembered, which was the wrong way round. Everything from childhood was supposed to shrink.

Her father's car was in the yard with a season of leaves banked against the tyres. Nobody had moved it. Nobody had moved anything, she would discover, and that would turn out to be the whole problem.

The key was under the third stone, where it had been under the third stone since before she could read, and she thought, with a flatness that surprised her, that a man who kept his key under the same stone for forty years was not a man who expected to be robbed or a man who expected to be visited.

The door swung on a hinge that had always complained and complained still.

Inside, the air had the particular staleness of a house that had been warm recently. Not cold-empty. Warm-empty. Somebody had been paying the heating on a dead man's house.

His coat was on the hook. His boots were under it, toes to the wall, the way he had made her line hers up when she was six and never stopped making her do it after.

In the kitchen there was a mug on the drainer, washed, upside down, a single mug, and Ada put her hand flat on the counter beside it and stood there for a while.

She had rehearsed this on the bus. Walk in, open the windows, make a list. Sell the car, sell the boat if the boat was still floating, find the deeds, find a solicitor who would not charge her for breathing. Be gone inside a fortnight.

She had not rehearsed the mug.

The stairs went up in the dark. She did not put the light on, because the switch was at the bottom and the pull cord was at the top, and her father had said for thirty years that he would fix it and had instead simply learned the stairs.

Her old room had been turned into nothing. Not an office, not a spare room. Emptied and left. The bed stripped, the mattress rolled and tied, the walls bare except for the four grey rectangles where her posters had been, faded around rather than faded through.

Across the landing his room was exactly as it had always been, and on the nightstand, squared to the edge, was a stack of envelopes with her name on them.

She counted them from the doorway without going in. There were nine.

One for every year, she thought, and then she thought, no. Don't. Not on the first night.

She went back down and opened the windows, all of them, the way she had planned, and the sound of the tide coming in at Cape Lorne filled the house from the bottom up until it was the only thing in it.