I’m prone to a spell of anxiety after pulling the door behind me. I lock it, push against it to see if it’s properly secure. I walk down the path, then turn back to make doubly, trebly sure. Further away, I pester myself about things I might have left on. Did I unplug the iron? Should I have left the ultrasonic pest repeller bleeping? Were the gas hobs really and truly fully closed off? Should I have shut the gas off at the mains? The water too? What about the tank in the attic: I’d returned one time to find it had overflowed. Its water had leaked through the floor and down the walls of the bathroom and spare room, leaving long streeling stains I had to paint over. Should I have checked the front door one more finally-final time?
Flooding, fire, explosion, collapse: I consider each befalling the house in my absence and how I might have prevented it.
I reach a point eventually—usually on clearing city limits or crossing into a different county or country—where I put my faith in my smoke alarms, in my neighbours contacting emergency services, and in the likelihood that I’ve attended to all the things I fear I’ve left undone. Then I relax and settle down to the business of Being Away.
But I wonder about my house when I’m gone from it. Does it pine for me like a dog left disconsolate behind a door? Does it fret that I might not return?
It’s probably not bothered. Just shy of its second centenary, my house is an old hand at being alone. It has seen people come and go. Previous residents each left for a final time and never came back. Some day I’ll do the same.
I presume to know some of what my house does when it’s alone because I’m aware of some of its habits. The front door will rattle in the vibrations of passing traffic. The immersion timer, if left on, will clack avidly upstairs, outpacing the tick-tock from my jewelry box of the Swatch watch I no longer wear. Breezes, if they blow, will ‘haw’ deeply down the chimneys and may dislodge tiny sprinklings of debris within the walls, spilling them like beans through a rainstick.
It is likely that the kitchen sink will drip, that the fridge will whirr and shiver. I don’t like to think of it but should a mouse decide to avail of the pest repeller amnesty, there will be flurries behind the skirting board and flittering in the cupboard under the sink.
There will be footfall up and down the neighbours’ stairs on either side, and their clocks chiming and doors opening and closing. Junk mail will be shoved through the letterbox of my house and glide to the Yoda doormat: Welcome, You Are. Shreds of conversation will fly in from passers-by and, if it’s a Sunday, the thunking techno of the running group doing warm-ups outside. The sparrows in the garden hedge are sure to be squabbling, and the clop of horses drawing carriages, carts and sulkies will embellish the dull rush of cars and buses.
There will be movements, stirrings, happenings: tiny ones. The hands of my watch on their clockwise course, dust floating, landing and settling on surfaces, on the little Mr Pickwick figurine on the mantlepiece, on the paper model of the Sacre Coeur beside him, on the bottle of plum nail varnish by the framed photo of my mother, black and white in the late Sixties.
The plants in the kitchen will stretch towards daylight filtering in through the French doors. The tender baby leaves of the spotted begonia may unfurl a fraction and sunshine, if it catches them, will light their red undersides as brightly as tomatoes. The monsteras will minutely test their leaf-spans, fenestrations and ropes of aerial roots.
