The House on Wexford Lane

The house on Wexford Lane was the sort of house that did not appear in guidebooks because the people who owned such houses preferred not to be found. It sat behind a wall and a stand of beech trees, long and pale and symmetrical, and when the car came up the gravel Iris had the disorienting sense of arriving somewhere she would never be allowed to belong. Mrs. Aldous met her at the door. She was a small, upright woman of perhaps sixty, with iron-coloured hair and a face that had clearly decided, decades ago, exactly how much of itself to reveal, which was almost nothing. "Mrs. Hartstone," she said. "Welcome. I'll show you the east wing. Mr. Hartstone keeps the west." "That sounds less like a house and more like a treaty." Something flickered across the housekeeper's face — surprise, and then, very faintly, approval. "It has been described that way before," she said. "Mind the third step; it's shallower than the others." The east wing was beautiful and entirely without personality, like a hotel suite designed by someone who had read about comfort but never experienced it. A sitting room. A bedroom the size of Iris's whole cottage. A window seat that looked out over a garden so disciplined it seemed faintly afraid of itself. Her boxes were stacked in the corner, and the sight of them — her ordinary, scuffed, masking-taped boxes — in that immaculate room made her want, suddenly and fiercely, to laugh. "He won't disturb you here," Mrs. Aldous said. "He never comes to this side. You'll see him at dinners, when there are dinners. Otherwise he keeps to the study, or the city. He works." She said the word the way other people said *he drinks* — as a diagnosis, and a sorrow. "How long have you been with him?" "Since he was nine." The housekeeper smoothed an invisible crease from the bedspread. "I was with his grandfather first. I stayed for the boy." She straightened, and her professional blankness came down again like a shade drawn against the light. "Dinner is at seven, in the small dining room, when he's home. Tonight he won't be. I'll bring you a tray. Tomorrow you'll meet the staff, and on Thursday there's the Pemberton dinner, and a woman is coming at ten to see about the dress." She left Iris alone in the beautiful, unbelonging room. For a long time Iris did not unpack. She sat in the window seat with her knees drawn up and watched the disciplined garden go grey with dusk, and she thought about the boy of nine who had been worth staying for, and the man of thirty-four who set his contracts at the precise edge of the desk so that no one would ever have to reach. Then she got up and opened the first box, because the boxes were hers, and the books inside were hers, and her father had taught her that you made a place your own by putting your own things in it, even a place you were only renting, even a marriage you had only borrowed. She found her father's photograph near the bottom — him in the vineyard, squinting into the sun, a basket of grapes against his hip — and she set it on the windowsill facing the garden, so that he could keep an eye on things. "Eighteen months," she told the photograph. "Then I bring you home." The house made no reply. But somewhere across it, in the west wing, a light came on, and Iris understood that her husband had returned after all, and had chosen, as agreed, not to disturb her.