AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The front door is green.
With frosted glass panels and a big chunky knocker. The bell doesn’t work. Has never worked.
He remembers that first viewing, standing in front of it, expectant, hopeful, hand in hand with Marius.
He remembers, like his first kiss, the first time he put the key in the lock, turning first the wrong way, then the right, fumbling over the not-yet-familiar gesture.2
When I tell people what I do, they always want to know if I’ve worked on anything famous.
The Ben Jonson Shakespeare.3
The Austen juvenilia.4
The Abinger papers.5
I have, but these aren’t the projects I cherish.
What I like are diaries and letters, commonplace books and ledgers, calendars, invitations and almanacs: the everyday documents of nobody in particular. Ephemera, it’s called. From the Greek. Like those frail-legged mayflies, with their lace-and-stained glass wings, who live only for a day.
I wonder, sometimes, if it’s a strange occupation, this semi-obsessive preservation of the transitory. But whereas for mostpeople history is a few loud voices declaiming art and making war across the centuries, for me it’s a whispering chorus of laundry day and grocer’s bills, dress patterns and crop rotations. The price of tallow.
Only that morning, as I was assessing and stabilising several folders of late nineteenth-century letters in preparation for digitisation, I noticed that some of the accompanying envelopes seemed slightly thicker than their fellows. Inside one, I found a handful of pressed flowers. Inside another, some pieces of fabric. Even my phone’s impatient reminders of a waiting message couldn’t break the moment.
Me and these pieces of lives, linked, for a little while at least, in quietness and time.
Then I peeled off my gloves and picked up my phone.
I hadn’t seen the sky darken or heard the rain begin to fall, but all of a sudden it was coming down hard, just streams of grey water on the windows, blurring the view like tears.
The message read:sure u you know this sweetie but theres a flood warning for ur area lol love mum x.
Two, nearly three years on, and Marius’s mother still kept in touch, still remembered my birthday, and still gave every indication of loving me. Unlike her son.
She had no idea how much it hurt.
Sometimes, I tried to blame her. If she had raised him with a little more guilt, a little more shame, a greater sense of social and personal obligation, he might never have left me.
What we’d had was good. It would have lasted a lifetime.
Thelolwasn’t personal. She’d picked it up as a thing commonly said on social media, and we hadn’t quite realised the magnitude of the problem untilUncle Teddy dead lol, and by then it was too late to do anything.
I wanted to ignore her, but she would worry. So I sent backfine lol, which would probably be true. We—I—lived on a floodplain, but most of the city is floodplain. My friend Grace, who was less romanced by sandstone and dreaming spires than me, once called it England’s cunt. She said Oxford was basically a big wet cleft in the middle of the country—a phrase that has somehow never quite found its way into the poetry or history of the place. But I always thought she meant it affectionately. She was the sort of person who could get away with saying things like that.6
The house had flooded twice, once in 1947 and once in 2007, though not since we moved in. We’d known it was a flood risk when we bought the place, but I’d wanted it, and Marius had apparently been willing to indulge me. Since the early days of our relationship, we’d found ways to live together—in cramped student rooms, awkwardly in shared housing with friends, in a flat we’d rented—but this was the first, the only property we’d ever owned.
You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.
From the moment I saw it, I saw us. I saw us in every room: talking, touching, sharing. I saw it all. But as it turned out, I saw only my dreams.
When we broke up, he’d wanted to sell, but I begged and he let me buy him out instead. I think it was a weird relief to both of usthat there was something I could fight for, since he’d made up his mind I couldn’t fight for him.
Looking back, I don’t know what I was trying to keep. Because all I’ve got are responsibilities and empty spaces.7
When I got back to them that evening, I dutifully went to the Environment Agency website and checked for my area. The whole of the southeast was on red alert status:FLOOD EXPECTED, IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED
So I went to bed with a book. Surrounded by the thudding of the rain.
At about ten o’clock, lost in that interminable nowhere-time before you can legitimately go to sleep, I went downstairs to make myself a cup of Horlicks. I’d call it the comfort drink of the single gentleman, but I’ve had a Horlicks habit for as long as I can remember. Based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I’m vaguely under the impression it helps me sleep.
