Chapter 2
My first thought when I woke up this morning was, What have I done?
My second was, I need to write my Morning Pages.
So here I am, marking this new start with a fresh page – though not a new notebook.
If I’d started one with every new beginning over the past ten years, I’d have left hundreds of pages empty, and that would have been a shameful waste of the planet’s scarce resources.
As it is, I’ve filled almost fifty of them – a pleasing array they’d make, all more or less the same size but with different colours and bindings.
They’re stashed away in a tea chest somewhere in the cellar, in this house where I am waking for the first time and filling my pages as I do every morning.
Three pages of longhand writing, no more and no less, every single day.
I thought, after all the excitement – to put it kindly – of yesterday, I’d sleep like a baby.
Not that babies sleep, according to those who know more about them than I do.
Like a log, then. But I didn’t. The unfamiliar sounds of this house – the scrape of a tree branch on a windowpane, the shouts of a group of young people making their way back from the pub late last night, the intermittent drip, drip, drip of rain coming through the roof on to the floor of the attic above me – all kept me awake last night for hours and punctuated my dreams.
Not to mention the whistling of wind coming from across the room: I thought I’d closed the window tightly last night, but it appears I didn’t – or that the wooden frame is rotten, letting draughts through around the edges of the glass.
Rotten, like so much in this house, from the ceiling joists to the floorboards and just about everything in between.
What have I done?
But what choice did I have? It has been bequeathed to me, as much a duty as a gift, and I already feel as if I have a responsibility to it – to nurture it, restore it, make it whole again.
Because none of this – not the leaks or the rotting window frame or the disgusting bathroom – is the house’s fault.
It’s no more to blame than a stray cat would be for wandering the streets scrawny and threadbare, its ears torn from fighting and its eyes rheumy.
The house has been neglected too, unloved and uncared for, fifty years of tenants leaving clutter and botched renovations but no memories that I can discern.
Only the cellar is sound, if damp, so that is where I have stored the possessions I have accumulated over the years, as well as those Mr Murphy had shipped over to save on storage costs.
Already, for all its faults, it feels like home.
It feels as if it has been waiting for me – which, of course, as a matter of actual fact, it has.
More than that though – it feels as if I have been waiting for it.
As if all those moves, from country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere, pillar to post, were all leading me back here.
I couldn’t just walk in, however. I had to wait for events to unfold, for the formalities to be completed, for Mr Murphy to track me down and tell me that it was mine.
And so here I am, lying on a stained old mattress in the most habitable room of a house that would probably fall down if I let it.
I’m not going to let it. I feel fiercely protective of it – almost maternal, which is an absurd way to feel about five storeys of bricks and mortar.
An absurd way for me to feel about anything.
And, of course, I have no more of an idea how to care for it than I would if it were a baby.
Instead of feeding and nappy changing and winding and settling down for naps, it’ll need plastering and rewiring and rodent extermination and no doubt repointing and other things I can’t begin to understand.
But first it’ll need a damn good clean, and I’ve filled three pages now so that is what I’m going to give it.
I will love this house. I swear I will – if only it will allow me to.
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