Once indoors I hung up my coat, kicked off my shoes, and undid the top button of my skirt in an effort to increase my physical comfort in a post-pasta universe. Thus civilianised, I wandered through the living room (an epic journey of exactly five paces) and into the kitchen, where I zoned out while waiting for the kettle to boil. I’d drunk only two glasses of wine but I was tired, and the combination put me into a fuzzy trance.
Then, for no reason I was conscious of, I turned and looked into the living room.
The kettle had just finished boiling, sending a cloud of steam up around my face, and yet there was a cold spot on the back of my neck.
Someone’s been in my house.
* * *
I knew it without doubt. Or felt I did. I’ve always believed it a romantic notion (in the sense of “sweet, but deluded”) that you would somehow know if someone had been in your house: that the intrusion of a stranger would leave some tangible psychic trace; that your dwelling is your friend and will tattle on an interloper.
A house is nothing more than walls and a roof and a collection of furnishings and objects – most chosen on the grounds of economy, not with boundless attention or existential rigour – and the only difference between you and every other person on the planet is that you’re entitled by law to be there. And yet I knew it.
I knew someone had been in my house.
What if he’s still here?
The kitchen extension has a side door, my back door, I guess, which leads into the garden. I could open it, slip out that way. I couldn’t get far, though, as the neighbours’ gardens are the other side of high fences (in one case built upon the remains of that old wall).
I didn’t like the idea for other reasons, too.
It was my bloody house and I didn’t want to flee from it, not to mention I’d feel an utter tit if I was discovered trying to shin my way over a fence into a neighbour’s garden on the basis of a “feeling”. That’s exactly the kind of shit that gives women a bad name.
I reached out to the door, however. I turned the handle, gently, and discovered it was unlocked.
I knew the front door had been locked – I’d unlocked it on my return from dinner. All the windows in the kitchen were closed and locked, and from where I stood, still frozen in place, I could see the big window at the front of the living room was locked, too.
There was, in other words, only one possible way in which someone could have got into the house – and that was if I’d left the back door unlocked when I left the house that morning.
I didn’t know anything about the tactics of house-breaking, but suspected that you’d leave your point of entry open (or at least ajar) while you were on the premises, to make it easier to affect a rapid exit if the householder returned home. You wouldn’t close it.
My back door had been closed. Which meant hopefully he wasn’t still on the premises.
I relaxed, a little.
I tip-toed back through the living room to the bottom of the stairs, and peered up them, listening hard. I couldn’t hear anything, and I know from experience that the wooden floors up there are impossible to traverse without a cavalcade of creaks – that sometimes the damned things will creak in the night even if there’s no one treading on them, especially the ones on the very top floor.
“Hello?”
I held my breath, listening for movement from above. Nothing. Absolute silence.
I went on a cautious tour of the house: the bathroom and so-called guest room on the first floor; the bedroom and clothes-storage-pit on the next; and finally the minuscule “attic” room at the very top, situated up its own stunted little flight of five stairs. According to the previous owner, this would originally have been intended for a housemaid. She’d have needed to be a bloody tiny housemaid.
The space was so small that any normal-sized person would have to sleep curled-up in a ball. She wouldn’t have been able to stand up in the space, as I’d confirmed only the day before. I’d finally got round to hoicking out and charity-shopping a few old boxes of crap that had been languishing in there since I moved in. During the process I straightened at one point without thinking, banging my forehead on the dusty old beam hard enough to break the skin, causing a drop or two of blood to fall to the wooden floorboards.
I could still see where they’d fallen, but at least the tiny room was tidy now.
And empty, along with all the other rooms.
The whole house looked exactly as it had when I left that morning, i.e. like the lair of a twenty-eight-year-old professional woman who – while not a total slattern – isn’t obsessed with tidiness. Nothing out of place, nothing missing, nothing moved. Nobody there.
And there never had been, of course. The sense I believed I’d had, the feeling that someone had been inside, was simply wrong.
That’s all.
* * *
By the time I reached the ground floor again I was wondering whether I was actually going to watch television after all (my intended course of action) or if I should have a bath and go to bed instead. Or maybe just go straight to bed, with a book. Or magazine. I couldn’t quite settle on a plan.
Then I thought of something else.
I shook my head, decided it was silly, but wearily tromped toward the kitchen. Might as well check.
I flicked the kettle back on to make a cuppa for bed (having decided on the way it was now late enough without spending an hour half-watching crap television, and showering tomorrow morning would do just fine, given the emptiness of my bed). Once a teabag was in the cup waiting, I turned my attention to the bread bin.
My mother gave this to me, a moving-in present when I bought the house. It’s fashioned in an overtly rustic style and would look simply fabulous if placed within easy reach of an Aga in a country kitchen (which my mother has, and would like me to have too, preferably soon and in the company of an only moderately boring young man who would commute from there to a well-paid job in the City while also helping me to start popping out children at a steady clip). In my current abode the bread bin merely looks unfeasibly large.
I don’t actually eat bread either, or not often, as it gives me the bloat something chronic. I was therefore confident that it should be empty of baked goods but for a few crumbs and maybe a rock-hard croissant.
Nonetheless this is what I had come to check.
I lifted the handle on the front, releasing a faint scent of long-ago sliced bread. Then I let out a small shriek, and jumped back.
The front of the bin dropped to the counter with a clatter that sounded very loud. I blinked at the interior, then cautiously reached out.
Inside my bread bin was a note. I took it out.
It said:
It’s very pretty. And so are you
* * *
I need to backtrack a little here.
Years ago, in the summer after I left college, I went on a trip to America. I can’t really describe it as “travelling”, as I rented a car and stayed in motels most of the time – rather than heroically hitch-hiking and bunking down in vile hostels or camping in the woods, dodging psycho killers, poison oak and ticks full to bursting with Lyme Disease – but it was me out there on my own for two months, and so it qualifies for the word “trip” in my book.
In the middle of it I lodged for five days with some old friends of my parents, a genteel couple called Brian and Randall who lived in decaying grandeur in an old house in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, the name of which escapes me. It was a pleasant interval, during which I learned that Mozart is not all bad, that my mother had once vomited for two hours after an evening sampling port wines, and that you can perk-up cottage cheese no end by stirring some fresh dill into it. Fact.