“When I came over here, I started all over again, ninety-nine pence each at charity shops. Okay, I’m going to turn on the light. Let me call you back. I want to have a look and then ask you about it.”
“I’ll just finish my eggs.”
“Great!”
“Great!”
“Bye!”
“Bye!”
•••
Everything was paintedthe same generic builder’s white: walls, skirtings, floorboards, cornices, and, at the back of the hall, the stairs. Two bikes leaned against the scuffed wall, one blue adult bike and a small pink one for Zora. The original fireplace was still there in the sitting room, light gray marble with dark gray veins. The alcoves on either side were lined from floor to ceiling with ply shelves on heavy-duty industrial metal brackets. One shelf, halfway up on one side, held a record player with an amp and speakers. Records filled the shelves underneath. The rest had books on them, all jumbled up.
Ottolenghi, Nigella, Nigel Slater. University reading list–looking books (black-spine Penguins). A selection of novels in French with their distinctive cream covers. Lots of politics and history, postwar British stuff. Diaries: Alastair Campbell, Alan Clark, Chris Mullin, Tony Benn. Politicians’ memoirs called things likeMy LifeandA JourneyandMy Life, Our Times. Extreme levels of Barack Obama: his books and lots of books about him. Adam’s sofa was very like her sofa. In the corner was a big TV on an antique trunk, sort of like a pirate’s chest. Under the bay window was a giant pink plastic house. Inside, small, nude human dolls were taking tea with Sylvanian animals, also nude.
Through double doors there was a small dining room with nothing in it apart from a large wooden table. At one end of the table was an open laptop, the screen dark, and two coffee cups, each with an inch of cold black coffee inside. At the other end, a long strip of butcher paper, Sellotaped to the pine, was covered in drawings ofanimals: orange lions, gray elephants, a black cat. “ZoRa, ZoRa, ZoRa,” Adam’s daughter had written. Coralie appreciated the flair of the random capitalR. At the top of the page, the sun had a smiling face. The ghost of a childhood compulsion came over her, and she put lids back on the uncapped felt-tips. She wondered what Adam was thinking about her long silence. But she couldn’t experience his house and process it with him at the same time.
Antoinette, forty-six, lived in a much larger version of this kind of Victorian terrace; her two-decades-older architect husband had replaced the walls at the rear with a futuristic glass cube. (Coralie hadn’t personally seen it; one of the top Google results for her boss was a house tour on the website Dezeen.) But Adam’s narrow galley kitchen must have been decades old. Wonky pine cabinets ran down both sides, leaving just enough space at the end for a small table and four chairs. There was a window over the sink and narrow French doors opening onto what she presumed was the garden. She peered outside but couldn’t see much. In the fridge she found milk in glass bottles, a bag of carrots, a giant slab of Cheddar in cling film, tomato ketchup and HP Sauce, half a bottle of supermarket white wine, and a phalanx of purple Petits Filous yogurt.
Upstairs in the big front bedroom that was clearly Adam’s room was a bed, made (but the dark gray linen very rumpled), a built-in wardrobe on either side of the fireplace, a bedside table with an industrial-looking task lamp, and a chair with a pair of jeans thrown over the side. The room next to his seemed to have no purpose at all: there were three large packing boxes (stacked, possibly empty), a rolled-up yoga mat, and an ironing board. The bathroom did have a bath, a huge freestanding one. Beside it, a clear plastic container overflowed with boats, ducks, cups, and a Ken with a plastic mermaid tail.
She clomped up the carpetless wooden stairs, happiness rising within her. When she reached the top landing, she gasped. The big front bedroom was the only one that wasn’t white. A nightlight had been left on and a scene of stars and planets gently rotated around walls of a bright sky blue. Over the single bed hung a red-and-white-striped canopy like a circus tent. A giant wooden toy box was propped open under one of the windows, filled to the brim with silks, feather boas, a space suit, a Spider-Man costume. Clothes spilled out of two matching chests of drawers on either side of the fireplace. In the unused grate, a collection of stuffed animals huddled together. In front of them, on a Persian rug, was a basket of colorful Easter eggs. The foil was half removed from each egg, and a child’s small bite taken out.
Her phone lit up with an incoming call.
“You do have a bath!”
“Have you found anything weird? You’ve gone all quiet.”
“I’ve only found nice things. I’ve just got to Zora’s room. It’s like a dream.”
“I can’t take any credit; she has a granny who’s very arty.”
“Your mum?”
“My mum’s partner.”
Coralie paused. “Oh God! Sorry! It’s like the riddle.”
“The fox, the chicken, and the granny…”
“Father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital—the nurse hands the surgeon a scalpel. ‘Stop! I can’t operate! This boy is my son,’ the surgeon says.”
“Oh? The dad was gay? Two dads? No! The surgeon was a woman.”
“Sorry it took me so long to work out you could have two grannies together.”
“Don’t worry! It took Mum ages too.”
“But where’s the guest room? Does it exist?”
“You must be right next to it.”
She walked down the hall to the last door. “I was right next to it.”
On the double bed was a clean mattress protector, two fluffy white pillow inserts, and a duvet with no cover. A chest of drawers stood empty, another task lamp on the top. She clicked on the lamp and hung her tote on one of the drawer handles.
