No, he says, he hasn’t had any letter. I pretend to be mildly surprised.
He looks at me carefully, his lip trembles. He says he would love to show me round but his wife is very ill at the moment. He grips the doorframe and shakes his head. ‘I’m grappling with so many problems right now, you see.’
I tell him I’m so sorry and that we’ll of course leave him in peace. But he keeps us there, somehow unwilling to close the door. Scratches his head, tells me he’s been here twelve years but he always thought that before that it had been owned by the same people – right from since it was built in 1959.
‘Mac someone – the editor of the Guardian, do you know him?’
‘The Guardian?’
‘The Nottingham Guardian – I’m sure he was – oh my goodness, what was his name?’
I tell him my parents were called Pike.
‘Ah. Yes, that rings a bell, yes.’ He says he thinks he has heard of them. ‘Pike. Yes. They must have been the first people then?’
I tell him I think we arrived in 1960 or ‘61. He’s warming up now.
‘The Smiths,’ he says, gesturing at the house next door.
‘Brenda? And John? You knew them?’
He nods. ‘Oh yes, they’re still there.’
‘But – after all this time! – I can’t believe it.’
‘Oh yes, nearly forty years it must be.’
‘And Luke?’ I ask him suddenly. ‘Their son? He was my age. Do you know how Jack is?’
I last saw Jack in 1971 when we were eleven. We decided to start an ornithology club. ‘I like birds,’ he said, quickly adding, ‘the feathered kind.’ I felt shy and couldn’t look him in the eye. I had just started to notice boys and I saw now that he was quite good-looking in his slim blond way. We made badges out of cardboard with safety-pins stuck on, we had a meeting. Then we forgot to write to each other and that was that.
The man’s face falls.
‘Oh … both of their sons died,’ he says. ‘One died as a baby, the other was about sixteen, I think. Cystic fibrosis, wasn’t it? I think they adopted a child – another boy – after that.’
The sky is getting greyer, heavy with morning rain. He apologizes again for not being able to show us round – another time perhaps? I say I’d love to call again – maybe I’ll write to him. He says that would be good. He gives me his phone number too. I look very hard at those stairs and that little landing once more before he shuts the door. As we leave I show Jonathan the space at the side of the house, where in my day there was a white painted door with a black metal keyhole.
‘Jack and I used to look through that keyhole and see things. There was a huge lake, with people in bright coloured boats, canoeing. We’d watch them for hours.’
‘But – they weren’t there?’
‘How can they have been? I must have made them up.’
‘But you’d watch them?’
‘All the time. Jack saw them too.’
As we walk back to the car, I wonder what I’d see, if I could look through that keyhole now. Dustbins? A dull narrow yard with a black drainpipe, or a huge shimmering lake? Or just the long-ago shadows of two small kids – a blond-haired boy and a brown-haired girl, running barefoot on a smooth green lawn?
Leon is expected at six. At five-fifty I’m still trying to finish a piece of work. Chloë is standing in my doorway in knickers and T-shirt, furious because I won’t let her have her ears pierced.
‘Just one hole, I’m begging you, Mummy – right high up, here. Look.’
‘Please can we talk about this later? I’m still working and Leon Pidgeon’s about to arrive. And can you put some trousers on?’
‘Here! Look, I said! You haven’t even looked –’
She clutches her upper ear lobe and rolls her eyes dramatically skywards.
‘I Am Working,’ I tell her, eyes firmly on my screen.
‘I just don’t see what’s wrong with one little hole – one little hole in one ear, do you hear me? Oh God, I’m never allowed to do anything.’ Her voice crumbles into a wail.
I give in and look up from my screen.
‘I haven’t said No. I’ve said you’re only twelve and we’ll discuss it later. And you’re not making your case any stronger by bloody well crying.’
She tosses her long blonde hair and narrows her eyes. She looks like Jonathan when she does that.
‘I’m a baby, apparently. Too babyish to get my ears pierced. Babies are allowed to cry.’
I push my door gently shut. ‘Go away,’ I tell her as softly as I can.
As if an explosive twelve-year-old wasn’t enough, outside in the street someone seems to be letting off fireworks. Every time there is a bang, the dog (a tough, no-nonsense Border Collie who is not allowed upstairs) rushes upstairs and trembles on the landing. With each subsequent bang, she dashes one flight higher, till she finally emerges, flat-eared and with nowhere else to go, in Jonathan’s study in the loft extension.
Jake walks her downstairs again, dragging her by the collar.
‘When I leave home,’ Chloë shouts, ‘I’m getting holes everywhere – anywhere it’s possible to have a hole, I’m getting one, OK?’
‘Be my guest!’ I shout back.
‘And I’m going to draw all over my legs in biro now!’
She storms up to her room and slams the door three times and then once more.
Leon is tall and slim, with soft eyes, and a tentative yet open face. Someone you would notice in the street because he looks kind. Just like his Dad said, in fact: a lovely person.
‘Come in,’ I say but he doesn’t. He just stands there on the doorstep and stares, speechless, and it takes me a moment to realize why.
‘Is this really weird for you?’ I ask him. ‘I mean, even standing here? It must be.’
He tells me even walking down the street gave him the strangest feeling. ‘I almost didn’t recognize the house,’ he says. He stares around him, at our Dulux Sexy Pink walls.
‘Completely, totally weird,’ he says. I like him immediately.
I get him a beer and we sit shyly in the sitting room, him still staring around, me wondering how to make him more comfortable. I wish I’d thought to light the fire, put music on before he came. To do it now seems forced.
We talk about the area – the house at 61 he used to live at with his Mum, the way he came and went between the two, the way he played football in the bit of driveway in front of the garages at the end of the road (where local boys still do), the fact that he didn’t know that many kids in the area, but he knew a few.
Room by room, beer still in hand, I show him round the whole house. He’s amazed by the kitchen, the way we’ve extended it over the yard. The size of it. I remember the pictures of him sitting in their old kitchen, near the cellar door with a dog. Layers of time and space. I realize that it’s just as weird to think of his ten-year-old self in here as it is to imagine Isabella Hinkley or Henry Hayward in the same space.