John tells me that there was an outdoor loo which they later turned into a pantry.
‘But it never felt right,’ Julia adds quickly. ‘We never quite liked the idea of it, did we? You know, a loo being a pantry.’ She wrinkles her nose.
‘There was also a bath right under the kitchen window,’ John says. ‘That was the only bathroom, you know.’
‘What?’ I ask. ‘You mean a horrid sixties one?’
‘No, no, not at all. A really nice cast-iron one. I had it outside the back door for ages and then eventually a rag-and-bone man came by and I said he could take it away. But I got something in return. Come and see.’
He takes me through into the low-beamed sitting room. Julia follows close behind. There on the wall are two brass candelabra-style light fittings, with flowers and bows. ‘I asked for those – they were on his cart – so he gave them to me in exchange.’
Julia says it was funny but in those days you still had this man with a cart and a bell – ‘a real rag-and-bone man’ – and as she says it, a dim memory slides back into view.
‘I remember him too!’ I say. ‘He still used to come when we first moved in.’ I realize he was one of those things you took for granted and then didn’t notice when he’d gone. The area comes up in price, times change, people too … the man with the cart goes.
I ask John how the house was arranged. Was it split up like flats for instance?
‘Oh no, not at all. No actual partitioning. But there were certainly different people living separately in different rooms.’ The little room at the back on the first landing (this is now my study but it’s also been a baby’s nursery and Raph’s room) was the kitchen. He says that in the (real downstairs) kitchen, the brick fireplace was plastered over with a nasty gas fire in it.
‘We pulled it all off and discovered this glorious original brick chimney breast behind.’
I apologize and tell them that in fact we finally got rid of it – ‘There was no light, we couldn’t see each other when we were cooking.’
John doesn’t react to this but says there used to be a door to the left of the fireplace – so those were originally two separate rooms. And the slab of York stone in the hearth came from Lassco Reclamation Yard. And we thought this was original as well. When we extended the kitchen out over the yard, we put the slab of stone in the garden, beneath the swing seat to stop feet scuffing the grass.
Julia asks if we kept the floor in the kitchen.
I hesitate. ‘The terracotta tiles? No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t that we didn’t like them – in fact, we did, we loved them – but when we extended the kitchen they had to go.’
Julia gives John a private look and sighs.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, putting down my pen.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but they were so special.’
He smiles uneasily. ‘They took a while to find.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again and I mean it. I realize I don’t especially want to mess with their memories. If the house was such a special and happy place for them, if they invested so much care in its decoration, do they really want to hear how we trashed so much of it?
But Julia’s face brightens. ‘Don’t be silly! We have practically the same here,’ she says, and I look at the floor and it’s true, they do. The earthy warmth of terracotta with little blue and white china patterned tiles at the corners, just like the ones that used to be in our kitchen. John asks me if I remember the zebra print wallpaper in the upstairs loo?
‘With the tassel tail you pulled to flush it?’
We all laugh. I tell them that for years we used to send guests upstairs to check out two things: the zebra loo and the Tottenham Hotspur Room.
‘Ah,’ says John and his face relaxes into a smile, ‘that was Leon.’ He shows me a photo of Leon in bed in the corner of Jake’s room. There’s the famous wallpaper with its blue and white Tottenham Hotspur logo repeated over and over. Leon is about Raph’s age – maybe nine or ten – and he has a Tottenham Hotspur duvet and a television and most of the rest of the room is taken up with a snooker table. Jake would be so jealous.
We kept the wallpaper for the first few months and then, that first Christmas in the house, with the baby due in late January, I began my maternity leave. The first thing I did was paint that room. It took me a week: Radio 4, the cool white light of mid-winter, and the sudden luxury of waking in the morning with no office to go to.
The Sanderson colour I chose was called Bisque – a pale, almost beigey, antique doll pink. It took a maddening number of coats to cover the Tottenham Hotspur shields. I wore a brown striped woollen dress and an old green apron and I stood awkwardly halfway up the ladder, holding on tight, an unborn pair of feet sporadically pounding me in the ribs. My body felt full and absurd, as if this baby should already be out.
By the time the last coat was dry, the baby’s head was engaged. The cellular blankets had come out of their cellophane and were waiting – neatly and satisfyingly stacked – in the small room on the first landing, where there was also a tiny Moses basket, a medium-sized changing table and a pine Mothercare cot which looked large enough to take a Great Dane.
John shows me another photo of Leon, in our garden this time. Our garden before he made it beautiful – a flat, barren, and barely recognizable expanse of scrubby lawn with a concrete path down the left-hand side. Leon is scowling at the camera and wearing a different football strip.
‘That was before he switched allegiance,’ John explains. ‘That room was almost a Chelsea room.’
I ask him how he and Julia met and he says it was in the Bowyer Arms on Clapham Manor Street. I tell him this is now the Bread and Roses, a Workers Beer Company pub – Jonathan goes there for Labour Party meetings in the upstairs room.
‘She was living in Iveley Road and trying to set up her own painted textiles business. But she came to help work on the house, with the decorating and so on, and when I moved in I had a kind of house-warming party and I invited her.’
‘And you went for my tight jeans!’ she says.
‘That’s when it started,’ he agrees soberly.
Julia tells me that she helped him take all the horrible old lino and rubbish out of the two top rooms that were going to be Leon and Lucy’s rooms.
‘And you chucked the stuff out of the second-floor window down into the yard below, and then you had a huge bonfire on the lawn, and there was this moment when you put your arm around me and we both looked back at the house and that was when you declared your love for me!’
John frowns. ‘I thought it was when you were varnishing floor-boards in the house.’
‘OK, but I remember it was the first time for something big, I know it was, the first snog or something.’
‘But we were already going out together by then, so it couldn’t possibly have been the first snog –’
‘Oh well, but you said something like you were glad to have me there or something.’ Julia turns to me and throws her hands up. ‘There you are, you see, Julie. Something significant happened to us on that lawn and we can’t even agree on what it was!’
I laugh and tell her it’s exactly what I’m trying to explore. The experiences people had when they were standing in certain parts of the house or garden. And also how they remember or feel about it now – or maybe even how they don’t. Because it’s true – more and more I’m realizing that entire moments dissolve and fall off the edge of memory. Sometimes