Page 7 of The Villa

There’s my girl.

I see you in my dreams, he says to me as we lay together/Girl, you haunt me every night.

But he haunts my days, every waking moment/when he’s with her, there in the light.

And I wish I could hate her/wish I could hate him/wish I could set myself free.

But we three are tied together/a golden chain unbroken/and I think it’s strangling me.

“Golden Chain,” Lara Larchmont, from the albumAestas(1977)

MARI, 1974—LONDON

It’s raining again.

But then it’s always raining, the rainiest summer Mari can remember, and as she sits at the kitchen window of her more-than-slightly shabby flat, she leans her forehead against the glass, watching the water run down the wavy glass, the people on the street rushing by in a mass of black umbrellas.

The smog mixes with the rain, the sky more of a noxious yellow than gray, and she suddenly longs to be anywhere but London. Back to Scotland, maybe, where she’d spent a year when she was thirteen, living with friends of her father. The air had been clear there, cold and crisp, and she thinks air like that might be the only thing that can clear her head, that can sweep away the pain of this disastrous year.

In the other room, she hears Pierce laugh, and she knows she needs to get up from this hiding spot, to go talk to the various people gathered in their living room, and play the part of Pierce’s loving girlfriend. It’s what she’s been doing for the past year, after all, ever since they moved to this flat.

It’s too quiet here,he’d said, and had proceeded to fill the place with noise at every opportunity.

Mari understood that he thrived with an audience and didn’t blame him for it, but she’d wanted to write today—heknewshe’d wanted to write today—which is why she’s holed upat the kitchen table they’ve squeezed into this tiny corner of their tiny kitchen, a notebook open and only two words written across the top of the page.

Houses remember.

She has no idea where she’s going with that thought, but it had popped into her brain this morning, and she’d written it down, sure it was the beginning of… something. Something big, some story just sitting coiled inside of her, ready to spring out fully formed.

Mari used to have these moments more often. When she was a kid, scribbling in her journal on her bed, the words had poured out of her, fragments of stories that never managed to materialize into anything as formal as a book, but still. Everything she read, she wanted to write. When she got into her stepmother’s collection of Victoria Holts, she wrote Gothic melodramas. When her father’s history books caught her eye, suddenly her journal was full of Napoleonic battles and tragedy on the high seas. Mari felt she could write anything, everything, and she had. She had reams and reams of paper stuffed in her tiny bedroom, peeping out of drawers, crumpled between books on her shelves, stacked up on her desk in messy piles.

She’d thought the words would always be that easy, that free.

That’s what life with Pierce was supposed to be about, after all. Both of them pursuing their art: Pierce through his music, Mari through her writing.

A lovely idea. An idyllic one.

The only issue was that it didn’t bloody work.

It was hard for two people to be artists when the rugs needed hoovering, and food needed to be purchased, dishes washed. And somehow, those things kept falling on her.

She might have had a perfect line in her head this morning, but when she’d gotten up, she’d discovered they were out of milk, out of bread, and, most important, out of wine, and Pierce was already strumming his guitar on the sofa, so she’d been the one to go to the shops.

And then of course there had been the rain, of course her shopping bag had broken, sending her items tumbling to the wet pavement, of course the milk bottle had shattered at her feet, so another run to the shop, another four p she didn’t really want to part with.

And by the time she’d returned home, there had been people in the flat, a record playing loudly, blue smoke drifting up from cigarettes and joints, and that slightly sour-sweet odor of too many bodies in too small a space on too warm a day.

It was a sight—and a scent—she was used to. Her childhood home had been like this, too, friends of her father’s always stopping by, taking up all the space in their semidetached in Camden. And there had been so little space to begin with, or so it had always seemed to Mari. When it had just been her and her father, it hadn’t been so bad, but then her father had met Jane Larchmont, a single woman with a daughter Mari’s age. Jane had heard there was a handsome widower living just down the street, and once she realized that said widower was also the semi-famous writer William Godwick, she had set her cap even more firmly. Soon she’d been at the door every day with tea, with cake, with a book she thought William might like, and before Mari had known it, Jane was living in her house, and her daughter, Lara, was sharing Mari’s room.

One of the reasons Mari had left was to escape that cramped, claustrophobic feeling, but apparently it was going to follow her forever.

From the living room, she hears the thunk of heavy glasshitting the rug, a high, shrill laugh, and she sighs, knowing that was an ashtray tipped over, knowing she’ll be hoovering up ash out of that rug tonight.

She’d just bought the bloody thing, too. She’d liked its bright green pattern, hoped it would make the flat a little less gray.

She turns back to her journal as there’s an abrupt shriek from the record player, the song cutting off to be replaced with Pierce’s guitar and his soft, deep voice.

Houses remember.

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