9

A buyer for Janus Brian’s house had been found – a young accountant with a purple mouth and a squirrel-like wife.

It amused Janus Brian that this accountant worked for a firm in the same part of the city as he himself had done for nearly thirty years. He would commute by taking the same stroll every morning up the close and through the alleys and along the High Street to the tube, even changing at the same stop (King’s Cross) for the same destination (Liverpool Street).

‘Funny how things come around,’ he said to Colette after telling her the news, ‘but it brings it all back to me, how Mary and I bought this place all those years ago. How clever we thought we were, how brave, just like this young chap and his wife . . .’

Colette knew what he meant about bravery. She’d felt the same when they’d bought their first house just after the war, when renting was still the norm. In those days estate agents were a highly specialized and rather secretive breed, mostly elderly gentlemen inhabiting oak-panelled offices, writing things with fountain pens in enormous parchment ledgers. Buying a house was a slightly mysterious process rooted in the arcanities of ancestral endowments and the ancient traditions of property and land ownership. Today estate agents were young blokes on the make, spivs and wide boys who displayed their properties in shop windows like stacks of washing powder, and as such had helped swell the value of properties like Janus Brian’s modest semi by, in his case, around sixteen hundred per cent.

There was one difference between Janus Brian and his young buyers however – they had children, a toddler with chubby legs and a little girl with white hair tied up with pink ribbons.

Colette still could not quite believe that her brother had managed it. That he’d maintained his resolve, on coming out of the asylum, to sell his house and move to High Wycombe. Secretly she blamed Reg Moore. Without Reg he couldn’t possibly have survived. He would have given up after his first gazumping. If Reg hadn’t driven him out to the Chilterns for countless weekends searching through all the mazy estates for suitable properties, he would never have lasted. It had taken a long time. All through the autumn, the winter and into the following spring before a swish bungalow was found near Amersham Hill.

Colette had to concede that the whole business of moving was doing her brother some good. It had focused his mind and given him a sense of purpose. He was drinking less, thinking more clearly. He looked less yellow.

Memory, for Janus Brian, was like an illness. That was the only explanation Colette could find for his improved health. With all its associated memories the house, and the neighbourhood, were making him ill. Colette at first found this hard to accept, since she regarded memory in quite the opposite way, as something nourishing. But with Janus Brian it was corrosive, malignant. That must be why, she thought, he so often regarded the past as a dream. By regarding the past as a dream he was inoculated against its virulent effects. But it worried her. What if, once he’d moved to High Wycombe, he came to regard his whole life in London, right up to his departure, as a dream as well? What would that do to her? Would she just become a kind of thing in his dream?

Colette had refused to have anything to do with Janus Brian’s move. She’d not once offered to help him, even when he’d read the solicitor’s letters out to her, explaining the various glitches and snags that emerged. But then again, Janus Brian never directly asked her for any help. Although he would sometimes drop strong hints – you know, I really need to get out to High Wycombe next this weekend, but Reg is away . . . Is he? How frustrating for you.

Not until the moving day itself did she finally relent. Not even with the help of Reg and his two sons, who were visiting, could Janus Brian manage. Also, there was surplus furniture to be had.

In condensing his life from a three bedroom semi to a two bedroom bungalow, Janus Brian found he had much that couldn’t fit into his new house – beds, chairs, settees, tables, wardrobes. Aldous took a selection back to Fernlight Avenue in a hired van in the morning, while Reg and his sons helped Janus Brian with the rest of his things. By the time Aldous was back at midday Janus Brian’s house was almost empty, and the new family’s removal van had arrived. A fleet of cars – Reg driving Janus in Janus’s Renault 7, Reg’s two sons following in their cars, to bring their father back to London – was waiting to set off when Aldous and Colette had one last look around the empty rooms of Leicester Avenue. Colette felt tears come into her eyes, even though she’d hardly known this house in the time her brother had lived there, but the emptiness of a house is always sad, she felt. In just a matter of a few days it would be unrecognizable as Janus Brian’s old house, once that new family had moved in, with their plans for playrooms, their new furnishing and carpets. This house embodied the thirty-odd years of her brother’s marriage, contained its essence somehow, and yet it was to be completely erased. Surely it should be allowed to remain for ever as a sort of memorial to her brother’s life, there should be something permanent left behind, but no. Now she could see houses for what they really were, mere shells, to be discarded and re-used, and this made her cry.

Then Aldous noticed the lampshades. In every room the lampshades had been left in situ.

‘What about the lampshades?’ he asked Janus Brian, who was about to get into the car.

‘I was going to leave them. There are lampshades in High Wycombe.’

While Janus Brian shakily oversaw the loading of the last few boxes onto the removal van, Aldous took down the lampshades.

‘Stupid to leave them,’ he said to Colette. There were few lampshades at Fernlight Avenue, and those were getting rather dilapidated. In some rooms the bulbs hung naked and dazzling, but here were excess shades, little cylinders of printed fabrics, bubble glass, budget chandeliers, tulip shades, Aldous took them all and put them in the boot of his Superminx.

At High Wycombe there followed an operation that was the reverse of the morning’s work, extracting the condensed life of Janus Brian from a removal van and allowing it to expand to fill the spaces of his new home.

It was the first time Aldous and Colette had seen Janus Brian’s new home, and they were horrified. Sycamore Drive was a steeply climbing road branching off from the even steeper main road, curving slightly between rows of newish bungalows and then flattening out a little at the top, where it ended in a turning circle. Sycamore Drive was another cul-de-sac. In all it seemed little more than a slightly newer version of Leicester Avenue, with smaller buildings and without the benefits of being close to the capital. Janus Brian had moved from one dead-end to another.

Colette managed to conceal her disappointment from her brother, but she could not help feeling distraught at the idea that Janus Brian, in moving into a bungalow, one of four radiating from the turning circle at the top of the cul-de-sac, had merely replicated his life in New Southgate. She wanted to ask him, why, why, why have you done it? Dead-ends are dead-ends, they are the root cause of all your problems, blind alleys, no through roads, that is what your childless life has always been. You need to break free, to live in a thoroughfare, somewhere with passing traffic, somewhere that leads somewhere else, don’t you see? But no, you’ve dug a tunnel from your prison cell only to come up in another one. But instead she helped Janus Brian settle into his bungalow, suggesting where the chairs went, where the telly should go. She made him tea, she made him dinner, while Aldous and Reg formed an uncomfortable, settee-shifting partnership, and her son sat on the floor reading John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. Eventually Reg left in one of his son’s cars, and it was just her and Aldous and Julian against Janus Brian’s loneliness. When the time came for them, too, to leave, she could see instantly the despair rise behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. My God, What have I done? He seemed to say. Too late now. Your house has been sold. This is where you live now. But with the frantic energy and drama of moving finished, there was nothing left now but the old, familiar prospect of endless solitude before him.

‘Agatha said she’ll be over tomorrow,’ Colette said, as she prepared to leave. Julian was already in the car.

‘Lovely,’ Janus Brian grimaced.

‘And I’m sure Lesley will be over soon, and Madeleine.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘And we’ll come over next weekend, I promise.’

‘I’ll defrost some faggots for you.’

‘He’s being so brave,’ Colette said, on the way home, a journey mostly in twilight, dark by the time they got home.

They were about to settle down to bed but Aldous was in the grip of an idea. He had all the lampshades out of the boot, the ones from Janus’s house, and he was fixing them up, taking down the dusty, decrepit old shade from the front room, rigging up one of Janus Brian’s crystalware fans in its place. A floral print in the music room, lit from within, searingly bright daisies. A globe of prisms on the landing, where there hadn’t been a shade for many years.

‘Look,’ Aldous kept saying, flicking the light switches on and off, adjusting the shades so that great circles of light moved shakily from one spot to another. As Aldous consolidated and adjusted his inheritance of light, he had the childish triumph of a boy raiding an orchard.

‘It does look better,’ said Colette, somewhat reluctantly, ‘they do make the house look much better.’