She looked back up at the house and felt it again, that basic attraction, the desire to live here. It was an old, worn house, old-fashioned and somehow rural in appearance. It reminded her of an old farmhouse near Bellville, where she had spent many happy weekends as a child. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t she be happy here?
She looked at Valerie’s tense, miserable face and wondered if it was pills, or an incipient nervous breakdown. Whatever it was, surely she didn’t have to be afraid of this poor thing, younger and frailer than she was herself. Sarah prided herself on her ability to cope.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go inside. I’d like to see it.”
Valerie moved away and bounded up the three wooden steps to the back door.
Sarah blinked, startled, and followed more slowly. Valerie’s movements had reminded her of some animal running free, and that type of grace was completely at odds with the neuroses she sensed in Valerie’s behavior.
The back door led onto an enclosed porch; there, a heavy wooden door with a window opened into the kitchen. Sarah realized that Valerie had opened both doors without using a key.
“Don’t you lock your house?”
Valerie shook her head. “Why bother? If anyone wants to get in, he’ll get in. Locks don’t work, they just fool you into thinking you’re safe. There’s a lock here, see, but it’s just a button—anyone could pick it. And there’s a skeleton key for the front door, if you want to use it.”
The bitter fatalism in Valerie’s voice made Sarah faintly queasy. She would have bolt locks put in, she decided, and a screen or burglar bars to protect the pane of glass in the center of the inner door.
“Did you get broken into, while you lived here?” she asked Valerie.
She was startled by Valerie’s laugh, which had more of pain than amusement in it. “Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t ask me that, don’t ask me! Just go—no, stay. Stay.” She shut her eyes and stood, swaying slightly, in the middle of the floor. Her messy hair was an aureole of pinkish light around her thin, bleached face. “I don’t care,” she muttered, scarcely moving her lips.
Sarah wished herself elsewhere. Seeking an escape from the embarrassment of Valerie, she looked around the kitchen. It was huge and dirty, with horrible splotchy linoleum which Sarah suspected had never looked clean. There was an old gas range, the burners encrusted with black accretions of grease, and a mammoth white refrigerator.
“The stove and the fridge both work O.K.,” Valerie said in a normal voice. She had opened her eyes. “The freezer door’s off, so you have to keep defrosting it, that’s all. Come on, I’ll show you the rest.”
Not wanting a repeat performance, Sarah resolved she would say nothing more to Valerie beyond what was strictly necessary. She followed her into the next room, which was long and bare with scratched, cream-colored walls, a wooden floor, and four or five windows which let in the leaf-dappled sunlight.
“This is the living room and dining room,” Valerie said flatly. She walked on, her boots clopping loudly and echoing in the empty house. Sarah lingered, looking around and envisioning her posters and prints on the walls, her own odds and ends of furniture filling the bareness and making it a home. One wall jutted out oddly, an unexpected corner breaking the room’s smooth geometry.
“There are two bedrooms,” Valerie said from another doorway, and Sarah joined her, glancing curiously at the front door as she passed. It had been painted a hideous burnt orange.
“You could use this as an office or a guest room,” Valerie said. “Or as your own bedroom, I guess. I never did anything with it, myself.”
Sarah looked around the large, square room, imagining bookshelves hiding the dirty walls, all her books neatly arrayed with her desk at the cosy center. There were four windows, the two on the east side latticed with leaves, the two in the south wall offering a view, only slightly obscured by branches, of the long, weedy front lawn and the street below. Sarah stood looking out, long enough to see several cars glide past. The street was far enough from the house that the sounds from it could be heard, but were not a noisy distraction. Living here, she thought, she would get to know this view well. She imagined herself waiting here, watching for some visitor to arrive, and when she turned away she felt a sense of dislocation at the sight of the bare room, shocked by the disappearance of the furniture she had felt behind her.
Valerie, too, had vanished, along with the imagined books and desk. Sarah walked through the far door into a short hallway. She glanced into the tiny bathroom. The floor was tiled in pink and brown, the fixtures and the wooden walls were white. It was no cleaner than the rest of the house—there were some spots and smears which looked unpleasantly like bloodstains. Sarah wrinkled her nose and moved on hastily. She’d give it a good cleaning. It was never a good idea to speculate on how or why something had gotten dirty.
The back bedroom was also empty, with the same cream-colored walls as the rest of the house, but the floor was covered by a stretch of hideous carpet. Whatever color it might have been originally had been altered by age and dirt to an extremely unpleasant pinkish-brown, and it gave off a faint but definite odor of mildew and ancient dust. The windows on the east wall must be invisible from the street, covered as they were by a tangle of bushes. Walking closer, Sarah saw that an accumulation of primal cobwebs filled the narrow space between the screens and the glass. The back windows were cleaner, and the view from them was unobstructed. Sarah looked out at the two parked cars, the fence, and the wilderness beyond before turning back into the room. First thing, she decided, she would get rid of that horrible carpet. Then she’d paint the walls pale blue, and the ceiling white. She wouldn’t need much furniture, just a bed and a chest of drawers. Then she smiled, amused at the way her imagination had taken over and was already settling her into this place.
Some small sound distracted her from her pleasant musings and she turned to see Valerie standing in the doorway staring at her with a ferocious intensity that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.
Valerie blinked, and seemed to return from some other place. “All right, you’re O.K.,” she said. “When do you want to move in?”
“I’m not sure,” Sarah said, lying coolly. “I’m not sure it’s right for me. I’d like some time to think about it. Can I call you?”
“No, you can’t.” The edge of hysteria was back in Valerie’s manner; in a moment, Sarah thought uneasily, Valerie would go white and rigid, her eyes would close, and she would sway in the breeze of her own madness. “Tell me now, you have to. Do you want it or not? Will you live here?”
She had known from the moment she set eyes on the house that she wanted to live here, but something, perhaps just her visceral response to Valerie, made Sarah hesitate and even doubt her own feelings. Why did she want this house, why should she? She could list the drawbacks of it as easily as she could list the positive aspects—perhaps they were the same. The size, the isolation . . . Was she about to rush into something she would later regret? Was it just her angry pride which made her want this house, to show the world—and Brian in particular—how happy she was to live all alone?
“Why are you moving?” Sarah asked, staring hard at Valerie. “If it’s such a good house, and the rent is so low, why are you moving now, six weeks into the semester?”
Valerie’s mouth quirked into a tight, unhappy smile. “Why are you?”
Of course. She’d walked right into that one, despite her best intentions. Sarah crushed the paranoid suspicion that Valerie somehow knew the answer already and was laughing at her. She drew a deep breath, determined not to reveal her distress, and said calmly, “I broke up with the man I was living with.”