We moved house six months ago. And with every month that passes I miss our books, which are, as yet, unpacked. I miss them as a writer and I miss them as a reader. I long for them – individually and collectively – and yet when we first stepped over the threshold I dumped them in the spare bedroom without a second thought.
When you move house you have the ‘essentials bag’, yes? The bag that doesn’t go in the removal van or hired van or back of someone’s else’s car. Our essentials bag contained: the kettle and some cups; our toothbrushes (because who wants to wake up on your first morning in a new place with a furry mouth) and loo roll; stuff for the cat (who eschewed the food we provided that afternoon in favour of mini cheddars, which she licked down to communion wafer-like slivers); passports, driving licences and various documents and photo albums I was terrified of mislaying. A jumble of oddments that were either basic or important, or both. The next day – and the one after that and the one after that – we unpacked. We got out all the kitchen stuff because we wanted to be able to eat and we got out all of our clothes because we wanted to be able to get dressed. We dealt with what was important. There was, I think, an inherent logic to our prioritisation. A common sense. Fast forward six months and what remains – in the room we don’t yet have a name or a purpose for – what we still haven’t unpacked, are the things that don’t (on the surface at least) fulfil a basic human need, that aren’t entirely essential to our day-to-day living: our photographs and pictures, and our books.
How strange and unsettling moving is. For months and months – sometimes years if conveyancing is problematic or the chain strains with the weight of each participant – you daren’t imagine yourself in the house you are trying to buy. You are afraid to put yourself inside it. You say, ‘When we have the keys I will allow myself to believe that it is real.’ ‘When I have the keys I will relax.’ But all the while you are distancing yourself from the house – the home – you are currently living in. That process has already begun. You have invited strangers inside. Perhaps you have begun to pack. You have put a price on what had been before priceless. A real and solid thing. Sanctuary. On the terrible holiday with the bed like a piece of concrete and the endless rain, on the work trip that drags on interminably, what you are longing for is ‘home’. A real and tangible thing. A destination.
And yet how easy it turns out to be to pack up that solid thing: the ‘home’ that is all your furniture and your things arranged a certain way. Your home is now in boxes. It has been dismantled. And no one box contains the ‘home’ you know, you feel, as a solid, indestructible thing. And somehow the sum total of the boxes don’t either. Nor do the bare rooms. You cannot find yourself there. You are not living in the new house yet and you are not really living in the old house either. You are between places. Cut adrift. And no more so when it suddenly, finally, happens. You move. You leave the old house for the last time, holding the keys for the new house. And for the duration of that journey you don’t live anywhere at all.
Our new house has been someone’s else’s house for fifty years.
Fifty.
For the first few months that we were living here I felt, as I wandered from room to room, the presence of the previous owners everywhere. I felt that this was not my house. What’s more, I did not know who I was in this new place. I had left myself behind in the old place, which I dreamt about often and woke up sad and sorry. In leaving I felt that I betrayed it somehow. That some unspoken pact had been broken. When old neighbours told me that there were different curtains in our old front window and a different light hanging from the old ceiling rose I felt an almost physical pain. (Though what choice did the new owner have? We had taken the curtains, the chandelier that had once hung there.) Even now I cannot walk down the street our old flat is on. I will take a long-winded diversion rather than drive past it in the car. My husband feels the same.
Meanwhile the months go by (as months do), and yesterday I received a letter from Royal Mail telling me that the redirection I set up in the throes of moving chaos (one more job in a list of hundreds) is coming to an end. From now on, unless we do the work of reaching out to banks, charities, utility companies etc. our post will go to our old house. Our names will appear on the mat there. I find this idea oddly comforting.
Meanwhile people come to see us. Friends. Family. They bring plants and smiles and their kids. Seeing them here is like finally putting up a much-loved, long-stored painting on a hitherto empty wall. It feels right. And I feel better. I’ve begun, too, to get out the books that I need – and some that I don’t. Outside the leaves fade and fall and the bulbs I planted in the Spring – bright pink gladioli, dahlias fat as sponges – make one last, triumphant stand while our books gather in little piles in the corners of rooms, on the arm of the sofa. The dining room table.
I am reminded of my writer friend’s office. Walking in there once and seeing open books all over the floor. And I mean all over. You couldn’t see the carpet (and this was a big office). And my first thought was how wonderful, because here you are inside all these minds, moving from one to the other while making your own connections: your own walkway. And so I try to imagine leaving our books as they are, in little heaps all over the house. But I am, at heart, a tidy creature. I don’t like heaps. I like things to be where they belong. Where they make sense.
But there are no shelves here, you see. And no book cases. In the old flat there remain the lovingly handmade built-in bookcases that my husband made – easily the most beautiful bookcases I’ve ever owned – which we had to leave behind, along with a lot of other lovely things that we had either built or restored ourselves because they counted as fixtures and fittings; a part, now, of the in-built fabric of the flat that we were leaving behind (though they had not been part of the built-in fabric of the flat that we had bought four years before). In all the heartbreak and stress and general unsettlement that is moving I did not have much time to mourn these bookcases, which were made of ash and set between a marble Victorian fireplace, which we also restored, but I mourn them now.
And not just because I’m tidy. And sentimental. No. What I want – what I really want – is for our books to sit next to each other – to see, physically see (not just imagine) the great continuum and endeavour that is literature. That is art. Peter Carey next to Colette. Julian Barnes beside Charlotte Bronte. To make connections. To see how we all try – and fail – to speak of the universal in a new and particular way.
I want to look at a novelist’s books and be reminded of how different they are, or similar, the risks they took perhaps. Their bravery. For all we all need to see courage second-hand sometimes (and if we are writers we need it see it often). Sometimes, less charitably, I like to remember when I was disappointed. That can be comforting too, sometimes, in a different way. Often I want to be able to lay my hands – literally – on that folded over page that is the perfect party scene or description of falling in love, the best beginning, the most perfect (to my mind) ending. I want to dive into a first person narrative that reminds me of the brilliance of that device.
As a writer our books give me strength. Courage. And while I am my most essential self when I write – my most alive, my most jangly – I am my most nourished, my most comforted during the act of reading. For books are friends, aren’t they? In tough times, lonely times. In times of joy. And somehow too, they remind you of what – and who – you are.
So today I’m not going to work on my next book. I’m not going to put a wash on or research which travel system we should buy. I’m going to get all of our books out of their many boxes and try to fit them into the only space in which there are shelves; a cupboard-come-entrance to our attic. There will be some doubling up. Some piles. There will be – isn’t there always? – some compromise. But it will be worth it. For when it is done, I will be able to go into this cupboard, torch in hand, and look at our books. I will go in, shut the door and find myself there, surrounded. At home.