Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

He picked up his control again. ‘Look, Mummy, I don’t mean this in a nasty way, but if you find anything else out, could you please not tell me?’

And then this happened. Two months later, on Boxing Day, in the odd, no man’s land that stretches from Christmas to New Year, we suddenly found ourselves with nothing to do. No one had invited us anywhere, we’d made no plans, we had no work to finish.

I found myself pacing up and down our hall in the fading light after lunch, a cardigan tossed over my shoulders and realizing something fatal, if only because I knew that now I would never be able to unrealize it.

‘It’s the wrong colour,’ I told Jonathan finally, ‘the hall and stairwell. Right to the top. I don’t know how I could have ever thought dark turquoise. All this time, I knew there was something. It’s just – well, I’m sorry but my heart always sinks when I walk in the door and now I know why.’

He was reading on the sofa. Or trying to. I snapped the uplighter on and he narrowed his eyes at me. He reminded me that he’d already painted the whole hall and stairwell twice (‘because you decided the lilac was a mistake too’) and asked me what day my period was due.

I threw myself down in an armchair. The whole room felt dark, oppressive. We’d painted it a chic, pale grey more than a dozen years ago, back when I was pregnant with Chloë. It was the winter that Thatcher went. I remember the joy of varnishing the bare boards on my hands and knees one winter’s day, the baby a fluid weight beneath me, while listening to the news on Radio 4. Every minute seemed to bring a fresh excitement.

Back then the dove grey walls had seemed grown-up, calming. Now they just looked drab. I thought I wouldn’t mind changing the colour of this room too. But I knew better than to say so.

‘OK,’ I told Jonathan, ‘you’re right. Forget it. The hall’s fine.’

He shut his book, calmly noting the page number. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Three weeks. My period’s due in three weeks – OK?’

‘Three weeks?’ He looked suspicious.

‘I am definitely not pre-menstrual.’

‘What colour would you want it?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’ I looked at him. ‘Pink?’

Raphael looked up from where he was sitting on the floor sticking football stickers in a shiny album. ‘I’m not living in a gay house.’

‘Blue’s fine, Mummy,’ said Chloë. ‘Relax. It’s just your hormones.’

‘The only way it would be worth doing,’ said Jonathan, who always warms to my plans in the end, ‘would be if we did it properly this time. That means stripping every single scrap of wallpaper off and then replastering and making good. No short cuts. Get a nice clean finish.’

I smiled. Because he likes his nice clean finishes. I’m not saying he’s wrong; it’s just that I will always sacrifice a nice clean finish for something more rapid and exciting – the instant, vivid gratification of a pot of paint slapped on a wall.

He saw my smile. ‘It would mean a lot of work,’ he warned. ‘You couldn’t rush it. We’re talking serious effort. Weeks of work.’

I smiled again.

‘The finish has always bothered me, actually,’ he said.

‘OK.’ I went and got a scraper from the cellar.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Starting.’

‘Now?’

‘Of course now. Why not now?’

‘You are a crazy woman. I don’t know why I live with you. You need the steamer anyway.’

He sighed and got up off the sofa. ‘I’ll get it. And the dust sheets.’

And that’s how we ended up undressing the very old lady that is our house. One dark, aimless Boxing Day, we started stripping her down to her most private, underneath self.

It was three o’clock, almost dark. It felt strangely moving and intimate, scraping the layers off – history unpeeling itself. There was a smell of dissolving paper, of oldness – the hiss of the steamer in the silence, the sight of naked walls. Even patches of mauveish, higgledy Victorian brick in some places where the plaster fell away in large, crumbling, worrying chunks.

‘Oh gross,’ breathed Chloë. ‘What’s all that hair?’

‘Horsehair,’ Jonathan said. ‘They used it to bind the plaster together.’

The odour was odd and sour. The kids fought over who did the scraping but, at thirteen, Jake was the only one who really had the strength to get much off. The light was fading so fast that Jonathan set up an Anglepoise so we could see what we were doing. A circle of white illumination in the misty gloom. It felt magnificent and formal, more like an archaeological operation than DIY.

And the layers of paper curled and rolled off and dropped onto the floor – and, quite perfectly preserved, half a dozen different patterns were revealed: imitation wood grain (the sixties?), brown zigzags (the fifties?) – then a bold Art Deco style in cobalt and scarlet (the twenties?). Under that, large Morris-style chocolate ferns and flowers, and beneath that a solid layer of thick custard-coloured paint, then a fuzzy snatch of long-ago roses, then another more satiny paper with tiny gold and mauve squares. Each layer – imperfectly glued, faded, merged – revealed another.

‘the layers of paper curled and rolled off’

‘What smells so horrible?’ said Jake, wrinkling his nose.

‘The glue, I think,’ Jonathan said. ‘Probably made from bones.’

‘Wicked!’ said Raphael and then, frowning, ‘But would vegetarians have used it?’

‘Weren’t really any vegetarians then.’

‘Just think,’ I said, as another William Morris-style lily showed us its black, almost funereally rimmed edges, ‘how long since anyone saw these patterns. I wonder when each one was covered up.’

‘Which one was the Haywards’ wallpaper?’ asked Chloë.

‘I imagine that’s something we’ll never know.’

But even a little information is seductive. Once you know names, you start to see things. It’s impossible not to – impossible to resist. I know almost nothing real of Henry Hayward but my imagination has already begun to whisper. And I admit it, I’ve begun to listen.

He’s tall, whiskery, gingery-haired (Hayward is definitely a gingery name). And maybe a bit of a punter, inclined to slope off to the races at Epsom or Goodwood, though he never loses too much – he has it in check. His wife Charlotte is much shorter, plumper and more self-effacing – a terrible worrier, especially about what other people say. Sometimes she thinks she only sees herself through other people’s eyes. Take away that critical, slightly warped perspective and she’s really not quite sure who she is – not that she’d ever think of expressing such a flighty idea to anyone.

Her ample figure is clad in brownish velveteen, the pile worn slightly thin around the bosom. She has a plain face, strong teeth (which she’s always been glad about), big thighs that always seem even bigger when she catches sight of them in the glass in the wardrobe door. She’s not well educated, doesn’t read much, and is always intellectually in thrall to her (she supposes) much cleverer and more artistically tuned husband. She tells herself this doesn’t matter, that she wouldn’t have it any other way, but some days it depresses her. Some days she can’t see a way forward, not even through this marriage. She calls these days her Glooms, though even to give them a name is overstating it, allowing herself a luxury she can only perceive as uselessly self-indulgent. She’s a happily married woman, for goodness’ sake. She worships at St John the Evangelist on Clapham Road. She believes in being content with your lot, especially if you can’t change it. She was quietly overjoyed when they managed to afford to rent this new, red-brick Clapham house in such a swiftly expanding neighbourhood.

Here she is now, carefully locking our front door with a hefty black key and stowing it in her skirts. Then moving solidly down our brown and cream tiled front path. Brushing past the very young laurel (now grown to a dreary spotted monster that blunts my secateurs every year). That’s her shadowy, tentative presence over there – hesitating in the space now occupied by our wheelie bin and green Lambeth recycling boxes.

The totter’s coming. She thinks she’ll let him have the old broken fireguard from the small room upstairs that they don’t need any more now that Frank’s left home. She pulls out her key and turns back, wondering whether to leave it till another day when Henry can lift it. But then Henry may stop her giving it away and she’s nigh on sick of all the bits and pieces they seem to store.

She waits, undecided – frozen on our path in a moment on a May morning in 1892. I have a photo of Jake aged two on that exact same piece of ground – blond and dimpled and dungareed – it now too seems to come from another time. Where did that small child go?

‘blonde and dimpled and dungareed’

But these are just a writer’s irresistible imaginings, not facts. What do I know? The totter may not have come that morning at all, and anyway the fireguard may still have been in use. And it might all have been quite the other way round. Charlotte might have been a quite different woman – shrill, sharp-tongued, wealthier by birth than her husband who, she never ceases to remind him, may be an author but is hardly a successful one. He’s yet to earn more than a few shillings from it. It’s pathetic, at his age – all very well to dub himself ‘author and journalist’ when the census man calls round, but when’s he going to get more than the odd article published in the South London Press? If it wasn’t for the money left her by her mother, they’d still be living out in the falling-down cottage in Deptford and would never have afforded somewhere so swanky and clean and new.