liked them all in different ways. Perfectly understandable, and nothing to worry about. Perhaps each house spoke to a different aspect of your character.’
‘No.’ I wave away her reassuring words. ‘Yes, it was silly of me to panic about not knowing what sort of house I wanted, of course it was, but I did panic – that’s what’s worrying. Each time I saw a house and wasn’t instantly sure if it was “me”, I felt more and more unreal. As if any self that I might once have had was draining away, drop by drop.’ I chew on my thumbnail, afraid that I’m admitting too much and will somehow be made to suffer for it. ‘And then we found this amazing house, 17 Pardoner Lane – the best of the bunch by far, I can see that now – and I was in such a state, I had no idea whether I loved it or hated it. Kit adored it. I pretended to – don’t know how convincing I was. I felt like I was falling apart. All I wanted was to be able to say, “Yes, this house is absolutely me” and . . . know what that meant.’
Alice bends down, reaches into the open brown suitcase under her desk. It’s where she keeps her remedies; the inside of the case is divided into tiny square compartments, each one containing a small brown glass bottle. ‘You were anxious and depressed, overwhelmed by your family’s unreasonable expectations,’ she says, picking up one bottle, then another, reading the labels. ‘That sense of your self diminishing came from trying to stifle your own needs for your parents’ sake, because they found them inconvenient. It had nothing to do with being flexible about what sort of house you wanted to buy, I promise you.’ She has found the remedy she was looking for. For extra, extra mad people.
I want to say more about the house I should have fallen in love with, but was too neurotic to see clearly. I need to confess to all of it: how I set out to ruin things, chipped away at Kit’s conviction with my paranoia. ‘17 Pardoner Lane was next to a school building – the Beth Dutton Centre,’ I tell Alice. ‘I lost sleep – whole nights – over the bell. How ridiculous is that?’
‘The bell?’
‘The school bell. What if it rang between lessons and was too loud? The noise might drive us mad, and we’d never be able to sell up and move on because we’d have to be honest with prospective buyers – we couldn’t lie about a thing like that. Kit said, “If the bell’s too loud, we’ll ask them to turn the volume down.” He laughed at me for worrying about something so stupid. He laughed again when I got cold feet a few days later for an equally ridiculous reason: the house had no name.’
‘I’m giving you a different remedy this time,’ says Alice. ‘Anhalonium. Because of what you said about feeling as if you were transparent and having no personality.’
‘I’d never lived anywhere that didn’t have a name,’ I say, not listening to her. ‘Still haven’t. First I lived at Thorrold House with Mum and Dad, then I moved in with Kit. His flat in Rawndesley was number 10, but the building had a name: Martland Tower. Anyway, that was different. Neither of us thought of the flat as home – it was temporary, a stop-gap. Now I live in Melrose Cottage, Fran and Anton’s house is Thatchers . . . In Little Holling, all the houses have names. It’s what I’m used to. When Kit was so keen on 17 Pardoner Lane, and I tried to imagine myself living in a house that was just a number, it seemed . . . wrong, somehow. Too impersonal. It scared me.’
Alice is nodding. ‘Change is incredibly scary,’ she says. She always sticks up for me. I’m not sure it’s what I need, not any more. It might do me more good to hear her say, ‘Yes, Connie. That’s really mad. You need to stop thinking in this crazy way.’
‘One night I woke Kit up at four in the morning,’ I tell her. ‘He was asleep, and I kept shaking him. I think I must have been hysterical. I hadn’t slept all night, and I’d worked myself into a state. Kit stared at me as if I was a maniac – I can still remember how shocked he looked. I told