interviews really. I’ve still one more to shoot on Monday.’
‘Yes, Rose said you were going back to London early. Is it for television?’
Laurel made a small noise of assent. ‘One of those biopic things, an hour or so long. It’ll include interviews with other people, too—direc- tors, actors I’ve worked with—cut together with old footage, childhood stuff—’
‘You hear that, Rose?’ said Iris tartly. ‘Childhood stuff.’ She lifted herself off the car seat to scowl more fully at Laurel in the mirror. ‘I’d thank you to hold back any of the family snaps in which I’m in a state of near or total undress.’
‘What a shame,’ said Laurel, picking a white hair off her black trousers. ‘There goes all my best material. Whatever will I talk about now?’ ‘Point a camera at you and I’m sure you’ll think of some-thing.’ Laurel masked a smile. People paid her so much earnest respect these days; it was comforting to bicker with an expert.
Rose, however, who’d always preferred peace, was beginning to fret. ‘Look, look,’ she said, flapping both hands at a razed block on the edge of the town. ‘The site for the new supermarket. Can you imagine? As if the other three weren’t enough.’
‘Well, of all the ridiculous … !’
With Iris’s irritation gracefully redirected, Laurel was free to sit back and look out of the window again. They passed through the town, stuck to the High Street as it tapered into a country lane, and then followed its gentle bends. The sequence was so familiar that Laurel could have closed her eyes and known precisely where she was. Conversation in the front fell away as the lane narrowed and the trees overhead thickened, until finally Iris flicked the indicator and turned into the driveway signed Greenacres Farm.
The farmhouse sat where it always had at the top of the rise, looking out across the meadow. Naturally enough, houses had a habit of staying where they were put. Iris parked on the flat spot where Daddy’s old Morris Minor had lived until their mother finally consented to sell it. ‘Those eaves are looking rather the worse for wear,’ she said.
Rose agreed. ‘They make the house look sad, don’t you think? Come and I’ll show you the latest leaks.’
Laurel closed the car door but didn’t follow her sisters through the gate. She planted her hands in her pockets and stood firm, taking in the entire picture—garden to cracked chimney pots and everything in between. The ledge over which they used to lower Daphne in the basket, the balcony where they’d hung the old bedroom curtains to form a proscenium arch, the attic room where Laurel taught herself to smoke.
The thought came suddenly: the house remembered her.
Laurel did not consider herself a romantic, but the sense was so strong that for a split second she had no trouble believing that the combination before her of wooden boards and red chimney bricks, of dappled roof tiles and gabled windows at odd angles, was capable of remembrance. It was watching her now, she could feel it, through each pane of glass; casting back over the years to marry this older woman in a designer suit to the young girl who’d mooned over pictures of James Dean. What did it think, she wondered, of the person she’d become?
Idiotic, of course—the house thought nothing. Houses did not remember people, they didn’t remember much of anything. It was she who remembered the house and not the other way around. And why shouldn’t she? It had been her home since she was two years old; she’d lived there until she was seven-teen. True, it had been some time since she’d come to visit—even with her semi-regular trips to the hospital, she never seemed to make it back to Greenacres—but life was busy. Laurel glanced towards the tree house. She’d made sure to keep herself busy.
‘It can’t have been so long you’ve forgotten where the door is,’ Iris called from the front hall. She’d disappeared inside the house, but her voice floated back behind her: ‘Don’t tell me—you’re waiting for the butler to come and carry your bags!’
Laurel rolled her eyes like a teenager, collected her suitcase, and made her way up to the house. She followed the same stone path her mother had discovered on a bright summer’s day, sixty-odd years before …
Dorothy Nicolson recognised Greenacres as the place to raise her family the first instant she saw it. She wasn’t supposed to be looking for a house. The war had only