with Julia until my grandfather’s death. My grandmother had died five years earlier. The house had an open hallway in the entry, with a family heirloom, a five-prong dark-walnut rack for hanging coats and hats, on the wall. Our living room was on the left. We had a brick fireplace, but we didn’t use it as much as other people used theirs. My father had read an article that revealed that fireplaces sucked up the room’s heat and sent it up the chimney along with the pounds we spent on heating oil. He called it “quid smoke.” There was another fireplace in our dining room, and that one was used even less, usually begrudgingly after my mum’s pleading when we had dinner guests. The dining room had a large window that faced the rear of our house, where we had a small plot of land that my father insisted be used to grow vegetables and not used as our little playground.
“There’s no value in anything that doesn’t produce or have the capacity to produce,” he said. He would often stop in the middle of doing something and make one of his wise pronouncements, even if I was the only one in the room. It was as if he had to get his thoughts out, or they might cause him to explode. He always lifted his heavy dark-brown eyebrows and straightened up before making his statements. How could I not be impressed, even if I didn’t agree with him? He was Zeus speaking from Mount Olympus.
At the rear of the house was a patio big enough for us to set a table and dine alfresco in the summer. There was a rear gate that opened to the street behind us as well. Julia and I took that one on weekdays because it put us closer to school, and by this time, she was mimicking our father’s own ten commandments, one being, “If you can get somewhere in a shorter time with less wear on the soles of your feet, take it. Make your shoes last longer.”
My father permitted my mother to plant flowers along the edges of the yard. She had magic hands when it came to nurturing Blue Dendrobium or Minuets. She planted Mums Surprise in front, where we had evergreen fern as well as Leylandii hedging.
My parents’ bedroom was on the first floor, and ours was upstairs. Their bedroom was nearly twice the size of ours and had two views, a side view and a rear view. My mother was proud of her kitchen, which had a Bosch gas stove and oven, an integrated Bosch dishwasher, and a Worcester Bosch combi boiler. We had a basement that my father converted into his home office and another bathroom. Both the upstairs and downstairs had the original wood flooring, which my mother cleaned and polished twice a week.
My father believed that if you took care of old things, they would never be old. People would think you had recently bought them. “Treat everything as if it’s destined to become a valuable antique, and you’ll never go wrong,” he said. “Nothing, no matter how small, should be neglected.”
We were a short walk from High Street, which was the English way of saying Main Street. Julia, who eventually became the elementary-school teacher she had intended to become, was always showing off her knowledge, even when she was only fourteen. She loved correcting my grammar and leaped to explain things before our mother could take a breath.
“High Street, you know,” she told me once, “is a metonym.”
“A what?” I said. I was all of ten.
“It’s when something isn’t called by its own name but by the name of something closely associated with it,” she recited.
“Oh,” I said, still not understanding, or, more important, not caring.
“It’s like calling Mummy’s best dishes china. It comes from its association with Chinese porcelain. We often say ‘the crown’ when we’re referring to the queen. Understand?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, before she could go on.
“I’ll ask you the meaning in two days,” she threatened, because I dismissed her so quickly.
We were quite unalike in so many ways, most of all in how we looked. Julia took after my father more. She was bigger-boned, which gave her “forever wide hips.” Her hair was lighter than mine, more a dull hazel brown, and no matter what she washed it with, it was always coarser. She had light-brown eyes and a bigger nose and wider chin but thin lips. I felt sorry for