The Corridor and the Bend

The plaster remembereth.

This is a thing not commonly understood, for plaster is accounted a dumb substance, a servant of the wall, the skin that covereth the bone of lath and timber and presenteth to the world a face of smooth indifference, as though nothing that hath occurred within its compass hath been registered or retained. But this is false. Plaster remembereth in the manner of flesh: it taketh the blow and holdeth the mark, and where the mark is painted over or filled and sanded and painted again, there remaineth beneath the surface a disruption in the grain, a fissure in the memory of the material, that can be felt, if one run one’s finger along it, long after the eye hath ceased to detect it.

A house. It standeth in a row of houses much like itself, in a street of no particular distinction, in a quarter of the city that is neither fashionable nor entirely without pretension, the sort of quarter where the rent is paid but not without effort, and the windows are cleaned but not every week, and the front steps are swept but the weeds in the cracks are tolerated with that particular English forbearance that doth not quite constitute approval but will not go to the trouble of constituting objection. The house hath a door, a green door, though the green is of a shade that hath lost its argument with the weather and arrived at a compromise the colour of moss on an old coin, and above the door there is a fanlight of frosted glass through which the morning entereth in a condition of permanent apology, diffuse and tentative, as though the sun itself were uncertain of its welcome.

Inside, a corridor.

The corridor is the spine of the house. It runneth from the front door to the kitchen at the back, a distance that is, in feet and inches, unremarkable, perhaps twelve yards, perhaps thirteen, but that in the economy of the lives that have been lived within it hath acquired a length far in excess of its measurement, for it is the corridor through which all traffic passeth, the artery through which the blood of the household floweth and hath flowed, and it beareth upon its walls and upon its floor and upon the particular quality of its silence the accumulated evidence of that flowing.

There is a scuff upon the skirting board at the height of a child’s shoe. There is a dent in the plaster at the level where a shoulder, turning too quickly, would strike the corner where the corridor meeteth the stair. There is a place, three paces from the kitchen door, where the floorboard giveth a sound unlike the others, a creak of a higher pitch and a more resigned quality, as of a joint that hath been asked too many times to bear weight and hath developed opinions about it. These are the house’s vocabulary. It speaketh in these, to those that have the ears.

Two people lived here.

They do not live here now, or rather one of them doth not live here now, and the other liveth here in the manner of one that inhabiteth a ruin, which is to say with an intimacy that is inseparable from the knowledge of collapse, the knowledge that what surroundeth him is not a dwelling but a record, not a home but a catalogue of the various forms of impact that two bodies in motion within a confined space will, over the course of months and years, inevitably produce.

They had run through it. This is the thing he returneth to, when the other and more dignified memories have exhausted themselves and the mind, scraping the barrel of its recollection for something it hath not already turned over and examined and found wanting, arriveth at last at the small and undignified truth: they had run through it. Through the corridor, through the kitchen, up the stair and down again, as children run, or as lovers run when the love is new and the body hath not yet learned to be embarrassed by its own joy, when the legs move not because there is a destination but because the blood requireth it, because the happiness is of a kind that cannot be contained in stillness and must therefore be converted into motion, any motion, the more purposeless the better, for the purposelessness is itself the point, the evidence that there existeth in the world a surplus of feeling that overfloweth the vessel of the ordinary and must find its channel or burst.

They had run, and they had not made the bend.

The bend is where the corridor turneth, just before the kitchen, a sharp angle that the architect, if architect there were, had contrived without any consideration for the velocity of human bodies in states of ungoverned delight, so that anyone approaching the turn at speed must either slow to a walk or accept the consequences, which are a collision with the far wall, a glancing blow to the elbow or the hip, a thud of flesh against plaster that leaveth upon the wall a mark and upon the body a bruise, both of which will fade, but at different rates, the body healing faster than the house, which is perhaps the injustice of all architecture, that it endureth the damage we inflict upon it longer than we endure the damage we inflict upon ourselves.

They did not slow. It would have been a concession to the fact that the house had dimensions and the dimensions had consequences, and they were not, in those months, in the business of conceding anything to facts. They were in the business of inventing a life, which is a different enterprise entirely from living one, and which requireth, as its first and most essential condition, the belief that the walls will move aside if one runneth at them fast enough and with sufficient conviction.

The walls did not move aside. The marks are there.

He standeth now in the corridor, in the late afternoon, in the particular quality of light that belongeth to this house at this hour, a light that hath passed through the frosted fanlight and been softened by it and hath lost, in the passage, whatever directness it might once have possessed, so that it arriveth at the corridor wall not as illumination but as a kind of remembering, a pale and diffuse recollection of brightness that no longer hath the strength to cast a shadow.

He doth not touch the marks. He hath touched them, in the earlier months, when the touching was still a form of communion, a laying on of hands that had in it something of the quality of prayer, the wordless petition of the living to the gone: be here, be here again, let the mark upon the wall be the seal of a covenant that hath not yet been broken and may yet be honoured. He doth not touch them now. The touching hath become something else, something closer to inventory, the cataloguing of damage by one that hath accepted the damage but not yet determined what is owed, or by whom, or to what tribunal the claim might be submitted.

The house hath other marks. There is a place in the kitchen where the table leg hath worn a groove in the floor, a shallow and persistent indentation that speaketh of the table having been pushed back, many times, with the urgency of people rising from it in anger or in laughter or in that condition which lieth between the two and which belongeth exclusively to the early years of habitation, when the furniture is not yet settled and the inhabitants are not yet settled and the relationship between the two is still being negotiated, the chair asserting its right to be where it was placed and the body asserting its right to place it elsewhere.

There is a crack in the frame of the bedroom door.

He doth not speak of the crack in the frame of the bedroom door. He doth not speak of it because it belongeth to a category of mark that is not the mark of joy converted into motion but the mark of something else, something that arrived later, when the running had stopped and the corridors had grown quiet and the only sounds were the sounds the house itself made, its creaks and settlings and the sigh from somewhere in the timber that hath no ready explanation, and in the silence between those sounds the other silence, the one that was not the absence of speech but the presence of everything that speech had failed to contain.

How they had craved it. He cannot now recover the precise quality of the craving, for the memory of desire, once the desire hath been satisfied and then unsatisfied again, loseth its original texture and acquireth instead the texture of the loss, so that what one remembereth is not the wanting but the having-wanted, which is a colder thing, an empty vessel that retaineth the shape of what it held but not the warmth. They had craved this life. This specific arrangement of rooms and hours and habits, this particular geography of kettle and bedpost and the third stair from the top that always creaked, this domestic cartography that they were drawing together, each day adding a line or a contour, each evening surveying what they had mapped and finding it, if not sufficient, then at least recognisable, a country they could claim, however provisionally, as their own.

Home was a form they had yet to learn. He seeth this now with the clarity that distance conferreth, which is not wisdom but merely the ability to see the shape of a thing after one hath stepped far enough away from it, as a man who hath been standing too close to a wall seeth only the grain of the plaster, but a man who standeth at the end of the corridor seeth the wall entire, and the crack in the frame of the door, and the scuff upon the skirting board, and the dent where the shoulder struck the corner, and all of it together constituteth not a wall but a story, a narrative inscribed in damage, legible only from a distance that is also a loss.

Another shape wherein to cast our dance. The phrase cometh to him, unbidden, as phrases will, and he turneth it upon the anvil of his considering and findeth it, as he findeth all his phrases, both true and decorative, for the dance is not a metaphor he would have chosen in the stripped and graceless hour of the actual, when the dancing was more nearly a stumbling, a blundering through rooms whose dimensions they had not yet committed to the body’s memory, so that corners appeared where none were expected and doors refused to open in the direction one’s hand assumed, and the whole of domestic life was a series of small collisions, some tender, some less so, that left their record upon the walls and upon the skin and upon the air between them, which was never quite still and never quite settled and never quite what either of them had imagined it would be, for the imagining is always cleaner than the thing imagined, and the thing imagined is always larger than the rooms that must contain it.

She did not cry.

He returneth to this as to a stone in the shoe, a small and persistent fact that altereth the gait, that cannot be ignored and cannot be removed, for it is lodged in a place the fingers cannot reach, wedged between the sole and the flesh, between what is felt and what is understood, and every step presseth it anew against the bone.

She did not cry. Not in the corridor, not in the kitchen, not in the bedroom with the cracked frame, not in the stairwell where the light from the landing window fell in the late afternoon at an angle that made the dust visible, each mote a small and temporary sun turning in the air with the slow majesty of things that do not know they are observed. She did not cry when the running stopped. She did not cry when the silence came. She did not cry when the silence ceased to be the absence of words and became instead the presence of a decision that had not yet been spoken but that could be felt in the way she moved through the rooms, her body already beginning to detach itself from the house, already beginning to forget the location of the creak on the third stair, already beginning to release the knowledge of which cupboard held the glasses and which the cups, the small encyclopaedia of domestic habitation being methodically dismantled, entry by entry, in advance of the departure that had not yet been announced but that the house, in its plaster and its timber and its particular afternoon silence, had already registered and begun, in its own slow and vegetable fashion, to mourn.

He cried. He hath no difficulty admitting this, for the admission costeth him nothing now, the tears having long since dried to that residue of salt that remaineth on the skin after weeping and that hath about it, when one encountereth it by accident, running a hand across the face in the dark, a quality not of sadness but of archaeology, the trace of a grief that hath been felt and expressed and deposited and is now merely a stratum, a layer in the geology of the face, that can be excavated but not re-experienced.

She did not cry, and he did not know why, and the not-knowing was, of all the things that remained after she departed, the most durable, the most resistant to the various solvents he had applied to it, the falsehoods, the tinctures of retrospective understanding, the preparations of explanation and counter-explanation that he had administered to himself with the diligence of a man who hath lost faith in the physic but continueth because the alternative is to sit with the wound uncovered and feel it for what it is.

The house hath wept. He knoweth this is a fancy, a projection of the animate upon the inanimate, a crediting of the walls with a capacity they do not possess. But the house hath wept, in its fashion. The pipe in the upstairs bathroom that weepeth in winter, a slow and persistent drip that formeth, over the course of weeks, a stain upon the ceiling of the room below, a brown and spreading aureole that resembleth nothing so much as the shadow of a face seen through frosted glass, indistinct and unreliable, there and not there, a presence that is also an absence, which is, he reflecteth, a fair description of everything the house containeth now, including himself.

The front door openeth onto the street. He hath considered this, the ordinariness of it, the fact that the distance between the life he is living and the life that other men are living is no greater than the thickness of a green door in a state of advanced negotiation with the weather, and that beyond that door the street continueth and the city pursueth its enormous and indifferent business, and that he might, if he chose, open the door and step through it and become one of those men, a man in a street, a man without a corridor and a bend and a crack in the frame of a bedroom door and the memory of running and not making the turn.

He doth not open the door.

He doth not open it because the house, for all its damage, is the only structure that remaineth, and to leave it would be to leave the last place where the marks are, and the marks are all he hath of what was, the only evidence that the running occurred, that the joy was real, that the walls were struck and the plaster held and the floor received the weight of two people in the full and reckless velocity of a life they craved and had not yet begun and could not, as it proved, sustain.

And mayhap she remaineth. Not in the house, not in the corridor, not in any room or stair or threshold that might be entered or avoided, but in the words, in the peculiar and ineradicable way that a person who hath departed from one’s life doth not depart from one’s language, so that certain words, once neutral, become uninhabitable, colonised by association, and certain phrases, once innocuous, become corridors of their own, with their own bends and their own marks and their own velocity, and one runneth through them as one ran through the house, without slowing, without making the turn, striking the walls of the meaning and leaving upon it the bruise of having meant too much.

A splintered ghost within the words “ne’er more.” He standeth in the corridor. The light from the fanlight is fading now, the afternoon surrendering its claims, and the corridor is growing dark, as corridors do, from the far end first, the kitchen receding into shadow while the front door still holdeth a little of the day, and in the diminishing space between the light and the dark he standeth, and the house standeth around him, and the marks are on the walls, and the creak is in the floor, and somewhere, in the plaster, in the grain of it, in the memory of the material, there is the record of an impact that was once called joy and is now called something for which he hath not yet found the word, and perhaps never will, and perhaps doth not need to, for the house knoweth it, and holdeth it, and will hold it long after the man hath gone and the door hath closed and the corridor hath darkened to the point where even the marks are no longer visible, though they are, for all that, there.