My son is working at my desk today, a lesson on zoom and so I’ve come to the sitting room write, this space of many doors and pitched wooden ceiling. The terrace onto which it leads is an echo of this room outside, the same roof and dimensions, both stretch the whole length of the side of the house, both are split level. In here there’s a free-standing fireplace at one end which divides the sitting room from dining room, one I’m sure I remember like a pillar, both sides free, but now to its right half filled with a broad white wall that is holed, like a small square tunnel, where logs are stored. It’s clever, this, as you can fill it from the dining room and use it from this side. My father probably put it in. He was smart like that.
The fireplace is large and stone, an oval frame in its centre in which there’s no picture but there should be, of a lady, I always think. Below it, probably to my family’s chagrin, I’m building a montage of polaroid pictures taken over decades; they mark the voyage of my children’s growth and mine and my friends and their children. It’s beautiful. It’s the thing that guests stop and stare at, point if they’re in it, find themselves, remember and feel all that sweetness that comes with a happy past.
To the left of where I sit on the huge, ancient sofa is the wall that faces the glass doors to the terrace. There used to be one large painting there by an artist who lived with us, Tom Pomfret, I can’t quite remember it now but I think it contained boats and was a landscape. There are dozens of Tom’s paintings all over this house and also in London in the house in which I grew up. Tom lived in the basement there, at the other end from the flat, and he was large and funny and wore pink earrings at Christmas. He never sold much despite the many exhibitions we held for him, me shoving plates of cocktail sausages up at guests spilling drinks in the basement corridor, Tom morose the next day. Not enough red dots. He’d make marmalade with the housekeeper and bitch at the kitchen table and treat us with chocolate biscuits, and out here, where he’d come with us at Easter, he’d bake Rumbuba and throw coins in the pool to make us learn how to swim. I still have the Rumbuba moulds he used. I can’t throw them away. But his painting from the large wall is gone and replaced by thirty-six framed pieces of a Japanese tapestry that was once one piece. It used to hang in the drawing room in London. It was what my father left to me in his will. My home in England doesn’t have a wall big enough so I brought it out here and reluctantly moved Tom’s painting.
But other than that, this room is the same; the rugs the fire place, the long window at the back, even the curtains that hang at the tall glass doors. We used to do shows in here, Annie Get Your Gun and anything Judy Garland. Often a quick barbershop quartet to the ranks of parents forced to move the sofa so that the split level became a stage, and then forced to sit on the uncomfortable wicker bench at the end. I split my head on that step one night of being chased with a wet dish cloth by my brother, spinning around this circular house, a foot slip and crash, my mother hurried from the vegetable patch where she’d been collecting tomatoes in a storm while dressed entirely for going out to dinner. I remember lying on her lap as my father drove, her hand bright red to my head, how the doctor said it was like a tiger’s claw had got me, how the waiting room was filled with campers nursing broken ankles, plastic bags over casts, tent wires that had tripped them in the rain.
Love a Polaroid wall! Such wonderful descriptions of this house too
So vivid, as always. I felt I was an interloper.