Work Text:
Old.
This house is old.
This house is old, and I listen to its creaking and feel the settling in my bones. I’m old too, you see. So we’re suited, I suppose, this house and I. We’ve grown old together. Well, I’ve grown old, and it’s grown older. It was old when I arrived here, a young blushing bride of seventeen on the arm my new husband, the world brightly minted and freshly laid before us, as we stepped over the threshold of this old house. I learned then that this was not a house for young people. My mother-in-law swooped round corners, lurking over my shoulder as I kneaded dough and straightening pillows in my wake. It was always a house of straightened, ordered things, with no place for the cheerful disarray of youth.
When my children were born air and light came into the house through windows flung wide and doors left ajar, through their bright eyes and wide smiles and exaggerated stories. But the house itself was still old, and the genesis of the light and life was always outside of it, coming in from the garden and the fields on a rolling wave of scraped knees and torn trousers. By then I was the one straightening the pillows myself.
Today the house suits me, and I like to think that I suit it. We’ve reached a comfortable companionship in our mutual old age, one that is reinforced by the straight pillows on the settee and the regular ticking of the grandfather clock. It’s been a long time since this house and I were anything but old together. My children have long since joined us in the ranks of the elderly, two of them even passing us by for the ranks of the dead. That’s what happens to old women, you know. But not to old houses. This house doesn’t feel the loss of my children, it doesn’t creak with pain for the lives that have left it. It creaks as stone moves against brick, as joints swell, as pilings shift. That is all.
Despite the differences in our creaking, our companionship had grown into a heavy, blunt reminder of my age that dulls the changes that have been wrought here over the years. Now there are young people in this house again, and it is no more hospitable to them than it was to me ninety years ago. Nor, I’m afraid, am I.
Molly is in the kitchen, pounding dough for a pie. I make my way over to the table and lean over her shoulder, unable to stop myself.
“More flour.” I say, a bit sharply, even though the dough is just right.
Molly knows this too, but she looks up and meets my eyes and adds a pinch more flour.
There is a distant clap of noise, and we both turn towards the door to the garden, which is firmly shut against any danger - any life - leaking in. Those two sons of hers are outside, doing Merlin only knows what. They are nearly always out there. They seem to realise that, in this house, life belongs in the garden.
I walk slowly from the kitchen, through the elf’s pantry and the dining room, both covered in dust – it has been so long since anyone came to dine – and come to the sitting room. I finger the cover of Rita Skeeter’s new book, discarded on my end table, and wonder idly if half the things she says in it are true. I find I don’t care much. True or not, it fills the lonely afternoons.
The girl is curled into the window seat, pillows clustered around her in disarray and she clings to one and stares blankly out the window. She does this every day, and whatever she’s looking for, it hasn’t come yet. I doubt it will. Things seem to pass by this house.
I watch her for a long moment, hoping for her sake that something comes soon. I know how unbearable waiting can be. I shake my head at my own silliness. Life is just a long series of waitings, so perhaps it is best she gets used to it now, in this place that can teach her how. And with me.
“Ginevra! Straighten those pillows. I can’t be tidying up after you. I’m a hundred and seven, after all.”
-End-