White House

There they go, down the gravel path, beeps as their doors unlock , and away they drive. Sensible, sensible anoraks and sensible Toyotas, beige and navy blue. All the colours of an unimaginative rainbow. Last visitors of the day.

The staff say goodnight to him in their cheery way. He knows what they have figured out, can hear how they talk to him in their special voice for the workers. The boss leaves, busy, brisk lady, calls out ‘Night, Ray’ to him. He’s been Reg since he was born, but he leaves it – ‘Near enough.’ he thinks. Him, the gardeners, the cleaners, the slightly less than normal. Cheery, life’s not too bad, after all you’ve all got a job. Just not as good as theirs.

Big lights go out now, little red lights glow, dim lights in the corridors. All the rooms are painted white, so at night there are no colours to disappear, it is quietly dark, darkly light. There’s so much to preserve here, to protect, the building is woven through with wires and sensors, things have to stay the same. Security. That’s why he’s here. He’s security. Always trust an old soldier. Man in uniform. Not much use for anything else these days. But if you need someone to sit alone all night doing nothing, he’s your man. Ray, or Reg.

He goes down to the kitchen, brews himself a tea. Has to search around amongst the Earl Grey packs to find some proper tea. ‘Early Grave’ he calls it. Has to enter codes as he goes from room to room, take his phone with him, make sure everything is locked up right.

When this was built, there was no security, not like there is now. It looked after itself. Not as if you can steal a building. It was a house, well it’s still a house, but not if you think a house is where people live. A house is where people live, or could live, or did live. Now, it’s a place to be guarded and preserved, to be visited and looked at. If he found someone actually living here, he’d have to throw them out. You can’t have people living in the house.

Then, he often wonders, who ever really lived here? Lived as in lived, rather than visited. He knows who built it, big industrialist from Manchester. Travelling up here on the new steam railway, opening up this wild forsaken countryside. Showing off, he’d have sat with his trimmed beard and expensive cigar in some mahogany club room in Manchester, reeking of brandy, and told the others what he was building. Best architect money can buy, grand view over the lakes, land sweeps down to the boathouse, sheep in the meadows, wide gestures with the cigar hand. Maybe knocks over his brandy with the excitement, a waiter pops up and replaces it silently. No expense spared. Not that I understand this modern architecture, but they say this is the future. Envy me, that’s what he was saying. Bloody well envy me. I’ve worked hard to make people envy me. It wasn’t easy. I deserve it.

What did he make? Cloth maybe, treacle, steam engines, biscuits, who cares, it no longer makes any difference. Something people wanted, like he wanted this house, like he wanted to be envied.

Across the room, he would have seen the old money. The owners of the mines which provided the coal for the fires in this richly coloured club, coal which added to the grime and sulphurous air of Manchester, and which drove his factory and the train to his house. They would have owned the mines out on the coast, past his new white house. Their wealth had been passed down. They despised his fresh, earned money, he despised their casual rudeness and their breeding. While he was buying brash paintings of imagined mediaeval scenes, the Burne-Jones and Rossettis, they already had rooms with Gainsboroughs and Van Dykes. But perhaps for his daughters – everything has its price, that’s business.

There’s photographs upstairs of them visiting – visiting their own house. Not living in it, visiting it. How often? How rare for this house of all houses ever to be a real house? To have people sleep in bedrooms, to wake at night and escape from dreams, to feel the person they love beside them. To eat at the table, to sit in this wondrous bay window and watch the stars over the lake. To witness a sunrise.

They built a ballroom. Well, obviously, you would, wouldn’t you? Who doesn’t? Best parquet flooring, French chalked so the delicate hand-stitched leather shoes would glide. With his cigars and his expensive, velvet stomach he would have sat watching as the young were obliged to flirt, to create the youth he would not have had. He would have been busy weaving cotton or making treacle, making money, so his magic, fairy children could dance here. So they could fall in love, and fall into even more money. The sons, rakish with their racing motor-boats on the lake. Lights burning out on the terrace, while the staff silently top up the champagne glasses. Laughter lost on the summer breeze. Daughters, perhaps not as beautiful as he hoped, but it would be their ball, their house, the cynosure of men’s eyes. All rolled up in that one, sweet ball.

Just one dance. 

War can be so inconvenient. 

There’s a photograph of both sons in their officers’ uniforms, standing stiffly by the front door, cap and gloves in hands. Another, last one, of them leaving, sitting in the back of the huge open Daimler, with what must have been two of the staff in a little car behind them. They would have been going off as well, wearing their coarse army uniforms. All the family and the rest of the servants standing, waving.

Bloody inconvenient.