The Portreeve's House
/Josie Turner
It was madness, Beth. I’m telling you it was madness – you, who know better than anyone what Euan’s obsession did to him. What it did to all of us.
We recognised his madness at the time, but we only responded in jest. We laughed because it was Euan, the fella we all admired – sat on his usual stool at The Hart, holding court, his audience ranged around him in various states of refreshment. It was spring, and sunlight struck The Hart’s polished horse-brasses. Maureen was serving behind the bar. The last fire of the season snoozed palely in the grate. We laughed – and yet it had gripped him already, his mania. It had taken root inside him.
'Yes, but –' Spoofy Lawrence challenged him, ‘That land’s expensive. The super-whatsit – superstore? – might have wangled a discount, but you can’t compete with a big chain like that. They’re American, is what I’ve heard.’
‘The land was excluded from the superstore deal,’ smiled Euan. ‘But there are different rules for a private purchaser.’
Noises of dissent. Big men in the village, hooting and whistling their scepticism. Euan Carter, up to his old tricks! No-one had forgotten the time he’d taken a metal detector over the vicarage lawn and dug up a pair of handcuffs. No-one would forget that for a hundred years. Euan Carter and his hi-jinks!
But I sat quietly. I watched his face. I was beginning to understand what he was telling us. He wasn’t discussing a hypothetical project: he was letting us know, quite gradually, that he had bought the Portreeve’s House.
‘Still too dear,’ said Arthur Cantwell. ‘Old place like that? Historic. Picturesque. There’ll be all sorts after it.’
‘No,’ said Euan. ‘Because the superstore’s going up no matter what, and no-one wants an old property stuck in the middle of a carpark.’
We acknowledged the truth of that. We thought of venerable cottages that had once stood in solitary rural dignity, now cowering amid orange-brick crescents and cul-de-sacs. We imagined the Portreeve’s House –windblown, decrepit – marooned among Fiats and Mondeos, its stained glass receiving half-bricks from loitering yobs, its timber frame covered in graffiti like a spreading mould.
We laughed because it was Euan, the fella we all admired – sat on his usual stool at The Hart, holding court,
‘The sale of the surrounding land made the house itself worthless,’ smiled Euan. ‘So I got it for a song.’
There was silence, for a moment. Then the crowd broke out.
‘You what? You mean – you’ve actually? – Come on man, be serious! – Never in this world!‘
But it was true.
‘I hold the deeds,’ he grinned, as the babble rose. ‘And I’m moving the house. Stick by stick, sod by sod, tile by tile. It’s coming to Little Acres. And I’m rebuilding it there. With your help, naturally.’
*
Wouldn’t be allowed now, of course, but those were lax times, and no-one but Euan cared much for the Portreeve’s House, although we all knew it from our earliest childhoods. I’d been taken there as a cub scout. I’d heard ghost stories about it, and endured hours of boredom in the village school as teachers tried to din into us the various phases of the house’s growth and decline. ‘England in miniature,’ weedy Mr Bantam had enthused, to rows of vacant faces. I’d sat next to Euan in those lessons, as he carved a groove into his desk with the tip of a compass point. There had been nothing to show he was absorbing it all – the original barn that had expanded into a hall-house, the collapse of the family’s fortunes followed by the multiple, apparently doomed tenants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
You sat across the aisle from us, Beth, and I watched you.
I did glean that it had never, in fact, been a Portreeve’s House. The title was bestowed on it by a visiting antiquarian in 1859. It stuck because we had no other name for what was, by the time of our adolescence, a glorified church hall that lasted for two harvest festivals before being declared structurally unsound and surrounded by steel fences.
Its roof, in places, sagged almost to its foundations. One of its gable walls crumbled and collapsed over a single weekend. It was a heap, a wreck. Unloved – or so we thought. It might have continued to subside into the earth from whence it came, years too early for rescue by English Heritage or the National Trust. Or it might have been bulldozed by the owners of the superstore. Everything has its time. The Portreeve’s House was a decaying shell standing on precious land near the junction with the new ring-road. Our village was booming: people clamoured for its starter homes. We were on our way to becoming a small town.
But Euan – was different.
You don’t need me to tell you that, Beth. I imagine it’s why you married him. Brooding Euan, tilting at windmills, full of romantic schemes. Your father was against the marriage, I remember that, but when he died he bequeathed you Little Acres and we all believed you were happy there. It was a good place to bring up a family. Euan worked for a credit card company, and you taught part-time in the school we’d all attended as children.
Little Acres had a paddock attached to it, and in that paddock Euan proposed to re-build the Portreeve’s House, complete with its sprawling wings and flag-stoned courtyard.
I noticed your complexion turning grey around a year after Euan’s purchase and halfway through your unbearable transportation, in wheelbarrows and buckets, of the fabric of the house. The villagers soon tired of labouring and left the two of you to trudge through the village with your burden while your kids watched TV, unattended. They all laughed at you, Beth – I expect you both knew that, although Euan would not have cared. The superstore deal stalled, and when the steel fences came down it became a race to protect the house’s leaded lights and carved doors, its balustrades and precious painted panels from the encroaching fires of tramps and teenagers. The Portreeve’s House became like sand running between your fingers, its centuries of existence subdued to stacks of timber in a muddy paddock.
‘Need my help?’ I asked.
As Euan’s cousin, I felt responsible for him, and for whatever he was inflicting on you. When you looked up at me that night, Beth, I could see that you desperately needed a different sort of help, what they call these days ‘an intervention’. You needed me to take a match to the whole festering heap of the Portreeve’s House and send it roaring back into the past, so that you could resume life – normal life – in Little Acres. Euan would never have forgiven us, of course, and his rage is terrible to imagine – but he would still be alive if I’d intervened then, and you would not be…where you are.
*
Belatedly, Euan accepted that the paddock at Little Acres was too small to accommodate a vast medieval manor.
‘I did warn you.’
‘There’s a way, Andy,’ he replied, looking out over the tarp-covered hulks. Little Acres was by now so hemmed in that no light penetrated its windows. It became too dangerous for your children to play outside; they edged out of the back door and around the malodorous, insect-ridden ruins. Sometimes they came to kick a ball around my two metre square patio.
Euan left his job, and you went full-time at the school. One day you came home from work to find a wrecking ball being winched up outside your home. Euan had decided to demolish Little Acres – your modest Victorian villa – to create sufficient space for the resurrection of the Portreeve’s House.
The Portreeve’s House became like sand running between your fingers, its centuries of existence subdued to stacks of timber in a muddy paddock.
He was stark mad, but – the world being what it is – it was you who was sedated, and given a leave of absence from work, when you quite understandably went into hysterics. He hadn’t even emptied Little Acres - he would have knocked it down with milk still in the fridge and the kids’ pictures stuck to the walls. I think he might have knocked it down without checking the children were safely outside. He couldn’t look at me, I remember that – he was staring so fiercely into his vision of the future, or the past.
I sent the demolition lads away. They wanted paying, and they made trouble, but they did at last leave.
‘What did you do that for?’ raged Euan.
Humouring him, I offered to help empty Little Acres and re-schedule the demolition.
‘But it’s October already,’ he objected.
‘Might as well wait ‘til spring, then.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
It was as though we’d all agreed upon a timetable for destroying his home, and I was being unreasonable. You, Beth, had been dragged off by some of the other wives, but I could still hear your voice carrying across the village. I never dreamed you had such a ripe vocabulary.
*
Winter set in hard and early, and even Euan accepted that the family had to hunker down for a few months. He tended to the rotting materials of the Portreeve’s House as though they were flocks of lambs, gradually insinuating the detritus into Little Acres. He stored bent iron nails in your kitchen drawers and stacked floorboards in your living room, arguing that they might ‘warp’ if left out in the elements.
You were in your catatonic phase by then, Beth. A few months earlier you would have snapped that it wasn’t the wood that was warped, it was him.
You were so worn-down that you accepted my idea without argument. Little Acres was yours, but wives at that time tended to defer, in property matters, to husbands. In any case, had you divorced – quite possibly on grounds of unreasonable behaviour – the property would have been split equally between both of you.
And so, to protect your interests, I persuaded you to sign Little Acres over to me – paddock and villa and all. As the proprietor, I could force Euan to leave. As landowner, the remains of the Portreeve’s House would be mine to dispose of – and dispose of them I would.
Of course, I’d always liked your place. Who wouldn’t? All I could afford, on my clerk’s salary, was one of those boxy new-builds. Incomers had pushed up prices to the point where lifelong residents like me could barely afford to buy. I didn’t plan to stay at Little Acres – I wasn’t planning to keep it, exactly, but it seemed to me that a period of temporary ownership might be beneficial all round. I was quite happy for you to stay, Beth. That would have been fine. You and the kids could have stayed with me at Little Acres as long as you liked, while Euan was … away. We would have sought medical help. Sent him to a residential facility, perhaps. For a nice long relaxing rest.
*
We didn’t tell him. By mid-winter he couldn’t possibly work on either the demolition or the reconstruction, and so we let things slide, as though he might spontaneously recover his sanity. In truth, I was afraid of him. He had a gleam in his eye that suggested he’d destroy more than a building if he had to.
his rage is terrible to imagine – but he would still be alive if I’d intervened then, and you would not be … where you are.
Nevertheless, Little Acres was mine. I liked it there. Despite the draughts I took off my shoes and socks to feel the carpets I owned, and I trailed my fingers along the walls, thinking ‘Mine, mine’. Even the water sputtering from lime-scaled taps was mine. I remembered your old dad, and how wild he’d be to see the maintenance so neglected.
No more, I decided. There would be improvements made. The place could do with a new kitchen and bathroom for starters, and it was crying out for a conservatory.
You would have liked that, Beth. We’d have enjoyed a conservatory in summer, looking out over the paddock once it had been cleared and laid to lawn.
We could have discussed it if you hadn’t spent so much time upstairs, behind a closed and bolted bedroom door. You and Euan were no longer on speaking terms, everyone knew that, but you could have made time for me. I meant to rescue you, after all.
*
When the storm came we both tried to keep Euan inside, but he grew frantic. The tarps billowed like great black sails, and the shivering, cowering bones of the old house jangled in the gale. You ran out after him and pursued him through toppling stacks of lumber. The whole wreck of the Portreeve’s House had become a maze. I caught your voice – very faintly – over the wind, calling ‘Darling, darling.’ And I realised then that despite the squalor of your half-life you still loved your husband. He was indeed the man you’d married – wild, impetuous, visionary. You would have stood by him, Beth. If I’d banished him, you would have left Little Acres, too.
When I caught up with you, he was gripping both your hands in his. You clung together, drenched, pulled sideways by the wind, and yet to me it was as though you both sat quietly in the centre of the maze while I blundered outside, lost and alone.
The dark ancient timbers which had seemed so desiccated were weighed down by water, and they were moving. Oak grinding over oak. Whole trunks of trees from razed forests, living on in our world. As the largest timber broke loose and began to fall I thought of it as an acorn, then a sapling, starting its long journey towards a terminal impact with Euan’s head. And as it moved inexorably towards you, Beth, I grasped all the wickedness of the past, and the weight of it, and how it never lets us go.
*
Legally, I was to blame. As the owner of the property I was responsible for the dangerous conditions which killed Euan and incapacitated you. I have a criminal record now, which seems unfair considering the altruistic circumstances in which I acquired your property. Little Acres had to be sold, and your children went to live with your sister. I bump into them sometimes at your nursing home, where they bring your grandchildren to visit.
You have a nice room here, Beth. Lemon sprigged wallpaper and the central heating turned up high. I imagine this is how you wanted to live all along. You can wiggle your toes these days, and grip a cup in your right hand. Everyone pretends that you’re just having a lie-down after a dizzy spell, or perhaps recovering from a summer cold, and soon you’ll be up on your feet again at your chalkboard, calling the register. But when I sit with you we look at one another, and I know you understand this raised, adjustable bed is your final home.
You should have married me, Beth.
I grasped all the wickedness of the past, and the weight of it, and how it never lets us go.
Of course the rubbish disappeared from the paddock, looted or salvaged by gangs. Euan’s deeds meant nothing because he’d dismantled the structure and flogged the land it once stood on to the American conglomerate. They did build the superstore, eventually, and I go there some afternoons to sit in its sunless antiseptic cafeteria.
Before I left Little Acres I managed to save one fragment of the old manor. Euan had kept a painted panel safe under a blanket in the utility room, and I slipped it out among my possessions. It measures perhaps two feet square, although irregularly shaped, and it must date from the time of the estate’s greatest prosperity. On the plaster surface is a faded sepia image of the Portreeve’s House in splendour, surrounded by fruit trees and parterres. Smoke rises from its many chimneys, and there are dovecotes and beehives in its grounds. At a first-floor mullioned window, a fine lady stands looking outwards. She reminds me of you, Beth. I think she has fair hair, and her hands are raised as though she’s clutching bars, and the rosebud of her mouth forms an O, as though she’s screaming.
Author’s Commentary: The oldest home in my town is called 'The Portreeve's House' and it's beautiful. I love admiring its timbered walls and peeking through its windows, and I love the word 'Portreeve', a bureaucratic title still used in a few English towns. Around the same time I noticed the house, my local newspaper reported on an artist who in the 1920s dismantled and reconstructed an ancient building in a new location, and I wondered about his obsession, and the price his family paid for it.
Josie Turner lives in a small town outside London and works for the UK's National Health Service. Her short fiction has been published in journals including Mslexia, Scoundrel Time, Ellipsis Zine, Noble/ Gas Qtrly and Mechanics' Institute Review Online. In 2016 she won the Brighton Short Story Prize and received the Sue Lile Inman Award for Fiction from the Emrys Foundation.
