It was not far from the coast, the place he was being shown. The sea was invisible but audible, hidden by dips and elevations in the land around the property. It was disconcerting; the house sounded like it was permanently engulfed in a low-level storm.
“When was it built?” asked Paul.
“Oh, at the best possible time,” said the agent. “You know, in the days of quality workmanship and materials.”
“What year though?”
“Can you hear that?” she said. “The sound of the sea. Just wonderful.”
The last person to live there had disappeared. There had been a story in the newspaper. She had been beautiful and alone and her name was Alice. Paul had often seen her in shops and tried to catch her eye. He held up garish packets of cereal and pretended to read them, using his peripheral vision to look at her. She noticed the flamboyant way he handled brightly coloured foods, and avoided his gaze.
Paul had never spoken to Alice and regretted it. He was probably twenty years her senior and not in the physical shape that rendered such differences meaningless. Even so, she seemed uninterested in other people. He had followed her home once and seen her lean her head against the front door and stand there like that, in the rain, for minutes. As if steeling herself. He had watched her weep through the windows, and stare into spaces that subsequent visits would reveal did not contain televisions. He used binoculars.
He put his hand on the bannister and imagined her hand having been there. He scanned rooms for clues of her existence but found none. She had been erased. The agent had made a concerted effort to remove all personal effects and unusual interior design choices, like the one room that contained no furniture whatsoever and had been painted entirely black; now, it was covered in dozens of layers of white paint and actually quite airy. Or the hundreds of photos of a particular child at a variety of ages but never any older than seven; photos found throughout every single room of the house except the black room.
Unlike Alice, Paul’s house was disappearing gradually. Year after year, a little more of the land beneath it fell into the ocean. The sinews of metal and wood that anchored his home to the clifftop were slowly becoming exposed, and before long Mother Nature would have reclaimed enough of his freehold that four spacious bedrooms, two gleaming bathrooms and an insouciant kitchen/conservatory would tumble from their perch and smash into a million pieces against the waves.
Paul looked for the painting on her sitting room wall. He had watched her paint it for months, a few nights every week, seeing her features emerge gradually from the deep, swirling blues and greens she smeared violently onto the canvas. A self-portrait. Alice appeared in the oils like a ghost, silently howling, eyes vivid with pain. And now it was gone. Along with the thick, green velvet curtains that had framed her, and the mirror conveniently placed opposite the downstairs bathroom.
He stopped coming to watch her after the painting. He looked out of his own window instead. The sea roared and salt air slapped his face - he loved it. The sun was brilliant in its final moments one evening; a luminous orange slipping into the ocean, setting the surface alight with a galaxy of dancing stars. But somewhere among them might have been a blackness. Paul wasn’t sure. Something silhouetted against the stars, that couldn’t reflect light but absorbed it. It came and went – a full stop bobbing in the water – and then vanished. It occurred to Paul that it might have been a person. He did nothing.
Now, he looked around her sitting room, pristine and anodyne. There was a calculatedly unobtrusive photo of an orchid on the wall. But he remembered the room in frenzied disarray. He remembered the silver takeaway food containers – strewn – and where the last drop of each tube of every colour of paint had been squeezed out and discarded. An easel in the middle of the room, like a monument. He remembered how, at the end, Alice had swept through the detritus and hung her painting defiantly on the wall, making very sure it was straight amid the chaos. He remembered thinking he saw himself in it, on the periphery.
“What if she comes back?” asked Paul, hopefully.
“Who?” said the agent.