There are, obviously,
lots of good books that aren’t about houses. But, my goodness, there are even
more that are. Brideshead, Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice, Alconleigh in The
Pursuit of Love, Top Withins Farm in Wuthering Heights, Green Gables, Hill
House… There’s something about making a house central to a story that brings
together landscape, history, and the personality of the owners, past and
present – all useful elements for psychological fiction, in particular.
Everyone’s favourite
fictional house is Manderley in Rebecca, famously based – at least, in terms of
its setting – on Menabilly in Cornwall. Du Maurier first stumbled on it,
abandoned and almost derelict, as a teenager, trespassing in its grounds.
Later, stationed in Cairo with her husband during the war, her thoughts turned
back to it as she dreamt Rebecca into life. That the success of Rebecca – and,
in particular, Hitchcock’s film version – made her wealthy enough to negotiate
a twenty-year lease on the dilapidated property she had, at that point, barely
stepped foot in, is one of life’s extraordinary ironies.
Du Maurier’s
relationship with Menabilly was always a romantic, almost obsessive one. In her
autobiographical essay ‘The House of Secrets’ she describes how, after she saw
it for the first time, ‘the house possessed me from that day, even as a
mistress holds her lover.’ (The reversal of gender is revealing: du Maurier
sometimes attributed her ‘writing energy’ to ‘Eric’, an alternative persona she
dubbed ‘the boy in the box.’) Her
daughter Flavia noted her habit of occasionally kissing its stone walls: ‘When
she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.’ And du
Maurier herself wrote to a friend, ‘I do believe I love Mena more than people’,
and compared having to leave it when her lease expired to the screaming of a
pulled-up mandrake. When she was sick with pneumonia on her deathbed, by then
exiled to the nearby Dower House, she manged to haul herself up and go out in a
storm, just so she could gaze on Menabilly one last time.
My new psychological
thriller, The Move, was directly inspired by du Maurier’s relationship with
Menabilly, though I chose to transplant her domophilia to Hampshire. Rosemary
and Paul Finch, both in their eighties, are downsizing from their beloved Trade
Cottage after many happy decades there. Paul has terminal MND and will soon be
in a wheelchair; their son Jamie and their grandchildren are all in America;
and the house is starting to get too much. At the viewing, they hit it off with
a nice family with young children who are looking to make the move out of
London, even going so far as to accept an offer that isn’t the highest bid, so
keen is Rosemary for them to have it. (Another nod, perhaps, to a fictional
house story, in this case E.M Forster’s famous plot device in Howard’s End.)
And for Kate and Matt
Crowther, the move is initially idyllic. Sure, it’s a little strange to
discover, the day they move in, that Rosemary and Paul have chosen to leave
most of their antique furniture behind – but then again, it wouldn’t fit into
the ultra-modern passive house which, it transpires, they’ve built just at the
end of Trade Cottage’s garden, close enough for them to pop round whenever they
want. And it’s great that they want to look after the children when Kate and
Matt are in London; to teach Tilly how to ride and Will how to shoot, and to
help Kate and Matt throw housewarming parties so they can meet the rest of the
village. Rosemary in particular is so welcoming that it takes Kate a little while
to realise there’s something almost obsessive about her need to maintain Trade
Cottage’s aura of picture-perfect loveliness just as it always has been – and
that her own children’s time there, twenty years previously, might not have
been quite the Swallows-and-Amazons paradise Rosemary paints it as.
Because that’s another
great thing about houses: they have facades, and facades can be deceptive.
Remember Cowslip’s warren in Watership Down? On the face of it, it’s wonderful
– the farmer even leaves food nearby. It takes even Fiver a little while to
work out that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Writing about houses,
of course, immediately brings you close to the Gothic tradition. In the
classics of the genre, there’s usually an isolated, ancient, crumbling manor,
full of shadows and unexplained noises, presided over by a brooding, damaged
master, as stuck in the tragic past as his dwelling place is. To this fearsome
abode comes an innocent, usually a young woman; both the house’s potential
victim, and its saviour. It’s an archetype that stretches all the way from Wuthering
Heights to Beauty and the Beast.
Personally, I like to
play around with the trope, to defamiliarize it. In The Girl Before I made my
crumbling mansion a tiny minimalist house in London, and my brooding master its
obsessively minimalist architect. (In a nod to my influences, I called the digital
home controller ‘Housekeeper’.) In The New Wife, it’s a dilapidated finca on
Mallorca that turns out – when the young man who has inherited it from his
estranged father visits – to have been gorgeously renovated by his father’s
third wife and her daughter, who he’s there to evict. And in The Move, it’s a
Grade-II listed country property that, even run down, requires the heftiest of
mortgages to purchase, and is crying out to be turned into an Airbnb.
When du Maurier titled
her essay ‘The House of Secrets’, she put her finger on another aspect of
houses which makes them such fertile ground for writers. Houses have pasts, and
those pasts are sometimes hidden. Again, there’s an archetype: in Bluebeard’s
Castle, there was one single room that his new bride was forbidden to enter.
Needless to say, she does. In The Girl Before, it’s a service cupboard
containing a dusty old sleeping bag and a pair of women’s pyjamas. In The Move,
it’s a smugglers’ cellar, latterly used by teenage boys as a kind of nightclub,
not unlike the ‘Club H’ Princes William and Harry created for their friends at
Highgrove. It contains an ancient sofa, complete with some rather
suspicious-looking stains.
Perhaps the final
aspect of houses that makes them so good to write about, though, is their
relatability. We all live somewhere, and that somewhere is our sanctuary; the
way we choose to furnish it, an expression of who we are. Our homes are where
we should feel most safe – and when that safety is threatened, we might all react
in ways it takes a novelist to predict.
The Move by J P Delaney
(Quercus Books) Out Now
New beginnings can be deadly . . . Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there. When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect . . .
More information about JP Delaney
and his books can be found on his website.
J P Delaney can also be found on Facebook. He can also be
found on Instagram @jpdelaney
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