The Pre-War House and Other Stories

The Smell of the Slaughterhouse

Rachel’s father opens the door and looks at her. Seeing her small suitcase, he says, ‘Is that it?’

‘I’ll go back for more,’ she says. She will go when Stan’s out. If she goes when he’s in, he will tell her that he loves her, and she doesn’t want to hear it. Or perhaps she won’t go back. She could leave it all behind and buy new clothes, new everything.

Stepping inside, she sees that she is treading something into the house. She leaves the offending shoe outside, puts the other one on the shoe rack and hangs up her coat. Her father, closing the door behind her, fetches paper towels and carpet freshener. Then he picks up her suitcase and she follows him through the floral mist to the stairs.

He carries her suitcase up to her room, puts it down on the bed and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

She packed hastily but has remembered her make-up. She takes her cosmetics case into the bathroom, where she washes her hands and face with her father’s soap before reapplying her foundation, covering the bruising.

Back in her bedroom, she undresses, putting her clothes into the laundry basket and choosing something clean from her suitcase. She puts the rest of her things into the drawers and onto hangers. Her room has not changed at all. When she has finished unpacking and has put her empty suitcase under the bed, it is almost as if she has never been away.

She can hear the kettle boiling and crockery chinking in the kitchen.

Downstairs, she finds her father on his way into the dining room with a pot of tea, cups and a packet of lemon sponge fingers on a tray. Putting everything down on the table, he says, ‘Shall I be mother?’

Her mother always had a clean shirt waiting for Rachel’s father when he got in from work, ready for him to put on after his shower. He smelt heavily of his carbolic soap at teatime.

There was always a cloth on the dining table, and something home-baked. There might be some quiet jazz on the stereo. Her mother would pour the tea and ask about his day. He never really talked about it though. ‘Fine,’ he would say, or, ‘Busy.’

Her mother would say, ‘Good,’ or, ‘It’s better to be busy,’ and nothing much more would be said.

Rachel, sitting down now at the table and accepting sugar in her tea, remembers how she used to look at her father, at the well-washed hands in which he held his slice of cake and his teacup, and she would think to herself that no one would know he had just come from the abattoir.

Except that the smell of the carbolic soap with which he scrubbed himself daily, and whose reek is on her own skin now, has come to seem to her, over the years, like the smell of the slaughterhouse itself.