Asylum Piece

A CHANGED SITUATION

When one has lived for seven years in the same house some strange things are apt to take place. Of course, I am not speaking now about people who have lived all their lives in one house which they have perhaps inherited from their fathers and grandfathers or even from more remote ancestors: I imagine that an entirely different system of laws must apply to them. But when somebody like myself, a person who is by nature a wanderer, through a chain of accidental circumstances becomes attached to a certain building, the consequences may be very surprising.

I belong to a family of rolling stones. We have never been landowners; in fact, we have always avoided the accumulation of possessions which tend to restrict one’s free movement about the world. So the prospect of my becoming a householder gave rise to a good deal of talk among us.

My relatives all advised me to sell the property. How I wish now that I had followed their advice! But at the time I was unaccountably averse to parting with the place. I remember that my uncle Lucius, who hates slow travelling, actually undertook a long, complicated cross-country journey — and in bitter Christmas weather, too — to come and discuss the matter with me. And I remember that I countered his reasonable proposals with arguments in which I only partially believed even then, saying that the house was too small to become burdensome and that if I sold it and invested the proceeds the income would be only negligible.

What made me so obstinate? That’s the question I’ve asked myself hundreds of times without finding any answer. Was it a sort of masochism, a secret desire for self-punishment, that held me to a line of conduct which, right from the beginning, I more than half-consciously felt could only end in disaster?

It’s not as though the place has any special attractions. It is a house of no definite architectural design, half old, half new. The lines of the new part are straightforward and easily read like a sum in simple arithmetic; the old part is complicated and oblique, full of treacherous angles, with a roof that sags like the back of a worn-out horse and is blotched with scabrous patches of lichen. Paradoxically, the old part has only been added recently. When I first came to live here it was an entirely new house — that is to say, it had certainly not been standing for more than ten or fifteen years. Now, at least half of it must have been built many centuries ago. It is the old part which has grown up during my occupation that I fear and distrust.

Lying peacefully curled up on a sunny day, the new house looks like a harmless grey animal that would eat out of your hand; at night the old house opens its stony, inward-turning eyes and watches me with a hostility that can scarcely be borne. The old walls drape themselves with transparent curtains of hate. Like a beast of prey the house lies in ambush for me, the victim it has already swallowed, the intruder within its ancient structure of stone.

Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbours not altogether unwillingly. The time has not yet come to eject me. A few more months or years the house will nourish me in its frozen bowels before it spews me like an owl’s pellet into the arches of infinite space through which my husk of skin and crushed bones will fall for ever and ever.

Sometimes I almost burst out laughing when, in the level daylight, it turns its new face to me. Why this childish clinging to a pretence which misleads no one? Isn’t it enough that the house has wound me with hateful entrails — that it will soon cast me out like vomit, like dung — but that it must even try to mock me with its deception as well?

Perhaps I do not catch a single glimpse of the ancient for days at a time. Only the tame grey animal confronts me, and seems as if it has rolled itself into a ball and is about to purr like a cat. Everything appears simple and above-board; but I am not taken in so easily. I watch, I am on the alert, I turn round suddenly to catch what is behind me. And sooner or later, sure enough, there, beyond the new innocuousness, is the old head rearing up like a hoary serpent, charged with antique, sly, unmentionable malevolence; waiting its time.