On Solitude Restored, Clearing the House, and Words Coming Back — a writer’s diary entry, 27th of July

Everyone’s gone. My daughter left on the early train and the house has that particular ring to it a house gets when it’s been full and then suddenly isn’t, not empty exactly, more like a bell in the second after it’s stopped being struck. I love her more than I can hold and I was glad this morning to shut the door behind her and stand in the hall and hear nothing at all. Both of those are true at once. I’ve stopped apologising to myself for the second one.

I was wrung out, I’ll be honest about it. Four days of feeding people and being delighted and never once being alone inside my own head, and by this morning I was scraped as thin as the last sliver of soap. I stripped all the beds. I found a wine glass in the most improbable place, the way you always do. I went through the rooms gathering up the last evidence of other people the way you gather yourself back up off the floor after a long thing.

And then I did the thing I do. I opened every door and every window in the house, front to back, so the draught could run clean through it, and I took the little brass chimes down from the porch and carried them room to room, ringing them into the corners, in the doorways, over the beds, letting the sound go into the places the voices had been. I haven’t a tidy word for why. Moving the air. Moving whatever the air had been holding onto. My mother would have called it airing the house and left it there, and perhaps that’s all it is, but I ring the chimes regardless, because sound gets into the corners a draught can’t reach.

I put salt down on the thresholds after. I burned a handful of rosemary off the half-wild bush by the door, the tough garrigue kind that grows like it owns the place here, and I walked the smoke of it along the skirting the way you’d walk a dog, letting it nose into things. I don’t fully believe in it and I fully do it, both, and I’ve long since made my peace with holding the two at once. By the time I’d finished, the house smelled of rosemary and rain and hot stone and nothing whatsoever of other people, and it felt like mine again, all the way down to the floor.

And then, and this is the whole reason I’m writing any of it down, I sat at the table and the writing came. Just came, the way it hasn’t in weeks, since before the heat, since before the fires. I wrote for two clear hours and didn’t once get up to check a thing or feed anyone or play the good host to my own distraction. The chapter I’ve been circling since the new moon simply opened under my hands. I don’t know why the clearing worked and I’m not going to go poking at it to find out. Some houses just need emptying before they’ll let you think in them again.

My agent rang in the middle of it, which she never does unless there’s a reason. I’ll write the details down when they’re real and not merely a good phone call, but she used the word soon about things I’d quietly started to file under never, and I sat afterwards with the phone still warm in my hand and every door still standing open and the chimes going faintly in the through-draught, and I thought: the paper’s still under the candle. I put it there on the new moon and it hasn’t moved. Two nights now until the full moon on the twenty-ninth, the releasing one, and I already know what I’ll be giving over to it. The doubt, mostly. I’ve carried that particular thing quite long enough.

The house is quiet. The good quiet. I’m going to make one plate of something for one person and eat it slowly, and then I’m going straight back to the desk.