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 that a house gets when it’s been full and then suddenly isn’t.

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 absolutely nothing. Both of those are true at the same time. 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. By this morning I had nothing left. So I stripped all the beds. I found a wine glass in the most improbable place, the way you always do. I went round the rooms gathering up the last evidence of other people, which is also more or less how you gather yourself back up off the floor.

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. Then 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.

Moving the air. Moving whatever the air had been holding onto. My mother would have called it airing the house and left it at that, and perhaps that is all it is, but I ring the chimes anyway, because sound gets into the corners a draught can’t reach.

Salt down on the thresholds after. Then 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 walked the smoke along the skirting and let it get into things. It works. I know it works because I can feel the difference in a room afterwards, and I stopped needing anyone to agree with me about that years ago.

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, not since before the heat and the fires. Two clear hours and I 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.

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 just a good phone call, but she used the word soon about things I had quietly started filing under never.

I sat afterwards with the phone still warm in my hand and every door 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’m giving over to it.

The doubt. 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, eat it slowly, and then go straight back to the desk.