A Good House for Children

by Kate Collins

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror; Gothic

Synopsis

"A feminist gothic that evokes Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House." -- New York Times Book Review

Once upon a time Orla was: a woman, a painter, a lover. Now she is a mother and a wife, and when her husband Nick suggests that their city apartment has grown too small for their lives, she agrees, in part because she does agree, and in part because she is too tired to think about what she really does want. She agrees again when Nick announces with pride that he has found an antiquated Georgian house on the Dorset cliffs—a good house for children, he says, tons of space and gorgeous grounds. But as the family settles into the mansion—Nick absent all week, commuting to the city for work—Orla finds herself unsettled. She hears voices when no one is around; doors open and close on their own; and her son Sam, who has not spoken in six months, seems to have made an imaginary friend whose motives Orla does not trust.

Four decades earlier, Lydia moves into the same house as a live-in nanny to a grieving family. Lydia, too, becomes aware of intangible presences in the large house, and she, like Orla four decades later, becomes increasingly fearful for the safety of the children in her care. But no one in either woman’s life believes her: the stories seem fanciful, the stuff of magic and mayhem, sprung from the imaginations of hysterical women who spend too much time in the company of children.

Are both families careening towards tragedy? Are Orla and Lydia seeing things that aren’t there? What secrets is the house hiding? A feminist gothic tale perfectly suited for the current moment, A Good House for Children combines an atmospheric mystery with resonant themes of motherhood, madness, and the value of a woman’s work.

Release date: July 4, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 332

Sample

1

2017

IT’S POSSIBLE TO LOVE SOMETHING too much. It’s even possible to love something to death, and when Sam was seven weeks old and screaming himself scarlet with an existential fury particular to small babies, Orla McGrath stood over his cot and thought, I love you so much I could kill you. It was only a quick thought and it passed into that humid night soon enough, but from time to time over the years she would remember that she had once had it, and adrenaline would race up her spine.

As Sam grew older, he grew less angry, and, gradually, silent. His early infant babble never really formed past a few words and soon those sounds, too, ebbed away out of his red mouth full of pearl-barley teeth, until one day, when Sam had just turned three, it occurred to Orla and Nick that their son hadn’t spoken a single word for almost a week.

“Should we take him to the doctor?” Orla peered into his mouth as he stood obediently in front of her in the kitchen.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him, really.” Nick, arms folded, leaned against the oven and looked interested but not exactly worried.

“Sam, darling, can you tell me if your throat hurts?” She cupped his cheek in her palm. Sam shook his head. “Do you mean you can’t tell me, or that it doesn’t hurt?” Sam nodded. Orla sighed, frustrated, and pulled her son onto her lap so that his little head rested against the hollow between her breasts and she could feel the heat of his blood through her shirt.

“I suppose an appointment couldn’t hurt,” Nick said. “I’m not here much next week, though; I probably won’t be able to come with you.”

When Orla was pregnant with Sam, heavy and slow and cow-eyed, she developed a thirst that couldn’t be put out. She drank no more than usual, but would descend into a panic if she found herself without water to hand, and so she developed a habit of collecting. Her nightstand became a fortress of half-filled tumblers, the boot of the car perpetually weighed down by cases of bottled spring water. Liters of sparkling water filled the cupboards, gathered dust stashed neatly behind the toilet cistern, rolled about beneath the sofa. Outside, buckets and pots stood in rows to catch the rain and slowly turned green. Sometimes, when she felt the thirst, just looking at her water suppressed the need for it, and she’d smile and touch the bottles lightly with her fingers. The biggest saucepan was called into service as a doorstop holding open the French doors from the living room into the kitchen, full of beautiful water and serene as a mirror.

Her mother-in-law came to visit during this time, saw the depths of Orla’s sickness and took her to the GP to test for gestational diabetes. Nothing—she was perfectly fine. Her GP, a kind man who looked a little like a heron, held Orla’s hand and said, “If it makes you feel better, you may go on collecting.” Orla smiled and was grateful.

When Sam came, tearing his way into the world, Orla and Nick brought him home to their house full of water, where Orla saw it all and decided she didn’t need it anymore. Out it went—the buckets splashed into the grate in the garden, the endless green bottles in their creaking plastic cases given away to neighbors. Orla stood with her son in her arms and emptied all the places in which she had collected herself.

Bridie, three years later, was an easier pregnancy. She was such an undemanding fetus that Orla occasionally forgot she was pregnant at all, especially in the early months, and when she finally delivered a hefty baby after a gasping ninety minutes of labor, she was almost startled by the appearance of a living thing. Although Bridie was a more relaxed baby, Orla found her less rewarding than Sam had been at that age. Nick said it was only natural, that first babies were always special, and Orla nodded along.

Orla worried that Sam might take against the new arrival—she’d heard enough horror stories of toddler siblings putting babies into the washing machine on the spin cycle, or pushing them out of prams. But Sam was enchanted by his sister—by her dark duckling fluff and satin lips and the way she lay curled up like a wood louse on its back. He stroked her toes when Orla bathed her in the sink and insisted that he be the one to hold the bottles when Orla finally gave up on breastfeeding, after six exhausting weeks of underproducing a thin and unsatisfying milk.

The GP, after a thorough examination through which Sam sat patiently, declared that he couldn’t see anything obviously out of the ordinary and referred them to a child psychiatrist. Orla and Sam endured three sessions, during each of which Sam grew more and more cross, until Orla put an end to it. The woman sent them away with a diagnosis of “selective mutism” and a shrug: “Honestly, I can’t find anything wrong. Most children who are silent around strangers are rather chatty at home. That’s not the case here, but I can’t see any reason for it.”

Orla looked at Sam, sitting placid on a chair in the waiting room, swinging his legs. “So, what do we do?”

“Not much, really. At the moment. For most children, it’s a manifestation of severe anxiety. I see no evidence of that in Sam.”

“I thought perhaps, with the new baby—”

“How does he seem with her?”

Sam adored his sister. He communicated with her without words—he dressed her carefully and picked up her abandoned socks and petted her cheeks while she slept. Sam appointed himself Bridie’s faithful custodian and loved her beyond language, and Orla was faintly jealous.

“He’s been great with her, honestly. But, you know, the disruption.”

“Perhaps. But in my opinion? It seems to be entirely stubbornness. Likely he’ll grow out of it.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Mrs. McGrath, there’s nothing physically wrong with your son and you should be grateful for that, at least. Right now, I suppose he just doesn’t feel like talking.”

So Orla was left to wonder, and she watched her son with an intensity that made them both too aware of each other and a friction developed between them. Only a slight rub, but it was there. She was conscious that her hovering and worrying was exacerbating the problem. She couldn’t help but encourage him to use words when he wanted lunch, rather than patting the fridge, and would hold up his bright T-shirts in the morning out of his reach, so that he’d have to tell her which color he wanted to wear that day. Stubbornness, indeed. Orla, privately, thought of it as a “mute-iny.” Sam sailed on his beatific silence; he pointed and smiled and circumvented Orla’s attempts at conversation with a wry ease that made him seem much older than three.

On a Tuesday night, while Orla rinsed the plates from dinner, her husband seated himself on a kitchen chair and said, “I’m worried about Sam.”

“What?” Orla stripped off her rubber gloves and turned to lean against the sink.

“It’s not getting any better.”

“Nick, we just need to give him time. Give him space.”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

Nick popped the caps from two bottles of Italian beer and handed one to his wife. “Space. I’ve been thinking—how would you feel about a new house?”

“What?”

“Stop saying what. A new house!” He grinned, excited.

“Do we need a new house?”

“I think so. I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

“Why?”

He took a couple of long swallows. “We’ve always talked about moving to the coast. Nearer my parents. I think maybe it’s time. The business is doing well, we can afford it. And I want the kids to grow up like I did. Free, you know? Countryside, all that. My parents would like it; you know they want to be closer. And Sam loves it down there—we all do.”

His parents lived in Dorset, not far from Poole, and their family did love it down there. The rocky coves, the scallop-edge of hidden beaches. She liked Nick’s parents, too, and how easily they’d folded around her and brought her in. Eva had been so kind to her when she was pregnant with Sam. It was Eva who held her hand in the doctor’s waiting room, Eva who admonished Nick, gently, when he shouted at Orla for spending almost fifty pounds in one go on cases of bottled water: Orla would always be grateful for that. And Sam loved his grandparents so much, Bridie too, in her limited way. Who was she to stand in the way of so much potential happiness? Orla recalled the rule-bound household of her own childhood, the constrictions that had choked her.

“Are you sure it would be the right thing?” Orla framed her opinion as a question, because she knew that Nick would have an opinion of his own. Nick’s opinions were never compromised by question marks.

He stood and put his hands on her waist. “Definitely. Sam needs it, I think we all need it. I don’t want to be in town anymore.”

They spent a few companionable evenings on various property websites, teasing each other about their differing priorities, setting the upper price limit at outrageous amounts. One million, one point five, two. Of course, they weren’t really going to end up somewhere like that, but it was fun to look; even Orla had to admit that. And Nick was right, there were some beautiful properties up for sale. Orla thought about gold summers and turquoise beaches and relaxed into the inevitability of moving, decided that she probably didn’t mind after all.

A benevolent summer turned gracefully into a warm autumn, and when Nick came home one day and told her, smiling, that he’d found them a new house, Orla was feeling generous enough to listen properly. The sun had made her limber, relaxed, and she’d spent a happy day in the garden with the children, watching Sam dig for worms and Bridie kick her fat feet under the shade of the parasol clipped to her pram. It was as if Nick knew that her day had been nearly perfect, and that in turn this was the perfect time to announce change. He’d always had a good read on her moods, although lately he’d used that to his advantage rather than hers.

“Right in Dorset. Like we talked about.” Nick sat back in his chair and took a long mouthful from a gin and tonic. He’d brought one out for her, too, with a segment of grapefruit, the way she liked. The citrus oils from the fruit sparked against the gin and turned the tonic cloudy.

“Which part?”

“About three miles east of Lulworth, just outside a village called Holmesford.”

“That’s far.” She drove the route mentally, looping around Bath across the downs, the straight shot south into national parkland, past the Regises and the Minsters and the Magnas.

“I saw it on the way back from Mum and Dad’s. Remember I went down the other week? Got diverted on the way back and saw a sale sign, so I thought it would be worth a look. Orla, this place. I’m telling you, it’s the one. Absolutely gorgeous, right on the top of a hill. Amazing views and honestly not half bad, price-wise. We’ve got a viewing at the weekend, thought we could make a bit of a holiday out of it. Leave the kids with Mum, go and have a look around.” He waved his hands in the approximate shape of a square. “It’s huge—amazing for the kids, and you’ll have so much room to paint. Great local primary.”

It startled her that they would soon have to think about primary school. They’d never put Sam into nursery—at first because what was the point? Orla was at home anyway, so why spend the money? And then because of his speech: they didn’t want him to feel left out or teased, and so the need to protect him within their family circle outweighed any benefit gently hinted at by the psychiatrist, who made a pointed little aside about socialization in their final session. Orla took him to various activities and classes instead, and hoped that was enough.

Nick pulled up the property listing on his phone and cupped his hands against the screen so she could see. “And the garden! Sam’s going to get such a kick out of it. And maybe, you know, a change of scenery—” He gestured toward their son, sitting on his haunches and peering intently at the grass. Sam was turned away from them, his face shadowed by a blue sun hat with a brim. For a moment he looked alien to Orla, as though he could be any child.

“He’s not broken—he doesn’t need you to fix him. Moving house isn’t the magic answer, Nick.” She hated having to defend Sam against his own father. Nick’s main concern always seemed to be what other people thought of Sam: how they responded to him, how they would treat him. Sam didn’t seem to mind much, he adored his father, but Orla minded on his behalf. She understood that Nick saw their children as an extension—reflection—of himself, and that deviation from expectation troubled him.

“I’m not saying it is. Christ, Orla, why does everything have to be an absolute with you? I didn’t say it was the miracle cure, I just think it’ll help.” He smiled and touched her arm across the table. “Will you at least try to like it?”

“Of course.” Orla drained her gin. “I’m sorry. I can’t wait to see it.”

Did she want this new house? Perhaps. She mulled on the topic with the same amiable ambivalence she once gave to getting pregnant. And because she didn’t know, she was happy to be led. Nick had so much purpose, so much focus, that she allowed him to gently position her as she ought to be. He turned her this way and that, looking toward or away from the things he decided were worth it or not, and she was grateful for it. Most of the time. Orla knew, really, that the decision had already been made.

She shrugged out of her old life, skinning herself, and slipped into the new.

2

2017

THE REEVE. THE NAME WAS engraved into a plaque of limestone on the pillar at the front gate and repeated above the expansive doorway of the house itself, along with the date of construction: 1812. The driveway looped in a semicircle to the front of the house and the front lawn stretched almost thirty feet down to a low brick wall. Beyond the wall was a sandy footpath and then, abruptly, the cliff edge.

Orla had been put in the back of the car and was largely silent while Nick chatted with the estate agent up front about local house prices, the logistics of their move, further plans to buy a small flat back in Bristol after their old house was sold. That was the arrangement they came to: Orla would be alone during the week and Nick would return for weekends. She’d been apprehensive about this until Nick reminded her that he left before the children were up anyway and was rarely home for bedtime. She wanted to ask, But what about me?

She watched the hedges weave past, watched as the land grew greener and emptier and lonelier. They’d come up the hill road from the village, rather than the main road that cut through the fields to the rear of the house, and Orla was pleased to see that the village looked large and lively. One nice-looking restaurant, a library, even a small gallery. A few tourists strolled about with optimistic ice creams, but the summer season was coming to an end and the air through the car window smelled of leaf rot and salt.

When they pulled up to the house, Nick reached into the back seat to squeeze her knee and transmitted, in that one brutally simple gesture, how things were to be.

“It’s been empty for about five years.” The estate agent shut the car door with a thump and peered up at the house. She shielded her eyes with her palm, as if to better take in the sheer scope of the property, and Nick did the same. Orla climbed out and moved away to look at the view out over the cliff edge.

“Yes, the girl on the phone mentioned that when I first called—but we don’t mind a project.” Nick pulled at Orla’s jumper. “Come here.” He slid an arm round her waist and turned her to face the house. “The previous owners died—they were quite old, I think—and the estate passed to a nephew. He’d been trying to off-load it for ages, and that’s when we came along.”

The estate agent nodded. “This could be a great deal, Mrs. McGrath. He’s already haggled us right down.” She winked at Nick, who laughed. Orla looked at the sapling growing out of one of the chimney stacks.

“Room for a double garage, if you take down that lean-to.” The estate agent pointed at the decrepit shed. On the gravel in front of the doors lay a small bird, brownish. Its body was collapsed and awkward, flesh long gone, just feathers on bone.

“Plenty of space on the drive, though,” said Nick. “If you get rid of the grass.”

The front lawn was overgrown and patchy, dotted with fierce dandelions that grew unchecked and daisies scattered like snow. The gravel was of the same pale, honeyed stone as the house, although it too was sparse and threaded with weeds.

The entrance was recessed enough to allow for a small porch area, in which stood two iron boot-scrapers and a rusted metal rake. Gossamer spiderwebs trailed from the glass carriage lamp that hung from the ceiling. The porch was laid with large gray flagstones, polished by two hundred years of feet and worn in divots.

The front doors, a double behemoth of aged oak, curved upward into a graceful arch—a strangely Gothic touch to a Regency house. Orla wondered who had designed them; they were a quirk of personality, a raised eyebrow on an otherwise serene face, and she liked them for that.

And then the windows. Orla had never seen anything like them, and they made the doors look almost sheepish by comparison. Two enormous picture windows at double height, one on each side of the front doors, that began on the ground floor and spanned up to the first. They matched the sash windows that covered the rest of the frontage in width, but the height was substantial and they were shaped to follow the curve of the doors. Iron frames painted white held the glass in place, cut in that incongruous Gothic arch. Original windows: they must have been enormously expensive at the time.

The slate roof, pitched at a gentle slope, housed four small dormer windows like narrowed eyes. A dead wisteria stretched itself across the frontage from the left, planted somewhere behind the high brick wall that led to the garden, and a narrow wrought-iron gate showed a glimpse of the wilderness behind the house.

“North-facing back garden,” said the estate agent. “Bit of a shame, but I suppose they wanted the sea view more.”

Inside, light and symmetry abounded; Orla imagined a split peach, a halved apple. The house seemed like something whole that had been bisected and then butterflied; incised and opened up.

The rooms were arranged around a vast entrance hall the full height of the house, capped with a clouded dome of glass and iron, splashed here and there with dead leaves and bird droppings. The light filtering through it was muted and warm, even on that gray day, and cast long shadows from the prominent lintels above each door on the first- and second-floor landings, giving them a glowering sort of look. It felt to Orla like the decks of a ship; the landings formed a horseshoe above the stairs and ended up against those great tall windows at the front—a cathedral to look out over the sea.

From the front doors, a long stretch of tiled hallway veered upward into the sudden vertical of the stairs, which swerved off into a perfect left and right along the first-floor landing. The left flight led up to the master bedroom, nursery, and en-suite, while the right-hand side trailed along past two further bedrooms, a family bathroom, and a large and dusty airing cupboard. All of the windows on the first floor were dressed with old-fashioned wooden shutters, precarious now but still pretty, although of the two sets in the master bedroom one shutter lacked its companion, and made the room look like a mouth missing a tooth.

The second floor was accessed by two further flights of stairs at either end of the first-floor landing. These stairs were narrower and carpeted with the same moss-green as the landings, splattered here and there with cheap white undercoat paint and thick with dust. Orla thought about the hands-and-knees job of pulling up all that fusty carpet and felt very tired. This floor was home to two smaller bedrooms, a toilet and shower room, and a nothing-y sort of room that contained a door hiding the attic steps.

Orla trailed after Nick, who strode ahead of the estate agent and flung open doors in what Orla felt was a proprietary and off-putting manner.

Nick caught her expression and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Fine, just thinking.”

“She’s a big thinker, my lovely wife.” He smiled at the estate agent and squeezed Orla’s arm.

The agent continued, “There is internet, the previous owners had it put in, but you’re quite far from the exchange up here so, to be frank with you, it’s pretty patchy. You might want to call around, price up a new line.” She pointed to a couple of LAN sockets screwed into the wall above the baseboard.

They moved together into the sitting room and Orla let Nick and the woman go ahead of her. They admired the original cornicing and the wide oak floorboards. Orla saw the woodworm and the rot and the dust, but she didn’t want to intrude on their mutual excitement. She stayed in the doorway, surveyed the proportions of the room, and let herself imagine a life here. Nick had made all this possible, she couldn’t forget that.

When they met, Orla was a young painter already gathering a solid following, and Nick had just dropped out of university to start his own programming company. She’d been struck by him immediately, in the back garden of a friend’s student house. The barbecue had gone out and Nick was kneeling on the concrete and fiddling with the gas pipe, laughing as he pretended to drop a lighter next to the leak. He was tall, funny, already balding but entirely unconcerned by the fact, younger than her by a margin that seemed faintly scandalous.

Nobody tells you how claustrophobic it is to fall in love at first sight. Balanced consideration must be abandoned, to turn away seems an impossibility. You are bound to a future you may not have imagined, or intended, and the idea that you might walk away from it is only a little more painful than accepting it. Nick decided he was going to marry her and Orla felt both imprisoned and breathlessly ecstatic at how certain he was of their future.

Nick gathered it up wholeheartedly, never questioned it—but Orla, who was seeking a certain kind of wildness, turned it over and over in her mind as she lay in the dark next to the man who had already claimed her possibilities. She loved him very quickly, and it altered the course she’d been charting.

Orla’s parents, back in Ireland—evangelical, worn, horrified—wrote her a furious letter when she moved into Nick’s studio flat. But Orla had already lived their life, and decided she wanted to live her own. And if sometimes she wondered whether Nick’s certainty about who he was and where they were going was comfortably familiar to her parents’ fervent rigidity, she tried not to think about it. His success had delivered them a comfort she would likely never have achieved on her own, certainly not as a jobbing artist.

After Sam, Orla produced work only sporadically, and after Bridie she stopped altogether. Nick didn’t exactly consider her painting to be work—even the paid commissions made him slightly fretful that she might not have enough time left over for him. Sometimes she wondered where she had agreed to all this, at which point she had placed her finger on the map of their lives and said, Yes, here we are and here is where we will go.

Orla hadn’t ever minded, until now it occurred to her that she should have minded, or watched closer for the losing of herself. Unnoticed, she’d slipped into a life that she’d never intended. Her blossoming career had been subsumed beneath Nick’s choices. It was an unspoken pact, what she was asked to give up in return for a measure of financial freedom. Increasingly, she didn’t feel so free. ...