A House for Alice

by Diana Evans

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction​ • A sweeping and beautifully rendered exploration of home and yearning, following the fracturing of a family upon the demise of its patriarch

"Each character here is richly and deeply drawn...This is a novel that encourages us to stand in life’s burning doorways, and to think long before we walk away or walk through.”
—New York Times

In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, consuming Grenfell Tower and many of the lives within it. Across town, an earlier spark has caught fire. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt—estranged husband, complicated dad, and Pitt family patriarch—takes his final breaths alone.

These twin tragedies open Diana Evans’s A House for Alice, an aching portrait of a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure. At the novel’s center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria. Her three daughters are torn on the issue of whether she stays or goes, and while youngest sibling Melissa also grapples with the embers of her own failed relationship, the Pitt family’s foundational pillars—of trust, love, and cultural identity—begin to crack.

Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

Release date: September 12, 2023

Publisher: Pantheon

Print pages: 352

Sample

1


Cornelius Winston Pitt, in the evening of his life, eyebrows white and wild, eyesight dysfunctional, moved with a dancy small-foot shuffle along his hallway, holding a pork pie. In the other hand was a cigarette shedding ash onto his route, over the slip mat, into the kitchen, where pausing he became freshly alarmed at the absence of his wife, an absence he felt most strongly in this room, its floor still sounding of her slippers, its toaster still evocative of her sadly buttered crusts. Where was she? Then he remembered. Kilburn. Was glad that he remembered, a whole crisp name. No chops anymore in this kitchen, no rice, rice being extremely complex, no Sunday chicken. Here in this land of the late and alone the menu was condensed. A pork pie was enough for a man, only it needed
 
Beetroot. Yes. That was why he was here. He opened the fridge immediately so that beetroot would not disappear again inside its name, “immediately” being relative to his particular nonagenarian physicality: a moment of slight forward falling, the grabbing of the low-down handle, the haul posing threats to his spine. Inside was a hollow ice cave, mist. There was milk in the mist, and a tomato (also good with pork pie), two meals in foil from a daughter to the north, butter, and the purple thing. He took it out, the cigarette now balanced on his lower lip get­ting smoke in his eye, the one that worked, so he closed it, couldn’t see anything, opened it again, and was struck by another requirement round and flat in his mind and useful for carrying food. The fridge he left ajar in this new venture, reach­ing up to the cupboard for a
 
Plate. Words were occasional boats, sometimish, coming at him brightly sailed then passing by. What Cornelius was learn­ing was that they are not always necessary. Abstraction is peaceful, like twilight, wide swimming in a quiet colour, and you can exist in a place without names, where nothing is labelled, nothing flaunts itself, but instead the words wait, so quietly, for a time like this when you become in need of a—yes . . .
 
Beetroot is wet. It slopped around the pork pie on the dancy shuffle back to the chair, a primordial green throne of once-abject patriarchy positioned in the living room directly in front of the TV where Cornelius spent most of his waking hours on this the ground floor of the house of many clocks. Around the chair were the apparatus of his daily proceedings. The table in front, individual-sized, for one eater, one smoker, one controller of remote control. Underneath the table the leather pouffe, for raising of feet when desired. To the left the dustbin, now half full, mainly with discarded post-its containing the names of fleetingly essential objects (WD-40, battery, sharpener, Adel—his daughter), and a shelf, also to his left, for beer coasters, glasses repair tools and the telephone, his conduit to the outside. Beyond all of this there were the clocks, everywhere, in every room, grandfathers, carriages, cuckoos, pendulums, collected over the course of his long working life in horology. The house ticked, and tocked, constantly.
 
At four o’clock today—it was Tuesday, sweltering, swollen at the windows the sick gold of a twenty-first-century June—he must call the tax office to find out about the implications of the recent changes to inheritance tax charges that might affect his will. The reminder was provided on one of the table’s current post-its, phone number included. It was incumbent upon him, he felt, as he neared the milestone of a century (which of course would come with a congratulatory card from the Queen) to make sure his financial affairs were in order, what with the grandchildren, and his wife who was still his wife as far as money was concerned, and then the daughters and their way­ward ways through the arts, Buddhism, break-ups and vegan behaviour. Money is messy and at the end of a century it should be neat, a nice scout’s knot, not flailing around like a raging octopus. He wanted to go neatly, like his father, himself a horol­ogist, who had died at exactly a hundred proudly in receipt of the royal note, leaving his family with only their grief to face, not an ensuing feud brought on by fiscal carelessness.
 
Before that, though, was this very adequate pork-beet lunch which did travel onto his shirt due to the additional forgetting of the floppy thing for residue that is called a serviette. Then there were ash streaks from the post-prandial smoke that didn’t find the ashtray in time because he was watching a repeat of Natasha Kaplinsky on Who Do You Think You Are? He loved Natasha Kaplinsky. She was his favourite newsreader, always so well dressed and neat, always well powdered and matt. He’d missed her when she’d left ITN, had watched her on Strictly, Have I Got News for You, wherever she popped up, it was a shame she’d chosen to prioritise her family now but he understood that she probably had lots of ironing and washing to do while her husband was at work. Right in the middle of the show, annoy­ingly, sending more ash onto his trousers as it made him jump, the phone rang. Why did it ring at the most inconvenient moments, when he was busy? Why couldn’t the world just leave him alone to enjoy the freedom of his retirement earned over more than fifty years of solid work, dutiful family-providing-for, tax-paying and pension contributions?
 
“Hello?” he shouted.
 
“Hi, Dad, it’s Adel.”
 
“Who?”
 
“Adel,” she said more slowly, though still sounding rushed. A boat sailed in displaying her haecceity: eldest, visits too much, bit of a nag, eats meat (he thinks).
 
“Ah right,” he said.
 
“Don’t forget the carers are coming at five. And remember the dinners in the fridge in the foil. Just put one straight in the oven, no need to take off the foil, and don’t forget to turn off the oven afterwards. Did you have one last night?”
 
“I’ve had a pork pie,” he said.
 
“When, last night?”
 
“No just now!”
 
“Did you have one of the foil dinners last night? Oh it doesn’t matter, I’ve got to go, I’m still at work. Carers at five, ok? They’ll help you with the dinner. Just show them it, in the fridge, in the foil. I’ll come round tomorrow.”
 
He would like to say it would be all right if she damn well didn’t come round tomorrow, seeing as the carers, those pointless people, were coming today and that would be too much visiting, he preferred it when they were more widely staggered, but he didn’t want to be rude, she was doing what she thought she was supposed to do. Actually Cornelius had envisaged his old age in a home, sitting in a large lounge with light falling in and the other aged around him knitting, watching, waiting, drooling and playing draughts, but when it came to it the thought had seemed unattractive. What about his clocks? Where would he put them? The house was moulded around him. It was the shape of him. Moving somewhere else would be like trying to pour himself into another shape and at his time of life he lacked the liquidity to be poured. He would have to die here and that was fine with him. He just wished people didn’t feel it was their responsibility to manage him and bother.
 
That was the reason, he remembered, for scheduling the tax call for four o’clock, to catch the afternoon lull before the busy lead-up to closing time and because the carers were coming at five (also stated on a post-it). He enjoyed the last few minutes of Natasha, and with infallible timing the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed four, a loud, reverberating gong, singing the hours, which after years of hearing he often easily slept through unless there was some appointment to keep that his subconscious was alert to. Likewise in the kitchen went the cuckoo. He tipped his ash, drained his stone-cold tea and picked up the phone with a quiver-prone beet-stained hand. The call was answered by a machine parading as a human, offering a list of options. Cornelius pressed two. No he did not want to take part in the questionnaire about his experience of calling HMRC.
 
“Ok. If you’re contacting us following a death and you want to know what you need to do, press one. If you’re calling about probate, confirmation, the online estate report, or inheritance tax, press two. For taxable trusts, press three. For non-taxable trusts, press four.”
 
Cornelius pressed two.
 
“Now. If you’ve already sent a probate or confirmation appli­cation and want to check the progress, press one. For help with the probate or confirmation process, the online estate report, or Forms IHT205, PA1 or C5, press two. If you’re calling to find out if we have issued Form IHT421, Probate Summary, or Cer­tificate for Confirmation, press three. If you need help with Form IHT400, press four. If you’ve sent in an Inheritance Tax form and are calling for an update, press five. Or for anything else, press six.”
 
Cornelius pressed five while muttering expletives.
 
“Just so you know, once we have received your form or request, it can take up to twenty-five working days for you to receive our response. Now, if you’ve been waiting longer than twenty-five working days, please hold to speak to an advisor.” Information followed on the routine recording of calls and the handling of personal data. Then some classical music, during which Cornelius lit another cigarette, having stubbed out the last one on the plate instead of the ashtray. The voice apologised for not yet answering his call and told him he was in a queue. In the midst of more music, and more high-octane swearing on his part, he began to suspect that option five was an empty office. It was the place for people with queries lacking in urgency and specificity, who therefore did not deserve to be answered. He slammed down the handset, resolving to try again tomorrow at 10:45. The post-it was amended accordingly.
 
They were strangers, these women who arrived at five, with their sandals and computer phones and cardigans around their waists and facial shine. Doreen and Emma, what did it matter there would be no boats. He wasn’t even sure he hadn’t met them before, they were interchangeable, he never settled on any of them with one eye. What right did they have to come in here and ask questions about his menu and domestic movements and tut at his ashtrays and empty his dustbins? Did they know him, who he was and where he had been? Did they know that he had served in the military ambulance during World War II and lost his brother whose name he just could not for the life of him remember which pained him, and that his father had fought in the first war and come back to Dewsbury crippled and partially blind in one eye but had never let that impede his horology? Did they know that Alice his wife whose name he could however always seem to remember which also pained him was still insisting on her new life in Kilburn when it was her duty according to their vows to accompany him on his journey to the final eclipse, and that he would much rather have her arranging his menu than these externals, these flat-eyed, borough-borrowed stand-ins from a town hall? Every fortnight or so he still telephoned Alice to tell her to come home, to end her sulky sojourn in Kilburn and return to Kingsbury, to reign with him in their empty castle, for wasn’t now, in the cave of old age, the calling of marriage? To warm and shield each other from storms, infla­tion and loneliness? But she always refused, saying she couldn’t live with him anymore, “we visit each other sometimes,” “we keep in touch,” as if that was enough, as if that was fair.