The Room Upstairs [antikvár]

ONE The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass, and levels everything neatly down again. In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them. When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble ±eir assault on Cape Cod, hills were levelled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship's rail. Because there is nothing to see, nobody looks, and there are habitual travellers on this road who have never noticed the yellow wooden house marooned there in the grass below the embankment. In the lush months, its ancient trees screen it mercifully from the summer cars that go by, zip, zip, zip, fifty a minute. It is only in the autumn, when the traffic thins that the house begins to appear. The oaks reveal one gable. Next week, another. A window heliographing the sun. The sentrybox side porch, as the copper beech begins to lose its claret leaves. By December, the old house stands nakedly, the broad meadow carpeting the hill behind, furnished with great trees, dark with winter firs. Anachronistic stretch of rolling parkland in a township where people with an acre's garden call it an estate. The traveller who sees both the house and the high red barn . i