The Landing

[Short Story]

By Anita Desai

The moving company’s truck, emptied of its load, now turned around in the driveway,
using the single immense hemlock tree as the pole on which to turn, and went lumbering
down the dirt road on to the highway below, and slowly withdrew.
Then the silence began to ring in her ears. Louder and louder till it practically shrieked.
So she thought it best to turn too, and go into the house to see what distraction it could
provide from that insistent ring.
It was, after all, very new to her even though it was very old: 1743 was the date carved into
the beam over the entrance. But she had entered it newly and now had to learn every plank
and brick and beam in it, one by one till all became familiar and she could move about without
hesitation.
She paced the length of it and then the breadth, going from room to room. In one the floor
sloped, in others the boards creaked, and the height of the ceiling changed from high to low.
Some were well lit, others shadowy. They all belonged to her now, and she had to show them
she was mistress. She said to herself, ‘Hmm, I will put my desk here’ and ‘I will need some
shelves there’ but there was something hollow, not quite convinced about these intentions.
That was because she was growing increasingly aware that there was an opposition to these
intentions that was also growing, and that she was not in command of the house so much as
it was of her. By entering it, she had subjected herself to it.
When she recognized that, she shook a little, a small shiver running down her neck and
through her shoulders.
She had bought the house and established herself in it – but now it was projecting a
powerful suggestion that it was not so amenable to her purchase as she had imagined. She
had not asked for its consent, after all, and it struck her that the house was withholding it.
Of course this was absurd. How could the house, an inanimate object, possibly contain
feelings or make them apparent?
Reason would not support such an intuition, however strong. The house was inanimate,
surely; a thing of stone, brick, board and beam. Mortar and lath. Sheetrock and slate.

© Anita Desai 2007

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

1
 But there was also the air entering it through the windows. She had gone around opening
them while the men from the moving company unloaded their boxes and brought them in.
And it was these windows that let the air in – let it in, let it out, in, then out. It was not the
house breathing, she told herself. That was an illusion, she said, and continued to prowl
through the house she now owned.
Having learnt the dimensions of one floor, she grasped the banisters and went up the
stairs. They were wide and hollowed out at the centre, as one might expect: through the
years, many had climbed them and climbed down. Generations. The banisters provided
safety and reassurance: these stairs could take more.
It was the landing that invited pause. It was somehow, inexplicably, more than simply a
place to stop and catch one’s breath before proceeding. Evidently bare and empty, yet
strongly suggestive of more. She stopped to study the whitewashed walls and wondered if
there weren’t traces of openings that no longer existed and were covered over with plaster.
Some heavy timber beams entered those walls, then vanished. They suggested that once
they had led to, and supported, another space, perhaps a room that had once led off the
landing.
If so, it no longer existed – all was bricked up, plastered over and painted.
What was it concealing?
She was certain that the landing, comfortably large as it was, was reduced from a formerly
large space. She could not have said why but had the clear impression of another, yet
undetected chamber that had for some reason been closed off. Why?
Baffled, she continued up the stairs to the upper floor. This too she carefully paced,
measuring it with her stride. Here the ceiling was lower, the windows smaller, as were the
rooms. All in all, they gave an impression of greater intimacy and friendliness than the rooms
downstairs. What linked them to those places was of course the staircase – and the landing.
When she thought of how the landing separated and demarcated them, the image that
came to her was of a landing stage on a river, or lake, where such a structure marked a point
of transition between earth and water, one element and what was distinctly another.
Then there was the other landing, the long strip of tarmac trembling in an excess of light
and heat, on which planes landed and from which they took off; she thought of such a strip in
the middle of a forest, or plantation, or grassland – a kind of scar or scab marking the point of
departure and arrival.
This had never before been suggested to her by a house.
Perplexed, she went back downstairs – and found all the windows shut. She had not heard
them bang in the wind, and they were securely fastened.

© Anita Desai 2007

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

2
 Perhaps she had not opened them, after all, only thought she did. Surely that was the
explanation. It was not a good idea, she knew, to start imagining ghosts in the house, or
intruders.
Still, she went upstairs to check and found the windows that she was sure she had not
touched, now all open. Breathing the air in, breathing it out. Perhaps they had been open all
along.
It was both irritating and intimidating to find that her memory had begun to play tricks on
her. Entering the old house – 1743, was it not carved in the beam over the door? – she
herself had suddenly aged, with a failing memory, she told herself, and shook her head at the
absurdity of it all.
But perhaps it was just being entirely alone, in that ringing silence, that made her imagine
things. Hallucinate. She would have to take care.

As she might have foreseen, it was all even harder at night. Once darkness fell, she could
not look around and reassure herself of what was there and what was not. She could have
switched on lights and done so of course, for in place of the lanterns that must once have
hung from the hooks in the ceiling there were now electric lights. But she never turned on
more than one light at a time, and if she went from one room to the next, she turned off one
light as soon as she turned on another. To have all the lights on at once and have every room
blazing would have been a sign, a blatant show of panic. To light just one at a time was like
taking a candle from room to room. As she might have, would have, done in 1743.
In that way she lit the way up the stairs to bed. On the landing she paused again, to see if
the beams still gave that effect of going through the walls to another space, and if a bricked-
up opening could still be deciphered under the pale layer of plaster and whitewash. But there
was no light on the landing itself, only one at the bottom of the stairs and another at the top,
and it was too dimly lit for her to see such traces. The walls and the stairs were mute, giving
away nothing.
She had a bed upstairs – she had bought a few pieces of furniture along with the house:
this four-poster bed and a chest of drawers upstairs, a kitchen table downstairs, all too large
and heavy, obviously, for the previous owners to have removed and taken with them. Now
she made up the bed for the night, and changed into a nightgown she had brought up in a
valise. She put out the light and climbed into bed, actually glad for the darkness so that she
could not make out any details – whether the closet doors were open or shut, the ceiling low
or high – and perhaps they would no longer trouble her but allow the erasure of sleep.
She fell deeply into oblivion as if falling into a pit that had opened suddenly under her: she
was tired. But soon, suddenly, awoke. In that pitch darkness she had a strong, throbbing
© Anita Desai 2007
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

3
sense – like a pulse beating in her temple – that someone was standing at the foot of her bed,
watching her. She could distinctly hear it breathing, heavily and unevenly. It made no motion
at all and she herself felt paralysed, incapable of any. It took a sudden lightning flash of will –
Off! On! – to leap up and switch on a light.
The space revealed around her bed was empty of course. There was no one there. What
she had taken for somebody was one post of the four-poster bed, at the foot. That was what
had stood there, watching her. And it was her own breath, struggling to heave itself out of her
sleep, that she had heard and taken for another’s.
So she sat back on the edge of the bed, weak with foolishness. Then lay back and waited
for day.
When it appeared, almost imperceptibly, as a silent dissolving of darkness, she went
barefoot down the stairs to the landing. Here the presence – or intimation – of what had
existed before and no longer did had become strongest. It no longer was but had left a grey
and insubstantial after-image.
It could not be verified because there was no evidence of a door or window that might
once have opened on to an additional space. Yet here, at what was arguably the heart, or
centre, of the house, was the most powerful sense of what had once been the heart and
centre and still marked a transition that had been made – from earth to water, land to space,
night to day, life to death. That was what left behind an after-image, as a boat leaves a wake
in water, a plane a trail of vapour in the sky.
She passed her hands over the surface of the walls to see if she could detect what her
eyes could not: traces. Apart from her certainty that there was a chamber to which the
presence that had watched her sleep had withdrawn, there was no other clue.
Perplexed and frustrated, she went back up the stairs with nothing but a sense of absence
and bereavement.

When she went in to work, colleagues asked her, carelessly, as if not really interested in
her replies, if she was ‘settling in’. She kept her replies suitably brief and cryptic. Yes. She
was. Settling in.
Once she went to the water cooler for a drink because she had had such an urge to shout,
‘No! I’m not! Settling in!’ and to ask some of them – some of the nicer ones in the department
– to come and see for themselves. And an aged man who was something of a ghost of the
department – he had been there for so long that he had almost been forgotten – came out of
the hall to collect his hat and coat, looked at her briefly from under ashy eyebrows, and
asked, ‘Well, and how are you liking the house on the hill?’ She wondered if he had ever lived
there himself but she had never spoken to him before and could hardly start questioning him
© Anita Desai 2007
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

4
or inviting him to tea so that he could see for himself. That was what she might have done but
he was already shuffling off down the hall, head sunk between his shoulders like an aged
turtle. The house might have suited him, she thought as she collected her own coat from the
stand; perhaps he would have been more attuned to its message and vibrations and been
able to decipher them.
On returning to the house, she took a few moments to pace the grounds, looking at the
walls, eaves and roof from outside, studying them to see if there were traces of an extension
that might have existed. That could have provided an explanation of sorts of her suspicion
that there had been one and that, like an amputated limb, it lived on, making itself apparent in
her discomfort, her distress at its absence.
But all she saw was a tile coming loose, a ring of mossy green damp rising along the
foundation and a spattering of bird droppings across a windowpane, but no clue that might
give her direction for further search.
She turned to go in and suddenly a scattering of black rooks fell out of the hemlock tree
with an astonishing volume of sound – flapping of wings, ruffling of feathers, indignant caws –
and sat on the ground beneath the tree, trying to get back their balance, then stalked off
across the drive into the shrubs, complaining of her intrusion.
She watched them till they were gone and only the rustling in the shrubs betrayed their
passage. Gradually her own alarm subsided, and she went in and unpacked the groceries
she had bought onto the kitchen table and made herself a meal, determined to keep herself
occupied. It was the empty stretch of time and the empty space that night and darkness
hollowed out of the visible world that let out the presence that came to watch her, audibly
breathing, when she lay on the four-poster bed. She knew that, but it manifested what was
otherwise invisible.
She was not afraid. Oh no. It was only that, while she had imagined the house she had
bought and moved into to be vacant, it proved not to be so. There was this presence
occupying it – and eluding her.
It became a nightly ritual to get up and pad on bare feet down the stairs to the landing,
both to escape it and to confront it there.It was the landing, she knew, that the presence
inhabited. Slipped through its walls as if they were porous, curtains rather than walls – in and
out, in and out, like breath.
There was another chamber, she knew it, but when she touched the walls, they were just
that – solid, not porous, cool and smooth to her touch like a blank face turning upon her,
saying, ‘Did you want something?’

© Anita Desai 2007

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

5
 Because she so much wanted that meeting, that confrontation, she began to try to entice it
into the open – by setting a place for it at the table, by leaving a light on in a room she had
left, or by placing a chair across from the one she occupied.
She did not talk to it, not yet. She held back that final communication. Not because it was
too difficult, but because it would have been too easy. To talk to it would have been to
acknowledge it out loud – and she would not do that; it would too closely resemble defeat.
But when the voices of the rooks startled her out of sleep at daybreak, she wondered if it
was actually trying to talk to her in those harsh, jagged syllables. Perhaps it was making the
attempt to break through that final barrier that she could not bring herself to make.
She started staying at work later and later, pretending she had paperwork to deal with after
everyone else had gone. But the sense that it was waiting for her would grow steadily more
powerful and more irresistible. Besides, she would be tired and want her tea and want to be
home, by herself. Eventually she would give in, drive back and stride to the front door in a
rush – to find it shut but unlocked, making her question herself: surely she had locked it on
leaving? Or else find it double-locked when she was certain she had not done that – why
should she? Always the door yielded reluctantly to her push as if the air, the emptiness
behind it, were pushing back to keep her out.
This was too much – it was her house, after all. So she set down her bag and spoke to it,
finally. ‘I’m leaving.’
She did, at great expense and in great discomfort and, worst of all, a sense of acting
foolishly. It made her angry to have bought and moved into that house and angry at now
moving out. Her colleagues at work expressed surprise but also sympathy. The old man, who,
she now felt, had something malevolent in his lidded eyes, twinkled darkly at her, ‘Too lonely
up there, eh?’ and she very nearly snapped back, ‘On the contrary, not lonely enough,’ but
caught herself in time.
The wretchedness of the transition was increased by the fact that the alternative
accommodation she found was a set of small rooms above a row of shops in town. She chose
it because there was simply no room here for any presence other than hers. She filled it
completely with her furnishings and belongings. She could barely turn around among them.
When the heat of summer drummed down on the low roof over her head and beat at the vinyl
panel on the outside, it became suffocating.
Lying awake on the narrow couch – actually just a metal foldup contraption – she thought
of the big house on the hill, and the presence in it prowling from room to room, looking for her,
waiting for her. If she returned, would it emerge from its secret chamber and ask her into it at
last, in welcome?

© Anita Desai 2007

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.

6
 She turned on to her side and closed her eyes, imagining that welcome. She felt neither
triumphant nor relieved at having escaped its embrace; she only felt bereft at having
abandoned all possibility of it.
Just under her window, on the street, a lamp glowed with ferocious zeal; some insects
revolved around it in a rumbling drone while others hurled themselves at it with piercing
detonations. If she drew her curtains to shut out the demon light, the room became so
oppressive that she could not breathe.
She stood leaning out of the window, her palms pressed upon the sill, and waited for
someone, some presence, to appear, even if only a cat prowling by night. But there was no
one there at all. Till a car appeared, raucous with music and drunken voices. It slowed and
someone flung a bottle that smashed against the wall just under her window. The shards
burst outwards into the light, then showered down. There was laughter, a shouted expletive.
That was the message, for her. It left her trembling.
Eventually she returned to the house, as she knew she would, her small car laboriously
climbing the hill, seeming to remember the potholes and exposed rocks and roots, then
arriving with a sudden, inexpert swerve. She tried hard to think of what she would say to the
present owners if they saw her and came out to see what she wanted. Perhaps she could ask
for some object she had left behind the house by the woodpile, or some garden tools propped
up against the shed. Yes, she could do that.
What she had forgotten were the rooks, the way they yelled in alarm when she appeared
under their hemlock tree, tumbled out of it as if they were going to launch themselves into the
sky but fell to the ground instead and waddled away in their ungainly, lumbering way, darkly
muttering.
Other than them there was no one around, although the new occupants’ car was parked in
the open garage.
She stood there uncertainly, letting her eyes rove, waiting to see if anyone would come out
and talk to her. No one did. No one ever did. She had missed the meeting on the landing.
She returned to her car, turned it around the hemlock tree and slowly withdrew.

© Anita Desai 2007

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for
educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written
permission from the British Council.