Napoleon's Roads
“If it was to avoid anything then it was to avoid everything, but he wouldn’t have said that.
The cellar had always been there, the idea of it. An openness under the house. A cool, dark space, with the damp earthen smell of a cave. Some sort of presence, or unconsciousness, and if you listened closely enough – as he had discovered the first time, clambering in through the hole under the veranda – the faint sound of trickling water. It had been precarious, that first time, climbing down, not know...ing where to put his feet, only the thin blade of torchlight bouncing about: down the face of a granite boulder into the sea of broken bricks and rubble that turned out, as best he could understand it, to be the remains of the house that had been there before, collapsed into its foundations to save the cost of carting it away, so that there was no knowing, until you removed it, how deep was the hole really.
It was this that had intrigued him and played on his mind, a sort of deferred planless plan to one day find out how deep it was and make a cellar, to store wine or use as a darkroom, or just as a place to put away the kinds of things that one puts away in the dark underneath, old bassinettes and wooden-barred cots and tricycles and trainer-bikes and steamer trunks full of old uniforms, not that, as it had turned out, there had been children, or uniforms.MoreLess
The cellar had always been there, the idea of it. An openness under the house. A cool, dark space, with the damp earthen smell of a cave. Some sort of presence, or unconsciousness, and if you listened closely enough – as he had discovered the first time, clambering in through the hole under the veranda – the faint sound of trickling water. It had been precarious, that first time, climbing down, not know...ing where to put his feet, only the thin blade of torchlight bouncing about: down the face of a granite boulder into the sea of broken bricks and rubble that turned out, as best he could understand it, to be the remains of the house that had been there before, collapsed into its foundations to save the cost of carting it away, so that there was no knowing, until you removed it, how deep was the hole really.
It was this that had intrigued him and played on his mind, a sort of deferred planless plan to one day find out how deep it was and make a cellar, to store wine or use as a darkroom, or just as a place to put away the kinds of things that one puts away in the dark underneath, old bassinettes and wooden-barred cots and tricycles and trainer-bikes and steamer trunks full of old uniforms, not that, as it had turned out, there had been children, or uniforms.MoreLess
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