On the craziness of London’s property market
basement to the temp receptionist in Richard’s office, 27-year-old Zoe, who is struggling to survive in London while on the rebound from the break-up of a long-term relationship.
Eleanor soon begins to feel the house is not just unwelcoming but making her ill. She believes it is “rejecting her, like an unwelcome transplant”. She finds unnerving signs of a disturbed child having scrawled her name everywhere. Her own daughter suddenly bites her. She hears obscure but alarming things from the neighbours about the previous owners. One of the upstairs rooms is particularly spooky and oppressive. She becomes convinced the house is not just a “sick building” but haunted.
Richard remains outwardly optimistic, telling her: “Eleanor, it’s a Victorian house! People will have suffered, and grieved, and died, and had babies, and fallen in love — all in this house. All in any house we could possibly live in. It doesn’t mean anything.” So we all tell ourselves, moving into buildings whose pasts we do not know. Richard doesn’t believe in moods, let alone ghosts — and insists they haven’t got any money left to move again anyway. But he too is being affected, becoming stalkerish towards Zoe, who herself has begun to sleepwalk and suffer hallucinations.
The Upstairs Room is compulsively readable without being at all melodramatic or cheaply noir. MurrayBrowne commands a lucid and reasonable prose, just the way to conduct you unprotestingly into the midst of this deranging subject matter. She is sharply observant but never overwrites — and on the few occasions when she offers a plain simile it’s surprisingly funny as a result.
Zoe finds Richard’s advice not to get a mortgage “as useless as telling her not to buy a pony”, while Richard and Eleanor’s sex life becomes “a more reliable, comfortable kind of pleasure, like a cup of tea or a pasta bake”. Such cool writing looks easy. It’s not. Murray-Browne is an expert editor and it shows. She accomplishes the balancing act of making it seem plausible that the malaise in the house is caused not so much by the supernatural as by bad relationships and stressed London life, right up to the end of the book. Maybe that ending is a little weak but until that point The Upstairs Room is engrossing. A fine holiday read. Far from London.