It wasn’t in keeping with their plans for the place at all. Months and months of strenuous decor had turned the rest of the pre-nineteenth century hand-me-down home into something clean, streamlined and modern. No awkward corners, no low mantles where scullery maids once paused to whisper furtively, no more pencil marks, smudged and forgotten, on the back of a door, marking the height of some long matured son or daughter.
Minimalist, the word they banded around at the ‘right kind’ of parties, while the neighbours peeked through the dusty windows and thought bleak. The icy white paint was a couple of shades too cold, the stripped back walls causing them to rub imaginary goosebumps from their skin. There was something skeletal about it.
This room had been left to last, purposefully of course. It couldn’t be seen from the windows, and they’d kept it locked, for fear of giving the wrong impression to some marauding dinner guest. At last, however, the transformation had begun.
They’d set out with aplomb, and a tantalising drive for completion, that would have concerned even the most efficient expert in the field. There was abandon in his destruction of the antique dresser, now dismembered at the bottom of a skip. She had fragmented the ageing china they had found within, creating an impossible jigsaw, an irrevocable porcelain mosaic. They had decimated a dusty old desk, overlooking the seal on its base speaking of true value. They’d splintered masterpieces and, in their haste, crushed crystal that had once served refreshments to royalty.
But they hadn’t counted on this. On one stubborn wall.
Manual tools had failed, as had the steam stripper that boasted speed and success. Peeling and scraping and scrubbing repeatedly had got them nowhere. And it seemed like the rich brown wallpaper, with it’s regal and yet unassuming gold leaf, was taunting them with its persistence, its enthusiastic refusal to budge. You would have called it magnificent, breathless at the sense of depth and movement its design communicated. You would have marvelled at the texture, reaching out as if to find comfort from its welcoming warmth. You would have questioned their obsession with removal.
And when they gave up on removal, you would question their purchase of the cheap white paint, the kind that comes in large quantity but with only watery quality, where one coat hardly shows at all. They slapped it on, layer after layer, longing for the safety of cool, sheer space. And the wall fought back. Small golden blooms blinked through the weak milky glaze, the rich chocolate hues glowed undaunted. Six, seven coats, and it shone through brighter than ever. Eight, nine and they gave up, despondent.
They walked out of the room and shut the door behind them, missing the shaft of sunlight streaming through the side window, shining straight onto the wall and bringing its colours to life.
