Short story · 4 min read · Set in Pinfold Lane ·
The House Name That Outlives It
The decorator hired to strip a painted house name off a bay window finds the same lettering under every coat of repaint, seven layers deep, and takes on a booking for a coat that has not been scheduled by anyone.
The house at the bend of Pinfold Lane is called Wrenfield. The name is painted on the frosted pane of the bay window, in a serif hand the width of a thumb, and it has been painted there longer than anyone on the lane can put a date to. Houses on the lane get repainted on a rota the council keeps; the rota does not mention the name, only the woodwork and the render, but the decorators have always worked around it, masking the letters off rather than stripping them, the way you work around a leaded light you are not insured to touch.
Derek Pym is the decorator who took the autumn booking. He is a careful man, and after thirty years on the lane he is the one they call when a job has history in it. This time the owner had asked for the name to be stripped back and redone fresh, because the paint had gone cloudy and the W had begun to read as two V's joined at the shoulder, which the owner's mother had reportedly objected to for years.
Stripping a painted pane is patient work. Derek started on the 14th with the heat gun and a blade, meaning to go down to bare glass and letter the name again from his own book of patterns. What he found, coat by coat, was that there was no bare glass to go down to. Under the cloudy layer was another coat of the same lettering, the same grey-green, the same hand, the strokes landing in the same places so that the edges sat inside each other like the rings of a tree. Under that, another. He counted seven off on the back of his invoice pad as he went, in pencil, the wafers of paint coming away in scales thin enough to read through.
He kept the scales. By the fifth day he had them laid out on the tailboard of his van in order, and he showed the owner, a Mrs Aldous, who looked at them for a while and said they were very uniform for forty years of repaints, because uniform was the word she had been taught to use about paint. She asked whether the deeper layers were older, or better, and Derek said they were not older, exactly. They were due. That was the difference he could not put plainly. The top coat came off like paint that had done its time. The sixth coat came off like paint that was waiting.
Under the seventh coat there was glass, and on the glass there was the lettering again.
That was as far as the 14th took him, and as far as the job went. He did not strip the eighth. He masked the letters off, painted the frames and the render, and lettered nothing, because there was nothing to letter: the name was legible through the mask when he peeled the tape, as clean as the day it was drawn, perhaps cleaner, the serif feet sharp in a way that made him think of a print pulled fresh rather than a sign gone grey. Mrs Aldous paid the invoice without a query. She said the house looked well. She did not ask what was under the mask, and Derek did not tell her, because he had decided that counting was his part of the work and telling was nobody's.
On his way home he checked his diary for the fortnight after. Under the entry for this job, on a line he had not written, in pencil that was his pencil and not his hand, there was a booking: Wrenfield, same address, the work described as coat six of eight. The pencil is his pencil because it is the one that lives behind his ear, and he has started keeping it in his breast pocket instead, pointedly. He has not rung Mrs Aldous to confirm. He told his wife over tea that the next coat was his choice, his entirely, and she said of course it was, and he did not book the fortnight, and the fortnight has stood empty since, unclaimed by any other work.
What he still counts on the tailboard, in fine weather, are the scales of paint, laid out in order, seven plus one. He has worked out the interval between coats and it is not years. It is decorators. The question he turns over, the one that has stopped him taking the lane's other jobs with history in them, is whose brush did the eighth coat on the pane, and whose hand kept the count of the coats before he was ever hired to keep one.