The House That Made Us | Alice Cavanagh

By Allison Hay

Read an exclusive extract from The House That Made Us, a heart-breaking novel of love and life from Alice Cavanagh…

This poignant love story is inspired by true events.

When Mac and Marie marry, Mac takes a snap of them outside their newbuild bungalow, the garden bare and the paint on the front door still wet. It becomes a tradition, this snap, and slowly the photographs build into an album the tells the story of a fifty-year relationship.

Every year the photograph captures the changes around them – the garden, the fashions, their appearance – but the one constant is their love. But life never travels the path you expect it to, though they know that a life with love is a life lived to the full.

Now, in the present day, the photo album belongs to someone who doesn’t know the people in its pages. As they watch the lives from the past unfold, will the truth of their love story be told?

A heart-breaking story for readers who love the work of Holly Miller, Jojo Moyes and Hazel Prior.

About the Author

Alice Cavanagh lives in London and comes from an Irish family. She is a romantic at heart and when not writing loves spending time with her family and her dogs.

Read on for an extract from Chapter 1 of The House That Made Us

Tuesday again.

He drives across the flyover and out of the city, onto wider roads. Parking up on the tarmac, scooping the flowers in their cellophane from the back seat, he passes through the wide double doors. Fighting, all the while, the droop of his shoulders.

He finds her in her usual spot, among the high-backed chairs in the pastel rec room. He searches her face for clues to today’s mood before she sees him.

‘All right?’ He bends to kiss her cheek, as usual. He puts the flowers down.

‘Look!’ She is alight today. Her eyes shine. Years fall away from her gentle, lined face. ‘I found this.’

He takes it, turns it over in his hands. ‘A photo album.’ It is the old-fashioned variety, stiff dark pages, the photographs held down by sticky white corners. It’s shoddily bound in dated brown and orange wallpaper. ‘Who does it
belong to?’

‘I’ve asked around and nobody seems to know. That care assistant I like, Blondie, said I can keep it unless somebody turns up and objects.’

He reads the handwritten label on the front. ‘Sunnyside – a love story’.

‘But whose love story, eh?’ She blazes with curiosity.

This is unusual. She has been fading, like a dropped flower, for the past few weeks. ‘Shall we find out?’

‘I hoped you’d say that.’

‘First,’ he says. ‘The all-important cuppa.’

He knows just how she likes it, and he knows better than to bring it with anything other than a modest Stonehenge of Custard Creams. He sets them down within her reach, and begins, awkwardly, ‘Actually, there’s something I have to tell you.’ He has rehearsed. He didn’t expect to be derailed by a photograph album. ‘You may not like it, but just hear me out and —’

‘It’s like a biography,’ she says, caressing the album. ‘Of ordinary people.’

He gives up. He’ll tell her next time. ‘No such thing’, he says, ‘as ordinary people.’

‘How about we look at one photo each time you visit?’ She frowns, seized by a dark thought. ‘You will come again, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’ He is accustomed to this question. ‘Every week, regular as clockwork. Promise. Come on, let’s see the first snap.’

She holds the album open. Above a small, blurred black and white photograph, in the same expressive hand, someone has inscribed, ‘29 July 1970 – Happiest day of our lives!!!’

‘Almost fifty years ago,’ he murmurs, aware that she lives in a permanent now.

‘A right pair of giddy goats, they are. Is that a wedding dress? It’s so short. Not sure she has the legs for it. That must be their house. Just a plain little box, really. The chap looks proud as punch, though. Of her, do you think? Or of the house?’

‘Both?’ He hasn’t seen her so engaged for weeks. ‘Looks as if he hasn’t a clue what to do with either of them.’

‘He’s making a right hash of carrying the poor girl over the threshold. Oh, look, there’s a nameplate by the door. Can you make out what the funny little house is called?’

‘Sunnyside,’ he says.

‘Sunnyside!’ giggled Marie. ‘The perfect name for our new nest.’ She bounced up and down, manhandled by her new husband as he tried to balance her in his arms and fumble the key into the door.

He dropped her, of course, and she was on her hands and knees on fresh concrete, her veil over her face. ‘Jaysus, Mac!’

She giggled some more as he hoisted her up into his arms again and dusted her down. ‘Don’t look so stricken.’ Her accent, warm and wicked, was as Irish as her fiery hair and her dot-to-dot freckles. ‘I’m grand, I’m grand.’ She kissed him, and they were both still.

This is it, thought Mac. This really is it. That morning they’d woken up as Ian Mactavish and Marie Neeson; now they were Mr and Mrs Mactavish. She’s mine, he thought, and the idea was like a balloon in his chest that would never stop inflating. And I’m hers.

Hardly anyone called Ian by his first name. He was Mac to all, and now he had a Mrs Mac. He swept her into his arms once more. ‘Got to carry you over the threshold, love.’

‘We should take a pic!’

‘Would you mind…’ Mac, bandy-legged with the effort of carrying Marie, held out his Kodak Brownie to the man who had emerged from the next house.

‘You the new people?’ Next Door – he was instantly christened and his name never changed – was small and sour, with the look of a well-squeezed lemon. ‘I watched them throw up those new houses. First puff of wind’ll take that down.’

He looked up at his own place, a holier-than-thou Victorian bristling with detail.

Staggering a little, Mac looked up at the house he had scrimped and saved to afford. It was a white cube, one of three Johnny-come-latelys added to the long terrace of handsome brick semis. The plain door was white. The narrow window frames were white. The garden was a grey slab with a crack here and there but no greenery. It lacked a gate.

‘We love it,’ he said defiantly.

Can’t wait to read it? You can win a copy here!

The House That Made Us by Alice Cavanagh launches on January 19 (Simon & Schuster, £8.99) – and we’ve 10 copies to give away to luck readers here! It’s so easy to enter!

Good luck!