The Housekeepers

Description

Trapped in every layer of wallpaper are the lives lived in this old house. The Housekeepers looks back at the lives of two women who, at a distance of sixty years and unknown to each other, find themselves, together, apart, shut up in the same house.
In 1955, nineteen-year-old, unhappily married Celia is one of the in-between generation, the inheritors of drab austerity in a world forever changed by war. Abi, who takes on the neglected Georgian house as a restoration project in 2015, is herself a beneficiary of the coming half-century of peace, prosperity and the Welfare State.
House prices are rising, she has choices, she loves her husband, life is good. And yet, convinced by a chaotic and unhappy childhood that things can only get worse, she worries over climate change, terrorist attack, mass migration, over-population, pollution, reality TV.
While the stories of the two women are told in counterpoint, at times converging, sometimes opposing, the third character in the mix is the old house itself. Like the still point in whirling time, over it’s two hundred year span it’s been witness to enormous flux and change, so that its rooms seem to echo with the voices of residents long passed as well as those to come.
Like our own insecure lease on this unpredictable planet, for Abi ‘home’ can be an unsettling, even a frightening place. To Celia it is the claustrophobic burrow where she hid her head that, as it appears, she now may never leave.
The Housekeepers is a tale of gothic horror, jokes, jeopardy and misdirection, as well as hope.