The best thing I’ve seen through a lighted window while passing by as night fell was a naked woman playing the harp. It was a modest room, the ground floor of a squat block of flats, and the room contained a dining table upon which stood an iced cake, half eaten, and this woman – voluptuous, brown hair, straddling her instrument. The light was pink. It was theatre.
Of course, every glimpse through a window at night is a little spectacular in its own way. Spectacular, dramatic and intimate, sometimes horribly so. Walking home from work in January you must note and temper your voyeurism, or else find yourself gawping creepily at a neighbour straining pasta before he violently closes his blinds. But then, sometimes they’re asking for it, and I mean this in the gentlest way.
In the Netherlands, most people don’t have curtains, let alone shut them. The reasons for this are debated – it’s partly due to taste and minimalist aesthetics, partly due to a hangover from Calvinism, which insists that honest citizens have nothing to hide. It’s also (a Dutch acquaintance tells me, proudly) that they just like being looked at.
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I appreciate it. There are few things more pleasing on a winter’s night than walking down a street of houses lit up from the inside, the feeling of secondhand warmth, the window like an abstract radiator, a silent scene being played out on a kitchen stage in the brief space between a public and private life.
You feel, don’t you, fleetingly connected to the person you see cooking their tea, folding their laundry, watching Pointless on their blanketed sofa – it’s the only time you will spend with strangers doing these most mundane of domestic activities. Usually, you only witness such moments with the people you know best, the people whose cereal you share, whose mothers you see at Christmas. And I appreciate it too because, gasp, I am an open-curtained person myself.
My house has large bay windows at the front, in the room where my family spends almost all our time, cooking, eating, bickering. Here is where the homework is dragged out on our scratched glass dining table. Here is where the breakfasts are mauled. As evening approaches, I become aware that our three lamps seem brighter against the wet black street beyond. A meagre olive tree makes up the front garden, and beyond that is a gate pillar upon which our cat sluts herself out to passing neighbours, who gaze squinting into our framed little life.
Increasingly, I’m choosing to keep the curtains open until we go upstairs to bed. Call this ‘giving something back to the community’, a gift to people walking their dogs at night; call it lazy exhibitionism – what it does, beyond offering a peek to strangers, is force me to be my best.
They can’t see everything through the window, but when I become aware of people passing, I want to make sure that what they do see is a flake of life lived well. In this hushed half hour, as strangers straggle home from the station, I make sure the candlelight on our mantelpiece hits just so, that we are laughing, that the illusion of a perfect family lands, if only for a second. And the beauty of the thing is, I catch a reflection in the glass, and almost believe it too.
