The Attic in Kate Morton's Homecoming: A Symbol of Buried Family Secrets
The Attic as a Physical Space
The attic at Darling House is the top-floor room of Nora Turner-Bridges's Sydney home in Vaucluse. It is a peak-roofed space with a dormer window overlooking the garden and harbor, a round carpet on raw pine floorboards, and an old ship's clock stopped at twenty past two. Its contents are a jumble of family accumulation: once-treasured toys, plastic tubs of fabric remnants, old schoolbooks, and a steamer trunk that belonged to Nora's brother Thomas. Behind a bookcase on one wall, however, lies a concealed doorway leading to a small storeroom—and inside that storeroom, a traveling case stenciled with the name Mlle Amélie F. Pinot, the inheritance of Isabel Turner from her French mother.
A Forbidden Space
From the moment Jess arrives at Darling House as a ten-year-old, Nora grants her free run of the house—except the attic. Nora's stated reason is safety: the stairs are rickety, the space is dangerous. But the novel makes clear that Nora nursed other reasons for keeping her curious granddaughter away. The attic is the one room Nora herself avoids; her fall near the attic stairs on the nurse's afternoon off is what precipitates the entire present-day narrative. The fact that Nora, who never used those stairs, was found near them is the first clue that something in the attic had drawn her there.
The prohibition creates the attic's symbolic charge. For young Jess, the forbidden room becomes an object of fascination—and, once she discovers she can enter it without consequence, a refuge. She spends half her adolescence there, curling up on the round carpet when school goes wrong, when she argues with a friend, when she needs to be alone. The attic is where she goes to recover after Polly leaves her behind. The irony is pointed: the space Nora designed as off-limits becomes the child's sanctuary, precisely because it is the one place in the house that feels like her own.
The Attic as Archive
When adult Jess returns to Darling House after Nora's fall, she finds the attic exactly as she remembers it—the rug, the mottled glass of the dormer window, the stopped clock. This stability is itself meaningful. The attic is a time capsule, a place where the past is preserved rather than processed. Its contents are not curated; they are accumulated. Thomas Turner's steamer trunk sits alongside Jess's old schoolbooks and Polly's childhood toys. The attic holds the family's material history without discrimination, mixing the significant with the mundane.
Nora's own comment about Thomas's trunk—that it is extraordinary a human life can be reduced to a container that size—frames the attic as a mausoleum of sorts. It is where lives are reduced, condensed, stored. The attic does not tell stories; it holds objects that might tell them, if anyone knew how to read them.
The Hidden Storeroom and the Traveling Case
The novel's central revelation hinges on the attic's most secret feature: the bookcase that conceals a doorway to a small storeroom, and the traveling case within it. Nora's will contains a specific instruction: Jess is to retrieve the case and destroy it without opening it. The request is striking in its insistence on privacy—the will argues that everyone is allowed personal matters and that the right to privacy continues after death.
Jess disobeys. She has just learned that Nora kept an enormous secret from both her and Polly, and she reasons that the case belongs to Polly's birth mother, not to Nora. The decision to open the lid is framed as a consequence of Nora's own secrecy: had Jess not heard the recorded confession, she might have followed instructions. But the deception has changed the terms of trust.
Inside the case, Jess finds a family shrine: Evie's handwritten nature book, piano sheet music, posters of John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald, a saxophone, a cricket ball signed by Donald Bradman, a knitted baby jacket, netsuke sculptures, and the shattered pieces of Isabel's teacup. At the bottom lies Isabel Turner's 1959 journal—and, hidden at the back, the loose pages that Daniel Miller had noted as missing. These pages reveal Isabel's affair with a married man, Henrik Drumming, his fathering of her baby, and her plan to return to England with her children. Jess realizes Nora tore out the pages and kept them to conceal the affair from Miller—and, later, from everyone else.
The Attic's Shifting Meaning
The attic's symbolic weight shifts across the novel's timeline. For young Jess, it is a forbidden space that becomes a refuge—a place of safety precisely because it is off-limits. For Nora, it is a vault: the place where she stores what she cannot destroy and cannot reveal. Her fatal fall is the past literally reaching out to claim her; she dies because she tried to climb to the attic to retrieve or destroy the pages after Marcus Summers's letter reopened the wound.
For adult Jess, the attic is first an investigative site—she searches it thoroughly, checking the steamer trunk, the books, the toys, the storage tubs, finding nothing—and then a site of revelation. The hidden storeroom and the traveling case transform the attic from a jumble of family debris into a deliberate archive of secrets. The case is not accidental accumulation; it is a curated collection, packed by Nora herself in the aftermath of the 1959 tragedy, as she walked through the rooms of Halcyon selecting the objects that mattered most to her nieces, nephew, and sister-in-law.
The attic thus becomes the novel's central image of the buried past: the past is not gone, merely stored, and it retains the power to injure anyone who tries to access it—or to protect it.
Character and Theme Connections
The attic binds the novel's major characters. Nora is its gatekeeper, the one who forbids entry, hides the case, and dies trying to reach it. Jess is the curious inheritor who defies the prohibition and opens what she was told to destroy. Isabel is the absent presence whose journal and keepsakes fill the case—her voice, preserved in the attic, finally speaks across sixty years. Polly, too, is implicated: the knitted baby jacket was made for her, and the journal's revelations reshape her understanding of her own origins.
Thematically, the attic is the novel's most concentrated expression of intergenerational secrecy and its consequences. Nora's decision to hide the pages does not protect anyone; it creates a chain of deception that reaches into the present. The attic also speaks to memory, narrative, and the construction of truth: the journal is the raw material of truth, and Nora's removal of the pages is an act of narrative control. For Jess, the attic is bound up with identity and the search for origins—she discovers in the attic that she is not a Turner by blood, and that the story she was told about her family was incomplete. And the attic is the site where guilt, complicity, and the legacy of past actions become visible: Nora's guilt is written in the pages she tore out and the case she could not bring herself to destroy. The novel's exploration of maternal love and moral ambiguity also finds its spatial home in the attic, where Nora's protective impulses and her acts of concealment become indistinguishable.
Study Questions
1. Why does Nora forbid Jess from entering the attic, and what does the prohibition reveal about her character?
Nora's stated reason is safety—the stairs are rickety, the space is dangerous. But the novel makes clear that Nora nursed other reasons. The attic contains the traveling case with Isabel's journal and the torn-out pages revealing the affair. Nora's prohibition is an act of concealment disguised as concern. It reveals her as someone who believes she can control the past by controlling access to it—a belief that ultimately fails, since Jess enters the attic anyway and finds the case.
2. How does the attic function differently for Jess as a child and as an adult?
As a child, the attic is a forbidden space that becomes a refuge—the one place in the house that feels like her own, where she goes to be alone and to recover from disappointments. As an adult, it becomes an investigative site and then a site of revelation. The childhood refuge is revealed to have been a vault all along; the space that felt safe was holding the family's most dangerous secret.
3. What does the traveling case's contents reveal about Nora's relationship to the Turner family?
The case is a curated collection, packed by Nora after the 1959 tragedy. It contains the keepsakes of Isabel's children—Evie's book, Matilda's posters, the baby jacket knitted for Polly—along with Isabel's journal and the hidden pages. The care with which Nora selected and preserved these objects suggests deep attachment, even as her decision to hide the pages suggests a willingness to control the narrative. The case is both a shrine and a secret.
4. Why does Jess choose to open the case despite Nora's explicit instruction to destroy it?
Jess has just learned that Nora kept an enormous secret from both her and Polly—the recorded confession. She reasons that the case belongs to Polly's birth mother and her mother before that, and that Nora had no right to determine that such a precious inheritance should be destroyed. The decision is framed as a consequence of Nora's own secrecy: had Jess not heard the confession, she might have followed instructions. The act of opening the case is an act of defiance against the family's culture of concealment.