A Perfect Home (39 page)

‘I'm sorry, Claire. I'm so sorry.'

‘Hush,' she said, comforting him like she would one of the children. ‘Let's forget about the past.'

‘You will take me home won't you?'

‘I'll take you home, I promise. As soon as you get better and the builders have finished I'll take you home.'

Chapter Thirty-three

‘A beautiful antique mirror illuminates the space.'

Claire put up muslin in Emily Love's shop window so that no one could see what she was creating. She worked late into the night the day before New Year's Eve; it was well past midnight when she stood back to look at what she had done. She longed to see it from the front but she too would have to wait until the unveiling at the grand opening of the shop the following lunchtime.

Gareth had designed flyers which Brian and Elizabeth had distributed around the town and Claire had sent out press releases to local radio and the newspaper. A breakfast DJ had phoned up the day before to ask if she'd do a live telephone interview with him about the new shop and two papers had promised to run articles about it, one on the front page.

Claire had bought several bottles of champagne, made up jugs of elderflower cordial, hired champagne flutes, and filled little bowls with sweets. She bought five dozen plain cupcakes, iced them with pale pink icing, and Brian and Elizabeth piped white icing outlines of hearts on each one.

By midday a small crowd had gathered outside the shop.

‘How will they all fit in?' Elizabeth asked, peering down at the street through the upstairs window.

‘They'll just have to squash up,' said Claire as she smoothed down her new crepe dress and put on a bright red apron which Doris had embroidered specially with ‘Emily Love' and had put little hearts and daisies all round its hem.

‘Is it time to reveal the window?' Sally shouted up the stairs.

‘Yes,' Claire shouted back, slipping her feet into black suede heels. ‘Do it now so I can see the customers' reactions from up here and then open the door and I'll be straight down. Brian? Are you ready with the fizzy stuff?'

‘Yep, all ready to go down here,' Brian shouted back. ‘Oliver and Emily have the cakes on plates. Is Ben suitably restrained with you?'

‘I have him firmly by the hand,' shouted back Elizabeth, ‘make sure all sweets are above his eye level before we come down.'

‘Sally's taking the muslin off now.'

Claire and Elizabeth looked down as the crowd suddenly noticed the shop window. They could hear the
oohs
and
aahs
and exclamations of delight as Claire's creation appeared.

Dozens of little embroidered birds hung down from sparkling painted branches. Each branch was festooned with pale pink fairy lights while white-ribbon flowers delicately threaded their way amongst the lights; strings of lacy lavender hearts were suspended at either side of the display and white crochet bunting made a delicately pretty back drop to it all.

Claire ran down the stairs into the shop and was immediately greeted by enthusiastic customers giving their congratulations for her new shop and already picking things up off the shelves and queuing up in front of the till where Sally tried desperately to keep up with the sales.

‘It's never like this in the gallery,' she cried as the shopping frenzy started to peak.

Afterwards, as the last customers reluctantly dwindled away, Claire turned the sign on the door to closed. Sally let out a great whoop from behind the till.

‘You won't believe how much you've taken, Claire. This is fab. I'm definitely coming to work for you.'

‘Yes, oh, Sally, please do. You'd be fantastic, you could be shop manager.'

‘I've had enough experience working at Anna's gallery and by the time I've finished my course this summer I'll even be qualified to do it! We'll be a great team.'

‘Oh, Sally, I can't believe all this has really happened.'

Sally hugged her. ‘What a year you've had, like a bloody rollercoaster. Let's open another bottle of champagne and drink to the New Year and hope it's as successful but slightly less dramatic than the last one!'

Spring arrived in a burst of celandines along the hedgerows and daffodils swinging in large clumps beside the riverbank.

Brian and Elizabeth were long gone back to France. Claire was busy with orders and the shop. A large chain of department stores was asking for work and the original one in London wanted more and more.

As the air grew warmer and the days longer, Claire felt an exhilarating lightness inside. In the evenings the children played beside the river with their school friends, who often ended up coming back for tea in the flat. Claire loved the lively chaos and chatter, the requests for hot chocolate and her home-made flapjacks.

In the mornings she could walk Emily and Oliver to school in a matter of minutes – no more mad rushes down country lanes. No more late marks in Mrs Wenham's
Tardy Parent
book. Ben's nursery was just around the corner, and Claire enjoyed the bustle of the high street around her and the friendly gossip of her neighbours and the other shopkeepers.

Every few days she drove back to the house to see how the work was progressing. She had been amazed how quickly it all seemed to be reappearing, as if by magic, in front of her eyes. Soon the thatched roof would be finished; already the house had regained its reproachful expression as the thatcher neatly cut the willow around the windows. The porch had been rebuilt and as Claire pulled up on the drive on the first hot afternoon they had had in May she noted a haze of colour around it. The roses were in bloom. Despite the fire and smoke they had survived to flower again. The sight filled Claire with optimism.

‘Come and see the living room,' said Neville Brady loudly so that she could hear him over the cacophony of hammering and chiselling coming from the house. He handed her a hard yellow hat to wear and held out the copy of
Idyllic Homes
. ‘Look, I think the floor looks just the same and we've got the width of the lintel over the fireplace exactly right.' He walked over to the French windows. ‘The window panes are a slightly different proportion in these doors but the joiner and I think it actually works better.' Claire nodded, trying not to remember how she'd dragged William's inert body through the fire months before. ‘The conservatory is being delivered next week so soon it should start to look like its old self at the back as well as the front. After that we'll have you back in here in no time at all.'

Every weekend Claire and the children visited William. He was walking now and would soon be well enough to leave the hospital. Claire dreaded the idea of having to visit him at his mother's house.

‘Not much longer till the house is ready now,' she said as she sat beside him in the garden of the hospital, watching the children playing underneath the willow tree on the lawn. ‘Neville Brady seems to think just a few weeks, six at the most.'

William nodded briefly, his face as immobile as a statue. She wondered if he was suffering from depression; it wouldn't be surprising; he'd been through major trauma in so many ways.

‘The shop's doing really well,' she said trying to sound cheery, ‘and the girls are really busy with the orders I'm getting now. Three orders from America this week and a gift shop in Berlin has asked to see some samples.' She wondered if William was listening. ‘I want to keep the shop after we move back into the house.' She looked at his face, searching for a reaction. ‘Emily Love is making a good profit now. You know, if you don't want to go back to work for a while, I think we'd manage.' She took his hand in hers and felt relieved when his fingers curled round hers and he held her hand back.

‘We're going to be all right,' she told him. ‘When we get back to the house we'll sort everything out and start again.'

William turned to her, his eyes searching her face.

‘I'd like that,' he said. ‘I'd like to try to start again.' His hand squeezed hers. ‘I've had a lot of time to think while I've been lying on my back for months. I can see I made a lot of mistakes in the past, Claire.' It was Claire's turn to be still and silent, waiting to see what he had to say. ‘I took you for granted,' he went on. ‘I thought you'd always be there and that I never needed to worry about your needs. I thought the house and children would be enough to keep you happy and that my job was to make a home for us all to live in. I didn't realise you'd become so lonely.' Claire remained silent. ‘I can see now that I didn't spend enough time with you or the children. I know that often when I came home from work I'd be grumpy with you. I'd expect my dinner on the table. I'd expect a clean house, clean clothes, and well-behaved children. I think I can see now why you might have been unhappy. I don't know how I got to be the sort of husband I'd become. I was so excited when we first moved to the house together. Do you remember how we'd make toasted sandwiches every night and then start doing work on the house together?' Claire nodded. ‘At the time I thought I'd never been so happy, we had a dream and we were making it happen together and then you got pregnant and that was great, we weren't just doing the house for us, we were doing it for our children too.'

‘I remember how excited you were,' said Claire. ‘You wanted to start on the nursery as soon as we got home for my first scan.'

‘I wanted to make the most wonderful house in the world for my family.' He stopped and watched Oliver racing across the grass in front of them; Emily and Ben were following, laughing as they tried to catch him. ‘And then the boys were born,' William's voice became quieter. ‘That was such an awful time, Claire. I thought I was going to lose you all. The boys were so tiny in those incubators and you were so ill in the beginning too, and do you know what I thought?'

‘What?'

‘I thought it was all my fault.'

‘How?'

‘I thought I'd made you do too much, made you push too many wheelbarrows around, helped me carry too many planks of wood, lift rocks, hack at plaster –'

‘I wasn't doing those sorts of things when I was pregnant. I was on to painting window frames and sanding down the front door by then.'

‘Even then I thought maybe the paint fumes or the floor varnish had done you harm.'

‘Why didn't you tell me this before? I could have told you it was nonsense. None of that contributed to having the babies so early; don't you remember what the doctors said? If you'd talked to me about this I could have made you realise it was nothing to do with you or the house.'

‘I just tried to push those thoughts away and then Jack died and you became so sad and so wrapped up in looking after Oliver I couldn't talk to you, you didn't want me to.' Claire looked at William and realised his eyes were wet with tears. ‘I didn't know what to do. I felt powerless to help you. All I could do was carry on with the house, try to make it as lovely as possible to try to make you happy again but somewhere along the line I must have got it all wrong and then you –' his voice trailed away and the tears were pouring down his cheeks. Claire got up and crouched down in front of him.

‘It's all right,' she stroked his face. ‘That's all in the past.'

‘But the fire?' His eyes looked into hers and anxiety swept across his face. ‘You know it was an accident, don't you, Claire? You know I'd never have done anything to destroy our house like that, to put our children's lives at risk?'

Claire didn't reply.

‘Tell me you know it was an accident, Claire. I need you to tell me that.'

‘Yes,' she said after few moments. ‘It was just an accident. Like the fire officer said, a log falling from the fire place, it was no one's fault. These things happen and it was just unfortunate it happened to us.'

Chapter Thirty-four

‘Where the heart is …'

At the end of May, Claire took the children to France to visit Elizabeth and Brian. It corresponded with William's move from the spinal unit to his parents'; Claire felt relieved that she could put off visiting his mother's house for another week. She wondered if his mother had ever told him of their encounter before Christmas. Somehow she doubted that she had.

After the longest journey Claire had ever done without William to share the driving, they finally arrived. At the end of a rutted concrete drive the flat, yellow house glowed warmly in the sun; faded green shutters were closed at the windows to protect it from the heat of the Dordogne summer. There seemed to be no one about. Claire and the children unfurled themselves from the car and the large house welcomed them into its cool, quiet interior. The ancient walls and limestone floors soothed her as soon as she walked in. Suddenly a heavy oak door opened and a beaming Brian and Elizabeth and a barking Buster tumbled into the hallway in a rush to greet them.

‘We weren't expecting you so soon,' Elizabeth cried, flinging her arms around her daughter.

‘We were in the kitchen preparing a feast for you,' said Brian, wiping his hands on a stripy apron before giving Claire a kiss and ruffling the children's hair.

‘What a treat to have you here at last,' Elizabeth said, as she led them into a huge kitchen, lined with pine cabinets and glass-fronted cupboards. Rustic pottery and copper saucepans were piled on the shelves and bunches of dried herbs hung from hooks on the walls. The most wonderful smell emanated from a huge cast-iron range; Brian took up position in front of it, stirring the bubbling pan of venison stew.

It felt good to be back in her mother and Brian's easy company again. They insisted on Claire resting in the garden with white wine while Brian brought in the bags and Elizabeth showed the children all the special hidden places in the house with Buster following, his thick tail wagging in a frenzy of delight.

On her first morning, waking up in a wrought iron bed under a crisp white quilt, Claire felt as though she'd had the best night's sleep she'd had since the fire.