Ashenden (43 page)

“Are you OK?” he said. “Honey, are you OK?”

More retching, and then he could hear her run to the bathroom.

“Think I’ve got a bug,” she said, when she eventually reappeared on his screen, some minutes later, looking if anything greener than before. “Don’t feel so good. Understatement.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Sorry. That was gross. Oh, God, the wastepaper basket’s fucked.”

“Don’t worry about the wastepaper basket. Do you have a temperature?”

She shook her head. “A little headache.”

“Tell Marisa you’re not coming in to the shop today.”

“I’ll see how I am.”

He understood her reluctance. Saturday was the shop’s busiest day. “Take it easy, OK? Promise me?”

“Promise.”

“You better go and lie down for a bit. I’ll Skype you later, round about eight your time?”

Rachel pushed the hair back from her face. “No, let’s talk tomorrow. I’ve been really bushed all week. Think I’ll go to bed early tonight.”

Earlier than eight? Charlie thought. Rachel wasn’t much of night owl, but she could usually manage to stay awake until eleven. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. Probably just something that’s going round.”

“OK, then, if you’re sure. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

They touched hands to screens and she was gone.

He closed his laptop, left the office, and headed back to the south pavilion. Probably a bug, he thought, nothing to worry about. Some kind of twenty-four-hour virus. Even so, he should have been there, holding her head, ministering with a cool cloth. It seemed like a failure that he hadn’t been.

A short while later, having left his computer, picked up his wallet and, out of force of habit, his camera, he set off down to the village to buy something for supper. This morning Ros had left by the time he woke up. A note on the kitchen table reminded him that Helen, his ex-wife, was dropping off their son, Luke, around five. “See you later,” said the note. “Your turn to cook tonight. xx.” He wondered briefly where Ros had gone—was the surgery open on Saturdays?—but he wasn’t his sister’s keeper. There was also the possibility that she had removed herself in protest at the way last night’s discussions had turned out. He thought he had been getting somewhere, persuading her that the house should be sold. Perhaps he was fooling himself and they were back to where they started. The idea was depressing and it preoccupied him for most of the twenty minutes it took to walk to Lower Ashenden.

The village had changed a great deal over the years, much more than the house, which was trapped in a time warp by comparison. He remembered it as a sleepy place with a couple of pubs, a post office, a shop that sold everything, except anything you wanted, and an old-fashioned butcher’s, which was always empty and displayed mostly bacon in its window. Now, despite the fact that the village had grown considerably in size, the post office had closed and buses to Reading ran only twice a day. The shop that sold everything had become a mini branch of Tesco’s, one of the pubs had been converted into a rather swanky house, and the other, the Ploughshare, was a decent, if pricey, gastropub where local farmers were name-checked on the menu. The butcher’s had been turned into an organic farm shop-cum-delicatessen, also pricey, which was where he was hoping to buy sausages that tasted of something. In view of Luke’s appetite, he thought he might cook sausages and mash tonight, with an onion gravy, although on reflection, after last night’s fish pie, he was really going to have to get back to running.

Outside the organic farm shop were wicker baskets containing remarkably dirty vegetables. When he pushed open the door, an irritating bell tinkled. Were bells a sign of authenticity? He supposed so. Ten minutes later, after dithering over the chill cabinet, he came out into the village high street £8.29 poorer, with eight free-range pork-and-sage sausages and a packet of organic beef stock cubes, which came highly recommended by the young woman, clad in a Breton T-shirt and striped apron (the stripes going in opposite directions), who served him. He had forgotten to bring a bag, was too embarrassed to ask for one in an organic farm shop-cum-delicatessen, so one pound of the £8.29 had gone on an unbleached cotton carrier on which was printed, in green cursive lettering contained within an outline drawing of an apple, “Pretty’s Organic Produce. Think Global, Act Local.” He felt like an idiot with the bag slung over his shoulder and tried to turn it so the slogan wouldn’t be visible, but the lettering was printed on both sides. Then, like a traitor to the environment, he headed to Tesco’s for cheap, clean, shapely potatoes.

It was when he was queuing at the supermarket checkout with his plastic bag of Maris Pipers and a couple of onions, worrying about Rachel again, worrying about the house, the two worries effortlessly exchanging themselves in his head, that he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see a tall, attractive middle-aged woman, dressed in one of those quilted sleeveless vests, jeans tucked into Wellingtons, smiling at him with an expectant look on her face that told him he was supposed to know who she was.

She acknowledged his bewilderment with a brisk shake of her head and held out a hand. “Charlie? Charlie Minton, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He took her hand, although it necessitated a bit of juggling with the potatoes to do so. Who was she? Friend of Ros’s? Friend of Reggie’s?

“Izzie Beckmann,” she said.

“My
God,
” he said. “
Izzie
. How are you?”

He hoped she wouldn’t think that his inability to place her meant that she had changed out of all recognition, because she hadn’t. Now that she had identified herself, he could see the resemblance to her former self. They’d gone out for—what, six months? An intense little period, yet, unlike many of his relationships, one that had ended fairly well. (She’d met someone else just as he was beginning to think about moving on, a form of dovetailing that hadn’t happened to him since.) Thirty-odd years down the line, she had worn well. The idea occurred to him that he must have worn well too, otherwise she would never have recognized him.

He was disabused of that notion when they came out of the supermarket and stood in the street talking.

“I’m sorry,” said Izzie. “I’ve got the advantage here, I think. I was at Reggie’s funeral and someone pointed you out to me.”

He had taken a backseat at the funeral. Ros organized it, and the vicar, who knew Reggie well, gave the address.

“I admired your aunt so much. Always did.” Izzie’s hair wasn’t short anymore, but she ran her fingers through it with an impatient gesture that tugged at his memory. “She was a remarkable woman.”

“Thanks,” said Charlie. “She was.”

“Well, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?” said Izzie. “You’re still taking photographs, I see.” She nodded at the camera he had slung over his shoulder, along with the Pretty’s cotton carrier.

A photograph he had taken of Izzie during their short time together, a delicious black-and-white nude (his Man Ray period), wormed itself to the front of his mind. What had he done with it? he wondered.

“It’s what I do for a living,” he said. “I sort of stumbled into it after university. Photojournalism mainly. Though these days I mostly teach.”

“Oh,” said Izzie, “where? In London?”

It piqued his vanity somewhat that she didn’t know his work.

“No, New York. I haven’t lived in this country for years. And you?”

“I’m in property.”

“You’re a developer?”

“An estate agent. In a niche sort of a way.” She adjusted her handbag on her shoulder and blushed. “You’re amused, I can tell.”

“A little surprised. You were a Trot or something, weren’t you? I seem to recall that owning a clapped-out Triumph Spitfire was enough to make me a class enemy.”

“It wasn’t so much the car, it was the family connections.”

“You can’t help who you’re related to.” As he was beginning to appreciate.

“True.”

They were walking slowly down the village high street, past an antique dealer’s and a shop selling upmarket furnishing fabrics and reproduction garden urns.

“At any rate, I still vote Labour, for my sins. Although I might vote Lib Dem this time. Anything to keep the Tories out.”

He laughed. “What brings you to the village? You visiting your parents?” He remembered that her father’s building firm had been responsible for restoring the Park. Ros had turned up some papers relating to the works among Hugo’s files.

She shook her head. “They’re both dead now. They left their house to me and my brother, and I bought him out after my divorce
came through. I’ve been living here for about two years. It’s convenient for my business. Most of our properties are in the Home Counties, and driving across London was getting to be such a drag.”

“So what exactly is your niche?” said Charlie.

“Big old houses, in a nutshell,” said Izzie. “The sort that other estate agents don’t have a clue how to market.”

“And you do?”

“Yes, I would say so, judging by results.”

“What’s the secret?” said Charlie.

“We avoid the usual pompous language for a start,” Izzie said. “
Facilities
and
accommodation
and
decorative order
. Maybe that works if you’re selling a semi, but people who are going to be spending millions on a house want a story. What they buy is a story.”

“A story?”

“Not in the sense of fiction. It’s more a question of conveying a sense of history and place. So that people can imagine themselves being part of it.”

“I see,” said Charlie, although he was not entirely sure he had grasped what she was talking about.

“Then, of course,” said Izzie, “you’ve also got to be perfectly straight with them. If there are problems, you’ve got to say so at the outset.”

“That sounds a little risky.” Charlie was thinking, among other things, of the decaying stonework at the house, the damp in the octagon room, the roof that needed fixing. The enormous heating bills.

“I happen to think,” said Izzie, “that what’s risky is pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Better to be up-front about what a survey’s going to reveal and pack away the wide-angle lens. The clients I deal with don’t want to waste their time. Of course they’re after value, but they’re in the kind of financial bracket where even quite substantial repairs aren’t off-putting if they really want a house.”

That Charlie could understand.

They came to the end of the high street.

“Sorry to go on. As my kids will tell you, it’s a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine.” She smiled. “It’s been so great to run into you. I would have introduced myself at the funeral, but it didn’t really seem appropriate.”

Charlie stepped off the pavement to make way for a young woman pushing a red three-wheeled baby buggy the size of a small car.

“You know, it’s funny we should meet and have this conversation,” he said, after the buggy had gone past conveying its little emperor, “because as it happens my sister and I have inherited the house.”

“Have you?” said Izzie, who knew full well that they had.

Then he found himself explaining the situation, how he wanted to sell but Ros didn’t, how much money it would take to run the place, let alone fix it up.

“The surveyors think the stonework needs about a million pounds’ worth of work doing to it.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t surprise me,” Izzie said. “My father always said the house would need redoing in another generation.”

“Did he?” said Charlie.

“These places aren’t always as substantial as they look.”

“The winter hasn’t helped.”

“No, it can’t have done.”

“I’ve made an approach to the National Trust,” said Charlie, “but it seems they aren’t taking on these kinds of properties anymore.”

“That’s true, they aren’t.”

“And obviously, in our case, neither of us is in a position to buy the other out. Ros has got all these schemes. The trouble is, I just can’t see any of them working.”

“It’s a worry,” said Izzie.

“It is.”

She looked up and down the high street.

“Are you staying around much longer or do you have to get back to New York?”

“I guess it depends.”

She hunted round in her handbag and handed him a card. “Look, why don’t you give me a call or drop me an email before you leave? It would be nice to meet for a drink or lunch or something.”

“It would,” said Charlie, and meant it. Rachel would like her, he thought, and the same would not have been true of most of his ex-girlfriends.

“And obviously,” said Izzie, “if you do manage to persuade your sister to sell, think of us.”

“For old times’ sake or the sake of business?” he said, putting the card in his pocket.

“Both. My father loved that house. And we’d do a good job of finding the right buyer for you.”

Izzie watched Charlie head out of the village in the direction of Ashenden Park. Had that seemed too obvious? she wondered. Had it been a mistake to pretend she knew nothing about his photographic career? On balance, she didn’t think so. Stroke of luck, bumping into him like that, and much better than the plan she had been about to implement, which would have entailed a more contrived approach. She didn’t doubt for a moment they would decide to sell in the end. The way things were, they would have to.

Izzie believed that you made your own luck, which meant that you did your homework and seized opportunities with both hands when they came your way. She went home to polish her proposal for marketing the house, and blessed Google and village gossip.

*  *  *

The onion gravy was going a bit wrong. A few minutes ago it was exactly the right consistency, but now it was turning into gloop. Unfortunately the sausages were nowhere near finished. Charlie was a good cook and he didn’t make a song and dance about it either, but he found himself defeated by his aunt’s old cooker, which confusingly combined a sluggish oven with ferocious electric rings. Sausage and mash was a dish that hardly depended on split-second timing; even so, having the constituent parts ready within something approximating the same hour was proving a challenge. It was not helped by the fact that Ros had not yet reappeared from wherever it was she had spent the day.