The Dream House (10 page)

Kate lowered the window and looked up at the church.

And there she saw her. Outside the lych gate, an elegant old lady with a stick was waiting by a small car parked with its nose pointing down the hill. Kate watched as a middle-aged woman opened the front passenger door, took charge of her companion’s stick and black handbag in one hand and held her arm with the other. The older lady gripped the car door, then looked up as she steadied herself. She gazed straight down at Kate. She and Kate stared at one another a moment, and Kate felt an odd shock of recognition. The old lady gravely inclined her head in acknowledgement, then Simon set off once more.

Over the next few months, whenever they drove through Seddington, which wasn’t very often, Kate remembered this tableau and looked for the old lady. But it was to be many months before she saw her again.

Easter 2004

‘Where has Kate taken the children today?’ asked Joyce Hutchinson’s friend Hazel. It was the last Friday of the Easter holidays and Hazel had just arrived at Paradise Cottage for lunch.

‘Easton Farm Park,’ Joyce told her friend, pouring her a glass of wine. ‘They’re meeting up with Kate’s new pal Debbie and her family. No,
down
, Bobby, or I’ll shut you in the hall.’ The spaniel slouched off to his bed in the corner of the kitchen. ‘I’ll just shove the quiche in the oven and find something to put on the salad.’

‘I took little Joe to Easton last week,’ said Hazel, wandering over to look out of the back window at the garden. ‘He just loves feeding the lambs. Ooh, doesn’t your garden look lovely? Especially the hyacinths. And, look, your lilac’s coming out already. Mine’s way behind.’

‘There, I’ll just set the buzzer and . . . Yes, I only noticed it today. It has such a gorgeous smell, don’t you think? It used to be a favourite of Dennis’s.’

Hazel nodded sympathetically. ‘Rodney liked tulips. Two lips in the dark was his joke.’

‘Really?’ Joyce said politely, though Hazel had told her this several times during their friendship. ‘It was because of the garden we chose this house, you know,’ she said, taking a gulp from her own glass and staring out at the lilac bush with its emerging dots of white.

Hazel had also heard Joyce say this before but as a widow herself, albeit for twice as long as Joyce, she knew how important it was to remind oneself of these facts; it kept the memories alive.

‘Dennis would have been proud of you, you know,’ she said gently, seeing a sheen of tears in her friend’s eyes.

‘How do you mean?’ Joyce said hoarsely.

‘The way you’ve picked yourself up and gone on. It was easier for me, I think, having the family near, but you were new to the neighbourhood – you hardly knew anyone. Look at all the things you do now.’

‘You mean the reading group and the charity shop? And the church flowers? That’s not much really.’

‘Six hours a week in the shop is more than “not much”. Then you’ve worked so hard on the house – and it’s not every grandmother who would be happy to have a family of four to move in for so long.’

‘There’s no doubt it sometimes feels very full here,’ Joyce agreed, looking round the kitchen as if seeing it with a visitor’s eyes. The room where everything had previously had its place and was in that place, had been allowed to slip into the cheerful messiness of a family home. Children’s paintings and clay models decorated every available surface, two overflowing boxes of toys and Lego were parked under the front window. On the carefully restored pine dresser, now scuffed, and with felt pen scribbled on one door, Joyce’s mother’s Royal Albert tea service fought for position with origami boats, snapshots and bits of broken toy. A heap of what looked like estate agents’ details had been pushed to the side of the round table, which Joyce had laid for lunch. And the fridge was completely covered in artwork, class address lists and children’s party invitations.

‘There’s just this overwhelming tide of possessions,’ said Joyce with a wave of her hand as if to brush it away. ‘And you should see upstairs . . . I can’t keep up with it.’

‘You look tired, dear,’ said Hazel. ‘Are you taking those pills at bedtime?’

‘I had one last night, yes,’ Joyce said, rubbing her eyes. ‘I still wake so early in the mornings and have to lie there, my thoughts whirling round. I should sleep really,’ she went on. ‘I’m tired enough after helping with the kids all day. They’re dear children, but Daisy teases Sam and Sam kicks her, and then she screams . . . you know how it goes.’

When, a year ago, Simon had asked if he could bring Kate, Daisy and Sam to camp in her cottage for a couple of months, Joyce had joyfully agreed. She had always envied Hazel having her grandsons in just the next village and it seemed such a privilege to have Daisy and Sam with her for a while and then for them to move to a house nearby. She had grown very close to them in the last eight months and she knew that they loved her back. It was just that it was much harder work than she believed possible.

‘At least I don’t have Toby and Joe with me all the time,’ Hazel mused, ‘and I couldn’t live with Gina now, she’s got such strong ideas about everything. And she’s my daughter . . .’

‘Oh, Kate and I get on well, surprisingly well really, but a daughter-in-law is not quite the same as a daughter, is it? I feel I’m on walking on eggshells with her sometimes. If I make a comment about one of the children not being made to eat up their food, or say something about it being their bedtime, she looks worried, as if I’m criticizing her. But it’s difficult to say nothing. I was always taught that children should have regular hours, and it’s important that they know the boundaries.’

‘I so agree with you. Children today don’t seem to do what you tell them. My mother always used to say “Don’t contradict me,” and “Do what you’re told or your father will get to hear about it,” and that was that. We shut up and put up.’

Just then, the buzzer on the cooker sounded and Joyce leaped up to turn it off. But when she picked up the oven gloves the phone started ringing in the hall.

‘Oh! Would you mind?’ said Joyce, passing Hazel the oven gloves and hurrying out to answer it.

Hazel found a heat-resistant mat hanging on a nail and carefully placed the quiche on it on the table. Then she turned off the oven and sat waiting for Joyce to reappear. Her eyes passed over the stack of estate agents’ brochures at her elbow. She picked up the top one and her eyebrows shot up. It was a huge thatched farmhouse in two acres of land and with a price tag to match. Extraordinary, what houses seemed to be worth now. Then, hearing her friend coming back into the room, she hastily put the paper back on the pile.

‘That was Kate’s father,’ said Joyce in a distracted voice. ‘He sounded a bit agitated. Wants her to ring him.’

‘Can he catch her on her mobile?’

Joyce shook her head. ‘She’s lost the charger. She’s been managing without for weeks. He is funny, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Major Carter. He’s very formal, and he never asks after the children. Isn’t that interested. He’s very wrapped up in his wife, you see. Barbara is never quite . . . well. She has been depressed for a long time. I told you about that awful business with Kate’s sister. Well, you never get over something like that, do you?’

‘Children are supposed to outlive one,’ Hazel said sadly.

Joyce picked up the slice and started to cut the quiche. The phone rang again. ‘Oh drat. Who can that be now?’

While she was out of the room, Hazel took the opportunity to flip through some more of the house prospectuses. Barn conversions, a fifteenth-century manor house, a modern architect-designed bungalow roofed with great solar panels. She let them drop again as Joyce returned.

‘One of Kate’s friends this time,’ Joyce said. ‘Claire. Nice girl but wears an extraordinary amount of eye make-up.’

As they started to eat, Hazel asked casually, ‘How are Kate and Simon getting on looking for a house, then?’

Joyce swallowed her mouthful too quickly. ‘Still no progress. Kate’s intent on finding somewhere nearby so the kids can stay at the school, while Simon wants somewhere nearer the station. They just can’t seem to agree. And to make it more difficult, Kate has some sort of ideal home in her mind. We all know there’s no such thing in reality. There’s always something wrong with a place.’

‘Have they really found nothing they like?’

‘There was one, last month. A Victorian rectory in a village halfway between here and Diss. I drove out to look at it with Kate one day. They put in an offer, but there were other bids and Simon wouldn’t go any higher. I could see that Kate really liked it but, no, he knew best. And he was very shirty with me when I supported Kate’s point of view. I got quite cross with him actually. After all, it’s difficult for me not to have some kind of opinion, isn’t it?’

‘You have to be ever so tactful,’ Hazel agreed, helping herself to more salad. ‘Sometimes with Gina and Andrew . . .’

‘As you can see,’ Joyce motored relentlessly on, ‘estate agents keep sending them more details, but Simon’s so busy at work he hasn’t got much energy at weekends to go out and look. Kate’s losing heart a bit.’

‘Is Simon coming home at all during the week now?’ Hazel asked, and watched in concern as Joyce slowly put down her knife and fork and pushed her plate away, half her lunch uneaten.

‘Hazel,’ she said, ‘that’s what’s really worrying me at the moment. That long journey is quite a strain on family life. Simon’s so caught up in his work, and he and Kate see less of each other than they did in London.’

‘That doesn’t seem right. What a shame.’

When Simon and Kate had first moved here, he had managed to be on the six o’clock train home most evenings or, at worst, the seven o’clock, unless he had a late meeting or was away on a trip. But as the autumn moved on and it became darker and colder, and there was a bad patch with the trains, he had started staying over at his friend Nigel’s flat in Docklands once or twice a week.

‘Nigel has moved out and is living with his girlfriend,’ said Joyce, ‘and is glad to have the rent, apparently. The trouble is it’s now four nights a week Simon stays in town.’

‘I don’t know how people can do that. There was a time in our marriage when Rodney had to work in Chelmsford on a contract and he boarded with a young couple there. I missed him like anything.’

‘I’m not surprised. But it is quite a grind, the travelling, and the trouble is, his firm are trying to drum up business in Eastern Europe – you know, all those new countries coming into the Common Market.’ Joyce still insisted on calling it that. ‘And there’s a lot more pressure. I don’t know what time he’ll get back tonight, but it wasn’t until after ten last week, and sometimes he’ll go back on a Sunday night if he has an early meeting next morning. He’s awfully tetchy at the moment, poor love, but then he’s so tired. And it’s rotten luck for Kate.’

‘She still helps you, I hope?’

‘Oh yes, we share the housework and the washing, and take turns going to the supermarket. She has had a bit of work to do for publishers, so I let her get on with that as much as I can.’

‘Writing things, do you mean?’ said Hazel.

‘Press releases, yes, and letters and phone calls to publicize books. She’s set up a computer in Dennis’s study. Simon is a bit impatient with her. Says she would get more work if she got on the phone to people and sold herself. Then she’ll say, it’s all right for him, he doesn’t know what it’s like being here all day away from the stimulation of an office, and so it goes on. They think I don’t hear them arguing, but I do. I can’t help it, the walls are so thin, and anyway sometimes they just argue in front of me as if I’m not here listening.’ Joyce was speaking faster and faster, and her final word ended in a distressed squeak.

‘You poor dear,’ said Hazel, patting Joyce’s hand where it lay on the table. ‘It’s not really fair on you, all this. Can’t you have a talk with Simon about it? Perhaps they should find somewhere to rent until they get a place of their own.’

‘I have tried broaching the subject, yes,’ said Joyce guiltily, ‘but not very hard. I feel mean, you see, when he’s having such a tricky time at work.’

But Hazel was right, Joyce thought. She would have to say something to Simon again soon. This situation couldn’t go on indefinitely, could it?

The phone began to ring for a third time.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I love it here. Suffolk’s beautiful,’ Kate was telling her new friend Debbie Samson. ‘Though I still can’t get used to the slow pace of life.’ They were sitting on a bench in the adventure playground at Easton Farm Park, watching Sam and Daisy play on the climbing frame with Debbie’s elder children, Natalie and James, while Debbie rocked the buggy, trying to get little Holly off to sleep.

Kate had got talking to Debbie at the school gate the previous September and, like a grateful flower to the sun, had opened up to the other woman’s comfortable friendliness. Debbie was nicely rounded, with dark curly hair, dark eyes and olive skin that betrayed her Italian forebears. She had taken Kate under her wing, introducing her to other parents and inviting her along to girls’ nights out and a regular weekly slot some of the women shared at a local swimming pool. She had proved a lifeline.

‘At first I’d find it maddening,’ Kate went on, ‘people at the front of the queue in the shops having a good long chat with the sales assistant about the weather and their husband’s gallstones while I’d be mouthing “Get on with it” and looking pointedly at my watch. You couldn’t see Londoners standing for it!’

Debbie laughed. ‘I know, and it still drives me mad.’ She peeped over the top of the buggy. ‘Oh, that’s good, she’s away.’ Eighteen-month-old Holly had flaked out, exhausted by the morning’s activity.

They had seen the lambs at feeding-time first of all. Twenty lusty-looking orphans, all bleating frantically, butted one another and the sides of their pen in their anxiety to get to the bottles of milk the assistant was doling out to the children squashed onto the row of hay-bales.