The Dream House (31 page)

More people arrived – an elderly man in an ancient black suit, several informally dressed young men, a plain and very talkative young woman in a shapeless cover-all garment with them. Agnes asked for a lemonade when someone offered her a drink, but when it came, it had a strange taste and she sipped at it with caution.

‘Where is he now?’ she shouted in Harry’s ear over the wail of the gramophone, careful not to trip over the snarling head of a tiger rug by the fireplace. ‘Mr Brett-Jardine, I mean.’

‘Nobody knows. Maybe he was eaten by this fellow,’ Harry shouted back, nodding at the tiger. ‘Or, more likely, Freda traded him for a native. Exotic tastes, our Freda.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, puzzled. Then ‘Oh,’ as the penny dropped and she blushed.

Harry laughed. Agnes laughed too. She was beginning to feel dizzy. From the drink – which certainly wasn’t just lemonade. From the seductive roll of the music, the heat, which was oppressive despite the open windows, the smoky spice in the air. And from happiness. Around them, as the room filled up with laughing, chattering strangers, she could hear snatches of fascinating conversation.

‘And she’s thrown him out again . . . this time she won’t have him back, I’m sure.’

‘Elegaic yet contemporary, a tour de force . . .’

‘Bankrupt, my dear, and since the police raid . . .’

Someone changed the music. Ambrose’s orchestra. A few couples were beginning to dance, dreamily, forcing the talkers to move back to make room.

‘Shall we?’ Harry whispered, relieving Agnes of her drink and taking her into his arms. She clung to him in the small space as they jostled with the other dancers.

There followed more drink, loud conversation, more dancing. Gradually Agnes was no longer aware of what she was saying, or to whom. She laughed and flirted and danced until the room started to spin.

‘I’ve got to get some air,’ she said to Harry. He drew her out of the flat onto the landing. It was cooler there, and she began to feel better. She leaned against the wall and, after a while, looked up at Harry, smiling.

‘Phew. I must look a sight,’ she said. ‘My hair everywhere.’

‘No, you don’t,’ he said, reaching out and touching her face. ‘I must paint you. You look . . . so lovely. Like Tennyson’s lily maid in your gold and white and green.’

‘
Lancelot and Elaine
,’ she breathed through soft parted lips. ‘You know Tennyson.’ The air between them altered, became thin, charged with possibility. An eternal moment eventually passed and the spell broke. He bent and kissed her. She kissed him back, and at her response he kissed her again, then he pulled her towards him and pressed his mouth hard against her open lips.

‘Agnes!’ Raven’s voice was harsh. They broke apart. Raven glanced briefly at Harry as if he were no one. ‘I think we should go. I’ll say our goodbyes and get the coats.’ He turned and went back inside.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Yes, you should. Yes, you should, Harry,’ Agnes said fiercely. ‘Don’t mind him.’ Suddenly she felt miserable. She would lose him. ‘You . . . m-may paint me,’ she stuttered.

Harry studied her, then kissed her again. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out a wallet, from which he extracted a card. ‘It’s the middle bell but it doesn’t always work, you have to knock. Come when you can,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a telephone, I’m afraid, but I’m usually in late afternoon. Or send me a note.’ Then he waited, wordlessly, as Raven re-emerged, helped Agnes on with her coat and swept her downstairs. As they reached the first landing, she looked up and her eyes met Harry’s where he was leaning over the banister. At his smile, a rush of desire coursed through her. She gazed at him, her heart plain on her face, until Raven pulled her away.

They hardly spoke a word in the taxi. Raven smoked and stared out of the window into the night. Agnes’s eyes fluttered closed, then she opened them again as the world raced round and nausea threatened. It was after 2 a.m. when they reached home. A flustered Jeanette, great circles of tiredness round her eyes, opened the door to the flat, showed them straight into the drawing room and pulled the doors shut on them. Vanessa was huddled up in an armchair, smoking furiously. She had clearly been crying. Gerald was leaning, one arm on the mantelpiece, his face like stone. He ignored Agnes. All his rage was directed at Raven.

‘So you’re home. Where in God’s name have you been with her? We’ve been frantic with worry. And what’s all this I hear from Armstrong? You’ve got some explaining to do, my boy.’

‘Gerald, you must listen to me,’ wailed Vanessa. ‘He’s not a child. He’s got to find his own way. Make his own mistakes.’

‘Let me deal with my son as I see fit!’ shouted Gerald. Then his voice softened. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. Why don’t you see to Agnes?’

‘We’ll get you something comforting to drink, darling,’ Vanessa whispered, ushering Agnes out of the room. ‘No,
va te coucher
, Jeanette,’ she told the maid, who put down the tea-cloth she was clutching and staggered gratefully to her room.

Vanessa made her stepdaughter a tisane and helped her to bed. There Agnes lay for a long while, drifting in and out of sleep, thinking about Harry and Raven and Vanessa. Something was worrying her there. Mrs Brett-Jardine’s voice echoed in her head: ‘No Vanessa? No Vanessa?’ Why should Vanessa have been there? Eventually, there came the sounds of doors opening and closing and the flat fell into darkness and silence. In the morning, she was briefly roused from sleep by the front door slamming. When she finally awoke, it was mid-morning and Raven had gone.

The closing of the front door and Bobby’s yapping woke Kate and she sat up, stiff and cold, and looked at the clock. Eleven fifteen. She grabbed at the exercise book that was slipping from her lap.

‘Hello, dear, you still up?’ Joyce put her head round the door.

‘Just about,’ yawned Kate. ‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Ooh yes. And I met a friend of Lillian’s who knows you. Marion someone. Says she’s a cousin.’

‘Marion? Of course, her family had a house in Woodbridge. I didn’t realize she still lived round there. She came to our wedding, Mum says, though I don’t really remember her.’

‘Well, I’ve got her phone number, dear, in case you wanted to give her a call sometime. Very keen to hear how your mother is, though I didn’t like to—’

‘Thank you. I will ring her. She might want to know about Agnes.’

‘Now I’m off to bed, dear. Anything you want?’

‘No, I’ll go up myself in a little while, thanks.’

When Joyce had gone upstairs Kate looked at the open book. She had read most of the entries before dozing off into a dream in which she could vividly recall the strange sculptures in Green’s, the exotic smells of Mrs Brett-Jardine’s drawing room, the touch of Harry’s lips . . .

She picked up all the books and arranged them in date order. There was only one more after this. She opened the final book to check. It was the journal that began in 1943 with the words
Father still very ill
. Either Agnes hadn’t written a diary for fifteen years, since 1928, or there was a volume missing. As she gathered up all the books to take them upstairs, Kate wondered what those fifteen missing years had brought to Agnes Melton.

July 2004

‘There’s the sign – Chapelfield Hall.’ Simon turned the car right off the main road, through a pair of stone gate-posts and down a gravel drive with coniferous parkland on either side.

‘It looks like something from the set of
The Addams Family
,’ breathed Kate, as they rounded a bend and a dark Gothic edifice rose into view. ‘Ravens and all.’

‘Well, common or garden crows. And the odd pigeon. But it is imposing, isn’t it? Looks good, Kate!’ And they grinned at one another in childlike excitement. Simon freewheeled the car gently into the large car park to one side of the hotel and they sat for a moment listening to the clicks and whirrs of the cooling engine as if, suddenly, neither had the reserves of energy for the task before them.

It was early Saturday afternoon. They had had a quick salad lunch with Joyce and the children before setting out for this hotel ten miles outside Norwich.

‘It’s just north of the city,’ she had told Simon that morning. ‘Right in the country. And it’s got a pool and a gym.’

And a golf course. But she didn’t mention that in case he thought he’d drag her round for a game. She loathed golf.

In fact, though, Simon had been most attentive since his unusually prompt return on Friday by the five o’clock train. The children had been all over him, proudly showing their Sport’s Day stickers, Daisy for being first in the egg and spoon race, Sam for being third in the obstacle race. Joyce and Kate had finally managed to get them off to sleep at nine, then Joyce had deliberately disappeared into the kitchen to tidy up by herself, leaving Simon and Kate contemplating one another in the sitting room. Simon wouldn’t sit down. He paced about sighing, rattling the coins in his jeans pocket, rearranging the ornaments on the mantelpiece, or going to one of the windows to peer out as if he were suddenly intensely interested in the garden. Finally, Kate suggested they go for a walk, and they let themselves out into the twilight leaving a resentful Bobby behind.

In the event, it wasn’t much of a walk. They just followed the road down towards the village and stopped in the deserted adventure playground. Sitting side by side on the swings, rocking gently to and fro, Simon shuffling the bark chippings with his brogued feet, they finally began to talk.

Kate told him briefly about her week, the news of the school, about Agnes, whom she had not had time to see since reading her journals, and what Max had said about the old lady going into a home. Simon was quiet, though he seemed very concerned about the school closure and questioned her about what exactly Mrs Smithson was recommending. When Kate trailed to a halt, he stood up and went and put a hand against the metal swing-frame, shoving it hard, as though testing it for its strength. Then he said, ‘I saw Meredith last night.’

‘Simon, you said . . .’ breathed in Kate.

He turned round sharply, and she could see the emotion working in his face.

‘I told her it was over. I wouldn’t be seeing her any more.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and stood up abruptly, then didn’t seem to know what to do with herself.

‘C’mon.’ Taking her arm in a clumsy movement, Simon guided her over to sit on a wooden bench at the edge of the playing area. He squeezed her to him, dropping kisses on her hair, her forehead. She raised her face and he kissed her mouth, hard and hungrily. It was then she realized he was crying.

‘Don’t,’ she said, and started to cry, too.

He pushed back the strands of her hair that had tumbled over her face and whispered, ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry, darling,’ over and over again, and she kissed him quickly then buried her face in the warm living comfort of his chest.

They sat there for a few moments until she said, ‘I’ve got to move. I’ve got a crick in my neck.’ She found a more comfortable position, with his arm round her shoulders and, after a moment, said quietly, ‘What did Meredith say when you told her?’

Simon’s voice sounded half-choked. ‘I said I had to put my marriage first and my children. That you were all too important to me. She was – angry. I – I don’t think she’s accepted it really.’

And you, Simon, have you accepted it?

‘But you’ve told her, firmly, that it’s over – and that you won’t see her again? Simon, I must know.’

‘No. I mean, yes.’ His expression was unreadable.

At that moment, a couple of teenagers pushed the park gate open and shuffled in; a gangly boy of about fifteen in a black T-shirt and camouflage trousers and a plump girl with ragged blonde hair and her tummy bulging through the gap between crop top and trousers. He was carrying a tin of lager and a pack of cigarettes. They went over and sat on the swings where Kate and Simon had sat a moment ago, and talked and giggled and smoked, casting sly looks in the Hutchinsons’ direction.

Finally, Simon got up and put out his hand to Kate. ‘Let’s go.’ They nodded at the teenagers, and walked back up the road in the gloaming to Paradise Cottage.

In bed, later, Kate’s doubts came crowding back, though Simon reached out and caressed her shoulder.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. Not yet.’ And they lay awake together, the moonlight illuminating the gulf between them.

It was after they had collected the key to their hotel room that the problems started. Simon had carried their cases up many ashwood-railed stairs, through several sound-muffling fire doors, over the corporate carpeting of endless corridors lined with bland prints, to reach the door of 312 at the very back of the hotel.

Kate got the door open on the third attempt with the electronic key card. It was a standard four-star room, no doubt exactly like most of the others in the hotel. The only troubles were: ‘Oh no, it only has a shower. No bath. I did ask for a bath.’ And, ‘Well, the view’s not great. Are those really the dustbins?’ They looked at each other and sighed.