The Dream House (36 page)

The first time she went to the flat, she hadn’t announced her visit, but used an excursion to Peter Jones in Oxford Street as an excuse to Vanessa for her absence and a reason to herself for calling on Harry casually – on the spur of the moment as if she was just passing, feeling it was too forward to send him a note first. One lesson she had repeatedly learned from those tedious girls’ lunches was that it didn’t do to be seen to chase men.

In the event, she didn’t have to test the unreliable middle bell – a man leaving the house held the street door for her as he passed through. The second floor, Harry had said. When he opened the door to his apartment, his expression was defensive, uncertain, and her heart plummeted into her little bowed shoes. But then his face lit up with a smile. He pulled the door wide and she stepped inside.

‘Sorry,’ he said as he closed the door behind her. ‘Thought it was that damned woman from downstairs again. She’s already been up twice today. Wants me to look after her horrid pug dog later – smelly animal.’

Agnes smiled weakly, suddenly shy. She had spent hours dressing for this afternoon, finally settling for a cream two-piece suit trimmed with lace, a hat the soft shades of a seashell, and a beige bag and shoes. Now, though Harry looked her up and down appreciatively, she felt overdressed next to his shabby Oxford bags and open-necked shirt.

‘Well,’ he said, pulling down his rolled-up sleeves as if aware of the sartorial comparison. ‘You’ve come. I’m so glad you’ve come.’

They stood facing one another, but Harry’s face was unreadable against the gold bars of light streaming through the windows. So instead, she looked around the untidy little living room.

Harry suddenly seemed to remember his manners and erupted into action.

‘Sit down over here, do,’ he said, pulling some newspapers and a cardigan off a sofa. ‘I’ll make some tea – would you like tea?’

But in the face of this brightness, Agnes lost what little courage she had.

‘I’m sorry, I’m probably interrupting something. Your work.. .’ she stuttered. ‘I was just passing and remembered you lived here. I won’t stay.’

Harry laid the cardigan carefully over the back of a chair, as if it were made of some precious material. Then he moved to her side and, hesitantly, lifted his hands and rested them lightly on her shoulders. She looked up shyly to see him studying her face.

Suddenly she understood. His feelings for her had not changed since the evening they had first met. They were there in his steady gaze, his slightly parted lips, the faint puzzlement in his brow. He was entirely present for her, sensitive to her every mood.

She smiled, slowly. He touched her cheek. Then he leaned forward and their lips met in a gentle kiss. He drew back and looked at her again, lazily, then kissed her once more, at first with soft, nibbling little kisses, then harder, more urgently, his tongue exploring her mouth as she leaned into him.

Breathless, she came up for air, then laughed, pulling away, suddenly overwhelmed by the situation, smoothing down her crumpled costume.

Seeing her confusion, Harry stepped back, like a sculptor scrutinizing his creation, a small secret smile on his lips.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you where I work, where you might sit for me if you like. And then we’ll have tea. Otherwise, I won’t be able to keep my hands off you!’

Now it was three weeks on from that first delicious afternoon. As Agnes reached the first landing, the door of the apartment there squeaked open and a woman’s face stared out. For a moment their eyes locked. Agnes had time only to take in the diagonal of short jet-black hair falling across a hard face whose paleness was only relieved by a carmine mouth before Harry’s voice echoed down the stairs, ‘Agnes?’ and the door shut with a click. She continued her journey.

‘Who is she?’ Agnes asked later in the warm post-meridian light of the second bedroom, which Harry used as a studio.

She was half-naked, sitting three-quarters turned away but looking over her nearer shoulder towards him, a pose she was finding it uncomfortable to maintain. Several times he had growled at her to ‘damn well keep still’ as she had tried to ease her neck or arch her back.

‘Mmm?’ he said now, frowning at the break to his concentration.

‘The woman in the flat below. She spies on me, you know.’

He shrugged, then put down his pad and charcoal and reached for a cigarette. ‘All right, I’ve finished for today. Suzie Herbert? Just some woman. Schoolfriend of my sister’s. She got me this place.’

‘She seems very interested in us.’ Agnes stretched like a cat, the smell of the newly lit tobacco giving her a sudden kick. She looked down out of the window to the street where a young man loitered with a newspaper. If he looked up, she thought daringly, he would see me like this. But he didn’t.

Behind her she heard Harry take a deep drag of his cigarette then exhale in a long sigh. ‘She’s just lonely. She left her husband – a drunk who hit her, my sister says. She gets on my nerves a bit, always wanting little favours. But she’s all right. I feel sorry for her really. Why? Jealous are you?’ He moved closer. His nearness made her prickle with desire.

‘No, not jealous.’ Agnes slowly turned towards him, lifting her stockinged legs langorously across the daybed. He drew on his cigarette, but did not breathe out right away. Through wreaths of smoky dust motes she watched him watching her, as she arched her breasts towards him, the nipples hardening. She brushed her fingers against herself and desire leaped like a pain. The silky gown that nestled modestly round her hips felt apart revealing her underwear, the suspenders digging into the pale flesh.

He rose as if in a dream and moved towards her, reaching out, touching her breasts wonderingly, then gently stroking them till she gasped. She pulled him towards her, grabbing his hair, bringing his face down to hers, kissing him in long deep kisses, her hands burrowing under his shirt, over his buttocks, pressing his hardness to her. In a practised movement he lifted her off the couch and fumbled her underwear undone, almost tearing it in his eagerness. Then he shuffled off his own clothes and pushed her down on the daybed and entered her.

It was painful, but it was a delicious pain. For a while he didn’t move and she could feel herself enfolding him, drawing him in so deeply every slightest movement was a wave of delight. He raised his head to look at her, he stroked her breasts, nibbled her neck and whispered in her ear, ‘Little love, you’re so beautiful.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, she was awed to see his were full of tears. Then he lowered his lips to her breasts and began to move inside her, at first slowly, then with more urgency. She raised her hips towards him, crying out as waves of sensation spread through her. She was on a galloping horse, flowers falling around her, then Harry gave a gasp, a wordless cry and arched up inside her. The flowers faded like stars . . . Darling, wonderful Harry.

Later, as they lay together on Harry’s bed, he got up and fetched a little box from the chest of drawers. He opened it and took out a locket on a silver chain.

‘I found it in a curiosity shop,’ he said. ‘The girl – look.’ He showed her. ‘Something about her expression. It made me think of you.’

It was an oval piece, about the size of a half-crown with a rough-hewn figure of a serene young girl on the front. On her open palm there perched a dove. Agnes slid a fingernail into the catch and opened the locket. Into one half Harry had slipped a photograph of himself.

‘You must find a picture of you for the other half,’ he said. Then, ‘I love you, you know.’ A look of deep sadness shadowed his face.

‘Harry?’ Agnes whispered. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ he said after a moment, and the sadness was replaced by tenderness. ‘No, nothing.’

And he leaned forward to embrace her once more.

When Kate woke panting in the darkness, her body pulsed with hot blood and her face was wet with tears. She lay awake for a long time in the darkness, wondering, until finally she slept again.

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If Mr Keppel, the man from the council, had a byword – it was
efficiency
. It wasn’t efficient to have a school where the roof was falling in and the playground had potholes in it. (The parents were with him on that one.) It wasn’t efficient to have lots of very small schools in satellite villages when a large, bright new school building in the local town could be used by everybody instead. It wasn’t efficient when the figures didn’t work – as they certainly weren’t doing at Fernley. The figures on his Powerpoint show certainly didn’t look efficient when viewed in that light. Nearly £50,000 was required to repair and upgrade the school.

‘It is impossible for the Education Department to find that sort of money when there are other viable, much cheaper alternatives,’ he said, switching his laptop onto standby. He sat down to a babble of angry voices from the 100 local people sitting on hired chairs who filled the little school hall to bursting point.

Mr Keppel’s presentation had certainly been efficient, Kate said to herself fiercely from her seat facing the crowd. The bullet points zooming onto the screen had been all about statistics and budgets and rationalization. They hadn’t been about fuzzy concepts like supporting local communities or tending to the needs of individual children and families. She shifted nervously in her chair and, as Peter Overden, a sweet-natured gentleman in his sixties, rose and waved a hand for silence, she unfolded a scrumpled piece of paper. On it was typed the question she had written out this morning and practised over and over in the mirror.

‘Our first question, Mr Keppel,’ intoned Mr Overden, ‘has to be, why has the Department done nothing previously to maintain the school?’ Kate noticed many heads nodding vigorously.‘We have been asking for repairs to be conducted for the last five years. Here is the file.’ He waved a thick sheaf of correspondence as evidence. ‘If the roof
had
been mended back in nineteen ninety-nine, we wouldn’t have had all these further problems with rotten timber, damp walls and ceilings that you’ve just itemized. Can I put it to you that this neglect represents a deliberate attempt to wind down and close the school?’

Mr Keppel insisted that it wasn’t and embarked on a complicated technical discussion with Mr Overden, who was a retired chartered surveyor, over maintenance problems in Victorian buildings.

When this was finally over, hands in the audience shot up. Here was Kate’s chance. She shakily put her hand in the air and, seeing that she was the first committee member with a question, Mr Overden chose her to speak. In the end she felt so fired up she found she didn’t need her notes.

‘We hear a lot in the media at the moment about rural depopulation, the loss of traditional village life and political disempowerment. Do you regard it as important, Mr Keppel, that rural towns and villages maintain the institutions that enable them to function as living, thriving, self-governing communities?’ Kate’s voice strengthened as she got into her stride. She was relieved when several people in the audience shouted ‘Hear, hear!’ and, ‘Exactly!’ in response.

Mr Keppel paced up and down in front of his audience. He didn’t have a Powerpoint screen for ‘life of rural communities’. After a moment, he cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes, of course I do. But in these days of fragmentation it is far more efficient to see a rural community in the . . . ah . . . broader sense. Halesworth and the villages around it form a cohesive, active community.’

A young woman from the floor raised her hand immediately. She spoke with barely suppressed anger. They’d already taken away the library, hadn’t they? And the post office had only just survived the latest decimation because of the village petition. Didn’t the authorities want everyone to get out of their cars and use local services? So why take those local services away?

After that, Mr Keppel was besieged on all sides. Kate felt overwhelmed by how much people here cared about their community. Once galvanized into action, they seemed prepared to fight tooth and nail to keep their school. They might be reluctant to go to their polling station (and where would they go to vote if their polling station, the school, closed – the pub?) to vote for a national government. Maybe they felt powerless when it came to national politics – perhaps it was in local matters that the politicians should try to reach people instead. If the electorate truly felt that they had a stronger say in matters such as how their local schools and hospitals were run, could resist main roads cutting ugly swathes through their towns, or huge housing estates going up at the behest of a faceless administrator in Westminster, wouldn’t they all become interested and more involved in the way their society was run? Kate rather thought they might.

As she listened to all the questions and Mr Keppel’s blustering attempts at answers, an idea began to grow in her mind. Around her the buzz of voices rose as the room, despite Mrs Smithson ordering the doors at the back to be opened, grew hotter and hotter.

Eventually, overwhelmed by the opposition, Mr Keppel turned to Mr Overden and raised his hands in a despairing gesture. The noise abated slowly and Kate indicated that she wanted to speak again.

‘Yes, Mrs Hutchinson?’ said Mr Overden, who looked exhausted. ‘This is the last question we’ll take tonight, ladies and gentlemen.’

‘Mr Keppel,’ said Kate, ‘you have seen demonstrated clearly and unequivocally tonight how much Fernley values its school. Could I ask you now, honestly: if the people of Fernley – and I say “if” because fifty thousand pounds is a huge amount of money – were able to raise some or a substantial part of the sum, would your Department reconsider its decision to close the school?’

The hubbub started to build again and Kate glimpsed people shaking their heads at the suggestion of such a commitment from local people. Many of them, she knew, held down low-paid jobs or seasonal work. Mr Overden rose and waved the room to silence.

After a moment Mr Keppel spoke. ‘I must agree,’ he said, ‘that the feelings in this room appear to run high. Much higher than I anticipated. I cannot properly answer the question you ask without consultation with my colleagues, but I am inclined to say that “if” – and, ladies and gentlemen, that is a huge “if” – the monies or part of the monies are forthcoming from the community, there is a large chance that the Department would reconsider the . . . ah . . . efficiency of its current decision.’