The Dream House (7 page)

But it was Nicola who drove too fast one rainy July night down a narrow country lane after an evening out, the headlights cutting a swathe through the black woods on either side. She misjudged the bend, plunging the car through the undergrowth and into the trees. She must have died instantly, the coroner said.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral.
Golden girl mourned by all
, the local paper said. Kate had never felt so lonely in her life. Her parents, felled by grief, turned in on themselves. They should have reassured Kate that they were glad they still had her, that she was precious to them, but it was as though they had lost their only child. Her mother hardly spoke for weeks after the tragedy, not least because the doctor had dosed her up with sedatives. And her father, alien to the language of emotion as his own father had been before him, could only manage to hug Kate awkwardly, then turn away so she wouldn’t see him cry.

Resentful, self-pitying, it was a while before Kate realized she too was mourning her sister. The year of her A-levels was one of the worst of her life. She tried to lose herself in her work, but away at school, cut off from her parents who were, anyway, too self-absorbed to help her, she felt isolated. Many of the staff and pupils were devastated by the loss of Nicola, but the fact that in death Nicola was raised to a pedestal of beauty and perfection made it harder for Kate to grieve. Only in the visits to her grandmother in Hastings was she able to unbottle her grief to someone who really understood and cared, and to cry herself to sleep in the old lady’s arms.

Since having Daisy and Sam, Kate had often wondered what her relationship with her sister would have been like if the accident hadn’t happened. She concluded that she would probably have grown out of her jealousy. Nicola would have become a happy and successful woman, married, had children. Sam and Daisy would have loved playing with their cousins and their mums would have laughed and cried over their own childhood, healing each other in the process, sharing the burden of trying to get on with their now-ageing parents.

But if Nicola hadn’t died, their parents would surely now be entirely different . . . Barbara might not have started to drink, Desmond might have been warmer, bluff and relaxed in retirement. They might have got on well with their adult children, have been close to their grandchildren. If Nicola hadn’t died . . .

‘Are the children allowed sweets, dear?’

Kate pulled her attention back to her mother, who had appeared with a suspiciously dusty box of mint imperials. Then Desmond bustled in with the tea tray and laid it on the glass coffee-table. He brushed at the sofa, plumped the cushions and sat down.

‘Well, we’ll miss you, there’s no doubt about that,’ he mumbled. ‘But your mother and I, we’ll . . . harrumph, I’m sure . . . When are you off?’

‘July probably,’ broke in Simon, coming to join them. ‘Fits in with Daisy’s schooling. And I’ll be able to take a bit of holiday to help.’

‘I had some lovely holidays in Suffolk when I was a girl,’ Barbara said, with unusual vivacity. ‘Frances and Marion – you know, my cousins – lived that way. There was someone else we visited, an older cousin. Ooh, Desmond, do you remember me talking about her?’

He shook his head. ‘Must have been before we met, darling.’

‘A beautiful house, yes – and she had a maid, a real maid with a uniform. I might have some photographs upstairs somewhere. Or did we throw them out when we came here? We got rid of so much.’

‘Sounds intriguing, Mum. I suppose she might be dead now, though.’

Kate studied her mother, who was furiously stroking the little dogs in her lap and staring at the carpet. She looked up and smiled at Kate, a smile that carried a flash of charm. Kate suddenly felt an inkling of another Barbara, a Barbara long gone. She wished she had the courage to reach out to her mother and hug her, but she knew that Barbara would shy away from physical contact. That was how it had been ever since Kate could remember. Barbara had rarely been able to demonstrate that she was sad or happy, that she loved or hated. Kate had seen pictures of her mother at twenty and could never believe this was the same woman; she’d seemed so vibrant then, full of the love of life, probably quite a catch for a kind but dull man like her father, handsome in his new officer’s uniform at the Sandhurst ball.

What had happened to Barbara after her marriage? Kate’s father had always deflected his daughter’s timid questions. Old-fashioned loyalty was the name of the game in his book and his love for his wife was tender and unswerving. Of course, Nicola’s death was the unmentionable barrier between them all now, a terrible loss that had frozen their family life entirely.

Kate’s eyes moved again to the silent ranks of photos, and was struck anew by how greatly Nicola resembled the pictures of Barbara when she was young. Kate was so different, with her pixie face, her jaw-length dark hair, her green eyes and shy smile. She certainly didn’t look like Nicola – the pretty, lively, laughing sister. Suddenly, Kate felt a bolt of childish anger charge through her. It wasn’t
fair
! No one ever took any notice of
her
! There must have been dozens of photographs of Kate by herself or of Kate and Nicola together in the family albums, but her parents had only chosen to put out ones of Nicola. Why did their only surviving child seem to matter so little to them?

But with the maturity she had only fully gained after rearing her own children, she breathed deeply until the anger ebbed away and sadness and compassion flooded in to take its place. Of course they must love her. It’s just they were so wounded by the loss of their other child. As she was by the loss of the sister she too, despite her envy, had loved.

But why would they never talk about it? Therein lay the hell of this situation. She remembered discussing it with a therapist once, and he’d encouraged her to try again to talk to them or to write them a letter. But she’d never found the courage to do that.

Even now she felt her father’s anxious eyes upon her.
Don’t mention your sister!
Better not let the side down, had I? Kate told herself with scorn, bringing her attention back to the land of the living. Her father’s expression softened and she smiled at him. He relaxed.

‘So how’s that car of yours, Simon? Still running smoothly?’ Normal service had been resumed.

‘Thank Christ that’s over.’ Simon slumped with relief in his seat as he pulled the car out onto the Downs roundabout.

‘Simon!’ Kate half-glanced round to see if the children had heard, but Daisy was recounting to Sam a long fantasy about her toy dog. ‘That’s my parents you’re talking about.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just they’re such an ordeal. They’re impossible! Anyone would have thought we’d just said we were getting a new washing machine for all the interest they showed, not removing their only daughter and grandchildren to the further reaches of the country.’

‘Simon, I know, but that’s not what they’re feeling underneath. I thought Mum looked quite upset actually.’

‘I expect she’s heading for the gin bottle even now – look, I’m sorry, Kate. It’s just I get so upset for you and the kids. They ought to cherish you more.’

‘They do their best.’ Kate’s voice was wobbly. ‘Well, OK, they probably don’t,’ she conceded. ‘Anyway, Mum’s drinking is much better than it used to be. Dad says she’ll go whole days now without anything.’

‘Then she has a blow-out on the Gordon’s and spends two days with her head down the toilet.’ Once or twice, when Barbara’s drinking had got particularly bad, she had had an enforced stay in a local clinic. But since she would never even admit to herself that there was a problem, all attempts to persuade her to overcome it had failed.

‘Oh, stop it!’ Kate looked round again anxiously but, lulled by the motion of the warm car, both children were falling into sleep.

‘Don’t shout, Mummy,’ yawned Daisy. ‘Shouting’s . . . rude.’ Kate leaned forward and fiddled with the air-conditioning to turn up the temperature in the back.

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘you won’t have to see them so often now, will you? Though I suppose we’ll have to ask them to stay – when we have a proper house, I mean. It’s a good thing I get on so well with your mum, isn’t it?’

‘Better than I do.’ Simon glanced in the rearview mirror then took his hand off the wheel to squeeze Kate’s thigh through her corduroy skirt. She accepted this as a silent apology.

‘She’s so – homey, your mum,’ Kate ploughed on. She knew Simon was often annoyed by Joyce. She could smother you with her affection and concern and she sometimes had too-strong opinions about how other people should run their lives – like what time grandchildren should go to bed and how married couples should run their financial arrangements, and so on. Simon had often felt his upbringing to have been claustrophobic, but Kate envied him the interest his father had taken in him and the way his mother worried about his welfare and comfort. Indeed, for someone starved of motherly love like Kate, Joyce was birthday and Christmas rolled into one.

By the end of May, their plans were moving on swiftly. They’d accepted an offer for the house from a couple with a baby daughter. The survey had revealed no particular concerns and they were now all waiting for the mortgage to be granted – no problem there, the estate agent assured them. Their sale was the end of a short chain but, fingers crossed, they would exchange contracts in the next few weeks, well in time for the planned move in mid-July. If absolutely necessary, they could always take Daisy out of school and go down early. Though Simon wasn’t able to take any time off before the second half of July.

Kate handed in her notice at work and was touched by the disappointment her colleagues and authors expressed at her going. Susie Zee had actually wept on her shoulder and even James Clyde had written her a dry little note telling her she had ‘worked quietly but well’. Thank you, James. Because of holiday due, she would leave in the last week of June.

The three weeks of her notice period turned out to be an oddly disturbing time. On the one hand, she felt no regret at leaving behind the dross – the boring admin tasks, the time-wasting at meetings, the office politics, the more troublesome authors, but she felt unreasonably hurt by the way office life was already moving on without her. No one bothered to fill her in on decisions about ‘her’ authors any more. She felt awful pangs at the thought of no longer being involved in exciting developments in writers’ careers. After all, it was her carefully planned publicity campaign that was really getting Anxious Adam’s first novel noticed. And people were still talking about her 1920s party at the Oxo Tower which had been attended by two B-list celebrities and reported in all the gossip columns. Although she remained convinced she and Simon were making the right decision, part of her wanted to shout ‘Stop!’ and reverse the whole process. This was such a leap in the dark, she thought, a disturbing feeling exacerbated by a conversation with her boss, Karina, about the possibilities of freelance work.

‘Kate, dear, you
know
we’d love to use you if such an opportunity comes up. You’ve got so close to some of your authors, they’re going to feel lost without you for a bit.’

‘Do you think there’ll be anything for me, until you find my successor, or after that, when you’re very busy?’

‘If budgets for freelancers aren’t too tight, Kate,
of course
. It’s just you know how rarely we’re allowed to use outsiders because of the cost. Somehow we always manage to keep the work inhouse, don’t we? But I’m sure something will come up, if not with us then with other companies. I’ll mention your name to one or two people, if you like.’

‘That’s very kind, if you would,’ Kate breathed weakly, trying to hide her disappointment at this response. It looked as though it would be more difficult than she thought to carry on working for Jansen & Hicks.

Tasha, the Hutchinsons’ nanny, had, been told about her employers’ plans early on. After all, she could hardly be expected not to notice the estate agent’s sign going up and parties of strangers wandering round the house, commenting on the navy bathroom and the flaking décor. She was devastated at the idea of leaving Sam and Daisy, but in one way it would be a relief, she confided, as her boyfriend, Rob, had been pressing her to go travelling with him and she’d been putting him off because she hadn’t wanted to leave the Hutchinsons in the lurch.

Liz, who had no luck at all with nannies, was sarcastic about this. ‘I reckon you just got your plans in first. She’s been with you nearly a year. Mark my words, come her anniversary, she’d either have slapped in a request for a massive pay rise or gone off with Lover Boy in a flash. The good ones go and the bad ones have to be pushed. Tasha is too good to hang about.’ Kate protested that she was being unfair but didn’t add that working for Liz must be the childcare equivalent of stone-breaking, for Liz ran a tight domestic ship.

One thing Simon and Kate had agreed about. It would be impossible to try and view houses in Suffolk from this distance.

‘It would just be crazy to pack the kids in the car and hare off down the A12 every weekend,’ said Simon. ‘We’re exhausted enough as it is, and the market isn’t going to change that much in a couple of months. We’ll look when we get there.’

This wisdom hadn’t stopped Joyce, who was overjoyed at the prospect of her son’s family moving down near her, from sending up estate agents’ details and cuttings from the local paper’s property section every week. Most of the houses she alighted upon were wildly unsuitable – either huge baronial halls beyond their craziest financial dreams or rather boxy-looking properties on modern housing developments. There was nothing, Kate mused, remotely like the house of her dream. But she and Simon enjoyed leafing through these missives with the excitement of newly-weds building castles in the air.

‘Look at Harwood Hall – sixteen bedrooms and forty acres of land! We could have four bedrooms each and a golf course for Dad.’

‘What the heck has Mother put this in for! A wet dyke, it says – dread to think what that is – at Brundall.’

‘Must be for mooring boats. Look, the photo’s just a patch of grass and a ditch.’