The Dream House (15 page)

‘That chap Tim Beaton we met last week recommended this place,’ Simon said. He was in a good mood this evening. He had enjoyed a bit of gardening with Daisy while Kate and Sam were at the party, and then Bobby had taken the three of them on a muddy walk in the fields after Kate left to see Miss Melton and Joyce had put her feet up.

‘Meet anyone interesting at the party?’

‘Actually, yes,’ she said. ‘Sebastian’s dad’s a bit of a dark horse. Runs an antique shop in Saxmundham. Knows a lot about local history, too. He was telling me all about Dunwich. Did you know it was a huge port in the Middle Ages, before a lot of it fell into the sea in a storm? They say you can still hear the old church bells on a stormy day.’

‘Get him to scare the kids with a few stories of Black Shuck, did you?’

‘You mean the devil’s dog with eyes like hot coals?’ Kate shivered. It was a local legend.

‘Don’t worry, Bobby’d see him off,’ laughed Simon and took a long draught of the local bitter that had just arrived with Kate’s very unlocal Chardonnay.

‘Bobby would see anyone off if he smelled like he did this afternoon.’

The spaniel had not distinguished himself by rolling in a manure heap. Simon, Sam and Daisy had had a fabulously messy time giving him a bath with, it turned out, Kate’s Jo Malone bath oil. Now he smelt of horse poo with grapefruit high notes.

‘So how did you get along with the old girl this afternoon? I haven’t had a chance to ask you.’

‘She wasn’t too bad. Surprisingly alert. It’s a good hospital and the nurses seem very caring and respectful of her. It’s funny, you know. I wonder whether we’re related.’ And she told Simon about the photograph and the coincidence of names. ‘I must ask Mum. Not that I can at the moment, though.’ She sat tracing circles on the tablecloth with her finger. Simon grasped her hand and held it tight.

Their food arrived and looked delicious. Kate had monkfish and Simon a very hearty steak and kidney pie. They ate hungrily and in silence, Kate trying out in her head different opening sentences to the matters that were on her mind and rejecting them all. Perhaps now, when they were sitting companionably together, wasn’t the time for heavy discussion about their pressured lifestyle.

They had nearly finished eating when Simon’s phone suddenly trilled. He ferreted around in his jacket on the back of the chair, pulled out the handset and gazed at the screen. A smile passed over his face and was quickly commuted to a frown. He pressed a couple of buttons and stuffed the mobile back in his pocket without looking at Kate. All he said was, ‘Work.’

‘On a Sunday night? Who?’ said Kate.

‘Oh – er, Gillingham. After some figures, I guess.’

The plates were taken away. Coffee arrived.

After furiously stirring in two sugars, Simon rested the spoon on the saucer and steepled his hands, his elbows resting on the table. He looked at Kate and seemed to choose his words carefully.

‘We’re having another difficult time at the office. I’m sorry I’m so late all the time. I know it’s hard on you, and I know I don’t see enough of the children.’

Kate relaxed. He was opening the conversation for her.

‘It’s certainly not how I thought it would be here.’ She played with her cappuccino, making snowy mountains of the frothy milk with her teaspoon. She put the spoon down. ‘I’m frankly in limbo,’ she said. ‘And you seem so far away . . .’

Simon gave a heavy sigh. ‘I just have a lot on my plate right now.’ He began to fiddle with the sugar bowl on the table beside him.

‘Is there anything I should know about? Are you frightened of losing your job, is that it? Whatever it is, don’t worry, we can sort it out.’

He looked at her in silence. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Nothing like that. It’s going pretty well, in fact, much better than last year. I’m enjoying it – more than any job I’ve ever had, I’d say. Gillingham says I might be up for promotion soon. No, it’s still this European thing. Just too few heads to do too much work. It doesn’t help having Mother nagging me, though. I could really do without that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We ought to get back, really, oughtn’t we? I must be up early tomorrow. There’s an eight-thirty meeting.’

While they waited for the bill, Simon looked at Kate, then reached over and stroked her cheek. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We will start looking for a place of our own again – when things settle down at work. I just need to get through this next bit with the Frankfurt trips. I know it’s not been fair on you. I’m sorry.’ He stopped. ‘I do love you, you know, Kate.’

Kate gave him a watery smile and rubbed her face against his hand. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could bear it all if you didn’t love me.’

He smiled but his eyes were troubled.

On Tuesday, when Kate phoned her father, it was to hear better news.

‘They’re sending her home tomorrow. Giving her some pills to cheer her up, poor old thing, but it’ll be good to have her home. Dogs are missing her like billyo.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Dad! But are they sure she’s ready?’ asked Kate.

‘The doctor said something about counselling,’ grunted Major Carter, ‘but I said we’d see. She needs a holiday, I reckon. I’m booking up that place in Spain again for the end of the month. She likes it there now she can take the dogs. Golf was good, too.’

‘Oh, I was going to ask you to come and stay round here again.’

‘We’d like that, yes. We’ll see how it goes. She might find the kids a bit much at the moment, though.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not that she isn’t fond of the children, don’t get me wrong,’ he added hastily. ‘They’re bright little things.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ Kate sighed. If only her parents would get to know Sam and Daisy better – it would be good for both sides.

‘But your mother would love to see you. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you popping down sometime? By yourself, I mean?’ Kate felt a rush of relief at the invitation.

‘That would be great, Dad, I’d love to come. I’ll have to talk to Joyce, though. Simon’s away for a few days in Germany, but she won’t mind managing them for a night. Would tomorrow be all right?’

Joyce had sighed, but had agreed to look after the children, and the next morning, after Kate had delivered Sam and Daisy to school, she insisted on making Kate a Thermos of too-weak coffee (‘just in case you need a break from the driving, dear’) and waved her off in the car.

Barbara was much better than Kate had feared. She was a bit disconnected because of the anti-depressants but, back home, distanced from her usual misery by the excitement and the medication, she was actually quite chatty.

‘I don’t know why everyone’s making so much of it all,’ she said, while enjoying the unaccustomed attention. The door bell and the telephone hardly stopped ringing. The doctor came, the next-door neighbours brought flowers, Kate’s jolly, unmarried Aunt Maggie, her father’s sister, came up from Sussex for afternoon tea.

‘It was just an accident,’ Barbara insisted to Kate that evening as Desmond was clearing up in the kitchen after supper and making coffee. Ringo and Benjy were curled up together on their mistress’s lap as if to stop her leaving again. ‘I thought the pills were the paracetamol. I had such a headache, you see.’

Kate forbore telling her mother that you never take so many paracetamol at one go either; she was reluctant to do anything to affect her mother’s unusual cheerfulness. She still wished she had accepted the suggestion of counselling, but their generation could be so suspicious of it. All she could get Dad to agree to was that he would ask Mum to consider it. Now she steered the conversation on to the other question to which she so much wanted an answer – the mystery of the photograph at Seddington House.

‘Mum, you know you said you had holidays in Suffolk when you were little, was that staying with family?’

‘Yes. My brother and I were sent to stay with Uncle Chris and Aunt Cecily. Where was it – began with a W. Wood something.’

‘Woodbridge?’

‘That was it. And they took a house by the sea in Southwold one summer. Nineteen fifty-four, it would have been. I was sixteen. They were still getting over those awful floods. Everything was a terrible mess, I remember.’

‘Christopher’s name was Lane, wasn’t it, like yours?’

‘Yes, that’s right. You remember Chris and Cecily, don’t you? I visited Chris once or twice in hospital before he died. No? And their daughters, Marion and Frances, coming to your wedding?’

Kate frowned uncertainly. ‘Just about,’ she said.

‘They’re my first cousins. Marion is two years younger than me and Frances four. ’

‘And what did Grandad do? Wasn’t he a civil servant before the war?’ Kate was fascinated. It was a long time since they had talked about the family tree and her mother seemed unusually animated, remembering the distant past. Kate’s grandfather had died in the D-Day landings and her grandmother when Kate was ten or eleven. Kate remembered Barbara telling her Grandad and Grandma had married very young.

‘Yes, his name was Philip and he was Chris’s younger brother. There was a sister, Lucy, as well, but I don’t remember meeting her much. She moved to New Zealand when she married.’

‘Mum, did you ever meet anyone in the family called Melton?’

‘Melton . . . Yes, that was the name I was trying to remember. When we drove back from seeing you last time, we went through a village and the sign reminded me.’

‘Was the village called Seddington?’

‘Yes. My grandmother was called Florence. She had an older sister, Evangeline, who had died. Once or twice when we stayed at Woodbridge, we visited a lady Chris said was a cousin, her daughter. Do you remember? I told you. She was the one with the maid – a proper maid with a uniform. It was a big house with tall chimneys. Full of antiques. I found a picture somewhere. Desmond,’ she told him as he came in with the coffee, ‘it’s Melton – the name of my father’s cousin that I was trying to remember. Could you dig out the album again? I want to show Kate.’ Barbara nodded to herself. ‘Agnes Melton. Yes. Aunt Agnes, I was told to call her. Though she wasn’t my aunt at all.’

When her husband returned, Barbara flipped through the black pages of the shabby little photograph album he handed her. Kate watched with stirring awareness. She hadn’t seen that album before, had she? Maybe she had, long ago, when she was a child.

The picture on the page her mother showed her was blurred, but instantly recognizable. It was a snapshot of a house taken from the end of the drive, a teenaged boy – Barbara’s elder brother Kenneth who had died as a soldier in the Suez crisis – standing on the grass waving. The high chimneys, the light reflecting off the diamond-paned windows – it was the house of her dream.

‘And so we must be related!’ Kate told Agnes.

It was early Monday afternoon, a week after Agnes’s accident, and Kate had driven over to see her. Debbie was having Daisy and Sam to tea and Kate didn’t have to pick them up until six.

‘Well, that explains so much,’ Agnes said, nodding in wonder. She was sitting upright in the bed today although, she’d grumbled to Kate, the nurses had been trying to get her up and walking about. ‘With that blasted thing.’ She had nodded grimly at the Zimmer frame parked at the other side of the bed. Kate gathered the walking experiment had not been successful.

‘Which makes us, Kate – well, let’s see . . . first cousins twice removed.’

‘I never understood how that worked. What does the removed mean?’

‘It means that you are two generations away from being my first cousin. The children of each of a pair of first cousins are second cousins to one another, but those children are a generation removed from their parents’ first cousin relationship.’

‘I see, so if all of those second cousins go on to have children . . .’

‘That new generation will be third cousins to one another, but second cousins once removed to each other’s parents. Personally I always liked the phrase “kissing cousins”, which is a general term used when everything gets too complicated to work out. You and I shall be kissing cousins.’ She held out a hand to Kate and the young woman clasped it. They sat for a moment, beaming at one another.

‘But I still can’t get over how like my mother you look,’ the old lady went on. ‘It’s uncanny. Especially since I remember Barbara and she didn’t take after our side of the family.’

‘Yes, it’s funny how looks can skip generations. And then some children seem to be mini-versions of their parents. I can never meet our friend Laurence’s parents without smiling; they’re so tall and thin like their three sons that their conversation at family events goes on above the heads of everyone else!’

‘I looked very like my mother, although my hair was lighter than hers.’

‘I know you said your mother died when you were little. That must have been awful for you. Had you any brothers or sisters? Did your father marry again?’

At first Agnes did not respond. She seemed to be thinking. And what she was thinking about made her sad. Finally she said, ‘I’d like you to know about it all. There’s been no one else to tell. Not my brother – he’s been dead many years. I have a great-nephew. Summers says he’s coming to see me, but he’s not turned up yet. Sent those, though.’ ‘Those’ were a large arrangement of hothouse flowers on a table in a corner of the room. ‘Lives in Norwich. No, it’s too long a story for today. Go on, off you go, you’ve got to fetch your children. Pass the tissues, would you? Then find the nurse for me. I need to get up.’

Agnes was clearly in some discomfort, but it wasn’t just physical. It was as though Kate had accidentally touched some nerve, for her mood had changed. Kate gave Agnes the fruit she’d brought, then when the nurse arrived, quietly slipped away.

As she made her way back to the car, Kate thoughts turned, as they often had over the last few days, to her mother’s photograph album.

‘Have I seen this book before?’ she asked her parents, but they didn’t know. They weren’t the kind of family who pored over photographs of the past together. Maybe she had once found this little album and turned the pages of this other world, a world where her mother was young and smiling, where Kate’s lost Uncle Kenneth stood waving in front of a house from a dream. And it had stayed in her subconscious all these years . . .