The Dream House (21 page)

The ferry boat was on the far side now, a queue of people disgorging onto the jetty, another queue ready to board. The ferryman helped out a young couple with a baby in a buggy, then handed in a succession of adults before settling down and picking up the oars.

Just then, in a streak of black and white, Bobby reappeared. ‘Oh, you’ve come over
here
now, how exciting, how exciting,’ he snuffled at the children. He wagged his tail and stuck his nose in the bucket.

‘
No!
’ shouted Charlie, and dived at Bobby. The spaniel jumped sideways. Kate grabbed at him. Too late. He scrabbled at the side then somersaulted into the water. One of the children laughed. Daisy screamed.

‘Bobby!’ screeched Joyce, loping up panting. ‘Quick, get him someone.’

Poor Bobby was treading water, fighting against the current. Kate swiped Sam’s net and lay down, poking the net end towards him. He was out of her reach and starting to drift away. At one point he vanished under the water, then bobbed up again choking and sneezing.

‘Here, let me.’ It was the man from the car park. He took the net from Kate and lay down, batting at Bobby. Useless. ‘Get a boathook from the hut. Quick!’ Kate ran to the shed where they had bought the nets and gabbled at the woman serving. The woman looked blank for a moment, then rushed out in the direction of another shed and returned with a long boathook.

‘Here, take this. There’s a lifebelt by the path. I’ll get it,’ she said.

Kate ran back with the hook. Bobby’s flailing was getting weaker; he could hardly keep his nose above the water. The man passed the boathook hand over hand across the water and, after some fumbling, jabbed it under Bobby’s collar. Caught. But how to get him out?

The shed woman arrived with the lifebelt, assessed the situation and ran back up the bank, shouting to the ferryman. He paused in his rowing, swung round in his seat and looked at Bobby, then turned back and said something to his passengers. He dipped hard with one oar and pulled the prow round.

To Joyce and Kate it seemed a long moment before the boat drifted alongside the exhausted dog and the ferryman shipped his oars. A burly man leaned over the side, put one arm under Bobby’s chest and tried to pull him up. The ferryman disengaged the boathook and felt for the dog’s back legs. In a moment they dragged him, sneezing and yelping, into the boat. They could see him crouched in the bottom of the boat, coughing up water. The ferryman rowed in strong quick strokes for the shore.

Liz gathered the children and they all went down to the jetty. Bobby was shivering and spluttering, but he was alive. Joyce hugged his sodden body to her. ‘You silly, silly boy,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re all right now. Thank you, thank you.’ She beamed at the circle of people. The ferryman gave a wave and pushed off in his boat once more.

Kate turned to the man from the car park, who was brushing at the mud on his suit with a handkerchief, though with little success. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You were brilliant.’ The man gave a modest smile, then looked at her more closely and his face changed.

‘Ah, it’s you. Yes, um, sorry about earlier,’ he said abruptly. ‘I felt bad about . . . maybe you didn’t see me after all.’ He put out his hand. ‘The name’s Jordan, by the way. Max Jordan.’

The name was familiar, but she couldn’t think how. She clasped his hand and then it was as if a shot of electricity ran through her. ‘Kate Hutchinson,’ she replied. ‘I know who you are.’

He stared at her, still holding her hand. Yes, thought Kate, his eyes are the same as hers, but a more intense blue.

‘Kate Hutchinson,’ he repeated. ‘Was it you who rescued my Great-aunt Agnes?’

‘Of course, I must thank you for everything,’ continued Max, releasing Kate’s hand. ‘Rescuing my aunt and coming to see her so often. And I gather we’re somehow distantly related? That’s an incredible coincidence.’ He stood shaking his head. ‘Why Aunt Agnes will insist on living in that old pile still, I don’t know. Something like this was bound to have happened sometime. Really, at her age, she should be in some sort of sheltered housing or a home.’

Kate thought he seemed nice but a bit patronizing, although Mrs Summers had said almost exactly the same thing when Kate bumped into her on one of her visits a few weeks ago. It had been one of those periods when the doctors thought Agnes might be well enough to go home soon. But Mrs Summers had said it differently, her anxiety for her employer born out of long acquaintance.

‘This whole thing has really shaken me, Kate,’ she confided. ‘I don’t want her coming back to that big house, I really don’t. She couldn’t get upstairs easily before, and what’ll it be like now? Though we could get a stairlift, I suppose . . . And it’s murder to clean – all that stuff everywhere and I’m not allowed to move anything, oh dear me, no. It’s my job on the line saying this, but she’d be much better off in one of them bungalows in the village with a nice new kitchen. I could go and clean for her there. But she keeps saying she won’t go. It do worry me, Kate, it do worry me.’

‘Have you been visiting your aunt today?’ Kate asked Max now. ‘How is she?’

‘Bit miserable, to tell the truth. They’ve suddenly moved her onto the main ward – say they need the room. She’s not her usual self. Wants to get out of there. Well, it’s the best place for her at the moment, I reckon, until something else can be arranged.’

Kate was shocked. She’d only been to see Agnes a couple of days ago and there had been no mention of this being about to happen.

‘Oh, poor Agnes, I’m not surprised she’s upset. She’d hate being on a ward with lots of strangers. Are you very close to her? Is there anything you can do? I mean . . .’

‘I can’t gauge how much she minds. I only met her for the first time a few years ago, after my mother died. It sounds ridiculous but Mum had never met her either. Apparently there was some sort of family rift that no one ever talks about. Some scandal about my grandparents’ marriage. I wrote to Aunt Agnes about Mum’s death and visited her once or twice . . .’

‘Kate, I’m sorry to interrupt, dear.’ Joyce, with a sodden and chastened hound on a lead, looked panicky. Kate introduced her to Bobby’s rescuer.

‘Mr Jordan, I can’t thank you enough. Bobby means so much to me. Since my husband died, you see . . . Kate, I ought to go and get Bobby looked over by the vet. He’s not himself. But what about Laurence? Oh dear, how are we going to manage the cars?’

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ said Max. ‘Hope to see you again sometime. Good dog you’ve got there.’ He ruffled Bobby’s wet fur, gave him a quick pat and walked off through the car park.

In the end, Liz took her children and Claire to pick up Laurence at Southwold church and return to their cottage in Blythborough. Joyce, Kate and the Hutchinson children took Bobby for an emergency once-over at the vet’s in Halesworth.

It was quarter past four when Joyce’s car turned into the lane up to Paradise Cottage. Kate’s heart leaped with relief when she saw the blue Fiesta outside. Simon was home, though he couldn’t have been there long if he had caught the two o’clock.

The vet had declared Bobby to be fine, but said she would keep him in overnight for observation, so it was a subdued party that got out of the car and trouped indoors.

‘Daddy! Daddy!’ the children shouted. There was no answer, but there was a sound of running water so they ran upstairs to look for him. The answerphone light was winking. Kate listened to a message from the Crown Hotel requiring her to ring and confirm the size of her party.

She reached for the receiver. Where was the number? The phone book had vanished. Well, it must have been the last call they’d made that morning before they left. She pressed the redial button and waited.

Two rings, then, in a perky American accent,
Hi, it’s Meredith here. I can’t talk to you now, but leave your name and number
. The beep sounded but Kate just stood there, her mind working. Then she realized she was listening to silence and replaced the receiver.

‘Wrong number,’ she said to Joyce. Very wrong, she thought. And yet she knew, with a flash of insight, that something at last made perfect sense.

So this is it, Kate said to herself later, sitting in the bar of the Crown Hotel, watching Simon embrace Liz and Claire and clasp Laurence’s arm and clap him on the shoulder. This is how it feels to know that your husband is having an affair. This is how countless women have felt over the centuries. What do I do? I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to think about what next. I just want to run away and cry.

But she sat there, a fixed smile upon her face, laughing when the others laughed, trying to ask Liz and Laurence sensible things about their work, hearing about the American tour Claire’s Alex was currently on. And she watched Simon.

Her husband seemed his usual self. Except she couldn’t say she knew what that was any more. It was like looking at him as she had at the beginning of their relationship, noting the careful way he dressed, the way his blond hair – sparser now – fell down over his forehead. Then the filter changed and he looked so immensely familiar that she felt a stab of pain. She could see her children in him. Daisy’s eyes, Sam’s mouth. This man belonged to her, they had forged their beloved boy and girl from their joined flesh. He was part of her. She was part of him. Is that what the one flesh of the marriage service meant?

The waitress came to announce their table was ready and the party moved from bar to restaurant. Kate hardly noticed what she ate or drank. Ashes in her mouth, yes. But as the evening went on, and everything seemed normal, she began to wonder whether she had got the situation wrong.

Meredith is in banking too. Why shouldn’t he have phoned her?

But on a Saturday afternoon, at her home, as soon as he’d got back from a long week at the office? Oh, come on
.

But he loves me – he’s always telling me he does. He wouldn’t betray me.

OK, so why has he been so quiet and withdrawn recently, so absent from our relationship? Isn’t that one of the classic symptoms?

He’s been working hard. He’s totally exhausted.

Yeah, right. And what about the mystery of the missing money? That’s another sign.

It’s been an expensive time recently. And there was that confusion over the lost credit card.

You’ll have to do better than that, Kate . . .

Kate sighed. Perhaps she should look at it differently. Suppose he had slept with Meredith – did that matter nowadays? It didn’t have to mean the end of everything. They could make it up, they could change things.

No and no and no
, her heart cried.
We can’t. It’s broken
.

But perhaps she had got it all wrong . . .

On and on, her thoughts whirled.

Then came another bolt from the blue.

Claire said to Simon, ‘What did you think of the play the other night?’

The others glanced at him, puzzled. Claire looked at Kate, a long look with a note of apology in it. Simon picked up a book of matches and began to fiddle with it. ‘Not bad. Not one of his best, though. Pretty difficult subject for a play, I thought.’

Claire explained to the others. ‘I saw Simon at the National Theatre, didn’t I? A week ago.’ Her tone of voice was artificially bright.

‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t usually go to the theatre,’ you’ve certainly barely been with me, Kate thought, ‘but a colleague had tickets and asked me to go.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were going out to the theatre,’ she said in a small voice.

‘I think you’d know his colleague,’ said Claire to Laurence. Again, Kate was bewildered. Why was Claire doing this? ‘Ted’s old girlfriend. You know, the American woman. Meredith Something.’

Someone moved the conversation on. To other London productions, thereby wending its way to Suffolk and what there was to do culturally there. Music festivals, Jill Freud’s summer theatre.

‘So how have you been spending your time, Kate, when the kids are at school?’ Laurence asked. ‘Not lying around eating chocolate, I hope.’

Kate explained about the friends she’d made, Debbie and Louise, and about looking for somewhere to live. ‘I work a bit, do the domestic stuff, look after the kids. I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘The time just seems to disappear. Oh, but I’ve found some family nearby.’ She went on to explain about Miss Melton. ‘It’s curious, but she’s become a very good friend. I wish I’d met her before, before she was ill, I mean. She doesn’t seem old – she feels things so deeply. She’s a very strong person but she is very vulnerable, too, as if a lot of sad things have happened to her. We connect. And she lives in this amazing house stuffed with antiques and interesting ornaments and books. I’d love to have a proper look round one day if she ever goes home and invites me.’

‘I think Kate would like us to put in an offer for her house,’ joked Simon, obviously trying to restore normality to proceedings. But his attempt was foiled.

‘I think Kate would like you to put in an offer for
any
house,’ said Claire, her face pale. ‘And live in it.’

Liz looked at her. ‘Claire,’ she said, ‘what is the matter with you this evening, darling? You’ve hardly eaten anything and now you’re being bitchy. That’s not like you, sweetie.’

Claire turned pale suddenly and gasped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m just upset about something. Oh, about Alex. Excuse me a minute.’ She got up and rushed off in the direction of the toilets.

‘Well,’ said Laurence, ‘this definitely isn’t our usual cool Miss O’Brien.’

‘I’ll just go and find her,’ said Kate, and squeezed behind Simon’s chair. ‘You go on and order coffee.’

When the door to the Ladies swung shut behind her she was confronted by the sight of Claire being copiously sick into a basin.

An ageing matron shut her handbag with a loud click and bustled past. ‘Well, that was a waste of a cordon bleu meal,’ she muttered to Kate, shooting a disgusted eye at the mess.

Kate watched her leave, stunned into silence by such tactlessness. Then she went over to the towel-holder and started pulling out wadges of paper towel.