The Dream House (9 page)

On impulse she slipped the chain around her neck and the pendant lay cold in the hollow between her breasts.

That night she dreamed of the house again. This time it was winter. She was standing in the drawing room, a huge log fire blazing in the fireplace. A young parlourmaid was stacking the tea trolley. She wore a calf-length black dress and a little white cap. When she turned to wheel the trolley out she looked right through Kate, who had to jump out of the way to let it clatter past.

Kate was left alone with the crackling of the fire and the slow ticking of an elegant grandfather clock. She wandered out into the hall, which smelled of beeswax. All was dark wood panelling, with the most beautiful carved wooden staircase rising up to a galleried landing above. She started to mount the stairs, then stopped on the half-landing. She could hear a woman crying somewhere above. Terrible, desolate sobbing. And another woman’s voice, harsher, speaking to her.

‘I hate you. I’ll never forgive you, never!’ the crying voice broke out in a wail.

A door closed upstairs, there was the sound of footsteps on carpet, then a thin, grim-faced woman appeared on the landing above. Like the maid she seemed not to see Kate. The latter pressed herself against the banisters and the woman, who wore a dove-grey twinset and a pleated skirt, brushed past her. Kate was shocked by the expression on her face – of suppressed triumph. Above her, the sobbing continued.

Just then, far away, she could hear a man’s voice and someone was shaking her. ‘Kate? Wake up! Kate, why are you crying?’

When Simon tore her from her sleep, her heart was thudding, adrenalin pumping painfully through her limbs. Once again she felt a deep sense of loss, but worse this time – an intense loneliness such as she had felt in the weeks and months after Nicola’s death. Burying her face in Simon’s warm neck, she cried. In stumbling words she tried to explain, but her account of a dream house and the locket merely confused him.

‘How can you say you want to live in a house that doesn’t exist? It’s crazy!’ He yawned.

In the morning, Kate shut the locket in a trinket tin and stuffed it into the top of a cardboard box of books that still had nowhere to go. Later, after she’d found Daisy trying to unpack the box again, she bundled everything back and took the box out to join the others in the shed. She had no idea what the dreams meant or if they really had something to do with the locket, but she had enough to fill her mind at the moment. She had brought with her from the kitchen of their Fulham home, the funny little picture of the dream house that she had drawn so many months ago, and now Simon pinned it to his mother’s fridge with a magnet.

‘I bet you didn’t believe for a moment when you drew this that it would actually come true.’ He laughed. ‘“Be careful what you wish for”, as they say.’

‘And “In dreams begin responsibilities”, don’t forget that one,’ Kate mock-lectured him.

‘Don’t I know it,’ he said. ‘I’ve just paid out for the rail season ticket and we can’t afford to eat until payday.’

‘Even dreams don’t come cheap these days,’ Kate said, studying her picture. Then she smiled. ‘But don’t worry, this one is going to be worth every penny.’

August 2003

Simon enjoyed looking round houses.

‘This is one of the best we’ve seen so far,’ he said, as they loitered on the gravel drive in front of the third property of the day, a fine Georgian rectory.

Simon’s work schedule had proved unusually punishing this summer, and this week towards the end of August was the only one from the original planned fortnight’s holiday he had, in the end, been able to take. Joyce had been looking after the children while he and Kate visited estate agents in the area and tirelessly viewed property. But nothing seemed to suit. Now it was the Friday afternoon and Simon’s holiday was nearly over. Kate was beginning to despair.

‘They’ve made a nice job of the roof,’ he said, taking several steps back and craning his neck to see. He looked down at the particulars again. ‘There’s certainly enough space, if we made this snug into the playroom. And the conservatory’s useful. There’s just the question of the master bedroom – isn’t it hideous?’

‘Sssh.’ Kate glanced anxiously at the open door. ‘The owner will hear you. I suppose we could change it easily enough.’ She turned and gazed over the front garden. ‘My real problem is with this road. There are so many lorries. What’s the point of moving away from London if we’ve still got traffic roaring past our door?’

‘I expect it’s mostly in the daytime, but you’re right,’ Simon sighed. ‘There are the fumes and we’d worry about Sam and Daisy running in the road. Never mind trying to get the car out of that blind entrance at night.’

The rectory was just outside a large village several miles east of Fernley. It had been recently restored to within an inch of its life. However, although the living areas had been suitably renovated – the farmhouse kitchen, the chintzy drawing room, the grand Georgian panelled dining room – the owners had gone astray when it came to decorating upstairs. The bedrooms had been themed in different periods of design. The Art Nouveau guest room was beautiful, if impractical with all the Tiffany-style glass fittings. The simple geometric patterns of the Art Deco room were attractive if dour. The Kate Greenaway nursery for the owner’s visiting baby granddaughter was delightful, albeit not right for Sam or the thoroughly modern Daisy. But when the owner flung open the door of the master bedroom, it was all Kate and Simon could do not to gasp in horror.

‘This is the one we were really proud of,’ said Mr Potts, a thin, sad-looking man who had lost his wife the year before. ‘Polly always felt we could really be ourselves in here.’

They stared in silence. Had Polly Potts had a hankering to be Mae West? The ceiling and one wall were one big mirror. The carpet was a field of white fur, the remaining walls were papered in a hideous ultramarine and pink circle design. As for the bed, Kate had never seen such a huge one. Never mind king-size, this one would cater for the Emperor of the Universe.

‘A water bed, as you can see,’ said Mr Potts, sitting on one corner and bouncing gently up and down, disrupting the pile of furry cushions on the pillows. ‘I can arrange to leave it if you like.’

The 1960s theme had been carried through to the bathroom, where a vast heart-shaped jacuzzi had been sunk into a dais approached by three shallow steps. Something told Kate that Mr Potts hadn’t used it since his wife’s death. This wasn’t a bathroom for one.

‘Let’s walk round the village, see if we can get a cup of tea,’ said Simon now. They called goodbye to the lugubrious Mr Potts, inched the car out of the perilous driveway and drove carefully through the village until they saw a pub that advertised afternoon tea. The lounge of the King of Hearts turned out to be shabby-genteel and dusty, but they sank into the comfy armchairs with relief and ordered tea.

‘There just doesn’t seem that much in our price bracket,’ Kate commented a little later, spreading a scone with butter and jam out of plastic pots.

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve seen thirteen places so far this week. I think we’re doing rather well,’ said Simon, who had drunk his tea quickly and was now rattling his keys, eager to get back on the road. They had one more place to see at four. ‘I just think we need to be looking nearer Diss. The drive to the station adds an hour to my travelling.’

‘Well, we’d better find somewhere quickly then,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t want the kids to settle in and then have to change schools again. Daisy’s nervous enough about starting at Fernley, and Sam’s confused. When Tasha’s postcard arrived the other day, he asked if she was coming back to look after him.’

To tell the truth, Daisy and Sam had hardly mentioned their old nanny. Despite having to fall back on one another’s company, without the host of friends Tasha had gathered round them in London, the children had been enjoying a wonderful summer. The weather had often been beltingly hot and, once the chores were done, days at the beach had been interspersed with picnics in the countryside and cooler days spent wandering around small market towns. They had visited the otter sanctuary at Bungay, the castle at Framlingham, and the safari park at Kessingland. Next week, Joyce’s friend Hazel was having her grandsons, Toby and Joe, to stay, and Joyce had arranged some outings with them.

In many ways it was proving an idyllic period for Kate. She had never had so much free time to spend with her children – maternity leave was tarnished by the memory of her depression – and she was free of the dread she usually felt during family holidays, knowing that soon they would end and the grind and the guilt would start up all over again.

The biggest problem was Simon – or rather, not seeing enough of Simon. Most mornings he caught the seven o’clock train from Diss and often returned exhausted only after the children had gone to bed. The weekends had become even more precious than they had been in London. Only on Saturday and Sunday, it seemed, could they be a normal happy family together.

Kate missed him badly now that she was at home all day, although she was far from alone – the children and Joyce saw to that. And therein lay a second difficulty: she had had to get used to living side by side with her mother-in-law. Of course, living with someone was always going to be different from staying with them for a few days; Kate hadn’t expected otherwise. And she knew she was incredibly lucky to have so much help with the children. But she hadn’t foreseen quite how irritating Joyce could sometimes be. For a start, her mother-in-law was so relentlessly cheerful. She chatted brightly about trivia, when Kate wanted silence. Joyce even talked to herself, a consequence, Kate supposed, of living alone. ‘Now, I wonder whether that cake is ready yet,’ or ‘What a silly place to put my glasses,’ Kate would overhear her say. Most annoying of all, if Kate was elsewhere in the house, reading, maybe, or putting away the children’s clothes, Joyce would come and check up on her. ‘Ah, just wondered if you were all right, dear,’ she would say or, ‘There you are. Do you need anything?’

Kate tried hard to fit in with Joyce’s routines, but small irritations built up. She hated the way Joyce would stack the washing-up in the sink ‘to soak’ before adding it to the dishwasher, and would pointedly transfer it all to the machine. And she disliked the fact that Bobby’s half-empty dog-food tin sat next to the family food in the fridge.

At the same time, she knew certain of her habits were annoying to Joyce. Kate was lazy about making the beds, she didn’t make gravy the ‘proper’ way Joyce had been taught, and she never drank the last inch of her cup of tea. ‘Have you finished with this, dear?’ Joyce would ask three times a day for the first fortnight before removing Kate’s mug.

Weekends, too, could be difficult. Simon and Kate had to go out together by themselves to achieve any privacy, and their love-making had become an almost furtive affair, indulged in only long after the house was quiet and Joyce, they assumed, safely asleep. It was a mercy at least, Kate often thought, that Joyce had her own en suite bathroom so that there wasn’t
that
kind of embarrassing encounter on the landing.

On the other hand, during the week, if Simon wasn’t back till late and Joyce was out at her reading group or having supper with friends, Kate found there was too much time to reflect. As the summer wore on she felt increasingly lonely and directionless, and began to wonder whether she had done the right thing in giving up her job and moving away from everyone she knew. A couple of visits to London to see her old friends merely underlined this feeling of loss: their busy lives were going on without her. She often slept badly, haunted by anxious dreams. Never mind, she told herself firmly. It will be better when we find a place of our own.

‘Durrants showed me some places near Diss here,’ Simon said now, and reached for his briefcase, removing the sheaf of prospectuses the estate agent had given him that morning. ‘There’s one here I liked the look of.’ He passed it to Kate who squinted at it in the half-dark of the pub lounge.

‘Oh, but that’s a barn conversion,’ she said, and threw it on the table. ‘It’s not what we’re looking for at all. I want somewhere old.’

‘We’ve looked at some old places. The one just now. And what about that farmhouse this morning?’

‘No, that didn’t look right. I’d like somewhere . . . Victorian, I think.’

‘Kate, the farmhouse
was
Victorian. Look here, it says
1865
. That’s mid-Victorian.’

‘Oh. Well, it didn’t look Victorian.’

Simon rolled his eyes in exasperation and Kate felt guilty. Somehow the image of the dream house had lodged very clearly in her memory. She was aware that she was being unreasonable, scouring the countryside for an imaginary house, and she was too embarrassed to say anything about it again to the oh-so-rational Simon, but she knew that wherever it was they chose, she had to feel in the deepest sense that it was ‘home’. The dream, she was growing more certain, had been a sign.

The final house of the day was too dark and there was a large swampy pond in the grounds. Kate shuddered at the anxieties that could cause. On the way back to Fernley they took a different route down a quiet country lane, and drove past a sign for the village of Seddington. Just after the sign they passed a row of poplar trees and Simon pointed at a large brick gateway with wrought-iron gates.

‘Wonder what that place is,’ he said.

Kate turned to look up the drive, but just then her attention was caught by a line of cyclists toiling towards them.

‘Watch out, Simon!’ She cringed as her husband swerved and braked. The cyclists sailed past with space to spare.

‘I saw them,’ he said irritably. ‘There was plenty of room.’

‘Sorry,’ Kate said, leaning back in her seat with a sigh. ‘I’m not used to these narrow country roads.’ They had forgotten all about the mysterious gateway.

They were in the village now, passing rows of thatched cottages, a pub, an antique shop. To their left was a short cul-de-sac up to the church. A family with two tots on bikes, and with another in a buggy to which was tied an elderly dog started to wobble their way across the road in front of them. This time, Simon slid deliberately to a halt and waved them across. He sat there as they ambled over, his fingers drumming on the wheel.