by Rebecca Reid
Poppy shook her head. ‘There are people working in every bloody room; they’ll hear me.’
‘They don’t care what you do as long as you pay on time. Come on.’
‘You’re not the boss of me,’ said Poppy, mostly to get Gina to leave her alone.
‘Louder. Aim it at the wall.’
Poppy repeated herself, feeling ridiculous as she aimed her words at the wall.
‘And once more with feeling,’ Gina instructed.
‘You’re not the boss of me,’ Poppy yelled at the wall.
‘Right,’ said Gina. ‘Now we prove it. We’re going to finish the painting. Come on.’
And so they painted the rest of the bedroom, singing along to Hits of the Nineties. Occasionally, while smiling at Gina’s Backstreet Boys descant, fear would niggle at her. But then Gina would say something about whether Ronan Keating had a massive penis or not, and she’d laugh. Gina’s presence made it difficult to feel afraid.
When they finally sat down at the end of the day, the room was perfect. It was the prettiest colour she had ever seen, and next to the newly painted white floorboards it was better than she’d even dreamed. The bed had been delivered the day before, beautiful and enormous and dominating the room. A long white chest sat at the end of it, with a dusky pink velvet cushion on top. The carpenter, whom she’d had to find from five villages over because no one in Linfield would agree to come, had built a matching window seat under the enormous picture window and by blissful good fortune she had found a pair of heavy silk curtains online which matched everything else.
‘Shall we walk it?’ Poppy said to Gina, who was lying next to her on the newly comfortable sofa in the snug, where they had replaced the too-big lampshade and painted the walls dark red.
‘Go on then,’ she said, ‘but only if you get me a drink.’
Poppy came back with a double vodka and tonic for Gina, who had called redecorating ‘thirsty’ work and got through two bottles of Grey Goose in a week. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe we did it.’
Gina took a slug of her drink. ‘Would you think I was mental if I said that I actually had fun?’
Poppy shook her head. ‘I’ve had so much fun. It’s like a different house.’
‘Nah.’ Gina got up, her glass already half empty. ‘It was always an amazing house. We just made it look like it should have looked. I’ve had some trippy dreams since we’ve been doing it though. Probably all the paint fumes.’
‘Me too! Like what?’
‘Oh, weird shit, like the house kept going back to how it was before we started, or falling down. Loads of dreams that I’m falling.’
Poppy opened her mouth.
‘No,’ Gina interrupted, ‘don’t give me that face. It’s not haunted, it’s not possessed, it’s paint fumes. What time does his lordship get back?’
In answer to the question, the noise of crunching gravel sounded outside. ‘Right now!’ said Poppy, her face lighting up.
‘Cool,’ said Gina, setting the glass down on the side. ‘I’m heading off.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I told you, I’m going to London this weekend.’
‘Do you have to go now?’
Gina looked at the clock. Poppy watched as her lips moved, almost imperceptibly. She was working out what fake train to claim to get so that she wouldn’t be able to stay. ‘Gee, why are you in such a rush?’
‘I’m not,’ she said, heading into the corridor, ‘I just want you and Drew to have the place to yourself. He’ll probably want to shag you in every room seeing as you’ve made it look so amazing.’
‘Darling?’ Drew’s voice came from the front door. Poppy ran along the corridor, up the little stairs that connected the front and the back of the house and into Drew’s arms.
‘The floor …’ he said.
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s …’ He paused, kneeling down to have a look at it. ‘How did you manage it?’
‘It was already there! We pulled up the floorboards.’
Drew’s face was a picture of marvel. ‘Bloody hell, Poppy, this is extraordinary.’
‘Come with me and see the kitchen.’
Gina was shoving things into her handbag when they walked in.
Drew opened his arms, offering her a hug. ‘Gina, it’s incredible. I can’t thank you enough.’
‘Oh, no, it was all Poppy, really. I just helped. Her vision.’ She shoved her feet into her trainers, treading the backs down. ‘I’m going to the station, OK? I can borrow your car, right?’ She directed her question towards Poppy.
Poppy nodded.
‘I’ll be back on Sunday, all right? Jesus, lose the long face or your husband’ll take one look at you and top himself.’ Gina stopped, looking guilty.
‘Are you all right to drive?’ said Poppy, ignoring the comment. She slipped her hand into Drew’s.
‘Yes, Mum.’ She dropped a kiss on the top of Poppy’s head, as if she were twenty years younger than her rather than two, and gave Drew an awkward sort of wave.
‘That was really weird,’ said Poppy as she listened to the car drive away. ‘It was like she wanted to get away from you.’
Drew shrugged. ‘Maybe she’s just being respectful of us needing some time together. She’s good like that.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘So, are you going to show me the rest of your miracle works?’
‘Yes!’
Drew seemed to want to stop and wonder at every tiny thing, each new bookshelf or lamp or lampshade, while Poppy wanted to run around the house pointing at things. She couldn’t remember the last time she was this excited. When they reached the dining room Drew looked gobsmacked.
‘It was amazing,’ Poppy said, running her hands over the new wallpaper. ‘When I pulled the paper off the walls I found kids’ writing. Do you know who Simon and William were?’
Drew shook his head. ‘Not sure. Maybe the kids of the family who lived here before? You really are astonishing,’ he said, wandering back into the hall. ‘It’s like a different house. Those are all my books!’ He pointed to the new wall of books on the landing.
‘I called Ralph,’ she said. ‘He had them sent up from storage. You do like it, don’t you?’
Drew wrapped his arms around her and squeezed. ‘I love it. It feels like you’ve given it what it wanted.’
Quietly Poppy thought that it was quite the opposite, more that she and Gina had bullied the house into submission, but she didn’t say that. Instead she melted her body into Drew’s and focused on the perfect floor beneath her feet.
BEFORE
‘I like this music,’ said Poppy, rinsing lettuce leaves in the ancient colander. She gestured towards the little speaker Caroline and Jim had bought on their second trip to the house and left here, so that they could always have music when they visited. ‘What is it?’
‘She’s called Dory Previn,’ Caroline replied. ‘She’s great, isn’t she? Jim was obsessed with her when we were at university. It still reminds me of sharing a single bed in his room.’ She looked up, through the window, and saw that the children were sitting outside on the grass with Jim, attacking enormous ice creams. ‘They’re never going to sleep after that much sugar. I suppose that’s the point of being on holiday.’
‘They’re going to have the best memories of this place when they grow up.’
‘What were holidays like when you were growing up?’ Caroline asked. It wasn’t a fair question, not really. She knew Poppy wasn’t close to her family. But she wanted to know why. Poppy was so reliable, so helpful. So funny and sweet and so very much a part of family life. How could her mother have taken against her?
‘We didn’t go away much.’
‘Why not?’
‘Money. But even if we’d had any, my mum doesn’t like going far from home. She doesn’t drive or anything.’
‘Didn’t she drop you off at university?’
‘Nope,’ Poppy replied casually a
s she put a glass in the dishwasher.
‘Then how did you get there?’
‘Train.’ Poppy grinned. ‘The girl handing out room keys looked so upset when I told her I was on my own, I’m pretty sure she swapped me into a bigger room.’
The vision of Poppy, even younger than she was now, standing on the platform at Durham train station on her own with everything she owned in one suitcase tore at Caroline’s chest. A little part of her liked hearing about Poppy’s mother. Whatever her own failings were – however late she stayed at the surgery sometimes – she was nothing like Mrs Grant.
‘We can drop you back in October,’ she heard herself say.
Poppy’s chest flushed pink. She seemed to be concentrating rather harder than she needed to on chopping an onion. ‘Oh, you don’t need to do that. Really.’
‘We’d like to,’ said Caroline firmly. Poppy looked embarrassed, so Caroline decided to shift the focus of the conversation. ‘So where was the first place you ever went away to?’
‘Away like abroad?’
Caroline nodded.
‘Here.’
‘This is your first ever trip aboard?’ She tried to keep her voice light, as though she wasn’t surprised. But how was that possible in an age of twenty-quid flights and package deals? How could Poppy have spent twenty-one years living in the UK and never gone anywhere?
‘We lived by the sea,’ Poppy volunteered. ‘So it never seemed to make much sense going away to a holiday place. That’s why I was so worried about the passport thing.’
‘What passport thing?’
‘About not having one. Didn’t Jim tell you?’
Caroline caught her face before it changed. ‘Of course he did. Anyway, all that matters is that we’ve got you here now. And it’s going to be great. I promise. Shall we take this lot outside? Not that there’s any chance of those little monsters eating a single savoury bite after those ice creams.’
Caroline picked up the bowl of salad and the plate of cheese and meat. There was no point cooking proper meals here; they’d just bought all sorts of bits from the supermarket. The kids loved French shops. In London they’d whine and moan about trailing around Waitrose, but here everything was foreign and exciting and they loved running up and down the aisles guessing what things were and trying to sneak things into the trolley. Caroline didn’t much care what they ate on holiday, but she knew that her job was to play the straight man, to make it look like they were getting away with something. Being boring was what they wanted from her, so it was what she did. Wasn’t that the thing about parenting?
‘This all looks amazing!’ said Jim, sitting down at the little wooden table. The chairs were all just a little bit wobbly, and would give you a splinter in the back of your thigh if you fidgeted too much. Would the shabbiness here always be charming? Or would they come to a point in their life where they wanted luxury? Would they be willing to trade off the total privacy and silence of Côte Rouge for convenience? Activities. TVs that always worked, electricity that didn’t fuse if too many people tried to use a plug at the same time.
‘What’s that?’ asked Poppy, pointing at one of the cheeses.
‘Pont l’Évêque,’ said Jim, before Caroline answered. ‘It’s a bit stronger than Brie, but not much. You’ll probably like it.’
He clearly loved this role, educating her. Telling her what various foods were, getting her to drink wine. ‘I drink wine,’ she had insisted earlier in the holidays. ‘But only on nights out.’
‘You don’t have to drink it to get slaughtered,’ Jim had insisted. He’d poured her a New Zealand Sauvignon and made her try it. Either she had liked it very much, or she’d committed to being polite and pretended with utter conviction. She’d mentioned school plays to Caroline, offhand. Something about being in a show at Durham. So clearly she had it in her to pretend.
Caroline was quite sure that Poppy would never reject anything she or Jim suggested, in case it offended them.
As Caroline sat down to join her family at the table, she couldn’t stop the voice in her head. What was the ‘passport thing’?
Why had Jim kept it from her?
CHAPTER 26
Drew and Poppy had, as Gina predicted, taken it upon themselves to christen every room in the house. Forty-eight hours had skipped by in a blur of tangled limbs, laughter, red wine and delicious food. Poppy had cooked every meal in her knickers and one of Drew’s shirts, a cliché he loved. Time had evaporated and Monday morning had arrived, dark and unwelcome. Poppy had woken up from a bone-meltingly deep sleep to find that Drew had already gone and Gina was yet to return, despite having said she would be back on Sunday. Yet again, she was alone here.
Poppy lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She and Gina had painted the walls, but hadn’t had the right shade of white to do the ceiling. It had a small yellow patch which needed extra attention. Perhaps it would need plastering. She added it to the list of things she kept in her head, things that still needed doing. The taps in the downstairs loo. The back door at the side of the house. These little things were like life rafts. The week with Gina, so busy and productive, had been perfect. Finding other things to do and adding them to her list, knowing that her work wasn’t all over, would keep her sane. A little bit of her wondered if she’d been too quick to finish the job, rushing to get it done before Drew got back from his trip, before his friends descended. Should she have saved something, made the whole thing last longer?
What a cliché. Younger wife, wanting to make everything look perfect, as if that would change anything. As if that would earn her place in this house. Poppy had found a book in the school library, years ago. Rebecca. It was the story of a young woman who married a much older man and moved to his huge house in the country. She hadn’t finished it. She’d found the heroine, who walked around the house intimidated by it, wishing she belonged, too irritating. Just fucking do something, she had thought, and she had shoved the paperback back on to the shelf, the plastic covering bending backwards as it caught on a next-door book. She smiled to herself, remembering it. If only she could be eighteen and know everything again.
The doorbell punctured her thoughts. Who could that be? She got up and pulled a pair of shorts from the chair in the corner of the room, finding a T-shirt to cover her nakedness and twisting her hair into a bun. Not that it would be anyone important. If Gina was back she would have used her keys. Drew the same. And no one had visited since they had arrived; no neighbours had dropped by to see them. It had surprised Poppy, to start with. She had thought that village life would mean fetes and bake sales and people popping over to introduce themselves. ‘Maybe if we lived in the village itself?’ Drew had explained. ‘But if you live on one of the lanes, it’s not really like that.’
Poppy pulled the door open and saw the postman standing there, a heavy-set man in a short-sleeved shirt and knee-length shorts.
‘Parcel for you,’ he said, holding out a large Jiffy bag.
‘Thanks,’ said Poppy, squinting into the sunlight. She took the little screen from him and slowly wrote her name with the plastic pencil.
‘Doesn’t need to be accurate,’ he told her as he realized what she was doing. But Poppy had had so few chances to write her married name, she could hardly resist.
‘Beautiful day,’ she said, handing it back.
‘Mrs Drew Spencer’, read the label. Which meant it was for both of them – the sort of confusing law of etiquette she’d never have known about if it weren’t for her years with the Hendersons. Did she have to wait for Drew to come home to open it? She looked up at the clock. He wouldn’t be home for hours and hours. He wouldn’t mind. A little guiltily, she pulled at the tab and tipped a cream box, tied with a blue ribbon, on to the table. There was a card. ‘Congratulations on your wedding, much love, Dilly & Mac.’
They were Drew’s friends. Mac had been at school with Drew, and they’d shared an apartment in New York for a couple of years. Drew had told her that during one of his rare bouts
of sharing. They were one of the couples coming to stay next weekend. God, it was next weekend. Poppy counted on her fingers to make sure that she had the date right. Yes, it was next weekend. That had come around terrifyingly quickly.
Poppy ran a finger over the heavy card. The writing was cramped, but neat. A blue fountain pen. She could just imagine what Dilly would be like, the kind of precise person who wanted to send a wedding present now rather than bring it with her when she visited. She would be embarrassed if she had to watch them open it. Poppy had been shocked when she’d discovered that children like the Hendersons’ kids weren’t allowed to open birthday presents at their party, but instead had to wait until everyone had gone home.
Poppy decided that Dilly, whoever she was, would have told Mac one evening when he came home from work that she’d sent Drew and his new wife a present for their wedding. Then they’d speculate about her – guess how old she was and what she looked like. One of their children would probably offer to look her up online and then be surprised not to find anything. ‘Are you sure that’s her name, Mummy?’ she imagined a lanky teenager asking.
Poppy tugged at the ribbon and lifted the lid of the box. The tissue paper was sealed by a sticker. She slid her finger underneath it and then lifted the paper. Inside was a silver photo frame. She picked it up. Expensive. Classic. Not, if she was going to be honest, very exciting. It was intensely plain. The kind of thing she would never have bought for herself, especially as it probably cost several hundred pounds. But the kind of thing that would be nice to have. She picked it up. She would put a photo from their wedding in it, and put it in the drawing room, so that when Dilly and Mac came to stay they would be able to see that she and Drew liked it. And that way they’d have to approve of at least one aspect of her decoration.
The only hard copy of their wedding photo was in a brown leather frame in Drew’s office. She pushed the door open and breathed in the strangely male scent of the room. Drew had never said that she couldn’t use the study, nor had he ever claimed it for himself. But something about all the leather and books, the way that sound went dead as soon as you made any, meant Poppy didn’t feel at ease in here. She picked up the photo frame. ‘Do you realize,’ she had asked Drew on their wedding day, ‘that was the first photo anyone’s ever taken of us?’ They’d laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Poppy had printed the photo out at a little shop in the town centre, determined to have a copy of it to take home. There were a few others on his phone, snapped by the witnesses they’d dragged in off the street, by the waiter at the restaurant. She should get those printed too. Make them a little wedding album.
