The House of Hopes and Dreams

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Come on, Shrimp, let’s go up to the house, thaw out over a hot drink and discuss things,’ he suggested and, though I was reluctant to leave the workshop, I realized I was partially glaciated and reluctantly allowed myself to be ushered out. I glanced at his face as I passed him and he was looking annoyingly smug.

  He knew he had me: I’d never be able to resist taking over Jessie Kaye’s workshop.

  The carriage turned into a circular gravel sweep with a central fountain and drew up in front of the porch.

  I had little more time than to cast an astonished glance at the white and black ornate intricacy of the ancient wing to the right, for both our host and his sister had come out to greet us.

  For some reason I had imagined Miss Revell to be younger than her brother, but she looked to me much closer to forty than thirty. She was very tall and unfortunately had inherited only a watered-down version of the family colouring, with sandy hair and pale-blue eyes.

  She welcomed us with cold civility and I had the impression she had taken me into instant dislike. But perhaps it was just that she considered herself to be a cut above entertaining tradesmen and their daughters as weekend guests and particularly a tradesman’s daughter who worked in the glass manufactory.

  Ralph, however, held my hand for longer than was due to mere politeness and told me with a warm smile that he was delighted to see me and looked forward to showing me his home.

  The glow in his eyes was, I was certain, entirely due to the prospect of showing Mossby off to someone who would appreciate every detail …

  14

  The Dust of Ages

  When we got back into the car, the short January day was as faded as an underexposed photograph.

  The white façade of the Arts and Crafts house might front boldly on to the drop down to the lake and woods, but the main entrance was to the rear, as I knew from my coach trip.

  Carey turned left into a gravelled courtyard, circled a small knot garden with a lichen-stained stone fountain at its centre, consisting of a bizarre sea creature disporting itself above a large scallop shell, and finally scrunched to a halt before an imposing entrance porch flanked by lollipop-shaped topiary. The Elizabethan and servants’ wings on either side formed a squared-off U shape behind the new building and the tower, but the white stucco blended well with the black and white intricacy of the older building.

  It was several years since I’d made that brief visit with the WI, but I remembered the coach had parked in a level area on the other side of the drive, just above the workshop, and we’d been ushered along a small pathway to a side door, where the rather grim-faced guide I now knew to be Ella Parry had awaited us. At the time, I’d been more interested in seeing the windows than the rest of it, which was probably why my memory of anything else was a bit patchy.

  ‘Here we are, welcome to the House of Revells.’

  ‘My little place in the country,’ I said sarcastically, and Carey grinned.

  ‘The central part really is just an overgrown cottage, you know, Angel. Unless you count the servants’ quarters and the Elizabethan wing, there are only six bedrooms.’

  ‘Only six? How on earth will you manage? Won’t Fang want a lordly chamber of his own?’

  Fang was sitting on my knee, looking at the sea creature looped about the fountain with narrowed eyes. He was either an outraged art historian or suspected it might leap off and attack him.

  ‘I expect I’ll survive with a mere six bedrooms, because if I have a houseful of visitors they can overflow into the servants’ wing. Arts and Crafts houses were generally built for the well-to-do middle classes, so they were usually fairly modest,’ he added.

  ‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ I told him rudely. ‘Don’t forget that I know all about the Arts and Crafts movement from writing that dissertation on the rise of the female stained-glass craftworkers in the late Victorian era.’

  ‘So you do, my little in-house expert.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I assumed the Revells were gentry, not middle class? There were lots of family coats of arms in the windows I saw on my visit.’

  ‘Originally they were minor gentry – there’s a portrait of one who is supposed to have briefly made a hit with Elizabeth I – but the last of the line was female and married a plebeian, but extremely wealthy, factory owner in the middle of the nineteenth century, so I’m afraid my blood probably isn’t even a watered-down blue.’

  ‘I suppose he was the Revell who built the workshop?’

  ‘That’s the one, giving employment to the locals,’ he agreed, then reached over for his skull-studded stick. ‘Come on, I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

  I put Fang down and we followed Carey as he limped away from the porch to a small side door into the service wing. Inside was a stone-paved passage with several intriguingly closed doors off it, which led to a large kitchen.

  It was a strange hybrid: you could see the remains of what must have been the last word in modern kitchen furnishings and appliances at the end of the nineteenth century, overlaid with the changes and additions of ensuing generations. There was a large, ancient and well-used table and two shiny benches up the middle of the room, while one long wall was fitted with modern units, an electric oven and hob and a very large fridge.

  Actually, when I came to think of it, it already resembled the eclectic effect of one of Carey’s finished cottage makeovers!

  Fang made a beeline for a cushioned basket next to the huge range set in an inglenook, which was radiating warmth.

  ‘This is nice,’ I said appreciatively. ‘It wouldn’t need much to make it quite cosy and home-like.’

  ‘True, though all the electric wiring in the house could do with an overhaul to make sure it’s safe, because it’s been put in and extended piecemeal. This servants’ wing has a lot of old wiring, especially in the bedrooms and some of the rooms off the passage.’

  ‘I was dying to open all those doors when we came in,’ I confessed.

  ‘There’s nothing terribly exciting behind them if you do: a utility room, scullery, boot room, a little parlour for the housekeeper …’

  He looked at me, the familiar enthusiastic glow lighting up his eyes. ‘I haven’t really checked them out properly yet. There’s still lots to explore. Maybe we can have a good look round together tomorrow, when you move in.’

  He seemed to be taking that very much for granted.

  ‘If I move in,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Of course you’re moving in, Shrimp,’ he said. ‘I need you and you need the workshop. Anyway, how could you resist being here on Wednesday, when Mr Wilmslow comes back to reveal the hidden chamber containing the family secrets? You don’t want to miss that!’

  ‘But what if there’s a skeleton in the family cupboard, one so terrible that no one but a Revell must ever know anything about it!’

  ‘I sincerely hope there is, because then you can help me decide how best to exploit it for filthy lucre, starting with giving it a starring role in the Mansion Makeover,’ he said flippantly.

  I sat down at the dark wooden table that had been worn and marked by centuries of use, while he made a pot of tea and got out mugs and a wooden biscuit barrel with tarnished silver fittings.

  ‘I’m afraid there are only arrowroot biscuits on the premises and they’re a bit limp,’ he said, offering it to me. ‘My uncle seems to have been on a bland diet for the last few months of his life, because the freezer in the scullery is full of mushy stuff like mince and mash, fish pie, macaroni cheese and that kind of thing. And the cupboards are stacked with tinned soup, rice pudding and semolina.’

  ‘Lovely. You need building up a bit, but I don’t think that kind of stodge is going to tempt your appetite.’

  ‘Mrs Danvers’ not very strenuous duties included preparing dinner – by shoving it in the microwave from the look of things – but apparently the nurses took care of breakfast and lunch.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, if they had to eat th
e same pap for dinner as your uncle. I expect that’s all he could digest, though,’ I suggested. ‘What else did your very own Mrs Danvers do for her extravagant salary?’

  ‘So far as I can see, not a lot. She ordered supplies, arranged for the cleaners and carers to come in, and sorted out the laundry for collection: nothing terribly hard or time consuming. But her husband, Clem, seems to do the work of five men in the garden, so I suppose it sort of evens out.’

  ‘Is there much actual garden?’

  ‘The way the land rises behind the house means there isn’t a formal garden, other than that small knot in the courtyard and the shrubbery round the parking area and down the drive, mostly rampant rhododendrons. But the terraces going down from the house to the lake have rockeries, stone troughs and flowerbeds on every level, so that keeps him busy.’

  ‘Yes, those terraces must take a lot of work,’ I agreed.

  ‘Clem told me there’s an old walled kitchen garden behind the garages and stables, but it fell out of use before he came here. I haven’t found the key to the door yet, but there’s a tin box of them in the boot room to go through.’

  ‘Nick will be entranced by the idea of a secret garden!’

  ‘It’s not secret, just unused and overgrown. But yes, he’s going to be delirious with pleasure when he finds out about it.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s just as delirious when he and his film crew find themselves hacking their way in and digging vegetable beds while they’re at it,’ I said tartly, and he grinned.

  ‘You won’t need Mrs Danvers to cook because you can do that yourself, and Grant’s wife, Molly, runs a business filling freezers with her own lovely home-cooked and healthy dishes, so you could have some of those for back-up when you don’t feel like doing the catering.’

  ‘Sounds good – especially since I know your cooking skills of old.’

  ‘I can cook!’ I protested indignantly. ‘It’s just that there’s usually something more interesting to do.’

  ‘We’d have to get rid of Mrs Danvers’ ghastly frozen stodge before we could refill the freezer,’ he said. ‘Seems a pity to throw it out, though. She’s going to come as usual this Friday to let the cleaners in and so on, till I decide what’s happening.’

  I looked round and noted all the signs of neglect in the kitchen, like the dull range, the dusty ceiling light, and the tarnished silver mountings on the biscuit barrel. ‘The cleaners don’t seem to be putting a lot of effort into their work.’

  ‘They’re only here for a couple of hours once a week and they strip and make beds and do any ironing in that time, too, so vacuuming the floors, cleaning the bathrooms and having a quick dust is probably all they’ve got time for. But the panelling in the old wing is immaculately polished: Ella said she cleans that herself and it’s obviously a labour of love.’

  ‘Well, that must be worth part of her wage, at least – and she shows visitors over it, too.’

  ‘Once or twice a year? Big deal!’

  He put down his mug and smiled at me, his wonderful purple-blue eyes glowing in the way that I sometimes think makes him look slightly loopy, but in a good way.

  ‘You have to find somewhere to live and work and I’ve got the space and the workshop – plus, I need you.’

  ‘To mend the cursed window and as general dogsbody?’

  ‘No, as my best friend. I think you’re the only person I could bear having around me the whole time just now,’ he said honestly. ‘We know each other so well and we’ve even lived together before.’

  ‘But with Nick and some of the others,’ I pointed out. There had been quite a group of us renting the student house together when we were at college. It had been chaos, in a fun kind of way.

  ‘Well, when Nick, Sukes and the rest of the unit are staying here, it’ll be just like old times, won’t it?’ he said.

  ‘You mean, you cook vats of spaghetti bolognese, nobody washes up for a week, there’s an endless party in the living room with empty bottles everywhere and someone’s new girlfriend is throwing up in the only bathroom?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, no, perhaps not quite like that.’ He gave me the borderline loopy grin again. ‘Come on, Shrimp, what do you say?’

  He knew the answer: after the last couple of weeks I needed a safe haven, and he was it.

  ‘Equipping the workshop will take all of my savings,’ I said cautiously. ‘You’d have to be responsible for the fabric of the building – any repairs, structural work, plumbing and electrics.’

  ‘Of course, and you can have it rent free until you’re in profit, plus live here rent free for as long as you like,’ he said. ‘Nick can come and film us cleaning the place up and planning what you need – but there’s no rush to start on it, is there? You could do with a couple of days’ break and I could do with someone to bounce ideas off.’

  ‘I expect you mean someone to follow you round noting down endless lists of things to do to the house and grounds,’ I said resignedly.

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ he coaxed.

  I wasn’t sure, after the last couple of years, that I remembered what fun was like.

  ‘Oh, well, I am actually longing to go over the whole house, and dying to see all the glass. But not today, because it’s getting late and dark so I ought to get back to Molly’s.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to let you see it today anyway, because I knew all that Art and Crafts glass would draw you back like a magnet.’

  ‘You know me too well,’ I admitted, getting up.

  ‘Before we go, I will just let you have a quick look at the bedroom you’ll have. Come on, we’ll go up the backstairs.’

  The steep flight of wooden stairs came out by a baize-lined door to the family’s quarters, which matched one in the passage below.

  ‘Separating the riff-raff from their masters,’ Carey said. ‘The nursery suite and servants’ bedrooms are to the right, but we go this way.’

  He opened the baize door, revealing a corridor on a grander scale, with a plush red carpet down the middle. The walls were a dark, soupy brown.

  ‘The interior of the house was originally almost all painted a soft white – there are some photographs downstairs that show it like that,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be some job getting it back to how it should be. I mean, this dark varnish is bad enough, but why on earth comb a wood-effect pattern into it, when it is wood underneath?’

  ‘I think that’s a fairly recent addition. Wasn’t it a popular look in the fifties?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s not popular with me,’ he said. ‘The main staircase comes out further along. There’s a half-landing with a stained-glass window you’ll see when you come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Tease,’ I said.

  ‘The best rooms face over the lake and woods, and there’s a big bedroom at either end of this corridor, each with a bathroom next door. We have all mod cons at Mossby: there’s a cloakroom downstairs off the hall and the servants have one in their wing.’

  ‘You could soon be known as “Four Toilets Revell”,’ I suggested.

  ‘I’d rather not. You’ll love the toilet off the entrance hall, by the way – it’s got an amazing blue glazed print of Windsor Castle inside the bowl.’

  ‘I can hardly wait to see it and I’m sure it’ll become my favourite,’ I said gravely.

  ‘My room was my uncle’s, so it has a connecting door to the bathroom of fairly recent date. There’s a sort of little kitchenette affair in a small room across the landing, too, where I assume the nurses brewed the tea and that kind of thing. I thought I might be able to turn it into a shower room eventually. The tower’s next to my room and connects to the Elizabethan wing on both floor levels and the lift is in there, too.’

  He opened the first door we came to, on the left. ‘This is the corresponding room to mine, so when no one else is staying we’ll have a bathroom each.’

  The room was very large and I was drawn immediately to the window, though it was too dark to see much of what must be a st
unning view out of it, down the terraces to the lake and woods.

  Carey said musingly, ‘I have no idea what’s under that horrible wallpaper above the panelling. And why paint the woodwork dark green? It’s the sort of municipal shade they use on park benches.’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘But the bed is lovely, isn’t it? Very Arts and Crafts! And that tapestry, too …’

  I peered at it. It was a little faded, but seemed to be the Lady of Shalott.

  ‘The room will look so much better when I’ve finished with it,’ Carey said, which it would. Carey’s art in transforming houses always made me think of the way diamond cutters could reveal the beautiful gem inside a dull pebble. He was not the kind of historical purist who wanted to strip a house right back to the probably hideously uncomfortable and impractical original, just pare back the worst excesses from successive periods, without removing its character.

  He felt that a cottage that had been occupied for generations should show signs of it – layers of individuality, but with the original bones of the house showing through. It was an art I really admired, along with his unquenchable thirst for learning new skills.

  Of course, the downside was that he got bored quickly and moved on to the next thing, but he didn’t forget anything he’d learned to do, it was just added to his extensive repertoire.

  When we were children, this succession of short-lived enthusiasms used to drive me mad, but I came to understand how they fused together later, in his work.

  ‘If the rest of the house is like this, then it will need some extensive TLC – starting with a damned good spring clean!’ I said. ‘Someone could at least have polished the furniture and the windows occasionally!’

  ‘If Mrs Danvers had expended only a fraction of the care she’s taken on the Elizabethan wing to this part of the house, it would have made a difference,’ he agreed.

  ‘If we keep calling her Mrs Danvers, we’ll do it to her face one day,’ I pointed out, and he laughed.

  ‘Do you fancy this room, or would you like to see the others?’

  ‘No, I love this one,’ I told him.