The House of Hopes and Dreams

by Trisha Ashley

  He seemed pleased about this, so I assumed that their argument, whatever it was about, had been made up. Honoria, however, did not seem to share her brother’s delight in his friend’s return, so the impression I’d gained on my first visit that she did not like him would appear to be true.

  When Ralph had gone out, I asked her what Mr Browne was like and she said that she did not care much for him and considered him a bad influence on my husband.

  ‘In what way?’ I asked, and I thought for a moment she wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘He encouraged Ralph to spend too much on the house and I expect will soon be persuading him to embellish the grounds with all kinds of expensive follies and other schemes,’ she said finally.

  I’d assumed Ralph to be very wealthy, for he spent freely and insisted on the best of everything. Honoria, however, was quite thrifty in the manner of housekeeping, so perhaps she would have preferred to rein in his spending on the house somewhat?

  22

  Small Creatures

  We knew Friday was going to be non-stop busy, because Carey’s removal firm had chosen the same day to bring up the things from his flat as my two men with a van had to fetch mine from the storage unit.

  One good thing was that there was no sign of Ella, because we’d been unsure if she might not just keep turning up on Fridays from sheer force of habit, or until the end of her month’s notice had been reached.

  Mrs Bartlett, one of the co-owners of the Dolly Mops agency, had come along to talk things over in person with Carey, while her team of cleaners set about their usual work. I was in the inner hall, carefully polishing the Jessie Kaye windows to a sparkle with a soft cloth when she emerged with Carey.

  She was a small, cheerful, grey-haired woman of perhaps sixty, who shook my hand before popping upstairs, where we could hear her exhorting her ladies to get a shift on, because Mr Revell wanted all the spare beds made up, since he expected a constant flow of visitors helping him renovate Mossby.

  Then, with a spurt of gravel, she swooped off in her red Suzuki Swift, leaving them to it.

  ‘I’ve given her a key for the back door, so the cleaners can let themselves in after today – lots of her clients are out when they clean for them,’ Carey said. ‘And the lady doing the ironing will put out the laundry to be collected and take in the clean stuff.’

  ‘That’s good. It was hardly one of Mrs Danvers’ more onerous tasks, was it?’

  ‘Mrs Bartlett is sending in a bigger team next Friday to spring clean the whole house. She says she’s been dying to “bottom” it, as she put it, for the last few years.’

  ‘Including the Elizabethan wing?’

  ‘My uncle used to get them to clean the muniment room sometimes, though he kept it locked up otherwise when he wasn’t using it, but she hadn’t seen the rest of it so I took her round. The good news is that they have a married couple who specialize in cleaning historic properties, because apparently this part of Lancashire is peppered with them. They’re very careful, use specialist products that won’t damage anything.’

  ‘Sounds brilliant! I bet they cost more, though.’

  ‘They do,’ he admitted, ‘but once they’ve given the wing a good going over, it won’t take them so long every week. I told her where the spare set of keys to the wing are: in the key cupboard in the housekeeper’s parlour.’

  ‘It’s all getting organized, but you’re going to have some big monthly bills!’

  ‘Tell me about it. Maybe we should have a treasure hunt for the Jewel of Mossby after all!’

  Just after the cleaners had had their elevenses in the kitchen and gone back to work with tea-restored energy, my belongings arrived. I got the two young men to stash most of it in the housekeeper’s parlour next to the kitchen, handy for unpacking, but Granny’s Welsh dresser and the rocking chair went straight into the kitchen.

  I asked them to carry the Lloyd Loom chair and laundry basket to my bedroom, where they didn’t look out of place against the Arts and Crafts ambience, unlike that dreadful blowsy flowered wallpaper.

  I’d started picking bits of it off in passing the moment I moved in, so it was starting to look a bit scabby.

  The heavy tea chests full of sheet glass were the last things in the van and Carey took the men down to the workshop so they could be unloaded straight into one of the back rooms.

  He must have gone for a rummage round the outbuildings after that, because by the time he returned, I’d put the jewel-bright rag rug down in front of the stove, wiped the dresser and was unpacking and arranging china.

  He sank into the wide, comfortable wooden rocker and sighed. ‘It already looks more like a real home in here – and any minute now, my stuff will arrive from the flat and we can spread that out a bit, too.’

  Carey had furnished his flat with the carefully collected antique furniture he’d bought for the country cottage that had been both his first home and restoration project. Since both cottage and flat had been tiny, there wasn’t a huge amount of it and I was sure it would fit in.

  The removal men must have stopped for lunch on the way up from London, for it was after two and the cleaners had long gone before they appeared.

  We watched anxiously as they reversed carefully into the small courtyard, only inches from the grimacing sea creature disporting itself in the fountain, then carried everything in.

  Carey’s desk went into the old servants’ hall that was to be our combined office/studio, along with bookcases, a sturdy kitchen table for me to work on and several boxes. The rest was stacked in the nursery suite upstairs.

  When the removal men were tipped and departed we both felt totally exhausted, and Fang was about to spontaneously combust with thwarted rage because he hadn’t been allowed to bite anyone.

  He’d been so good with the cleaning ladies earlier, too, apart from pestering them for biscuits …

  After a cup of coffee and a toasted teacake apiece, we revived enough to start sorting out the studio. I stacked the boxes of sketchbooks, portfolios, rolls of cartoons and cutlines, my old easel and everything else I needed in the corner near my worktable and put my laptop on the end.

  ‘We’ll have to fight over the plug sockets till I can have more put in,’ Carey said. ‘And we’ll have a hunt in the attic for more bookshelves and perhaps a couple of cupboards when we’ve got some nice strong visitors to carry them down.’

  There was enough wall space to have a giant corkboard each, and I suddenly thought how useful it would be to have a whole cork wall in the workshop on the windowless side of the wide double end doors. I could pin up entire cartoons, even of very large windows.

  Later, while Carey was starting to prepare dinner – nothing fancy, just pasta and a ready-made sauce from a jar – and I fed Fang his gourmet portion of Canine King Salmon Surprise, someone knocked at the back door.

  ‘I hope that’s not Ella with more bloody carrots, or we won’t just have good night vision, but X-ray eyesight,’ Carey said ungratefully.

  ‘If it is her, it must be some kind of peace offering, though,’ I suggested. ‘Or maybe poisoned, like the apple in Sleeping Beauty.’

  He went out and returned a moment later with Vicky in tow, who had now poured herself into skin-tight leather trousers and another off-the-shoulder top with a big floppy bow over one boob, as if she’d awarded it a prize.

  A booby prize?

  ‘Vicky’s brought us some potatoes and more carrots, isn’t that kind?’ he said blandly.

  ‘Lovely!’ I agreed. ‘You can never have too many carrots. Perhaps I’ll batch bake a lot of carrot cakes tomorrow.’

  ‘I wish I could eat cake, but I daren’t, because you have to be soooo slim in my business,’ Vicky said, giving me a pitying look, as though I was the size of a minke whale. ‘But of course, it doesn’t matter for you.’

  ‘When Angel isn’t wearing those big boots, I have to tie her to something to stop her floating away,’ Carey said, and she gave him a puzzled look. I’m not sure s
he has a sense of humour, or if she has, it’s withered from lack of use.

  Fang had been gulping down the last of his dinner as if he suspected Vicky of coming to steal it. Now he’d finished, he began his slow-stalking, lip-lifting and growling routine – and after he’d been so nice to the cleaners, too! I’d started to think that apart from Ella, he was fine with women, it was just men he hated.

  Vicky recoiled. ‘Mum warned me you had a vicious dog. He’s very ugly, too, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think he’s cute,’ I said, picking him up and holding him on my knee, where he continued to vibrate with temper, like an idling engine.

  Seeing he was secured, Vicky sat down opposite, uninvited, and cast her big, baby-blue orbs around the room.

  ‘Gosh, it looks so different in here now!’

  ‘Of course, you must have been in and out of the house all your life,’ I said.

  ‘Not really. I was about fourteen when Mr Revell offered Mum and Dad jobs and somewhere to live, and I’d never seen the place till then. He didn’t encourage me to come to the house, either, because he didn’t like teenagers, especially female ones. In fact, Mum said he didn’t really like women, full stop, so how he came to be married twice, I don’t know!’

  She gave Carey a melting smile, but he’d gone back to chopping onions and garlic to jazz up the ready-made pasta sauce and missed it.

  When he did look up, through slightly watering eyes, he said to her, frowning, ‘You know, the minute I saw you I was sure I’d seen you before somewhere and it’s still puzzling me.’

  For a moment, her face went strangely blank, and then she said, ‘Really? But I’m sure you haven’t seen my blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances in Casualty and Coronation Street, so it must have been in Dulwich Village.’

  ‘Do you live there?’

  ‘I did, and I used to catch sight of you cycling around occasionally – and once you were going into Gino’s Café just when I was leaving with some friends. I didn’t think you’d noticed me, though.’

  Not for want of trying to catch his attention, I suspected. I bet she’d tried everything bar throwing herself to the ground and clinging to his knees.

  ‘I suppose that must be where I remember you from,’ he agreed, though still frowning, as if trying to grasp some distant and elusive memory.

  ‘Of course, I’d no idea you were related to the Mossby Revells until your uncle made a will not long before he died, and told Mum you were his estranged brother’s son and he was leaving everything to you. It was a bit mean of him, I thought, because she’d assumed she was his only relative.’

  ‘She wasn’t really related to him at all, though, was she?’ I pointed out. ‘She was the daughter of his second wife by her first marriage.’

  ‘She looked after him like a daughter, anyway,’ Vicky insisted. ‘And when he told her about the will, she was so upset she jumped in the car and drove straight down to my place. Dad had no idea what had happened to her till I rang him to say where she was.’

  It was odd to think of Ella, Vicky and Carey all being in Dulwich Village at the same time, though perhaps by then Carey had already had his accident and was in hospital.

  ‘I’ve sold my flat in Dulwich now,’ Carey said.

  ‘I’m not there any more either, because I lost my flat share after the other two got married within a month of each other, so I’m back with Mum and Dad for the minute. My agent’s sniffing around, so if any auditions or work come up, I’ll crash on a friend’s sofa till I find something else I can afford. I’m getting more work as an extra these days, though I usually get the roles with a couple of words to say,’ she added.

  ‘It must be a hard profession to make a living in, unless you’re really lucky,’ I said.

  ‘Or you know someone useful, who will give you a hand up.’ She directed a languishing glance at Carey, though what she thought he could do to boost her to stardom, goodness knows. He doesn’t have theatre directors or film producers in his back pocket.

  ‘Mum says you’re an old friend of Carey’s, down on your luck and staying here till you’re back on your feet again,’ she said, making me sound like a bag lady that Carey let sleep in the doorway out of charity.

  ‘No, I’m the one trying, quite literally, to get back on my feet again,’ Carey said. ‘Angel and I have been friends all our lives and we just happen to need each other’s support at the moment.’

  ‘Friends from our cradle days, when we threw our rattles at each other,’ I agreed. ‘And I wasn’t so much down on my luck, Vicky, as bereaved – I lost my partner before Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ She perked up slightly. That made me practically a grieving widow and so no competition at all. ‘I mean, that’s sooo sad,’ she commiserated.

  ‘Angelique is a well-known stained-glass artist and she’s going to reopen and use the old workshop by the stable block,’ Carey said.

  ‘Angelique? Is that really your name?’ she asked rudely, staring at me. ‘It’s a bit weird.’

  ‘My mother used to love a series of novels with a heroine called Angelique, so that’s how I ended up with it.’

  I was seriously thinking of having the explanation tattooed on my wrist, so I could just hold it up for people to read whenever I was asked.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Mum? No, alive, kicking, married to a millionaire and living in the Caribbean.’

  Though of course, there was a chance that Mum could at this moment be dead drunk and out for the count on rum punch.

  ‘Really – a millionaire? I was all set to holiday on Branson’s Necker Island with my boyfriend a couple of years ago, because he was a well-known actor and he got invited, but then he dumped me just after I’d bought a whole load of sarongs and bikinis.’

  ‘How tragic,’ I commiserated. ‘Did you get your money back?’

  Scanning my well-worn black jeans, Doc Marten boots and a Grateful Dead sweatshirt I’d bought at a car-boot sale, she said, ‘You don’t look like a millionaire’s daughter.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She glanced uncertainly at me through spider-leg eyelashes and gave up any further attempt to suss out what my relationship with Carey was.

  There had been times when even I hadn’t been too sure about that … or even what I wanted it to be.

  I mean, when we’d bickered in front of Molly about that last year at college, it had made me remember how we’d briefly seemed to come even closer than ever before … until I caught him snogging a former girlfriend at a party and realized he hadn’t really changed his ways. And then, almost immediately, I’d met and fallen head over heels in love with Julian, so it was probably just as well.

  The next time I’d seen Carey he was going out with the first in a new line of dazzling blonde beauties with velociraptor instincts wrapped up in pink fuzzy coatings.

  But there was no denying he would always be special to me: take the way my heart had leaped at the sound of his voice when he’d turned up in the workshop to rescue me, and the feeling I had that I wanted to wrap myself around him and never let him go …

  Vicky was obviously keen on working up to that position, for she’d moved her chair nearer to his and was now employing every flirtatious trick in the book and, what with all the fluttering, I was surprised her eyelashes hadn’t dropped off. If she’d had a fan, she’d probably have rapped him over the knuckles and told him he was very naughty.

  ‘Mum was upset all over again, when you told her she was going to lose her job and salary,’ Vicky told him. ‘Of course, since you’re putting Dad’s wages up, they won’t be that much worse off, only she’s so attached to that stupid old wing of the house, she seems to think it’s her life-work to look after it. She’s batty.’

  If she’d cleaned everything else the way she did the panelling, I’d have suspected Ella was OCD, rather than batty, but I didn’t say so. I’d obviously been relegated to the back of the audience and Carey was occupying the Royal Box.

  ‘She s
eems to love polishing the panelling in the old wing and I don’t really mind if she carries on doing that, so long as she doesn’t wear it away,’ Carey said good-humouredly. ‘But I can’t afford to pay her that large salary any more, and what I save in the difference after increasing your Dad’s wages will go to pay the cleaning company for the extra hours they’ll put in to get the place up to scratch.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll tell her she can still haunt the old wing if she wants to, and that might cheer her up a bit,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t catch me in there on my own, because it really is haunted. When she lived at Mossby as a little girl the old nanny used to tell her stories about the ghosts. Lots of people died there.’

  ‘That goes for all old houses,’ I said. ‘And after all, Carey’s uncle died here only last year.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be haunting me, though,’ Carey said. ‘Or not yet. Maybe he will when he sees Mossby on telly and hordes of visitors swarming round the old wing.’

  ‘Is Mossby going to be on telly? Like in your Complete Country Cottage series?’ Vicky asked eagerly, so Carey gave her a short, edited description of our plans for a new series.

  ‘I’d love to be in it,’ she sighed wistfully, and pointedly.

  ‘It’s not a film, it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary,’ I said, but I could see she was already imagining herself into a starring role – maybe as chatelaine, if she could nudge me right out of the picture.

  I thought we’d never get rid of her after that, until my eye caught Carey’s and he gave me a wink.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ he said, standing up and tipping his onions and garlic into the pan with the sauce. ‘Angel, if you put some water on to boil for the pasta, I’ll just run Vicky back home in the golf buggy: it’s so dark out there, we don’t want her breaking anything, do we?’

  She went eagerly enough, probably assuming he wanted to get her on her own. And perhaps, despite that wink, he did, for even though I disliked her, I could see she had sex appeal – and a great technique.