The House of Hopes and Dreams

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘So, it’s a free-standing sculpture, really?’

  ‘Yes, or a screen. It’s at the centre point where four arms of the mall come together and light will come from the glazed doors at the end of each of them, as well as from above, so it’ll change from whichever angle you view it.’

  I clicked on the webpage email address and said, ‘I’d better contact them right now and explain that I’ve moved to my own workshop since I entered.’

  I also added that I’d entered the competition in my personal capacity, with the full agreement of my former late employer, Julian Seddon, just to make things clear.

  And that, I hoped, would take care of any contact they might have from Nat.

  ‘So you were right about Nat: he must have known I’d won,’ I said, finding the right roll of cartridge paper from the unsorted heap in the corner. I spread it out on the big table, weighting down the corners with an empty coffee cup, my piece of lucky amethyst rock and two bottles of drawing ink.

  Carey stared at it and gave a long whistle. ‘That’s absolutely brilliant – no wonder you won!’

  ‘I was quite pleased with it myself,’ I said immodestly. ‘I put so much into it.’

  My design, at first glance, looked as if a Hokusai-type wave was pulling the sea away from a beach, exposing all kinds of crabs, shells and seaweed, while underwater it dragged fish, octopus and long tendrils of seaweed in its wake.

  But once you looked closer, the body of the wave was a blue whale, twisting upwards, the spout forming the snowy crest as it curled back towards the beach. The foamy edge broke away, turning into the fluttering, swooping shapes of white birds against a blue sky.

  ‘The eye really follows it right round in a great twisting sort of loop,’ Carey said.

  ‘Well, that’s the Golden Mean for you,’ I told him. ‘I wish I could make the window, not just send the cartoon and notes, and the temptation is always to do the cutline, too. But then that hampers the person making it, so it’s usually better not to.’

  ‘You get a trip to see it when it’s made, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes – you’ll have to come with me!’

  I sighed happily. ‘I feel as if it’s set off a sudden creative explosion in my head, a whole host of ideas, and now I want to work on lots of sea-themed windows. I just need some suitable commissions!’

  ‘They’ll come,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, you could make some free-hanging roundels on that theme, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I could. They always sell well …’ I agreed, then broke off as an email pinged into the mailbox: it was the Brisbane organization, thanking me for contacting them.

  Apparently, they’d both posted and emailed me the notification several days before and had been surprised not to hear back from me before now. But of course, they said, they now understood the situation and Julian Seddon was a huge loss to the profession.

  ‘Julian would have been so proud of me,’ I said, tears coming to my eyes.

  ‘I’m proud of you, too, Angel,’ Carey said, and enveloped me in one of his warm and loving hugs.

  By then the morning was getting on, but before I finally went down to the workshop, I rang Nat’s mobile and told him I knew he’d been opening my post and reading my emails, and had kept the news of the competition win back.

  ‘I’m perfectly entitled to open anything addressed to the workshop,’ he said defensively.

  ‘Not when it has my name on it. But it’s clear now why you wanted those designs back. Well, you haven’t a hope in hell. My solicitor will be in touch with your solicitor,’ I added grandly. ‘And don’t bother contacting the competition organizers, because I’ve already explained the situation to them, so it isn’t going to get you anywhere.’

  I ended the call while he was still gibbering with fury.

  ‘I hope that’s the end of him and I’ll never hear from him again,’ I said to Carey.

  ‘No, I don’t think even he will try and pursue it further,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll book a table in the restaurant at the pub tonight, because this calls for a celebration!’

  ‘It certainly does – I’ve just remembered how much money I’ll get for winning!’ Visions of endless packing cases full of expensive Antique glass filled my head with joy.

  ‘Will you ever award me that look of stunned wonderment?’ he asked, amused. ‘You’re seeing the world through gold-pink glass spectacles, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted but I didn’t tell him he always looked as glowingly wonderful as any Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass angel: perhaps that was part of why I loved him so much?

  I wasn’t expecting Ivan that day, but the first deliveries from my huge shop were due to arrive that very afternoon – exciting packets of tallow sticks and thin rods of solder, plastic sacks of plaster of Paris and whitening, and tubs of ready-made glutinous glazing cement.

  It was only a fraction of what was to come, but I ticked them off and filed the delivery notices in the office bit of the back room.

  After that, I unpacked a bit more sheet glass before returning to the house, intending to have a good stare at the Brisbane cartoon, but instead I got hijacked by Carey into helping him finish sanding banisters.

  We had a lovely meal at the Screaming Skull and afterwards, in the lounge, we found Lulu, Cam, Rufus and Izzy. When we told them what we were celebrating, Lulu produced a bottle of champagne on the house, which, since we’d already had one bottle with dinner, went rather to my head …

  I seem to remember describing my winning design with great arm gestures and knocking a rack of local tourist leaflets off the wall, but not a lot about subsequent conversations.

  Rufus, who was not a great champagne drinker, drove us home: I’d have to walk back tomorrow and pick my car up, but it had been worth it.

  And, as a bonus, while we were out we’d missed the third Seamus Banyan Cottage Catastrophe programme, so Carey remained cheerful and his blood pressure quite normal.

  I hoped he didn’t sneak off to watch the repeat …

  The win not only ignited a whole seething mass of creative ideas in my mind, but also spurred me on to get the workshop finished as quickly as possible.

  It seemed to inspire Carey with the desire to demolish something – in this case a door-sized hole in the wall dividing the small room that backed on to the stable block behind the workshop, where he’d established a sort of man cave, with all his benches and tools and various bits of equipment. He’d thought it would be nice if we could come and go between the two without walking all the way round.

  With Carey, thought quickly becomes action, so in no time at all I was talking to him from my side of a large hole, as he loaded debris into a wheelbarrow.

  ‘I think it’ll take a couple more weeks before the workshop’s finally fully functional,’ I told him, batting away a cloud of cement dust. ‘I’ll have to test the new kiln too as soon as it’s in. They all fire differently.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a party in the glazing room to celebrate, when it’s all finished?’ he suggested.

  ‘A party? Well, I suppose we could,’ I agreed. ‘In fact, it would be the only time it’s feasible, because a working glass studio isn’t really a good venue for food, drink and revelry – all that sharp glass and toxic substances like acid and lead about.’

  ‘Let’s pick a date now, and work to it?’ he suggested. ‘How about Saturday the fourteenth – Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Want to come out to an architectural antiques place I’ve found, to look for a good old door for this hole?’ he asked enticingly.

  ‘Only if you wash the filth off your face first, and change out of the Postman Pat jumper, because on that scale he’s a bit scary,’ I said.

  ‘I’d better get down to the workshop early,’ I told him next morning. ‘They’re bringing the heavy-duty vinyl flooring and starting to lay it today. Are you going to come down and put in that nice old door and frame we found?’

 
But no, it seemed he was still in masonry demolishing mode.

  ‘I might get down later, but first I’m going to knock a hole in the wall between the back gate and the stile – or where the gates will be when they get back from their beauty treatment.’

  ‘What do you want a hole there for?’

  ‘To put in a small gate, for any ghost trail walkers who can’t get over the stile. I mean, if they’ve got gammy legs like me, or pushchairs or something, it would be a bit difficult, and I don’t want the big gates left open.’

  I hoped he wasn’t overdoing it with the heavy work, but he seemed to be increasingly glowing with health and enthusiasm, and his stick now spent most of its time propped nearby, just in case.

  I remembered that years ago he’d learned walling, including the intricate art of dry-stone walling, and loved it, so he was probably giving himself a treat.

  ‘Have fun,’ I said. ‘I might come up and see it later.’

  A team of burly men arrived at the workshop in a large van just after I did and made short work of moving the heavy furnishings and laying the dark grey heavy-duty vinyl. Ivan kept their strength up with vats of builder’s tea and a box of assorted biscuits I’d laid in specially.

  He offered them a lot of unwanted advice, too, while I pottered about filling in the random grooves and channels left by the electricians.

  Once the flooring was down there was only really some touching up of the paintwork to be done in the glazing room and a few other small jobs. Soon I’d be ready to pin up the Big Wave design on the corkboard wall and think about scaling it up to full size.

  But first, I was going to blow some of the competition money – even before I got it – on better door locks and a burglar alarm system.

  Nat’s threats had made me permanently edgy.

  One day, idly looking among the books in the muniment room, I discovered a slim, calf-bound and handwritten tome, which briefly narrated Lady Anne’s story.

  She was a noble but impoverished widow with one daughter when she married Phillip Revell in the seventeenth century, having made an unfortunate runaway match the first time and been left penniless. She and her daughter had been grudgingly given a roof over their heads by her uncle, so I expect she was glad to exchange that situation for a good, if not grand, marriage.

  The Civil War divided many families and her new husband fought on the King’s side, while her uncle almost immediately switched to the Parliamentarians.

  After Phillip was killed in battle, she bore a son and continued to live at Mossby while, as I had already heard, the daughter of her first marriage subsequently went to live in some kind of Protestant religious order abroad.

  I showed it to Honoria, who said she had read it, but there were family traditions that there had been more than met the eye in this dry outline. ‘There may be something more among the papers in the Spanish Chest in the muniment room,’ she added.

  ‘Which chest?’ I asked puzzled.

  ‘Oh, it is hidden in a secret place – the old house is supposed to be riddled with priest-holes, for the Revells were secretly papists a long time ago.’

  She told me that although she had seen inside the concealed place in the muniment room, only Ralph knew how to open it, the secret having been passed down to him.

  I had not before thought of there being secret hiding places at Mossby and found the idea very intriguing.

  31

  Mixed Messages

  The end of January was surprisingly mild, but February roared in with an arctic blast, so it was lucky we’d finished stripping and undercoating the workshop’s outside paintwork, unblocked the gutters and mended a few cracks in the stucco, ready for it to be repainted white when the house was done in spring.

  As the days passed, I heard nothing more from Nat and my life with Carey at Mossby began to settle into a basic pattern that was constantly overlaid by the interesting comings and goings of workmen and the friends and acquaintances who lent their help, and very often their specialist skills, for a few hours or even a day or two.

  The electrician had moved his operations into the house, while Garry the plumber was installing a shower cubicle upstairs in a small room formerly used for making hot drinks and storing equipment by Carey’s uncle’s carers.

  Garry and his silent lad had begun to appear frequently on Nick’s film, but in the guise of friends merely helping out. I’m sure Carey was often complicit in helping some of the workmen to cheat HMRC, but mostly he got the help he needed by bartering, of one kind of another, rather than the exchange of hard cash, so I don’t think he actually saw it like that.

  But I decided that when I was in a situation to start paying Ivan for his time, I’d get him to find out how much he could earn before it affected his pension and then put him on the official payroll.

  As well as all the workmen and visitors, there was a constant flow of delivery vans trundling up and down the drive. Much of it was for the workshop, where we stacked everything in the back room next to the newly installed door to Carey’s realm, ready to be unpacked.

  Ivan and I were like children with Christmas presents, not knowing which box or parcel to open first: small packages of glass paint and silver stain, a big box of shiny new horseshoe nails, a crate of imported German flashed glass in interesting colour combinations … ginormous rolls of wide cartridge paper – you just never knew what you’d discover next and everything found its rightful place in the workshop.

  I’d bought one small light-box, but Grant and Ivan were constructing a larger one on wheels in Ivan’s shed, as a gift to the new workshop, along with a set of wooden battens in different sizes for edging the panels as they were being leaded up. It’s the small things that tend to get overlooked – Ivan had cut some small spare lathekins, the pointed and smoothly shaped pieces of wood we used to open out the flanges of the lead calme as we worked and, one weekend, Louis sandpapered them smooth.

  Every morning I’d get up in the early hours, as I always did before Julian’s illness, and go down to the studio next to the kitchen to work for a while. Then, when Carey came down for breakfast, we’d discuss what we were each doing that day. Sometimes we’d have lunch together, too, or he’d bring sandwiches down to the workshop, but if not, we caught up at dinner, when it might be just us – and Fang – or quite a crowd if there were helpers staying and perhaps Nick and the crew up filming. The big drawing room would come into its own on these occasions and the old billiard table got a bit of use. I could see what a lovely room it would be in summer, with the doors from the little veranda wide open on to the terrace and that wonderful view down to the lake and the trees.

  Catering was easy enough. Molly kept the freezer stocked up, and now we had broadband the supermarket shopping took minutes. We’d found a choice of delivery takeaway meals to choose from, too, for the days when we were too tired to even open the microwave door.

  But Carey’s interest in cooking was rapidly reviving and he bought a bread-making machine. Soon the smell of freshly baked loaves drove me wild every morning and, given the number of calories I was consuming, if I hadn’t been working so hard I’d probably have been spherical and could roll down to the workshop every day.

  After dinner we quite often went to the pub, especially when we had visitors, and Carey now walked there and back. He seemed to be gaining strength in his bad leg every day and though he always had his black stick studded with shiny silver skulls with him, it seemed now to have become more of a habit, rather than something he actually needed. Once his new series aired, he’d probably start getting walking sticks by every post, as well as the hand-knitted jumpers.

  Carey and I were both happy and excited about what we were doing. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten Julian, or didn’t mourn him, but the Julian I’d fallen in love with had vanished with his first stroke and I’d already done my grieving for the life we’d shared together, long before the second …

  Fang, due to the dog whispering, trotted docilely about after me
or Carey without biting anyone. The only person he really growled at was Ella.

  And who could blame him? She was still being really odd and spent hours in the old wing – sometimes at very strange times of day – obsessively polishing the panelling, or communing with the ghosts, or whatever it was she did. She certainly made a point of being there on Fridays, when Mitch and Jenny were cleaning, jealously watching to make sure they didn’t encroach on what she clearly considered to be her own special task.

  ‘Jenny said Ella now chats to them a bit sometimes,’ I told Carey one day, when I’d been up at the house while the cleaners were having a cup of tea. ‘So it’s just you and me she’s ignoring. And Mitch said he didn’t like to tell tales, but while he was walking along the passage to the muniment room earlier, he was sure he could hear the roll top of the desk going down – and when he went in, she seemed to be locking it.’

  ‘Remember that other time, when it looked as if she was trying to open it? Perhaps she’s got hold of a key,’ he said, then got up. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a look.’

  We went through the house to the muniment room, where everything looked the way it usually did, except cleaner.

  ‘You did put the copy of your will in there, like I suggested, didn’t you?’ I asked as he produced his own key and rolled up the top of the bureau.

  ‘Yes, and it’s still there, but in a different pigeon hole to the one I left it in!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, positive. It was in the right-hand cubbyhole and now it’s in the one next to it, with the writing paper and envelopes.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘Well, you did say it would be a good idea if she knew about my will, in case she’d overheard that conversation with Mr Wilmslow about a codicil leaving her the house and decided to poison me or something equally Agatha Christie!’

  ‘I did. And I wish she’d found out earlier, because I still have a sneaking suspicion that she had something to do with the stone ball nearly killing you.’