The Dream House

by Rachel Hore

  ‘The bonus wasn’t that much, Kate.’ As an accountant rather than one of the dealers, his rewards were modest. ‘And we put it in the pension pot, remember?’ Simon was on edge now, looking at his watch, tapping his foot.

  ‘But you could have told me about this.’ Kate prodded the passbook on the table before her.

  ‘What d’you want me to do, ring up the wife for permission every time I write a cheque? For God’s sake!’

  Kate flinched. This was so unlike Simon. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ She was lost for words.

  ‘No, I know. Look, we can’t talk about this now.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve got to get back to work.’

  ‘Yup, sandwich lunch with Gillingham et al. Three-line whip. C’mon, darling, I’m sorry I was sharp. Everything’s so stressed at the moment. Let me put you in a taxi.’

  Outside on the street, he rattled the coins in his pocket and said, ‘Let’s have another look at that old farmhouse outside Diss this weekend, eh? That one with the huge kitchen. Durrant’s rang this morning. The owners have reduced the price.’

  He kissed her on the cheek and helped her into a cab. A quick wave and he had gone. Kate sat there as the taxi pulled away, stunned at how he had just brushed her off – had refused to discuss something as important as their finances and then just dispatched her like a parcel. Suddenly she remembered the house he’d mentioned. It had been too small upstairs and too isolated, they’d decided. Had he really forgotten? What was going on?

  On Wednesday night, Marie Summers rang to tell Kate that since Agnes was now out of the surgeon’s care she was being moved back to Halesworth the next day to the community hospital there.

  ‘It’s a nice place and it’ll be easier for us to visit,’ she said comfortably.

  On Friday afternoon, Kate drove into Halesworth and parked outside the hospital, a pleasant redbrick building in spacious grounds. But when she reached the little room Agnes had been allocated, it was to find the old lady was asleep.

  ‘She didn’ have a good night,’ whispered the young West Indian nurse, who had accompanied Kate. ‘The pain was botherin’ her, my dear. And she was worryin’ about something. So Doctor gave her some pills after lunch.’

  Kate sat by the bedside for a while, watching Agnes. Her sleep wasn’t restful – her lips were moving without sound, her face contorted in a frown. She looked very, very old now and, without her teeth, her face looked all caved in. There was hardly a scrap of flesh on her, thought Kate, noting the thin wrinkled skin hanging over the proud cheekbones. How old was she? Well over ninety, surely. And yet the sharpness of her mind and the strength of her spirit belied her age.

  Kate was surprised at her feeling of tenderness towards the tiny figure in the bed. It was such a strange coincidence, the way they had met, and such a short time ago, but already, she and Agnes seemed to have formed a strong bond, the same as she had used to feel with her Hastings grandmother. It wasn’t just the fact of their being family, though that was part of it. Although there were sixty years between them, they were kindred spirits. Was it because they were both wounded birds? Kate didn’t yet know the full extent of Agnes’s emotional wounds, though losing her mother so young had had an obvious effect, but she hoped as she got to know her cousin better, that she would learn something of the secrets she guarded.

  After ten minutes spent deep in thought, she left the bottle of elderflower cordial and the copy of Mansfield Park she’d brought on the bedside table and got up to go.

  ‘Hello, you’ve found her then.’ Dan had put his head round the door. He looked at Kate appreciatively and she automatically smoothed her hair.

  ‘Oh, hi. Haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said, a touch shyly.

  ‘No. I went to the other place every week, but not till late most times. Thought I’d get here early today. I needed some parts from the garage, so it seemed sensible to drop in here first.’

  ‘Bit of a wasted trip for you, I’m afraid.’ And Kate explained about the sleeping pills. As they walked down the stairs together, she asked him about his work.

  ‘I help out at Seddington a couple of mornings a week,’ he said. ‘Do a bit of gardening, repairs – that sort of thing. Wish I had more time to go there. That garden needs a lot of looking after.’

  ‘Maybe Miss Melton will be home before too long.’ Kate paused on the bottom step. In front, Dan swung to face her. His blue eyes looked deep into hers.

  ‘I hope so, Kate, I do hope so.’ Then he said, ‘Whatever happens, meeting you has made a difference to her. She talks about you a lot, you know. I gather you’re cousins or something. It’s so amazing that you found each other like that.’

  Kate smiled. ‘Yes, it makes you believe in destiny or something. And she’s made a difference to me. Now she’s nearby I want to bring the children to see her – do you think she’d like that?’

  ‘I think she might. Why don’t you do that?’

  The next morning, by the time she got back from taking the children to school, Kate and Simon’s credit-card statements had arrived. Kate opened hers. No surprises there. For half an hour, she prowled around, wrestling with her conscience. At ten o’clock, when Joyce went out with Bobby, she took Simon’s envelope into the kitchen and steamed it open. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Simon owed £4,000 on his card. She read the list of entries. £430 for some dental treatment, yes, but over £1,500 to City restaurants? £700 to British Airways? She resealed the envelope but the operation didn’t look convincing, so she ripped it open again. She could always pretend she’d done so in error. But in the end, when Simon came home, she didn’t even bother to do that.

  ‘Look, it’s all right, Kate. God, you’re so suspicious What’s got into you lately? It’s just I lost my business credit card. Really stupid – can’t think how it happened – and the new one didn’t come through straight away. Then Zara had to fix up some German flights at a moment’s notice, so I got her to use my personal card. I’ve got the new company one now so I just have to claim this little lot back. All right? Satisfied?’

  I want to be convinced, Kate said fiercely to herself, but her feeling of uncertainty grew. Why was Simon becoming so distant? There were times when he seemed to be miles away and would jump when she spoke to him. He was rarely unkind, just absent.

  May turned to June. Kate took the children to EuroDisney at half-term; it turned out to be an exhausting affair, especially since they wouldn’t sleep thanks to all the E-numbers they consumed and the high-pitch level of excitement. Simon had been supposed to come too, but a week before they were due to leave, he was dispatched to Germany again – Munich, this time. Joyce was reluctant to take his place on the basis that it would be too tiring so Kate, disappointed, bit the bullet. While it was lovely being on her own with the children, she missed Simon dreadfully, not least because he always took responsibility for tickets, passports and finding seats on trains.

  The Carters came back from Spain and settled into their normal routine. They talked about coming up to see the family in Fernley, but kept putting it off. Then one of the dogs developed kidney trouble and Barbara didn’t want to leave home.

  Simon was working as hard as ever, with regular trips to Germany and sometimes further afield. He remained remote and hardly touched Kate. Money was a subject they avoided. Simon seemed to be spending more on clothes – two Armani summer suits, a pair of handmade shoes. Well, it was important for presentation, Kate thought. But Simon had always been so careful with money. She couldn’t quite shrug off the feeling that he was hiding something, but he avoided all her attempts to talk seriously about money or moving or changing jobs. She drifted through her days with a sense of disquiet, not daring to face what was happening to their relationship.

  Her greatest comfort every week was going to visit Agnes.

  Chapter 13

  June 2004

  On the sixth of June it was Kate’s thirty-sixth birthday. Joyce offered to collect the children from school, so that Kate needn�
�t hurry back from visiting Agnes. Early in the afternoon, Kate arrived at the hospital to find that her cousin had a little package for her wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon. When Kate unfolded the paper, she found a string of large pearls with a diamond-studded clasp.

  ‘Agnes, they’re beautiful. But I can’t accept them – they must be so valuable.’

  Agnes smiled proudly. ‘Well, who else would I give them to? They were my mother’s, but I’ve no use for them now. Go on, put ’em on.’

  Agnes was sitting up in a wheelchair by the window today. She was wearing a blouse and skirt and someone had put her hair up for her. Only her socks and slippers and a greyness about the face gave away her status as a patient.

  Sitting opposite, Kate slipped the pearls round her neck. They lay warm on her collarbones, and when she looked in the mirror over the little sink they seemed to glow. She stared at herself. With her slightly parted lips and her dark hair tucked behind her ears, she fancied she could pass for the portrait in Agnes’s bedroom – if it weren’t for her own air of sadness.

  She turned back to Agnes, who seemed to think the same for she said, ‘I’ve always believed they were the ones my mother wore in the photograph.’

  ‘What was her name, your mother?’ asked Kate, taking advantage of Agnes’s cheerful mood.

  ‘Evangeline. My father was besotted by her. People don’t know their Longfellow any more, but Father had written on her gravestone, When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music. She was buried with the baby boy that had never breathed.’ Agnes stared out of the window, where the rain was falling in torrents. Kate waited, hoping she’d go on.

  ‘People talk about bereaved lovers being heartbroken. I think my father just wanted to die. For weeks he shut himself in his room. Then one day, he signed up for the army and was sent to the trenches. For my elder brother Raven and me it was like losing both our parents in one stroke. I was too little to understand. I was used to them being away sometimes and I loved my nurse. But for Raven it was terrible.’ Agnes shook her head as though the memories of ninety years ago were fresh upon her. ‘But when Father came home a year later, he found he could go on with life again.’ She looked at Kate. ‘You asked once whether he married again. Well, he did and I can remember the day he broke the news . . .’

  Suffolk, July 1927

  If, as a small child, Agnes Melton climbed on a stool and peered out of the window of the highest attic of Seddington House, she fancied on a clear day she could see over the tops of the poplar trees that marked the garden’s boundary with the road, across the rolling woods and fields of Suffolk, to the wetlands and the sea beyond. Her brother, Raven, had always sneered at this idea, and said that the line of distant blue was just part of the sky, but to be able to see the sea was vital to the romances that the lonely little girl wove about herself, and so she persisted in her belief. Today, as a willowy sixteen year old, no longer in need of the stool, it was still possible to imagine that the house’s site on the gentle slope of a hill gave them a vista of the coast three miles away.

  The attic had always been one of her favourite places on a sunny summer’s day, and when she could escape from her governess, Miss Selcott, Agnes could either be found curled up with a book on the old swing seat in the rose garden or up here playing with her dolls in a den she’d made of the old iron bedstead and the broken furniture. It was warm and quiet in the attic, and Agnes would lie and listen to the buzz of the flies on the windows, the screeches of peacocks and the distant sounds of the life of the house, and fall into a daydream that, instead of being an ordinary-looking (for so she saw herself), motherless little girl, she was a great beauty and queen of all the lands around, that the dolls were her ladies and confidantes and that Alf, the gangly gardener’s boy, was the latest of a line of princes who came to ask for her hand. Down at the harbour at Southwold, she imagined, bobbed a fleet of tiny ships bearing her ensign, only awaiting a fair wind and the swell of the tide to launch them across the sparkling seas in search of riches and adventure.

  The attic was also an excellent lookout when her father was expected home from one of his all-too frequent trips to London, and this was why Agnes had come up here today. He would take the train to Halesworth to be met by Lister in the car. The child used to stand, teetering on her perch, where she could see the road, and when she spotted the silver Bentley, tiny in the distance, turning the bend and tipping down the hill, she would jump down in a clatter of falling furniture and, with a shriek to Raven, race harum-scarum down two flights of stairs and out of the front door in time to see the car nosing in at the great iron gates.

  Little Agnes knew that Gerald Melton was the most wonderful father any girl could wish to have. He would wave frantically at his daughter as she stood jumping up and down on the doorstep, then, when the car drew to a halt and Lister strode round to open the door, he would step down stiffly, with the help of his stick, and open his arms to her.

  ‘How do, little princess. Haha!’ And he would envelop her in the folds of his greatcoat and squeeze her tight. She would rub her nose in his tickly tweed waistcoat with its familiar smell of warm wool and tobacco and know that everything was all right again. ‘Well, damn it, I’m sure I had some little somethings somewhere,’ he would groan, patting his pockets. ‘Don’t say I left ’em on the train.’ And a pantomime would ensue whereby she would search all his pockets and his briefcase and the car until they found whatever he had brought with him this time – a little ornament for her collection or a dolls’ tea-set or a necklace of shiny red beads.

  In the meantime, Raven, loitering on the steps behind the servants, always too superior for such displays of enthusiasm, would slouch over to let his father ruffle the blue-black hair that gave him his nickname, and to snatch whatever packet Agnes held out to him. Then he would lope back inside to open his present in private. Gerald Melton would look after him in puzzlement; his only son, handsome and intelligent though he was, was a sulky enigma to him. It was Agnes he felt at ease with, this friendly child who teased and flirted with him, who took him inside and asked about his trip as a wife would have done, and helped him into a chair in the drawing room, and loosened his tie and ordered tea.

  Like a wife. The other reason Gerald could bond so well with his little daughter was that she had such a look of Evangeline – her hair was wavy and lighter in colour, but the blue eyes, the full lower lip, the beguiling expression were the same. Any other grieving widower might recoil from such a constant living reminder of the woman he had loved and lost, but Gerald found the thought that Evangeline lived on in her daughter a comforting one.

  It hadn’t always been like this. Soon after his wife had died giving birth to their third child – a stillborn boy – the Great War had broken out. His excuse for joining up was his officer training at Sandhurst, but in all reality he was so heartbroken at the loss of Evangeline he was reckless of his own life and immune to the needs of his children. When he’d been sent home with a shattered leg and a dose of mustard gas, a year later, he had been forced finally to spend time with Raven and Agnes. However, by then, the damage to his relationship with Raven had already been done. The youth was eventually packed off to Bellingham’s, a public school where, as far as Agnes could gauge, he had lied, cheated and charmed his way through something by way of an education. Gerald Melton had been hurt by his son’s obvious resentment, was at a loss how to deal with his dark moods. But he had been drawn to Agnes, so sweet and sad and lost, Agnes, who would climb into his lap and tell him she was so sorry for him and that she loved him.

  Agnes had always recognized the nature of this close bond with her father, and now she was sixteen was looking forward to filling the gap in the household left by the death of her mother thirteen years before. Although her head was currently full of Tennyson’s poems and the novels of the Brontës, and her daydreams were of romantic trysts, she had as yet no admirers and felt marriage must still be years away. In the meantime, she co
uld take over the running of the house for her father. She would learn to negotiate with Cook and look after the accounts – but only if she could get round her rival for the role, her governess Miss Selcott.

  When Raven had first gone away to school, Agnes had missed him terribly, but she enjoyed a steady friendship with Diana, the Rector’s only child, and in the school holidays, both girls followed Raven around like lambs; he would organize their games and make them perform terrible dares like walking on the garden wall or soaking poor Alf with the garden hose.

  In termtime, with Raven away, first at school and latterly at Cambridge, Miss Selcott ruled Agnes and Diana with a rod of iron. There were lessons from nine o’clock until one every day, then a rest after lunch followed by physical jerks – the governess was a keen proponent of regular exercise – followed by a nature walk, weather permitting, or silent reading in the library if not. Both Agnes and Diana were good and dutiful scholars, and, if they didn’t actually like their governess, they did not mind any of this. What Agnes did mind was the transparent way in which Jane Selcott sought the attentions of her employer, and her never-ending efforts to show that she was superior to the rest of the staff of Seddington House.

  Cook, the redoubtable Mrs Duncan, knew her place – as mistress of the kitchen and, in the absence of a housekeeper, the guardian of the household accounts. She also knew Miss Selcott’s place, and that, Agnes sometimes overheard her telling Ethel, the maid, was not to order her, Mrs Duncan, around. From time to time, Miss Selcott would try to alter a menu or comment loudly to Lister about the quality of Ethel’s dusting and a genteel kind of low-level warfare between the governess and the rest of the servants would rumble along for a while.

  As she grew up and became more aware of downstairs politics, Agnes sometimes wondered how on earth Seddington House ran as smoothly as it did. It was partly down to Mrs Duncan’s natural authority and efficiency, she decided, partly down to Lister the butler’s phlegmatic nature, and partly down to Ethel’s tact and good humour. Alter any ingredient in the mixture and the household might descend into crisis.