by Rosie Thomas
‘They’re four sizes too big.’
‘Room for growth, then.’ He waved, and turned back to the site entrance.
Harriet whistled as she drove. She negotiated the south London traffic, and headed out towards Everden. She had told David no less than the truth, there wasn’t much time, but she was convinced that somehow she could make it enough.
‘Back again?’ said Miss Bowlly.
‘May I come in?’ Harriet asked. Miss Bowlly didn’t say yes or no, but the door seemed to inch wider of its own accord.
‘I don’t know what keeps bringing you down here,’ she remarked in the mounded-up nest of her kitchen. ‘I don’t suppose it’s my tea, is it?’
Harriet sipped at the brown brew in the mug rimmed with tannin scum. ‘I called to ask you if you’d like to come for a walk with me. It’s a fine day.’
‘A walk?’ Harriet might have been proposing a crime, or an act of exhibitionism. Miss Bowlly scrutinized her with distrust. The old lady’s eyes were set in pouches that seemed surprisingly fleshy in comparison with the rest of her bony frame. With her grey hair sticking out in wisps around her face she looked like some small but threatening mammal.
Harriet calculated briefly, and then offered, ‘I thought we might go over and take a look at Birdwood House. And the grounds, too. No one will accuse us of trespassing, will they?’ Miss Bowlly was calculating as well. For a moment they stood still, weighing each other up.
‘I’ll get my coat,’ she said at length.
It was another warm, still day. Harriet had walked over from Everden in shirtsleeves, her attention fixed on the house in its hollow and the curves and undulations of the land around it. But Miss Bowlly pulled on an ancient brown tweed coat that only stopped short at her ankles, and covered her hair with a kind of faw n knitted bonnet. They made an incongruous pair as they set out on the short walk to the gates of Birdwood House. Miss Bowlly was not inclined to make conversation, Harriet discovered. Harriet was also busy with her own imaginings that each car sweeping past them might contain one of Keith Bottrill’s emissaries, or even Bottrill himself, circling his target like some bird of prey. The idea of herself and Miss Bowlly slipping in through their guard, dismissable as an eccentric old lady and her daughter out for a dutiful stroll, was pleasing and also exciting. Harriet knew that the thought was also far-fetched, but that was part of her pleasure in it.
The entire scheme was far-fetched, and that was its strength as well as its weakness. The surprise would be greater and the impact more powerful when the time came.
Harriet was smiling. She walked briskly, and Miss Bowlly showed no difficulty in keeping up. The hedges on either side of them were heavy with the creamy froth of may blossom. They reached the end of the driveway and edged around the heavy gate without trying to push it open any farther. The shade of tall trees closed over them at once.
‘I used to come up here, you know,’ Miss Bowlly said abruptly. ‘When the house was still kept right. Christmases; and for the village festival in the summer, that was always held in the garden; cricket matches sometimes, that my father played in.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Harriet asked her.
‘Oh, all a long time ago now.’
It was a familiar story, Harriet thought. Before the war there had been indoor servants and gardeners, and after the war a slow decline to the point where one elderly survivor lived a confused existence in two barricaded rooms. They reached the house.
‘Shame to see it like this, isn’t it?’ Miss Bowlly said.
They made a slow circuit. The afternoon’s sunshine promised summer, but still the house seemed dark and cold in its morbid setting of overgrown shrubs. The fanciful wrought-iron work of the verandah was hanging in places of truncated ochre fragments that denied the symmetry of filigree scrolls and wreathed acanthus leaves. As they passed the wooden screens roughly nailed over the windows Harriet examined the black scribbles of graffiti once again. She was right, there was nothing sinister here. Only children, announcing their allegiances in spray paint that would probably outlast them.
There was more fine iron-work over the elaborate porch. By the height of summer, buddleia would be raising its purple spikes out of the stone on either side. Up against the heavy double doors there was a deep drift of dead leaves, cigarette packets and empty drinks cans.
Harriet wanted to stoop and clear it away, exposing the heavy stone flags beneath, making a path to the doors so that she could push them open and step inside on to the exuberant pattern of the Victorian hall tiles. Instead, the marked wood nailed where there must once have been panels of stained glass solidly confronted her.
Yet her first instinct had been right, Harriet thought. It was a magnificent house. It drew her like a magnet. She was not afraid, but galvanised.
She stood ankle-deep in the litter at the door.
‘I wish we could get in,’ she whispered.
Miss Bowlly had sharp ears as well as eyes. ‘Tom Frost’s got the keys,’ she said. ‘But why would he let you in? The place belongs to Everden.’
‘I want to buy it.’
The old lady laughed. ‘You’ve got the money, have you?’
Harriet turned away from the padlocked doors. ‘I’m rich enough,’ she said.
She couldn’t remember having admitted it so simply before. She was neither apologising nor advertising, but stating the fact.
The possession of the Peacocks money had begun to have a significance unconnected with Peacocks and defeat. If it enabled her to rescue Birdwood House, then that was well and good. And with Birdwood House, enticingly linked, came the Birdwood development.
Miss Bowlly looked differently at Harriet now. Not with direct suspicion or mistrust but sidelong, speculative. They began to walk away from the house, through the rim of the shrubbery and under the big trees on the far side of it. Green bramble snares caught at their ankles and soft, rotting branches split underfoot. They came to a sagging fence of metal rails that marked the boundary of the garden. Looking behind her, Harriet saw that the house was masked by spring growth.
Miss Bowlly spread her hands on the top rail of the fence and rested one boot on the lower. The fields fanned in front of them, green alternating with ribbed brown, marked out by hedges and gates and narrow lines of trees. Once again, Harriet noted that the seclusion of Birdwood was deceptive. From here she could see the outskirts of two of the three villages in the enclosing triangle, and there was a handful of houses scattered between them. She was wondering again which acres of land belonged to which of them, and how many of the landowners had signed Keith Bottrill’s enticing option agreements.
Free money now, and a percentage of the take when the property bonanza finally came. Miss Bowlly had not taken the bait, at least.
Harriet said quietly as they looked out over the saucer of land, ‘There will be a housing development of some sort here, you know.’ I think it’s inevitable now. Planning permission will be granted to someone in the end, for something. Only it doesn’t necessarily have to be boxes for commuters, which is what Bottrill intends.’
Miss Bowlly turned her back on the view. She only said, ‘I’ll get back home now. I can’t be gadding about here all the afternoon.’
They walked back again, almost in silence, as they had come.
At the cottage Miss Bowlly held open her front door, clearly expecting that Harriet had not finished what she had come to do. And Harriet, who had planned to walk straight back to Everden and let Miss Bowlly cogitate for a precious day or two, took her chance.
‘I want to put a proposal to you.’
She was looking around the dim kitchen at the heaped-up newspapers and the cardboard boxes overflowing with empty jars and old saucepans and pieces of ironmongery. The sense of familiarity came back to her, but she knew that Miss Bowlly was no Simon. Miss Bowlly was shrewd and suspicious, and she was well able to take care of herself.
‘I guessed that,’ the old lady said, looking at Harriet without blinki
ng. The resemblance to a small, unfriendly mammal grew stronger.
‘I want to buy your property.’
‘I told you the first time. I’m not signing or agreeing or selling.’
‘Won’t you listen to what I’m proposing, and then decide?’
‘If it doesn’t take all night.’
And so, speaking softly and without emphasis, Harriet made the offer that she had been thinking about for days.
She would buy Miss Bowlly’s cottage and two acres of garden, outright, and not under an option agreement. While she was talking, she watched Miss Bowlly’s face carefully, but she couldn’t detect the smallest flicker of interest. So when she came to naming the price Harriet revised it upwards by ten per cent. It was such a large sum of money she almost regretted it as soon as she made the offer. It was beyond what was necessary, a long way beyond. Harriet stopped and waited, with the figure resounding in the air between them.
Miss Bowlly had never even blinked.
‘Why so generous?’ she demanded.
‘There are two reasons. The first is that I need your land, to use as a wedge to drive into the Castoria holding. And I can offer to buy it outright because I have made money elsewhere, and I’m not a big-scale developer with a dozen similar deals under way. There’s also the chance that, knowing you and hearing that you have decided to support my scheme rather than the rival one, other local owners and the village and the parish council might be influenced in my favour too. I’m being generous because I need to be.’
Harriet was candid, because there seemed to be no point in dissembling.
‘And the other reason?’
The table they were sitting at was crowded with the empty glass jars that seemed to be Miss Bowlly’s chief collecting interest. Most of them were as yet unwashed. Harriet watched a fly making progress around the rim of a jar that had once held raspberry jam. In between the jars there were boxes of cereal, and white sliced bread in cellophane wrappings. Miss Bowlly appeared to live on Weetabix and jam sandwiches.
Harriet tried to imagine what it would be like for Miss Bowlly to live in another place, in one of David’s sound, modern cottages constructed on approved traditional lines, for instance, or in a sheltered unit in an old people’s community with a warden who called in to see her every day, and nagged her about eating properly and attending the evening whist drives in the common room.
It was, she was aware, only partly an act of generosity on her own part to offer Miss Bowlly a chance to direct her future. The terms were more than generous, but they were based on self-interest. Harriet understood that, and she also knew that she would have to learn to live with many similar self-accusations if she was to progress beyond Miss Bowlly’s garden boundary. If she was going to blow up her bubble and let it catch the wind over Birdwood.
Her presence in Miss Bowlly’s kitchen was an intrusion. She remembered the steps by which she had intruded into Simon’s life, both consciously and with careless ignorance, and the conclusion, in the deep cutting under the bridge.
She met Miss Bowlly’s suspicious stare full on. ‘I took something from someone else, when I started out in business. I didn’t pay him in the right currency. I don’t want to do that again. I want to make sure there are no debts.’
Miss Bowlly gave her laugh that sounded like an animal’s yelp.
‘Making atonement with me, are you?’
It was ridiculous to imagine that anything that could be done for Miss Bowlly was an atonement for Simon. Miss Bowlly would not look at her and see Kath’s young face gazing back; Miss Bowlly would never wish that Harriet might have been her daughter.
Simon was dead.
In the end bulldozers would arrive at the gate outside, and whether they came on Harriet’s account or via some faceless developer operating out of his distant office suite would not, finally, make very much difference.
The decision whether or not to accept Harriet’s offer was Miss Bowlly’s alone.
‘I can’t atone, in this case,’ Harriet said. ‘But you asked why I was being generous, and that is the second reason.’
Miss Bowlly sniffed. One nostril collapsed and she puffed heavily out again.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she conceded.
Harriet knew it was as much as she would get, for the time being. ‘Thank you,’ she said warmly.
She left Miss Bowlly to do her thinking, and walked back to Everden.
When Alison returned from London for another weekend, Harriet asked her, ‘Do you mind my still being here?’
She had cleared the chaos of her papers off the long kitchen table and packed them neatly away in the blue bedroom, and she had made a lengthy and very accurate list of the dozens of telephone calls she had put through in Alison’s absence. The cottage was tidy because Harriet had hardly moved around in it, and she had taken uncharacteristic care to make sure that there was food in the refrigerator as well as cold white wine.
‘If you do, there must be some sort of pub or hotel I could stay at, or a cottage to rent somewhere.’
Alison sank into a paunchy armchair and drank from the glass that Harriet put into her hand.
‘I don’t mind you still being here. I told you, stay as long as you like.’
‘It’s already been long. And you didn’t expect me to treat the place like an office.’
‘That’s true. I expected you to come and have a rest. To read a novel or two and potter about in the garden and perhaps strike up an offbeat friendship with someone from the Wheatsheaf.’
‘I don’t play darts well enough for that.’
‘That’s also true. But what do I find? Within a couple of weeks you’re in the middle of creating a property empire. You’re planning to buy up half the village and build a theme park for community-conscious country folk. You intend to take on one of the major bad-boy developers and beat him at his own game.’ Alison closed her eyes, and then forced them open again. ‘It’s very tiring. I’m exhausted by the spectacle of your energy and industry.’
Harriet said gently, ‘It’s all speculative. Nothing exists, yet, except a few architect’s outlines, a pile of posters and some invitations to attend a meeting in the village hall.’
‘Which makes your energy and enthusiasm all the more awesome.’
‘It’s what entrepreneurs run on.’
‘You’re an entrepreneur, Harriet. You must have been born one.’
‘Do you mind what I’m doing?”
‘As I said when we talked about it at the beginning, this is a small country, and people have to live somewhere. Why not next to the village of Everden, Kent? And if some developer is going to pocket a pile of money out of it, I’d rather it were you with your artisans’ cottages than Keith Bottrill and his Kentish executive homes. Only one thing worries me.’
‘Which is?’
Alison looked up at her. She was thinking that for all Harriet’s warmth there was an obliqueness about her when it came to analysis of her own feelings. Coupled with her formidable determination it could make her seem unapproachable. Alison chose her words with care.
‘When we were here together the first weekend, you told me that you hadn’t given any consideration to happiness since, you couldn’t remember when. And that now you would, because you had plenty of time.’
There was a silence. Involuntarily, Harriet put her hand up to her jaw. The marks left by the attack had all but disappeared, and she remembered that to touch them was to draw attention to them. She dropped her hand again and fiddled with the bottle of wine to occupy her fingers elsewhere.
‘I was miserable when I had nothing to do. I felt sick, dismembered. I don’t know about happiness. I don’t know what else to do, if I don’t do this.’
Alison went on looking at her. Harriet could detect only interest in her expression, not pity or sympathy nor any trace of disapproval. It came to her that although she could not benefit from Alison’s warning, she was deeply grateful to her for troubling to make it. She wa
s aware of the value of new friendship that took her as what she had become, rather than as a reminiscence of other times. She got up now, and went across to Alison’s armchair. Awkwardly, because she was not physically demonstrative, she put her arm around her and as quickly withdrew it. It was Jane who hugged and patted hair and linked hands, and when she thought of her Harriet remembered other friendships, different and possessed of their own value. The warning found a kind of mark, then.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet smiled at her. ‘I’m happy, doing what I’m doing.’
She reached into her pocket, and took out a pair of heavy old keys. ‘Look. Tom Frost has lent me the keys to Birdwood.ʼ
Harriet had been to see the chairman of the parish council, just as she had also discreetly visited the vicar and the individual members of the Everden Association, and all the other local residents who, on Alison’s advice, were judged likely to be receptive to her ideas.
‘I waited for you to come home, so that we could go and see it together.’
Alison sighed, but she was already on her way up and out of the depths of the armchair. In the middle of May there was plenty of light until nine o’clock. There was enough time to go with Harriet to see the house of her dreams, and to be back home again before dark.
‘More like a nightmare,’ Alison shivered, as the heavy doors creaked open. A soft tide of dead leaves and litter drifted in at their heels.
Harriet and Alison stepped into the hallway of Birdwood House. The light was dim, and Harriet switched on the big torch she had brought with her. The tiles were there, just as she had imagined them, an intricate plaid of buff and terracotta and olive-green, chestnut and startling blue, criss-crossing and receding into the depths of the house. The torch-beam moved upwards. It travelled up the wide staircase, illuminating elaborately turned fat newel posts and mahogany globes furred with grey dust, and the intricate pillars and balustrading of a first-floor gallery.
Alison shivered again, more theatrically, but Harriet walked slowly forward. Through tall doorways and gothic archways they could see dim rooms, inward-turning, blinded by the wooden screens nailed over their windows. The torchlight penetrated more deeply. There were bare floorboards marked by unvarnished rectangles that the soap manufacturer’s fine Turkey carpets had once generously covered. Marble mantelpieces that had displayed wax fruit trapped under glass domes, coloured glass, silver candlesticks were naked now, decently veiled by the blankets of dust. Plaster ceilings garlanded with leaves and pendulous with fruit showed the brown archipelagos of damp stains, and in places the bare teeth of laths above where the plaster had crumbled away.
