Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
T he electricity came back on around lunchtime and Teddy gleefully texted to let me know we were definitely still on to move some kitchen furniture around. So, like the brain-dead people pleaser that I seemed to have become, I headed to his house after work, wearing old clothes and a determined expression. But when I got there, Teddy was no where to be found and all the doors to the house were locked.
Wandering around the back of The Old Rectory, I called out, hoping I might find him in the garden or in the goat shed, but to no avail. After feeding Deidre some dandelions and giving her a quick scratch behind her ears, I pottered back, heading for the French doors into the kitchen. Peering inside, nose pressed against the cool glass, I called his name again, but there was still no sign.
“Where the hell are you?” I muttered, feeling sure he had to be here as his Land Rover was in the drive and his text message had definitely said to come over for six. Sitting on the low stone wall of the ramshackle patio, I pulled out my phone and called his number, hearing the ringing of his phone coming from somewhere deep inside the house. But it went to voicemail.
About to give up and go home, I heard the very faint call of my name.
“Teddy?” I shouted back.
There was another desperate cry, but louder this time, as I followed the sound down a narrow path between the high wall of the surgery car park and around the side of the house.
“Hannah! Down here!”
In the overgrown border of the garden was a smallish opening in the wall of the house at ground level that dropped away into darkness.
“Teddy?”
His face appeared at the bottom of the hole. “I’m so glad you’re here.” He paused and scratched his head, his shadowed face a little sheepish. “I may have got myself into a slightly tricky predicament in the name of the Goddess of Love.”
A loud meow echoed from the hole.
Teddy looked up at me from the dark pit he was in and seemed in two minds whether to fess up about what was going on.
“So…” I prompted, “what’s she done?”
“She fell down the coal chute here, and without really thinking I scrambled in to get her, and now we’re both stuck in the cellar.”
Teddy disappeared from view and the next moment, Aphrodite’s patchwork tortoiseshell face was being thrust up towards me. Leaning down to take her from Teddy’s outstretched hands, I placed her on the path, where she gave a little shake and trotted off down the garden without a backward glance.
“Are you coming out now then?”
“Yeah, about that.” Teddy’s embarrassment seemed to have magnified. “You see, I accidentally locked myself out of the house, so I opened the coal chute to see if I could get in that way when Aphrodite jumped in. I thought I could get out through the cellar door into the main house but it’s jammed, so I can’t open it from this side.”
“So you’re stuck?”
“Yes.”
“Can you not just climb back out the way you went in?”
“No, I’ve tried and it’s not happening. There are no hand holes or ledges, so I can’t get any purchase. I’m definitely stuck.”
“Rescuing you is becoming a habit, Ted.” Incoherent grumbling came back at me from the darkness. “How did you even fit down there in the first place?”
“It was pretty tight.”
We both contemplated the situation at hand from our varying viewpoints while the stifling silence and mustiness of the coal cellar wafted up to me from the bottom of the chute.
“Shall I call Henry?”
“No!” he shouted, sounding almost desperate.
“So what do you propose to do, Ted?”
“I have a plan.”
I was distinctly aware that I would not like this plan. Call it a gut feeling, if you like, but somehow I knew it was going to involve a significant amount of effort and discomfort on my part.
“And that is?”
“You need to come down the chute and join me in the cellar.”
“No.”
Teddy carried on as if he hadn’t heard me. “I took up some floorboards in the dining room to fix a leaky radiator pipe yesterday and I’ve found the hole from down here. It’s just big enough between the joists that I think you could squeeze through.”
“It’s still a no. Has no one got a spare key?”
“No, they don’t.”
“That’s a mistake you should rectify.”
“Yes, thank you for that pearl of wisdom, Dr Havens. I’ll be sure to do that once I’m out of this fucking cellar.” I could hear him moving about below me and then his face came back into view. “Right. This is how it will work: I’ll lift you up so you can climb through the gap in the floorboards and that will get you into the house. Then you go to the cellar door, un-jam it, and let me out.” He paused theatrically. “Ta da! I’m a genius.”
“All the actual no’s, Ted.” There wasn’t a single part of this plan I liked – mostly because I’m really quite claustrophobic and the thought of being in the tight confines of the coal chute was making my palms sweat already.
“You kind of have to, Hannah, or else I’ll wither away to a stinking corpse in here and then come and haunt you for eternity.”
“That’s a plan I can get on board with.”
“Please?” He paused. “There’s a homemade lasagne in the Aga that I’m willing to share.”
“You can’t buy me with food.” I mean, he probably could, actually, because I could already feel my resolve slipping, and he seemed to have picked up on the fact that I’m always really hungry.
“I have Viennetta too, and it’s the mint one.”
Dammit.
“All right. Fine.”
Looking at the point of entry to the cellar, I contemplated how I was going to manage this. Head first? Or feet first? My heart was already thumping along in abject terror at immersing myself into the dark, bottomless hole. My throat closed at the thought of being stuck in there forever, the walls closing in like a vice. And my brain began to fog up with panic.
“Feet in first, Hannah, and I’ll catch you at this end because there’s a bit of a drop.”
Manoeuvring into position, my legs dangling into the hole, I faltered as dread wrapped around me like a cold, wet blanket.
“Ready?” came the voice from the depths, like a merman calling me to my briny death in Davey Jones’s locker.
“Of course I’m not bloody ready,” I said before taking a lungful of air and hurling myself into the shadowy hole that had already swallowed my feet.
At this point I should make it clear that I expected to slide gracefully down this tunnel of doom and land light as a feather in Teddy’s outstretched arms, a picture of elegance and femininity.
It did not, however, happen like this. Not even close.
Primarily this was because the chute was quite a lot smaller than I had anticipated, so that when most of me was inside, I ground to a halt, arms wedged by my sides.
“You’ve got to keep moving,” Teddy called out helpfully.
“No shit, Sherlock! How did you even fit in here?” I muttered in reply, engaging in a worm-esque full-body wriggle in an attempt to propel me further into the cellar. I barely moved, and suddenly an overwhelming fear of imminent death swamped me. An alarming inevitability that I was going to be entombed in this tunnel forever.
I lay there hyperventilating for a moment, until hands grasped my ankles and Teddy began to pull. My clothes caught on a rough patch of concrete as I bumped down the remainder of the chute, and I heard a faint ripping sound that accompanied my frantic breathing and occasional squeaks of surprise. And when I finally emerged out of the hole, landing in a heap at Teddy’s feet on the cellar floor, I was acutely aware of a cool breeze wafting about my skin in the region of my derrière.
“Shit. I think I’ve ripped my jeans.”
“Where?”
Hand outstretched, Teddy helped me up and I got my phone out of my pocket, switching on the torch and twisting around to view the carnage, but couldn’t quite see what had happened to the back of my jeans.
Teddy craned his neck to get a good view of my spotlighted arse, which was now illuminated like the actual moon by my phone light.
“Oooh, you really have as well.”
“How bad is it?” Still unable to see my own bum sufficiently, I moved my phone to better light up the area.
“Let’s put it this way, I no longer have to imagine what you look like in pink knickers, Hannah.”
“Shit,” I said again, exploring with increasing dismay the gaping hole where the pocket of my jeans once resided, fingers brushing against the obviously highly visible cotton of my pants. How fucking marvellous. “Right, well, that’s these jeans in the bin when I get home then. Should we try and get out of here?” When Teddy didn’t reply, I shone the torch light into his slightly vacant face. “Earth to Edward?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, where were we?” Teddy’s voice sounded like he’d just returned from somewhere very far away indeed.
“Getting out of this cellar, with another of your cunningly cunning plans?”
“Right.” He gave himself a little shake and guided me through the damp-smelling cellar towards a chink of light at the other end of the room.
I’m going to have to lift you through that gap in the joists,” he said, pointing to a small square above our heads where the missing floorboards revealed the enticing light of the dining room. “It might be a squeeze.”
Excellent. Contorting my body into another small gap was exactly what I wanted to do right now. Reaching up as far as I could, my fingertips only brushed the very bottom of the wooden joists, and I had to accept that there was no way I’d be able to haul myself up there without his help.
“Fine. Hold your hands together and I’ll use them as a step.”
Teddy looked dubious.
“I thought I’d just pick you up and push you through the hole.”
Memories of being in Teddy’s arms the last time he “just picked me up” flashed through my mind, and the annoying fluttering butterflies of desire started their little dance again. Touching really did need to be kept to a minimum. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
With a sigh he bent down and laced his fingers together underneath my right boot.
“On the count of three, I’ll boost you up, ok?”
“Ok.”
“One, two, three!” And with an almighty shove, he propelled me airborne and towards the hole above my head.
Grasping the rough wooden joists, I used all my strength to try and clamber through the hole with Teddy grunting below at my incessant wriggling. As I got my head and shoulders through, I attempted to lift myself up and onto the dining room floor, but I just wasn’t strong enough.
“Can you go any higher?” Teddy called out.
“No. Boost me again?”
“I can, but it would be better if I pushed you from higher up your body.”
“Like where?”
“There is a delectable-looking arse in my face. How about there?”
“In your face?” I replied in horror.
“I’m not complaining, but I reckon this would be over quicker if I pushed you from there.”
“Of course it would,” I muttered.
“We doing it then?”
“There’s really nowhere else?”
“There are plenty of places I can think to put my hands, but right now I think this would be the most effective launchpad to get you through that hole.”
“Fine.” I tensed in anticipation as he repositioned his large hands to snugly cup my backside, the warmth of his skin against mine where the jeans had ripped sending a ripple of heat through my whole body.
“You have a spectacular bum, Hannah.”
“Just bloody push it, will you?”
“Push it real good?” He sang, then chuckled at his own hilarity and 1980s Salt-N-Pepa reference, and I begrudgingly began to smile again. That tiny kernel of self-confidence that had been squashed before grew a little brighter for just a minute because of Teddy, because of his merciless flirting, before he steadily and skilfully shoved my entire body through the gap.
With more of my torso now out of the hole, I was able to drag myself up and onto the dining room floor, where I lay for a minute amidst the shafts of sunlight and the comforting, bookish smell of the house.
“I’ll see you at the cellar door in the back passage, Hannah. It’s the one next to the old servants’ staircase.”
“The back passage?”
“Honestly, get your mind out of the gutter. It’s what I call the corridor off the kitchen that leads to the utility room.”
“Right.” Unlike me at this point, he was able to think some non-arse-related things then.
Got it. Good.
Getting to my feet, I went through the house, marvelling as always at the glorious parquet floors and oak panelling that had been witness to at least a century of history. I inhaled deeply the glorious atmosphere that imbued every inch of the building, making it feel like a living, breathing thing and not just a house. In the kitchen, an old half-glazed door stood slightly ajar to the side of a huge pine dresser and, pushing it open, I entered a corridor of rooms joined together in a chain that skirted the back of the house. Next to a narrow spiral stone staircase stood another door with paint pots, sacks of plaster mix, and used tools wedged against it, and a hook and latch barring it from being opened from the other side. Lifting the items and stacking them carefully at the foot of the stairs, I cleared a path to the wooden door and unlatched the rickety metal catch, tugging the handle but it wouldn’t budge.
“Ted, are you there? The door’s clear now, but you’ll need to give it a shove from your side.”
“Righto,” came the muffled reply. With a grunt and the telltale screech of wood against stone, the door slowly opened towards me and Teddy emerged from the gloom with a wry smile. “What do you think of my back passage then?”
“Better than expected,” I replied and couldn’t help the bubbly little snort of laughter that erupted from my nose.
After we’d moved some new cabinets for the kitchen into the house from the garage, and I’d held various pieces of worktop and screws while Teddy worked, we eventually sat down for dinner, tired and distinctly grubby. I had to admit that Teddy was a rather excellent cook as I stuffed my own bodyweight of lasagne into my mouth, barely taking time to breathe between bites.
“I think you might have to roll me home,” I sighed, patting my belly and leaning back in my chair.
“Bribery with food is my top-tier flirting technique.”
I undid the button on my jeans to relieve some of the pressure on my bulging abdomen. “It’s working.”
Teddy smirked. “I can see that. Are you going to remove those tattered jeans entirely?”
“Shush. Let me sink into this food coma in peace, you heathen.”
Teddy scooped the remainder of the lasagne into a spare bowl and covered it with tin foil, placing it on the counter near the fridge to cool. “I’ll drop this into Agnes tomorrow for her to reheat. I forgot to say that I saw her this morning and I’m a bit worried about her.”
“Why?”
“Well, after that incident in the car park the other day, and the state of her house, don’t you think we should contact someone about helping her?”
“I spoke with Giles about her and I’m not sure she wants any help, Teddy.” I was uncomfortable thinking about this. She was struggling, undoubtedly, but in her lucid moments she was as capable as anyone I’d ever met. I felt her independence at my very core and saw her unshakeable tenacity as something to which I could only aspire to on my very best days.
“Not social services, but family?”
“Perhaps, if you can find anyone. Do you think she’d be upset if we went behind her back though?”
Teddy looked doubtful for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m just not sure I can sit back and do nothing.”
“Well, why don’t you talk to her about her family. Perhaps her husband’s brother is still alive? See where you get to with it.”
Teddy nodded and took another sip of wine, seemingly placated that I was on board with his do-gooding. “You haven’t forgotten that it’s the garden party tomorrow, have you? We need to leave by 8pm.”
“Yes, right, of course.”
I’d completely forgotten about this. I’d blanked out the horror of the scenario from my mind in a vain attempt at hoping this obligation would go away. No such luck.
“You might even have fun. You never know.”
The withering look that appeared unbidden on my face must have been a sight to behold because Teddy roared with laughter. He stood up and pulled me reluctantly to my feet.
“Come on. I’ll walk you back to yours so we can both get clean in your shower.”