Chapter 18
Mum told Dad what happened during the stolen viewing of Shukes (stolen from poor Mr. Henry Christensen) and about Lesley Gavey weeping in front of her for a second time.
She didn’t tell him in her usual way, however: really giving it her all, both detail-wise and emotionally.
No, she decided to play a game in which she pretended to be a robot, determined to strip her account of her own point of view and relinquishing all attempts to shape Dad’s opinion.
His initial responses had not been encouraging, and Mum had a self-preserving routine for such occasions (like when all the non-furry Lamberts refused to believe her car engine kept weirdly cutting out and told her the car was fine and it must be something she was doing wrong—until Dad drove it, it broke down, and instantly everyone accepted the engine was the problem, not Mum, and the garage was summoned to tow it away and fix it).
Mum felt strangely invigorated whenever she knew she had no one’s full support.
It sparked a sense of power inside her, a sort of recognition that this was what she was born and trained for, that she was moving closer to her essence.
She’d felt it for the first time aged thirteen, during the Gardenia Incident: a heroic (but also quite bitchy) inner voice that was braver than her had said, “Okay, then, you soul-crushing despot. If you really want to earn my hatred, let’s fucking go.
I’m going to be ready for you from now on.
” Mum knew there was a big difference between Dad and her own father.
She didn’t think my dad, Mark Lambert, was a despot, but she was sure he was a contrary git who loved to quibble wherever possible.
Tonelessly, she gave him only the facts that would have been provable in a court of law: She’d shown Lesley the front garden first, then the lounge, the den, the downstairs loo, the utility room.
In each of these, Lesley had emitted a loud sigh of contentment and said things like, “Oh, it’s gorgeous!
” and/or “You couldn’t have made it look more incredible” and/or “This is so lovely! What an exquisite color—is it Farrow & Ball?” (It was: Vardo.
A bold choice for what used to be a small lean-to at the side of the house.)
Mum wondered how the outside of Shukes could have caused Lesley Gavey such distress on 12 August, and then the inside such joy on 19 September.
“Oh, I forgot to say,” she told Dad. “I found out from Peter that she’d rung him in early August to ask if anything would soon be going on the market in Swaffham Tilney, anything that wasn’t on Rightmove yet.
He told her about Shukes—name, address, everything.
That’s why she was there that day in August.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“Our estate agent.”
“Right.” Dad nodded.
“Anyway, then I took her into the kitchen, and that was her favorite room of the whole downstairs, she said. The sight of it made her yelp with joy. She started praising my good taste, but in a mad, almost desperate way, as if I’d saved her life or something.
” At this point, since Dad was properly listening now, Mum abandoned her attempt at objective narration.
“It was like… I don’t know how to describe it.
Like I’d set up a new religion with…with our kitchen as the main deity, and she wanted to be the first… ”
“Disciple?” Dad suggested.
“Exactly. It was embarrassing. Normally I’m good at taking compliments graciously, as long as it’s only one or two. But she went on and on: how clever I was not to have worktops darker than the drawers and cupboard doors—”
Dad looked indignant. “I hope you told her I was the one who chose our countertops.”
“I couldn’t get a word in edgeways—not until later, when she was miserable.
For as long as she was happy, she gushed on and on, and then Champ came in and she patted and stroked him and said he was a lovely boy whose mum had just as good taste in dogs as she did in kitchen cabinets and floor tiles.
At one point she froze, and I was terrified she was having a heart attack.
Then she said breathlessly, ‘Are these tiles Fired Earth’s Galicia?
They’re my favorite in the whole world!’ I had no idea if they were or weren’t.
I forgot the name and brand as soon as I’d picked them—which I was about to tell her, until she gasped with horror, having noticed what was beyond the kitchen windows. ‘What’s that yard?’ she said.
“‘It’s just a little yard,’ I told her, feeling proud of how cozy it was looking.
It was full of sunlight, and I’d watered the pot plants and swept and plumped up the cushions on the chairs.
To be honest, she’d been so ecstatic about everything else, I was kind of waiting for her to say, ‘Oh, this yard is the most heavenly thing I’ve ever seen, and you should enter it for a landscape design competition in the Small Backyards category. ’”
“No such luck?” Dad guessed.
“Er, no. The honeymoon period was well and truly over. She said, ‘Well, then, where’s the back garden?’ and her voice sounded tight—completely different, total change of demeanor.
And she shooed Champ away from her suddenly, as if he was a pest. That was the worst thing she did.
Poor Champy! And she’d been so friendly to him until then.
Honestly, I was scared when I told her there was no back garden of the kind she was clearly expecting.
Her plan at first was evidently to put a brave face on it.
All she said was, ‘I see,’ though she sounded furious and sort of… refused to look at me.”
“Sal, I’m not happy about you doing these viewings,” said Dad. “Can’t the estate agent take over? I don’t want you having to cope with any loon who feels like turning up.”
“This particular loon won’t be back, I promise you,” Mum told him.
“I put on my brightest voice and said, ‘Shall I show you the upstairs?’ and she did a funny thing with her head. It started as a nod but turned into a weird neck-twisty headshake. She looked, honestly, as if a malign spirit had possessed her and was writhing inside her body.”
“I hope you booted her out,” said Dad. “I would have.”
“I left her in the lounge while I went to make her a cup…sorry, a mug of tea, and when I got back there, she was all heaving sobs and streaming tears, just like the day she was outside the house in August. I didn’t even have the chance to ask her what was wrong. She started laying into me—”
“This is so out of order.” Dad shook his head. He looked ready to spring out of his chair and deck someone.
Lesley Gavey had accused both Mum and Peter, the estate agent, of being con men (“Though she immediately amended it to ‘con people,’ for added inclusivity,” Mum told Dad).
How dared they fail to draw attention, in Shukes’s sale brochure, to the lack of a back garden?
(“But it’s there, under the heading ‘Outside’: ‘beautiful, cottage-style front garden and paved backyard.’ How much clearer could it be?
” “I know, Mark. Please stop shouting at me. I’m not Lesley Gavey, remember? ”)
She’d demanded a box of tissues. Shukes didn’t have one, so Mum offered to get her a roll of loo paper instead.
On her way out of the room, she half heard something that was definitely intended as a complaint sent up to the heavens—a railing against Fate’s twisted cruelty—but she couldn’t quite make out the words on account of all the blubbing.
She turned. “Pardon?”
“Nothing,” Lesley Gavey said in a hard voice. “It doesn’t matter.”
On her way to fetch the toilet roll, with Champ at her side, Mum whispered, “It matters to me, actually. I’m going to make her tell me, Champy.” What she thought she’d heard, though surely it couldn’t have been, was: “This was supposed to be my poor house.”
The stress was on the “poor,” with “house” following after it as if it was all one word, if that was indeed what Lesley had said and Mum hadn’t misheard.
Mum’s mind went straight to Victorian workhouses and to Dad saying, while they were watching Scrooged one Christmas, that the writer Charles Dickens’s father had been sent to the poorhouse at some point, or the workhouse. Or maybe it was Dickens himself who’d gone there, Mum couldn’t remember.
This was supposed to be my poor house.
The last Agatha Christie novel that Swaffham Tilney’s book club had discussed before it died in a blaze of entirely unnecessary acrimony was By the Pricking of My Thumbs.
That story opens with an elderly lady asking, “Was it your poor child?” while staring into a fireplace.
Knowing that Agatha’s famous sleuth Miss Marple liked to look for parallels, Mum tried to do the same but could think of nothing that made sense.
How could Lesley Gavey have believed at any point that Shukes was meant to be her Victorian-style workhouse?
It was surreal and ludicrous. Mum told herself she must have heard wrong.
After handing over a brand-new loo roll, which Lesley received with a wrinkled nose and fingers that bucked and fluttered, Mum asked her what she’d said before. “Something about a poor house, wasn’t it?”
“I told you, it was nothing. Will you please drop it?” Lesley snapped.