Chapter Four
With just three days’ grace until her mother came, the pressure was on to get the house habitable. The combination of her
tiredness and the heat meant the last week had drifted past with hardly anything to show for it. She made herself some coffee
and, pursued nonchalantly by Tango, who gave the impression of having a number of better things to do with his time, she made
a reconnaissance.
The kitchen was all right. The formal drawing room that led off the hallway to the front of the house was potentially beautiful. It had a pair of high arched windows to the front, with their original wooden shutters, and it ran the full depth of the house, with French doors into the garden at the back. The room cried out for elegant but comfortable sofas, a glossy grand piano, and jugs of roses from the garden. Unfortunately, what it had instead was twenty or more collapsing cardboard boxes of books with no shelves to put them on and a jarringly inappropriate selection of the fashionable contemporary furniture Nigel had preferred. The Eames chair looked distinctly odd by the faded green silk curtains the previous owner had left, and the starkly angular sofa and chairs looked brutal marooned in the middle of wide oak floorboards, which would be beautiful with polish and effort. The study, filled with Nigel’s papers, and the dining room both led off the other side of the hallway and were even worse because they were smaller and seemed more cluttered.
She and her mother would just have to carry on living in the kitchen as Imogen had been doing.
That decision made, she felt more energetic. She went to tackle the upstairs but was soon glum again, making mental lists
of urgent work to be done and wincing at the sight of electric wiring running along the skirting boards.
It looked prehistoric. She dreaded to think what an electrician would say. She imagined the ritual of tooth sucking and head
shaking that plumbers and electricians seemed to engage in before announcing an estimate the size of a small country’s national
debt. “And that’s just for the essential stuff, love,” they always say, thought Imogen irritably, before going on to break
down her resistance with sotto voce phrases like “death trap,” “bleedin’ cowboys,” and “don’t know why you didn’t call me
in earlier...” until Imogen had lost the will to live and sacrificed her annual holiday to pay for boring but essential
things like new fuse boxes and damp-proof courses.
Off the galleried landing there was an airy, spacious bathroom with a huge claw-footed bath on a raised platform in the middle
of the room. The view from the window was the orchard and the manor house beyond. So far there were no curtains, which hadn’t
bothered Imogen at all, but she could only imagine what her mother would say.
Oh well, thought Imogen. I’ll just tell her I doubt the sheep are interested in seeing anyone with no clothes on, and if the inhabitants at the manor are voyeurs with binoculars, then cheap thrills to them.
There were three bedrooms on this floor. The larger one looking out onto the front of the house had the same high arched windows
and window seats as in the drawing room. She would have shared this one with Nigel. Another, they had immediately dubbed the
nursery. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go in there since she arrived. Not much chance of playing happy family now.
Going into the master bedroom, she decided it would do perfectly well for her mother. It was lucky she had at least unpacked
the bedding. She dug a set of clean white cotton sheets out of the huge airing cupboard in the bathroom—the same cupboard
she had eventually found the immersion heater in, thanks to Gabriel’s instructions.
With sheets and bedding sorted, she shifted ten or so boxes and bin liners of clothes to the nursery room and found a bedside
light with a working bulb, which she stood on a wooden chest next to the bed. Then she cleared the junk from a little chest
of drawers formerly in the spare room of their Wimbledon flat, and the room was ready. Luckily there were already thin curtains
at the windows, not enough to cut out the light but enough to ensure privacy.
Apart from the cellar that Imogen—terrified of spiders—was too scared to explore, the only other rooms in the house were the attic rooms. One was currently Imogen’s bedroom; the other room, leading off it, was slightly larger and flooded with light from the dormer window. She had secretly earmarked it as her studio, somewhere she could go to draw and paint. Tomorrow perhaps she would unpack her art materials and make a start.
After several days of relentless sunshine that had left her feeling utterly drained, it had rained heavily overnight, and
the stultifying heat of the last few days had finally lifted.
Tango had made his habitual early morning arrival on Imogen’s pillow and was now curled up like a prawn on his side, instantly
adopting the appearance of deep sleep to dissuade her from pushing him off. She prodded him experimentally. In response, he
opened one eye and fixed her with a glacial stare.
After a hasty bath in water that was none too warm, Imogen pottered around the kitchen in her socked feet. Tango had followed
her down and was howling piteously for food.
“You’re awfully fat for someone who’s starving,” she told him. “Really, to look at you, anyone would think you’d already snarfed
down a good half a tin of cat food as recently as last night,” she said, knowing he had done exactly that.
She bent to scoop the remains of last night’s tin into Tango’s plate by the back door. She caught a whiff of the food, and
her stomach lurched suddenly. She straightened up, taking a deep breath to fight the wave of nausea. It receded, leaving a
faint dew of sweat on her upper lip.
“Honestly, I don’t know how you can stomach the stuff,” she said weakly as Tango abruptly stopped caressing her legs with
his tail and tucked into his breakfast without a backward glance.
She sat for a minute in the Lloyd Loom chair by the stove and tried some deep breaths. Feeling better, she put on the kettle and rinsed out the teapot, chucking in a couple of fresh tea bags from the open box on the counter. With Nigel, the thought of failing to decant the tea bags from the box into their own ceramic pot was more than shocking. At Storybook Cottage, Imogen would be the first to admit that standards had dropped.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, she peeped into the bread bin. The stale heel of the loaf was so impressively moldy, she thought
fleetingly about donating it to science instead of chucking it out. Then she turned her attention to the remaining half loaf
sitting on the bread board. It was stale but good enough for toast. She carved off a couple of thick slabs and chucked them
under the grill.
A visit to the garrulous Muriel was definitely called for. Remembering her afternoon appointment with Simon, the doctor hottie,
she made a mental note to do some essential shopping on the way home. She indulged in a few seconds’ fantasy of Simon patting
her hand and telling her charmingly what a gallant and brave woman she was, his face filled with admiration and concern.
Not that I could possibly be looking for romance, she added hastily to herself, remembering disturbingly how close she was
to throwing herself at the grumpy tractor driver. It would be unseemly for such a recent widow to even entertain such a thing.
Grabbing the toast seconds before it burst into flames, she scraped off the worst of the carbon into the sink, plastered them with peanut butter and banana slices, and munched away contentedly. If my friends could see me now, she thought. Imogen had been famous for living—apparently for months on end—on coffee and her nerves while juggling her jobs and artistic ambitions in London. Breakfast had rarely happened. Despite the nausea, her appetite was not so much returning as introducing itself to her for the first time in living memory.
Hunger satisfied, Imogen settled to planning her day. She was getting used to a more relaxed lifestyle and was often surprised
when she checked her watch how much time had passed without her having done anything. In London she had prided herself on
guessing the time before looking at her watch, and she was rarely more than ten minutes out. She poured another cup of tea
from the brown Denby teapot and marveled at the change. Success then had been measured by cramming more into the day, like
finding Nigel’s favorite olives from a particular delicatessen and then building even more insanity into life by making sure
never to buy olives from anywhere else even if it meant a ridiculous detour to go there. A walk through a park, even with
screaming roads on all sides, was a balm to the soul, and a treat was to stop for a flat white on the way to whatever job
she had not yet been sacked from.
Now, let’s face it, the treat is not having to go to work, she thought, but she sensed a creeping unease niggling at the back of her mind that was a bit more than the obvious problem of having to earn her own living pretty soon. Moving had been exhausting, so she had allowed herself a rest to recover, but now weeks had passed with little to show for it, and reality was going to have to return one day. Soon. It felt like one of those corny horror films where the children are playing in the sunshine, watched by smiling parents as the ominous music grows ever louder in the background. There was definitely a sense of unease. She even wondered if the house was haunted. She could be picking up the vibes of long-ago sorrow. Maybe a long-dead lovelorn serving wench was keeping watch in an upstairs room, longing for her dastardly lover to come and sweep her off her feet, only to discover that all along he had been double-crossing her with a woman of substance, leaving her to pine away... forever awaiting his return.
Or something.
With her overwrought fantasies, she was quite overcome, and reaching for her tea, she took a huge swig to restore herself.
“Aargh! Poison!” she choked. Spluttering and spraying the contents of her mouth everywhere she looked aghast at the mug in
her hand to discover that she had grabbed the jug of salad dressing left on the table from her supper the evening before.
“Teach me to be such a slob,” she said aloud, still gagging. “Sorry, Tango,” she added appeasingly.
He was not quick to forgive and shot her appalled looks between licking the spray of oil and vinegar off his face and chest.
Sitting on the table within strategic reach of the butter dish, he had received the full force of the explosion and was clearly
disgusted.
At least it was a distraction from disturbing thoughts. Clearing up the mess proved to be a catalyst, and Imogen leapt into clean-up mode. She emptied the dishwasher and immediately nearly filled it again with the pile of dirty crockery piled up on the side. Then she poured lukewarm water over the washing up, and adding the remains of the kettle contents, she washed several days’ worth of saucepans and baking tins. Finally, she rinsed out a cloth and wiped down the surfaces, including the scrubbed pine table that dominated the center of the room, scouring industriously at numerous unidentifiable sticky marks that had appeared only at the end she always used. The rest of the huge table was covered in a thin layer of dust, along with a pile of junk mail—mostly addressed to the previous owner—which was threatening to slide to the floor.
Filled with zeal, Imogen finished cleaning up the worst of the mess in the kitchen—although she knew she was only leaving
it in a state where supercritical Nigel would have started. She even grabbed a dustbin liner and ruthlessly chucked away most
of the junk mail, sternly averting her eyes from the intriguing piles of catalogues stuffed with indispensable items for the
home. Imogen could never resist those “versatile nests of willow baskets” and “lovingly handcrafted casserole dish stands.”
With the recycling bin only a quarter full of wastepaper, Imogen stood holding it, in the middle of the kitchen floor. She
knew perfectly well where she should go to fill it up and—prodding her emotions cautiously like a tender bruise—she decided
this was the morning to make a start on Nigel’s papers in the study.
Apart from the policy documents and bank statements the solicitor’s clerk had taken away to sort out probate, the contents of Nigel’s office in London had been packed and brought down wholesale, because—until now—the thought of tackling old letters and photographs had been unbearable.
Feeling sick at the smell of oil and vinegar on her clothes, Imogen went upstairs to change. The washing was another thing
that wasn’t getting done too regularly, and she was out of any clean clothes that didn’t feel hopelessly restricted around
the waist, especially in the summer heat. She helped herself to one of Nigel’s blue-and-white-striped office shirts, folding
back the cuffs into a thick wodge at the wrists.
Before she got stuck in, she fortified herself with another mug of tea and another toasted sandwich. Then, with the tea in
one hand and bin in the other, she headed for the study.
Settling herself cross-legged in a little space on the floor, she undid the flaps on the box nearest to her. Old bank statements
and credit card bills were quickly consigned to the recycling, although she knew she should shred them, really. Perhaps she
should burn them. The next box, filled with neatly filed mortgage paperwork on the Wimbledon flat plus old car Ministry of
Transport certificates and garage bills, went the same way. Emboldened by the knowledge that Nigel’s crusty old solicitor
had any paperwork that might be vaguely important, she worked quickly through another couple of boxes filled with ancient
tax returns and box files full of receipts.
She flattened the boxes as she went and took full bins to the bonfire at the end of the garden—she doubted the bin men would
be thrilled with that much recycling—and the study soon started to look clearer. In fact, with its sweet little woodburning stove and window overlooking the garden, she was quite taken with the idea of turning it into a cozy sitting room. The main drawing room was beautiful, potentially, but sorting out a room on such a grand scale was still too daunting. This room, on the other hand, would be gorgeous at night with its dark-red-painted walls and its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. She was dying to unpack some of her art books and could think of nothing better than snuggling up in the evening with the roaring fire and a favorite book.
Opening another box, she whooped with pleasure. There, on the top of the box, was a thick pile of photographs she recognized.
Here was a picture of her at sixteen with Sally, nearly a year older, dressed up to go to a disco. They were posing in minidresses
from Boohoo, Imogen’s a catastrophe of pink ostrich feathers... What was she thinking? Sally’s dress—a barely there sequined
number that made her look like a hooker—wasn’t much better. Both were striking what they had fondly imagined were sultry poses.
Memories of the night were suddenly so vivid she could even smell their body spray as they danced to Beyoncé and then—once they were drunk and maudlin—Amy Winehouse and Adele, leaning tearfully on each other as they promised to never ever lose touch after that long, hot post-exam summer had come to an end. Then, with a pang, she remembered the end of the evening, watching Sally clutched in the arms of the local heartthrob, Steve Winters, swaying to Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” while he investigated her tonsils with his tongue. All the while, Imogen had felt conspicuously alone as she wondered where her own date, his name long forgotten, had gone to after disappearing to the bar for more drinks nearly half an hour before.
Sally made life look easy in a way it had never seemed to be for Imogen.
She riffled through piles of photos showing nameless members of Nigel’s family, with stiff little groups wearing rictus smiles,
representing Christmases, weddings, and christenings past. There was one of their wedding in Nigel’s parents’ village, the
photographer’s pictures outside the church perfectly capturing maiden aunts with hurting feet and parents, rigid-jawed, trying
to control overexcited children. Imogen had stood in the center with Nigel, beaming up adoringly at him, his hands around
her waist as her mother-in-law looked on with a bitter smile.
Next she came across some older Polaroid photos. Her eye fell on a small, faded square print of a little boy around nine years
old, standing by an open car door. He wore a school uniform too big for him, and one corner of his mouth was curved in an
uncertain grin. Behind him stood a smiling younger version of Nigel’s father, resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. She assumed
this was him on the way to boarding school.
He looked so vulnerable in his oversized blazer and cap; she felt a stab of sympathy for the long-ago little boy, so different
to the ebullient, loud, and confident man she later married.
No child of mine would ever be sent away, she thought, conveniently forgetting how she, gripped by Enid Blyton school sagas of midnight feasts and “jolly good eggs” trouncing the bad girls at lacrosse and life in general, had begged her parents to send her to boarding school. Then, within months of getting into a mild bit of trouble at secondary school, she was sent away. She had hated it, she remembered.
Imogen flicked rapidly through the remaining photos and, separating her own plus a few of Nigel as a child, she packed up
the box again to offer to Nigel’s mother. Groaning aloud at the thought of having to contact her, Imogen wondered if it would
be too awful to get in touch with his sister, Anne, instead.
She decided on plan B. Anne was always civil and even sometimes quite warm. She could post them of course, but it would be
so awful if they got lost. She should deliver them herself, and what’s more, she could take a couple of days on a London trip,
maybe stay with Sally and catch up with some old friends.
With this uplifting thought, she rallied her energy and opened the final box. This one was stuffed full of personal letters
mixed up with old birthday cards and the correspondence sent by guests to their wedding. She quickly dispensed with the latter,
slightly dispirited that—even only two years on—she could not put faces to the names on quite a few of the letters.
In an age of texts and messaging apps, it was a shame she and Nigel had never sent each other a single proper letter, she thought sadly. It would have been nice to have a little stack of love letters, all tied with a ribbon, but it just hadn’t been that sort of relationship. They had decided—really, he had decided—to marry such a short time after meeting. Once she had moved into Nigel’s flat, she was right there—and there
had been no need to write down loving messages. Not then, and now it was too late.
Scooping up the pile of letters to shovel them into the bin bag, her eye fell on a piece of blue letter paper covered in thick
black writing. Glancing mildly curiously at it, her eye fell on a phrase.
I hate having to keep our relationship secret , it said.
Picking it out of the pile, she sat back on her heels and read. As she did so, her hands started to shake and her heart to
hammer so loud she could hear it thundering in her ears.
The date on the top of the letter was May that year, she noticed, just weeks before Nigel’s death.
Dear Nigel,
It was so wonderful to see you last night. I can’t believe how much we have in common. I have never found it so easy to talk
to anyone before. It’s almost like we’ve known each other all our lives, don’t you think?
I hate having to keep our relationship secret. I want to meet everyone. The family, your friends—to feel like I belong in
your life. I can hardly wait for the day to come, but I completely understand there are obstacles I have to let you remove
before that can happen.
I know I shouldn’t call you, but I really want us to meet again soon. Please, please try to get away as soon as you can.
Until then, with all my love,
Victoria
She felt sick.
Bastard, she thought. “Bloody, sodding bloody, bloody bastard,” she said aloud. “Not only does he bloody get himself bloody
killed within virtually minutes of me giving up my entire life to do his bidding, the bloody bastard wasn’t even faithful.
Not even for two years. Pathetic! Now I can’t even confront him with it because he’s bloody got himself out of it by dying...”
She sat, shaking, on the floor, great tears of rage and loss combined rolling down her cheeks and running together on her
chin to drip onto the floor.
After some time, she became aware that she was cold. Worse, her feet, trapped under her, had gone to sleep. Staggering upright,
she waited for them to wake into an agony of pins and needles. Her nose was running too and, eventually, sniffing, she went
through to the kitchen feeling lightheaded.
Blowing her nose on the kitchen towel and mopping her swollen eyes, she felt a little better.
“Sorry,” she said to Tango, who had followed her—not out of concern, of course, but possibly curiosity. He was a sucker for
drama.
Her eyes filled again, this time with self-pity.
Horrified, Imogen caught sight of the kitchen clock. She was supposed to be at the surgery twenty minutes ago. She was sure missing appointments was the height of rudeness in a small community like this. And also, although the last thing she felt like was a trip out of the house, the prospect of another conversation with the divine Dr. Simon beckoned seductively.