Chapter Seventeen
Imogen slept badly, her dreams racked with nightmares of Nigel and a blond woman whose face she couldn’t see frolicking in
bed together. She covered her eyes, but when she looked again, Nigel and his lover had gone, replaced by Gabriel and Louise.
The bed was unfamiliar but the setting, bizarrely, was the main bedroom at Storybook Cottage. In between fondling each other,
they were laughing and waving handfuls of money at her in return for what she was holding. Looking down to see what they wanted
her to give them, she was horrified to see she had a tiny baby in her arms.
Richard had chosen his club as the venue for their lunch. When Imogen arrived, exhausted, she was escorted into the dining
room, where he was already seated, with a stranger, at a table for four. He was waving a glass of what looked like scotch
and was speaking in an overloud voice, apparently telling a joke. Jumping to his feet, he welcomed her solicitously.
Imogen, my dear,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks. “Do let me introduce you to Duncan Grant from our property department.”
Duncan was a skinny, nervous-looking man in his fifties, and his handshake was unpleasantly damp.
Imogen dared not bring up the reason for their meeting until Richard acknowledged it. This he finally did, once lunch was
ordered and wine poured.
He cleared his throat and looked serious. “Imogen, I’ve asked Duncan to examine the deeds for Storybook Cottage and have obviously
told him everything I know about this claim you described on the phone. I’m afraid this is not a subject with a swift and
sure resolution.”
Imogen’s heart sank.
“I suspected as much, Richard,” she said. “Perhaps, Duncan, you could tell me where I stand?”
“Gladly,” said Duncan, although he looked anything but.
“They have a claim, don’t they?” said Imogen, reading his expression.
He nodded, flushing. “I’m afraid they do.”
“So, this isn’t good, then, basically,” said Imogen.
“Er, not brilliant,” agreed Duncan. “Then,” he continued, “I was looking to see whether such a risk had been insured against.”
“You can take out insurance?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s quite common.”
“Did Nigel take out insurance?” asked Imogen, knowing the answer.
“Nope. I’m afraid not. Although, even if he had, it probably wouldn’t have met the requirements for a claim once the company
had examined the deeds for themselves.”
“Right,” she said bitterly. “In other words, Nigel should have known.”
“Er, well—yes, basically.”
At that moment, Imogen hated her dead husband. The man had obsessed boringly about every other detail of his life, requiring
Imogen to match his socks, iron his shirts, and ensure a constant supply of his favorite breakfast cereal, but—when it actually
counted, when an error would be utterly catastrophic—he had been criminally careless. It seemed a screaming injustice that
he would not even be punished for his ineptitude but that, instead, Imogen had to face this impossible situation on her own.
She squared her shoulders.
“What are my options?” she asked the two men, who were looking at her anxiously. “Can I contest the claim?”
“Legally, this sort of thing is still a bit hazy,” admitted Richard.
“Also, any sort of legal action is going to require pretty deep pockets.” He gave Imogen an inquiring look, which enraged
her.
“If I had deep pockets,” she retorted, “being asked to pay for repairs would hardly be such a disaster, would it?”
He nodded, head bowed.
Imogen’s rage abated and was replaced quickly with guilt. “I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said, thinking she would never have
spoken to him so directly when he was Nigel’s boss. “You are all being enormously kind. I can’t thank you enough for giving
me your advice.”
“My dear,” he replied. “Anything we can do, you know that.”
Bunging me half a million quid wouldn’t go amiss, she thought.
“Thank you,” she said again. “And, talking of advice, what on earth do you suggest I do?”
Richard and Duncan sighed in tandem, neither keen to volunteer, it seemed.
“The only money I have is in the house,” mused Imogen aloud. “I suppose I could sell...”
Duncan and Richard glanced at one another and then both looked at her miserably.
“Oh, bloody hell, what?” said Imogen.
“Well, the value of any house is always a bit of a ‘movable feast,’?” ventured Duncan timidly, pausing for Imogen to catch
up with his reasoning.
“You mean it’s worthless?” she asked bleakly.
Both men lowered their eyes.
“It’s worthless,” she repeated, and let out a shaky sigh, patting her bump absently, more to comfort herself than a baby who
was entirely unaware she was going to be born to a woman with nothing. Literally nothing. Not even a roof over her head.
“Although you could hope a buyer would accidentally overlook the clause?” suggested Duncan.
“Not ethical,” said Imogen firmly. And not flipping likely, anyway, she added silently to herself.
“Any other thoughts?” she asked the two men.
“Well,” said Richard at last, “I suppose you could always go back to this earl chap and beg.”
On the way back to Alistair and Sally’s house, her mind churning over what Richard and Duncan had said, she nearly missed the sound of a text coming in. It was an unknown number and simply said: Victoria Harris, 23c Ifield Road, Chelsea. Good luck.
At supper with Sally that evening, she let her old friend wang on about the trials of work and motherhood. It was easier to
listen—or, at least, half listen—than it was to try and put into words the turmoil she was feeling. It had been a hell of
a day, all right. And she couldn’t even have a glass of wine.
The birds had mainly migrated now—there were fewer in London, anyway—and Imogen felt a pang of sadness at a dawn chorus of
traffic noise instead. After lying there uncomfortably for half an hour, she got up, tiptoeing to the bathroom for a shower.
Pulling on comfortable clothes and deciding not to bother brushing her hair, it was only fifteen minutes later she was sitting
at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, gazing out across Sally and Alistair’s perfectly manicured London garden. A pair of
clipped bay trees stood sentry over the tiny circular lawn. The absence of color—“Actual flowers are sooo last season, darling,”
Sally’s garden designer had said—and the preference for heavy evergreen shrubs over more ephemeral beauties gave the garden
a funereal look. The mist of rain and dew graying the outlines made the end of the small garden seem further away, and yet
the effect was a cheat, like a stage set.
Imogen found herself wishing fiercely for the orchard at Storybook Cottage, where the grass grew shaggy and wild at the base
of the gnarled fruit trees, the meadow studded with wildflowers in the summer adding an impressionist haze of floating color.
Today she would go back home—for as long as she could call it that. But first, there was something she had to do. Taking out
her phone, she looked again at the text from her kind private investigator. The mystery of this Victoria who meant so much
to Nigel was within her grasp.
Just half an hour later, Imogen was sitting on a low wall in Chelsea, pretending to wait for a bus midway down Ifield Road.
From where she was sitting, she could see number twenty-three, a high, narrow town house converted into flats. The street
was lined with expensive-looking cars, but the stucco on a few of the houses was shabby, dreary net curtains at some windows
contrasting with elegant shutters at others.
Pretending to have an intense interest in an article in yesterday’s Evening Standard about rising property prices, she covertly studied the street for activity.
By now it was just after eight o’clock. A businessman in irreproachably tailored pinstripes, rosy cheeked and perfectly shaved,
tutted to see that his red Audi had been wedged in overnight by two other cars. She watched with amusement as he edged backward
and forward, backward and forward, to ease his car out into the road, having about sixteen goes before accelerating bad-temperedly
toward the junction. The lights were red, doubtless not improving his mood.
A bus came, and the short queue that had formed around Imogen got on. She stayed where she was, but no one seemed to notice.
She watched more openly now, newspaper folded on the wall beside her, as office workers went past, mainly with heads down, intent on getting to the Tube station before the misting rain worsened to a downpour. Imogen considered them all, feeling safe to disregard the men but studying all females. Who was Victoria? Was it this mousey twentysomething with cheap shoes and a too-thin raincoat? Or this fat-bottomed Sloane with her navy tailored trousers and velvet headband? Too old, surely? But then who would Nigel be interested in, anyway? She just didn’t know. She wondered if the woman would look like her; from her avid consumption of tabloid newspapers—a habit Nigel had noisily disapproved of—she had often seen the staggering lack of imagination that led serial philanderers to get involved with a string of photofit women. It was as if the near-identical mistress was chosen to be a more accommodating, less jaded version of the original model. On the other hand, why would Imogen flatter herself? After all, he would hardly be looking for a duplicate of a woman he had no interest in being faithful to. And still they all trailed past, with just one woman challenging Imogen with a suspicious look.
A door next to her target house opened, and a harassed mother shepherded two primly dressed little girls down the steps to the street. They were wearing matching wool coats with velvet collars. She quickly gathered from the mother’s clucking that they were called Henrietta and Hermione. She was amused to see the mother getting into the station wagon that had been blocking the businessman’s Audi. It pulled noisily off toward the junction, and she could see the mother’s mouth in constant motion, head half turned to her charges glumly sitting on the back seat. After it passed, she spied a woman on the pavement opposite. She had appeared in the short time the station wagon had blocked Imogen’s sight, meaning she must have come from one of the houses nearby. That made her a contender. Imogen studied her closely. Shoulder-length, heavy blond hair, a neat figure in a navy skirt suit, perfect makeup, and—despite the gloom of the day—sunglasses. She checked left and right and then trotted across the road directly toward the bus shelter. Imogen stared at the woman, drinking in every detail. Then her heart crashed as the woman looked directly at her. Imogen did a classic comedy double take.
Victoria?
The utterance seemed to hang in the air between them. The woman’s eyes slid past, and Imogen realized she had not spoken out
loud. She felt sure this was the mystery blonde. As for that lurch of recognition. It was unmistakable. Visceral. And yet
where could she have seen that face before? Frozen with shock and indecision, Imogen watched as the woman walked away, disappearing
out of sight around the corner.
The rain was falling heavy and monotonous by the time the taxi drew up outside Storybook Cottage. She waited for the driver to unload and carry her bag to the doorstep; obviously he was hoping for a fat tip. Imogen glanced guiltily at her little red Ford Fiesta. Her test was in just a few weeks, and she felt horribly unprepared. She still had a habit of glancing down to the pedals when she braked or changed gear. It was a futile gesture, especially now her belly was too big for her to see her feet anyhow. And she could hardly count on Gabriel to take her out practicing anymore. Not after their last conversation.
The taxi driver departed with his tip, and Imogen let herself in. Glad to be alone at last, she closed the door and leaned
on it, tears pricking at her eyes. The house had an expectant air, an electric frisson in the atmosphere as if the telephone
had, just that moment, stopped ringing.
She checked her mobile. It was flat and dead in her pocket. God knew how long it had been like that. She remembered Rowena
insisted on taking her landline only, professing to hate mobiles. Chiding her superstition and half hoping her sixth sense
was telling her the new London agent had been trying to contact her already, she grabbed the hall phone and dialed 1471. A
local number had called much earlier in the day. Probably Genny checking if she was back or, more likely, Gabriel calling
to complain about something she had done. Or even more probably—on the basis of recent history—to break some more appalling
news.
There was a thud on the floor above, making Imogen jump. Then Tango trotted down the stairs toward her, yowling resentfully
to distract her from the near certainty that he had been illicitly sleeping on her bed.
Unfortunately for him, bumping down the stairs made his mews come out jerky, and Imogen laughed, to his fury. He stalked ahead
of her to the kitchen and stood whinging over his bowl until she filled it. Waiting until he was sure she was watching, he
turned up his nose at the food and crashed through the cat flap into the rain.
Lulled by the drumming of the water on the roof, Imogen stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. Beans on toast for supper, followed by an early night—simple comforts seemed like untold luxuries after the highs and lows of the last few days.
Not entirely relaxing, though, were the implications of the curtain of water sluicing down from the roof past the kitchen
window and spattering onto the stone path. Clearly a gutter was blocked. She thanked her lucky stars the kitchen was only
a ground floor extension, since she knew she would have to clean it out.
Next afternoon, when the rain had stopped, Imogen dragged out the heavy old stepladder from the shed and tried it up against
the kitchen wall for size. It was only just tall enough, and her big belly meant it had to go a bit further away from the
wall than she would have liked, leaving her to lean precariously forward. Armed with a black plastic bucket, she got started
and was amazed to discover that the gutter was filled to the brim with the black, rotting remnants of leaves from many autumns
with the soggy cornflake remains of this year’s crop in a layer on the top. Entertaining herself with a spirited rendition
of the soprano line of the final quartet from The Marriage of Figaro , filling in the rest of the parts in her head, Imogen scooped and chucked handfuls of gunk with enthusiasm.
“What the hell do you call this?” roared a familiar voice, causing Imogen to sway and clutch the gutter for a moment. “Oh,
Christ, don’t fall off...” he added, grabbing her legs firmly.
“It’s Mozart, actually.” Imogen deliberately misunderstood as she gazed down into Gabriel’s ever-scowling face. Good God, it was rich that he always seemed furious with her. She had a lot more cause to be cross than him when you thought about it.
“That’s not what I meant, as you well know,” he replied. “Although I have to say, I’ve never heard it sung quite like that
before.” His mouth twitched into his familiar almost-smile. “Anyway, you’d better get down, for God’s sake. I don’t want you
falling on your head and the village gossips saying I pushed you or something.”
“They would? Why?” Imogen muttered to herself, picturing Joan and Muriel gassing in the village store.
“Because you’re so annoying, obviously,” replied Gabriel testily. “Now, get me some coffee, why don’t you?”
By the time Imogen returned with the mug, which steamed like dry ice when it encountered the sharp autumn air, Gabriel had
finished clearing out the gutter and was chucking the evil-looking sludge at the feet of the rosebushes.
“Good fertilizer,” he said, taking the mug and handing back the bucket with a mock bow.
“That looks like a few years’ worth of gunge.”
“So?” he snapped.
“Well—I—obviously it hasn’t been done for a while,” she continued, “not surprisingly, given that an elderly lady lived here
before.”
“Not just any old lady,” he said bleakly, “my grandmother.”
“Ah, yes. It must have been nice for her having you so close.”
“Mmm, well, I wasn’t always on the spot.”
Ah, guilt, she thought, the little voice that says, I could have done more .
“There’s a few other jobs to do before winter, you know,” he said as if he had heard her thoughts.
“The garden, yes, I know.” She nodded guiltily, looking at drooping brown stems in the flower beds and tussocks of grass,
still frost-rimed in the shade. There was obviously a velvet lawn there once, now shamefully neglected, to say nothing of
the windfall fruit rotting on the ground in the orchard beyond.
“Don’t waste your effort on the aesthetics,” he said roughly. “I mean the important stuff. Come and look at this,” he barked,
marching toward the orchard.
Stopping on the little wooden bridge at the entrance to the orchard so suddenly that she almost cannoned into him, he pointed.
The stream was no longer the grass-lined bubbling brook of summer. After the heavy rain, the water rushed, red-brown with
soil, in a torrent, the seething surface nearly reaching the underside of the bridge.
“See this?” Gabriel was pointing to the borders of the narrow gully made narrower still—Imogen noticed for the first time—by
the copious growth of the hedgerow plants lining the bank.
“All this greenery has to be cleared away, or the stream will choke. It’s fed by all the fields around here”—his arm swung
comprehensively—“so it gets blocked, and the whole lot’s under water in no time.”
She nodded, wide-eyed. “It’s almost a river, I hadn’t noticed...”
“You’re right. Basically, it’s the river that comes out at Portneath,” he said. “Or a tributary that feeds into it, anyhow. All this water is coming right off the moors. With the rain we’ve been having, it’s going to come straight down and straight through. It’s not interested in what’s in its path.”
She thought of the broad, serene river that ran alongside the road toward Portneath, just a couple of miles before it reached
the sea.
“Wow,” she said. “No wonder.”
“I’ll get a couple of the lads from the estate down to clear it out in the next week or so,” he said briskly.
“No, you don’t have to do that,” she began, fed up with so very obviously being considered unable to look after herself.
“Yeah, I really do,” he said shortly, giving her an unreadable look, and with that, the interview was over, it seemed. He
handed back the mug with a nod of thanks and marched back across the orchard, lightly vaulting the stone wall, ignoring the
recently built stile. She watched him go, loping across the fields to the manor, even his back view broadcasting negativity.
“Of course, you want to clear the stream,” she said aloud to his departing back, although he was too far away to hear. “We must protect your assets, mustn’t we?” She looked at him disappearing now into the forest, out of sight, with a painful yearning. And then she reminded herself Gabriel must have known about the clause when Storybook Cottage was put up for sale. Had he and the trustees been waiting and hoping someone would fall into their trap? Come to think of it, the house had been on the market for a while when she and Nigel saw it. Maybe they were the only ones stupid enough to buy it?
“Sod him,” she said aloud, and went back inside, realizing that not only had neither of them mentioned the elephant in the
room of their last conversation, he had not even asked about her trip to London. At the same time, she was relieved he had
come. It was a perverse comfort to see they were still—apparently—on talking terms, even though the atmosphere was frosty.
It would be worse—her heart whispered—to have to bear the thought of not seeing him at all, even though he was simultaneously
the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her.