Chapter 6
SIX
But, in the event, there wasn’t a next time – at least, not until after they moved in.
The conveyancing, which had been crawling along so slowly, suddenly shifted up a gear.
A series of complicated questions about Trade Cottage’s oil tank were resolved to both solicitors’ satisfaction.
Contracts were exchanged, a date fixed for completion.
They would be in by the beginning of August, which was perfect – the children would have a full month to get settled before starting their new schools.
And, in the meantime, Kate and Matt were kept busy saying their goodbyes.
It seemed as if everyone they knew wanted to get them round one last time, ‘before you move to your mansion in the country,’ as Kate’s friend Jude jokingly put it.
No matter how many times Kate pointed out that they were only going to Hampshire, and that it barely took any longer to get there from Dulwich than it did to struggle across London to Willesden, say, there was a sense they were crossing some kind of Rubicon, emigrating to a completely new life.
She made all their friends promise to come and stay, once the bedrooms were sorted, but she didn’t press them to come too soon.
She wanted Trade Cottage to herself for a little while, so they could get to know each other.
In the meantime, she and Rosemary emailed.
No, that was the wrong word, Kate thought: they corresponded.
The older woman wrote her lovely long missives – letters, really – that started with a formal Dear Kate, and ended, With my very best wishes, R.
They began as follow-ups to her visit – there was a set of curtains that Rosemary discovered had moth damage, so those she was chucking; would they like the big chest freezer in the outbuilding, and, if so, should it be left on?
What about the ride-on mower? But they quickly segued into more personal matters.
Paul’s motorised wheelchair had arrived, Rosemary wrote, but it was really only useable on the terrace; it slipped if he went on the steepest parts of the garden, and it was too wide to navigate inside the house.
So at least he’s impatient for this move, which helps me stay positive.
But it will still be a wrench. There’s a mythical plant, the mandrake, which is said to scream and bleed when it is pulled up.
I shall do my level best not to shriek when we leave this house for the last time, but I fear I may not entirely succeed.
It is such a comfort to know we are passing it on to a young family who will enjoy it as much as ours did.
Jamie continues to rumble and cuss from Washington, but he didn’t even manage to bring his children over for one last summer hols – they have to go to ‘camp’, he tells me, though I told him they could perfectly well camp in Trade Cottage’s garden.
That reminds me: you will find a small treehouse – just a wooden platform, really – in the largest apple tree.
We used to spend at least one night there every summer, sleeping under the stars . . .
Kate replied to these emails equally warmly, if not quite so frankly.
She felt it was her responsibility, as Rosemary’s successor, to make her leave-taking as painless as possible.
So she promised they would sleep in the treehouse, and treat the cesspit with the respect it deserved, and never plug in two heaters at opposite ends of the house at once, and everything else Rosemary asked of her.
‘This is like that movie,’ Matt said to her once, when she relayed some particularly arcane piece of domestic instruction.
‘Which one?’
‘You know – where the older woman makes friends with a younger one and gives her their house in the country. The family burn the letter of wishes, but she ends up getting it anyway. Anthony Hopkins was in it. And Emma Thompson.’
‘Oh – Howards End.’ Matt was right, she realised. How could she not have made that connection herself? She loved houses in fiction – Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love, the gatehouse in I Capture the Castle, Manderley, Top Withens Farm, San Salvatore in The
Enchanted April . . . As a child, books had been her escape, and there was no better escape from a succession of homes where all was chaos and shouting than a house described in words, comfortingly immutable.
Howards End had been one of her absolute favourites – the book, even more than the film; she loved Forster’s conversational, almost laconic waspishness.
That, and the fact the Schlegel sisters had no mother.
On moving day, they had to be out of Dulwich by noon.
After breakfast, Matt stayed behind to supervise the removals and give the keys to the estate agent, while Kate crammed the children and the most essential boxes into the car and drove down to Hampshire.
Paul and Rosemary, she knew, had moved out a few days before, as their bungalow wasn’t part of the chain, so it didn’t matter what time she arrived.
She picked up a few groceries on the way and reached Trade Cottage before lunchtime.
For the first time, she allowed herself to park next to the house.
We belong to each other now, she thought with a surge of excitement as she bent to retrieve the keys from under the mat where Rosemary had left them.
Damon was too busy to come and hand them over in person, he’d said; when she’d asked anxiously about security, he’d laughed, telling her that Rosemary and Paul usually didn’t even lock the place.
The key itself was suitably ancient, like something you’d use to unlock a church.
As she put it in the equally ancient keyhole, another book came to mind – Through the Looking Glass, Alice trying the golden key.
But there was no time to enjoy that thought, because the children were clamouring at her to ‘hurry up, Mummy, let us in.’ No sooner had she got the door open than they were racing inside, hollering with excitement.
She paused on the doorstep. It felt momentous, to be stepping over this threshold as owner for the first time. Brides used to be carried into their new homes by their husbands, she recalled. She wondered how many had been carried into this one.
To her surprise, the panelled entrance hall still contained the same ancient console table as on her last visit, complete with the same silver bowl for keys. She went through to the sitting room. The sofas and chairs were gone, but the oak side tables were still there.
Puzzled, she did a quick tour of the other rooms. The dining table and chairs had been left behind, as had the massive old sideboard.
The painted oars had been removed from the corridor, but in the study, although the bookshelves had been cleared, the captain’s chair and desk remained where they’d always been.
She recalled Rosemary saying there were a few things that she and Paul felt belonged with the house.
This was way more than a few, though. In every room, she found vases, paintings, an old chest, rugs .
. . In some rooms it looked as if they’d barely moved out.
Much of what had been left was beautiful, if a little battered or threadbare.
A sudden thought occurred to her. Where would the removal men put all Matt and Kate’s furniture now? She called Matt as she went upstairs. He was on the road, in a hired van, but he picked up straight away.
‘We’ll just have to use a couple of bedrooms as storage,’ he said when she’d explained. ‘That’s assuming they’ve taken the beds?’
‘Checking now.’ She went into the main bedroom. ‘This one’s gone, at least.’
‘Phew.’
‘Hang on.’ Just because she could, she went to the window, to throw it open. She looked out, drinking in that glorious view, then glanced to her right and gasped.
‘What’s up?’ Matt asked.
She said breathlessly, ‘Someone’s cut down the leylandii.
’ At the further end of the great green cliff, almost a quarter had gone, ruthlessly trimmed from about thirty feet high to about six.
It had clearly been done very recently – from where she was standing, she could see the trunks’ innards, almost white, surrounded by brown branches.
It made the hedge look dead and hollow, a series of empty eye sockets.
Beyond, where it had previously been completely hidden, she could just make out the edge of a modern house with big glass windows.
‘The cheeky bastards!’ she exclaimed. ‘They’ve waited until Rosemary and Paul left, then opened up their view. They can see right down the end of our garden. Are they allowed to do that?’
‘I guess it depends on who owns the hedge,’ Matt said uneasily. ‘I’ll check with the solicitor.’
‘Even if it’s us, it’s too bloody late now.’
‘Hardly a nice way to kick off relations with your new neighbours,’ Matt agreed grimly. ‘Maybe I should go round and have a word. But I’ll check the legal position first.’
She was still fuming as she went downstairs and into the garden.
You couldn’t see the chainsawed trunks so much from here, but there were several places where you could now see the other house over the lowered hedge, its stark modern lines a jarring contrast to Trade Cottage’s ancient flint walls.
It took the shine off what should have been an ecstatic day.
She wasn’t even cheered up by the bottle of Pol Roger she found in the kitchen, along with a card in which a shaky hand had written, Time for a wonderful new chapter at T.C.
! Just remember the house rule! Beneath that, a different hand had added, I forgot to say, don’t poison the mice.
There’s an owl nesting in the barn and you will kill him too.
That must be Rosemary, though she’d already told Kate about the owl several times.
The same hand, she discovered, had left more notes scattered around the house.
Careful – loose step, warned one on the stairs.
Window is broken! was tucked behind one of the latches in a bedroom.
And in the ancient downstairs loo, with its thunderbox seat and clanking overhead cistern, If you flush ANYTHING but toilet paper down here, it WILL block.
Matt called back a little later. ‘Anwar says it’s a party boundary, so they shouldn’t have done anything without Paul and Rosemary’s agreement.
But he also said there are specific regulations about leylandii hedges – if the neighbours asked for it to be cut down to two metres, for example, they wouldn’t have been able to say no. ’
‘I’ll go and see how high it is.’ She walked outside, the phone still to her ear, then stopped. ‘There’s a gate.’
‘What?’
‘A wooden door. In the hedge.’ From the amount of weathering, the gate looked as if it had been there since the hedge was planted; the leylandii had simply been allowed to grow around it, which was why she hadn’t noticed it before. ‘It must go into their garden.’
‘Even bloody cheekier. Is it locked?’
‘I’ll see.’
Ringing off, she tried the handle. It turned, but the wood of the door had swollen against the frame and she had to put her shoulder to it. She fell through it in a rush.
She was on a kind of narrow terrace, looking up a grassy incline towards the house – a long, low, modern construction that dominated the small space around it.
The windows reached from floor to ceiling, so she could see right in.
In the corner nearest her was a stubby telescope on a tripod, which made her bristle – it overlooked the bottom half of Trade Cottage’s garden.
Then she saw an electric wheelchair gliding towards the window.
There were reflections on the glass, and for a moment she couldn’t see clearly who was in the wheelchair, or make out the other, much slighter figure walking alongside.
The wheelchair stopped, but the second figure came right up to the glass, and it was only when it waved enthusiastically at her that she saw it was Rosemary.