Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
Somehow, though, a new date to go and sit on Fresco didn’t materialise, and Kate felt it would be rude to push for it when they’d been the ones to postpone.
In any case, they were busy now. Tilly and Will had started at their new schools – Kate was on tenterhooks all that first week, dreading some tearful homecoming and the accusation, however unfair, that she’d been the one to drag them out of London against their will.
But none came. All their chatter was about nice teachers, friendly classmates, sociable school buses, breaktimes that sounded refreshingly free of fights and bullying and knives.
Liv, who ran the book club, followed up after the party with a lovely handwritten thank-you note and a PS that said, By the way,
it’s sort of a tradition that the new member chooses a personal favourite as our next read.
So we can get to know you through books, as it were!
It was a perfectly reasonable, even kind, thing to ask, but at the same time terrifying.
Was Kate best represented by something relatively recent, like Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger?
Or a classic, like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?
She should definitely avoid anything show-offy or ponderous.
But, equally, the lighter books she loved – the Jilly Coopers and the Freya Norths – might be too much the other extreme.
And it would be stupid to choose something they’d all have read before, like The Secret History, or Rebecca, or The Remains of the Day – great books, all of them, but dull choices.
In the end, she plumped for Brother of the More Famous Jack – it was amazing how many people still hadn’t read it, and almost everyone she’d pushed it on had thanked her afterwards for the recommendation.
She sent an email to the address Liv had included on the card, and was gratified to get a reply that said, Ooh!
Don’t know that one! Intriguing! PS: Just to warn you, we spend as much time on village gossip and character assassination as we do on literature!
The builders began work on the new utility room, ripping out Rosemary’s Formica-topped kitchen units and replacing them with a washing machine and a butler sink.
Then they moved on to what would now become the kitchen, which Kate had designed with the help of a local kitchen company.
They were putting in underfloor heating, but, with the cellar immediately below, something time-consuming had to be done with insulation.
It was a couple of weeks before Steve’s team were ready to plumb in the new island and wire up the newly electric Aga, but she knew, the moment they’d finished, that she’d made the right decision moving the kitchen here.
It was exactly what she’d wanted – spacious, light-filled, welcoming, the warm centre of the house.
She knew, too, that a huge beech-wood island with a breakfast bar and a row of pendant lights above it was a bit of a cliché, but it was also the kitchen she’d dreamt of, back in London: sleek and contemporary, but with subtle nods to the house’s age, such as the rack of gleaming copper pans hanging above the Aga.
Meanwhile, she was painting. Windows, walls, ceilings, shelves – there was the whole house to do, and several of the rooms had rather twee wallpaper that needed to be stripped off first. She tried not to let Rosemary see any of this work in progress.
It would be kinder, she felt, to show her only the final, beautiful product, Trade Cottage gleaming with fresh new colours, but not the process of getting there, during which – even she had to admit – some of the rooms looked a bit battered.
‘You’ve worked so hard at this,’ Matt said appreciatively one evening, when she showed him what she’d done that day.
There was a technique that was big on Instagram just then called ‘colour drenching’, where you painted the ceiling, window frames, sills and even doors the same colour as the walls.
She’d tried it in the downstairs loo, using the colour of the moment, a rich cocoa-brown with a silky eggshell finish, and was amazed at how much larger and more stylish the room looked as a result.
‘I’m enjoying it,’ she said. It was true: the slow, sensual rhythm of putting paint on Trade Cottage’s walls was bringing her even closer to the house, like one of those hermit crabs that gradually becomes fused with its borrowed shell.
It had been less than two months since they’d moved in, but already everything before that seemed a kind of distant dream.
Sometimes it felt as if she’d been at Trade Cottage forever, that she was a reincarnation of the sea captain’s maidservant, say, or the Mrs Linwood who Rosemary had said lived here before her and Paul .
. . Painting, she’d found, did that to her – gave her all sorts of vague, mystical fantasies, which flitted idly through her head even as her hands moved methodically, almost ritually, over the centuries-old walls.
Perhaps I will live all my life here, and die in this very room, she found herself thinking as she applied another brushstroke, and the thought gave her a serene, meditative sense of calm.
It was Steve, the builder, who popped his head round the door one day and said, ‘I think there may be a bricked-up cavity beside that fireplace.’
They’d already decided to replace the fire surround in the small sitting room. It was one of the house’s few jarring features: an elegant but incongruous Wedgewood-style confection, a marble mantelpiece beneath which Grecian nymphs cavorted in white relief.
‘I’ve just run the laser measure over the walls,’ he added. ‘Either they’re really, really thick, or there was some kind of passage there that got blocked up when the first conversion was done. I think there might be an older fireplace behind that one, too – maybe the original inglenook.’
‘You mean, one of those big old fireplaces with a seat in it?’ she asked, immediately intrigued.
He nodded. ‘Want us to take a look? It’ll mean knocking a few holes, but we can go through that big cupboard, where they won’t show.’
She agreed enthusiastically, and the sledgehammers started up again.
It wasn’t long before Steve came back, smiling. ‘You’re going to want to see this.’
She followed him to the sitting room. Inside the floor-to-ceiling cupboard, a work lamp illuminated a space they’d uncovered at the back.
To one side, there was a domed alcove – an old bread oven, perhaps.
Beyond that, there appeared to be a small wooden door, some kind of hatch or recess – it was hard to make out.
She stepped forward, and the work light’s harsh glare was lessened. Even so, it took her a moment to realise that what she was looking at was an ancient wooden barrel.
It was empty, unfortunately. But it still smelled dankly of alcohol, evaporated by the centuries.
‘The back of the cupboard was brick,’ Steve explained. ‘But it hadn’t been mortared at the edges, only plastered. It could easily have been pushed aside, if you knew where.’
So the cellar was only a decoy, she realised. Finding it empty, the customs men would have moved on, never thinking to unbrick the cupboard by the fire.
Tilly was going to be overjoyed. But first, she knew, she had to share this news with Rosemary.
She and Paul came straight away, in the Popemobile. Leaving his wheelchair at the front door, Paul levered himself slowly into the house on sticks, Rosemary hovering by one arm to steady him.
Eventually, they got there, and Kate showed them the cupboard. Paul peered through the cupboard door, but didn’t venture in. Rosemary darted inside, ran her finger round the rim of the barrel and touched it to her lips.
‘Brandy,’ she reported. ‘All gone now.’
‘The angels have drunk deep,’ Paul announced. Turning to Kate, he explained, ‘When spirits evaporate from a cask, it’s called “the angels’ portion”. The more the angels drink, the smoother what’s left becomes. Shame it’s all gone. A hundred-and-fifty-year-old brandy would be quite something.’
‘You should brick it up again,’ Rosemary said. ‘So there’ll still be a secret for future generations to find.’
‘I had the same thought,’ Kate confessed.
‘I don’t understand that at all,’ Paul said, shaking his head. ‘How will they even know it’s there?’
The two women smiled at each other, enjoying the fact that they were both on the same wavelength.
While Rosemary was here, Kate decided impulsively, she’d show her the new kitchen, too. ‘I’m dying for you to see your old dining room. I think you’ll be amazed how the re-enamelling turned out—’
‘What’s going on here?’ Rosemary interrupted. She was pointing at the fireplace, where Steve’s men had been chipping away at the cement. They’d spread an old dust sheet on the floor, on which they’d left their tools – chisels, hammers, a couple of crowbars.
‘Well, that’s another of Steve’s discoveries,’ Kate began. ‘He guessed there was an older fireplace behind this one, so they’re going to—’
‘They’ve broken it!’ Rosemary was pointing to the bottom left corner, where the marble had indeed got cracked.
‘We’re not actually going to keep it. Even if there isn’t an older one behind, we’ll probably . . .’
Her voice trailed off. Rosemary was staring at her, red with fury.
‘That fireplace cost over a thousand pounds!’ she snapped.
Bending down, she picked up a chisel and hurled it across the room.
‘We put it in because the old one smoked. As we could have told you if you’d only asked, instead of just arrogantly tearing Trade Cottage to pieces like fucking barbarians! ’
Kate was too shocked to respond. It was as much the fact that Rosemary had sworn, as the suddenness of her fury. She stared back, willing herself not to cry.
There was a long moment where nobody spoke. Then Paul said gently, ‘Come on, old girl. Let’s get you home.’
Rosemary rounded on him. ‘I am home. This is where I ought to live, you stupid old cripple.’