Secrets (48 page)

‘There's a
For Sale
sign outside my house!’ she cried. ‘What's it doing there? Come and take it down!’

They asked for the address.

‘But madam,’ they then said, ‘your house came on the market today.’

Word for word, the response from the other agents was the same.

Phone Joe.

Why doesn't he answer?

Because he's in bloody America and it's however many hours behind.

She went outside and physically shook the stakes of the boards but they were wired tight against the gateposts. She looked up at them and felt them glowering down on her like a pair of hostile eyes. All her plans for the afternoon were scrapped. No way was she leaving the house – no
way
. She didn't dare – who knows what would happen next if she did. Removal vans? Changed locks? This couldn't be happening.

‘Hullo?’

‘The house! The house!’ Her voice came through hoarse and manic.

‘Tess?’

‘What are you
doing
? What are you thinking? The house!’

‘Christ – it's the first of October today, isn't it?’

‘There are two
For Sale
signs outside, Joe.’

‘I know.’

‘Tell them to take them down!’ She was shouting.

‘Take them
down
?’

‘The Resolution isn't for sale!’ Her voice suggested that the concept was not just ludicrous, but heinous.

‘Pet, it is. It is. It was a decision I had to make and I had to make it on my own. I don't want you thinking I've been devious. I know it's a big deal for you – but it's a bigger deal for me and I had to keep it secret until I was absolutely sure, until it was all official. I meant to tell you today before the signs went up – of course I did. But I forgot about my trip and I forgot about the bloody time difference and for that I am truly, truly sorry.’

‘Joe,
no
. Please no.’

‘Listen.
Listen
. My mother's will. The house is mine now. I love you, Tess, I love how at home you've made me feel in a house that I hated.’

‘You've told me I've made it your home.’

‘Spiritually, yes. But physically, it's still a place I don't like.’

‘Joe, no. Please!
Please
. It's
my
home. I've made it my home.’

‘My home is with you, Tess.’

‘That's just fluffy semantics, Joe.’

‘No, it is not.’ Now he was indignant. ‘I mean it. Will you listen – just for a moment? My needs are actually little different to yours. I found you – or you found me. And, like you, I want our future to close the door on our pasts. I want to lay foundations with you. And I'm looking forward to that being done somewhere new, somewhere ours, somewhere for us to raise our family.’

‘But I can
do
it.’ Tess was crying now. ‘We'll completely reconfigure the layout – we'll get proper
professional
decorators in. An
architect
. We'll pave the driveway and change the gate. Rip out the old kitchen. Have a new front door.’

‘Stop it!’ he shouted and it silenced her. When he spoke again, it was with a voice she had never heard before.

‘It's still That House. It always will be. Though I've loved playing home with you I have to tell you that sometimes I lie awake while you sleep. I cuddle up next to you, I hide behind you, because though the secrets are out, there are still ghosts there that haunt me.’

She'd never heard him say anything like it. His voice was forlorn, stripped. She'd had no idea. And suddenly, she hated to think that she'd slept through such moments.

‘I know you love the place,’ Joe said, ‘because it means something so profound to you. It's as if it's your first home. The walls protected you, enabled you to come out of your shell and it provided a base from which you felt safe enough to confront the big bad world that had chased you up to the Resolution in the first place. You found your feet there, didn't you? You found your métier – not as house-sitter but as talented homemaker. But Tess, you can take all of that with you. It'll be in the first packing box. That's why I have no doubts, that's why actually, I'm really excited. Any place we move to, you can use your very great skill and, with a wave of your magic paintbrush, you'll turn it into our dream home.’

She thought, Joe's right – it was my first home. I grew up here.

But Joe grew up here too. And he had a very different experience to me.

A detached house, built in 1874. Of rosy-hued brick with stone-mullioned windows and a slate roof with decorative lead flashing. Four grand chimneystacks of different designs. The Resolution. The Doctor's House. Who will it be home to next? Tess trailed her fingers along the dado that not so long ago she'd painstakingly sanded, treated and repainted. She sat down halfway up the first flight of stairs. The sound of the grandfather clock gradually instilling a sense of calm. She looked around her, all around her. She looked at the cornice and the coving and the ceiling roses; she looked at the different hues that the velvety evening light elicited from a single paint colour. She looked down to the soft gleam from the flagstone slabs, the sheen off the cherrywood banister. The sturdy wide doors. Brass knobs – they needed a polish. A job for tomorrow.

As she looked all around her, she also found her voice.

‘I love you, house, thank you. Thank you for sheltering me while I grew. Thank you for so much happiness and for memories that will last my life.’

Chapter Forty-four

The house sold – of course it did. And to everyone's surprise it sold not only quickly but for quite close to the asking price. There were three viewings that first weekend and it was off the market by the middle of the following week. Initially, both Joe (who was still in America) and Tess worried about her being there when potential buyers came to peruse. He was worried about the pain it might cause her. She was worried that she wouldn't be able to control a scowl; nor resist grumbling about the warped windows, exaggerating the dodgy electrics – ‘violently unpredictable’ – and calling the hot-water system ‘unbearably noisy’. She didn't want people poking around the kitchen cupboards or knocking their knuckles against walls or seesawing on the floorboards to see how uneven and creaky they were. She didn't want to hear their ideas for new uses for the rooms. She didn't want to see them planning where to put all their furniture. She didn't want to hear what changes they planned to make.

However, the three sets of potential buyers who came to see the house fell in love with it on crossing the threshold. And they all loved what Tess had done and they marvelled that they could move right in and they murmured that really, they wouldn't need or want to change much at all. And they all had small children – two of the women had one on the way as well. One set told her that they had a dog and they fussed over Wolf and these were the people Tess hoped would buy it.

Joe agreed the deal on his last day in the United States. He asked the agent to say nothing to Tess. He needed to tell her himself.

There were tears – abundant and plaintive on Tess's part, silent and inward on Joe's.

‘How long do we have?’ she asked.

‘Six weeks. Ish.’

‘That'll never give us enough time.’

‘We'll rent, then.’

‘But it's Em's birthday on November the twenty-first.’

‘Well, that gives us a date to work to, doesn't it – a joint housewarming and birthday party.’

‘Joe?’

‘Yes, Tess.’

‘Where are we moving to?’

‘Well, I was thinking four bedrooms – a period property, preferably detached with a good-size garden. With a shed or two for me to hoard and for you to blitz on an annual basis.’

‘But
where
, Joe,
where
are we moving to?’

‘Well, Staithes is glorious and Runswick Bay is exquisite. Or we could go inland a little – say, Stokesley or around Great Ayton? There again, we could go further south – Robin Hoods Bay is called the Clovelly of the North you know. Or, if you fancy something more urban, Pickering perhaps. We could always venture further north to the Durham Dales or move to the moors but Tess, do you not want to stay right here, in or around Saltburn?’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Tess. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

‘You
do
want to stay?’

‘What a daft question.’

At first, Tess closed off her imagination and narrowed her breadth of vision until it was blinkered. If the places didn't look like the Resolution – if they weren't detached or the brick was too red or not rosy enough, or if there was too much stonework or the windows were too small or large, the roof too steep, or if the garden was too long but not wide enough – then she rejected them with a grave shake of her head at Joe.

‘You'll not find another Resolution House,’ the agent warned her.

‘Oh yes, we will,’ she told him. ‘We've only been looking a fortnight.’

‘You've only a month to find somewhere,’ he said, sotto voce to Joe.

With three weeks to go, they took a six-month let on an expansive ground and first-floor apartment on Albion Terrace, not far from the Resolution. At the front, it alternated bay and box windows which looked out to the woods and the playground. To the back was a sizeable square garden though Wolf was really of the age when he wasn't that fussed by acreage. He knew where he was, he was in Saltburn and wherever they lived, he'd be off to the beach or the woods each day, or allowed to sprawl over the pavement with his lead looped around the railings while the family made merry in the playground.

It was when the packers arrived at the Resolution that Joe had to go.

‘I can't watch,’ he told Tess. ‘I'll take Emmeline and Wolf and drop them off at Lisa's, shall I? Leave you to tell them what's for storage and what's coming with?’

Tess nodded. She walked over to him and touched his cheek.

‘It'll be OK, Joe.’

He looked down and tapped his foot along the line between two of the flagstones in the hallway.

‘I know,’ he said quietly, ‘but I didn't know it would feel so weird.’

‘Look, take the child and dog – and thank Lisa again, won't you – then why don't you and I go out somewhere? I don't know – go for a drive? Go to the Transporter Bridge – or have lunch in Yarm or a walk up Roseberry Topping? Do something different – but get away from the house. It feels – I don't know –’

She looked around them as if the right word was in one of the packing crates.

‘Undignified. Packers swarming around, bashing furniture against walls and swamping our stuff in newspaper – it's not nice.’

Joe nodded.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘it's a plan.’

They didn't get very far. They had planned to drive to Whitby and have fish and chips there. But after Joe left for Lisa's with Emmeline and Wolf, the agent phoned the house and Tess battled through the maze of boxes to take the call. She knew it was perhaps the last time she'd be able to answer the phone. Resolution House – hullo? Goodbye.

‘He said just to have a look – it may not be for us. It's just a little way out of town – off the Loftus road but way before Brotton,’ Tess told Joe when he returned.

‘Well, we're headed that way anyway,’ said Joe.

They turned left off the coastal road and passed two tiny cottages before the single-track lane made a sharp right, straightened out a short way and then came to an abrupt end. Joe switched off the engine and he and Tess just sat and looked – just as the agent had told them to do.

‘That's it, isn't it?’ Tess said eventually.

‘Yup,’ said Joe, ‘looks like this is it.’

‘I mean – it's
it
.’

‘I know you do – and I totally agree.’

Fish and chips and a trip to Whitby were all off the menu. Joe made a call to the agent who called him back and said, sorry, the vendors are out. But then he said that he had keys and if Joe could wait half an hour, he'd come along with the particulars and show them around himself.

Joe and Tess lifted the latch on the gate and stood just inside it. The driveway was gravel and a little like a comma, ending in a generous circle in front of the house. Only it wasn't a house, it was a cottage. It wasn't brick, it was stone. The roof looked new but was in old slate. There were stout chimneystacks at either end. The entrance was a white wooden porch, proudly central, with a pretty fanlight above the front door. There were three windows to either side. Seven windows on the next floor, attic rooms above that. A hedge of hawthorn and hazel edged the perimeter and to one side of the house, an iron gate was cut into it. Tess followed Joe who was already walking towards it. It wasn't locked. They intended to see the back of the house, to peer through windows in advance of the agent arriving. But if the garden wasn't a distraction in its own right (a mature shrubbery rolling down into billowing herbaceous borders demarcating a wide, even lawn in a horseshoe-shaped embrace) then the view rooted them to the spot. Straight out to sea.

‘We're about a fifteen-, twenty-minute walk from town,’ Joe said eventually.

‘The view comes free with the house,’ the agent said, suddenly at their side. ‘Come on, I'll show you around.’

It would take a little work, but nothing too daunting. Mainly cosmetic – getting rid of the chintz, rubbing down the woodwork, modernizing the bathrooms, changing the use of the reception rooms downstairs, swapping gloss paint for eggshell, replacing PVC windows upstairs with wooden frames.

‘Emmeline's room,’ said Joe at the precise moment Tess thought the very same.

‘You could easily put an ensuite to the master bedroom,’ the agent said, taking them through. But both Joe and Tess were not concerned with anything other than staring and staring at the view they could potentially wake up to every morning.

The agent couldn't gauge their reaction. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know it's a cottage not a house. I know the building is older than the Resolution, the ceilings are lower and it's not a central location. It doesn't have the grandeur of Resolution House and it doesn't have a garage or the fancy entrance hall. But it's light – don't you think? It's a find, wouldn't you say?’

‘But it
is
just like the Resolution,’ Tess said.

The agent had long thought she was a little peculiar but who was he to judge, so he just nodded as if he was about to say, yes, you're so right, it's a carbon copy.

‘Isn't it?’ She turned to Joe.

Joe nodded thoughtfully and his face was lit with a contented smile. ‘I think it is, yes.’

‘It's home. We live here, don't we, Joe? This is us.’

It was a trip Joe had to make alone. Tess understood this. We'll see you back at the flat, she told him, there'll be something in the oven for you.

Apart from a pile of newspapers the packers hadn't needed for wrapping, the Resolution was completely stripped of its contents when Joe went back. It was just the building; the walls and floors and ceilings and windows and doors. He walked from room to room with his eyes wide and his ears peeled. All the way up the hill, his pace had slowed with trepidation, as if he feared this final visit would be one last confrontation – flashbacks of his past in each room he went into.

But it wasn't like that.

He went into each and every room.

He took his time.

He didn't shudder once.

He felt neutral.

It was bare.

It was empty.

It was quiet.

It was just a fine old house awaiting its new residents. A family of four with one on the way and a chocolate Labrador.

Joe thought, this house has absorbed the secrets of the Saunders into the dust deep within the bricks.

And yet those secrets had left no negative trail. In fact the house had consumed them to no ill effect whatsover.

Joe thought, its past has no relevance to its future – and the same goes for me.

He thought about the new residents, the new family. The Resolution's future lay in what the new family would bring to the house, what they would make of it.

Laughter will continue to decorate this place, Joe thought. As it has done for most of this year.

Love will be the central heating.

Unity will keep the building standing strong.

And in return, this house will let them know that they are in the safest place in the world.

He locked up and strolled off down the gravel. He didn't look back. He didn't need to.