The Dream House (40 page)

On Sunday night he quarrelled with his mother after, Kate heard from Joyce later, she tentatively suggested he wasn’t spending enough time with the children. ‘I know, dear, it’s none of my business, but it’s so difficult to say nothing when I can see what’s going on in front of me. Sam particularly wants input from his father. Boys need to do things with their dads, don’t they? They go off the rails so easily these days.’

Secretly, Kate had to agree with her. When she had picked Daisy and Sam up from the swimming party at Saturday lunchtime, she had been concerned to find Sam had been crying. The birthday child’s mother had taken Kate aside and said, ‘I don’t think he’s enjoyed himself very much. He didn’t want to go in the pool and was upset when everyone else did. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what to do.’

‘What was wrong, Sam? You love swimming,’ Kate had said on the way out to the car, Daisy skipping ahead.

‘He’s just a wuss,’ Daisy said, spinning round to stick her tongue out at her brother.

‘I wanted you and Daddy to have stayed,’ Sam wailed, aiming a kick at Daisy.

This week, Sam had asked Simon on both Monday and Tuesday, ‘Promise to c’llect me?’ Simon had dutifully turned up at the school gates at three o’clock each afternoon, but once he had brought the children home he would vanish back into the study or out by himself, leaving Sam in anguish, searching for him. Simon might have been living on another planet, Kate thought crossly, for all the interest he took in domestic life. And yet it was her job to berate him about it, not Joyce’s.

‘He’s very tetchy at the moment,’ she said to her mother-in-law. ‘He might take it better from me.’ In the end, she didn’t have the courage to start what would undoubtedly end up as another argument, and it was a relief when her husband went back to work on Wednesday morning.

That same Wednesday morning, after Kate had taken the children to school, she drove to Seddington House to help Max start tying up some of the loose ends of Agnes’s life. In the library, there were two big writing bureaux and a filing cabinet full of papers. Upstairs, a preliminary search revealed a dozen dusty cardboard boxes of files, letters and memorabilia in one of the spare bedrooms. The contents of the boxes looked older than the papers in the bureaux, though. It was obviously the bureaux they had to tackle first.

As Max pulled out of the filing cabinet a folder labelled
Buildings Insurance
in Agnes’s shaky handwriting, Kate asked him the question that had been hovering in her mind ever since her visit to Raj Nadir’s office last week.

‘Max, perhaps I shouldn’t be asking you this, but I need to know how you feel – about the will.’

Max dropped the folder back in the drawer. ‘Am I going to contest it, you mean? I don’t know. I’m taking advice from a colleague.’

‘Do you still think that it’s my fault? Agnes leaving me the house, I mean.’

He sighed, then smiled, a bit sadly. ‘To tell you the truth, no,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re not a fortune-hunter. And various people – Nadir and Dan and Mrs Summers – have taken pains to make me see that it was important to Agnes, leaving this place to you. Having a family here again to bring it back to life.’

‘That’s something then,’ Kate said. But he had not quelled her unsettled feelings. Despite what Raj said about Max not having a strong case, wills did get contested and surprising judgements were sometimes made.

‘I’m sure I’ll get the money she’s left me, though,’ Max continued. ‘This story of a child – it’s got to be a load of codswallop. No one knows anything about it, do they? Unless there’s something in here.’ He tapped the nearest bureau with the toe of his brogue. ‘Still, whatever happens, she was my aunt, and it’s our duty as executors to sort everything out. Perhaps we’ll find something that clarifies matters. Come on.’

They started making piles on the floor of the mishmash of folders and papers, writing a list of the myriad tasks that have to be carried out in the event of a death. Kate opened the top drawer of the second bureau and found it to be full of photographs. She picked out one of a beautiful young man with short black hair sleeked back in the style of the times.

‘Must be my grandfather,’ breathed Max. ‘Raven. He looks like a matinee idol, doesn’t he? It’s been touched up, of course, but my grandmother used to say how good-looking he was.’

‘Oh, did you know Vanessa well?’

‘My grandmother died in nineteen eighty-five, soon after her eightieth birthday.’

‘What was she like? Raven died in nineteen sixty, didn’t he? It was a long time to be a widow.’

‘She was very lovely when she was young. Mum left some photographs. Even at eighty there was something fragile and appealing about her. Dad said she made men want to look after her, made them feel manly and protective. I was only a graceless lout of a teenager, but I could see what he meant.’

‘Did she marry again?’

‘No, but she had lovers.’

Kate laughed suddenly. ‘I can’t believe you were a graceless lout,’ she said, taking in his tall neat form, the blue cashmere sweater perfectly teamed with camel cords and a snow-white open-necked shirt.

‘I used to dress all in black,’ he said, ‘and practise a sneer.’ He gave one now, making Kate giggle.

‘I bet you were the type of guy I was terrified of at uni,’ she said. ‘Impossible to impress and refusing to engage in any conversation that didn’t come back to Post-structuralism.’

‘I was all of that,’ he admitted, ‘but only because I was lonely. University was a bit of a disaster for me. It was only when I started work that I got some confidence. Then I met Claudia – she was a social worker involved peripherally in a case I was working on.’

‘She’s your ex?’

‘Yes. She’s from Norwich originally, and I had been brought up in Cambridge, so when she got pregnant we decided to go back to home ground. Her parents could help with the kids, you see.’

‘What went wrong, then?’

‘She seemed different at home amongst her family. They smothered her. It was “Mum says this,” and “Dad says you shouldn’t do that.” We started to argue a lot. And then she bumped into an old boyfriend from school . . .’ He shrugged, his face impassive.

Kate nodded in sympathy, then busied herself again with the contents of the bureau. She wondered whether she should confide in him about her own relationship problems, then decided it was more restful not to.

Two hours later, papers and files lay in neat piles around the library floor. Max and Kate sat drinking coffee and staring at the mess.

‘It’s like Raj said – most of the financial stuff must be with him or the bank,’ said Max.

‘Or the accountant,’ agreed Kate. ‘Raj said his predecessor wound up everything to do with the old farm estates, and made Agnes put things like the deeds and share certificates in the bank. Can’t think why he didn’t deal with the jewellery, though.’

‘God, jewellery. I suppose we ought to see what’s around the house. It all belongs to you now, of course’

‘Yes, but I know where some of it is. In the safe over there.’ Kate nodded in the direction of the fireplace and picked up her handbag to find the little key Agnes had given her. Then she walked over and started pulling the
Domesday
volumes off the shelf.

‘A safe. So
that’s
what you were up to with Dan that afternoon,’ said Max, aggrieved, so Kate explained as she worked.

‘There were some diaries Agnes wanted me to read, you see. To tell me about her child.’

‘Diaries?’ he said sharply.

‘Yes, but there’s nothing in them about the child,’ she said hastily. ‘Just a letter she wrote to tell him to read the diaries. There might be another volume that I’ve missed. I don’t know, we must see.’ She knew she ought to offer Max the chance to read the exercise books now that Agnes was dead, but she was jealous of them. They were her private bond with Agnes, with the past. And anyway, she wanted to find and read that final volume first – if it existed.

The door of the safe swung open, and Kate removed the top box from the pile of jewel-cases. Max gasped when he saw the exquisite diamonds within. He grabbed at the other half-dozen boxes, opening them one by one, his eyes widening in amazement at the contents. As he pulled out the last box, Kate could see with disappointment that the safe was empty. No more diaries, then.

‘These must be worth thousands,’ Max breathed. ‘They ought to be in the bank.’

‘That’s exactly what Dan said when he saw them—’ Kate stopped, seeing Max’s face change expression. ‘What have you got against Dan?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just that he always seemed to be hanging around my aunt, that’s all.’

‘I don’t think that was for any sinister reason,’ said Kate gently. ‘Just that she helped him and he was fond of her.’

‘He was very relaxed with her, very close. In a way I could never be.’

Suddenly Kate understood. ‘It’s a shame,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose there was too much baggage. Not your fault.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looked at him, her gaze level, taking in his sensitive face, the nearly black hair, the intense expression.

‘You are Raven’s grandson, that’s the problem. And you look so incredibly like him. Agnes wanted to forget the past, to bury it. And every time she looked at you, she must have been reminded of all her pain.’

By lunchtime, they had sorted through both bureaux and each of them had a long list of tasks. Kate’s included sorting out the buildings and contents insurance and advising a raft of different companies of Agnes’s death. Max’s involved taking the jewellery and the miniatures and a number of other bits and pieces to Agnes’s bank in Halesworth. He turned down Kate’s suggestion of lunch and arranged to meet her again the following week for the start of the auctioneers’ visit. On the way out, they met Conrad parking his bicycle and explained what they were doing with the valuables.

As Kate drove through the village, her mind turned to Dan. Leaving the car by the church she walked down and tapped on the door with the little dolphin knocker of number 2, The Row.

When he opened the door, Dan was wearing a paint-spattered brown shirt and eating the last of a sandwich. He waved Kate into the living room, where the television was showing the lunchtime news. The room smelled stale, the cushions were crushed down the backs of the chairs, papers and glasses nestled against table-lamps and the waste-paper basket overflowed in a corner. But the toys and children’s videos had all vanished.

‘I couldn’t remember which days you go to the gallery,’ she said as he turned off the news.

‘Usually this morning, but I wanted to finish something here.’

His face was tired and rumpled, Kate noticed, and he was unshaven – a complete contrast to his smart appearance at Agnes’s funeral last week.

He seemed aware now of how he must appear.

‘Sorry,’ he said, drawing his fingers through his unkempt hair. ‘You’ve not got me at a good time. No,’ he put a hand on her arm as she embarked on an apology, ‘don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased you’ve come. Have you eaten?’

Kate said she hadn’t so he took her into the kitchen and made her a great wedge of bread and Cheddar. ‘What have you been finishing?’ she asked through a mouthful, trying not to notice the piles of dirty crockery everywhere, the crumbs and smears on every work surface.

In answer, he opened the back door and she followed him out with her sandwich into the now overgrown garden and down the path to the shed.

She gave a gasp of surprise as he pulled open the door and stood back to let her go in first. Without, this was an ordinary garden shed smelling of creosote. Within, she was hit by a great waft of turpentine and linseed oil. White-painted plasterboard and a huge north-facing window in the roof, hidden from the garden, had transformed the interior into an art studio. Though cluttered with canvases and a mess of equipment, like Dr Who’s Tardis, Kate thought, the inside seemed bigger than the outside.

‘I’ve got to show it to someone sometime,’ Dan said sheepishly as he turned an easel towards her, ‘so it might as well be you.’

It was a painting of a woman sitting at a table – the little table in Dan’s dining room – with a mug of coffee before her, and staring up, out of the window as if in rapture. In a corner of the painting, a small child sat on the floor absorbed in dressing a doll. The texture was fine, painterly, the line between the child on the ground, the woman’s face and the object of the woman’s gaze a natural arc, but what was breathtaking, Kate thought, was the light – that cold north light that would hit the dining-room windows in the same way it would enter Dan’s skylight here. It rendered the figures as carven statues, serene, peaceful, lovely, all imperfections smoothed away by its silver touch.

‘It’s Linda,’ she said after a moment. ‘And Shelley. You’ve made them beautiful. No, they were beautiful before, but you’ve made them . . . like angels. Uplifted, not of this world.’

‘Like before the Fall,’ Dan said, nodding, and they stood and looked at the painting together.

‘How long have you been working on it?’ she asked.

‘Six, seven months.’ He shrugged.

‘It’s good,’ she said, wondering if it was the right thing to say. ‘Very good.’ Something was tugging on the thread of memory. What? ‘Does it have a title?’ she asked.

‘Have to think of one,’ he said, as he led her out of the shed, locked it, and they walked back to the house. ‘Titles are important. What do you think?’

‘I can’t name your painting for you,’ she laughed.

She stood in the hall and peered into the room where the painting was set. Apart from the square-hatched windows it was unrecognizable as the same place. There was mess and dust everywhere, books sprawling across the floor.

‘I’ve not done much about housework for a while,’ Dan said. The implication was obvious – since Linda left.

‘Dan, are you OK?’ Kate asked in response to his bleak expression.

‘Yes, I suppose I miss her. Linda – and Shelley. Well, I don’t miss the fights with Linda, but I miss having them both about the place, you know. And Shelley’s unhappy. Linda’s mum says she misses me.’

‘I’m sure she must do. You’re like a dad to her, aren’t you?’