The Dream House

by Rachel Hore

  As she listened to all the questions and Mr Keppel’s blustering attempts at answers, an idea began to grow in her mind. Around her the buzz of voices rose as the room, despite Mrs Smithson ordering the doors at the back to be opened, grew hotter and hotter.

  Eventually, overwhelmed by the opposition, Mr Keppel turned to Mr Overden and raised his hands in a despairing gesture. The noise abated slowly and Kate indicated that she wanted to speak again.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Hutchinson?’ said Mr Overden, who looked exhausted. ‘This is the last question we’ll take tonight, ladies and gentlemen.’

  ‘Mr Keppel,’ said Kate, ‘you have seen demonstrated clearly and unequivocally tonight how much Fernley values its school. Could I ask you now, honestly: if the people of Fernley – and I say “if” because fifty thousand pounds is a huge amount of money – were able to raise some or a substantial part of the sum, would your Department reconsider its decision to close the school?’

  The hubbub started to build again and Kate glimpsed people shaking their heads at the suggestion of such a commitment from local people. Many of them, she knew, held down low-paid jobs or seasonal work. Mr Overden rose and waved the room to silence.

  After a moment Mr Keppel spoke. ‘I must agree,’ he said, ‘that the feelings in this room appear to run high. Much higher than I anticipated. I cannot properly answer the question you ask without consultation with my colleagues, but I am inclined to say that “if” – and, ladies and gentlemen, that is a huge “if” – the monies or part of the monies are forthcoming from the community, there is a large chance that the Department would reconsider the . . . ah . . . efficiency of its current decision.’

  He sat down. Everybody looked enquiringly at Kate as if to say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about that then?’

  After the chairs were piled up and pushed to the sides of the room, ready for collection by the hire firm in the morning, Mrs Smithson invited those of the committee remaining for a glass of wine in her office. Mr Keppel had sensibly vanished, almost before Mr Overden had closed the meeting. As the parents began to disperse, they could hear his powerful car screech away outside.

  ‘And good riddance,’ said Jasmin. ‘What a number-cruncher he turned out to be.’

  ‘I thought Kate’s last question pinpointed things nicely,’ said another of the governors, a grey-haired lady in a dark wool suit. ‘It does seem to come down to us meeting the cost of the repairs ourselves, but how could we raise that sort of money? Think how difficult it was to raise thirty thousand for the church repairs five years ago. None of us could look another cake sale in the face after that!’

  ‘We could see what there might be available in grants and regional funding,’ said Jasmin, fishing a piece of cork out of her wine glass. ‘Maybe we could build in some special project – I don’t know, like having a musician in residence or a young people’s science lab to attract money.’

  Everyone nodded with enthusiasm at that.

  ‘We’ve some good ideas here,’ said Mr Overden. ‘Why don’t we meet next week before school breaks up, and get some plans in place for the holidays?’

  Fifty thousand pounds, thought Kate as she walked home afterwards. It was a huge, an impossible sum of money. It seemed that staying in Seddington was going to be a battle every which way she turned.

  Chapter 28

  Although Kate was familiar with the profile of Seddington church, its short spire rising above the square-towered building on the little hill, the Friday of Agnes’s funeral was the first occasion she had had to go inside. It was very like St Felix’s, she thought, plain and dark, with the same simple Norman design, but whereas the church in Fernley had stained glass only in the window above the altar, the four arched windows on the south side of St Mary’s Seddington cast a rainbow of soft jewelled light across the twenty-odd people waiting quietly in the old oak pews.

  The coffin, completely covered with flowers, was in place by the altar rail and a thin elderly lady was squeezing some appropriately lugubrious sounds from the little organ. Kate selected an empty pew halfway down the church, then noticed Dan, distinguished in a dark suit, wave to her from his seat next to Marie Summers, so she slipped in beside him instead.

  Just then, the vicar emerged from the vestry and swept over in his robes.

  ‘We’ll just wait a couple more minutes,’ he whispered, nodding to Max who arrived to sit in a pew nearby. The Reverend Mike Davies was, on the face of it, a jolly man who would not have been out of place running children’s parties, but since the Hutchinsons’ move to Fernley, where he was also vicar, Kate had quickly noticed that he had a side to him of considerable depth and experience. He had been a management consultant until his early forties, he had told her, but his parishioners knew he was as patient of their personal problems as he was at the frustrating administrative side of running this large rural parish with its overwhelming financial burdens.

  When she and Max had met up with Mike earlier in the week, it was to learn that he had come to know Agnes well in the seven years he had been in the parish, and he was able to reveal that she had had an active spiritual life and a very enquiring mind in theological matters.

  ‘She would come up with questions I certainly couldn’t answer,’ Mike shook his head smiling, ‘about the afterlife and what would happen there. And she had strong views on which bits of the Bible she believed in and which she didn’t. We had some lively conversations, I can tell you. I will miss her.’

  After Mike had moved away, Kate looked down at the Bible open on her lap and tried without success to calm her nerves. It was Mike who had suggested the reading to her as one from which Agnes had frequently found comfort, a passage from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans about the workings of the Holy Spirit. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God . . . She had noted the connection with Mother Julian straight away: All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. The phrase was like an underground river, coursing through both their lives.

  ‘Are you all right?’ whispered Dan, close beside her. ‘Not nervous?’

  ‘A bit,’ she said and smiled at him, then she caught Max’s eye across the church. She wondered who the other people in the congregation might be. Some were surely villagers, but there was a neat, carefully made-up matron in a navy suit and pearl stud earrings near the back, sitting on her own, flicking through a pocket diary. Could that be her mother’s Cousin Marion? She was Kate’s first cousin once removed, Kate established, remembering Agnes’s explanation of how it worked. She thought the woman looked vaguely familiar, though, to be honest, Marion was not the only relation who had come to her wedding but whose face had since dimmed to a hazy blur in her mind.

  Marion had returned her call on Tuesday, and had immediately agreed to come to the funeral, ‘for old times’ sake’ as she’d pronounced in her loud county tones. Marion was clearly a lady who knew where her duty lay. Kate’s mother had been right about Marion’s sister Frances, who had communicated through Marion that Newcastle was too far away to come for the funeral.

  Raj Nadir, in a baggy black suit he probably reserved for client funerals, was talking in a low voice to a bony, very serious woman with an ash-blonde bob. She was nodding vigorously and using her hands a lot when she talked. Otherwise, there was a sprinkling of well-to-do elderly gentlemen in dark lounge suits, and a few assorted women, one in an ancient pudding basin hat, who must be locals, quietly waiting for the service to begin.

  The church door opened, and one of the undertakers slipped in and nodded at the vicar. Mike whispered to the organist and the lugubrious music ceased mid-bar. Finally, after a wheeze from the organ, the strains of ‘Abide with Me’ started up and the congregation rose.

  Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;

  Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

  Kate stood, too choked to sing, watching a fat tear plop onto her hymn book. She and Max had chosen this hymn because Marie Summers had thought it
a favourite of Agnes’s. Kate hadn’t liked to say that it had been sung at her sister Nicola’s funeral, too. She gave the skin of the hand holding the book a sharp pinch with the finger and thumb of the other hand to hold herself together.

  The service was a simple one. Max read a passage from Psalm 121: ‘I will lift mine eyes to the hills’, before Kate took her place at the lectern. Her voice broke once or twice as she read the short passage, but she managed to keep going. Afterwards, the vicar spoke very movingly, giving thanks for the long life of a warm and brave woman.

  ‘She had lost so many people she loved so early in life,’ he said, ‘and now we can thank God that she is reunited with them again.’

  Kate sat, head bowed. Mike was right. This service should be the celebration of a long and full life, but that didn’t stop Kate from missing Agnes.

  The service over, they followed the coffin out into the warm sunshine and over to a corner of the churchyard dotted with Melton family gravestones.

  ‘. . . in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life . . .’ Mike’s voice was strong, unwavering, as Kate scattered some rose petals from Agnes’s garden over the coffin in the grave, whispered goodbye and turned away. After the ritual was finished, she walked amongst the other graves for a few moments, noting older, long-dead Meltons, then finding the faded headstone to Agnes’s mother. Beneath the inscription to Evangeline and her dead baby was written Gerald Maurice Melton, d.1943. There was a vase of fresh roses on the grave – had Marie placed them there?

  Later, in the drawing room at Seddington House, two trestle tables groaned under the weight of sandwiches, savouries and cakes that Marie Summers had prepared.

  Kate helped pour sherry then stepped out into the garden to talk to Marion. She was in her early sixties, Kate remembered her mother explaining, but looked younger, carefully coiffed and made-up. The inflections of her voice were also like her mother’s, but whereas Barbara spoke softly, Marion was clearly used to view-hallooing in the hunting field.

  ‘I was just hearing from Agnes’s solicitor that you’re getting the house,’ she boomed. ‘What a windfall. Mind you, rather you than me – it’s quite a pile, isn’t it? You’re surely not going to live in it? I must confess myself a bit surprised she left it to you. I’d have thought that young man, her brother’s grandson, would be first in line. Still, she always knew her own mind, did Agnes.’

  Kate, at a loss as to what to say after this forthright speech, managed to change the subject to the safer ground of family reunions. Then wished she hadn’t, as tact was not one of Marion’s strong points.

  ‘Of course, I haven’t seen Barbara since your own wedding. It’s a shame. We used to spend so many holidays together when we were little. Barbara and her poor brother Kenneth often came to stay with us at Woodbridge. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but she changed after she married. Became quieter. A bit dowdy. Quite unlike when she was twenty. She was a scream then, I can tell you. But your father – I was surprised Barbara went for someone quiet like that.’

  Kate gave the plate in her hand the gurn of dislike she was too polite to project at Marion, then looked up and studied the woman’s face. How much did Marion really know of her parents’ marriage? she wondered.

  ‘Then there was the awful business of your sister,’ Marion continued. ‘They didn’t seem to want to have much to do with us after that. Turned in on themselves. We invited them to Tiggy’s wedding soon after yours – Tiggy is our eldest – but they said it was too far. It was only Suffolk.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s Christmas cards, but that’s it. How is she now, Barbara?’

  Kate explained deliberately vaguely that she was very up and down. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Dan in conversation with Max. The latter’s arms were folded and Dan was half turned away, looking across the garden. What were they finding to say to one another?

  ‘I don’t think you can ever get over the loss of a child,’ went on Marion, draining her sherry. ‘Really awful.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Kate, on sudden impulse, ‘whether Agnes ever had a child?’

  ‘Agnes?’ Marion gave a skirl of a laugh. ‘Good Lord, no. She was an old maid when I first knew her. Of course,’ she added, ‘there was talk of some man she had turned down once, an older man, but I can’t imagine she did that with him. Still, people do surprise you, don’t they?’

  Kate watched Dan amble off into the house, head bowed, and Max came up to introduce himself to Marion, so she left them to spar with one another. She was immediately captured by Raj Nadir.

  ‘Kate, I want you to meet Ursula Hollis – from Farrell’s, the auction house.’ Kate shook hands with the tall bony woman Raj had been sitting with in the church.

  ‘I am so sorry about Agnes,’ said Ms Hollis softly. ‘She was a good friend of mine and a great source of advice. Her knowledge of English eighteenth-century miniatures was astonishing.’

  ‘How long had you known her?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Twenty years – as long as I’ve been at Farrell’s. My then boss – John Sands, he’s long retired – introduced us.’ She looked up at the house. ‘I understand that this place will be yours?’

  Kate nodded. Nadir was obviously telling everyone about the will. Now he broke in. ‘I’ve been talking to Ursula about the contents, Kate. She’d be most happy for Farrell’s to give a valuation.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Ursula’s eyes shone with interest. ‘Agnes asked us to put a rough price on a number of pieces a couple of years ago, but we would obviously need to be more precise for the taxman. It would be a real privilege to help you with this treasure-house in any way we can.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kate, taking the business card Ursula Hollis passed her now. ‘I’m sure we’ll be in touch once all this,‘ she indicated the funeral party, ‘is over. I know we couldn’t expect Agnes to live forever, but it’s all somehow been such a shock. Not least about inheriting this place.’

  She smiled at Ursula and then moved on to talk to the other guests. There were three elderly gentlemen who turned out to be prominent figures in the arts and antiques world – one a Cambridge emeritus professor, one a retired expert from Sotheby’s, the third an Italian dealer in paintings who had happened to be flying over to Britain on business and so was able to attend the funeral. Each of them cited Agnes as a close friend as well as a colleague and all of them congratulated Kate on inheriting the house. Kate was struck by the position of influence Agnes had held within her chosen field, and by the respect in which these people had held her. Suddenly she felt a weight of responsibility for the care of Agnes’s collections.

  People were starting to say their goodbyes. Kate gathered a tray of glasses and went inside to give them to Conrad, who was washing-up in the kitchen. She asked him how his job interview had gone, but he shook his head sadly. On her way back through the house she came across Dan, studying a small painting in the hall. She turned on the picture lights and came to stand at his shoulder.

  ‘It’s Dunwich,’ he said, gesturing to the representation of the ruins of a church on the edge of a cliff, against a stormy sky. He squinted at the signature. ‘Local artist, looks like,’ he added. ‘Eighteen ninety. Might be worth a bit though.’ He stood back and looked around the cluttered hall. ‘You know, all this – you might be pleasantly surprised by how much it’s worth.’ He gestured at another painting, this time a huge still-life. The dead birds and the hares were beautifully drawn, so the fibres of each feather, the colours in each hair, reflected the light.‘Beautiful – if you like that sort of thing, of course. George Woodstow. His oils are fetching upwards of twenty thousand now.’

  ‘No!’ Kate breathed. Her head was beginning to whirl.

  Dan turned and studied her face, then smiled. ‘I’m glad that it will be yours.’ Then he sighed. ‘I miss Agnes already, you know. It seems to be a week for losing people.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Linda,’ he said simply,‘ and Shelley. They’ve moved out. Y
ou know when you came round on Monday? Well, when they got back, after Shelley had gone to bed we had this blazing row. They left in the morning.’ He shook his head sadly. Kate couldn’t see his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Poor you. And Linda. And Shelley. Where have they gone?’

  ‘Back to her mum’s.’

  Just at that moment, someone called ‘Kate?’ and Max came into the hall. He took in Dan and Kate at a glance but spoke just to Kate. ‘The vicar is looking for you to say goodbye,’ he said. Kate looked at Dan, who gave a tiny nod and stood back to let her pass. As she walked through the doorway, she felt Max’s hand lightly press her back.

  Later, when Max was leaving he said, ‘I can come down for a day next week and we could start going through Aunt’s papers. What do you think? Would Wednesday be all right?’

  By the time they had finished clearing up and helped Conrad lock up, it was getting late. Kate hurried off to pick up the children from Debbie’s. When she arrived, the house was in pandemonium.

  ‘Have they been awful?’ groaned Kate, staring at Debbie’s living room, which had been turned into a big den with half the bedding from upstairs.

  ‘Let’s just say lively,’ said Debbie, who looked exhausted.‘Getting into the holiday spirit a week too early.’