‘I confess I haven’t booked anywhere yet,’ said April. ‘Everything the travel agent suggested seemed horribly expensive. I was hoping I could find a cheap B&B, or a backpackers’ hostel. Is there such a thing here?’
Irene came in, coffee in china cups on a silver tray. Edward Gill opened his mouth, as if intending to ask his secretary’s advice on cut-price accommodation, and clearly thought the better of it.
‘Thank you,’ he said instead, and received a gracious nod in return.
‘Has Irene been with you long?’ said April, when the door was safely closed.
‘She came with the practice.’ The cup he handed her clinked on its saucer. ‘Milk and sugar?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I’m not sure she’s forgiven me yet for not being my predecessor.’
‘Mr Dunne-or-Hollander?’
‘Mr Dunne. Known as Over-Dunne. He could be somewhat pedantic.’ Edward Gill spooned two teaspoons of sugar into his cup. ‘Irene, a stickler herself, admired him for it. Despite my best efforts, she considers me shamefully lax by comparison.’
‘What happened to Mr Hollander?’ said April.
‘Met a Bluebell girl in Las Vegas in 1974. The pair eloped to Buenos Aires.’
‘I won’t ask what Irene thought of that.’
Edward Gill’s smile lasted a little longer this time. ‘Would you like to see the estate?’ he said. ‘Or are you about to drop from jet lag?’
‘I’d like to see it.’ It was not the whole truth, April knew. But it was what she had come all this way to do.
‘Look,’ he added, ‘if this seems presumptuous, I apologise. Though it is rather isolated and its amenities not exactly five-star, the gamekeeper’s cottage is perfectly habitable. Kit seems to have taken nothing with him to Canada except romantic intentions, so it’s fully furnished and equipped. It also has a relatively modern boiler, which, appearances to the contrary, I do know how to switch on. If you wanted to stay there…?’
What must he think of her, April wondered, this plain, drab, no-longer-young woman, arriving in his office with one battered suitcase and no money? He had not seemed surprised, which made her wonder if the private individual had provided a description along with confirmation of her identity. Then again, Edward Gill seemed very well bred. He would no doubt have been trained to be unfailingly courteous, no matter how unprepossessing the person opposite, or how sorry their circumstances. He might dust his bentwood chair with a handkerchief after she’d gone, but if he had such an urge, April would never know.
Not that she need bother about what he thought. Their acquaintance would be short and professional. Once her week here was up, April would never see him again.
‘That sounds ideal,’ she said. ‘I’m quite used to being on my own.’
CHAPTER 4
late February
The directions Edward Gill had given her led April out of the town and up into the hills that would eventually, according to her map, open out into countryside. There were still plenty of houses here. They looked to be owned by the well-to-do, with tidy stone-chip driveways and gardens that had been designed to have winter colour rather than retreat into a dormant mush of damp sticks and rotting leaves. A yellow sign for a school made April breathe harder for a moment, and she made a mental note not to travel down this road at the times the school might start or finish. April had become adept at defusing the charge of memory, but this one continued to leap forward, launching itself into her mind’s eye as if it had been waiting for her around a corner. Back home, there was a small inner-city primary school down the road from Circle Court, which April avoided at every hour, even though it meant walking an extra block on her way to the community education centre.
At the top of the hill the houses were fewer, replaced by trees. As April took the road, or lane, really, to the left, the woods were now on both sides, their branches a latticework canopy that added darkness to the already dimming winter light. Having long since lost track of the time, April checked the clock in her rental car. It was just after one, yet it felt as if the day was about to end. She hoped Edward Gill was right about the gamekeeper’s cottage; it would be no fun searching for accommodation in a strange town in the dark.
The lane dipped sharply, and when it rose again the woods had become fields, bordered by hedgerows, leafless, gaps in the weave like a poorly made basket. On the crest of the hill now, April could see that the fields in every direction ended in a blur of dark green. Woods again, or a denser forest. The fields were either all mud, or mud and patches of stubbly green and brown. April knew little about farming, but assumed it would be a couple of months before the crops or pasture reclaimed the ice-hardened winter ground.
A flash of red caught April’s eye, and she was surprised to see an old phone box, nestled in the lee of a tall hedgerow, and next to it what looked like a community notice board. She doubted the phone still worked; the box’s continued existence was probably due to the fact that everyone had forgotten it was there. There were only two notices pinned under the board’s plastic cover, and they were both yellowed and curling with age.
April had slowed down to get a better look at the phone box, and now a car was coming up behind her, so she pulled over onto the verge. But instead of passing her, the car drew alongside. The driver wound down his passenger window, so April wound down hers, and saw her breath cloud in the frosty air.
‘Are you lost?’ said Edward Gill.
Ben’s father had been very keen on classic cars, but their financial position had limited his indulgence to a monthly magazine subscription. While breastfeeding Ben, April, unable to concentrate on anything more demanding, had often flipped through these magazines, and it was down to this that she was able to identify Edward Gill’s car as an Alvis, British, from the 1960s. The Alvis’s stacked double headlights and tall oval grille gave it a slightly fish-faced look. It was ox-blood red, with well-shined wire wheels. Ben’s father would have admired it, April knew, but would have preferred a Mark II Jaguar.
‘Nice car,’ said April. ‘And no, I’m not lost. I was just bemused by the phone box.’
‘Ah, yes. The call of the wild. It does still work. If ever you’re stuck.’
Then he said, ‘Our turning is just up there. Follow me. I will be your guide.’
April did, past more fields, and a few small, sturdy houses that looked like they belonged to a farmer, or his workers, if such people were permanent these days, and were not brought in and out as the workload required, like they were on so many of the farms, orchards and vineyards in New Zealand.
The road proper ended suddenly, becoming a single gravel track that forked left, heading to what looked like a clump of barns. On the right, there was room for a single car to park, beside a stile and a green pointed sign for a public footpath. Edward Gill took the gravel track, then turned immediately again to the right, between what April could see as she passed were the stumps of long-gone iron gates.
She followed the Alvis, her rental car bouncing and gritting on the rutted surface. A line of trees appeared, the space between them occupied by winter-hardy weeds. April tried to picture how the entrance to the house had looked on the map. Had there been an avenue, or had these trees grown since? She could not recall. As the house had been built in the 1920s, any trees planted then would have only been saplings, not large enough, perhaps, to warrant being included.
On the right, the trees began to thicken and close in on those lining what April knew must be the drive. The woods on the map had seemed further away. They’ve moved. Birnam Wood is come to Dunsinane, she thought.
And then, there it was. Empyrean. For the second time that day, April erased the image in her mind (a near-derelict red-brick Victorian-style manor) and replaced it with reality, which appeared to be a compact version of a castle from a German fairytale. Out of her car now, looking upwards, April counted five turrets. The exterior white paint was badly faded and peeling, and a few windowpanes cracked and boarded
up, but the part of the roof she could see had no missing slates, and none of the turrets was falling down.
April had expected a ruin, beyond saving. Here instead was a distressed gentlewoman, doing her best to keep up appearances, despite darned patches in her tights, and moth holes in her only cardigan. April felt a burst of sympathy, which she suppressed, annoyed. That was not the plan. Seeing the house in its true light was meant to flatten it into nothing, pack it away like an old cardboard box. It was not meant to give it even more shape, nor, Heaven forbid, a personality.
‘It doesn’t look too bad from the outside, does it?’
Edward Gill stood beside her, collar up on his coat, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
‘But let me warn you that it’s a mess inside,’ he went on. ‘Filthy, threadbare, nothing works. The plumbing and the electrics are shot. As there had always been the possibility of selling the place, my predecessor made an executive decision to keep the roof at least in good repair. Once the water gets in, that’s the end of it. So I’m afraid we have spent most of the money from the estate on scaffolding, slate tiles and men with no fear of heights.’
‘Didn’t the gamekeeper want the money?’
‘It wasn’t his to have. He had the right to live on the estate, nothing more.’
April took in again Empyrean’s turrets and arched windows.
‘It looks like the backdrop to a production of Swan Lake,’ she said.
‘Scottish baronial style,’ said Edward. ‘The late Mr Potts was a fan. Though I suspect, from what I’ve been told of him, that it was less the bartizans, machicolations and crow-stepped gables that he liked and more the style’s ability to wind people up. In the early twentieth century, this kind of house would have been considered rather … tasteless.’
‘Why did he want to wind people up?’ said April.
‘You have to know what it was like in the 1920s,’ said Edward. ‘Many long-established landowners had been crippled by the combination of a depressed farming economy and death duties. By the beginning of the decade a quarter of England had changed hands. What galled was that the buyers were not less unfortunate gentry but a whole new breed of landowners, trade millionaires, who’d made their fortunes in chemicals and tobacco and suchlike.’
‘The nouveau riche?’
‘That lot, yes. Despite Edward VII’s penchant for socialising with rich Americans, most of the English upper class still considered Mr Potts and his ilk beyond the pale. Lewis Potts was well aware of that, and from what I gather played up to it. Empyrean was designed deliberately to be showy and fake, to give perhaps the impression that Lewis Potts had built it on a whim and, should another whim take him, he would tear it down and build a completely different, and probably even more tasteless, house.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ April protested.
Edward Gill’s pleased smile made her regret not thinking before speaking. She did not want to give the impression that the house in any way appealed to her.
‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘It’s not at all. Personally, I’m very fond of the place. Vita Sackville-West put the Gothic revival down to boredom with the classical style, a rejection of the safe but dull. My taste tends unvaryingly to the safe and dull, which is why I appreciate that Lewis Potts was prepared to stick the snobs right in the eye with a dentated pinnacle. My only issue is with his insistence that the place appear so disposable. If he had gone all out, like Horace Walpole or Sir Walter Scott, then the National Trust might have been interested. But he built a teasing, temporary fake, furnished not with important antiques or modernist deco classics but with rooms ordered new-made from Harrods.’
‘Now you’re teasing,’ said April.
‘Not at all. At the time, one could order an entire Elizabethan manor house from Harrods. Waring and Gillow also, I believe, advertised all-new “old” interiors. The 1920s was an excellent period for fakery, legitimate and not.’
‘And none of the furniture’s left?’
‘A few scraps in the attic. The rest sold over the years. Or burned as firewood. In his latter years, Lewis Potts had no affection for his possessions.’
Edward tightened his scarf. ‘Dear God, it’s cold. I suggest a brisk walk to the cottage to see if I was lying about being able to operate the boiler. Then, if we haven’t succumbed to hypothermia, we can take a quick look around the house.’
There was no driveway to the cottage, only a path through the woods, which, as they walked, became steadily more dense and dark. April made a mental note to buy a torch. A patch of lighter green ahead opened up into a clearing, quite a large one, and in it lay a cottage that was, this time, exactly as April had imagined. Squat and square, of whitewashed brick, a green painted front door, with two windows on either side, and a chimney on one end. The style of house most usually seen drawn in crayon and stuck to a refrigerator with magnetic plastic letters.
The cottage had no lawn but the clearing, which had not been mown in some time. To one side of the house were a small shed and a vegetable plot filled now only with what looked like silverbeet gone to seed. The clearing was large enough for the woods around not to seem oppressive, though April wondered if that would change when the leaves returned. Probably not, she decided. The clearing would be filled with dappled light. On a sunny day, it would be glorious, and utterly private.
Stop it, April scolded herself.
‘What is that darker circle in the grass around that tree over there?’
‘The fairy ring?’ said Edward Gill. ‘Bluebells. They pop up around May.’
April was relieved. She would not be here to see them.
Edward Gill was turning a key in the front door, and switching on a light.
‘I’ve kept the power on,’ he said. ‘The line is old and can be a little erratic, so it would pay to stock up on candles. Unfortunately, a cut puts the boiler out as well, but no need to also stock up on firewood. Kit has left enough out the back for the next five generations, as far as I can tell.’
April followed him inside. A square of flagstones inside the door served as the place to drop your boots before you stepped straight into a living room that held two armchairs facing the fireplace and draped in coloured knitted blankets. Edward Gill did not stop, but walked through an open door at the rear of the room that led, April could see, to the kitchen.
Not modern but homey, April thought as she looked around, with the lingering warmth of a room that has been cared for and enjoyed. When she and Ben’s father bought their house, the real estate agent, an effervescent woman called Cynthia, had said that it had ‘a lovely family feel’. April had been eight months pregnant. The house was down forty steps, it had no garage, and its garden was large and mostly overgrown, but they’d bought it because Cynthia was quite right: it had a lovely feel. April wondered what the real estate agent who sold it for Ben’s father had said to the new buyers. Did a house keep its feel no matter what? Or did it absorb the emotions of its inhabitants, did grief and anger and despair seep into the walls and infect its atmosphere like a creeping black mould?
Kit’s kitchen had an old gas range, pitted but clean, wooden bench tops that looked hand-made, a blue check curtain on a wire that covered the shelves beneath a square ceramic sink, green lino tiles on the floor, scuffed to thread in places, two mismatched Windsor chairs, and a narrow wooden table — hand-made again? — set hard against the back wall.
Edward Gill was in a small pantry-sized room off to the side. April heard metal scrape and then the muffled thump of a pilot light igniting.
‘I will check the gas level on our way out,’ he said, as he stepped back into the kitchen. ‘There’s an eyesore of a tank hidden, thankfully, behind the cottage. I’m not sure how often Kit needed to replace it, but I imagine not often. He was a man who preferred a life of simple, solitary routine.’
‘Until he found the internet?’
‘Our public library system has a lot to answer for.’
He paused. ‘The boi
ler will take several hours to heat up. Would you prefer to find somewhere else to stay just for tonight? Please don’t feel that I’m forcing you into this.’
‘It’s perfect.’ April felt an anxious twinge as she said it. Because it wasn’t just perfect for a short stay, it was perfect full stop. She could not imagine a better place to live her own life of simple, solitary routine.
Her return ticket was booked, she reminded herself. The concrete certainty of that reassured her.
‘Well, if you’re quite sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the bedroom and bathroom, but I suggest, for selfish reasons — i.e. I’m famished — that we leave the main house until tomorrow. So unless you feel an urge to forage for fern shoots, may I shout you a late lunch at The Oak and Rose?’
‘Was that the pub at the edge of the town?’
‘No. That one has two Michelin stars. In exchange for a large sack of money, they will cook you a duck-fat chip and a breast of quail the size of an acorn. It’s booked up months in advance.’
April’s appetite was on New Zealand time, where it was the small hours of the morning. But there was no food in the cottage, and she was starting to feel the black fuzz of jet lag. A meal that she did not have to prepare or pay for had enormous appeal. She could eat, drive back, and crash to sleep in Kit’s old bed, where she might very well dream strange dreams about women in Canada.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I gratefully accept.’
In The Oak and Rose the ceilings were beamed and low, the windows small and leaded. At a table in the corner, by the fire, a man in a Barbour jacket and green wellington boots sat reading a newspaper, his two setter dogs stretched out asleep at his feet.
‘Now, what will you have?’ Edward Gill scanned the menu chalked on a blackboard behind the bar. ‘The steak and kidney pie is very good. Not for the waistline, of course, but in every other respect.’
The Hiding Places Page 4