by Jenny Harper
Tom’s mouth closed round the pasta. He began to chew. He said nothing.
Lexie ploughed on. ‘I said I’d do a year to help out. I think I’ve done what I can. Once the tender comes in from Fleming House, as I’m sure it will, cash flow will begin to improve. Anyway, Neil’s more than capable of taking on more responsibility.’
Tom was eating steadily. Martha was toying with her food. Lexie hadn’t touched hers.
‘I do think you should consider letting Neil take on more, Dad. It’s time you and Mum had a holiday, for a start. Give him a bit of rope and see what happens.’
It can’t get much worse, she wanted to add, but bit the words back.
Martha said, ‘Your father would miss your support at Gordon’s.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But I’ll still be around to talk to about things and – be honest – I’m not really cut out for a life in retailing, am I?’
Tom’s head was down. He was examining a prawn as if it might spring to life again, headless, tailless, legless and without its protective carapace.
Martha said, ‘Where would you paint, Lexie? There’s nowhere here that’s suitable.’
‘I’ll find somewhere to rent. I’ve got a bit saved up.’
Tom put down his fork and looked at her levelly.
‘Will you come back, do you think?’
Lexie, who had spent twelve months struggling to be unselfish, wanted to weep with love and gratitude. He had acknowledged her request. His longing to establish his succession was painfully evident and conveyed the depth of loss he felt, but he had given his tacit permission to go.
She leapt up and hugged her father ferociously, then tilted her newly re-coloured head to one side and smiled at him.
‘Can we take it one day at a time, as we have this last year? I think that’s all I can manage, even now.’
Her father’s arms stole round her, drawing her close. She could smell the sweet, familiar residue of that morning’s aftershave and feel the scratch of the evening’s stubbly shadow on his chin. This was how he used to hug her when she was a child and ready for sleep. This was how he’d comforted her when she fell and grazed a knee. This was how – she realised – he had not been able to hug her since Jamie died.
She tightened her arms round him.
It might not seem much, but it was the first sign of emotion he had allowed himself and she treasured the moment.
Esther Goldwyn’s exhibition received much critical attention. Inevitably, opinion was divided – some critics saw it as a satirical comment on contemporary art, others as a visionary interpretation of recycling, topped by a delightful tongue-in-cheek humour. Lexie, who couldn’t face attending the opening even though she had an invitation, was moved by a reluctant compulsion to read the reviews. Despite herself, she couldn’t help feeling a stab of envy. It should have been me. She put the thought aside. She’d made her own choices. Jamie’s death had been a factor, of course, but it had been the catalyst, not the cause, of her withdrawal.
Would she have faced the truth about her art if the accident hadn’t happened? She couldn’t be sure about the answer to that.
She put all the papers into the recycling. That was all past. She had a new agenda now – and Molly had offered a way forward. She was going to look at a possible studio somewhere in the grounds of Fleming House.
Although she much preferred walking to driving, Lexie borrowed Tom’s car for the visit. If she moved out here, she’d have to invest in a bike.
At the junction on the far side of Hailesbank she signalled right and began to turn, just as a car rounded the corner into her path. She stepped on the brakes and screeched to a halt inches from tar-black metal.
‘Oh God, sorry!’
The driver’s window slid open. It was Patrick.
‘Are you all right?’ There was concern rather than anger in the voice.
Lexie sent up a fervent prayer of thanks that she hadn’t crashed into this of all the cars in Hailesbank.
‘Fine. Thank you.’
‘You are meant to let traffic on the main road pass, you know, before turning,’ he said in a mild voice.
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘Are you really all right, Lexie?’
She just wanted to be on her way.
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then can we both go, do you think?’
His voice stiff, he said, ‘Take care then,’ and slid his window up.
She completed the turn and tried to think of their disagreements rather than the good times they’d had together, because that way it was easier not to want him. It was now a pleasant drive along the country road, and by the time she’d reached the new sign at the entrance, she’d regained some equanimity.
Fleming House. Weddings, conferences, events.
Molly was certainly getting things licked into shape. Before she’d taken up the job, everything at this country-house estate had been run down but now the approach was delightful. A dozen red deer were grazing peacefully a hundred yards away across the green parkland, their hides gleaming russet in the evening sunshine. Lexie lost sight of them as the drive wound through a stand of birch fluttering in a wisp of a breeze and scattering dappled shadows across her bonnet. Then she picked a path between towering rhododendron bushes, drooping with heavy flowers. After a mile, she left the tarmac for the gravel in front of the main entrance to the Georgian mansion. The idea of a studio here lifted her spirits. She forgot about Patrick and thought only of possibilities.
‘Hi!’ Molly must have seen the car coming, because she was waiting on the gravel. ‘Hey, the hair’s looking good!’
‘Topped it up yesterday. Where’s this building, then?’
Molly laughed. ‘You can’t wait, can you?’
Lexie leapt out of the car, adrenaline surging. ‘When you said, about the outbuilding, I couldn’t think where you meant.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever shown you the walled garden. It’s been woefully neglected. I don’t think anyone’s grown so much as a potato there for decades, but if you can stand weeds, it has a charm of its own. Come on, let’s walk.’
The house was satisfyingly symmetrical. Steps ran up to the grand entrance, which was framed by four magnificent columns. A wing on each side completed the building. They rounded the corner to the back.
‘See those sash and case windows?’ Molly gestured to the first floor, ‘They run from floor to ceiling of the ballroom. That’s where we hold most of the wedding receptions. They look out onto the formal gardens over there.’
They walked past clipped box hedges and careful plantings.
‘That’s where most of the gardening resource has been focused, obviously. It’s very popular for photographs. The walled garden’s behind the high wall almost hidden by those sycamores. The greenhouse has been cleaned out and made watertight, so the gardeners have started using it again, but they haven’t time to restore the veg patch. You’d be left pretty much in peace, if you want the place.’
‘I never knew this was here.’
‘We don’t bring the public round this way.’
Lexie spotted a door and two windows, and realised that there was a small cottage built into the wall. Molly took a bunch of keys out of her pocket and stopped.
‘Here we are.’
The door scuffed along the floor and Molly had to push hard to get it to open. Lexie’s first reaction was disappointment, because the hallway was tiny and very dark. Inside she pushed open a door on the left. This room was small and the window looked out into the trees, so would get little natural light. On the other side, a matching door opened on an identical room. In this one there was a stone sink and a wooden dresser, its green paint cracked and faded. Her anticipation was fading into despondency.
‘I did warn you it wasn’t exactly luxurious, didn’t I? But hang on in.’
There was a bathroom, of sorts. It looked as if nothing had been done to the plumbing for fifty years. The toile
t had a high cistern and long chain flush and the bath was an ancient roll-top, grimy and clearly beloved by the local spider population. The symmetry of the architecture was maintained by a storage cupboard on the other side of the hallway.
It could all be scrubbed up and made usable, but there was only one thing Lexie cared about – a room in which she could paint. These rooms were too small and too dark. Molly paused in front of the last door.
‘Ta-da!’ she proclaimed dramatically as she threw it open.
Lexie gasped. The cottage might only have been built for a gardener, but the original architect had clearly insisted on echoes of grandeur from the main house. Three sash and case windows had been let into the walls from floor to ceiling, allowing light to flood in to the room. When she looked more closely at them, she saw that the centre one was not actually a window but a door constructed to resemble the other two windows, and it opened directly onto the huge walled space that had once been Fleming House’s kitchen garden.
‘Oh. My. God.’
The room was almost as large as all the others put together and its ceiling was higher, arching into the structure of the roof. Lexie walked to the windows and looked out at the garden. Low evening sun was about to dip behind the wall, but for the moment it was bathing the space in gold. The grass had been cut, but beyond that, little had been done. What would once have been nursery beds and vegetable plots had become overgrown with wildflowers – campion and candytuft, thistle and tansy, and a host of other plants she could not even begin to name. The greenhouse Molly had mentioned was way to the left, almost at the far end of the garden. Its elaborate white ironwork supported what seemed like an acre of glass, but it was so far away that she would not be troubled by activity there.
Molly was clasping the bunch of keys to her chest.
‘What do you think?’
‘I couldn’t possibly afford the rent on a place like this!’
‘It’s a mess.’
‘It just needs a good clean. Don’t any of the gardeners want to live here?’
‘They all live locally. Lady Fleming says we haven’t got the resources to do a proper job here at the moment, she’d be delighted for you to have it on a nominal rent for a year, and she’ll send a squad of cleaners down for a morning to help make it habitable.’
‘I’m gobsmacked. I don’t know what to say.’
‘Just say yes. I was thinking maybe your dad would let you have a few ex-display bits and bobs from the store, like a bed and a couple of chairs, and a table for the kitchen? There’s no cooker, but you could maybe get a plug-in hob and a microwave – or one of the halogen oven things, like big bowls? You’d need a small fridge too, but other than that, not a lot.’
‘Wait a minute – are you suggesting I could actually live here?’
‘Why not? I know what you’re like when you start working on something. You never stop. It’d be bloody dangerous for you to even think of cycling back to Fernhill at some unearthly hour.’
Lexie rubbed her hands round her face, trying to take it all in.
‘Am I dreaming, Moll?’
‘Nope. It can be yours by Monday.’
Lexie clapped her hands in delight. The noise echoed round the empty room like the sound of a starting gun.
Chapter Eighteen
Catalogue number 30: Black leather brogues. Donor, Arthur Donnelly, Edinburgh. ‘In October 1986, I was a journalist, attending the meeting in Reykjavik between Reagan and Gorbachev that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. I followed the two men into the press conference, my shoes treading where theirs trod. My partner finds my reluctance to part with these shoes overly romantic, but I felt I was walking in a moment in history.’
By the end of July, Lexie was settling into a new rhythm of life. She ate, slept and breathed her work. Early in the morning, she tumbled out of the bed that had been her one extravagant purchase. The bedroom had been cleaned and painted white, and was graced with a threadbare rug from the attic at Fernhill. She liked the fact that it was worn and aged. Many feet had padded across this rug – her ancestors, probably. She liked the idea that she’d brought her past with her, that she hadn’t severed all links with her family, even in making the break from home.
She bathed in the roll-top bath, which had been made respectable with the assistance of strong detergents and elbow-grease. She made toast in the kitchen. She loved the kitchen. She’d painted the walls white, spent precious hours sanding the old dresser and giving it a coat of duck-egg emulsion, and she’d hung a new cream-spotted cotton curtain in a matching shade under the wooden counter top to conceal her few kitchen necessities. It was basic, but it worked.
Martha drove over every few days, usually with another small consignment of shoes, all meticulously catalogued. Lexie had turned the large walk-in cupboard opposite the bathroom into a computer room and her mother was helping out by photographing the shoes and scanning in any letters, old photographs or other sentimental items sent with them.
One morning Lexie was pulling on her old painting clothes when there was the toot of a horn. She peered outside.
‘Thought I’d do this while I could,’ Cameron said, jumping down from the cab of the Pettigrew’s lorry.
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Lexie laughed, bemused, as Cameron crunched her into his arms and dropped a light kiss on the top of her unbrushed hair.
‘I’m leaving Pettigrew’s. My uncle wants me back on his farm.’
‘Brilliant! Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘Sure. Look,’ he followed Joe McPhail’s bulky form round to the back of the lorry and watched as the roll-door rattled up noisily.
‘What’s this?’
‘Your dad says it’s damaged stock.’
‘Stop gabbing, man,’ Joe called, ‘and get on with it.’
The pine table that appeared was small and utilitarian. Lexie recognised it – it had been sitting neglected in the corner of the store for some time – but she didn’t mind its plainness, it would be perfect in the kitchen. Four chairs followed.
‘Wow. I can sit down to eat!’
A bulky sofa emerged from the van. It was a dull brown, but it looked extremely comfortable.
‘Where d’you want this?’
‘And these armchairs?’
‘Did Dad really say I can have these?’
‘No,’ Cameron muttered breathessly as he hoisted one end of the sofa into the air and backed towards the cottage door, ‘I broke in and nicked them.’
Lexie’s throat tightened. He might not voice it, but her father had found his own way of expressing his love.
‘Can you put them in the studio, down the far end?’
Cameron and Joe edged the bulky items expertly through the cottage and dropped them in place. She flopped down on a chair and splayed her arms and legs out in a pastiche of exhaustion, although in truth she felt wired to a new energy source.
‘Brilliant!’ she sighed.
‘I could get you a telly,’ Cameron said.
Lexie laughed. A television would introduce the wrong kind of energy. She liked to listen to the radio while she worked, or just enjoy the calm of the garden cottage.
‘If you want to watch rugby, Cameron Forrester, you’ll have to go down the pub. I can’t have a TV in here.’
‘I’m off out for a fag,’ said Joe. ‘You two love birds can have five minutes before we have to get on, eh?’
Lexie smiled at his retreating back. Making love with Cameron seemed so natural now.
‘Thanks for doing this, Cam,’ she said.
‘Self interest,’ he grinned as he bent to kiss her.
When she recovered her breath, she said, ‘Are you pleased? About the farm, I mean?’
‘Sure. My Uncle Hugh can be a grumpy old git, and he wasn’t best pleased when I went AWOL that time, but I guess this means he’s forgiven me. Anyway,’ his eyes became knowing, ‘he’s got no kids of his own, so I figure he’ll leave the place to me one day, if I
play my cards right. Maybe time to settle down, eh?’ His grin widened.
‘Put the lassie down, Cameron, you don’t know where she’s been,’ Joe shouted from outside.
Cameron edged towards the door.
‘I’ll be round tonight, huh? Fancy something Indian? I can bring a curry.’
‘Great. See you later.’
She intended to start work, but not long after Cameron left, Molly appeared, carrying two large hessian bags.
‘There was a wedding yesterday, they over-catered. There was loads of chicken casserole and strawberry pavlova left. I’ve put them in plastic containers, see?’
She opened the bags for Lexie to inspect.
‘Yum, I’ll put it in the fridge. Look what Cameron arrived with this morning, by the way.’
‘It’s really looking like home,’ Molly said, admiring the new furniture. ‘Any more shoes?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Lexie picked up a sheet that was draped over something by the back wall and revealed a stack of shoeboxes. She opened one at random and handed the box to Molly.
‘God, what are these?’
She picked up an old boot, so battered that its sole was hanging half off. ‘Yuk.’
‘No, listen.’ Lexie read the note in the box. ‘They’re Flying Officer’s boots from the second world war. The guy’s written, “I was still in training, on an old Gypsy Moth. We were practising spinning, and recovering from the spin. I stamped hard on the rudder pedal, the Moth was spinning to the earth, then I realised that the sole of my flying boot had jammed between the rudder bar and the side of the cockpit. Talk about panic! I managed to wrench it free just in time”.’
She dropped her hand and smiled at Molly.
‘Does that make you feel differently about them?’
Molly looked at the boot now with interest.
‘Wow. I see what you mean. It’s a great story. Makes you think about what those poor guys went through.’
‘That’s it. That’s it exactly. It’s about the stories of people’s lives.’
Lexie dropped the note back into the box and closed it.