by Lucy Dillon
‘How long can you stay?’ he asks casually. ‘I remember you said the other night that you’d never had a proper curry. I’d love to take you to this great Nepalese place we go to a lot – if you’ve got time . . .’
Naomi taps her watch, and points to her copy of Romeo and Juliet, their A-level set text, then at the clock.
11.35 a.m. Suddenly the time seems meaningless.
‘That’d be amazing,’ says Gina. ‘I’m not very good with spices, though. My mum thinks garlic’s a gateway to all sorts of trouble.’
He laughs, a charming, inviting sound, right in her ear. The corners of her soul curl up, tingling with anticipation.
‘We. Are. Going. To. Be. Late,’ Naomi hisses. ‘It’s Psycho Marshall.’
Gina sighs and reaches forward with a finger to tap Naomi’s set text. Romeo and Juliet. Then she points at herself and swoons.
‘I’ll say you’re having lady troubles,’ Naomi whispers, and leaves her to it.
Gina’s project-management company, Stone Green, was based in a converted warehouse overlooking the Longhampton canal. She had the smallest office, just one large room full of her mood boards and two old maps of the area on the bare brick wall, but it had the best windows, stretching around two sides of the room.
On a good day she could sit and watch the tawny ducks with their strings of ducklings weave along the bank, battling stoically against the wind. On a less than good day she could gaze down at the iron-grey water and wonder how many shopping trolleys had passed under the bridge since the last barge had cruised through in 1934.
Whatever the weather, Gina liked staring out of the long window at the leisurely ripples of the water. When she had awkward phone calls to make to the planning department about her clients’ projects, and five different tradesmen’s diaries to mesh together, and frazzled homeowners to calm down, the canal put things in perspective: winter came and went, the ducks always returned. Something about the shapes picked out in the brickwork on the opposite bank made her feel better, too: there was no need for the ornamental work there, not on an industrial canal, but some Victorian architect had clearly thought it worth doing. When the flat grey water mirrored the pale diamonds, Gina found the energy to chase up the most tedious final details. One day they might matter too.
A month after she’d been made redundant by the council, Gina had taken a year’s lease on the office and set up on her own as a freelance project manager for renovations like the one she’d organised on her own house. She’d dealt with enough confused applicants drowning in paperwork (usually the wrong paperwork) to know that there were people out there willing to pay someone else to handle planning applications, as well as hunt down double-booked plumbers and translate builder-ese into something understandable.
Her first job, via a recommendation from a colleague in the planning department, had been co-ordinating a barn conversion in Much Larton for a young family. The eco-barn had featured in a house-building magazine, and since then, a steady stream of work had come her way, mainly via the builders she’d used herself, none of whom particularly enjoyed dealing direct with inexperienced clients. The office had been Stuart’s idea. When she’d signed the unit-rental contract, Gina had immediately felt a lurch of terror and pride that she hadn’t had when she’d signed the wedding register or the mortgage agreement for her own house. This was hers. Her vision, her responsibility.
Downstairs, there was a communal kitchen area with a microwave, a kettle and a cupboard for mugs next to a noticeboard that occasionally had a handwritten note about items for sale. As the year wore on, Gina got to know the others in the units above and below: Sara the wedding planner, Josh and Tom, the web designers, David the tax accountant. They shared a nervy camaraderie, joking as the kettle boiled about the madness of setting up on their own in a recession. Sara was a brisk networker and chair of Longhampton Women In Business; she had organised a Christmas party at the pizza place nearby, and after a few glasses of wine, Gina had gazed at her random office-mates with real affection. They were all loners like her, escapees from bigger workplaces where they had never quite fitted in. But she drew the line at joining the pub quiz team Sara set up. After the constant hum of speculation about everyone and everything that had buzzed round the planning department, she liked the sense of being almost in an office but not quite.
If I were going back into Planning now, she thought, as she let herself into the foyer with her swipe card for the first time since she’d moved into her new flat, they’d be like lemmings peering over their cubicles trying to work out what was wrong that I’d had to have time off work. There’d be a sweepstake on how long I had to live by lunchtime.
Gina pushed open the door to the kitchen, thankful that she didn’t have to run the gamut of what she’d called the Coffee Coven back at the council, particularly Sheila the office manager and her ‘Are you okay, hon?’ eagle eyes that never missed an absent engagement ring or blood-test plaster. Naomi had told her to ignore the murmurs in the kitchen when she’d first returned after her sick leave, but she couldn’t: once you were labelled, that was it. You weren’t you, you were the Thing That You’d Done. She was the Cancer Survivor. It could have been worse: her old colleague Roger was Mr Thai Bride, even though Ling, his wife, was actually from Wolverhampton.
She’d come in early this morning, but from the faint sound of Radio 1 in the unit above, the web designers had beaten her. Gina opened the crockery cupboard and lifted the jute bag full of mugs onto the counter. She hadn’t told Naomi the whole truth about her mug purge: yes, she’d given a lot to the charity shops, but there had been some she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. Fifteen, in total, sitting in mug limbo under the sink.
Gina didn’t intentionally collect mugs, just as she didn’t intentionally collect scarves, or wooden spoons, but there was something about them that she couldn’t resist. They were like postcards, keeping a reminder of happy times in her everyday life: the ‘I ª NY’ mug from her first trip there with Naomi, the Oxford University mug, the Love and Kisses cup that had been her first Valentine’s present from Stuart. Echoes of her old life that were too personal to spot, unwanted, on the shelves in the Oxfam shop but too personal to keep in her new flat, reminding her of what she’d lost.
Gina lined them up in the crockery cupboard, and stood back. To her surprise, they already felt a bit less personal. They looked . . . random. She frowned. A bit ugly.
As she stared at their jarring colours and slogans, something slowly loosened its grip on her heart. Once David had made his newest client a coffee in the ‘I ª NY’ mug, she wouldn’t own it any more. It wouldn’t mean she and Naomi hadn’t been there, that they hadn’t clutched each other in fits of giggles at the gusts of hot air from the subway, and at the fire hydrants and yellow cabs, everything just like the movies. Gina remembered the giddiness of that long weekend with a sudden pang; there’d never be another trip like the ones she and Naomi had made in their carefree, careless twenties. That time had gone.
There was a commotion outside the kitchen window as a man and his dog jogged past on the towpath. The little white terrier set the ducks quacking on the canal, its joyful barks ricocheting off the red-brick walls.
Gina peered out to check her duck family were OK, and when she turned back to the cupboard, it was as if the mugs had always been there in the office. A collection of random office mugs. Familiar, friendly. Someone else’s. She took a deep breath, and felt another piece of her past floating away. She wouldn’t miss this one.
The faint lightness of a good mood crept around her, as she pinned her list of kitchen gadgets for sale (most of her wedding list) to the noticeboard, then went upstairs to start the first Monday of her new life.
The morning sun streamed in an uplifting lemony wash through the tall warehouse window on the landing, but there were only four letters and a lot of junk mail in the pigeonhole outside her door, which put a dampener on Gina’s mood.
She was trying not to worry but
January had been quiet. There’d been the usual burst of activity before Christmas, mainly wives calling her at the end of their tether, determined to get unfinished DIY projects tidied away before the family arrived, but apart from some conversations about a listed-building renovation in Rosehill that sounded problematic already, Gina didn’t have much lined up. She hadn’t had the energy to chase leads as she’d done in the autumn, when work was the only thing that blotted out the growing sense of impending doom that swamped her the second she put her key in the door at Dryden Road at the end of each day. So far Gina’s diary for February contained only the pencilled dates of her meetings with her solicitor, and a project Naomi had commissioned before Christmas – a timber outhouse for their garden that would be half a playhouse for Willow and half a man-house for Jason, their joint birthday present in April. The file on that was already half as thick as a finished project, thanks to Naomi’s very specific instructions.
Gina sorted through her in-tray, filed her receipts for the previous week, then turned to the paperwork she’d brought from home. There were some letters that were better dealt with here than in her new place. She had started to feel quite protective of her fresh white nest, and its growing clear spaces.
The envelope was franked with the name of the other big firm of solicitors in Longhampton, the one she wasn’t using. Gina took a deep breath and opened it. It ran to several pages, three of which were checklists. Stuart, it seemed, had changed his mind about ‘keeping things amicable’ and was now going for the sort of forensic examination of their joint finances usually conducted by the meaner outposts of HM Revenue and Customs.
Gina blinked in dismay at the pages, unable to reconcile this man with the soppy new boyfriend who’d surprised her with the Love and Kisses mug. Thank God I don’t have to look at that any more, she thought. Before the memory of the rose petals that had filled it swam into proper focus, the phone rang.
She grabbed it, relieved. ‘Hello, Stone Green Project Management—’
‘Good morning. Am I speaking to Gina Horsfield?’ It was a woman’s voice. She sounded pleasant but no nonsense, and Gina hoped this wasn’t anything to do with her last tax return.
‘Yes.’ She shoved the letter under a catalogue from a stationery supplier so she wouldn’t have to be reminded of Stuart’s demands to see her pension provision, then something made her add, ‘It’s actually Gina Bellamy.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry? I’m looking at your feature here online and it says Gina Horsfield.’
From that, Gina knew there were two possible online features the caller could have been looking at. One was the interiors spread featuring an unusually tidy Dryden Road, showcasing her ‘faithful but very personal renovation of a four-bedroom Victorian family home’, Stuart in crisp chinos, her in a polka-dot pinny. The cats standing in for the ‘family’. The other was the eco-barn. Gina sort of hoped they’d be discussing the barn. ‘Yes, well, it was then. It’s Bellamy now.’ She made an ‘argh’ face at the window. That didn’t sound right either. Gina Bellamy had plaits, or a student-union pint glass in her hand. But, then, she’d only been Gina Bellamy since she was eleven when Terry had formally adopted her. Maybe she should go right back to Gina Pritchard now. But who was Gina Pritchard? She barely knew who Huw Pritchard had been.
A sudden swaying sensation rushed through her, a feeling of being unattached to anything.
‘Still Stone Green, though! How can I help you?’ she asked quickly.
‘I’m looking for a project manager to help me with a renovation in your area. My name’s Amanda Rowntree, I’ve just been looking at your house in 25 Dream Homes, and it’s really lovely.’ There was the sound of a mouse clicking. ‘Definitely a dream home. And no hand-stitched bunting in sight, which is a plus.’
Gina’s heart sank. It was Dryden Road. She made herself think positively about it: it had been a lovely place. ‘Thank you. I’m not a big fan of bunting.’
‘And I like the way you’ve brought out the period features but at the same time not made it look . . . cutesy. It actually looks like a real person lives there, not Miss Marple or Jane Austen or someone.’ More clicking. ‘The kitchen’s great. Is it Fired Earth?’
‘No, it was made specially for us by a local carpenter.’ Gina tried not to think about her soft-closing tulipwood cabinets, her butcher’s block. ‘I designed it myself with him. We worked out exactly how far I needed to reach from the oven to those handmade cooling racks for cakes and roasts. It’s not that much more expensive to get things exactly as you want them, and details are what make it your house, in the end.’
‘Perfect. That’s just what I wanted to hear. I need someone with a good eye for detail because ours is going to be a big renovation, and I’m not going to be able to spend as much time as I want on site, unfortunately.’
‘That’s not a problem,’ said Gina. ‘I’m a bit of a detail freak. I named my company after my favourite paint shade in that house. The pantry?’
‘Did you? Ah, I see the one you mean. Nice. Well, to be honest, the décor’s the least of our problems at the moment.’ Amanda was starting to sound a little more relaxed. ‘We bought the property several months ago and, what with one thing or another, we’ve only just got the plans back from the architect and it looks like it’s going to be more complicated than we initially thought.’
‘It’s listed?’ Gina started flipping through the various local properties that fell under that heading. There were a handful of big houses, mostly in the leafy outskirts of Longhampton, but they didn’t come on the market often. Ashington Hall? The Dower House?
‘How did you know? Yes, it is. Grade Two.’
‘Oh. Well, that will make things more complicated. The preservation element can get a bit tricky, but it’s very rewarding in the end. Listed buildings are full of stories – you’re not just buying a house, you’re living in a little moment of history.’
‘Have you had much experience with them?’
‘Yes, I’ve project-managed several listed renovations for clients who felt they needed some extra support with the red tape. And actually, I used to work on the other side of the fence, as it were, in the council planning department.’
There was a long groan at the other end, which told Gina exactly where Amanda had got to already with her application: the Listed Building Consent form.
‘No, don’t panic! I’ve always felt quite strongly that houses are supposed to be lived in, whatever their age,’ she went on. ‘You can’t create museums, you’ve got to work out ways of supporting them as living spaces. Old houses can be surprisingly robust. The fact that they’re still standing says a lot.’
She meant it too. There’d been plenty of snippy inter-departmental emails between her boss, Ray, and the conservation officers, about which was more important: the building or the human beings living in it. Gina had always tried to find ways to keep everyone happy. Secretly, she’d been on the side of the houses, but not for the same reasons as the conservation purists. Houses without people in them felt lonely to her. Humans were the blood moving around their rooms, the air in their chimneys, the sound of laughter and conversation in their halls. What was the point of keeping them intact but lifeless?
Amanda Rowntree made a hmm noise. ‘Well, this one doesn’t seem that robust. It’s going to need a lot of work, according to the architect.’
‘They all say that. Have you engaged a builder yet?’
‘No. No, my architect’s in London but I thought it’d be a good idea to get local builders and a local project manager. You know the reliable tradesmen and you’d co-ordinate them so it’s as efficient as possible. And it’s nice to have that continuity within the house. Local craftsmen and materials and so on.’
‘It is,’ agreed Gina. They’d probably also be cheaper than a team of London trades. Amanda didn’t sound like the kind of owner who’d have missed that advantage. She pulled out her day book and opened it to a fresh page, her mood lifting with the prospect of a decent pr
oject. This was karma, rewarding her mug sacrifice with some work. ‘So tell me more about the house. What period is it?’
‘It’s a mish-mash. Some Georgian, some Victorian. Some maybe older. Seven bedrooms, not enough bathrooms, some nice outbuildings, which we’re hoping to get planning permission to convert into a studio for my husband . . .’
‘Recording studio?’
‘No, he’s a photographer.’
‘Oh, really? How interesting.’
‘Mm.’ Amanda brushed over it before Gina could ask what kind of photography. Obviously it wasn’t that interesting in the circles she moved in. ‘Anyway, he’ll be there most of the time to oversee the work, answer questions, and so on. I’m based in London but I’m abroad a lot, and my diary is really hectic for the rest of this year. Obviously I want to be as involved as I can be but . . .’ Her voice trailed off as if this required no further explanation.
‘Well, sometimes it’s better to be off site while it’s chaotic,’ said Gina. ‘You can keep in touch with Skype and FaceTime . . .’
‘No, I mean it’s more that I’m busy than not in the country,’ said Amanda. ‘I can’t leave meetings to make decisions about electrical sockets. I need someone I can rely on to do that for me.’
Not the husband? Maybe he was the sort of arty photographer who didn’t get involved in electrical sockets. Or maybe he was too busy as well. Gina pushed it to one side: it was a mistake to pre-judge clients. ‘I think the best thing is for us to have a meeting at the property so I can get a sense of what you’re aiming to achieve,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a look at my website, but I can send you some more details of other projects I’ve worked on, if you’d like to see what experience I’ve got with similar houses.’
‘That would be great. I’m going to be back in Longhampton on . . .’ more clicking, and a muffled hand-over-phone instruction to an assistant ‘. . . on Thursday morning to meet the conservation officer for some – what he calls – guidance.’ There was a pause and when Amanda spoke again she sounded almost despairing. ‘Just for my own information . . . Do they treat everyone as if you’re about to bulldoze the house and build a car park over the top?’