Kate's Progress

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  But at last they drove over the first bridge (‘That’s the Elder Bridge,’ John said helpfully), turned sharp right, and reached the crossroads and the second bridge (‘The Burr Bridge’), and there they were, in the heart of the village. There were the handsome stone-built houses, clustered around the scrap of green she remembered so well, with the red telephone box and the bench where you could sit and look at the burling river while you ate your ice-cream.

  Next to the green was the same old tin-roofed garage with its single petrol pump outside – did they still sell petrol? The square tower of the church poked up beyond the houses down the left arm of the crossroads, backed by the woods that rose up to the skyline. The two pubs, the Blue Ball and the Royal Oak, faced each other across the wider of the two roads which, having sprung over the Burr Bridge, curved round the flank of the hill and wandered off, up over the high moors towards Exford.

  Kate ran down her window and stuck her head out. She could smell the damp woods and the green freshness. She could hear wood pigeons and jackdaws, and the muted roar of the weir that held back the Elder waters for the mill, which was down the right arm of the crossroads, and even in her day had been converted to a private dwelling. As they stopped at the crossroads while John consulted the map, they were not holding up the traffic because there wasn’t any: they were the only car in sight that was not parked. A girl on a bay horse clattered past them, giving them a curious look, and turned left. Kate stared at the pretty jumble of houses and knew she had lost her heart. It seemed unchanged since her childhood, and how many places could you say that about?

  ‘Right,’ said John, and he put the map aside, and drove on. They went along the Exford road and turned left at the first turning past the Royal Oak, called School Lane. The school was still there, a Victorian, red-brick, ecclesiastical kind of building which was now obviously a private house. Beyond that the road sloped steeply up, with small houses and cottages on either side, and at the top, John stopped alongside the three-foot-high stone wall on their left. Behind it was the cottage.

  Here the road ended in a T-junction with a track, on the other side of which were the open moors. Kate got out of the car, drew in a deep lungful of the air, clean and sharp and with a brown hint of peat in it. She stared across the track at the expanse of heather and bracken rollicking away for miles and miles, all the way to the sky, heard the profound silence under the small nearby sounds, and felt she would never be able to tear herself away from this place.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell us where you were going?’ Jess complained from the kitchen where she was making cheese on toast. ‘We could have come with you.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you about my plan in case you thought I was crazy.’

  ‘We do think you’re crazy,’ Laura assured her kindly. ‘We won’t think it any less for not having seen the place. Don’t you see, as it is our imaginations have been left to run wild.’

  ‘Yes, we really need to inspect the place,’ Jess agreed.

  ‘To make sure you’re not being rooked,’ Laura concluded.

  Kate laughed. ‘I may take that from you – but from Jess, who thought the really cheap Prada bag on that market stall might be genuine?’

  ‘You never let go of that one,’ Jess complained, coming in with the tray. ‘I didn’t buy it, did I?’

  ‘Only because we wouldn’t let you.’

  ‘But it was pretty. It would have gone so well with my new coat.’

  ‘Not at that price.’

  ‘You just said it was cheap.’

  ‘Not cheap enough.’

  Jess plonked the tray down on the coffee table. Three plates of toasted cheese and three mugs of hot chocolate threaded their smells into the warm air, a bulwark against the cold wet evening outside. ‘So tell us,’ she said, ‘all the details. I hope you took photos?’

  ‘I did, but they’ll only depress you. It isn’t very pretty – not cute and picturesque.’

  The large garden was overgrown – well, that was probably an understatement. It was a horribleness of brambles and nettles, ivy and convolvulus, through which the occasional plant thrust forlornly, begging for rescue. The cottage was square and plain, with the maroon paint peeling from the filthy, cobwebbed windows, and grass sprouting from the gutters. But it was at least stone-built.

  ‘And the roof is sound,’ Kate said quickly at this point in her exposition. That had been a major relief to her. ‘In fact, all the fabric is sound, though the chimney probably wants repointing. But that’s not a big job, just painstaking. I can do that.’

  ‘You can? How come?’ Jess said, sinking her teeth into the first slice.

  ‘My dad’s a builder. I thought I’d told you that.’

  Jess waved a hand. ‘It doesn’t follow,’ she said indistinctly.

  ‘Well, it was pretty tough for him, having five daughters and no son, and I was the tomboy of the family, so he took me with him and taught me stuff. I used to help him on Saturdays and school holidays. I can do it all, pretty much.’

  ‘She did manage to put those flat-pack bookshelves from Ikea together,’ Jess remarked to Lauren.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ Kate said. ‘I can lay bricks, point, hang wallpaper, glaze a window if it’s not too big. I’m a fair hand at carpentry. I’m not brilliant at plastering, but these days there’s plasterboard. And I don’t do plumbing. Dad always said, don’t mess about with water if you don’t know what you’re doing. He’ll do everything but that. He says if you get the electrics wrong, the worst thing you can do is kill yourself, but get the plumbing wrong and you can ruin the whole house.’

  Lauren looked amused. ‘So you can do the electrics as well?’

  ‘Well, I could,’ Kate said, ‘but I probably wouldn’t.’

  ‘So how bad is this house?’ Lauren went on. ‘How much is there to do?’

  ‘It looks pretty bad when you step in, but mostly it’s just grottiness.’ She remembered the horrible patterned wallpaper, marked with use and scuffed right through here and there, where the old lady had scraped her Zimmer frame in later days; the paintwork clogged with lumpy old layers, the last of which was a depressing maroon; the cracked panes in the cobwebbed windows; the chipped and warped architraves; the doors which had been clumsily hard-boarded over in the days when that was the fashion, with cheap’n’nasty chrome handles with the chrome peeling off. The ceilings were so stained with age and smoke that they were practically mahogany. Two of the floorboards needed replacing. The kitchen was furnished with horrible old melamine units from early eighties, and the bathroom suite dated from the same period, and was in the shade known then as avocado, though what with stains and limescale the colour didn’t exactly shine through.

  ‘So it has got a bathroom,’ Lauren said, the relief evident in her voice. ‘I was imagining you having to fill a tin bath with a kettle, and going down the garden for the whatnot.’

  ‘Actually, there is a whatnot down the garden,’ Kate said. ‘I suppose it saved old Mr Brown coming indoors in his muddy boots when he was working. It’s a little, narrow wooden hut like the guards’ huts outside Buckingham Palace. Only with a door, of course.’

  Jess made a sympathetic face. ‘Did it smell terrible?’

  ‘Actually, it didn’t smell at all. No-one’s used it for years. And there’s a rambling rose growing over it – I expect it’ll look quite pretty in the summer. I’m looking forward to using it, with the door open – there’s a fine view of the moors from there.’

  ‘Kate!’

  ‘Why not? Don’t be such a townie! There were still squares of newspaper threaded on a string hanging in there,’ she added. ‘The Daily Mail. April 2000. Rather poignant, really. Mrs B obviously preferred to go indoors.’

  Doggedly, Lauren got back to the point. ‘But there is a bathroom, with mains drainage?’

  ‘Yes, and mains water and electricity. No gas, of course, but you can’t have everything.’

  Downstairs, the front door opened directly into the
living room, with the stairs in it, directly opposite the door on the left – an arrangement quite common in the area. Behind that was the kitchen, and at the back there was an open-fronted lean-to with a corrugated roof, in which was stored the remains of a log-pile and some old junk and a few tools.

  Upstairs there was a bedroom on the mezzanine floor over the kitchen, which had been converted into the bathroom, and up a further half flight of stairs were two more bedrooms, a decent-sized one over the sitting room and a tiny one in between.

  Kate said, ‘My plan is to knock out two-thirds of the wall between the sitting room and the kitchen, and make the downstairs semi open plan, so as to get some more light in, and more of a feeling of space.’

  ‘Can you do that?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, it isn’t load-bearing,’ Kate answered.

  ‘I think she means, do you know how to?’ Lauren said.

  ‘Nothing to it. It’s only lath and plaster. You can cut through that with a kitchen knife.’

  ‘Why only two-thirds?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Because you need some wall in the kitchen to put units against. And I think it’ll look better than completely open plan – cosier. I’m imagining a nice dresser on the sitting room side, with pretty plates on it.’

  ‘What else? I mean, what else will you do?’ Jess said.

  ‘Well, other than that, it’s pretty much just decorating. Stripping everything out, making good, repainting. Take the hardboard off the doors – if they’re panelled underneath, they’ll look brilliant. I’ll rub them down and wax them, new handles. Replace a couple of floorboards, and some bits of architrave. New kitchen and bathroom. Et voila!’

  ‘Oh, that’s all, is it?’ Lauren said drily. ‘You’ll fit the kitchen and bathroom yourself, of course.’

  ‘No, I’ll get someone in for that. I could fit the kitchen units, but there’s the electrics and plumbing to think of, and—’

  ‘—your dad said never mess around with water.’

  ‘And then what?’ Lauren asked. ‘When you’ve done it all up?’

  ‘Sell it,’ Kate said blithely. ‘At a profit. And come back to London having purged my soul of misery with honest hard work and a sense of achievement. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s certainly a plan,’ Lauren said, in the tone of voice that doubted what sort of a plan it was, whether lunatic or merely half-baked. ‘But, Kate, you’ve only got a hundred and twenty-five thou.’

  ‘I never thought to hear anyone call that “only”,’ Jess murmured.

  Lauren waved the interruption away. ‘How long will all this take? And what will you live on while you’re doing it?’

  ‘I’ve got it all worked out,’ Kate said. ‘Do you think I’d dare to face you without having thought it through? You’d chop me into little bits.’

  ‘Someone’s got to have sense in this house. The two of you are about as level-headed as a pair of puppies with a carpet slipper.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered why it was called a carpet slipper,’ Kate said. ‘It’s not made of carpet.’

  ‘Stop being evasive. Answer the question.’

  ‘I will,’ said Kate. ‘The place is pretty grotty-looking, and John from the estate agent says the owners want a quick sale and will drop the price, especially as I’ve got no chain. He thinks they’ll go for one-oh-two-nine-fifty. If I allow five thousand each for a bathroom and kitchen, couple of thou for materials, couple more for contingencies, that leaves me eight thousand to live on. I reckon I can do it easily in six months.’

  ‘Can you live for six months on eight thousand?’ Jess said doubtfully. ‘It doesn’t sound like much. It isn’t half of your present salary.’

  ‘But you have to remember that’s deduction-free. Eight thousand take-home pay. And I don’t suppose there’ll be much to spend it on down there.’

  ‘Except the cottage. I think you’ll find all sorts of extras coming up once you start,’ Lauren said.

  ‘Well, if I find myself running out, I can always get myself an evening job as a barmaid or a waitress. There’ll be lots of jobs like that once the season starts. But at the end of it, I’ll have had my adventure, got the restlessness out of my system, had time to think about what I want to do with my life – and best of all, I’ll have something to tell Gaga, an adventure. Oh, and I’ll end up with a profit. John says once it’s done up it ought to sell as a holiday cottage for a hundred and thirty-nine thousand, easily. More, if the market’s picked up by then.’

  They all thought about it, in a silence punctuated only by the crunching of toast and the sipping of chocolate. Kate was pretending insouciance, but she was worried about what Lauren would say. Not that she would be prevented from doing what she wanted by her opinion, but Lauren was the level-headed one, and if she thought the whole thing was nuts, it would plant an uneasy seed of doubt in Kate’s mind. And she didn’t want to doubt herself. She wanted to do this. Bursford called to her from the recesses of her mind like a siren song. She wanted the peace, a complete break in lovely surroundings, and the satisfaction of saving that ugly little cottage: the Cinderella project – wasn’t that always irresistible? She knew she could do it: she had the skills – disasters excepted. And she knew Gaga would approve, not because it was a sound investment, but because it would be fun.

  Lauren spoke. ‘Well, I can’t see that it will be much fun,’ she said, uncannily picking up Kate’s thought, ‘living in a dirty old cottage, surrounded by rubbish, dust everywhere, nowhere clean to relax after the day’s work, grinding away day after day at the same old job – and all alone. And I think, as I said, you’ll find all sorts of extras you haven’t budgeted for.’

  ‘We’ve all watched those restoration programmes on the telly,’ Kate said. ‘But you haven’t seen it – it’s so small, there’s really nothing to uncover. Everything’s in plain view. And you can’t not do something because of what might happen. That way you’d never do anything.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Lauren said, ‘that at worst, all you can do is lose everything. And since you believe you’ve lost everything already …’

  Kate grinned. ‘You approve!’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. But if it worked out the way you hope, you’d have gained valuable life experience—’

  ‘And a few valuable thousand on the way,’ Jess finished for her. ‘Hooray for Kate, the Sarah Beeny of Crouch Hill!’

  They were both smiling at her. ‘You guys!’ she said gratefully. ‘That’s the worst thing, really, having to leave you two.’

  ‘Only for six months,’ said Jess. ‘And we’ll come down and visit you. Maybe not stay in the cottage,’ she added hastily, ‘but there must be B&Bs in the area.’

  ‘Bound to be,’ Kate said. ‘But it’ll be more than a six month separation, because I’ll have to give up my share of the flat.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jess, suddenly realizing.

  ‘I couldn’t afford the rent here as well,’ Kate said sadly, ‘and you couldn’t manage with just the two of you, so you’ll have to replace me.’

  ‘And then there’s your job!’ Jess cried. ‘Your lovely job! You’ll have to give it up.’

  Kate had thought about that. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame. But I expect I can get another when I come back. PR’s about the one sector that’s always expanding.’

  Lauren had been thoughtful. ‘I can’t answer for your job,’ she said, ‘but I may be able to ease the pain a bit over the flat.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do you remember Marta, the Dutch woman I found a place for last year?’ Lauren worked as a freelance relocation agent.

  ‘Of course,’ Kate said. ‘She was a blast.’

  ‘I always said it was a waste finding her a flat,’ Jess said, ‘because she seemed to spend more of her spare time here than at home.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Lauren, ‘and I had a message from her last week that she’s coming over again in April for six months, asking me to keep an eye out fo
r a place for her. I’d be willing to bet she’d be just as happy taking over your share of the flat as being in one on her own. Anyway, I can but ask her.’

  ‘But that would be brilliant!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘Then I could come back here afterwards.’

  ‘It’s as though it’s meant,’ breathed Jess, who could be a bit fey at times.

  ‘You’d have to clear everything out of your room,’ Lauren warned. ‘And we’d have to have a grand clean and tidy up of everything. Hotel standards, you know.’ She looked at Kate thoughtfully. ‘And who knows how you’ll feel at the end of six months? You might not want to come back.’

  ‘I shall,’ Kate said firmly.

  ‘But at least it gives you the option,’ Lauren finished, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  After that, things seemed to move really fast. Kate telephoned the estate agents, and the next day they came back to say the owner had accepted the offer. ‘It helps that it was cash,’ John said. ‘They’re keen on a quick sale, so the sooner we can complete the better – assuming that’s what you want.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kate said. ‘I want to get on with it as quickly as possible.’

  Lauren contacted Marta, who was delighted with the idea of sharing the flat. It meant that Kate now had a firm date for moving out, which would be awkward if she couldn’t get into the house in time: it looked like being a close shave, one way or the other, and she might find herself looking for a sofa to sleep on, and a garage to store her stuff.

  But there was good news on the job front. She explained the situation to her boss, Ben, when she handed in her notice, and he was flatteringly dismayed that she was going. ‘I know you’ve had a bad love affair,’ he said. The office was very chummy and everyone knew everyone else’s business. And besides, the PR world was a small one. ‘And I have offered to go and punch that bastard’s lights out for you.’