He moved, surefooted, through the trees with another armful, to where the woodland opened on to the road. People often went back to the old ways, and it was no different with coppicing. Big money in garden furniture, Frank had said earlier that morning, observing Byron working. Or rustic fencing. They loved that in the garden centres now. Any leftovers you could use for charcoal. There were grants available to pay for restoring coppice woodland. All the wildlife trusts were pushing landowners to do it.
Occasionally, he thought of Matt, and tension crept into his neck and shoulders, his jaw clenched, and he would have to breathe deeply. Matt McCarthy had almost driven him away from his home, almost driven Isabel from hers. He had wondered several times whether to tell her about the rat, about Matt's ruthlessness when it came to getting what he wanted. But she had been so happy the previous day, as if she were finally daring to believe in something good. He hadn't wanted to spoil it for her. His mobile rang.
'It's Isabel.'
'Hi,' he said, unable to disguise his pleasure at hearing her voice. And then again, trying to moderate it, 'Hi.'
'I wondered how it was going. Your work, I mean.' She paused. 'Thierry asked me to ring.'
'Doing well.' He glanced at the area of brambles he had cleared. 'Hard work, but . . . good.' His hands were criss-crossed with scratches.
'Yes.'
'It's nice up here. Near the sea. Feels more like a holiday than work.'
'I'm sure.'
'And Frank, the owner, he's been great. He's offered me more work.'
'Oh . . . Wonderful.'
'Yeah. I was pleased. How's it going with you?'
It was then that he realised she sounded strained. He had watched three cars go by before she spoke again.
'I didn't know whether to tell you this but we - we've had a bit of a scene. A man came, some kind of property developer, who wants to buy the house. Matt turned up unexpectedly and picked a fight with him.'
'Are you okay?'
'Yes, we're fine. The developer man took a punch, but then Laura turned up and it cooled down.' Then she added quietly, 'Byron, I think Matt's having some kind of breakdown.'
'Matt McCarthy?'
'He - he's not himself.'
Byron said nothing.
'In fact, he seems almost . . . disturbed.'
I bet he does, thought Byron, bitterly. The idea of someone else taking that house from him. 'Don't worry about him,' he said, more harshly than he intended. 'He'll always look after himself.'
She sighed. 'That's pretty well what the man said.'
He began to walk slowly along the edge of the wood, now oblivious to his surroundings. 'What did you say to the developer?'
'I didn't know what to say. I don't know what to think any more. He told me . . . that Matt has been damaging the house, trying to get me out.'
Byron closed his eyes.
'After you'd gone he knocked a big hole in the bedroom wall. The one you've been staying in.'
His chest felt tight. He shouldn't have left them. He should have warned her, made her listen. He should have stopped Matt. He was crushed by guilt, by the weight of things left unsaid.
'Byron, I don't know what to do.'
'Do you have to do anything?' he said. 'You don't have to decide right now.'
'I can't live like this any more.'
It was in her voice. She had made up her mind. 'You're going to sell the house,' he said.
'What do you think I should do?'
He didn't know how to respond. He had stood by while Matt plunged her into this mess. He would always owe her, even if she chose not to see it. And what could he offer? To come back and chop logs? Skin rabbits? Live under her roof? If he did, he could never be on equal terms with her, could never give her anything but gratitude.
He swallowed hard. 'Well, I suppose it's sensible to get out before winter comes.'
There was a lengthy pause.
'Oh.'
'If that's what you think you should do.'
'I suppose you're right.' She coughed. 'How long do you think you'll be gone?'
'I don't know. Look - I was going to tell you this when I got back, but Frank thinks he might have a job for me.'
'There? A full-time job?'
The grant was enough for a man's wages, Frank had said. And there was other work besides the woodland. Byron had reminded him of his criminal record. 'That stop you wielding a saw, does it?' he said drily.
'There's a decent mobile home I can stay in. He's talking six months at least. It's a good offer.'
'I guess it is. You know . . . you could always stay with us. For as long as you want. Don't feel you have to rush off.'
'I need to support myself, Isabel. Jobs like this don't come every day.' He kicked a pebble. 'And if you're going to be moving anyway . . .'
There was another pause.
'You're definitely going to take it?'
'I think so. I can still pop by and see you all. Take Thierry out at weekends. If you want me to.' He tried to read the silence.
'Well, I'm sure he'd love to see you.'
Byron sat down on a tree stump near the flint wall that ran along the coast road. The air was tinged with salt from the sea; his eyes were suddenly sore with it.
'Will you make it back for Kitty's party?'
'I've got a fair bit to get through but I'll do my best.'
The phone went dead.
Byron took his axe and, with a grunt of fury, hurled it into the middle of the field.
Isabel put down the phone. Downstairs the children had returned from their shopping trip and had been making decorations. Now they ran on to the lawn, trailing lengths of bunting, laughing as Pepper raced off with trails of it in the gold of the setting sun.
They could be happy again, were lighter even than they had been in London. For them, an irresponsible decision had become a good one. But Isabel could not stay so close to Matt and Laura now that she knew every glance they sent towards the house was covetous, that her family's presence there would always be tainted with what the McCarthys believed they had lost.
And Matt's touch had permeated everything. The few bits of the house that the Delanceys had claimed for themselves no longer felt like theirs.
It needn't be so bad, she told herself. They could move somewhere close by so that Kitty and Thierry could remain at their schools. She could downsize to a cottage in one of the villages. It would be nice to live without debt, without having to scrabble in the earth for their food. Sometimes she wanted to laugh when she told people her address, and watched them reassess her, sometimes becoming almost deferential. Status came with living in the big house. Would you still be so nice to me if you watched me sorting weeds for the children's tea? she asked them silently. If you saw my daughter selling eggs so that we can pay the electricity bill? In a new, smaller house, growing vegetables might be a pleasant diversion rather than a necessity. She would never again have to look at a piece of plasterboard.
Isabel watched Thierry scale a tree to tie bunting from a branch. He would find leaving this place hard; the lack of a bathroom had been no great hardship to him, but to lose the freedom of the woods and Byron's friendship would be a different matter.
Perhaps Byron would still visit, although she wasn't sure. He had sounded different, now that he no longer needed them, more confident, distant, as if he had already grown away from them. Please don't hurt my son, she willed him, and ignored the possibility that she might be talking about herself.
She turned and looked at the hole in the master-bedroom wall, an ugly cavity. That great piece of nothing had frightened her more than almost anything else that had happened in the house. Its symbolism overwhelmed her, the prospect of a future with nothing, a gap where her family and security had once been.
'Oh, for God's sake, it's just a house - a bloody house,' Isabel said, into the empty room, hearing her voice bounce off the varnished floorboards. It was time to pull herself together. It was not their house. If she wa
s honest with herself, it never had been.
She hauled a large piece of plasterboard across the gap between the bedroom and the bathroom until it all but covered the hole. She fetched a drill from downstairs and screwed it neatly into place. Then she found an old framed print, a line drawing of Jose Carreras taken from some Spanish music festival, and propped it against the wall, covering the space. On the bathroom side, she tacked an old white sheet, draping it softly to suggest that there might be something beautiful behind it.
She would ring the developer and ask him his best price, then call on the local agents for second and third opinions. They would live somewhere ordinary, and their time at the Spanish House would have been a strange interlude in their lives. And she would make sure their last weeks here were perfect. Kitty's sixteenth-birthday party would be magical. It was a good decision. A sensible one.
Isabel surveyed her work with something close to satisfaction. Then she walked lightly downstairs to the kitchen, to the DIY books she had borrowed some weeks ago from Long Barton's understocked library. She had a bath to install.
A short distance away, in her garage, Laura was also making decisions about her future. She had come for the large suitcase, but had been diverted by the unexpected chaos of Matt's spare tools and had found herself tidying them. It might have been force of habit. It might have been that some part of her could not leave the house without it being in good order.
She pushed a pressure washer into the corner, and rolled two empty gas canisters out of the way of the desk that Mr Pottisworth had promised them. She gathered up the rubbish and put it into a wheelbarrow, ready for burning. Laura knew that the most effective way to ease mental chaos was with domestic activity. It took her almost two hours to clear up the worst. Then she broke off to appreciate the neatly stacked shelves, the cans of paint labelled with the rooms they had decorated in case anything needed touching up. Matt, of course, wasn't around. He had walked away, ignoring her calls, and even Anthony, angry as he was with her, had been too cautious to follow him.
'Give him time before you speak to him,' Nicholas had said. His handkerchief was almost completely sodden with blood, even though his nose was barely bruised. 'He's got a lot to take in.'
She had not attempted to call him. She had learned weeks ago that Matt no longer answered his phone.
Nicholas had left an hour earlier. They had sat in the car in the lane, and he had told her how proud he was of her. He told her how their life would be, the happiness that lay ahead. The house would be their fortune.
'Nicholas?' She focused on her hands, folded neatly in her lap. 'You didn't use me, did you, to get the inside on all this?'
He had been horrified. They stared at each other, and in that moment she saw the suspicion, the mutual deceit and mistrust that had landed them where they were. She saw a house of pain.
'You are the one honest thing I've done in my whole life,' he said.
Laura removed her rubber gloves, wiped her hands on a paper towel and walked out of the garage. She was not ready to go into the house. There, she would be reminded of everything she was about to leave, the family she was about to fracture for ever, the vows she was about to break. Silly things preoccupied her: what would she do about her family paintings? The silver that had belonged to her aunt? Would she take the most precious items with her tomorrow, in case Matt damaged them in a fit of temper? What would Nicholas think if she turned up with several cases of family heirlooms? Would removing them be an inflammatory act in itself? Matt had seemed so unlike himself. He had been so cool, so distant, when he had been doing the leaving. Now he knew that she had someone else she could not anticipate his reaction. And what would her family think? She wanted to ask Nicholas where they would live until their new home was supposedly ready, but too many questions about his house would make her sound picky, as if he himself wasn't enough for her. She hadn't even visited his London home. What if she hated it? What if she found she couldn't live in London? And what on earth would she do with Bernie? He was too old to adapt to London life, but Matt couldn't be expected to look after him. He was hardly ever at home. Should she have Bernie put down to satisfy the demands of her love life? What kind of person would that make her? When Nicholas had asked her to come and live with him, she had suspected it had felt, to him, like some grand romantic gesture. It had felt that way to her too. But if you were a nearly-forty-year-old mother with a home, a dog, school runs and a position on the village-hall committee, extricating yourself from your life wasn't just a matter of walking out of the door with a suitcase.
And as she worried over this, she found herself thinking, bitterly, This is why Matt no longer finds me attractive. Because I never could give in to passion. I am always going to be the person who hangs back, worrying about whether someone has fed the poor old dog.
Laura went back into the garage. She sorted the recycling boxes. She swept the garage floor and then her eyes settled on Mr Pottisworth's bureau. It was a tired old piece of furniture, faded walnut, with chipped veneer and handles that appeared to be far from original. She would treat it for worm, polish it and bring it inside. It would enable her to remove her own writing desk - the one her parents had given her on her eighteenth birthday - with less guilt. Matt wasn't interested in furniture anyway, unless it was too soft or not soft enough.
She pulled on her rubber gloves and scanned the shelves. Then, for the best part of an hour, with the thoroughness for which she was renowned among her friends and neighbours, Laura dismantled the Victorian bureau, carefully removing one drawer at a time, sponging it clean, then painting it slowly with woodworm treatment to ensure it was saturated, reaching far back into it. It was as she pulled out the last drawer, turning it over and laying it on top of the desk, that she saw it. Two pieces of paper, folded several times and taped haphazardly to the bottom.
Laura removed her gloves and closed the anti-woodworm treatment can, taking care not to let the noxious liquid spill on to her fingers. She peeled the tape slowly from the edges and unfolded the documents, squinting to read them in the dim light of the garage.
Laura read the first once, then again, checking the official stamp, the unfamiliar solicitor's address. Then she read it again, in duplicate. She glanced at the bonfire. Lastly she read the addition, scrawled at some later date in blue ballpoint pen. Mr Pottisworth's writing - as spiky and unreadable as he had been.
Let's see how much of a lady you really are, Mrs M. Noblesse oblige, eh?
Twenty-four
One drill, one workman's bench, one holdall with assorted metal tools that weighed almost too much for one person to lift - a jigsaw, an electric saw, two spirit levels and a tape measure. A pad, its pages indented with scrawled figures, a transistor radio, batteries missing, and one sweatshirt, its faint scent an uncomfortable reminder of something she would have preferred to forget. Isabel moved the last of these items into the hallway and wiped her dusty hands on her shorts. She would have no trace of him in this house. When the party was over she would move the items into one of the outhouses and leave a message with his wife that he could come and collect them from there.
One large ham on a wooden board, eight French sticks, a cheese platter, two silver-foil trays of mixed fruit. A cardboard box containing the ingredients for several salads, two carefully sealed boxes of marinated meat and fish, two large bowls of rice and pasta salad. One crate of assorted fruit juices, two bottles of champagne.
'Oh, my God,' breathed Kitty, as the Cousins unloaded their car. 'Is that all for us?'
'Hang on to your best compliments, sweetheart. You haven't seen the piece de resistance,' said Henry. He reached in and, from the back shelf, carefully brought out a square silver base with a vast cake. A marzipan figure with bobbed hair stood in the centre, distributing silver candy balls to little hens. 'Happy birthday, poppet.' He beamed.
'That,' breathed Kitty, 'is ace.'
'Would that be a young person's vernacular lingo?'
'I do believe sh
e likes it,' said Asad.
'I can't believe you've done this for me!'
'Well,' said Henry, walking carefully across the lawn towards the trestle table, 'everyone should have a really good sixteenth birthday party. It's all downhill from here, you know.'
Two smart outfits, two pairs of jeans, a cocktail dress and several sets of brand-new La Perla lingerie, some sensible chain-store knickers for everyday. Boots, shoes, running shoes, a silk nightdress and a new pair of pyjamas. A washbag, a hairdryer with nozzle attachment, a photograph album and four silver frames containing sepia-tinted family pictures. A jewellery roll. A silver teapot. A christening mug and a porcelain pot containing Anthony's first tooth. A folder containing investment documents, bank-account details, share certificates, her passport and driving licence. The deeds to the house, just in case. And then there had been no more room. That was it: her life, in a three-foot-by-four Samsonite suitcase.
Laura sat on it in the hallway, fiddling with her watch strap as she checked the dial for the hundredth time, her jacket across her lap. The dog lay peacefully at the end of his lead at her feet, snoring, unaware of the cataclysmic way in which his life was about to change. She leaned down and stroked his velvety head, blinking away the tears that threatened to drop on to it.
Anthony was not coming. He would be staying at his gran's, he had announced that morning.
'But I thought you were coming with me.'
'No, that's what you thought. Not what I thought.'
'But you'd love London. I told you, it'll be great. You'll have your own room and--'
'And leave my home? All my mates? No, Mum. You're talking about your life. I'm old enough to make my own choices. And I've decided to stay put.'
'You can't stay at Granny's for ever. It'll drive you mad.'