'Afternoon, Mr Firth,' said Henry, bearing the tea into the shop and letting his eyes run over Byron's dripping oilskins, his muddy boots. 'I see you've been communing with Nature. And I believe we can announce that Nature, today, is the victor.'
'Where are the handmade cards, Henry?' Asad was scanning the shelves. 'We did have some, didn't we?'
'We don't stock the ones with ages any more,' said Henry. 'All the fours and fives would go and you'd be left with a ton of elevens.'
'Ah. Here.' Asad held out a pink card, decorated with sequins. 'There was a woman who made these on the other side of town. That's the last one and the envelope is a little bent so I can give you fifty pence off, if you would like it.'
'Thanks.' Byron handed over his money, and waited as Asad put the card into a brown-paper bag. With a nod to the shop's proprietors, he tucked it inside his jacket and left. Through the steamy window it was just possible to see the elation of the dogs as their master stooped down to greet them.
Mrs Linnet had been studying labels with unusual intensity. 'Is that man gone?' she asked unnecessarily.
'Mr Firth has left the building, yes,' said Henry.
'I don't think you should be serving the likes of him. Gives me the willies, that man.'
'You wish,' murmured Henry.
'I don't believe Mr Firth's distant past has any bearing on whether we should sell him a birthday card for his niece,' said Asad. 'He has always seemed pleasant to us, if a little uncommunicative. Mrs Linnet, as a good Christian woman, I'm sure you're familiar with the notion of penitence, and forgiveness.'
'He's the thin edge of the wedge, as far as I'm concerned. Word will get out,' she said mysteriously, tapping her nose. 'We'll become a magnet for all sorts of undesirables. It'll be paediatricians next.'
Henry's eyes widened. 'Heaven forbid.'
The little bell heralded the opening of the shop door again. A girl came in, a teenager, no more than fifteen or sixteen. She was wet, but she wore no coat and wasn't carrying an umbrella. She was somewhat crumpled, as if she had been on a long journey. 'Sorry to bother you,' she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes, 'but you wouldn't happen to know where . . .' she consulted a piece of paper '. . . the Spanish House is, would you?'
There was a brief silence.
'I would indeed, dear,' said Mrs Linnet. 'You're not far at all.' She had clearly forgotten her previous trials. 'Might I ask who you're hoping to find there?'
The girl looked blank.
'Old Mr Pottisworth died recently,' Mrs Linnet explained. 'There's nobody living there now. If you're here for the funeral I'm afraid you're too late.'
'Oh, I know,' said the girl. 'We're moving in.'
'In where?' Henry was in the doorway to the back room.
'The Spanish House. This young lady's moving into the Spanish House.' Mrs Linnet could barely contain herself, given the portentousness of the news. She thrust out a hand. 'In that case we'll almost be neighbours, dear. I'm Deirdre Linnet . . .' She peered out of the steamed-up window. 'I take it you're not here on your own?'
'My mum's outside in the car with my brother. Actually, I'd better go because the removal van's waiting for us. Erm . . . where did you say it was?'
Asad gestured towards the road. 'Turn left opposite the signs for the pig farm, right at the crossroads, and then follow the track all the way down until you get to the sign marked "Cave!"'
'"Take Care,"' Henry and Mrs Linnet added helpfully in unison.
'We'll be open till five,' said Asad, 'if you need anything. And go carefully on the track. It's a bit . . . unfinished.'
The girl was scribbling on her bit of paper. 'Left pig farm, right crossroads, follow track. Thanks,' she said.
'See you again,' said Henry, handing a mug of tea to Mrs Linnet.
They watched as she disappeared into the road. Then, after a brief, barely decent delay, they scrambled to the window and wiped a viewing hole in the steam. Through it they watched the girl climb back into the passenger seat of a large, battered old Citroen. Behind it the removals van was almost blocking the lane, its windscreen wipers periodically revealing three burly men inside.
'Well, how about that?' said Henry. 'Young people in the big house.'
'She might be young,' said Mrs Linnet, reprovingly, 'but that's no excuse for the state of those shoes.'
'Shoes may be the least of her worries,' said Henry. 'I wonder what kind of welcome they'll get from the neighbours.'
Kitty sat in silence as her mother attempted to negotiate her way down the dirt track. Every now and then she would check her rear-view mirror for the removals lorry swaying precariously behind them and mutter a plea under her breath. 'Are you sure they said it was this way?' she asked Kitty, for the fourth time. 'I don't remember this track.'
'Right at the crossroads. I even wrote it down.'
The car jolted and crunched on to its front bumper as it came through another water-filled rut. Kitty heard the wheels spin briefly without purchase, the engine whining in protest, before they moved forward again. Around them the pine trees towered, blocking what remained of the afternoon light.
'I can't believe it's down here. We'll need a tractor to get out.'
Kitty was secretly glad that the track was so awful. Perhaps it might make her mother see sense about this stupid move. For weeks she had hung on to the vain hope that Isabel would admit it had been a mistake, and decide that somehow she could juggle their finances to keep them in their home. But no. She had made Kitty say goodbye to her school, to her friends, in the middle of the spring term, and head off to God only knew where. And it didn't matter what Mum said about everyone keeping in touch - she knew that once she was no longer there, swapping texts and gossiping, she would no longer exist for them. Even if she went back to visit every couple of weeks she would only ever be on the periphery, missing all the in-jokes, behind on the moment's trend.
The windscreen wipers swung back and forth with a delay and a slight creak, as if every move was an effort. A year ago today, I was happy, she thought. She had kept last year's diary, and checked everything she had done so she knew this was true. Sometimes she tortured herself with it: 'Dad picked me up from school. After dinner we played chess and I won. Neighbours was really good.' Sometimes she wondered where she would be exactly a year on. It was hard to believe they might be back in London. Harder to believe they might be happy.
Thierry, in the back, raised his earphones briefly. 'Almost there, T,' she said.
'Oh, come on, Dolores, you know you can do it.'
Kitty winced. It was so embarrassing that Mum called the car by name. Suddenly they drove out of the trees into a large clearing. 'There's a sign.' Kitty pointed.
'"Cave!"' read Isabel. 'Mmm . . . "Take care."'
'That's it,' said Kitty, relief in her voice. 'That's what they said in the shop.'
Isabel peered through the streaming windscreen. There was an orderly two-storey flint house on the left, which looked nothing like the photograph. The car crawled forward, round a tree-lined bend, and then it was before them. A red-brick house, three storeys high, its walls half covered with ivy, the roof lined with incongruous battlements. Tall windows gave out over a front garden so overgrown that only the box hedge showed where it had once ended and the wilderness began. The house was a hotch-potch of designs, as if whoever had started it had got bored, or seen a picture of something else they liked and adapted it accordingly. A flint wall led to the battlements; Georgian windows nestled against Gothic arches.
The Citroen swept into the drive and pulled up outside the front door. 'Well,' said Isabel, 'this is it, kids.'
It looked cold and damp and unwelcoming to Kitty. She thought wistfully of their Maida Vale house, with its cosy rooms, its smells of cooking, spices and perfume, the comforting mumble of the television. It's derelict, she almost said, but stopped herself. She didn't want to hurt her mother's feelings. 'Doesn't look very Spanish.'
'If I remember right, it was meant to be
Moorish. And there's the lake. I didn't remember it as big as that. Look!' Isabel had tugged a large envelope out of the glove compartment. She rummaged around in it and took out a key with a sheaf of paper. Beside the car a huge magnolia had burst into early life, its pale flowers glowing like white lanterns in the dim light.
'Now, according to the solicitor, we sold off sixty acres to pay the death duties, and twenty to put some money into our bank account. But that still leaves us seven acres to the left there . . .' The sky was darkening so it was hard to make out much beyond the trees. '. . . and to the front of the house. So we've got the whole view, the woods and the lake. Imagine that! We own almost as much land as we can see.'
Great, thought Kitty. A muddy pond with a scary forest. Haven't you seen any horror movies lately?
'You know, if Granny was still alive it would have gone to her. He was her brother. Can you imagine her living in a house like this? After her tiny flat?'
Kitty thought she couldn't see anyone living in a house like this.
'That water. Oh . . . it's magical. Daddy would have loved the lake - he could have gone fishing . . .' Isabel trailed off.
'Mum, he never went fishing in his whole life,' Kitty said, gathering up the rubbish bag by her feet. 'We'd better get out. The removals men are here.'
Thierry pointed towards the trees.
'Good idea, darling. You have a scout round outside.' Kitty could tell her mother was glad that Thierry had shown any interest at all. 'What about you, lovey? Do you want to explore too?'
'I'll help you get organised,' said Kitty. 'Thierry, put your coat on, and don't get lost in the woods.' The slam of the car doors echoed round the little valley as they tramped across the wet gravel to the front door.
The smell hit them first, the cold, musty odour of long neglect; subtle hints of hidden mould, exposed damp and wet rot mingled with the fresher air of outside. A holdall slung over her shoulder, Kitty let the stench seep into her nostrils with a mixture of appalled fascination and disbelief.
This was worse than she could possibly have imagined. The hallway was floored in cracked lino, patches of which had worn away to reveal an indeterminate surface underneath. Through an open door she could make out a front room, whose walls were covered with a print that looked as if it dated from the Victorian era, and a rickety painted sideboard of the sort found in a 1950s kitchen. Two windows appeared to have been broken and boarded up, half blocking out the daylight. From the ceiling a wire hung without a fitting, let alone a bulb.
It didn't look like a house one could reasonably live in. It didn't look like a house that had ever been lived in. Now she'll see, Kitty thought. She'll have to take us home. There's no way we can stay here.
But Isabel gestured to her daughter. 'Let's have a look upstairs,' she said. 'Then we'll find the kitchen and make a cup of tea.'
The two upper floors were barely more reassuring. Several bedrooms appeared to have been shut off for years. The air held the chill of disuse, and in places the wallpaper was peeling away in strips. Only two seemed remotely habitable: the master bedroom, nicotine-yellow, which still contained a bed, a television and two cupboards of tobacco-scented clothes, and a smaller room beside it, which had been decorated in the 1970s, perhaps two or three decades more recently than everywhere else. The bathroom suite was cracked and limescaled, and brackish liquid sputtered from the taps. The landing creaked underfoot, and trails of droppings suggested the presence of mice.
She's got to see, thought Kitty, as she and her mother confronted each new horror. She's got to see that this is impossible. But Isabel apparently didn't. Every now and then she would mutter something like 'A few nice rugs . . .' as if she was talking to herself.
Kitty counted perhaps three rusting radiators in the whole house. And on the top landing, a piece of the ceiling was missing, revealing a skeletal structure of struts and plaster through which a slow but constant drip made puddles in the bottom of a strategically placed tin bath.
But it was the kitchen that made Kitty want to weep. If a kitchen was supposedly the heart of a home, this one said the house was unwanted, unloved. It was a long, rectangular room with filthy windows along one side, set a few stone steps down from the ground floor. It was dark and infused with the smell of stale fat. An old range cooker stood beside the sink, its lids dulled, grey and sticky with some unidentified collusion of substances. To the other side of the room there was a free-standing electric stove, not quite as filthy but bearing the same signs of abandonment. There were a few 1950s-style units, but the shelves that lined the walls held a random assortment of cooking implements and packets of food, sprinkled with dust, mouse droppings and the occasional petrified corpse of a woodlouse.
'This is lovely,' said Isabel, running her fingers along the old pine table in the centre of the room. 'We've never had a decent-sized kitchen table, have we, darling?'
Above them the removals men thumped and heaved some unidentified piece of furniture. Kitty stared at her mother as if she were mad. The house was like something out of a war zone, Kitty thought, yet her mother was wittering on about pine tables.
'And look,' Isabel said, from beside the sink, as a tap coughed into life. 'The cold water's running clear. I bet it tastes fabulous. Isn't water meant to be better in the country? I'm sure I read that somewhere.'
Kitty was too upset to hear the faint note of hysteria in her voice.
'Mrs Delancey?' The largest of the removal men had joined them. 'We've unloaded the first of the items into the front room, but it's pretty damp. I thought I'd better check with you before we go any further.'
Isabel looked at him blankly. 'Check what?'
The man stuck his hands into his pockets. 'Well, it's . . . it's not in the best . . . I didn't know whether you might want to put your stuff into storage. Stay somewhere else. Till you're sorted out a bit.'
Kitty could have hugged him. Someone, finally, had seen sense.
'The damp's not too good for all those antiques.'
'Oh, they've survived a few hundred years. They'll cope with a bit of damp,' said Isabel, dismissively. 'There's nothing here we can't sort out. A few blow-heaters will warm the place up.'
The man glanced at Kitty. She detected a hint of pity in his eyes. 'As you wish,' he said.
Kitty imagined him and the others marvelling at the madwoman who would have her family living in a leaking wreck while she eulogised a pine table. She thought of their homes: snug, centrally heated, with well-stuffed sofas and huge plasma-screen televisions. 'Well, where's the kitchen stuff? I suppose we'd better start cleaning,' she said.
'Kitchen stuff?'
'Household cleaners. And food. I put two boxes by the front door before we left so we'd be ready.'
There was a short silence.
'Those were for us?'
Slowly Kitty faced her.
'Oh, hell - I thought you'd put them out as rubbish. I left them by the bins.'
What were they going to eat? Kitty wanted to yell. How would they get through today now? Did she ever think about anything but bloody music?
Why do I have to deal with this? Kitty turned away so that her mother couldn't see how much she hated her at that moment. Her eyes had filled with tears of frustration, but she fought the urge to dab them away. She didn't want her mother to see them. She wished she had the kind of mother who came prepared and bustled about getting things to work. Why couldn't her mother be just the littlest bit practical? A rush of grief assailed her for her father, for Mary, who would have seen this house for what it was - a massive, ridiculous mistake - and told Isabel that there was simply no question. They would have to go home.
But now there were no grown-ups. Just her.
'I'll go and get some stuff from that shop,' she said. 'I'll take the car.'
She half waited for her mother to protest that there was no way she would allow her to drive. Perhaps even to ask how she thought she could. But Isabel was lost in thought, and Kitty, one palm wiping her eyes n
ow, left.
Isabel turned as her daughter stalked out of the room, making her displeasure plain in every footstep. She heard the door slam and the sound of the car ignition. Then she turned to the window and closed her eyes for a long time.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was still low and forbidding, as if it had not yet decided whether to offer a reprieve. It took Kitty almost twenty minutes to make her way to the top of the track; her father had only ever allowed her to drive short distances on holiday, in friends' fields or up a private road to a beach. Now the car skidded and growled over the ruts as she hung on to the steering-wheel, praying that the wheels wouldn't get stuck while she was alone in these horrible woods. She kept remembering the horror films she had seen, and saw herself running through the trees pursued by shadowy monsters.
Once she made the top of the lane, she abandoned the car and walked the last five minutes down the road into the village.
'Hello again.' The tall black man smiled as she opened the door. 'Did you find it all right?'
'Oh, we found it.' Kitty couldn't keep the resignation from her voice. She picked up a wire basket and made her way round the little shop, grateful for the warmth, and the smell of bread and fruit that suffused the air.
'Not what you expected, perhaps?'
She didn't know whether she was irritated by his enquiry, the assumption that he had known better, but there was something so gentle about him that she replied honestly. 'It's awful,' she said miserably. 'So awful. I can't believe anyone was actually living there.'
He nodded sympathetically. 'Things always look worse on days like this. You might find it's better in a good light. Most of us are. Here.' He took her basket from her. 'Sit down. I'll get Henry to make you a cup of tea.'
'Oh, no, thanks.' Suddenly she was picturing newspaper headlines of vanished girls and wondering about his motives. She knew nothing about these people. She wouldn't have dreamed of accepting food or drink from any London shopkeeper. 'I'd - I'd better--'
'Hello again.' The other man, Henry, emerged from the back of the shop. 'How are you getting on? Anything we can help with? We can order stuff in, you know, if you can't see it on the shelves. Anything. Waders, waterproofs . . . I've heard you might need them where you are.' He spoke kindly and lowered his voice, even though there were only the three of them in the shop. 'We've got some really good mousetraps. They don't actually kill the little beggars, just trap them. You can take them for a drive a few miles down the road and let them out into the wild.' He wrinkled his nose. 'Like a little touring holiday for them, I like to think. Saga for rodents.'