A Perfect Home (36 page)

Claire put the key into the solid front door, turned it, and then pushed. She felt nervous; had she been right to commit herself to the six-month lease before she had properly seen around? The thick oak door was heavier than it looked; it gave way and let Claire into a little vestibule with a pretty etched glass door leading inside. A bell jingled as she opened it, disturbing the silence of the empty shop. It smelled of cake and biscuits. A shaft of golden sunlight flooded through from a doorway at the back picking out the dust suspended in the still, warm air. Everything was gone; Trevor and Edmond had either taken or sold it all, the mahogany counter, the rows of shelves, the old pine dresser where Trevor and Edmond displayed their range of artisan jams and chutneys. Only the wide oak floorboards remained; the wood worn lower at the doorway where customers had walked in and out for hundreds of years.

Claire went into the back and found herself in what must have been the storeroom, equally as empty in the shop. This led in to another room and then another with a large oven in it and then a tiny kitchenette and then an ancient toilet and enamel washbasin. Beside that small room an uneven wooden staircase led upwards in a spiral; the walls enclosing it were lined with painted panelling. The treads were high and Claire had to lift her legs up higher than she was used to in order to go upstairs. A warren of little rooms ran backwards from the landing, Claire's footsteps echoed as she opened door after door and the level of the floor went up and down with a succession of small steps and slopes.

Claire mentally allocated each room to a child. Towards the back she found a bathroom and simple kitchen made up of fitted white units, a sink, and a 1950s pale blue kitchen cabinet just like one her grandmother had once had.

The last room was big, with an ancient gas fire set amongst a surround of garish marble tiles. A large arched window looked down at a small overgrown garden and beyond the tumble-down garden wall, the river. Claire saw two swans glide past followed by a brightly painted barge with a well-wrapped-up couple on the deck. They looked up and waved, Claire waved back, and when they'd disappeared she turned and climbed the rickety set of open tread stairs which led up to the second floor.

This was the attic room; the low ceiling beams were dark against the fresh white paint on the walls and ceiling. A little dormer window at the back looked onto the river again and a little dormer window at the front looked down on to the high street. A single pale green Lloyd Loom chair stood, forgotten, in the middle of the room. Claire sat down in the chair and looked around her. This would be her room.

She smiled; she had been right, it would be perfect.

Her very first priority was to move into the flat as quickly as she could. Sally helped her clean the small white kitchen and the bathroom with its rose-coloured sink and toilet and chipped enamel bath. Then they swept out the big room with the large arched window to make a temporary bedroom for Claire and the children until Claire had time to sort out the other rooms.

Claire bought four blow-up mattresses plus a basic assortment of pillows, duvets, and plain white bed linen.

‘We'll get more furniture and rugs and curtains when I've finished the big order. I'll make it really cosy for us,' she told the children as they stood in the sunlit room. It was bare apart from four beds neatly made and lined up along the wall and a bin bag full of clothes that people had kindly given for the children.

She wasn't sure what their reaction would be to the empty shop and flat, it was so different from the pristinely decorated and furnished home they had been used to. There were no toys, no comfortable sofas, no large television; she hadn't had time to replace anything they had lost in the fire. The children were wide-eyed and silent, their expression giving nothing away. Claire held her breath, waiting for protests or even tears.

‘It will be a bit like camping,' she said trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘It will be great being able to see the river, there are ducks and swans and boats and –'

Oliver interrupted her. ‘It's really
cool
.' He let out the last word slowly as he looked around him.

‘It's like a fairy's cottage,' said Emily smiling. ‘I like all the tiny rooms.'

‘Yeah, like a hobbit's house.' Oliver was nodding with approval. ‘Can I have that room that doesn't have a window?'

Ben ran a small toy car, which one of Sally's boys had given him, down the slanted floor. He laughed with delight when it gathered speed and crashed into the skirting board with a satisfying
thwack
.

‘I'm afraid there isn't any television or computer,' said Claire, ‘I'll get that sorted but it won't be for a few days.'

‘No probs,' said Oliver, ‘we can play hide and seek.'

‘Can we do it now?' said Emily. ‘It's the perfect place for hide and seek.'

‘Of course,' said Claire with relief that they seemed so enthusiastic.

The children went in all directions, their feet noisy on the bare boards, their hands running down the bumpy walls. Claire smiled to see them enjoying themselves and she went into the kitchen to make jam sandwiches for tea.

Claire bought a power drill, followed by a box of screws, a tape measure, a spirit level, and several long packs of wooden shelving.

‘We could find someone to do this for you,' said Sally as Claire marked out in pencil on the walls where the shelves would go, measuring between them and testing the straightness with the spirit level.

‘No,' replied Claire, concentrating on the numbers on the tape measure. ‘I'm determined to do this myself.'

‘Do you want a glass of Cava to give you courage?' asked Sally, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a bottle and two plastic cups she had brought with her to toast Claire's first attempt at DIY.

‘I'll wait until after I've finished,' Claire said, plugging in the drill. ‘I think drinking and drilling may be a criminal offence.'

‘Are you sure you know what you're doing?' Sally asked. ‘It's not too late to find a man to –' Her words were drowned by the shriek of the electric drill. Sally put her hands over her ears.

‘There!' Claire stood back to admire the triangular support she had just attached to the wall. ‘It's easy. I don't know why I've never tried it before. Come on, Sally, I need your help to hold one end of the shelf.'

An hour and a half later three neat rows of shelves and several rows of pegs and hooks lined the room plus a large blackboard where Claire intended to write a list of things to be done every day. The two women sat in the middle of the wooden floor.

‘To my new workshop,' Claire said, raising the cup in her hand. Sally raised hers and they laughed as the plastic dented as they tried to clink them together.

‘It's a far cry from that cramped spare room you were forever having to tidy up when William's parents came to stay. How did you ever think you could get the department store order done in there?'

‘I'm still anxious about getting it done in here; we've only got two weeks now.'

‘Leave it to Nana Needles! When I was little we called her Super Nana because in a crisis she always seemed to save the day! I can't count the number of times she stepped in to stop my mum from going completely bonkers looking after me and my brothers. She'd suddenly appear and clean up all the mess and feed us proper food and kick my dad off the sofa and make him go to work.'

‘Well, she'd be my super hero if she can help me get this order out, it is even more important for me than it was before the fire. I feel as though it could really change my life.' She took a sip of wine. ‘I'm beginning to feel excited about this.' With her arm she gestured around the room. ‘I think it's going to be lovely in here and upstairs in the flat. It's really cosy up there. When the big order is out of the way I'm going to sort out the front and open an Emily Love shop.'

‘Brilliant!' Sally sloshed more Cava into their cups. ‘Let me come to work for you on the days I'm not in college. I only work Saturdays for Anna now and I wouldn't expect you to pay me much – in the beginning anyway. Do you think you would keep the shop and workshop here when you go back to the house?'

Claire shrugged. ‘We'll see. It's funny, but I don't miss the house nearly as much as I thought I would. I don't miss our things, the furniture, the ornaments, my clothes. I don't feel sad, in fact I feel quite liberated.'

For the next three days she worked like a woman possessed. She sat in Gareth and Sally's cramped study and trawled eBay for materials. She successfully bid on bales of vintage fabric and boxes of buttons and reels and reels of lace and ribbon – much of it cost hardly anything at all. She had Emily Love labels made up on an express delivery service and from a haberdasher's website bought cotton thread, silk thread, needles, five pairs of fabric scissors, pins, and three tape measures and she begged and borrowed as many trestle tables and picnic tables as she could; when she couldn't find any more tables she took planks of wood retrieved from a skip and put them on stacks of bricks to make makeshift work benches.

She was surprised how much sunlight poured into the workshop through the little skylight. As she swept out the room, flour and icing sugar dust blew up around her, she could taste the sweetness in her mouth; it was strangely comforting.

Emily and Oliver helped her clean out a huge pile of wooden crates she had found in the garden; they would be perfect for keeping the finished stock in. When the fabric started to arrive the children helped her open and unpack the boxes and stack the ginghams, paisleys, spots, and stripes neatly along the new shelves. They sorted the buttons into size and colour and poured them into huge glass sweet jars that she'd also found in the garden.

On Saturday morning the W.I. ladies started to arrive. Mrs Needles had done well. She'd found eleven other women and six sewing machines. Some women seemed quite young and sprightly, some seemed much older – thin-skinned and frail.

One tiny woman called Doris told her she was over ninety, though her eyes sparkled like a young girl's in her wizened-apple face.

‘I wish I'd had the opportunity to have my own business when I was young,' she said to Claire in a husky voice which made Claire wonder if it was from age or the packet of Silk Cut that she could see in her cardigan pocket, ‘instead of spending all my days serving my bastard of a husband.'

Claire's eyes had widened, taken aback by the ancient woman's language. Mrs Nettles laughed at Claire's shocked face.

‘She's right, he was a bloody lazy philanderer and he never could get his fingers out of other women's knickers.'

‘Even in the hospice they couldn't trust him having his bed bath,' Doris added.

‘You're well rid of him now aren't you, Doris?' said Mrs Nettles.

‘Too right I am. Much better off with my young Colin now.'

‘Is Colin your son?' Claire asked. The room burst into laughter.

‘Colin is her toy boy,' said a well-padded lady with frizzy purple hair. ‘Seventy-nine he is and you wouldn't think he was a day over seventy to look at him.'

‘You're such a lucky tart, Doris,' said another lady. Claire could see they were going to be in for a colourful time.

Claire had cut out stencils of her bird and flower and heart and house designs in tracing paper. She set up a line of ladies to cut them out from stacks of pre-cut squares of fabric, who then passed them on to be pinned onto the Christmas stockings, cushions, bags, or aprons. Other ladies were put to sewing, others to ironing, and one lady in particular liked to add the lace or ribbon to the pictures.

The purple-haired woman was very good at sewing on buttons and Doris had a real talent for embroidery despite the fact her that hands were twisted with arthritis. Claire was amazed at the speed at which the women worked. Mrs Nettles became a sort of foreman, consulting Claire's list on the blackboard, allocating jobs, overseeing quality control, openly being in charge of her ‘girls' as she liked to call the W.I. ladies (or The Dirty Dozen as Claire and Sally had taken to referring to them.)

When she wasn't at school, Emily sat at her own little table stuffing gingham hearts with lavender. Doris helped her when her embroidery techniques weren't needed elsewhere. The old lady and the little girl were soon chatting like old friends and Claire tried to make sure that all the women toned down their language when the children were around.

Even Oliver was keen to help and spent a whole weekend sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor pinning the Emily Love labels to the finished products.

Claire's days were so busy she sometimes forgot about the house and the fire and even William; sometimes time ran away and she'd arrive too late at the hospital for visiting hours and she'd have to beg the nurses to let her and the children see him.

He was out of intensive care now but though he seemed to chat to other patients on his ward he turned his head away whenever Claire approached the hospital bed. Sometimes the children could make him smile, but mostly he just stared at the ceiling. He didn't want to speak to Claire at all.

But his progress was good, he was no longer connected to oxygen and fluids by tubes and with physiotherapy and proper care the doctors felt sure his spine would mend and he'd regain full mobility.

‘Have you heard back from the insurance company? When will they start to rebuild the house?' William's mother phoned Claire for updates every day as though she was desperate to recreate the house as soon as possible and didn't quite trust her daughter-in-law to get it done.

‘It's all in hand,' Claire soothed. ‘I have a meeting with builders next week.'

‘You'll make sure it's put back just like it was?'

‘Yes, I'll have it put back like it was before.'

‘If you need to know what colours or finishes were used you will ask me won't you?'