Chestnut Street (26 page)

The woman’s face softened. “Of course it’s not, and if I had a home myself, which I never had, then I’d offer you the room straightaway—nothing I would like better.”

“So where do you live?” Molly asked.

“With my brother and his wife. Not entirely satisfactory, I may tell you, but they need the rent and I can’t afford a mortgage.” She shrugged; that was the way life went. She had a kind face—probably in her mid-forties. Her name, Anita Woods, was on a little brass plaque in front of her.

Molly wondered was it better never to have had a house, like Anita, or to have had one and lost it, as she had done herself.

“And I don’t suppose you could get a mortgage with just my rent coming in to help out?” she said lightly.

“Sadly, no,” Anita said. “Though you’re not the first to suggest it, as it happens.”

“Someone else in the same position?” Molly didn’t have much hope—Anita was only making conversation.

“Not exactly, but there was a woman in here last week. Looking for a house where she could teach music during the day, so she needed the owner to be out during working hours. Said she would clean and garden as well. Very nice person—some story about wanting to get out of her home. The children were driving her mad. Grown-up children, I mean. I’d love to have helped her but I just couldn’t find anyone suitable.”

“Is she in your files?” Molly asked.

“Well, yes, but what’s the point?”

“What’s her name …?”

Anita looked through the files. “It was Jackson, Jane Jackson. Really, she was a very good-natured person, someone you’d remember. I just hate to think of all those ungrateful young people leaving her bags of washing and eating everything out of the fridge.”

“Why don’t you buy a house, Anita? You must have seen something you like on your books—and let Jane and myself be your lodgers.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Anita protested.

“Is it really?” Molly was very clear-sighted when she wanted to be; this is why she had succeeded so well at work. “Let’s have lunch, the three of us—that won’t do any harm,” she begged, and she could see a serious flicker of interest in Anita’s face. The two women knew that there was distinct possibility that this mad scheme might work.

Anita couldn’t take more than forty-five minutes’ lunchtime during the week and they would need more than that to sort
out their future. Jane couldn’t cancel the music lessons she had arranged for this week. Molly couldn’t be away from her screen in the financial center. So it was a Saturday lunch meeting, in a small Italian restaurant where the lunch had a set price and they would all pay for themselves.

Jane had a music case with her and locked her bicycle outside the restaurant. She looked tired and said that it would be such an ease to have the pupils to her own place, but two of her children worked at home and couldn’t bear the noise and disruption. Anita had a briefcase with details of properties on the market so that they could all look and see what kind of thing they had in mind. Molly had brought nothing except a big pad of paper with columns so that they could write down all the pros and cons.

They knew that they were making a leap of faith, three strangers even discussing the possibility of setting up a home together. But still they talked easily about their lives. There was no awkwardness, no examining one another as future flatmates; there was a sense that they were three women meeting for a normal Saturday lunch.

Anita explained that she had never thought of getting anywhere permanent to live since she had traveled so much in her youth and had not wanted to be tied down anywhere. Now she regretted it. Her sister-in-law was a difficult woman and the household was always very tense. Anita longed to let herself into a place where there was no atmosphere or mood in the air.

Jane said that since her husband had died, the children thought they were doing her a favor by staying at home. She knew they told their friends that they just couldn’t leave her alone and struggling, but in fact she made their lives very comfortable and was so exhausted looking after three adults that she had hardly any energy left for giving the music lessons that she loved to teach.

Molly spoke to them about Hugh in a way that she had not spoken to anyone else. How she had found a love letter in a jacket
she was taking to the dry cleaner’s; how he had denied that it had anything to do with him, that it belonged to someone else at work.

The night a woman rang the house to speak to him, and Hugh had said it was a deranged colleague who had been pestering them all. And then the day her sister had seen Hugh and the woman in a hotel.

Without self-pity she told them that Hugh had said she should have let it pass; it would all have blown over. Molly had bought a country cottage to try to change things. It worked, in a way. Sort of …

Then they got down to details, and price ranges and room rates. There was a place on Chestnut Street they all liked with a small garden, three large bedrooms, which could be bed-sitters, large enough to hold Jane’s piano, Molly’s computer. There were two bathrooms and one big kitchen–sitting room.

They got out a calculator and did their sums. They bought another bottle of wine.

They promised to meet in three weeks.

During that time Anita worried less about her sister-in-law’s moods.

Jane did less washing and cleaning for her children.

Molly slept longer and more deeply.

By the time they were to meet again, Anita had made an offer on the property and had the keys, so that was where they met. The previous owners had gone abroad, leaving a lot of furniture behind them, so they wandered freely around, talking about their new lives.

Somehow, a whole afternoon passed happily and they were amazed that they had spent so long and with so few reservations. They each decided what they would bring for their bed-sitting rooms, what kitchen gadgets, garden tools, extra bookshelves they would each contribute.

Then they went home to tell the story.

Anita said that she was sure her sister-in-law would be pleased that she would finally have her spare room back. Now there would be room to leave her sewing machine in place, or to invite friends to stay.

Jane told her children that she could either sell the house and give them all a share or let it to them at a fair rent. They must make the choice.

Molly went home to her cottage and told nobody. Her neighbors in the countryside were charming, helpful people, but they didn’t really know or care much about her life in the city. They wouldn’t be excited about her change of location.

Molly was sad that she had nobody to tell. But when she met the others a week later she thought that perhaps it might not have been the worst situation.

Anita said that her brother and sister-in-law deeply resented her leaving them, accusing her of being ungrateful for their hospitality. They showed little or no interest in her new home; they only regretted the loss of her rent.

Jane said her children had been so outraged they had talked about the possibility of having her certified as insane. They said it was a delayed reaction to grief over their father. Finally they said they couldn’t possibly pay the rent she suggested, so she had said she would sell the house and give them their share.

In comparison to all this drama, Molly felt that somehow she was fairly lucky.

The move, when it came, was almost seamless. It was over in one weekend, and on the Sunday night they had a celebration supper before retiring to their own bed-sitters—which had been part of the original plan. But they stayed on longer and longer and put more wood on the fire. They washed up companionably and knew that this was more than just a rooming-house arrangement.

“I give it two months,” Jane’s children had said when they first heard the news. But two months after they had all gone to live together, Jane was happily installed, giving her music lessons.

“In three months you’ll be at the door wanting your old room back,” is what Anita’s sister-in-law had prophesied.

Hugh telephoned Molly, just to ask how she was. As a friend. Molly said that as a friend she was fine. And the cottage? That was fine too. And did she still stay in a hotel? he wondered.

No, she said, she now shared a house with two other women.

“I’d say that will last for about six months,” Hugh said, annoyed at the calm way she spoke to him.

At the end of the first year, Anita said she was going on a walking tour in Italy. The others were interested and even envious. They had never been on a holiday like that.

On the holiday they made a few decisions and when they returned, fit and sun-tanned, Molly arranged to let her country cottage, since she hardly ever went there at weekends anyway.

Jane sold her house and divided the proceeds with her squawking children.

Anita, who had now been made a partner in the accommodation agency, paid for a holiday for her brother and sister-in-law and was back in their good books again.

They knew that it might not be forever, this life. They would not necessarily grow old in a trio. There could be a different and exciting future ahead for any of them. But for the moment they were luckier and happier than most people just because they had the courage to take a leap of faith.

Lilian was born and grew up at Number 5. Everyone who had lived on Chestnut Street then remembered her as a beautiful child with glorious golden hair. They told her mother that she could be in the movies. Mrs. Harris was never pleased to hear this prediction. It was entirely too fast and too far away for their plans. They wanted Lilian to be around and look after them in their old age, Mrs. Harris said firmly.

Lilian was taken on as an apprentice in Locks, a hair salon up on the main road only five minutes’ walk from home. She would come back for lunch most days and have a cup of soup with her mother. The other girls in the salon went out and had a proper lunch, but they weren’t saving like Lilian was. Saving to buy a house of her own.

Lilian never wanted smart, elegant clothes like the customers in the salon and the girls she worked with did. They all said she didn’t need them anyway; her hair was so attractive with its shiny golden curls, that nobody bothered with what she was wearing. She never went on holidays abroad. Why should she? All she wanted was a house in this very street. A house of her own.

If Lilian had a house she would turn the downstairs into a hairdressing salon and work from home. Upstairs she would have a beautiful flat, which she would paint in bright colors.

And then, when she was a woman of property and style, she would look for a husband when she was about twenty-eight.

It didn’t work out like that.

Firstly, Mr. Harris, who had always been a careful man, made a very foolish investment. He mortgaged their house at Number 5 in order to raise money for a crackpot scheme. A colleague who was starting a leisure center needed some carefully chosen mates who would put in several thousand each. All Mr. Harris needed, he wept afterwards, was his stake. It was gone in a few short months and so was a lot more.

Mr. Harris found that his job was gone too, since he had been unable to concentrate at the reception desk in the hospital. And his health had gone since he was now suffering from a serious depression.

Mrs. Harris also suffered by all this change. She had never been strong. Now she no longer had a husband who would do the shopping for her. Lilian’s savings were needed to pay the mortgage on Number 5, her parents’ home. There would be nothing left to buy her own place. Her free time was needed to clean and shop for the family that was no longer able to function without her. She never complained, and at work she was so unfailingly good-humored as well as being an accomplished hairdresser that Albert, the boss, offered her the post of opening up a new store in the center of town.

“I can’t take it,” Lilian said sadly. “I have to be on my own doorstep. This place is perfect for me—I can even race home in my coffee break to see they’re all right.”

Albert shook his head.

“It’s no life, Lilian. They’ll have to live without you one day; best to let them get used to it sooner rather than later.”