Half Broken Things (3 page)

But the broken teapot ceased to matter when she picked up the keys from across the floor and considered them, for this was a house with a great many locked doors. Householders varied, Jean had found. Some encouraged a house sitter to move in and treat the place as their own, proffering so much access that it was embarrassing. In her time Jean had been invited to use computers, drinks cupboards, dubious videos, occasionally a sauna and once the client's electric hair rollers. Others were less profligate but still welcoming, sometimes dust-sheeting and closing unneeded rooms as much for the house sitter's convenience as their own. But few locked rooms the way these people had, without explanation, but still leaving open four empty bedrooms upstairs and all the downstairs rooms that Jean was supposed to clean and maintain but not use. They had also locked what they called, in their instructions, the pool pavilion, the garages, the potting sheds and implement store. Desk drawers and small cabinets throughout the house also had been locked and the keys taken away. And had been placed in the blue and white teapot at the back of the sideboard, Jean now supposed, lifting and dropping handfuls of keys, letting them clank softly in her palm. Or to be more accurate, placed in the teapot so that they would be hidden from her. Her vague offence over the owners' behaviour was warming into resentment. They were practically saying they did not trust her. Did they assume that a humble house sitter would be unable to resist the temptation to sully their beautiful and valuable possessions?

The keys that were obviously for cars were of no interest to Jean, who had never learned to drive. Nor did she think she would ever need or want to operate garden machinery using the keys with paper tags marked
mower, old saw
and
new saw
. But the largest mortice keys would surely open the locked doors upstairs. They would show her the rooms that were thought too good for her, which would offer up their spaces, grateful that she had come to claim them. The smaller keys, she guessed, would be for cupboards. They would reveal even finer things that would console her for the destroyed teapot, treasures yet more precious, even now waiting to be brought into the light. And the smallest keys would surely turn the locks of some of the carved boxes, of hidden drawers in exquisite cabinets; they would yield with scarcely a click and she would pull out tiny handles and lift lids on secrets that these people, in their insulting way, had thought to keep from her. Next to these pewter-coloured keys, whose dullness merely disguised the scale and richness of what they protected, the bright blue and white, silver-mounted teapot was already losing its glamour. Jean retrieved the porcelain shards, now as discarded and irrelevant as shed skin, and put them in a bag.

You might think it's a perfect recipe for bitterness, living all alone in the house of somebody much richer than you are, but I don't think I have ever fallen into that particular trap. Besides, this house isn't the biggest place I've done or the most luxurious, nor did I mind not having neighbours. It's a solitary job anyway, you accept that, and a mile from the village isn't really that far. Thinking about it I've been much more solitary in towns, behind electronic gates in huge opulent houses full of expensive trash, usually in places that are both popular and disgusting, like Bournemouth. Or Wilmslow. I could never be anything other than solitary in places like that. Those houses have carpets so thick you think you're walking on squashed animals, and big upholstered chairs with huge cushions, like corpulent women in tight dresses in too young a colour. Most often it's peach. In places like that you are lonely, comfortable and revolted all at the same time.

So, this house, the fifty-eighth, is not the biggest, nor the loneliest nor the richest. It is the most gracious. Put simply, it is beautiful. From the first, I knew it was the first truly beautiful house I'd ever seen, because I could imagine really living in it, as distinct from just staying a while. It's beautiful in the old way, quietly. I don't think I'm a snob but there's such a thing as good taste—though there's more to it than that. I never really associated this house with its owners. It seems strange even to call them that. I thought about them, a little, in the first week or so, but gradually less, and hardly ever after Michael came.

When I arrived, three of the rooms upstairs were locked. So was the door to the cellar, various other cupboards around the place, and the garages and outbuildings. I was a bit cross about that, clients shouldn't do that. First of all, one of my jobs is to keep rooms aired and how can I if they're locked? Second is the fire risk. What if there's an electrical fault, and a fire starts that you can't get to? You're wondering all the time what could happen behind the door and all you can do is rattle the handle and pray that everything's unplugged. People just don't think about that, not until they've experienced a house fire for themselves. The irony was that on that very long list of things they wanted me to do or not do, they'd put ‘avoid any fire risks'! So, no candles, no open fires, unplug the television. I could have taken that personally, but I kept reminding myself they knew nothing about me and fires and houses. They couldn't, because Town and Country Sitters didn't; if they had I should never have been taken on at all. No, the ‘owners' were just being cautious in case I was as stupid as they were afraid I'd be, being only a house sitter.

Other things on the list that annoyed me: after ‘no open fires' it said that the radiators were turned off in the library, drawing room, dining room and upstairs, but not in ‘my' bedroom or the smallest bathroom, or in the small sitting room where the television was. That was an assumption, wasn't it? That I'd just watch telly and go to bed. Well, I may have been in the habit of doing so, but I didn't care for the assumption. Straightaway it reminded me of the Ardenleigh where it's a choice between the bedroom (heating off, discouraged in the daytime) or what they call the lounge, where the television is on all day with nobody watching it but not really doing anything else either, except looking offended. And oh yes, the Aga kept the kitchen warm, the list said. If that wasn't a hint about where I belonged I don't know what was.

So almost from the very beginning I lit a fire in the drawing room every evening, right up till the beginning of June. There are enough logs stacked outside in the open shed in the courtyard to last for years and plenty of trees round about anyway. Michael has been lighting a fire again since last week. August evenings can be chilly.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be trying to explain. I admit I wasn't in the best frame of mind about Mr and Mrs Standish-Cave, but it wasn't malice. It was more a case of things just coming round in a particular way, starting with me coming here after another Christmas at the Ardenleigh. The Ardenleigh is dreadful at Christmas. It's half holiday guesthouse and half old people's home. She (Mrs Costello) takes anybody who pays as long as they're not geriatric, and I daresay it suits her to have people there all winter. But at Christmas it's neither one thing nor the other. A plastic snowman on every storage heater, wisps of tinsel (turquoise to match the carpet) sellotaped on to the pictures, the barometer and the cuckoo dock, even on the stainless steel cruet on every table. This year there was an artificial Christmas tree with flashing lights that played
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,
until one of the residents had a nightmare about it and wet her bed. It was the talk of the place, would she be allowed to stay? The pictures on the walls are like the tablemats and the tablemats are like the pictures, and I've never known grapefruit segments in syrup (first course on Christmas Day) improved for being eaten off a coaching scene from Olde Englande. It's not uncomfortable exactly; you get used to the sound of the traffic outside and the television, and at least the heating goes on in the bedrooms at six. But the irony was that even though I loathed the Ardenleigh it was better than where I would probably end up, because I wouldn't be able to afford even the Ardenleigh's terms for permanent residents after September.

Later, it was the three of us together, Michael, Steph and me, and then the baby, and its seeming suddenly so clear what was important. This is hard. I've just read that last bit back to myself and it doesn't really tell you much, does it? Suppose I put it like this: it wasn't just the thought of the Ardenleigh or worse, or this house, or the things in it, or just me, or just Michael, or Steph, or the baby. Not any one single thing, not one thing more than any of the others. It was all of us, and all of it: the way this place allowed each of us to stop struggling in our various ways, how it seemed to give us strength, how it seemed right to care for it so much, and for one another. All of it added up to more than just us.

We came to it late, you see, we came late to the idea of belonging in a place and belonging to other people. I mean we'd all had goes at it in the past, it's hard to avoid, but it was us being here, the family we made, that was the point. If you think that sounds like an attempt to justify what's happened, you'd be quite right.

———

Six tapestry kneelers at maybe eight pounds each would hardly make it worth the trip. Michael's whole trip had been planned round the pair of 16th century alabaster effigies in the display case and now, just because the vicar wasn't here and thanks to this stupid woman, he wasn't going to get his hands anywhere near them. The consolation prize of six tapestry kneelers made it worse, somehow. Michael was thinking this in his head while smiling and listening to the woman—she must be some church volunteer—who had interrupted him between the sixth and seventh kneeler and was now following him round the church.

He had called at the vicarage to ask if he could handle the alabaster figures, to be told by a preoccupied woman at a computer screen that the vicar was away and she knew nothing about the procedures for unlocking the case holding the figures, but he was of course welcome to look round the church. He had been glad to find it empty, and not too disheartened. He had half-expected to find the figures inaccessible, but he might still find out useful things such as the strength of the lock on the case, perhaps even where the key was kept (pathetically often with church people, simply in a drawer in the vestry). It would not be the first time he would have to make a return trip, and in the meantime a decent number of kneelers would make this one worthwhile. So when this other woman had appeared eight minutes later he had been sitting in one of the pews with his backpack beside him, half prepared for the interruption.

Long ago he had learned that the quiet of country churches was deceptive and that people came and went all day, self-importantly engaged in parish drudgery of one sort or another. So he always made sure that he was ready to assume, at the split second's notice usually given by the clack of an iron latch, an attitude of prayerful contemplation. Until such time as he might be interrupted—today, a mere eight minutes—he would be quietly busy. This time he had been stuffing the boring but quite saleable hand-stitched kneelers into his backpack. It could have held twenty. Twenty might have fetched well over a hundred quid; still only a fifth of what the alabaster figures would make, so it would have gone down as a poor day. But still respectable, at least worth his while.

But he would have to revise those calculations, because he had only managed to get six of them. And the woman was now into her twentieth minute of telling him that the vicar wasn't here because his wife had died three weeks before Christmas and the poor man had had to go on a retreat.

‘Just yesterday, how unlucky! Poor man. I said to him, you just never know how it's going to take you, we're all different. We are, aren't we? But he said he would see things through to Epiphany, that was yesterday of course, and then he would take a break. He's finding it much more difficult than he expected, if you ask me.'

Michael smiled and said he quite understood. ‘But if perhaps
you
could open the case? As I explained, I've been looking at artefacts from this period for several years and it's only by—'

‘I said to the parish clerk on Sunday, I said if you ask me that man is heading for a breakdown, he said oh I know, but at least he's off for a week, off to Columba's Lodge on the seventh and I said well I'm glad to hear it—'

‘You see, handling the figures is the only way—'

‘What? Oh, no, I am sorry, I wouldn't be comfortable. I am churchwarden as I said, but I'm not sure I've got the authority. I've never been asked, you see, and the vicar keeps the key at the vicarage, so—. I mean if the other churchwarden was here as well, but no, he's away, I know for a fact it's this week. He's in the Canaries, they always go in January. Lucky for some!'

Michael pulled his mouth into another understanding smile but doubted if he could say ‘it doesn't matter' without hissing, so said nothing. He wandered off down the nave, raising his eyes to the roof as if it held some interest, blinking several times to disguise the faint flickering of muscle that tugged at one side of his face whenever he got upset. Then like a familiar ache came the realisation that she was not going to finish talking and push off to leave him alone again in the church. He would have to leave first.