The Dream House (8 page)

‘Mmm, only thirteen thousand pounds, though. Perhaps we should think about it. I did a lot of sailing with school. It would be great to have a little mirror dinghy.’

That was the difference between them, thought Kate, with sudden unpleasant clarity. Simon seemed to be treating the whole move as a kind of hobby while Kate herself was making life-changing decisions in a search for somewhere to call home.

July 2003

‘Who would have thought we had so much stuff?’ Kate said, surveying the wall of boxes waiting in the living room to be stowed in the van. ‘Where in this house did we keep twenty boxes worth of books?’

‘No idea,’ said Simon, shaking his head. ‘When I moved here eleven years ago, I got everything in a small Bedford van. One more problem having a wife and two children has added to my life.’

Moving day had dawned at last – a grey drizzly Wednesday at the beginning of July. In the end, the moving chain had all clicked into place, but the Hutchinsons were having to go earlier than planned. Simon had managed to get today, Thursday, and Friday off, but was expected back in the office on Monday morning for a meeting at nine o’clock sharp.

A huge removal van had edged its way down Queensmill Road at eight o’clock that morning into the space Kate had pre-arranged with the council. She had spent the previous week piling into cardboard boxes the portion of their clothes, toys and other possessions that they intended to take with them to Joyce’s, storing those boxes out of the way in their bedroom. Today, the removal men were packing up everything else, including all their furniture, and driving it to a storage depot in Beccles. There it would stay until the Hutchinsons found a home of their own.

‘Never mind what we’ve got already, I’m going to make you buy a whole lot more,’ Kate teased Simon. ‘Once we find our dream house, this scruffy old suite will have to go, and we’ll need proper garden furniture and a formal dining table and chairs.’

‘Remind me to leave my credit card in London then,’ said Simon waspishly. ‘And do you think the kids would notice if we left half their toys behind?’

‘Oh yes, they’d notice. Daisy made me promise they’d all go to Granny’s and not into store.’

‘Good thing Mother’s got a huge shed then, isn’t it?’

Tasha had taken Sam and Daisy out for the day – London Zoo was the plan. Later, she was due to take them back to the Longmans’ house where the Hutchinsons would all stay the night, then that would be goodbye.

Tasha was off with her boyfriend Rob the following Friday for a year abroad. The thrill of it all had not stopped her bursting into tears at various points during the previous week – which had unsettled Sam rather – but she had shown the kids picture books of Australia and promised to send them lots of postcards and bring them back toy koalas. ‘No, I want a crocodile,’ shouted Sam. ‘A biting one.’

Liz had pleaded to be allowed to throw a farewell party for the Hutchinsons, but Kate had stubbornly refused.

‘I can’t face the fuss, Liz, kind of you though it is. The party at the office was ordeal enough and you gate-crashed that.’ The marketing director, Emma, had organized drinks and canapés downstairs at a nearby wine-bar one sultry evening during Kate’s final week, and Kate had been overwhelmed at the large numbers of well-wishers from the office who had squashed into the hot little cellar room in pursuit of free food and drink. She hadn’t been the centre of such attention since her wedding day and, melancholy after too much champagne, she wept copiously on Simon’s shoulder in the taxi home because she was leaving all these lovely people who had insisted on how much they would miss her and had contributed to the generous Habitat token they gave her as a present. The next day they looked at her in the lift as if to say, ‘What, are you still here? I thought we got rid of you last night!’

‘No, Liz, we’ll just say goodbye to people individually and slip away. It’s not as though we won’t be seeing everyone lots – we will.’

And, indeed, there had been a month of going out for drinks or dinner or Sunday lunch with friends and acquaintances. ‘It’s a bit like Christmas,’ joked Simon. ‘There’s this kind of desperation to see everyone. As if the world is about to end. We’ve seen people we haven’t bothered with in years of living in the next borough to them in London!’

By July, Kate felt the whole thing was peculiar, like a sort of honeymoon but with kids. Here she was, effectively on holiday, but with lots of help from Tasha, arranging all sorts of exciting things for the children, buying clothes for their new life.

But most unsettling of all was the evening she went out for a drink with her old university friend Claire. Claire was now a portrait photographer who ran a successful business out of a small studio in Greenwich. She lived in a tiny flat there, over-looking the river. At York, Claire had been considered arty and eccentric; after graduation, those attributes had worked in her favour and she had collected a wide and interesting range of friends in the arts and entertainments world. She and Kate had always stayed close, as if Claire were taking the place of the sister Kate had lost. They had shared a flat together when they had started work in London thirteen years before, and the experience of managing on low budgets and buoying one another up through the low periods had proved to be a glue of super strength. The main difference between them was their attitude to relationships. Kate had always wanted to marry and have children, to create the warm family unit that she herself had missed. Claire, on the other hand, had come from a large affectionate Catholic family. In the O’Brien household there had never been a moment’s peace, and as the eldest child it was the unspoken assumption that Claire would help with the five younger children. As a result, she was still running.

‘Sam and Daisy, I love them to bits,’ Claire would sigh, and indeed she was a most generous aunt figure to them, despite having a whole heap of real nephews and nieces of her own. She was always arriving with forbidden sweets and chocolate and was happy to watch endless
Thomas the Tank Engine
videos with Sam and play amusing alternative Barbie games with Daisy, in which Barbie threw off her model clothes and went off to climb Kilimanjaro in kit borrowed from Sam’s Action Man. ‘I also just love waving them goodbye at the end of the day and going home to my peaceful little flat.’

Claire’s lovelife was a constant source of interest to Kate and Liz. Men from all sorts of backgrounds came and went in her life, but not one of them was allowed to move into that peaceful little flat.

One evening at the beginning of July, Kate met Claire in the champagne bar of Kettners in Soho. Claire arrived late as usual and laden down with cases of photographic equipment. She had, she said, been doing the kind of job she hated most – taking stiff little photographs of members of the board of a well-known travel company for their brochure. No creativity involved and too much masculine self-importance. And one instance of groping in the lift.

‘Revolting lech,’ she remembered, shuddering. ‘Why are men like Broadband?’ she quipped, slumping down in the chair in front of the glass of champagne Kate had fetched from the bar.

‘Because they’re always on?’ Kate guessed. ‘Good thing you were wearing sharp heels then.’ She laughed. Claire always dressed in black up to her short spiky hair, black and silver earrings and black eye make-up, and down to her high-heeled boots. ‘Oh Claire, it’s so lovely to see you. I can’t believe we won’t be doing this again for ages.’ She swung her half-filled glass through the air in a mock toast. Claire laughed.

‘
I
can’t believe the next time I’ll see you will probably be on a boggy heath, me in my walking boots and cagoul.’

The thought of Claire dressed down for a country walk made Kate choke on her champagne.

‘Seriously though,’ Claire leaned forward and studied her friend with a look of affectionate concern, ‘I know it’s a bit late to say this, but do you really think you’re doing the right thing? At least here, with people you know and love, you’re protected. You’ll really be out on your own where you’re going. And I worry about you.’

‘I’ll have Simon and the children – and Joyce,’ Kate countered. ‘And I’ll make friends. It’s much easier with kids, you know. You meet parents at the schools and the Brownies. And I can always volunteer for the church flower rota if I get really fed up!’

‘When did you last go into a church?’ For all her individual personal morality, Claire still rigorously attended Mass every Sunday. Simon would engage her in frenzied argument about this every now and then, but she remained firm. Today, before Kate could reply, Claire moved swiftly on. ‘It’s just that you’re in danger of cutting yourself off from your support systems. And it’s you who’s giving everything up, not Simon. You won’t be so much a part of his world any more. It’s all more of a risk for you.’

Kate was used to Claire’s forthright manner. Indeed, she had always enjoyed the mild bickering that studded their friendship. She felt safe with Claire who had always proved an unswervingly loyal and loving friend.

‘What on earth do you mean? I never did work in the City so I haven’t ever been part of his world, as you put it.’

‘Yes, but he will still have all the sophisticated urban side, won’t he?’ Claire waved her hand in the air to emphasize her point. ‘The excitement of the hot deal, being with the movers and shakers. He’s late enough home every night now – think what it’s going to be like, especially if he stays here during the week.’

‘Half the City have little weekend cottages in Suffolk,’ Kate reminded her. ‘We’ll probably always be entertaining his colleagues to lunch and dinner. Anyway, we’ll be a haven for him. When I was working I was often never there to come home to. And he hardly ever had a decent evening meal and both of us would be too tired to enjoy putting the kids to bed if we did come home in time.’

‘I know, and I can see how fond of you Simon is. But it is so important for women to be independent. I think men look at you differently when you’re completely reliant on them. I’ve told you about my sister Maura, haven’t I? She’s mad cos Andy’s always moaning at her about what a great time she must be having at home with the baby, seeing her friends and spending his money, while he’s out on the road all day.’

‘Oh Claire, Simon’s not like that . . . and he doesn’t drive a van round South London like Andy. It’s all different.’

She stopped, feeling a worm of unease but bidding it depart. Claire was away on one of her pet subjects. She just didn’t really understand the issues. After all, she’d never done the marriage and children bit. She just overvalued her freedom, Kate thought smugly. Well, Kate did have responsibilities and now, with this move, she was going to be able to attend to them properly. Everyone, after all, talked about making sacrifices for their children, and if moving away from the friends she loved and the places that were familiar was a necessary sacrifice, then she was happy to make it. And so, she knew, was Simon.

‘Claire, don’t worry, really. After all, if it doesn’t work out – but it will – we can always move back. We won’t have done anything irrevocable.’

‘No, I suppose not. Sorry, I do preach, don’t I?’ Claire shook herself out of her mood and smiled. ‘Oh, I will miss you!’

‘And I’ll miss being bossed around by you and Liz. What on earth will I do without you both?’ And she squeezed Claire’s shoulder.

Driving the car down the A12 to Suffolk, Sam and Daisy in the back with a heap of duvets and toys – Simon had gone ahead with the rented van with all their boxes – Kate’s thoughts wandered back to this conversation.

Her husband seemed very upbeat about this move and had shown none of the qualms that Kate had. For him, it was merely a logical solution to an awkward domestic situation, and every time Kate had lain awake having a dark night of the soul about their decision, he’d slept on beside her, blissfully unaware of her torment. It was true that he was returning to home territory, but Halesworth was thirty miles from where he had been brought up. Anyway, he’d lost touch with so many friends from his childhood, he was in many ways starting again. But husbands often didn’t seem to mind about this as much as wives, Kate mused. Their emotional needs seemed to be met within the home. And Simon was usually happy to be friendly to those he was with at the time. His best friends at the moment, for instance, tended to be people he had met at Canterbury, where he was at university, and who had moved to London when he did. Before he met Kate he had spent most of his spare time going out for drinks or football matches with them, yet he hadn’t seemed to miss this kind of socializing once he had the responsibilities of a wife and family, and he got on well with most of Kate’s friends and their other halves. The only friend of hers he was not at ease with was Claire.

‘I feel she doesn’t like me,’ he complained once to Kate. ‘I can’t seem to say anything right. It’s as if she doesn’t think I’m good enough for you.’

‘She’s just always been very protective of me,’ said Kate. ‘She does like you, I know she does. Only the other day she was saying you’re really good with Sam and Daisy.’

‘That’s a bone women throw to men they don’t approve of,’ said Simon glumly. ‘“Say what you like, he’s a good father”.’

‘Well, you are,’ insisted Kate. And that was the end of
that
conversation.

By the time evening came, they were all exhausted. They had spent hours unpacking the van and the car and stowing away bikes and clothes, books, toys, endless coats and pairs of wellingtons. Joyce had been overwhelmed by their huge amount of possessions. One of the garden sheds was now piled high with boxes of bits and pieces they weren’t sure they could do without but didn’t have anywhere to put in the cottage.

It was while she was emptying her holdall of clothes, stowing them away in the pine chest of drawers, that Kate noticed a few links of a chain hanging out of a zip pocket of the holdall. She opened the zip and scooped out the locket. So that’s where it went, she thought, having looked everywhere when she wanted to wear it at Christmas. She untangled the chain and laid the pendant in her palm, feeling its weight, stroking the design with her thumb. Then she turned it over and stared at the faded photograph as though urging it to come into focus and reveal its secrets.