The Orphan Choir (14 page)

‘Hmm.’ Pat sits back, finally. ‘Maybe I should talk to your husband.’

‘Why, to check I’m not crazy? I’m not. The choral music is real. I don’t know how you have the nerve to sit there and say these things to me! You promised you’d help me!’

‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.’

‘You’ve got a strange way of showing it. What’s stopping you from serving Mr Clay with a noise abatement order right now?’

‘Mr Clay assured me that he’s not going to be making a nuisance of himself in the future,’ Pat says. ‘Your tactic worked – you should be pleased. After
you socked it to him with a bit of loud music of your own, he drew the conclusion someone more sensible might have drawn weeks ago – he can’t get away with it, not without paying a price. Oh, I’ve seen it countless times. It always makes me laugh. Noise offenders assume, for some reason best known to themselves, that their noise-averse neighbours wouldn’t play them at their own game. Why? Well …’ Pat looks up at the ceiling. ‘I have a theory.’

I’m not going to ask. I don’t give a shit about her theories. If she isn’t going to help me, I’m not interested in anything she has to say.

‘I think the mindset is along the lines of “If she can’t bear loud noise then she can’t use it against me because that would mean having to listen to it herself.” A bit like someone who can’t stand the sight of blood – they wouldn’t train to be a doctor, would they?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I say, wondering if she’s right. ‘It’s loud noise you can’t control that’s the problem.’

‘Quite. But many people are unimaginative and … well, a little bit stupid,’ says Pat. ‘Mr Clay strikes me as a prime example. Which is why when he told me that he wasn’t going to risk making you angry again if that was how you were likely to react, I believed him.’
She leans forward again, stares down at her shoes. ‘I don’t see him as being cunning enough to dream up a spiteful plan like the one you’ve described in your noise diary. I honestly don’t.’

I’m too furious to speak. Furious with myself. A voice in my head is whispering:
She’s right. You know she’s right
.

‘Louise, I think you ought to make an appointment with your doctor.’

‘No! So what if he’s unimaginative? He’s got friends, hasn’t he? A girlfriend? Anyone could have suggested the choral music to him – who says it was his idea?’ Too late, I realise she might only have meant my eyes: that I should see a doctor to sort out the skin eruptions.

‘Where are you going?’ Pat asks out of the blue.

‘What?’

She points at the car keys I’m clutching. ‘You said when I arrived that you were on your way out.’

‘Oh. I … just …’ I don’t want to tell her. I don’t have to. It’s none of her business.

‘I hope you’re not planning a long drive,’ she says. ‘You don’t look anywhere near well enough.’

‘I’m going to the Culver Valley. For a sales tour of a second-homes development. I’m thinking of buying a place there. So that I get can away from here, at least at weekends.’

Holidays will be trickier, because Stuart won’t always be able to take the time off work. It won’t be a problem for me, thankfully; as soon as I heard that Joseph had got a place at Saviour, I reorganised my work schedule so that I could work longer days in the office during term time and from home during school holidays, when I would also take all my annual leave. I didn’t think work would agree, and was planning to resign if they didn’t, but to my surprise they said it was fine.

The tricky part will be confessing that my plan is for Joseph and me to live at Swallowfield whenever he’s not at school, even if that means leaving Stuart behind in Cambridge, as it often will.

Am I trying to stealth-leave my husband, subtly and by degrees? Trying to make a point by insisting on taking Joseph as far away from Saviour as I can, whenever I can, just to prove to Dr Freeman that I’m in charge?

Whatever my motivation is for wanting to leave Cambridge, I would prefer not to know. It’s as if I’m receiving my instructions from an authority that has nothing to do with me and isn’t even part of me – one I trust absolutely. I know what I need to do and that’s enough. It’s a weird feeling. Like none I’ve ever had before.

I need to buy a house on Swallowfield Estate.

‘I’d advise against,’ says Pat. For a minute, I forgot she was there.

‘Sorry?’

‘Now’s not a good time to be making important decisions, Louise. Trust me. It sounds to me like you’re trying to run away. What you should be doing’s sorting things out here – at home.’

‘Excuse me?’ I laugh. ‘First, I
did
trust you, to a ridiculous degree, and look where it got me – you believe my neighbour’s lies over me. Second, who are you to tell me how to arrange my life? I don’t even know you. You know nothing about me.’

‘I know you shouldn’t drive to the Culver Valley. Don’t do it, Louise.’

The room has darkened, as if someone has adjusted the dimmer switch, but that’s impossible. Pat and I are the only people here. Shaking, I haul myself to my feet and say, ‘I’d like you to leave now, please.’

Pat stands too. ‘Stay here,’ she says, looking past my shoulder, at the wall behind me. ‘Get some sleep. Forget buying a second home. The noise will stop. It already has. Mr Clay won’t bother you again. Please take my advice.’

‘That’s not true! You’ve not listened to anything I’ve said. Look, just … go.’

She nods, apparently unoffended, and begins to
rock her way to the door, tilting from side to side as she goes.

‘Ring me if you need me. You know where I am,’ she says before leaving. ‘And keep writing the diary.’

It is like falling in love. It
is
falling in love. I knew it was going to be. I knew Swallowfield would be the right place. Two hours ago, as I drove past the sign that says ‘Welcome to the Culver Valley’, I imagined myself doing the journey with Joseph, his happy voice asking, ‘How much longer?’ from the back seat. He’ll be beside himself with excitement whenever we come here, desperate to get out of the city and back to his other house in the beautiful countryside outside Spilling.

Of course, I didn’t know for sure, on my way to Swallowfield, that I’d want to buy: this is what I tell myself and, although it doesn’t feel true, it must be. I hadn’t seen the estate yet, or any of the houses. I hadn’t been on Bethan’s sales tour. All I knew was
that I felt drawn, as if by a magnet, and couldn’t resist. Didn’t want to resist.

As I drove along the approach road to Swallowfield, I imagined that it might have been rolled out, brand new and only seconds ago, for my sole use. There were no other cars on it going in either direction. I lowered my window to see if I could hear traffic in the distance; I couldn’t. The only sound, apart from my car’s engine, was that of the birds – so many and so varied that it made me realise I’d never really heard or listened to anything like it before. People say birds chirp – they call it ‘song’ – but I heard no tunes and all kinds of other strange utterances, most of which couldn’t be summed up so easily. It was like listening to an uncoordinated orchestra playing above my head, one that contained dozens of different instruments.

When I saw, coming up on the left, the large pale green sign with ‘Swallowfield’ printed across it in lower-case white letters, I had a crazy idea. I was a little early for my meeting with Bethan Lyons, the sales director, so I decided to try something that, in Cambridge, would be regarded as a suicide attempt: I slowed down, drove into the middle of the road and parked horizontally across the white line that separates eastbound traffic from westbound.

Nothing bad happened. No other cars came. I wasn’t worried that they would, either. I felt utterly
calm and at peace, as though nothing could happen here that would threaten my safety or happiness in any way. It was the oddest feeling. I opened the car door and looked to my right at the fields, hedges and trees – at the hills in the distance with white and pastel-coloured cottages, warm beige stone farmhouses and black-painted barns dotted across them – and I almost closed my eyes and fell asleep on the spot. Finally, I could relax. I was home. (Technically, the opposite was the case, but I didn’t, and don’t, and never have cared about facts when they don’t feel true.)

It was cold – and still is – but the sun was shining brightly, lighting up patches of vivid green everywhere I looked. It was as if I’d strayed into some kind of magical other-world, a sparkling alternative reality that most people knew nothing about. And this was before I’d set foot on the estate itself. I don’t know how I’d have dealt with the disappointment if Swallowfield had turned out to be hideous. All I can say (and Stuart won’t believe me, unless he feels the same way himself, which he won’t) is that I knew it wouldn’t happen. I knew Swallowfield would exceed my expectations.

‘So, the nature-only part of the estate starts here,’ Bethan says, bringing me back to the moment. We have been round the stunning glass sculpture of a
show home, the café and the shop, and now we are in the official crested Swallowfield Range Rover, about to go through wooden gates, off the gravelled lane and on to a wide grassy path that has a lake to one side of it. Swallowfield has five lakes, and residents are allowed to swim and fish in all but one of them. Three of them, the smallest, have houses around them and still a few bare plots for new houses to be built, and the two largest lakes are in the purely rural bit that Bethan is driving me around now, on the land that will never be developed, Swallowfield’s residents’ own private cultivated wilderness. I want it for myself, and for Joseph, with a desperation that verges on hysteria, though Bethan wouldn’t be able to guess from looking at me. I stare out of the Range Rover’s window at the ripples on the surface of the water and the wooden jetty, and I can see Joseph throwing off his clothes and diving in on a stifling hot day. I picture myself leaping in after him, Stuart shouting after us, ‘Rather you than me! I’ll save my swimming for the spa, thank you very much.’

I can’t wait to see the spa. Bethan says I can have a swim and a complimentary half-hour back, neck and shoulder massage. Well, it’s only complimentary if I end up buying a house here, but I already know that I will. I made up my mind for certain when Bethan buzzed me in and I drove through the gates on to the
estate; my feeling of ‘This is right, this is the one and only right thing in my life’ intensified, and has been intensifying ever since.

‘So, this is the rural idyll bit,’ Bethan says, laughing. She has an odd habit of looking in her rear-view mirror every time she addresses me, as if she’s talking to someone sitting in the back instead of beside her in the front passenger seat, as I am.

Maybe she doesn’t understand that I would only be able to see her eyes in the mirror if she could see mine. I think about Pat touching the mirror in my lounge with her index finger …

Am I such a frightful sight at the moment that anybody would prefer to look at their own reflection than at me? Actually, I wouldn’t blame Bethan if she felt that way, even if the skin beneath my eyes weren’t such a mess; she’s got thick shoulder-length hair the colour of dark honey, big brown eyes, perfectly straight teeth, flawless skin. Her only not-ideal features, if I’m being strict, are too-thin lips and a too-small nose that looks sharp, even though it wouldn’t be if you touched it. In spite of these minor physical blemishes, ninety-nine out of a hundred men would choose her over me, I’m sure.

‘Honestly, it sounds silly, but it
is
an idyll, this part of the estate,’ she gushes. ‘It’s the heart and soul
of Swallowfield, really – that’s what all our homeowners say. This is where you and your family will come when you want a purely rural experience – no houses, no car noise, hardly any people – you might bump into one or two walkers or picnickers, but most of our residents tell us they never bump into anyone out here. And no one who isn’t a resident can get in, obviously, so you’ll have five hundred acres of beautiful countryside all to yourself.’

‘Wow,’ I breathe. ‘It’s like paradise, it really is.’ Privately, I am thinking, ‘All to myself apart from having to share it with all the other homeowners, and there are at least fifty houses here.’ I don’t care; if anything could put me off, it certainly isn’t that. Stuart and I could buy a holiday home that we wouldn’t have to share with anyone, but it wouldn’t have 500 acres attached to it, or an award-winning £10-million spa, or a helipad (not that we’ll ever need it) or a concierge service, whatever that is. No doubt I will find out.

It must be satisfying to be Bethan, I think to myself, especially when the person she’s trying to sell to is me. I’m a sure thing. She is peddling desire to someone who is already head over heels, and I can’t imagine that anyone would come here and not be instantly smitten. Bethan’s job-satisfaction levels must be sky high.

‘Unlike a lot of gated second-home communities, we don’t allow subletting or holiday rentals,’ she tells me, ‘so the only other people you’ll ever see anywhere on the estate are the staff and other residents. Our homeowners love the exclusivity of Swallowfield.’ She laughs. ‘To be honest, they love everything about it – the beauty, the incredibly fresh air, the quiet, the absolute safety. We’re gated, obviously, and there’s a discreet but constant security presence, so from a lock-up-and-leave point of view, you won’t find better, and the best thing is that it’s totally safe for children to roam around unsupervised, and where else is that possible? Not even in a village these days. Course, the other thing with a village is that people resent you, don’t they? City folk buying up the houses to use as second homes – here you don’t get any of that because it’s a community where it’s
everyone’s
second home. And what everyone forgets about villages is that they can be incredibly noisy – all that agricultural machinery, farmworkers going about their daily business. There’s none of that here.’

Her use of the word ‘noisy’ has unsettled me. There might be no agricultural machinery at Swallowfield, but there are other people. What’s to stop Mr Fahrenheit buying a second home here? Or someone like him?

‘And all the amazing animal and plant life we’ve got!’ Bethan goes on. ‘Fascinating though many of our homeowners are, they’re unlikely to be your most interesting neighbours – there’s all kinds of rare species living here. You’ll be amazed by what you see when you nip out for a walk – rabbits, deer, dragonflies, frogs, all different kinds of birds. And almost the best thing of all is watching the changing of the seasons at Swallowfield. You just don’t notice it in a city in the same way, but here … oh!’ She half closes her eyes, as if in ecstasy. She is overdoing it, but I don’t mind.