and plaster the whole place so there wasn’t a bump or a crack to be seen. The place milled with joiners, electricians and tilers, all managed by Mark who seemed to relish his role as Director of Operations. Della would never have imagined a 120-year-old house could appear so unblemished and pristine. The kitchen – original sixties, which she had thought rather charming – had been flung into a skip, to be replaced by glossy white units and sleek granite worktops. She had found one of the original pistachio green Bakelite drawer knobs lying in the gutter and had wiped it down and stuffed it into her pocket.
When the work was complete, Della had been seized by an urge to fill their home with dazzling colour, of the kind their daughter used to love to daub onto rolls of lining paper before progressing to canvasses at the easel in her room. ‘This place should be bright and cheerful,’ Della had announced, ‘like a butterfly.’ The fiery dashes on a Red Admiral’s wings, she meant, or the beautiful azure of a Common Blue. While Mark started to pore over the sleek, modern furniture offered by high-end stores, she dabbled around on Gumtree, hoping to source more interesting items to add a dash of character to their newly renovated home.
‘Hey,’ Della said now, finding Mark reading the five-day-old Sunday paper in the living room. She perched beside him on the unyielding sofa. ‘Look, darling, I know I’ve been a bit rash. You’re right, we don’t have space for them. But they’re important to me, okay?’
‘Mmm.’ His gaze remained on the newspaper. ‘You could have left them in their boxes, though. At least then I’d have been reassured that they’re not a permanent fixture.’
‘But that’d look awful, as if we’d just moved in.’
‘And it looks great with them all piled up, hardly any room to move, stinking the place out?’ As if she had lugged a crate of rotting fish into the house!
She glared at him, deciding not to explain that unpacking was just an excuse to go through the books, to handle and pore over them, as she had done as a child. She had wanted to feel the pages, to study her mother’s rather ill-tempered scribbled notes. Pie far too tart. Jeff refused to eat. 2 oz more sugar needed … Took TWICE as long to bake as says here … Unpleasant cheese sauce. Waste of ingredients. Avoid!!!
‘Okay,’ Della went on, aware of tightness in her chest now, ‘I accept that they can’t sit there piled up in the hall forever. I mean, I know it makes us look like the crazy family, and no one’ll want to visit us.’
She glanced at him. Not that Mark was a huge fan of gatherings in the house anyway, lest a drink be spilled, heaven forbid. ‘I’ll find somewhere else to store them,’ she added, feeling like a child, summonsed to the head teacher’s office to give an explanation for some minor misdemeanour.
Was this how marriage was meant to be? It wasn’t as if Mark was unkind. Yet somehow, without Della even noticing it happening, he’d become the one who decided pretty much everything. It made her feel faintly ashamed and bewildered – why had she allowed it to happen? She had raised Sophie to be confident and strong and to go for whatever she wanted in life. Yet here Della was, pandering to a man who barely seemed to care or even notice what she did, unless it involved 962 cookbooks.
He turned to her. ‘Okay, have your books. Keep them wherever you like. That’s not really the issue.’
‘What is the issue then?’ She frowned.
He flared his nostrils in a rather equine way, Della thought. ‘You and Freda, in cahoots …’
‘She’s my friend,’ Della retorted. ‘We weren’t in cahoots. She was only helping me out. She’s been a huge help, actually, these past few weeks.’
‘What I mean is,’ he cut in, ‘the two of you hatched a plan, hiring that bloody great van that’s parked outside …’
‘It’s the smallest one they had!’
‘And bringing them all here without even consulting …’
‘Consulting?’ she spluttered.
‘I mean, without even discussing it with me.’
Della stared at him, and all the words she wanted to say – I don’t have to consult you about everything – faded away in her mind. Instead of defending her actions, which would have led to a row, and which Sophie would have heard from her room, she sat still and stared around their living room. It was a shrine to neutrals, a study in muted good taste. That’s what Della felt like too sometimes: muted, as if all the sparkle in her had been dimmed down so low as to be barely noticeable anymore. She hadn’t got her way in the decorating scheme for their home. Mark had vetoed any vintage furniture she’d found on Gumtree. Without any discussion – and certainly no prior consultation – he had taken himself off to Homebase and returned with several cans of Farrow & Ball’s Cabbage White.
In fact, Mark was only pretending to be engrossed in the newspaper. He couldn’t read right now; he could barely think, since it had become apparent that Della was determined to keep those darned books. She couldn’t let her mother go – that was the real issue. She had spent weeks looking after and visiting her, and now Kitty had gone, leaving a gaping hole that Della had no idea how to fill. Mark hadn’t really considered how he would feel when his own mother and father passed away, but he was pretty certain he wouldn’t want to pack up their possessions and haul them all to this house.
In fact, books in great numbers had always made him feel decidedly uneasy. His parents owned perhaps a dozen between them, and he had never been a great reader himself. It had always pained him slightly, the feeling of being hemmed in by all those cookbooks whenever they had visited Kitty at Rosemary Cottage. And now – he could hardly believe it was true – the books had damn’ well migrated here.
He couldn’t bear it. Hemmed in: that was precisely how he felt right now. Why, he wondered, as he made his way through to the kitchen in search of wine, couldn’t Della have chosen one of Kitty’s necklaces instead?
Della could forgive Mark’s air of mild grumpiness because that was just him: a hardworking fifty-two-year-old man who tended towards jadedness but was still capable of small acts of kindness, like the way he had started to bring her coffee in bed every Saturday and Sunday morning.
‘Thanks, darling,’ she said, registering the time on the bedside clock – 7.47 a.m. – as he handed her her favourite mug. ‘You golfing today?’
‘Yep, leaving in a minute. Lovely morning so we’re having an early start before the riff-raff show up.’ He chuckled. ‘You have a lie in. You’ve had an exhausting time lately, you look really tired …’ Gee, thanks, Della thought, suppressing a smirk.
‘I can’t today. I’m working.’
‘Oh, I thought you’d finished doing Saturdays?’
‘So did I,’ she said with a shrug, ‘but Liliana’s gone back to Poland so we’re short-staffed.’ In fact, she had already told him this, but clearly the information hadn’t sunk in.
She sat up and sipped from her mug. Although Della appreciated the gesture, the weekend coffee delivery had only started a few weeks ago, and after nineteen years of marriage it had been a surprising turn
