a while the dirty old streets of the East End turned into clean, wide roads with pavements for people to walk, and tall beautiful houses either side.
‘I didn’t know we was going to the countryside,’ Nora whispered to me, pointing out her side of the coach and sure enough it was green grass, shrubs and trees stretching away as far as our eyes could see, and even people riding horses. Around the edges were real flowers, planted in dazzling carpets of colour, brighter than you could imagine. More brilliant even than the printed cottons we loved so much.
‘That’s Hyde Park, silly,’ sharp ears Emily said, ‘where the grand ladies and gentlemen go to take the air, to walk or ride.’ Well, that silenced us both – the very idea of having the time to wander freely in a beautiful green place like that – and it wasn’t long after that the coach passed beside a long, high wall and slowed down to enter a gate with guardsmen on either side, went round the back of a house so tall I had to bend down beside the window to catch a glimpse of the roof, and then we came to a stop.
We had arrived.
The voice stops and the tape winds squeakily for a moment or two then reaches the end, and the machine makes a loud clunk as it switches itself off.
Chapter Two
London, January 2008
‘Panic stations, darling. The Cosy Homes people are coming next week, and they say I have to clear the lofts before they get here, and Peter down the road was going to help me, you know, the man who suggested it all in the first place, but he’s gone and hurt his back so he can’t come any more and I don’t know what I’m going to do …’
My mother Eleanor is seventy-three and her memory’s starting to fail, so it doesn’t take much to upset her. Plus she’s always nervous on the telephone.
‘Slow down, Mum,’ I whispered, wishing she wouldn’t call me at work. The office was unusually quiet – it was that depressing post-Christmas period when everyone is gloomily slumped at their desks pretending to be busy while surreptitiously job hunting. ‘You’re going to have to tell me what all this is about. For a start, who are Cosy Homes?’
‘The insulation people. It’s completely free for the over-seventies, imagine that, and they say it will cut my heating bills by a quarter and you know what a worry the price of oil is these days so I could hardly refuse, could I? I’m sure I told you about this.’
I racked my brains. Perhaps she had, but with everything that had been going on in the past few days, I’d clearly forgotten. On our first day back after the break we’d received an email announcing yet another round of redundancies. Happy New Year, one and all! Morale was at an all-time low and the rumour mill working overtime. And, joy of joys, next week we were all to be interviewed by some of those smug, overpaid management consultants the company had called in.
I didn’t really want to be here anyway – it was only meant to be an ‘interim job’ to raise enough cash to realise my dream of starting my own interior design business. But the macho, target-driven environment, the daily bust-a-gut expectations and ridiculous deadlines had become surprisingly tolerable when I saw the noughts on my monthly pay slip and annual bonus-time letter. The financial rewards were just too sweet to relinquish. Especially now that I was newly single, with a massive mortgage to cover.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I said, distractedly scrolling down the recruitment agency website on my screen. ‘I was planning to come at the weekend, anyway. I’m sure we can get it sorted together in a few hours.’
I heard her relieved sigh. ‘Oh could you, dearest girl? It would be such a weight off my mind.’
My Mini can virtually drive itself to Rowan Cottage, home for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents moved there in the 1960s, after they married and my father was recruited by the new university that had recently opened on the outskirts of Eastchester. He was already in his fifties and there was a twenty-year age difference between them – they met at University College, London, where he had been her doctorate tutor – but it was a very loving marriage. I was born five years later, to the great joy of both.
When I was three years old, he and my grandfather were killed in a terrible head-on collision on the A12 in heavy fog. All I can recall of that dreadful night is two large policemen at the door, and the woman officer who held me when my mother collapsed. She took my hand and walked me down the lane in my pyjamas and slippers, clutching my favourite teddy, to be looked after by our neighbours.
My grandfather was fairly senior in the local police, and my father by then a noted academic, so the accident was widely reported, but no cause ever explained. When I turned seventeen and began to take driving lessons, I asked Mum who’d been at the wheel that night, whether anyone else had been involved or whose fault it had been, but her eyes had clouded over.
‘We’ll never know, dear. It was a long time ago. Best let sleeping dogs lie,’ was all she would say.
Thanks to my father’s life insurance policy she managed to hang on to the house and kept his spirit alive by displaying photographs in every room and talking about him frequently. He looked like a typical sixties academic, with his gold-rimmed glasses and baggy olive green corduroy jacket, leather-patched at the elbows, often with his head in a book or a journal. Mum always says that she fell for his eyes, a kingfisher blue so brilliant that they seemed to hold her in a magic beam every time he looked at her.
There he is, frozen in time, lighting his pipe, playing cricket at a family picnic, sitting in the car with our small dog, Scottie, on his knee. In the photographs he seems to wear a perpetual smile, although apparently he could also be impatient and bossy – traits which, alas, he seems to have passed on to me. I have also inherited his slight stature, blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin, although the genes that gave him a brilliant academic brain seem to have passed me by. I’m more like my mother in temperament: always daydreaming and with a tendency to become distracted.
Money must have been tight. We had few luxuries but I always felt happy and loved, and never overly troubled by the lack of a father in my life. Mum never had any other relationships, not that she let me know about, at least. ‘You should join a dating agency,’ I suggested once – such things appearing to my teenage self as exotic and daring.
She brushed away the suggestion. ‘What a stupid idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I want a new beau? I’ve got my house and my health, my friends and my singing. And I’ve got you, my lovely girl. I don’t need to go out dating at my age.’
I took the slip road off the A12 and into the peace of the lanes. After the urban sprawl and unlovely highways of outer London, North Essex is surprisingly rural and beautiful. At this time of year, furrows in the bare fields collect rainwater and reflect silver stripes of sky against the brown soil; giant elms and oaks stand leafless and black against the wide sky, and rooks gather in their branches each evening, their fierce cawing echoing across the countryside.
Every village is dominated by an outsized flint church, each with its tower reaching robustly towards heaven, built in medieval times by a landed gentry grown fat on wool farming, who sought to secure their seats in paradise. These days the villages still attract fat cats: sleek City types drawn here by the newly-electrified line to Liverpool Street, who worship the great god of annual bonuses and whose vision of paradise is a new Aga in the kitchen, a hot tub on the patio and a sports car in the double garage.
At the end of the lane, in a shallow dip between two gentle hills,
