‘Generally, yes.’ Gina could guess exactly which conservation officer Amanda had spoken to: Keith Hurst. Or ‘Hurst Case Scenario’, as he was known in the office, on account of his oft-repeated theory that a good conservation officer assumed the worst and worked backwards. ‘But don’t worry, I know how to handle them.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Would you like me to arrange to have a builder come out too?’ Gina woke up her laptop, checking to see when Lorcan Hennessey was back from his holiday. He was her first-choice builder: thorough, easy-going, and sympathetic to the quirks of old houses. ‘I’ve got a couple of experienced foremen I’ve worked with on listed properties. They could give you some idea of costs, maybe put the conservation officer’s mind at rest that you’re not bringing in the bulldozers.’
‘You’re going to need more than that with this guy. When I told him I was based in London, he almost shut the conversation down then and there.’
‘Oh dear.’ Gina knew what that was about: Hartstone Hall out by Much Larton, bought by a London developer, green-lit by Keith, abandoned after six months, due to lack of cash. Fifteen years ago. It still rankled. ‘But I can help you shape your application so it’s as appealing as possible from their point of view. We can talk about it. No obligation, obviously.’
‘Thanks. It’s not as if we’re planning to ruin the place. I just want to be able to live in it.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. So whereabouts is the house?’ Gina’s mouse clicked on her favourite property website; she was normally obsessive about monitoring the local fantasy home market but she’d lost track of it a bit lately.
‘I’ll send you a link. It’s called the Magistrate’s House.’
Gina’s hand stopped moving. Of course it would be the Magistrate’s House. Her heart plunged inside her chest like a shot bird, falling blackly into the pit of her stomach. The elegantly proportioned double façade of the Magistrate’s House rose in front of her mind’s eye, three storeys, with long Georgian windows, red-streaked ivy winding around the central porthole window, the old brickwork now cleaned and repointed, the sashes replaced and the glass polished . . . ‘I didn’t know that was on the market,’ she said.
‘No? We found it through a private search agency. It might not have been advertised. Is it a house you know?’
‘Um, yes.’ Gina swallowed. First someone else had snaffled her husband from under her nose, now someone else had bagged her dream house. ‘It’s one of the nicest properties in the area. One of the oldest. I’ve always . . . always liked it. Congratulations. It’s got the potential to be stunning.’
‘Good.’ Amanda seemed pleased. ‘Well, I’ll email over some contact details, and I’ll look forward to meeting you on Thursday.’
‘You too,’ said Gina, but Amanda had hung up while she was still staring out at the canal, where two interloping seagulls were skimming greedily across the water. They seemed too big for the canal, too opaque and white. The ducks were nowhere to be seen.
A few minutes later, Amanda’s email popped up on the corner of Gina’s screen with directions and notes, but Gina didn’t need a map reference – she knew exactly where the house was.
The Magistrate’s House lay on the outskirts of a village called Langley St Michael, and its location – opposite the old Norman church and surrounded by cider-apple orchards, untouched by modern estates or mobile phone masts – summed up its comfortable position in the social hierarchy of the area. Most of Langley St Michael was a designated conservation area; houses there were lovingly returned to their former lime-rendered glory, not improved with extensions. If anything, extensions were discreetly nipped off, like unsightly warts.
Gina knew the history of the Magistrate’s House; she’d traced it at her council desk, while pretending to update her project files. It had been the family seat of the Warwicks, wealthy eighteenth-century wine merchants who’d first imported sherry and Madeira into the county, and exported the local cider. The house had been passed proudly from one red-nosed Sir Henry to another, until a persistent outbreak of daughters had disrupted the line in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, and it had been sold to a Birmingham couple who’d made their substantial fortune in bicycle parts. They’d had no children to carry it through the strained post-war years, and during the Blitz, clutches of bewildered refugees from London had been packed into makeshift dorms where housemaids had once slept three to a bed. In the Fifties, a local doctor had rolled up his sleeves and taken on the now shabby house, and it had become the epicentre of cocktail parties and parish-council meetings, until his widow had sold it after his death in 1998. A developer had proposed converting it into a hotel but plans had (been) stalled, twice, and the Magistrate’s House had slowly fallen into a state of magnificent decay.
Gina and Stuart had been out to see the house three times, once with the estate agent, once with her mother, who had loved the address but shuddered at the damp wine cellars (‘Too dark, and that pond’s dangerous for children’) and once with their builder, Lorcan. Like Gina, Lorcan saw the possibilities in ramshackle buildings, and talked about them as if they were wayward old relatives who could be set right with a bit of attention.
‘She’s in a rough state now, but she’s got great bones,’ he’d said, patting a flaking window frame, and Gina, her heart already decorating the grand master bedroom in draped brocades, knew what he meant. It was a handsome house, even in its unloved, morning-after state. It just needed a family to wake it up, to transfuse it with life.
Stuart hadn’t felt the same. Everything she had loved about the place rang alarm bells for him. The complicated roof. The decaying sash windows. The listed status. He wasn’t wrong, which made it even worse. And the timing had been terrible: a few weeks later, she’d had her diagnosis, and Stuart’s third reaction, after ‘Shit’ and ‘Let’s get married right now’, had actually been, ‘Thank God we didn’t buy that money-pit in Langley.’
Gina stared, unseeing, at Amanda’s email. Dryden Road had probably been the right house to buy. It had been straightforward, habitable, if gloomy, during the grinding months of Gina’s chemotherapy, and then, when she had finally recovered enough to go back to work, renovating its square Victorian rooms had given her and Stuart enough conversation to fill the strange anti-climax that had followed her final sign-off at the hospital.
But when it was done, Gina thought, it was done. The house had been the helpful third person in their marriage, the one who’d kept them together, jollying them along with discussions about mixer taps and pendant lights when they’d had nothing else to say to each other. All the while the Magistrate’s House had lingered in Gina’s mind, the one that got away. The might-have-been house.
And now it was someone else’s.
Chapter Five
ITEM: a green Victorian witch-ball on a long brass chain, for hanging in a hallway to lure and trap any lurking evil spirits
Langley St Michael, March 2010
Gina looks down at the witch-ball she’s holding and sees her own face reflected back at her, green, like Glinda the good witch.
The witch-ball had been given to her by a nice old lady she’d advised about re-roofing an old farm cottage out near Rosehill. The hollyhocks and foxgloves in the garden had reminded Gina of a gingerbread house and, she’d found out over several cups of tea, the cottage had been in Mrs Hubert’s family since the land around it was all farmed, something she could remember herself. She’d helped with the harvest as a little girl.
‘Apples and pears, right up to St Mary’s Church on the hill! And the dray horses grazing where that hospital is now!’ she’d said, as if she could still see their feathery hooves out of the corner of her pale eye.
Ever since then, Gina has seen St Mary’s Road into Longhampton through a different filter. She likes the way houses capture their moment in history, imprinting crinolines and flat caps to the landscape while time and change wash around them, like the tide. Then, when they’re fragile and
at risk of being lost, Gina can save them and the tissue layer of the past over the present day, iron boot scrapers keeping the rasp of muddy button boots alive next to Internet cable covers.
But no sooner had Mrs Hubert got her roof finished than she’d had a fall, the children had appeared from Bristol to sweep her off to residential care and the house was sold. The skinny lass who’d picked pears in the perry orchards that lay underneath Meadows Shopping Mall was now sitting in the converted drawing room of the house once owned by Longhampton’s jam magnates. Gina wonders whether Mrs Hubert can see the former residents floating in surprise through the new stud walls, indignant at the descendants of farmers and housemaids inhabiting their family home.
The witch-ball is from the cottage, of course. Long before the fall, before Mrs Hubert’s house was cleared for auction, the old lady had hidden it in the back of Gina’s car, and wouldn’t listen when Gina tried to give it back. Accepting gifts was absolutely, totally against all council rules. She’d offered to buy it, anxious not to hurt her feelings, but Mrs Hubert had refused outright. ‘It’s terrible bad luck, dear!’ she said. ‘You can only give them away, look.’ The hands had folded over hers. Bird-like, so translucent that the blue veins and the spreading coffee-brown liver spots merged, but strong. ‘And none of us need go looking for more bad luck, do we?’ she’d added, with a squeeze that made Gina wonder how much of her mind Mrs Hubert could read.
And so she’d guiltily driven home to Dryden Road with a genuine Victorian witch-ball in the boot. It was the most perfect witch-ball Gina had ever seen: about the size of a Galia melon, a rich festive green with a burnished brass loop at the top, like a giant Christmas tree bauble, so it could be hung by the door, ready to lure a malevolent spirit then trap it in the strands of filigree glass inside.
Gina looks at the witch-ball now, in her lap. She really wanted to hang it in the hallway, above the encaustic tiles she’s been regrouting, but Stuart doesn’t want it in the house; he thinks it’s superstitious nonsense. After the experience Gina’s had of dry facts, of single-minded chemical truths, she wants to make a bit more room in her world for superstition, but Stuart’s adamant, and his flat refusal to see the beauty in it pinches out another guttering flame inside her.
Gina isn’t sure why she’s brought her witch-ball to the Magistrate’s House. She isn’t even sure why she’s here now. She and Stuart looked at dozens of other properties before they bought Dryden Road, but this was the one place that filled her with its energy. Even now, Gina feels a connection with it, a need to know its forgotten stories. In the middle of the night, jarred out of sleep by thoughts that go round and round in circles, she’d had a strange, romantic picture of hanging the witch-ball in the abandoned doorway, leaving it for the lucky person who buys the crumbling house and turns it back into the family home that she can see hovering over the broken shell like a ghostly negative. The house needs protecting until it can attract a new family.
It could have been them. Gina loses herself in her favourite private fantasy of what might have been, imagining herself floating through the garden, now landscaped and not overgrown with weeds; she’s rosy-cheeked and healthy, snipping dead heads off the fondant-coloured roses that form banks of drifting scent between the drive and the house.
She pictures herself in the cool, cream-tiled kitchen, making apple pies with deft, floury hands; Stuart in the book-lined study, transformed into an enthusiastic reader of Victorian fiction; both of them in the bedroom, in a brass-framed bed, passion licking and burning between them again like the first purple flames of the coal fire in the tiled hearth. It’s idyllic but not impossible. They’d have grown with the house, she thinks, they’d have stretched up to match its convivial dining room and welcoming hall.
Gina rubs her eyes, suddenly tired. In the fantasy, she and the house are always sharper than Stuart, and obviously she never gets cancer. It’s been nine months since her final appointment with Mr Khan. There are no signs of her original cancer, and the chances of it coming back, as long as she’s on the daily Tamoxifen, are ‘very low, in a woman your age’. Stuart had taken them all out for a celebration dinner; Jason and Naomi had bought champagne; Janet had cried with relief. Everyone had felt relief, apart from Gina.
Gina just felt, secretly, that a bigger balance had been squared. She was back to zero. Twenty-nine, and back to zero.
She looks down at the witch-ball, gleaming in her lap like a magical pea. It’s a stupid idea to leave it here. It’s a delicate thing, just old silvered glass – an easy target for a kid with an air rifle. As she moves, the light shifts on it, and Gina shivers at the thought of seeing another face behind her.
Gina had always thought a witch-ball was supposed to trap spirits but Mrs Hubert said it was to warn you of any witches creeping up on you. This is a fresh start but there are lots of things behind her. Like Mrs Hubert, Gina thinks it’s better to be able to see them than to pretend they’re not there.
It wasn’t the best day to see the house. The local radio weather forecast was promising early rain that would make the damp feel damper and the halls seem darker, but as Gina turned down the short tree-lined drive, a burst of sunshine emerged from behind the clouds, and her heart fluttered at the sight of the red roof rising above the trees, the symmetrical chimney stacks at each end.
She parked her red Golf next to the array of cars already assembled along the gravel turn: a black Range Rover, a BMW estate, and the council’s pool Astra. No sign of Lorcan’s van yet.
Good, she thought, getting out. She’d deliberately arrived ten minutes early so that she had time to gather herself, put the old dreams firmly away, before she went in.
As she headed towards the terraced lawns at the side of the house, Gina’s expert eye spotted signs of deterioration since she’d last been there. There were some tiles missing off the roof, and two of the crenellated chimney pots were visibly leaning. The mental calculator in her head started clicking: she was well over fifty thousand pounds before she’d even looked lower than the roofline.
Fixing damage was one thing, but Gina knew that even when you’d arrested decay, houses like these had expensive tastes. Agas that burned great quantities of oil, grounds that demanded weekly gardeners, and a heart that had to be stoked with atmosphere and activity, as well as furniture. You needed the social life, too. Weekending friends, their children and dogs; mellow, wine-warmed autumn dinners in the kitchen; village book groups in the drawing room; and ebullient New Year’s Eves spilling into the candlelit garden. Those high ceilings would have echoed the silence of two people who barely spoke to each other down to them, reproach lingering, like dust, in every unused spare room.
Gina walked round the gravel path and stopped by a stone bench, positioned to give the best view of the house from one side, as well as a sweeping panorama of the terraced gardens from the other. She gazed at the beautiful lines of the front elevation, trying to flush any lingering traces of regret from her system before she met Amanda. She’d already warned Lorcan not to say anything about her own interest in the place; he’d understood.
This house would have ruined Stuart and me, Gina reminded herself, unable to stop searching for more signs of structural damage she didn’t really want to find, the same way you’d half hope, half dread to see wrinkles on the face of a still-attractive ex.
The sun went behind a cloud, and Gina felt an unexpected loneliness, for Stuart and the happiness they’d once had. There had been happiness. He had carried her over the threshold of their first place together, joked about nurseries and trampolines ruining his lawn. She’d never get that time back: it was gone. Those chances had been blown. Gina let the sadness run through her for a moment rather than fight it: it dissipated faster that way.
From the outside, she thought, blinking tears away hard, it’ll just look like I’m taking in the project. That’s fine.
She heard a van door slam, and the sound of boots crunch on the gravel, but didn’t turn because her eyelashes w
ere wet. The steps came nearer, and Gina was aware of a solid male presence behind her, one that smelt of a light, lemony aftershave and clean clothes. It didn’t say anything, which confirmed her suspicions about who it was.
‘Morning, Lorcan,’ she said. ‘Just putting some old memories to bed. Don’t say anything to Amanda, will you?’
‘Course not. About what?’ The voice wasn’t Irish. It was southern English.
Gina spun round. The man standing behind her was wearing jeans and a Pixies T-shirt under a half-zipped fleece, with a builder’s bag slung over one shoulder. She didn’t recognise him, but Lorcan had said he might bring along a few ‘trades’ to advise on specialist work and, like Lorcan himself, most of his mates were of the old band T-shirt persuasion.
‘Oh, er, nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just . . . just . . .’
‘Just looking. I know. It’s a lovely old place.’ He dumped the bag and took a step nearer, standing next to her with his arms folded, his head tilted to take in the view. ‘You can almost see them wafting out of those french windows, spot of croquet on the front lawn, fancy hats and boaters . . .’
‘Pimm’s in hand, light music playing inside.’ Gina paused. ‘Weather permitting. You don’t tend to picture the endless afternoons playing Scrabble while it’s too wet to go out, do you?’
‘Ha! Indeed you don’t. But isn’t that when you imagine the roaring log fire and eight-foot Douglas pine with teeny tiny candles? And urchins arriving for the annual mince pie and half a crown in the kitchens?’
Gina liked this game: she played it herself. ‘Ah, yes. Chestnuts roasting on the hearth, and the ominous letters arriving from the Front? Brought in on a silver tray during a raucous cocktail party?’ She mimed a gramophone needle screeching to a stop.