Harriet shot Pippa a look she really didn’t think she deserved. When had Harriet seriously been interested in pets, other than that time she’d wanted a hamster and Pippa had refused, imagining it escaping behind the skirting boards and dying a horrible death trapped in some dark corner? Of course Harriet had pleaded for a puppy on occasion, like most children, but Pippa had successfully fended off those demands as well.
‘We’ll leave you to collect your things, then.’ Pippa leaned forward to grab the handle and closed the door none too gently, causing the landing window to rattle alarmingly.
‘What’s going on, Mum? Who is he?’ Harriet was staring at her phone again, having long ago perfected the art of conversing without making eye contact. ‘And why do you look all hot but not in a good way?’
‘Coffee,’ Pippa replied casually. ‘You know I’m hopeless until I’ve had the first. Let’s talk at breakfast and make a proper plan.’
‘Wi-Fi? You find the network yet?’
‘No, Harriet.’ Pippa resisted a groan. ‘There really are more important things to deal with first.’ Like Gil Haworth, who was probably getting dressed right now behind that door.
‘Yeah? Like what?’ Harriet flashed her a rare smile as she backed into her own room and Pippa knew she wouldn’t get another the minute her daughter found out the unwelcome news about the Wi-Fi.
‘Something to eat, for a start. I’m hungry and I’m sure you must be too.’ Pippa retreated to her own room and yanked her phone off the dressing table. This time, that ugly mirror revealed three flushed versions of herself, with darkened pupils and wild blonde hair falling to her shoulders. Another glance failed to conceal two undone buttons on her grey silk pyjamas. The rest were thankfully fastened but not quite in the right order. She really had been tired last night, and she was going to have to work hard to regain some dignity in front of Gil after that introduction. She fired off a furious message to her dad, who would probably chuckle and ignore it.
Pippa threw her case on the bed in search of clothes, musing over her dad’s reasons for wanting her in Hartfell. Both her parents had grown up in Yorkshire, meeting when Jonny was twenty-two and her mum just eighteen. Her mum’s family had owned a furniture-making business in town and one day Jonny had turned up in search of a job. He’d got it and come away with a girlfriend too, and Pippa had been born when her mum was twenty. Her brother Raf arrived eleven months later, and his birth was followed by a wedding.
Jonny had founded the band, Blue at Midnight, with three mates, and he always said they’d been in the right place at the right time when they were noticed by a scout and then signed by a label. Back in the Eighties, that was how things were done. There were no social channels, no opportunities to release music online to find a following. It was down to hard graft, night after night on the road, playing clubs no one had heard of, and sometimes luck as well. And after that first runaway hit, even more work to keep at it; to keep producing, performing, selling.
Life on the road was a given for Jonny when Pippa and Raf were little, and time spent with the family at home grounded him back in the real world. The band was soon onto their second album with a US tour booked, and the family followed Jonny south, settling in a house in north London.
Pippa had never forgotten those days and it still hurt to think too far back. Life had been normal for them then; she and Raf didn’t know any different, and without the internet they were mostly untroubled by their dad’s growing fame. Their mum, Stella, was content to raise her family and remain in the background while Jonny performed around the world. But he always came home, and a baby sister, Tilly, joined them five years after Raf.
But those days ended, as all days do, and it was her mum’s illness when Pippa turned thirteen and then her death a year later, that totally transformed their lives. Not fame, number one albums, or sold-out stadiums. Lost, stricken with grief, Jonny took time away from the band and the whole family struggled to find a way forward. Fun and loving though he was, he didn’t have any real idea of what it meant to be an ordinary parent day by day. Homework was missed, schooldays skipped, and routine flew out of the window and took their contentment with it.
Pippa couldn’t get used to the house without her mum; no longer was it a proper home. Raf showed up for school but that was pretty much all he did when it came to education. Tilly had seemed to cope best, too little to remember everything or even fully understand the magnitude of what she’d lost with their mum’s passing.
Jonny bought a holiday house in Majorca where they could hide away and avoid school, family, news – anything he thought might upset them. He carted them off to Disneyland and hired a yacht to sail around the Caribbean. Finally he admitted defeat at home and employed a housekeeper to bring order to the chaos, escaping onto a long-planned tour and leaving his younger sister in charge. The children were left behind, trying to lead the lives they’d had before but without the anchor that had held them steady.
Pippa liked the housekeeper who came in daily because she was kind, and it meant that chores were done, lunches made, and uniforms ironed. She craved order after all the turmoil and hated that her mum wasn’t there to cheer them on or track down their dad when they wanted to share something with him, though Jonny tried his best, even from a distance. Whenever Pippa caught sight of his face on a newspaper or on the television, it seemed like a stranger was staring right back at her. Her dad, far away; her mum, gone. And with it the life she’d known.
The only way she could find comfort and strength for herself was to reach out to her brother and sister, and try somehow to make their world better. Art had always been her go-to, her passion and now it became her therapy. She drew and painted in every spare moment, tucking away beautiful sketches and watercolours that filled page after page. She encouraged Raf to study before it was too late and she read with Tilly at night before bed, both sisters escaping the real world to process their grief in another.
It was to Pippa that Raf turned when a first girlfriend dumped him, to Pippa her siblings gravitated when they wanted support or merely a hug. She made herself available for them always, tried her best to step into her mum’s shoes and become what they needed, watching, loving, mothering, from the sidelines of her own life.
When Jonny came home, he never quite fitted back in. Somehow, they’d made a way to manage without him, and as money became more plentiful, he filled the emotional void with stuff. Walkmans, albums, clothes, trips, even another holiday cottage in Scotland. But he wasn’t always there, and their mum never would be again. Stuff didn’t hold them when they were sad, or wipe away tears after a breakup. Stuff didn’t sit by the phone and comfort a bereft sister when the boy she wanted to call never did.
Once, Jonny brought up the possibility of returning to live in Yorkshire and Pippa was aghast. She made him promise that he would never sell their home and drag them back north to distant relatives that had fallen away over time. Fame did that, she’d found. Only those people who’d stuck close knew who this fractured family really were. Their lives were rooted in London, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind all she knew.
Pippa pushed away thoughts of the past and went to freshen up in the bathroom. She decided to leave a shower for later, when Gil was safely out of the way. Downstairs, she glanced in at the sitting and dining rooms, decorated in the same style as the first floor of the house. The final door in the hall led into a kitchen, a pantry off that with grimy yellow walls lined with empty, dusty shelves. The fuse box looked as though it had been installed when the house had been built and she resolved that she and Harriet would go nowhere near it. The state of the electrics would probably knock another few thousand pounds off the price of this place when she got it on the market.
Given everything she’d seen of the house so far, Pippa’s expectations of the kitchen were suitably low, and she wasn’t disappointed. Smaller than contemporary living now required, three walls were covered in plain beige cupboards with metal handles, the space between the wall-mounted units and the lower ones filled with pale yellow tiles, a dark blue range jammed between them.
She was ready to weep as she thought of the clean and bright kitchen back in her beloved London home. A mullioned window framed in stone let in some light, but it was up against it with all these clashing colours. She noticed another door and window to her left; a glance through the glass revealed a terrace and large garden with a path leading towards a farmyard.
Two dog bowls were near the back door and a Formica table with pale, spindly legs had one flap raised, the other hanging down, with four cheap plastic chairs set haphazardly around it. If Gil really did live here, then he hadn’t made the place much of a home and she wondered why not. And it certainly didn’t look as though he shared the house with anyone else. Who would put up with such a state?
She checked inside the old white fridge. A small door at the top revealed an empty, iced up freezer tray and the shelves beneath it held cheese, bacon, mushrooms, milk and butter. Not the yoghurt she had hoped for, or even a scrap of fruit, and she jabbed the door shut again.A few provisions left ready, the solicitor had mentioned in the email. At least there was milk for coffee. Pippa was desperate for that caffeine hit now and one cupboard revealed coffee, a box of cornflakes, a few tins, packets of dried pasta, quite a bit of chocolate, chopped tomatoes, a jar of crushed chillies and a half-empty bottle of olive oil.
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this, and now she had yet another decision to make. Did she spend time trying to make the house look like a home before inviting an estate agent in to value it? Or did she laugh away the state of the place and declare it the perfect project and price it accordingly? It was going to take a lot more than fresh bread rising in the oven and the aroma of coffee in the kitchen to make this house a home.
But right now they were questions too complicated to answer and she was grateful for small mercies when she ran the tap and the bowl in the sink began to fill with hot water. Not for anything was she going to make even a single cup of coffee without washing the mugs first.
Once everything was dripping dry on the draining board, Pippa switched on the kettle, staring through the window as she waited for it to boil. It really was the most glorious view and Harriet had been right, she should have googled the house and Hartfell before they’d arrived. She’d employed her usual tactic of avoiding anything she didn’t want to think about. It had always been her default since her mum had died; focus on the good and deal with the bad only when necessary.
The sun was climbing higher in a blue sky, patches of dappled light falling between trees and overgrown shrubs in the garden. The grass was too long to be a lawn and there was an abundant and natural beauty to the deep borders blazing with summer colours, delphiniums and verbena tall and stately amongst clumps of lavender geraniums and pink achillea.
Wooden furniture sat on the stone terrace, green with moss and tatty from neglect. Over the hawthorn hedge bordering the garden on the right, Pippa saw the farmyard, a converted stone barn between two more outbuildings, windows set below the eaves. The driveway where she had left her car last night continued on to the yard, an area next to a small paddock set aside for more parking.
