“This particular loon won’t be back, I promise you,” Mum told him. “I put on my brightest voice and said, ‘Shall I show you the upstairs?’ and she did a funny thing with her head. It started as a nod but turned into a weird neck-twisty headshake. She looked, honestly, as if a malign spirit had possessed her and was writhing inside her body.”
“I hope you booted her out,” said Dad. “I would have.”
“I left her in the lounge while I went to make her a cup…sorry, amugof tea, and when I got back there, she was all heaving sobs and streaming tears, just like the day she was outside the house inAugust. I didn’t even have the chance to ask her what was wrong. She started laying into me—”
“This is so out of order.” Dad shook his head. He looked ready to spring out of his chair and deck someone.
Lesley Gavey had accused both Mum and Peter, the estate agent, of being con men (“Though she immediately amended it to ‘con people,’ for added inclusivity,” Mum told Dad). How dared they fail to draw attention, in Shukes’s sale brochure, to the lack of a back garden? (“But it’s there, under the heading ‘Outside’: ‘beautiful, cottage-style front garden and paved backyard.’ How much clearer could it be?” “I know, Mark. Please stop shouting at me. I’m not Lesley Gavey, remember?”)
She’d demanded a box of tissues. Shukes didn’t have one, so Mum offered to get her a roll of loo paper instead. On her way out of the room, she half heard something that was definitely intended as a complaint sent up to the heavens—a railing against Fate’s twisted cruelty—but she couldn’t quite make out the words on account of all the blubbing.
She turned. “Pardon?”
“Nothing,” Lesley Gavey said in a hard voice. “It doesn’t matter.”
On her way to fetch the toilet roll, with Champ at her side, Mum whispered, “It matters to me, actually. I’m going to make her tell me, Champy.” What she thought she’d heard, though surely it couldn’t have been, was: “This was supposed to be my poor house.”
The stress was on the “poor,” with “house” following after it as if it was all one word, if that was indeed what Lesley had said and Mum hadn’t misheard.
Mum’s mind went straight to Victorian workhouses and to Dadsaying, while they were watchingScroogedone Christmas, that the writer Charles Dickens’s father had been sent to the poorhouse at some point, or the workhouse. Or maybe it was Dickens himself who’d gone there, Mum couldn’t remember.
This was supposed to be my poor house.
The last Agatha Christie novel that Swaffham Tilney’s book club had discussed before it died in a blaze of entirely unnecessary acrimony wasBy the Pricking of My Thumbs.That story opens with an elderly lady asking, “Was it your poor child?” while staring into a fireplace. Knowing that Agatha’s famous sleuth Miss Marple liked to look for parallels, Mum tried to do the same but could think of nothing that made sense. How could Lesley Gavey have believed at any point that Shukes was meant to be her Victorian-style workhouse? It was surreal and ludicrous. Mum told herself she must have heard wrong.
After handing over a brand-new loo roll, which Lesley received with a wrinkled nose and fingers that bucked and fluttered, Mum asked her what she’d said before. “Something about a poor house, wasn’t it?”
“I told you, it was nothing. Will you please drop it?” Lesley snapped.
But no, Mum wouldn’t. She told Dad: “I refused to accept that she might leave without telling me. Our house wasn’t her anything, and I wanted to know what crazy story she’d made up about it. If it’s my house, then it’s my business. I asked her once more, and out it all came in a big splurge: She and her family were about to become what she called ‘dirt poor.’ It was all her husband’s fault—bad investments, too much letting debts get out of control—andso they were having to sell their seventeen-acre smallholding in Oxfordshire and buy somewhere for maximum six hundred grand. After a period of feeling suicidal, she identified Swaffham Tilney and a few others—Reach, Swaffham Bulbeck, Burwell—as villages that were pretty, quiet, and safe, though no civilized person would live in any of them by choice, of course—”
“She said that?” asked Dad.
Mum nodded. “Swaffham Tilney was her favorite, she realized after a few trips to Cambridgeshire. She rang round estate agents, heard about Shukes from Peter, and ordered him to send photos before he’d even finished putting the brochure together, even though Shukes was right up there at her six-hundred-grand limit, and to be honest with me, she said, she’d hoped to find something palatable for less than five hundred, but every single other home on the market in her price range was a disgusting hovel—”
“She really said that?”
“So it felt like Shukes or nothing,” Mum went on. “When she stood on the village green weeping in August, that was a bad day for her.”
“Yeah, we guessed as much,” said Dad.
“She’d come with high hopes to look at Shukes for the first time. Peter had told her viewings were still some way off, we were still at the preparations stage, but she couldn’t resist coming to have a nosy from the outside. She hoped she’d see Shukes and know instantly he was the one for her: the home in which she could be blissfully happy, even though dirt poor.”
“No one who can afford a six-hundred-grand house is poor at all, in any way, shape, or form,” said Dad. “This woman needs acheckup from the neck up. I hope you told her.”
“To be fair, she realized she might have offended me and apologized: ‘I’m sorry, Sally. I know you probably don’t think of this house as any sort of…massive comedown. I actually envy you. I wish I could see it the way you do. I’d be so much happier.’”
Dad was shaking his head.
“When she came in August for her outdoor surveillance mission, what set her off crying was that Shukes looked so much smaller than in the photos Peter had emailed her.”
“It’s not small!” Dad protested. “We havefivebedrooms and three reception rooms, excluding the kitchen! We have a bedroom specially for when I’m drunk and snoring and you don’t want to sleep with me, and we also have the spare room you call Furbert’s room. How many people have so much space they can reserve entire bedrooms for urns containing dead pets?”
“There’s no need to yell our floor plan at me.” He was so indignant, Mum couldn’t help smiling. “Also, Furbert’s room isn’t a spare room. It’shisroom. And Shukes is a he, not an it.”
“Yeah, if you say so.” Dad sighed.
“It’s true, Mark,” Mum said patiently. “Furbert’s soul is still with us. It’s not about the urn; it’s about him. It means a lot to him to have his own dedicated room, even though he’s…you know…”
