I’ve never had much money. My mum was a cleaner and my dad worked in a warehouse. I grew up in Keynsham, a small town between Bristol and Bath, and we never went on fancy foreign holidays, or even on day trips, and any money my dad had would be spent down the pub. After Dad went to prison I lived with Alison. Seven years older than me, she was twenty-one when Mum died. She’d escaped our aggressive father and moved to Cardiff three years earlier, only returning now and again. After our mum died she reluctantly moved back to Keynsham in order to sell the family home and, with the little money we received from it, she rented a flat near to my school so that I had some continuity.
Josh makes a disbelieving sound that brings me back to the present. ‘I can’t believe this is our house,’ he says.
Myhouse, I think. And then I instantly feel guilty after everything Josh has done for me, how kind he’s been about my suspension. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’
‘You never said it was anything like this. I mean, it’s got a wood out the back. Its own fucking wood.’ He laughs. ‘It must be worth millions.’
I picture my sister in her tiny new-build semi in Cardiff. What will she think about this? It doesn’t seem fair. Why did Dorothea leave this to me and not to both of us? Although I think Alison only met Dorothea twice, and that was after Mum had died. Alison had already moved away to Cardiff when Mum started her cleaning job for Dorothea. She worked for a chain of hair salons so managed to get relocated to the Bristol branch after Mum died and Dad was arrested. We rubbed along together well enough for those four years. I had a part-time job after school as a cashier in Tesco so that I could help Alison with the rent. After I followed Josh to Nottingham University, Alison moved back to Cardiff, met and married Gareth, and now they have a little girl, my six-year-old niece, Lila. Even after everything we’ve been through I wouldn’t say we are close. We’ve rarely talked about our parents. We’ve buried it all under hard work and polite small talk. It’s been our way of coping, I suppose. Heads down and carry on.
I wonder why there is the clause in the will that won’t allow me to sell the house for the first year.
Josh is opening the gates with a code the solicitor gave us. He suggested we change it as soon as we can. Josh is wearing wellies over his work trousers and the fabric has puffed around his knee, making it look as though he’s wearing old-fashioned breeches. I want to laugh atthe absurdity of it all. It’s like we’ve abruptly been transported to the early 1900s and Josh is standing at the foot of his estate.
‘What?’ he asks, noticing my expression.
‘Nothing. This is all a bit surreal, that’s all.’
‘Too bloody right.’ He hasn’t stopped buzzing since we left the solicitor’s office. I’m excited too, of course. It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.
Almost too amazing. As though something is about to go wrong.
Josh returns to the car and drives it through the gates, and I follow behind, preferring to walk over the gravel, which is sparse in places. In my peripheral vision I see something yellow fluttering in one of the bushes by the front porch. It looks like a piece of ribbon and then, with a stab of revulsion, I realize what it is. Police tape. I untangle it from the branches and pocket it. Then I walk up to the front door with the arc of stained glass above and wait for Josh to get out of the Vauxhall. His car, a decade old, looks out of place next to this beautiful house. He comes over to me, his expression softening. ‘Are you okay, Ims?’ He takes my hand. ‘I can imagine this must all be weird.’
I squeeze his hand. ‘I’m happy – about the house and everything. But also sad, for Dorothea.’ I think of the police tape lining my pocket and it hits me again that Dorothea died here. Since Friday I’ve read everything I could find online about her death. It sounds as though she fell down the stairs in her rush to escape a fire whichhad broken out in her studio, and it saddens me that she died all alone. I can just imagine the fear and sheer panic she must have felt when her house started to fill with smoke. She had no family, no children, and another pang of regret hits me that I didn’t try harder to get back in touch. That I let my hurt pride get in the way of reaching out to her.
‘You never talked about her to me,’ he says gently, rubbing his thumb against mine.
‘It was all tied up with my dad.’ I swallow. ‘And after Mum’s funeral, Dorothea never got in touch and so I … I pushed it all to the back of my mind.’ I’d felt so close to her when we stayed here that summer. This was the last place where me and my mum were truly happy.
I picture Dorothea as she was back then. A woman in her late fifties with long, sandy-blonde hair held back from her face with a red neckerchief and wearing paint-splattered dungarees. She was tall, willowy, attractive, with the most beautiful silvery grey eyes I’d ever seen, well-spoken, blunt, quick to laugh and, well, like nobody I’d ever met before. Her outfits were always thrown on haphazardly and she favoured suede Birkenstock clogs with socks, yet on her, it all worked. She was stylish, like an elegant, ageing supermodel. I’d liked her instantly. I was a nervous, meek teenager, used to making myself small, so as not to take up too much space in the world, trying to be unseen by my bad-tempered father, but there, in Dorothea’s studio, sitting cross-legged in a patch of sunlight as I devoured my mum’s old Penny Vincenzinovels, Casper on my lap, while she painted, I felt calm. I felt safe. I thought her paintings were strange and floaty, like a confused dream, but I’d admired her creativity.
I’d confided in Dorothea, once, about my wish to be a writer one day. She hadn’t sneered like my father had, her brow hadn’t crumpled with worry like my mother’s had at the notion of chasing an impossible fantasy, she hadn’t scoffed and taken the piss like Alison. Instead, Dorothea had listened seriously and told me I could do anything, be anyone I wanted to be if I worked hard enough. She’d cupped my chin with her long, slender fingers, the nails encrusted with paint, and sighed, almost wistfully. ‘It’s so much easier for your generation,’ she had said. ‘You’re not bound by convention or forced to marry young. You’re not restricted by an outdated class system.’ I hadn’t understood what she’d meant, not really, not then. As far as I could see, Dorothea was a strong, independent woman, free.
Josh lets go of my hand and I reach into my coat pocket for the keys to let us inside.
Instantly we are rendered speechless. I’d forgotten just how huge the space is. There are doors facing each other across a wide hallway, an intricate archway and the magnificent staircase, carpeted with a duck-egg blue runner. The floors are a creamy stone and the walls are painted a pale blue. Original cornicing runs around the high ceilings and there is an antique dresser to my left. Next to the stairs is a coat stand with a red mackintosh hanging from it and a checked umbrella that I assumebelonged to Dorothea. My eyes rove around the hallway, taking in the photographs and framed artwork that I recognize as Dorothea’s on the walls going up the stairs. I feel a pang when I realize it’s barely changed since I was last here. I almost expect Dorothea or my mother to come out of one of the rooms to greet us and I’m hit by melancholy. But I also can’t help but imagine Dorothea’s prostrate body lying here, at the foot of the stairs, and I blink the image away.
The air is musty and the withered flowers that droop sadly over the side of a narrow glass vase have cast their crispy dead leaves along the top of the bureau like a foul-scented potpourri. It’s so at odds with how the place used to smell: a mixture of Dorothea’s Givenchy perfume and the cut roses, sweet peas and irises from her garden which she’d always dot around the house in anything she could get her hands on – empty milk bottles, old champagne flutes, vintage glass medicine bottles she’d found in charity shops.
‘I didn’t realize it would be furnished,’ says Josh, stepping further into the hallway and running his hands over a Louis XVI-style chair that has been pushed against the wall. ‘But then I suppose she has no family, so where else would it go? It all belongs to you now. To us. Do you think this is an antique? I bet it’s worth a bit.’ He runs a finger along the dresser, and I want to tell him to stop. He’s like a magpie. These were Dorothea’s things, not items to be pawned. I feel a surge of protectiveness towards the house and everything in it. I want him to go.To leave me to wander the house by myself, to let myself wallow in my memories of that idyllic summer before everything changed. But I can’t say all this to him, of course. He wants to share in my joy. He’s never going to fully understand my oscillating feelings.
Thankfully his phone rings and he retrieves it from his pocket with a frown. ‘Damn it. It’s the office. I better take this,’ he says, pulling off a glove with his teeth as he heads out of the open front door. I can hear his voice floating towards me, his words clipped and polite, which makes me think he’s talking to his boss. When he returns he’s wearing an apologetic smile. ‘I need to go into work. I’m really sorry, babe, but we can come back at the weekend.’
I can’t leave. Not yet. I’ve not had the chance to look around the rest of the house, let alone the grounds. ‘Um … why don’t you go and I’ll get a taxi to the train station.’
His smile wavers. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. I want to have a proper look around.’
I can tell he’s disappointed, but he gives a small nod. Then he kisses the side of my head. ‘See you later, then.’ I watch as he reverses out of the driveway and backs out onto the narrow country lane, and I’m thankful to be alone at last.
Silence rings in my ears. That summer I was last here the place had been buzzing with people and animals and life. In my mind’s eye dust motes floated in the sunlight that slanted through the windows, beaming down on well-worn Persian rugs; dogs lolloped on squishy sofas; chickens strutted across the lush green lawn; birdstwittered in the wood and the honey scent of buddleias filled the air.
I’m probably looking back at that time through rose-tinted glasses.
I retrieve my phone from my bag and scroll to Alison’s number. And then I hesitate. How am I going to tell her? I stare down at my phone for a couple of seconds, before changing my mind and slipping it into my coat pocket.
I sigh as I make my way through the hall and down the short flight of stairs into the kitchen. The runner is more faded than it was sixteen years ago but the kitchen is exactly the same: cream-painted French-style cabinets, rustic stone floor tiles and the black Aga on the far wall, the wooden table with mismatched chairs in the middle of the room. I picture the functional but ugly kitchen in our tiny flat with its sharp-edged modern units, black work surfaces and odd shape. This kitchen was always the beating heart of the house. It was where we all congregated, where Harry would come and visit me and we’d sit drinking homemade lemonade, giggling over some shared joke while my mum pretended not to listen. I close my eyes, remembering it all.
