Chapter 1
Sally reminded herself that she was very lucky to be spending part of her afternoon in the quiet occupation of writing birthday party invitations. The invitations, in their duck-egg -blue box, tied with a ribbon and edged with a balloon pattern, were a luxury they couldn’t afford, and yet had been irresistible in Village Voices, a little artsy stationers that had just opened in Church Road. She had stacked them on the kitchen table next to a lined A4 pad, on which she had writ-ten a list of invitees who were asked to come and celebrate Louis’s second birthday.
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She ticked off her parents, saw the next name and put down her pen. She looked up. The weak February sun fell through the leaded French windows, slicing over the blue-green slate floor and across the edge of the kitchen table. The garden beyond was showing promise beyond the developer’s carelessly laid turf and ragged beds. Edward had spent most of the previous Sunday clearing leaves and digging the beds, pointing out places for planting rhododendron, azaleas and hostas, and other plants that she was not sure she could identify. The rear boundary was marked by a rickety larchlap fence,
beyond which rose up their neighbor’s majestic plane tree.
Louis would be awake soon, his afternoon nap seldom lasted longer than an hour. So determinedly she returned to the task at hand, reached for her pen and wrote her step-daughter’s name on the top right-hand corner of the card
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She pushed Hope’s invitation into an envelope and wrote out the address at the university. More often than not Louis refused to take a nap these days but when he did she would select one or two of the tasks that required silence or concentration to be performed in his absence. She still hadn’t totally unpacked the top floor. After the initial flush of enthusiasm she had lost interest in unpacking another box and she now understood how it was possible to be boxed years after moving in.
But Sally loved her new house. The light and spacious kitchen -dining room was set at the back of the house. At the centre was a kitchen table, a flyweight expanse of light oak set on slender tapered legs, the chairs fashioned in a single, smooth curve of matching wood. Edward, spotting the table in the Conran shop, had pointed to it. ‘That’s the one.’ He could still surprise her like that: his easygoing demeanor snapping into decisive mode; his tastes and preferences unpredictable.
It was a white wood kitchen. Allegedly hand -painted, with a beech countertop that looked fantastic and was laughably impractical, the walls were panelled in three-inch timbers to waist height and painted white, the plaster above finished in magnolia. Edward now suspected that the panelling had been installed to conceal some residual damp, since the wood in the corner on the outer wall was lifting.
But there were nice touches - a wall rack on which hung her blue Le Creuset saucepans, the convenient bookshelf above it for her cookery books, a white butler’s sink and beautiful antique-style brass taps - and best of all the view onto the garden. The French windows opened onto a brick terrace and lawn. Edward said that in the summer the terrace would be scorching at midday and they would need an umbrella for shade.
She hadn’t realised that Edward knew so much about
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_ Hope, As she did so she felt a surge of irritation that she powerless to resist. Nothing could shift Sally’s enduring resentment that her son’s March birthday fell on the same day as that of her stepdaughter - or that this year was Hope’s twenty-first. She knew it was ridiculous. It was not - Hope, as if it could be changed. Moreover, her husband Edward did not feel the same way. On the day of Louis’s birth he had said blithely that it was something the two of them could share, Louis and Hope, united by one birthday. She had not been able to think of anything to reply to this and two years later she was still struggling to find a good word to say about what was at best a bloody big inconvenience and at worst a perpetual reminder of his ex-wife Pia.
Edward was infuriatingly vague about Hope’s plans for her twenty-first birthday. Sally had tackled him about it again last Sunday in the garden as he dug the back border.
‘Are you positive Hope hasn’t said anything? Surely she’s having a party?’
He had continued to dig. ‘No.’ He had stopped, leaned on the fork then looked up into the branches of the neighbor’s tree, which loomed over them. ‘Plane trees soak up the water. The lawn needs a wet summer.’
‘Edward! What about Pia? Have you spoken to her?’ He shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He resumed digging. ‘Why don’t you call her?’ he added helpfully.
Sally had turned on her heel at that point. She had never believed in so-called friendships between past and present wives. In the beginning she had thought that some civilised, very grown-up, pulling -together -for -the -sake -of -the -children effort with Pia might happen - and for a time there had been polite exchanges and stiff telephone calls. But all that had ended with the events of last Christmas: how was it possible for two intelligent women to get so worked up over a pile of dirty laundry?
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gardening. There had been no opportunity in the rented Putney flat and before that the Barbican. It had been out of the question to remain at the Barbican. Pia had stayed there more than once.
They had been house -hunting for months, growing ever more demoralised, each property dingier and more expensive than the last. Sally had protested that there was no point in going to see 12 North Walk, ‘It’s way out of our price range.’
But Edward, drinking coffee one Saturday morning, had been adamant. ‘We need a house. And we want to be in it for Christmas. So, we’re going to find one this weekend.’ He had picked up the telephone, set up six viewings for that afternoon and suggested that she leave Louis with her mother.
North Walk had been last on the list, the light failing as they pulled up outside the red -brick Victorian terrace on a narrow street close by Cannizaro Park.
The youthful agent greeted them by looking at his watch. It’s newly converted into one house and a basement flat.’ He took out the keys. ‘The builder’s open to offers,’ he added, wrestling with the Yale lock.
Finally, he opened the door and switched on the hall light. Then she saw the colors in the delicate design of the Victorian stained-glass front door and the broad staircase framed by elaborately turned oak balusters and carved newel posts.
‘A lot of the original features have survived,’ said the agent, leading them into the front room. ‘It was rented out for years.’ The spacious room, the bay window accented by a window seat, had the high ceiling of the era, a centerpiece ornate carved medallion of leaves and roses and a broad plaster fireplace.
Edward led the way out into the hall, gesturing at the new carpet. ‘There might be some of the original floor tiles under that.’ Then he turned to the agent. ‘We’ll take a look around on our own.’
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‘No problem.’
They admired the kitchen, stopped by the red -painted cloakroom on the ground floor and by the time they had reached the master bedroom on the first floor Sally wished they had never come to see the house at all. First she set eyes on the small exquisite Belgian rouge marble fireplace, then on the sash windows giving out onto a view of the Wimbledon Common golf course. Nothing else they had seen in months of searching came close to this.
But Edward was looking around with far more than a casual eye. Next he took a hard look at the second small bedroom on the first floor. ‘Spare room or office?’ Then he bounded up the stairs, pausing at the white -tiled bathroom on the half -landing to point out the power shower, and onto the attic bedrooms. ‘So, that’s two attic bedrooms up here and two downstairs.’
‘Edward! It’s way beyond our budget.’
He looked unconcerned. ‘Everyone ends up borrowing more than they think they will.’
‘But-’
He interrupted her. ‘Sal, we need a house. This is the best one we’ve seen. We’ll make it work.’ He went over and pulled up one of the sash windows, peering out at the brickwork. She thumbed through the particulars. At the end there was a ‘historical note’.
‘Hey, listen to this,’ she said, as Edward closed the sash. She read out loud, ‘The property has a famous heritage. In Victorian times 12 North Walk was owned by Mr and Mrs Robert Latham. Love letters between the couple were dramatised in the award-winning BBC television series Letters of a Victorian Lady.’
She looked up. ‘My mother raved about that programme.’
Edward turned round from where he was looking at the
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ceiling plaster. ‘There you are. You could write a history of the house.’
She liked the idea, caught up now in his enthusiasm. He came over to her, taking hold of her waist. ‘Sal, I want the best for us.’ He pulled her towards him. ‘It’s a stretch, but if he takes a low offer we can make it. Of course, there won’t be much over for extras. You might as well tear up your passport.’
They were in for Christmas. Edward had cashed in some life assurance policies and she had blocked out of her mind the reality of twenty-five years’ worth of payments on a 90 per cent mortgage. Somehow, in the divorce, Pia had escaped with all the assets, notably the house in Gerrards Cross and half of Edward’s pension, but none of the liabilities. There were times when it made Sally furious. And at other times she felt guilty that Edward was starting all over again when some of his contemporaries were paying off their mortgages altogether.
She had met Edward when she was appointed as his temporary PA at Porter Stone. Porter Stone was a bank that guarded its reputation for exclusivity and discretion, dealing only with ‘high net worth clients’ and having just three London branches located in Fleet Street, Sloane Street and Grosvenor Square. At each branch a liveried footman opened the door for clients, dressed in a tailcoat in the bank’s burgundy colours, a short top hat and tan pigskin gloves.
To open an account at Porter Stone, Edward had briefed her on her first day, it was necessary to show assets of one million pounds.
‘That’s clear assets of a million,’ he said casually. Not mortgaged.’
The staff were by and large privately educated, the clients increasingly not. Edward’s job was to recruit new customers.
‘We don’t necessarily make any money out of the banking,’
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Edward had explained, ‘at least, not if the customer maintains a minimum balance of ten thousand pounds in their account.’
She had tried not to look surprised at that. She aimed simply to be in credit, if only by forty-five pounds, which was her current balance. ‘But we do make money on all the other things that follow once they become clients,’ Edward continued. ‘Tax planning schemes, life assurance, legal services ...’
They were in his second office in the bank’s headquarters in Fleet Street with a view of the turrets of the Royal Courts of Justice.
‘I don’t suppose your clients go overdrawn,’ she had ventured.
He had raised an eyebrow. ‘More often than you might suppose. Fortunately, you and I don’t have to deal with that. We reel them in, pop them in a basket and send them along to be filleted by the private client department.’
She noticed that he was already including her. And he was always doing that, implying that they were a team, never seeking the credit or pulling his weight at her expense.
He put her at her ease. Arriving at the bank she had still not been sure she even wanted the job. But something of the atmosphere of Porter Stone had touched her, even as she had been escorted through the building: the thick carpet, the smell of beeswax, the absence of banter and laughter, all set Porter Stone apart from the offices she had hitherto worked in. It was an institution with its own rituals, language and codes: daunting at first and then compelling.
She had liked Edward immediately. He was a big man, not fat but with a rugby player’s physique, unruly hair, a ready smile and a genuine laugh. But his eyes were tired, she had noticed, and she had understood at once that there was something out of kilter with him, that he was weary and
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heavy-hearted beneath his affable exterior. She had guessed that he was about forty and married with children from the photograph on his desk. In fact, he was separated and living in a flat in the Barbican. He had not said so at the time. But he had gestured to the photograph. ‘My daughter, Hope - she’s hoping to go to university to read History. I see you read History, too. And my son, Dan. He’s hoping to go to Welton.’
It was nice of him to recall her degree subject. He had taken the trouble carefully to read her CV. She learned in time that Edward always paid attention to detail. He was intelligent enough to conceal his ambition, however. Outwardly it was his natural charm and high energy that caught the attention of clients and colleagues.
She had heard of Welton, a Buckinghamshire public school. She had not herself gone to private school. When the agency had first suggested Porter Stone she had hesitated, not least because she could not envisage herself there. But Eileen at the agency had been enthusiastic.
‘It’s a maternity -leave vacancy.’ Eileen had consulted her notes. ‘He travels frequently and entertains, and there needs to be precise follow-up. And discretion.’
‘I’m really looking for something in the media,’ she had ventured.
But Eileen had brushed that aside. ‘So is everyone else, dear. Porter Stone is very good for your CV. Banking always is. I’ll send you along.’
In the event, Edward’s permanent PA had decided that she did not, after all, want to return to Porter Stone. And so it was that a five -month placement as the PA to Edward Kirwan-Hughes had stretched into three and a half years until she left, now Mrs Kirwan-Hughes, and seven months pregnant. They had discussed her leaving sooner but they needed the money even more then. Between Edward’s divorce and her
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credit card bills, it felt as though they would never get their heads above water. Then there was the wedding, small but costly, and the honeymoon, a long weekend in New York and a trip back on the Queen Mary II.
So far they had had the house to themselves but two weeks ago a Sold Subject to Contract sign had been affixed over the agent’s For Sale board and last weekend she had come down to the kitchen on Sunday morning to see a couple standing in the middle of the back garden. The woman was holding a tape measure and an A4 notepad. Sally had stood back quickly, conscious that she was wearing her pink fleece maternity dressing gown, making a mental note to replace it as soon as possible. The woman was casually but fashionably dressed: distressed jeans, a navy blue pea coat with a striped scarf that looked like it came from Paul Smith and a pair of
sheepskin boots, with a low heel and an overlap at the top. She had an outdoor look about her: she appeared unmade up, with mid -length rather scruffy brown hair, but she was good-looking in a sporty way. The man looked like a professional type. Observing them, the woman doing most of the talking, Sally guessed they weren’t married and they didn’t have children. They had stayed for ages. Later, looking out of Louis’s bedroom, she had seen them get into a red BMW convertible, the woman driving, pulling out confidently in the direction of Wimbledon Village.
She wrote out an invitation to Vickie and the other girls from playgroup and then one to Brickie. Brickie, who was the PA to the Chairman of Porter Stone, had been her closest ally there and remained a friend. She considered whether to invite Mad Auntie Mary, her mother’s sister, who was not mad but was very loud, and then put her on her mental list of possible invitees if numbers were down. But all the while, as she wrote names and addresses on the pale blue envelopes, thoughts of Hope’s birthday intruded and with it the prospect
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of seeing Pia for the first time since that call. Edward’s silence on the matter, the date was only three weeks away, was not encouraging.
She came to Edward’s parents. Did Edward’s mother know what was going on? Sally knew that Pia still saw her. What was being planned? They must have organised something by now. Why hadn’t they told Edward? Maybe they had told Edward? It was hopeless. She got up. She already knew there was nothing in the fridge to snack on. The fruit bowl was uninspiring, a couple of apples and some overripe bananas. She opened a cupboard and ate a handful of mini rice crackers. She really needed something sweet, though. She ate a box of Louis’s raisins. But she was doomed. Why couldn’t she stop herself? She felt a surge of irritation towards Edward. She had asked him, please, please, please no chocolates. But still they had come, for Valentine’s Day, the huge pink heart-shaped box filled with a plain chocolate assortment.
She had gained too much weight during pregnancy, a combination of her desk job and lunches in the Porter Stone dining room. Now Porter Stone seemed like another life altogether. For work she had worn dark tailored suits, inventively combined with fitted shirts and silk scarves in pinks and reds and creams, her shoulder -length auburn hair tied back or pinned up in the house style. Her mother, noticing her wearing more make-up, objected. ‘You have perfect skin! Foundation clogs the pores, you know.’
Her father had looked up from his newspaper. ‘You’re an English rose!’
It was true. She did have good skin, the pale type that goes with blue eyes and only tans with enormous effort. Nowadays she was lucky if she found time to smear on tinted moisturiser and a dash of lipstick. Her hair would be much easier to manage if it was shorter but Edward always vetoed having it cut.
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‘I like it long. It suits you. You’re beautiful.’
He still said that, though not as often as he used to.
As for the suits, with their close-fitting, knee-skimming skirts, there was little point in unpacking them. On a good day, if she weighed herself as soon as she got up, it was possible to say that two years after Louis’s birth she had lost nearly half of the weight she had gained. The last stone was notoriously difficult. But spring was not so far off and on New Year’s Day she had vowed that this would be the year she lost the weight, in time for summer and sunbathing in the back garden.
Not today, though. She went into the living room, got down on her hands and knees, and pulled out the box from under the claret-red calico-covered sofa. Out of sight, out of mind did work occasionally. She lifted the lid, then the white corrugated paper, then the piece of thin russet tissue paper that covered the five remaining pieces. She was depressed to realise that she did not need to consult the guide. She already knew there was an orange cream, a coconut, a raspberry, a lemon and a coffee. The plainest had gone first, little bars of unadulterated chocolate luxurious in their own gold foils, then the nut clusters, then the truffles, then the toffees, until all that had remained was the nougat and the bloody creams.
She ate the orange, then the raspberry and then, even though she did not want it, the coffee. With its sticky sweetness coating her teeth she pushed the box back under the sofa and thanked God that Edward didn’t have a sweet tooth or a taste for thin women. Then she pulled the box out again, took off the lid and the card and the tissue paper and ended the temptation once and for all by eating the lemon and the coconut. The coconut was surprisingly good.
Brickie had said she was crazy even to think about coming back to Porter Stone. She had come to see the house last weekend while Edward was at a Welton hockey match and
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they had sat in the kitchen eating shortbread fingers and drinking tea while Louis played with a farm set that Brickie had bought. Brickie, a brunette, was in her weekend uniform of chocolate moleskins and fisherman’s polo-neck.
‘Even if they take you back, they’ll give you some awful job in settlements or complaints.’
She knew Brickie was right. The women who returned from maternity leave were given terrible posts involving huge amounts of travel and rotten clients until, worn-down, they left.
Brickie shook her head as Sally pushed the packet of biscuits towards her. Her eye was on the wall next to the boxed in chimney breast. She stood up, peering closely at the wall.
‘Look! You can see that there was a bracket here once.’
‘A bracket?’
‘For lighting,’ Brickie explained.’ Candles and then gas lights until they converted to electricity. If you looked in the basement you might see where the servants’ bells used to hang.’
After that, she had shown Brickie round, up to their bed-room, sparsely furnished with a Bedknobs and Broomsticks brass bed and two small teak chests, which served as bedside tables, and a trouser press.
‘We need more furniture,’ Sally had commented, almost apologetically.
‘Oh, all in good time. That’s the fun, isn’t it, doing it bit by bit.’
It was so typical, Brickie, whose parents could buy up all of Wimbledon Village, had none of the airs and graces that so often went with old money.
Brickie had wowed at Louis’s attic room, at his curtains with their tin -soldier motif in red and blue, his aeroplane mobile, framed Babar posters - Babar on one, Celeste on the other. Sally wondered if Brickie felt regrets that she did not
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have children. It had been astounding to her when Brickie had revealed that she was forty-four. She had thought her somewhere in her mid -thirties.
‘Probably a result of not having a husband,’ Brickie had said wryly. Brickie had looked round at Louis’s room with a searching eye. ‘Really, the builders didn’t change the layout at all. This room must have been freezing.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘It’s the attic. There was no roof insulation. Only a tiny fireplace.’
Brickie put her hand on Louis’s radiator. ‘Louis doesn’t realise how lucky he is. Think what it must have been like up here in the winter ...’
For Sally, the birth of Louis had brought a belated realisation of how lucky she was, of how much her parents had done for her. Once, when she was five or six, playing in the garden, she had overheard through the open kitchen window Mad Auntie Mary talking in an urgent whisper.
‘You’re spoiling her! It’s too much.’
She never did find out what was too much. There were no Caribbean holidays, no private school, no ponies. But there was ballet and drama and new dresses, never second-hand or hand-me-down. Much of it was the inevitable dominion of the only child, seated between her parents, enjoying the attention of two adults. And now the spoiling had begun all over again with Louis, his birth healing the disappointment her parents were unable to conceal at her marriage to a divorced man.
‘So, Edward has two children, Sally?’ Her mother had made it sound like an incurable illness.
But Louis had changed all that, from the first time, minutes after the birth, that her parents had seen him, her mother crying over his little red face and his swaddled body, and her father briefly embracing Edward.
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It had all seemed so promising back then. Louis’s birth had inspired Sally with a new consciousness of the importance of family. She had been full of good intentions and positive resolutions. Hope, slight with her mother’s dark brown eyes, had come to the hospital and pressed a wrapped present into her hands. It was a Wedgwood Peter Rabbit child’s set, a bowl, plate and cup. Sally had felt a novel surge of warmth towards her stepdaughter. Stiffly, they had embraced.
‘Hope, thank you. We want you to come and visit.’
‘Of course,’ Hope had said, a little too quickly.
But though she had come to Louis’s christening, Hope had been only once to the flat and never to North Walk. Dan came. At Christmas Edward had collected him from Welton. Dan arrived smelling of cigarette smoke, laden with dirty laundry and fresh from an argument in the car about his housemaster’s insistence on a haircut.
The back and forth between Edward and Dan continued in the hallway as Dan dropped several duffel bags on the floor. ‘Everyone has it this length,’ Dan argued, rolling his eyes.
Edward sounded weary. ‘If he says you have to get it cut,
you don’t have much choice.’
‘He’s a prat. No one listens to him.’
It had been a chaotic holiday: most of the house still unpacked, Louis growing each day more over -tired and overexcited, Dan and Edward locking horns over Dan’s hair and smoking - Dad, I’m really, really not smoking- and non-stop television viewing.
Sally had brokered a truce for Christmas Day. ‘Let’s just drop it for today,’ she had appealed to Edward.
Edward had held up his hands in mock surrender and Dan had cast her a grateful glance.
Nonetheless, Christmas Day had seen the chaos intensify, her parents staggering in with presents for Louis, and soon the living-room carpet was covered with plastic, boxes and
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wrapping paper - mixed in with a forest floor of dead pine needles from the tree that had started dropping as soon as they brought it in. Her mother had pulled out a garish red velvet mini Father Christmas suit, its hood trimmed with white fur, the middle accessorized with a black felt belt.
‘I know it’s only for one day,’ her mother said cheerfully, teasing Louis’s arm into the sleeve, ‘but I couldn’t resist it.’ ‘I’ll film him in it,’ her father added, taking out the camcorder.
Sally had exchanged glances with Edward.
‘Drink?’ he said, by way of a response.
The day had passed in a blur of cooking, eating and clearing up. At eight o’clock she had fallen asleep on the sofa.
So, in the circumstances, on Boxing Day, Sally had thought it a very generous gesture on her part to do Dan’s dirty washing for him. He would arrive at Pia’s in ship shape condition, apart from his hair. Loading the washing machine she had not noticed the red Father Christmas outfit inside, changed after Louis dropped a gloop of cranberry sauce down it, then helpfully left in the machine by her mother.
Dan, seeing her pull out five, pink tie-dyed school shirts had said just one anxious word: ‘Mum.’
She found the offending Father Christmas suit and read out the label resignedly. ‘Hand wash cold separately.’ Then she saw the anxious expression on Dan’s face. ‘Hey, don’t worry. Tell her it’s my fault.’ Should she offer to replace them? No, they paid out a fortune in school fees already. ‘Your mum can get some Dylon and run them through. They’ll be good as new,’ she added optimistically.
Later, waiting for Edward to return from dropping Dan at Pia’s house, she wondered if she ought to pay for new ones after all.
Then the telephone had rung. Without any prelude Pia had started yelling. She sounded drunk. ‘They’re ruined!
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