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Mercy Benton laughed. ‘Of course!’ She paused. ‘Silly bugger.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That fast-talking chappy from John Denby.’ Mercy thought about it quietly. He’d expressed no interest in her home – only in the house. He couldn’t see the intrinsic difference. He hadn’t even asked a thing about Summerhill Place. That’s why, twelve weeks later and with only a dribble of viewings, Mercy had decided to invite Elmfield Estates to cast an eye. She liked this young woman. Look at her now, peering at the face on the toby jug as if it was someone she recognized; running her fingers lightly back and forth across the tasselled edging of the tapestry cushion. She had gazed and gazed at the view of the garden from the back bedroom. She’d asked Mercy what flowered out there. Made notes on her pad of all Mercy told her.
‘Would you be considering Elmfield as joint agents? Alongside Denby?’
‘What do you suggest, dear?’
‘Between you and me, Mrs Benton, if you haven’t had an offer in three months, they are showing the wrong people around. Off the top of my head, I have two clients on my list – this beautiful home would suit either of them down to the ground. Also, if you give Elmfield a crack as sole agents, the commission you pay is much less.’
‘Will it be you?’
‘I wish I could afford it. I’d love to live here.’
‘No, dear – I mean, will it be you who does all of the everything?’
‘All of the everything,’ Stella smiled. ‘Yes, it’ll be me. I assure you. Everything. Phone calls, visits, negotiations. The lot. Just me, Mrs Benton.’
‘Call me Mercy.’
‘Well, Mercy, I’ll need a couple of days to organize the particulars, photographs and red tape – and hopefully, by midweek at the latest, I’ll be back, with my clients.’
‘Would you like a humbug?’
‘I’d love one. Thank you! And Mercy – when I bring people to view, offer them a humbug too, or a cuppa. It helps.’
That brash young man from Denby’s had recommended she go out when he brought anyone to her home. ‘Thank you, dear.’
‘Thank you.’
Despite the sprint home, Xander wasn’t particularly happy with his time. And he couldn’t really blame the young woman who’d all but floored him. She hadn’t really slowed him down more than a few seconds. He’d rest tomorrow. Possibly the next day too. His legs felt heavy. He was heading towards the run less run faster period in his training which, though he knew it was sensible, today still seemed like a contradiction.
He looked in his wardrobe. Tea with Lydia. He chose a white Oxford shirt with button-down collar and looked from his choice of ties to his one good jacket. It would be one or the other. He couldn’t bear both at the same time, he’d feel trussed up and garrotted. Ultimately, he went for the tie. It was vivid blue with a pale lemon stripe. He couldn’t remember when last he’d worn it.
The afternoon was bright and the morning’s breeze had subsided – a brisk walk to Longbridge in shirtsleeves would be fine, but home again later, he knew the air would have chilled considerably. He grabbed his North Face jacket and set off with it slung over his shoulder, strolling down from the Back End along the high street to the gates to Longbridge. He could have gone the back way – walked uphill to the end of his lane and along the footpath, over two fields and through the side gate hidden in the yew hedge after the farmyard. But the track could be muddy this time of year. And it was lambing season. He waved to Mercy Benton, her headscarf tied neatly under her chin, pulling her old tartan shopping trolley as if it was a reluctant, aged dog. He spoke to the Pickards, out for a stroll, and he told the Pittman kid who lived at Wisteria House to pick up the crisp packet and put it in the bin. They were dreadful, that family – money, but no manners.
Up the driveway to Longbridge, a force of habit compelled Xander to try and count each of the two hundred and fifty-two panes of glass in the twenty-one sash windows by the time the avenue of limes had ended and the formal box hedging had begun. The approach to Longbridge was an exception to the rule of distances seeming shorter, places seeming smaller, than childhood memories decreed. Though he knew the house well – even down to the one missing stone support on the balustrade parapet high up where the brick walls ended and the hipped slate roof began, or which of the window panes were new glass and not the beautiful shimmering original – familiarity had not compromised the pleasure of the sight of this grand old building. He still felt awestruck by its sedate, imposing grandeur. He never climbed the broad stone entrance steps without patting one of the stone lions that stood guarding it, he never rang the clanking great doorbell to the side of the mahogany double doors without looking up and marvelling at the fanlight – vast yet as delicate as lacework.
He waited, wondered whether he should ring again or give the doors a polite rap. But he didn’t want to be given short shrift – he’d been on the receiving end of that, once before, when he was a teenager and he’d seen Lydia a little way ahead of him along the high street. Yoo hoo! he’d called that day. Yoo hoo! The public dressing-down she’d exacted had been mortifying.
No. He’d wait. Up until a couple of years ago, Barnaby the black Labrador would have retaliated at the doorbell with a cacophony of howls – but he was deaf now. And it had been a long while since there’d been an excitable posse of Jack Russells at Longbridge bred, it seemed, precisely for the purpose of nipping the ankles of any visitor.
‘Xander!’
But the door hadn’t opened.
He turned to find Lydia standing at the bottom of the steps, swamped by an ancient waxed jacket, a headscarf neatly under her chin, a walking stick used so naturally, so deftly, that it was more like an extension of her arm than a crutch of any sort. She climbed the stairs slowly, not taking her eyes off him.
‘You’ve grown!’
‘You always say that,’ Xander laughed. ‘It’s only been a month.’
‘Five weeks. And you never say I’m shrinking,’ Lydia said, ‘but I’ll bet you think it.’
‘Not when you have that walking stick with you!’ said Xander. ‘Your cheek, Lydia, what have you done?’
‘Nothing, just a silly knock. Looks far worse than it feels. Have you rung the bell?’
‘Yes.’
Lydia sighed, exasperated. ‘Where is that wretched woman!’ She tapped hard against the doors with her cane and Xander noted all the little dents, flecking into the wood like rain against a windscreen. ‘She’s in there, you know. Reading the Mail.’ Lydia spoke the newspaper’s name with such disdain it might as well have been Mein Kampf.
Through the doors, they could hear footsteps and the sound of someone talking to themselves. ‘Is someone at the door? I didn’t hear. I’ll just check.’ The door was opened gingerly and Mrs Biggins’ face peered out. ‘Oh,’ she said, glancing at Lydia, ‘it’s you. And Xander! Xander! Come on in!’
‘You’re an utterly useless woman,’ Lydia told her housekeeper.
‘And you’re forgetful – you must remember to take your keys.’
‘I have my keys!’ Lydia protested.
‘Then why did you knock?’
‘I didn’t. Xander did.’
‘Xander – did you knock?’
He paused, feeling like a ping-pong ball caught in a particularly vicious rally between two dab hands in this long played-out game. ‘I rang the bell,’ he said.
‘You see – you knocked. He rang the bell.’
‘Well, you didn’t answer the bell when he rang. He was probably standing there for yonks. You’re as deaf as Barnaby.’
‘I am not!’
‘You were reading the Mail, then.’ Lydia brushed past Mrs Biggins and into the entrance hall.
‘You’re not going to hang that stinking old coat here,’ Mrs Biggins warned her.
‘No,’ said Lydia, ‘you’re going to hang it in the boot room.’ And she stood still, while Mrs Biggins eased the coat off her, in much the same way as the butler would remove her mother’s mink stole decades ago. Not that any butler who wanted to keep his job would have pulled a face such as Mrs Biggins was currently wearing.
‘We’ll have tea,’ Lydia announced. ‘In the drawing room.’ And Xander thought, one day Mrs Biggins might well say get it yourself.
But not today.
* * *
Tea in the drawing room. It was an institution that Xander enjoyed as much now as then. The anticipation of the tray being brought in, counted down by the frustratingly slow, patient tock of the grandfather clock, while legions of Fortescues observed the event from their slightly tarnished photograph frames crowding the grand piano, the mantelpiece, the ledge in front of the glazed bookcase.
The selection was always the same: sandwiches of fish paste or butter and cucumber slices, and a plate of cakes. Today, it struck Xander how the food seemed to personify the irascible dowager and her cantankerous housekeeper – the cucumber sandwiches delicate and refined like the former, the fish paste slightly common yet comforting like the latter. Similarly, the pastries so elegantly put together with the fancy toppings, just as appealing as the plain but reassuringly doughy Chelsea buns.
‘Will that be all?’ Mrs Biggins asked.
‘Thank you, Mrs Biggins, that will be all.’
‘Thank you, Mrs B.’
‘Lovely to see you, Xander. You send your ma my love. And don’t be a stranger.’
With the large French-polished coffee table between them, Xander and Lydia sat opposite each other on matching sofas – faded, capacious rather than comfortable, fleshed out by a growing collection of daily-plumped cushions to counteract the general sag and lumpiness. Xander offered the sandwiches to Lydia and then took one of each for himself. Lydia poured the tea, the same tea cosy warming the pot that Xander remembered his mother knitting when he was still a boy. There was so much about Longbridge that stayed the same. There were the sounds – the clocks, different in each room, the water in the crunking old pipes complaining its way around the house, the whistle of the kettle on the Aga as dramatic as an air-raid warning. And the smells – Assam tea, ancient tobacco, a faint mustiness from old soft furnishings, a subtle drift of floral arrangements that needed changing, of vegetables cooking in the kitchen, or lavender secreted in little muslin pouches in between cushion and cover. And there was the set-up of each room – the photograph frames and various porcelain ornaments just so, the furniture whose configuration never changed, the heavy folds of the enormous curtains as vertical and precise as the fluting on Greek columns. And the portraits of the ancestors, positioned around the house like sentries, some gazing benignly, some fixing sternly, all staring directly.
‘Little changes, Xander.’
‘I’m pleased.’
‘You still look from portrait to portrait, as if answering questions asked of you in a particular order.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re wearing a tie.’
‘I could have worn a jacket.’
‘Mostly, these days, I see you scampering around in all that ghastly sportswear.’
‘I’m training – I have a half-marathon next week.’
‘Does that mean you’ll be begging me for sponsorship?’
‘Most definitely.’
‘African babies again?’
‘Cancer, this time.’
‘Jolly good. Pastry?’
Xander finished a jam tart and waited for Lydia to raise her eyebrows at the platter for him to help himself to another. ‘Longbridge plums,’ he said, ‘incomparable.’
‘Jars and jars of the bastard stuff in the pantry – help yourself when you go,’ Lydia said. ‘Surplus from the summer fete – the first time we’ve come back with unsold produce. Ever.’
‘Don’t take it personally,’ Xander said. ‘People are holding on to their pennies. Anyway, I heard it was more to do with politics within the committee.’
‘That wretched bouncing castle monstrosity?’
Xander laughed. ‘And the rest.’
‘Personally,’ said Lydia, ‘ I blame all that shopping people do nowadays on those computers. It’s an obsession and, if you ask me, absolutely unnecessary! All those supermarket vans double parking along the high street and all those delivery companies doing the postman out of a job. More tea?’
‘Please.’ He offered his cup because Lydia liked to pour and she wouldn’t tolerate people stretching. ‘How are things here?’ He looked around – it looked the same, but Longbridge was so much more than the house itself. ‘I hear Mr Tringle made a good recovery – pneumonia is no laughing matter, especially not at his age.’
‘I’ve always thought, if they dropped one of those nuclear bombs, he’d be the one creaking his way out of the debris. Extraordinary chap, really.’
‘How about the barns?’ asked Xander. ‘Did you get anywhere with the planners?’
Lydia looked a little uncomfortable. ‘I’m just going to have to let them crumble – it’s too much work and too much money. And Xander, how are you? Are you any closer to marrying?’
Xander stirred his tea thoughtfully, despite not taking sugar. ‘No.’
‘Are you one of the gays?’
‘No, Lydia. I’m not.’
She raised her eyebrow, archly. ‘I’ve heard people talking.’
‘Talking?’
‘Village tittle-tattle.’
‘And you listen to it?’
‘Sometimes I like to remember dear Alice Roosevelt who used to say, if you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.’
‘And people are saying I’m not nice?’
‘Well, if you won’t provide the real story of Laura – then the only option you give them is to rumour.’
‘Whatever the gossip is,’ said Xander, ‘it’s probably far more salacious and entertaining than the reality. I don’t care what people say about me.’
‘If you’re sure you haven’t joined the gays – perhaps you’ve become a playboy?’ Lydia chuckled. ‘A cad?’ She laughed. ‘A gigolo?’ And she pronounced it with hard ‘g’s.
Xander shrugged – coming from Lydia, none of this irritated him. ‘I haven’t met the right girl, Lady Lydia.’
‘But you’re having lots of fun with all the wrong ones, for the time being?’
He loved it when Lydia turned saucy.
‘Your mother must be so proud.’ She paused. ‘I bet your mother doesn’t know the half of it.’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Xander.
‘Are you a two-timer?’ She said it as if it was some modern phrase she wasn’t entirely sure she was using correctly.
‘No, Lydia, I’m not. I just don’t invest much time, or importance, in – relationships,’ Xander said, as if it was a word whose meaning he was unsure of. He loosened his tie, feeling hot under the collar.
‘I hope you’re a gentleman,’ Lydia said sternly.
‘I’ve never made a girl cry,’ Xander said, with a theatricality that had Lydia chuckling.
