While I Was Waiting. Georgia Hill
inevitable tea. Rachel had never felt so stripped or so exposed. It was one thing to have Gabe look over her house when there were only packing cases in it; it was another when most of her belongings were out on show.
The two men had inspected every inch of the house. They had spent twenty minutes inspecting the wall in the back bedroom, with much tutting and discussion, and had proclaimed damp. To her dismay, they had even poked about in the bathroom, as Gabe had thought he’d seen a silverfish invasion. She bit her lip. From the way they were talking, she would have their company for some considerable time. She wondered if she was being taken for a ride but had no prior experience to go on. Her London flat had never needed any work so she hadn’t a clue if the men were talking sense or inventing jobs for themselves.
Uncannily, Gabe again seemed to sense her mood. He turned from his father and said, ‘You can ask around, for references and the like. The Garths up at the farm had us in to do a fair bit of work last year; they’ll tell you if we’re ripping you off.’
Rachel smiled at him, embarrassed at being so transparent but grateful. ‘I – ’ she began.
Mike had been poring over scribbles in a notebook and interrupted, ‘’Bout four months’ work here, more if you wants heating put in.’
‘Four months!’ Rachel sat back in disbelief. She saw her independent and solitary life leaking away.
‘Well, might take less if we do it all at once, but you say you don’t want that?’
Rachel shook her head at Mike. ‘No, and to be honest, I can’t afford to have it all done at once.’
Mike smiled. ‘Well, we don’t expect payment straight away. Trust works both ways in this game. You trust us to do a good job and we have to trust you to pay us eventually, like. We’ll better get off then, our Gabe.’ He stood and then looked down at her. ‘We’ll leave you to think it over.’
Rachel nodded. ‘I’ll get back to you. I’ll need to get a few more quotes, you know.’ God, this was so embarrassing, but this is what you did, wasn’t it? You didn’t just take on a firm of builders without checking out the competition?
Mike looked from his son to Rachel and gave a cryptic smile. He nodded.
Gabe spoke. ‘Yes, well of course you need to do that. Ask the Garths as well, number’s in the book. Get back to us when you can.’
‘By the end of next week would be better,’ Mike interjected. ‘Otherwise we might not be able to fit her in along with the Halliday job.’
Rachel had had enough. She rose decisively. ‘I’ll ring you on Friday, then. And now I think we’ve all got things to do?’
She saw them out and, before the Toyota could be heard grinding down the track, was hunting through Yellow Pages.
Later that week Rachel took a pot of mint tea into the sitting room and collapsed on the sofa in front of the fireplace. The weather had turned cloudy and it was a clammy but chilly sort of an evening. If she could trust the chimney, she’d risk lighting a fire, but remembered Mike Llewellyn’s words that it would need sweeping first. She made do with her little electric radiator and wrinkled her nose against the dusty smell as it heated up.
The cottage had a strange atmosphere this evening and she needed comfort. Last night, her heart thumping, she’d woken up to sounds outside – some kind of screeching. Common sense told her it was probably an owl or something, but it had sounded disconcertingly like a person in pain. It had taken hours to get back to sleep and she’d become very aware of being alone in a remote place. Today she had wanted to continually look over her shoulder, certain someone was there. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed in ghosts, but there was definitely a weird atmosphere in the cottage sometimes. Putting it down to tiredness, she tried to shrug off her mood and took a sip of tea. She shivered. Perhaps it would be nice to have central heating after all.
After thinking through what Mike and Gabe had said, she was resigned to the inevitable; that the house needed work. A lot of work. So she had applied herself in her usual methodical and thorough way and had tried to get some comparable quotations for the job. But her search for other builders had proved fruitless. Two firms were unable to visit for another month; another local one had managed to come and had then quoted a price far higher than the Llewellyns’; one said they were fully booked for the next three months and yet another hadn’t even bothered to reply to the messages she’d left on their answering service.‘Looks like it’ll be the Llewellyn boys, then,’ she said to no one in particular and tried to warm her hands around her mug. ‘It shouldn’t be too bad,’ she went on, forcing herself to be optimistic, ‘as long as I can find a way of working around them.’
She already had some work overdue, inevitably delayed by moving house. She was also getting far too distracted by the sumptuous countryside around the cottage. ‘I wonder if I could combine the two,’ she murmured. ‘Who would like some stunning landscapes?’
Rachel shook her head and laughed. It felt like madness talking to an empty room but, in some peculiar way, it really felt as though there was someone listening. Someone not completely unfriendly, more curious.
Her mother had always poured scorn on the thought of ghostly presences. ‘I leave the arty-farty nonsense to you, darling,’ she’d giggled, already on her second gin and tonic. ‘After all, you’re the one who claims to be artistic. That’s just the sort of rubbish you lot believe in, isn’t it?’
Rachel knew it had been the gin talking. When sober, her mother excelled in the odd, sly, caustic comment. She declared wide-eyed innocence if anyone took offence. She only really loosened up with alcohol. Rachel hated seeing her mother so out of control. She almost preferred the closed-up, sarcastic version.
She shook herself, trying to instil some sense into her head. It helped make up her mind; she’d ring Mike first thing in the morning. She lay back on the cushions, more relaxed now that she’d come to a decision, albeit an expensive one, and her eye was caught by the Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin. She’d shoved it out of the way when clearing the kitchen to paint and it was wedged between Sister Wendy Beckett and a book on Kandinsky. She’d forgotten all about it. Putting her mug down carefully, not wanting to stain the floor, she took the tin down and settled back on the sofa.
‘So, little tin, what secrets are you hiding?’ Part of her was aware of the air shifting around her as she unwrapped the book. There were the eclectic mixture of papers again, a few neatly stuck in. Some looked as if they had been cut from a diary and were covered in densely written handwriting. The photographs caught her eye. One, a wedding photograph, featured a tall man in uniform with a vibrant-looking woman at his side. They were both holding themselves very erect, looking tense. Another was of a very dashing dark-haired man on horseback, a whip in his hand and a grin splitting his face. Both photographs looked old; they were sepia-tinted and spotted with age.
As she sifted through the loose pages, Rachel noticed that each was neatly numbered at the top right-hand side.
‘Someone after my own heart,’ she said with a smile.
She flipped back to the very beginning until she found the frontispiece again. ‘Henrietta Trenchard-Lewis,’ it proclaimed in an elegant and imperious hand. ‘Her Life.’
Henrietta? Lewis? Rachel found the postcard from Brighton and again looked at the address. Mrs H. Lewis. There was no doubt about it; it must be the same Mrs Lewis who had lived in the cottage.
At the bottom of the tin lay the letters, tenderly tied with their faded-pink velvet ribbon. Rachel laid them to one side; it felt far too much of an intrusion to read them now. She checked the tin for any more loose pages and, satisfied that there were none, pulled the throw around her, snuggled into the sofa and started to read.
June 1963, Clematis Cottage
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