Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming - Cathy Kelly - Страница 23

‘Here we are,’ Jodi said as she drove over coral azalea petals lying like confetti on the driveway.

‘Oh my,’ breathed Izzie, as she caught sight of the house for the first time. It was early afternoon and bright sunlight painted the graceful façade of the house with a pale, shimmering gold. Set in the middle of a bower of trees and overgrown gardens, Rathnaree was like a graceful bride on her wedding day: no matter how lovely everyone else looked, your eyes were drawn only to her. ‘It’s beautiful.’

They parked beside the estate agent’s car and Izzie began to wander around the garden, touching shrubs and small statues, admiring it all, astonished at this beauty, something she’d grown up so close to and yet had never seen. Here, buried under a Japanese maple and covered with lichen, was a marble goddess with a half-smile on her soft lips.

Izzie ran her fingers over the smooth stone. Rathnaree was from another world and yet Izzie’s own family had been a part of it. To think that her family had worked here in this amazing house, her grandmother and her great-grandmother. And all these years it had remained undisturbed, preserved as if waiting for her to walk in.

‘Come on, Izzie,’ said Jodi, who’d seen the gardens and just wanted to get inside.

In the end, it had been Izzie who had managed to persuade the estate agent to let them see Rathnaree. That she had managed to achieve this was a combination of her charm – and the fact that she and the estate agent had gone to school together.

‘Aggie, we just want to have a look around for this history that Jodi’s writing. Look at it this way: anyone who is willing to put up the money to buy somewhere as massive as Rathnaree is bound to be egotistical enough to want a history of the place written. Rich people have egos the size of Mars, right, and having a history of their new house already written – well, it’s got to be a selling point. You could put it on your marketing brochures. Can you see what I’m getting at? It’s not just a massive old Anglo-Irish wreck in need of restoration…’

‘I thought you were putting a positive spin on it,’ muttered Aggie, the estate agent.

‘– it’s a beautiful example of classic Irish architecture, with a fantastic history that links it to Tamarin and all the great events in Irish history.’

‘Such as what?’ said Aggie.

‘Well, I don’t know yet. That’s why we want to see inside, isn’t it?’ Izzie said. Honestly, Aggie was hard work.

‘I’m not going to tell Peter about this,’ Aggie said, weakening.

Peter Winters was the man who owned Winters & Sons, the estate agency trying to sell Rathnaree. The company’s motto was along the lines of: If you want to sell an exquisite family heirloom, with style and dignity and no nasty modern advertising, then come to Winters & Sons.

That sort of ploy might have worked years ago, but it clearly wasn’t working now, Izzie realised. Rathnaree had been empty for four years and there was no sign of anybody taking it off the owner’s hands.

‘Peter doesn’t need to know anything,’ Izzie said. ‘We won’t tell him, Girl Guide’s honour.’

‘Were you in the Guides?’ Aggie asked.

‘I went to Brownie camp once,’ Izzie volunteered.

Aggie shrugged. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘I’m warning the pair of you, Rathnaree needs a hell of a lot of work,’ Aggie went on as she found the keys for the house. ‘If a bit of plaster falls off and kills you, I’m not liable, right?’

The current owner was one Freddy Lochraven, a distant nephew of the original family. According to Aggie, he divided his time between London and Dubai and had only visited the house once shortly after he’d inherited it.

‘Peter thinks it suits him that it hasn’t sold on the grounds that, with property prices rising all the time, it will make more money when it eventually sells.’

‘And he’d love, I’m sure, a detailed history of the place,’ Izzie interrupted.

‘I suppose,’ said Aggie. ‘Fine, I’ll let you in and I’ll leave you, but don’t take anything, please.’

‘Oh, Aggie, for God’s sake,’ grumbled Izzie. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We just want to breathe in the atmosphere. Besides, you’ve known me all your life – and Jodi’s the Vice-Principal’s wife, she’s hardly going to start ripping the fireplaces off the walls, is she? No. We’re doing you a favour.’

‘We have to go in through the kitchen,’ said Aggie now, jangling keys, ‘because the front door’s a nightmare. The last time I was here, I could barely open it.’

They walked around the side of the house to the big gate into the courtyard through which Jodi had peered once before. She was so excited and was mentally urging Aggie to hurry up but the estate agent was taking for ever, slowly inserting key after key into the lock, trying to find the right one and muttering as she did so.

‘Hurry up!’ Jodi wanted to scream, but she daren’t. If Aggie changed her mind, they wouldn’t be able to get in and she just had to see inside.

Finally, the stiff lock yielded. Aggie unhooked it and pushed the creaking gates open. Jodi ran in first, looking around, trying to commit everything to memory. Photos! She’d better take photos.

The courtyard had stables at one end with arched doorways and horseshoes hung for luck all over the place. Jodi wanted to look everywhere, but she wanted to go inside too.

At the kitchen door there was another interminable wait while Aggie fiddled with the keys again. And then the door was open and they were inside.

‘Holy smoke, it’s an awful mess,’ said Aggie, sighing as they went in.

Jodi and Izzie exchanged a grin. Aggie had never been the most imaginative person in school, Izzie thought and clearly, nothing had changed. All she saw was dust and cobwebs, while Jodi and Izzie saw history right in front of them.

‘If you want to leave me the keys, Aggie, I’ll lock up and bring them back to you in a couple of hours,’ Izzie said.

‘Well, OK,’ said Aggie grudgingly. ‘I have a lot to do.’

Izzie nodded as if this was indeed the case, although she didn’t think so. The phone hadn’t rung once when they were with Aggie in the office. Business didn’t appear to be too brisk at Winters & Sons.

‘Of course, you’re busy,’ Izzie said briskly. God, the fibs she was telling. ‘I’ll take care of this. And thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to us.’

With Aggie gone, they could look to their hearts’ content. Izzie almost didn’t know where to start. She walked around the big kitchen with the huge old Aga and recalled Gran once telling someone about cooking on such a beast. Apparently, it was difficult to learn the vagaries of the giant Aga, and a total nightmare trying to relight it when it went out.

In one part of the kitchen were bells hung high on the wall with names for each room: library, drawing room, study, bedroom one, bedroom two, etc. There were three rows of bells and Izzie imagined staff rushing off at high speed when one rang.

To the right of the kitchen was a huge scullery with two vast sinks and lots of old wooden crates still lying on the floor. There were newspapers on the floor too, dropped carelessly there as if mopping up a spill. Behind the door they found the source of the newspapers, piles and piles of carefully tied-up news print. There must be years worth there, Izzie thought.

It was a dark room with only a tiny light and in her mind’s eye she could see a girl, her hands raw from scrubbing potatoes or peeling mounds of vegetables. Until now, Izzie had never thought of herself as a particularly psychic person but here, in this old house, the sense of the generations who’d worked their fingers to the bone seemed to permeate the very walls.

‘Izzie, look – back stairs,’ came Jodi’s voice. ‘Come on.’

She left the scullery and went out into a little hall. There were plain stone flags on the floor and it was cold, freezing even in the heat of a warm spring day. There were lots of little doors off it and she quickly opened some of them, finding a boot room with old footwear standing dusty and covered with the film of age, and another room with nothing in it but shelves of empty bottles and jars, along with a strange contraption shaped like a sideways barrel on a wooden frame with a big handle on one side. It was a butter churn, she realised, delighted with herself for recognising it. Gran had talked about making butter when she was a child: the fun of separating fresh milk into cream and skimmed milk, and then the hours of winding away with the churn until the magical moment came and the golden butter began to appear like little knobs in the milk.

‘Are you coming?’ said Jodi.

They ran up the narrow stairs and came out via a small door into a large airy corridor. It was a different world, the difference between downstairs and upstairs. Izzie tried to take it all in.

The walls were palest green, covered with silken wallpaper that almost looked as if someone had painted exotic birds on by hand. With their wings spread as they flew, the little birds were rainbow-bright: acid yellows, crimson reds and electric blues. Beneath their feet was a wooden floor covered with a long, threadbare carpet. Even though it was old, it had clearly once been very beautiful with an intricate architectural design along the edges and huge old roses tumbling over each other in the middle.

Jodi half ran down to big double doors at the other end of the hallway and pushed them open. Izzie followed her and they found themselves in a light, airy sitting room with huge sash windows and heavy silk curtains. The original furniture was still there, some draped in off-white Holland covers. A pair of gilded chairs sat in front of a beautiful fireplace, a vision of white marble with delicately chiselled Roman goddesses frolicking around the edges. Izzie guessed this must be the lady of the house’s personal salon. Here, her ladyship could sit and amuse herself, in sharp contrast to the women toiling downstairs in the scullery.

Next were bedrooms, two huge ones, for the master and mistress: his with a small dressing room and masculine bookshelves on the walls; hers with an enormous four-poster bed as centrepiece. Izzie recognised Indian carvings on the heavy bedposts, but the crimson and golden hangings had been badly attacked by moths and they hung in threads around it. It was such a shame. The wardrobes and the other furniture didn’t match the Indian bed. The wardrobes were vast 1930s style, with simple lines and doors hanging open, smelling musty. There was candle grease on the small bamboo table beside the bed and Izzie had a sudden vision of the last of the Lochravens as a little old lady getting into bed on her own, with a candle to save money on electricity. Jodi had told her that Isabelle Lochraven had been ninety-five when she died. She’d never married and had lived here in the house all her life. Izzie knew her grandmother must remember Isabelle from a long time ago because Isabelle had been a young woman when Lily worked in Rathnaree, yet Izzie was quite sure the two hadn’t met after that, even though they were of similar vintage. They must have shared many memories, but the servant/mistress divide was so great that even in old age they’d never thought to breach it.

Izzie thought back to her childhood in Tamarin. She couldn’t recall hearing anything about the Lochraven family, apart from the odd reported sighting of Isabelle driving into town in one of her ancient cars. She was a danger on the roads, everyone said. Drove as though she owned the road, which a long time ago she had.

What a sad way to live, Izzie thought, touched with empathy for these people. They had so much and yet, because of their position, they cut themselves off from the people around them. They were part of the country and yet not part of it. How sad.

On the next floor up were children’s rooms and a giant nursery, painted bright yellow with all sorts of old-fashioned children’s toys lying in disrepair on the floor. There were cross-faced dolls with hard china heads and little wigs; a tricycle that must be at least a hundred years old, with its paint nearly all chipped off; and little books from another age, Kipling and Noddy in tattered covers.

Further along the corridor was another door that led up to the servants’ quarters in the attics via a narrow and winding staircase. Here were the maids’ bedrooms: tiny little box rooms separated by paper-thin walls. Some had iron bedsteads, but only one had a small fireplace. Perhaps with their tiny windows, the attic rooms weren’t as cold as the rest of the house, but with so many chimneys it seemed heartless that these maids, after a day stoking the Lochravens’ fires, would climb the stairs to shiver under the eaves.

Again, she began to get an understanding of why her grandmother resented the Lochravens. For a woman as proud and intelligent as Lily, it must have been hard to have to serve these people with their sense of right and privilege. Lily, who thought that respect should be earned, would have found it hard to admire people who thought themselves entitled by virtue of their aristocratic blood. They lived in the pretty gilded salon and dined on fine china, while their servants were denied any comfort whatsoever.

Finally, she went downstairs. The main stairs were grand and at least six foot wide, carved out of the palest white marble with a vein of grey running through them. On either side was a solid brass stair rail. There was a huge hall at the bottom, with a pattern picked out in black-and-white Victorian floor tiles and ornamental columns topped by pots of dusty earth now sat on top of them with no trace remaining of the ferns that once must have been planted there. An ornate grandfather clock stood against one wall and the mounted heads of several stags stared down at her through dusty eyes that hadn’t gleamed with life for many decades.

‘Here it is,’ cried Jodi. She’d found the room from her precious photograph: the room in which the glamorous men and women had posed for the picture marking Lady Irene’s birthday. Without the sepia mystique of the photograph, the room looked sad and tired, for all its elegant proportions and huge windows and the giant fireplace with the club fender exactly as they’d seen it in the photo.

But there was no fire in the grate. The tables with the beautiful arrangements of flowers were gone, nor was there the sense of music in the background or the feeling of laughing people enjoying themselves, holding up crystal tumblers to the camera.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ breathed Jodi, enchanted.

And Izzie wondered exactly what was wrong with her, because all she felt was sadness in this place. Maybe she lacked the archaeology gene. Or maybe she was a lot more like her grandmother than she knew. She didn’t long to be in this grand house playing at being a lady, with servants running up and down the back stairs every time she rang a bell.

There was too much unbalance here. As if something had kept Rathnaree going unnaturally and, now that the cycle was over, all that was left was this beautiful, sad shell which had witnessed so much. Many people had lived their lives out in the house, yet the only stories people heard about Rathnaree concerned the wealthy people who’d lived here. The poor people of Tamarin who’d served them had been forgotten. That felt wrong to Izzie.

‘It’s a pity we don’t know more about the people who worked here,’ she said. ‘That’s the interesting story, isn’t it?’

‘I agree, both stories are interesting,’ Jodie said, surprising her. ‘It’s like there were two separate worlds here, independent and yet linking up: the aristocrats, and the servants. Two different stories at the same time, how interesting is that! Oh, I’m so glad we got to come in here. Thank you, Izzie, for arranging it.’

‘You’re going to work on it, then – the history from both sides?’ Izzie asked.

Jodi nodded. ‘I love uncovering the past, don’t you?’ she said happily. ‘It teaches us about ourselves: that’s what they told us in college, anyway.’

Izzie stood in front of the big fireplace the way the people in Jodi’s sepia-tinted photograph had stood and tried to imagine herself back in their world. She’d read a novel about time travel once, where a woman from the twentieth century had been whisked back to the seventeenth. The idea had fascinated Izzie. What would she bring to the past if she was transported back to 1936 right now? Would her wisdom be of any use then? Or would she find that, instead of her bringing superior modern knowledge into the past, the past would turn out to be her teacher?