Читать книгу While I Was Waiting - Georgia Hill - Страница 9

The following Monday morning, Rachel rang Mr Foster, who explained that Mrs Trenchard-Lewis had died several years ago in a local nursing home and that Rachel would need to contact the solicitors about her find. He also said that the house had been cleared and, as it was unlikely the tin contained anything valuable, she could probably keep it.

‘The house was sold complete with chattels, wasn’t it?’ He didn’t sound as interested as she thought he might be, but she could hear voices in the background and several phones ringing, so maybe he was having a busy day. She thought back to the worm-infested kitchen table and the two bookshelves that constituted ‘the chattels’. ‘Erm, yes.’

‘Well, especially as there seem to be no descendants to make a claim, I would have thought the box is rightfully yours. Do let me know if there’s anything of interest in there, I’m quite keen on local history. I do apologise, Miss Makepeace, but I must go, the office is getting rather hectic.’

Rachel thanked him and a further call to the solicitors confirmed that the tin was, indeed, her legal possession.

Over the next few days it lay on the kitchen table, hidden by the mess that had accompanied the house move. Stuff that, try hard as she might, she couldn’t find a home for. The tin and its intriguing contents remained undisturbed; she had other things to do. Rachel was desperate to get organised. She liked order and she liked everything in its place. No, she admitted to herself with a smile, she craved order and until she had everything sorted there was no hope of doing any work. And if she didn’t work, she may as well give up on the idea of living in the cottage completely; she’d never make the mortgage.

So for the next three days she toiled long hours into the night to replace the chaos and unpacked boxes with calm and organisation. On the third attempt to scrub the sitting-room floor, the first two efforts being not to her satisfaction, she sat back and grinned. She remembered, long ago, Tim claiming she was getting far too much like her mother. That her perfectionism would risk her ending up alone, with only cats for company. She didn’t need a psychoanalyst to tell her it was an attempt to live up to her mother’s intolerance to mess or dirt of any kind. Paula Makepeace was fanatical. She’d gone through dozens of cleaners, as none of them did the job to her exacting standards. No one came up to Paula’s standards – in any way – and that included Rachel. She didn’t know how her father coped.

She gave a shrug, pausing only long enough to turn up the radio, and scrubbed even harder.

Thanks to Gabe, the boiler continued to produce copious amounts of scalding hot water and, after a day’s cleaning and sorting, Rachel was only too glad of a long soak in the bath. As she lay there, listening to Radio Three and the sounds of the cottage settling quietly for the night, she mulled over what she was going to do with her new home.

The kitchen she was going to leave more or less as it was, once she’d brightened it with paint. She liked its old-fashioned, unfitted quality and the quarry tiles and wooden plate rack, which she suspected were original. She would get the old table mended; she guessed it was oak and too good to simply throw out. Her own electric cooker looked out of place, but the long-desired Aga would have to wait.

She looked around the bathroom as she idly blew soap bubbles. The tiles were pale green – not very exciting, but liveable with. The suite was old-fashioned but thankfully white and the bath was deep, with enormous taps. She lacked the power shower that had got her through so many sticky days in the city but, again, that would have to wait.

The rest of the house was, thanks to her hard work, becoming grime-free and small though the rooms might be, some good-looking floorboards had been revealed. A sander would do the trick, she thought dreamily, and then it would be the home of her dreams.

Eventually.

She put Gabe Llewellyn and his long list of expensive repairs firmly to the back of her mind and blew another bubble.

Below her, the old house shifted in agreement.