Love Song Read online

  Later, after what Aunt Rosabel described as ‘prep school boys’ favourite lunch’ in the eau de Nil dining room, hung about with portraits of horses and dogs from other eras – roast chicken followed by the best bread and butter pudding that anyone had ever tasted, delicately flavoured, deliriously light – Aunt Rosabel and Alexander once more closeted themselves in the library to talk business while Hope beckoned to the girls and Verna to follow her up the stairs with their weekend luggage, and find their bedrooms.

  Room after room displayed the same perfect taste as the house boasted in its downstairs rooms. Graceful silk furnishings in delicate colours, high-backed beds and old wood floors set about with rugs, curtains trailing to the floor and looped and pleated in effective folds that showed off inner silk linings of contrasting shades. And in all the rooms there were watercolours of flowers, or country scenes, depictions from long ago, acquired because the buyer liked them, and not with investment in mind.

  Aunt Rosabel’s own room, very much sequestered from the other bedrooms and next door to a large Victorian marble bathroom with a tub set in the middle and large windows giving onto a magnificent view, was dominated not by a watercolour but by a portrait in oils of the kind that is normally found in dining rooms. Unable to resist a closer look at the painting which had caught her eye from the moment she pushed open the old painted door with its eighteenth-century panelling carved in six, Hope tiptoed across the room and gazed up at it where it hung above the old carved and painted chimneypiece.

  Now she could see it at close quarters she realized that her first impression was right – this masterpiece had to be of the young Rosabel. As she stepped back from the portrait to look at it once more, she saw that the eyes staring out at her from the beautiful young face above her were precisely the eyes that had stared so luminously out of the old lady’s face downstairs. The same penetrating, unswerving gaze, the same sense of having been put on this earth for a purpose, and perhaps even knowing just what that purpose might be.

  ‘So,’ Alexander said to Hope as they prepared for bed on Easter Monday night. ‘Isn’t Hatcombe just as beautiful as I have always told you?’

  ‘Well, it is a fairly magical place, outside. Stables, barns, a lake – horses in the next field, all sorts of wildlife and wonderful walks.’

  ‘Could you live here, darling?’

  ‘No, and nor could you. You’d be bored in a minute.’

  Alexander shook his head. He’d given the matter a lot of thought – more thought than he normally gave things, since his declared attitude to life was to fly by the seat of his trousers – and he had reached the conclusion that Hatcombe House would be the answer to his own particular everything, in all ways, bar none.

  ‘But it’s academic anyway, darling,’ he heard Hope continuing beside him as he reached over to turn off his light at the on-off switch hanging on a nearly bare wire. ‘I mean, for one thing we couldn’t afford a place like this and for another—’

  ‘We might not have to afford a place like this, Hope.’

  Hope turned round on her pillow and stared at him in the half-darkness. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just a feeling I’ve got, that’s all. But I’m not going to say anything more because you’re forever lecturing me about raising false hopes. And you’re right.’

  As Hope saw Alexander fall asleep and heard his breathing become slow and regular, it occurred to her that she had never seen him do so as quickly, nor look so relaxed. In contrast, Hope herself found that she could not sleep, but lay staring at the dense, still, black darkness that is so characteristic of the countryside at night, unlit as it is by street lamps, the fields resounding not to the comforting sound of distant traffic but to the call of hunting owls.

  Only the wind rattling the doors of the old house gave her a strange feeling of comfort, as if it was reassuring her that it too was awake.

  ‘Our worries are over!’ Alexander shouted from the hallway, just over a week after their return from Hatcombe. ‘I told you so! Didn’t I tell you so?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Hope replied as Alexander came into the kitchen re-reading the letter in his hand. When she saw the small light yellow paper with the beautifully formed handwriting she didn’t even have to ask who it was from.

  ‘Has she sent you some money, Alex?’ she asked. ‘Is that what this has all been about?’

  ‘Better than that, Hope darling – a lot, lot better than that. Here – read it for yourself.’

  Hope read it standing up, then she sat down at the table and re-read it. Then she shook her head and handed it back to Alexander. ‘Don’t even contemplate it.’

  ‘She has left me the house, Hope. She is leaving me Hatcombe.’

  ‘Noticed anything, Alexander?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Rosabel Fairfield is still alive, Alexander. She is not dead.’

  ‘She is leaving me Hatcombe in her will.’

  ‘That, Alexander darling, is the way people normally get left things.’

  ‘So?’ Alexander shook his head in slow wonder at Hope. ‘Don’t you realize what this means?’

  ‘All too well, Alexander,’ Hope said, and then she added flatly, ‘It means you intend to move us to the country.’ She got up from the table, picked up the pile of ironing she had just finished doing, and started to stack it away carefully to air on the shelves above the boiler.

  ‘But we agreed!’ Alexander protested. ‘We agreed that Hatcombe would be a wonderful place to live. And what a background for the girls.’

  ‘No, we did not, Alex. All we agreed was that it was a lovely part of the world. We never agreed to move to that terrible old house.’

  ‘Terrible old house?’ Alexander echoed, then frowned dramatically. ‘Terrible old house? A Grade II listed Georgian rectory in Pewsey Vale? Have you seen what those places go for?’

  ‘Alex.’ Hope put her laundry basket back down on the table and looked her husband in the eye. He started fidgeting the moment she did so, just as he always did when she pinned his wings. ‘Alex, the best thing you could do, believe me, if and when Aunt Rosabel dies—’

  ‘There’s no if about it. Death is life’s only great certainty.’

  ‘When your great-aunt does finally die, and if she has left you the house—’

  ‘Of course she’ll have left me the house! You read the letter, didn’t you? How you and I and the girls have brought sunshine and light back into her life! How much she loves having her great-nieces round her! How—’

  ‘Alexander?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is it that you always say – there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Don’t you think it applies most of all to families, darling? Really?’

  ‘What’s got into you, Hope?’ Alexander groaned. ‘You complain when things don’t go right—’

  ‘I do not complain, love. When have I ever complained?’

  ‘You complain when something goes wrong with my business—’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘And then when at last we get a real chunk of good fortune, you complain about that as well!’

  ‘No, I don’t – I just think that we should what Mellie calls get real. We are fine, for the moment. We can’t change our whole life on the promise of a will, really we can’t.’

  But Alexander just sighed and took the whisky bottle off the nearby worktop.

  ‘And it’s no good just sighing. She might not leave you the house.’

  Having poured himself a drink, Alexander looked up at his wife. ‘She will if we go and move in there now,’ he said, screwing the top back on the bottle.

  Hope said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ Alexander began again. ‘She’s a lonely old woman, and that is a very big house—’

  ‘It might need things done to it,’ Hope insisted, hating to hear the rising panic in her own voice. ‘I mean, we know nothing about the house.’

  ‘If it needs anything done to it, or we want to alter it to suit our need
s, she will pay for whatever needs doing, she said so.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We certainly discussed the matter when we were down there at Easter. And when you think about it, it’s only common sense. Since her son was killed in the war, she’s been living there on her memories. This way, if we move in with her, there will be a family there again.’

  ‘We’ve barely finished converting this, and it’s hardly, you know, Interiors standard—’

  ‘Let me finish for once. Look. Just suppose – that’s all I’m asking you to do, suppose – just suppose we did go and live in Hatcombe. Great-aunt R says she’s perfectly happy to move into a wing and let us have the rest of the house. We can change whatever we need to change, at her expense, and when the old lady pops off either we sell it and realize a tidy profit or we go on living there. Either way it’s not going to cost us. She’s leaving me the house, Hope. That’s the point, she is leaving me the house.’

  ‘How do you know how much money she’s got?’

  ‘She told me. No – all right – she showed me.’

  ‘She took the sock out from under the bed?’

  ‘She told me she has over two hundred and fifty thousand – and another quarter of a million in stocks and shares,’

  Hope frowned deeply, not at the amount of money but at the look in Alexander’s eyes. ‘It’s not our money, Alexander,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s her money and her house.’ She sat down and started folding some napkins she had forgotten to include in the ironing, thinking for a moment. ‘What about this place? What about our home here? This is our home, not just a house.’

  ‘The girls will like living in Hatcombe even more than here,’ Alexander replied. ‘And what about this place? This may be home to you, Hope, but to the rest of the world it is merely a little piece of suburbia with a long narrow front room and a long narrow back garden and, let’s face it, a shabby sort of road with down at heel housing at the bottom half and hardly better at the top. Anyone can live in this sort of house, but it takes someone particular to live at Hatcombe.’

  ‘I realize it must seem mad to you, Alex, but I really don’t like the idea of living somewhere like Hatcombe. All the responsibilities of a great big house just make me panic. I like being normal, and ordinary, and here.’

  ‘Hope, Hatcombe is hardly Kensington Palace. And look – if the worst came to the worst—’

  ‘Which when other people’s families get involved it invariably does—’

  ‘We can sell Hatcombe and always buy back. This is the chance of a lifetime. Do you know what a place like that would be worth properly modernized? Five bedrooms, four reception rooms, separate granny wing, staff cottage, over ten acres with stables and paddocks?’

  ‘No,’ Hope said quietly. ‘And I’m not sure that I really want to know.’

  ‘Six, seven – eight, nine – hundred thousand pounds – and that’s a conservative estimate in a bad market.’

  Hope nodded, got up again, and added the folded napkins to the rest of the laundry she was airing because there was no point in continuing the argument. The trouble was, in a way Alexander was right. It did make perfect sense.

  If everything went according to plan, not only would they have a lovely home, a background for the girls as they finished growing up just as Alexander had said, but with one move they would be out of debt. If on the other hand everything went pear-shaped, then they would hardly be any worse off than they were now, namely facing some sort of Alexander-induced ruin.

  For once Alexander would have a cast-iron opportunity to make some money without any enormous risk in a market which was regarded as the most secure of all, the property market.

  ‘OK,’ she heard herself say, finally closing the boiler cupboard doors. ‘OK – you had better start talking formally to Aunt Rosabel, if she really does mean it.’

  ‘Hope darling,’ Alexander said, taking her in his arms. ‘You won’t regret this, I promise. This has to be the best thing that ever happened to us.’

  That night when everyone was asleep Hope slipped out of bed and went down to the kitchen, a habit of hers when she was anxious. As quietly as possible she made herself a hot drink and with mug in hand went into her back garden and sat down on the bench under the little cherry tree which she had planted when they first arrived in West Dean Drive.

  Minou, the girls’ little Burmese cat, appeared from nowhere and ran up the tree behind her, pausing to sink her claws in and out of its bark, purring loudly as she did so, while Hope stared up at the night sky, oblivious of the cold air. If she was at Hatcombe she knew she would be able to see a sky studded with stars and seemingly aglow with light, but from West Dean Drive very little of it was visible, while ever more aeroplanes dropped low on the flight path approaching Heathrow, it being still the Easter season.

  Yet these were some of the many things that she liked about where she lived, its smallness, its ordinariness, its proximity to everything else. She even liked the sound of the night flights returning from exotic places about which she had only read, the rumble from a distant city that never slept, the hum of traffic from the South Circular Road at the end of the Drive. The very sense of all the other people living or sleeping, of life going on, in a neighbourhood without pretension or grandeur, pleased her and gave her a feeling of content.

  Most of the people who lived around them thought of themselves as ordinary, and perhaps even took pride in so doing; but Hatcombe was the very opposite. Hatcombe was everything West Dean Drive was not, graceful, grand, even a little imposing. She knew she should feel hopeful about the change in their fortunes, yet for no reason she could name she was filled again with that same senseless dread she had experienced at Christmas.

  ‘How soon do we have to be out of West Dean Drive?’ Hope asked as they stopped off for lunch at a pub, on their way to make a closer inspection of Hatcombe House. ‘If we do decide to sign? How long, Alex darling?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘Three weeks?’ Hope echoed disbelievingly. ‘You’ve just given me a heart attack. That just isn’t possible.’

  ‘It’s a buyers’ market, Hope darling. When they say jump, you jump. Ask the estate agents. You know with the slump and Black Monday, and Black Wednesday, everything’s pretty – black,’ he ended, joking, because he felt so light-hearted. He was all right. He was going to be all right. The rest of the world might have jumped out of various windows, but he was going to be all right, thanks to Aunt Rosabel.

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘Foreigners buying for employees, the estate agent told me. Nowhere to sell, they can move straight in. The company they work for want them up and running within a month.’ As Hope continued to look aghast, Alexander put his head to one side and said to her as soothingly as he could, ‘Come on, Hope, it isn’t as if we don’t have anywhere to go.’

  ‘What about the kids’ schools? We can’t just pull them out weeks before the end of term, Alex.’

  ‘We pay the fees. We can do what we like, I’d have thought.’

  ‘And Rose? We haven’t really discussed Rose.’

  ‘We’ve been through all that, Hope darling.’

  ‘What about what Rose wants?’

  ‘Rose is a girl, she’ll soon forget about being a ballet dancer. Inevitably she’ll marry and have babies. Ballet won’t be a full-time career thing for her, really.’

  An unsaid Just like you, darling lay between them and Hope felt a burning sense of the futility of it all. Why should Rose’s life just be like her mother’s? Why should she be forced to choose between marriage and dancing, for that matter?

  ‘You don’t want Rose to be a dancer because it doesn’t fit in with your plans, Alex,’ she finally said, in a quiet voice. ‘That is the only reason, nothing to do with her having babies, or getting married, or anything.’

  ‘I don’t want Rose to be a dancer …’ Alexander took his wife’s hands and looked into her eyes. ‘I don’t want Rose to be a dancer? Sweetheart, it has nothin
g to do with what I want, or do not want. It is a fact that I am talking about, Hope, and that fact is, darling, she is going to grow too tall, so why let her go on hoping and sweating on the line, believing she will become something that she will never in reality be able to become, through no fault of her own?’

  ‘At least we should give her the chance to follow her bliss.’

  ‘Of course she should follow her bliss, darling, we all should. But being too tall for something that you want to do is not going to make anyone happy, and who is to say that her bliss, as you so sweetly call it, is not ours? Who is to say that moving to Hatcombe will not make her happy, away from sniping dance masters?’

  ‘I think we should give Rose the chance to see how good she is. She’s earned it. She won that place over hundreds of other applicants.’ Hope turned to look pleadingly at her husband. She could not stop thinking of that moment when Rose won her place, how her eyes had shone.

  ‘Look – I do not want Rose to go on with her dancing only to end up on the scrap heap. The rest of the family understands that, but because you were a dancer and it came to nothing—’

  ‘I loved dancing, and it only came to nothing, as you call it, because I married. Besides, I’m still teaching, and you know, Alex, it may not seem much to you, but going back to teaching dance has done so much for me—’

  ‘Even if I changed my mind, Hope darling, there would still be the question of the fees. I simply can’t afford those fees, not on top of everything else.’

  ‘You never mentioned there was a problem with the fees before. You said you’d borrow the money from your father until this latest scheme of yours came good – you told Rose that was what you would do.’

  ‘That’s not such a good idea any more, and anyway – it’s academic.’

  ‘I want Rose to go to Park Lodge, Alex, I really do. I want her to have the same chance as I had. If she decides to give it all up, of her own accord, well – that’s another matter.’