A Hundred Pieces of Me (17 page)

By her third donation drop-off, she’d learned that the collie was called Gem, the manager, who also ran the rescue kennels, was Rachel, and the older helper, Jean, couldn’t get going in the morning without a good strong cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich. They all looked forward to Gina’s donations as they were, according to Jean, ‘a better quality of item’.

‘Ooh, lovely, thank you, dear,’ Jean said on Monday morning, not bothering to hide her nosiness when Gina heaved two bags of untouched paperback novels onto the counter. ‘More books! It makes a change from the usual, what you bring in. Doesn’t it, Rachel?’

Rachel looked up from unpacking a donation bag of nylon headscarves and hats. ‘It certainly does. Although we also like your lovely chinaware and antique candlesticks. Hint, hint.’

‘I’ve given up book groups,’ said Gina, watching with relief as Jean unpacked her pile of unfinished Booker Prize shortlisted novels. ‘It feels like a weight’s lifted from my shoulders. Call me a philistine, but I’ve decided life is too short for a fourth attempt at
Ulysses
.’

Rachel pushed her thick black fringe out of her eyes and laughed. ‘Life’s too short for my first attempt. I’m saving it for my old age.’

‘You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been getting recently. Perfectly respectable types who come in all prim and proper until you unpack their bag and it’s full of . . .’ Jean pulled a shocked face ‘. . . filth. Mind, they dash in and out pretty quickly, but I still know. I couldn’t meet Mrs Nixon’s eye at WI last week. Her poor Arthur . . .’

‘Now then, Jean.’ Rachel looked askance, but winked at Gina. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t read them round the back!’

Gina smiled, but then had a moment of horror as she realised that the various charity-shop volunteers along the high street were probably building up five different pictures of her from the contents of her donation bags. Without thinking, she’d been directing different things to different shops: heavy books and small furniture here, home accessories to the Hospice at Home with the big display window, clothes to the Breast Cancer Care shop, who had more imaginatively dressed dummies.

As she left the shop for her office, Gina wondered what they made of her once she’d gone. If people analysed the bags like fortune-tellers, it was all in reverse: they’d be constructing her personality from books she’d never got round to reading. From clothes she’d never found the right occasion for.

She slowed down as something in the Hospice at Home window caught her eye. Out of all the charity shops in town, Hospice at Home had the best displays: it was dressed to look like a 1960s-inspired bedroom, and on top of a Perspex bedside table there was a beautiful silver bedside lamp, with a huge round metal shade.

That looks
gorgeous
, thought Gina. I wonder how much they want for it?

She was crossing the road to see, when she abruptly remembered that it was, in fact, hers. It was the touch-operated bedside light from the master bedroom at Dryden Road, and had gone straight from the packing crate to the GIVE AWAY box: Gina hadn’t been able to look at it without hearing the
tap tap tap
of Stuart turning it down to read his cycling magazines in bed, rather than talk to her, and then the
tap tap
as he turned it off to slide over in the bed without making contact with her body.

She didn’t hear any of that now. Weirdly, it just looked like a very expensive touch lamp, one that would work perfectly in the small spare bedroom of her flat.

Gina glanced at the ticket and winced. Twenty pounds? It had been a lot more than that, five times that, even in the sale.

She could remember the day she and Stuart had bought it, at Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road in London. It had been a surprise weekend away for her twenty-sixth birthday; Gina found she liked London a lot more when she didn’t have to live there. Stuart had booked the most romantic boutique hotel he could find, and they’d giggled about the hand-knitted hot-water-bottle covers – what sort of honeymoon hotel needed bed-warmers? Hotels seemed to bring out the best in their relationship: Stuart had handed over his credit card in Heal’s while he was still in a dazed good mood brought on by a very late lie-in.

It’s a nice lamp, Gina thought. Buying it was more vivid in her memory than the weekend away; she wanted it back. That couldn’t be right. Could it?

A woman appeared in the shop window to rearrange the display and caught Gina looking at the lamp. She raised her eyebrows jokingly and pointed at it but Gina shook her head with a sad smile. It wasn’t coming back into her house. Let someone else get the benefit of its designer curves. Better that Hospice at Home got their twenty quid for it, before Stuart remembered they’d bought it and demanded it back.

At quarter past ten there was a knock on Gina’s office door, and Sara, the wedding planner, stuck her blonde head in. ‘Brought you a bit of cake,’ she said, putting a plate on top of the filing cabinet. It had a chunk of salmon pink and white sponge on it. ‘Had a naughty box of wedding-cake samples, and if it stays in my office I’ll eat the lot.’

‘Thanks!’ said Gina. ‘That’s really kind of you.’

Sara raised her mug of coffee; it was a glitzy silver one of Gina’s that never looked right with just tea in it. ‘Meant to say thanks for the new mugs. To be fair, I was getting a bit depressed with David’s Inland Revenue freebies. Who wants to be reminded of last year’s tax deadline on their tea break, eh?’

‘How’d you know they were mine?’ Gina asked, still conscious of the charity-shop character-analysis issue.

Sara tipped her head. ‘Aw, hon. They’re very you. All of them. I knew as soon as I saw the “Keep Calm and Eat Cake” one.’

Naomi had given her that for her birthday. Gina wondered if she should be offended, then decided it was better to be known for eating cake than for tax reminders.

‘While I’m here, your for-sale notice in the kitchen. Have you sold that steamer yet?’ Sara asked. ‘I need to start my diet before the season gets going. It’s the same every year, pure agony.’ She sighed and patted her stomach, straining her pencil skirt to the limits of its ponte power. ‘Very hard to keep brides on the straight and narrow with their low-carbing when you’ve got a bit of a tum yourself.’

Gina was about to tell her she could have it for a tenner, then changed her mind. ‘You know what, Sara?’ she said. ‘Have it. I’ve got a juicer as well, if you fancy that.’

‘Really?’ Sara looked thrilled. ‘How much do you want for them both?’

‘Nothing. You’re very welcome to them. Make a donation to charity, if you like. I’ll bring them in tomorrow.’

‘Thanks!’ Sara’s face was flushed with pleasure as she left, and Gina felt pleased too. It was nice. Nice to get rid of some junk, nice to feel it wasn’t junk to someone else. If only everything leaving her house could be as useful.

When Sara had clip-clopped upstairs, Gina got up and retrieved the cake. She ate it with her feet on the window ledge, looking out at the canal. It was vanilla, with raspberry jam, and it tasted like a summer wedding.

By eleven, she’d made a timetable of the renovation stages for the Magistrate’s House, and had started the first rough draft of the Design and Access statement for the consent application form when she realised she hadn’t got a final answer from Nick and Amanda about what they were planning to do with the cellars.

She dialled the mobile number Amanda had left; Nick picked up.

‘Hello, Nick, it’s Gina Bellamy. This a good time to have a word?’

‘It’s fine. I was just . . . Hang on.’ She heard some clunks and the phone was put down and picked up. ‘Sorry, just juggling cameras. How are you?’

‘Great, thanks.’ Gina opened the file of photos she’d taken of the house’s interior while they’d been walking around; she could already see how stunning the main hall would look once the panelling had been restored, ready for paintings and subtle wall lighting.

There was a lot to do yet, though. Lorcan had pointed it out while they’d gone round: the walls beneath the panelling were full of damp, which would have to be painstakingly cut out, the rotten battens removed and new seasoned wood patched in where it had decayed over the years. No one would know it was there once the panelling was back on, but it’d be sound, and
they
’d know: Gina liked that. Making the house solid, not just papering over the cracks.

She dragged her attention back to her spreadsheet. ‘I’m just putting together a set of consent applications to get the ball rolling with the council, and I realised that we didn’t talk about the cellars. You were going to let me know what your architect said about Keith’s feedback.’

‘Ah. We’re still waiting on our architect. Busy man, by all accounts.’

‘Busier than Keith?’ Gina pretended to be amazed.

‘They are two very busy men. Lucky for them that we’ve got all the time in the world, eh?’

‘Well, quite.’ She looked at her list. ‘While you’re there, did you decide whether you wanted to go ahead with the reclaimed oak flooring in the study and downstairs areas, or have me price up alternatives? And we need to talk about windows. I might have to get some measurements, if that’s not going to disturb you today.’

‘Sure. I’ve got Lorcan here, actually. He’s doing some measurements himself. Something about lime replastering?’ Nick dropped his voice. ‘He keeps knocking on the walls, like he’s looking for a secret door. Is that normal?’

‘Yes. He’s seeing if your plaster’s blown. Or if it’s solid brick or just plasterboard – some of it looks a bit modern, like it might have been a later addition.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘I thought there might be some hidden tunnel down to the church or something.’

‘You’ve been reading too many historical romances. Although the house was built by a wine merchant, so you never know, there might be a secret tunnel down to the cellars . . .’

‘Aha! A wine chute, straight from the dining room to the inner cellar? I like the sound of that. Do you think we could get one?’

‘I’ll talk to Lorcan,’ said Gina. ‘He’s built a couple of slides for me. I don’t think a drink chute should be a problem. You might have trouble getting it past the conservation officer, though.’

Nick laughed. ‘It’s a practical modern addition. What time were you thinking of coming over? I’m here all day.’

She glanced up at the clock on the wall opposite; a dark gold 1930s starburst, bought with her leaving collection from the office. It was quarter past eleven. There were a couple of calls to make about Naomi’s super-shed, and a few emails to return, but the rest of the day was empty. ‘About twelve?’

‘Great,’ said Nick. ‘I might have to nip out but Lorcan’s here. You might get more sense out of him anyway. Fewer questions, at least.’

There was something about windows that Gina found fascinating, the connection, maybe, with previous owners who’d stood at them, looking out at the same view, but in different clothes, with different eyes.

The Magistrate’s House window frames had rotted badly in the wet winters Longhampton had suffered for the past few years, and the sills were soft and spongy beneath the crumbling paint. When she got near enough to inspect them, Gina could almost shove her finger into the wood until it splintered like a chocolate Flake.

That’s going to be expensive, she thought, as she took a few photographs of the detail, mentally tallying the cost of repairing twelve full-size sashes on the front and sides, with more decorative windows round the back, and that nice stained glass. Amanda could forget all about her eco-double glazing too: Keith Hurst was going to come down hard on any attempts to change the glass. He was passionate about preserving any original features, particularly historically authentic draughts.

Gina got a notebook out of her bag and wrote down, ‘Draught proofing? Insulation? Ring Simon/Longhampton Energy Save’. It was her job to come up with Plan B, and Plan C, and if necessary Plan D, then make the client feel like it had been their Plan A all along.

Her boots crunched on the gravel that ran around the side of the house, as she went into the garden. The large north-facing drawing room at the rear of the house led onto a croquet lawn at the same level, which then dropped down via a flight of ornamental stone steps to a bigger flat lawn that could easily have passed for a small cricket pitch. Gina had found some photographs in the archive of four well-covered Edwardian girls playing tennis on it, in big hats and striped leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouses; she planned to email them to Nick and Amanda along with the proposed timetable.

Around the lawn smaller flowerbeds were now overgrown and knotted, and beyond that wilder land had run to meadow over the years. A few trees stretched their bare branches towards the pale sky. Gina was gazing at the stone steps where the tennis-playing girls had sat in awkward clusters with their mothers and beaux, wondering which of the big houses they’d come from, which well-to-do local families they’d married into, when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.

She pulled it out. It was a text from Stuart. She stepped back, unlocked the screen and braced herself for another petulant demand about loans.

I love you. Xxooxx

An unexpected acrid taste rose up in Gina’s mouth, followed by a wash of relief that she was shocked to feel, given everything that had happened.