The Perfect Retreat (4 page)

Kitty jumped out of the car quietly so as not to wake the children and pulled the keys from her backpack. Heading over, she found the key to the gates’ padlock. She tried to open it but it was stuck, rusted from lack of use over the past three years.

Willow got out, and having watched Kitty’s attempts with the lock, went to the back of the car to rustle through the organic cotton bags. She found what she was looking for, walked up and sprayed the lock. Kitty turned the key and the lock opened.

‘Organic olive oil,’ said Willow as she walked back to the car holding the can.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Kitty as she swung open the gates. Willow steered the car through them and waited for Kitty to get back in. Lucian stirred and rubbed his eyes to try and focus on the darkness outside.

As they arrived at the house, Kitty suddenly remembered she had forgotten to ring the power company to reconnect the electricity. The house looked black and forbidding in the moonlight and Kitty felt slightly sick at the thought of Willow and the children staying in the dark and cold all night. ‘Only for a few weeks,’ Willow had promised her, but now
Kitty wondered if they would make it through the night. Kitty
prayed there wouldn’t be any dead birds in the entrance hall. Three years was a long time to leave a house locked up.

Kitty alighted from the car, pulled her keys back out and opened the front door. Willow followed her. The door swung open and the smell of dust and old air filled their nostrils. Kitty made a face as she felt for the light switch, silently praying that perhaps the electricity would still be on, although she distinctly remembered getting it switched off before she and Merritt had left three years before.

The power gods were obviously listening; miraculously the light turned on, and Kitty blinked a few times in amazement as her eyes adjusted to the light. Memories of the house flooded her mind and she stood in the large entrance,
spellbound
.

Willow was entranced. ‘Jesus, it’s amazing Kitty! Why didn’t you tell me you lived here?’ Willow was circling in one spot, looking up at the vaulted ceiling. She stopped and gazed up the magnificent oak staircase that stretched before them.

Kitty was in a trance as she stood by the front door, not hearing Willow. Memories of running up the stairs with Merritt; the sound of her mother in the kitchen. Bach flowing out of the drawing room when her father took to the piano in the evenings. He had stopped playing after Kitty’s mother died. It was as though the music in him died with Iris.

‘Kitty, Kitty!’ Willow’s voice shook Kitty from her daze.

‘Sorry,’ said Kitty. ‘I’ll go and turn the lights on and unpack the car, if you want to get the children.’ Kitty walked towards the kitchen.

‘Great, I’ll meet you back here,’ said Willow, looking happier than Kitty had seen her in months.

Kitty wandered through the house, turning on lights and opening whichever windows would allow her. Some were tightly stuck, but she figured she could get Walker, the local handyman, to get them opened – if he was still working.

As she walked back to the entrance, she could hear Poppy’s voice. ‘I can be a princess here!’ she was yelling. Jinty was crying and Lucian was as silent as ever.

Willow handed Jinty to Kitty, as she usually did when she cried. ‘Show me everything,’ she said, her cheeks flushed.

‘OK, well, this is the entrance. The staircase leads up to the first floor, where there’s an ancient bathroom and sixteen bedrooms of different sizes, plus a nanny’s quarters and two smaller rooms, including a playroom. There’s also another wing, but we never open it as it’s just more to look after.’

She walked with a now settled Jinty, who was going back to sleep on her shoulder, towards large oak double doors to the side of the entrance. ‘This is the drawing room,’ she said as she opened the doors and turned on the light. Willow took a sharp intake of breath. ‘My god! Did a
Brideshead Revisited
bomb go off in here and time has since stood still?’ she laughed.

Kitty looked at her blankly.

‘You know,
Brideshead Revisited
, the book? Evelyn Waugh?’ said Willow.

‘I’ve never read any of her work,’ said Kitty.

‘Evelyn was a man, and
Brideshead Revisited
was the book that made me fall in love with England. I read it when I was fourteen. It’s set in the twenties,’ said Willow as she walked around touching everything that wasn’t covered with a dustsheet.

Kitty felt embarrassed. Willow was so smart. She was forever offering to lend Kitty books, but Kitty always declined – although she devoured the glossy magazines.

Willow walked around the room looking at its contents. There was no television. The only television they had was in the parlour off the kitchen, where Kitty had hidden herself away after Iris had died. Merritt preferred the library.

‘It’s a bit out of date, I know. We didn’t have a lot of money to do it up with. A house like this eats money, I’m afraid,’ she said, rocking Jinty in her arms.

‘It’s not a criticism. It’s wonderful. People go to great lengths to get their houses to look like this nowadays. If it were mine, I wouldn’t change a thing,’ said Willow, picking up a bronze astrolabe off a side table. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘It’s some astronomy thing,’ said Kitty.

‘How do you use it?’

‘No idea. My brother knows,’ said Kitty as she tried to open a window with one hand, careful not to wake Jinty.

‘You have a brother?’ asked Willow. ‘Where’s he? Why doesn’t he live here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kitty honestly. ‘After my father died we went our separate ways and said we would meet again when we could sell the house. There’s a caveat on it. We can’t sell it for ten years.’

‘Don’t you and your brother get along?’ asked Willow. She had longed for a sibling as a child. The idea of never speaking to one seemed unnatural.

‘We get along but we are very different. He’s almost twenty years older than me,’ said Kitty, feeling the cool night air on her face now the window was open.

‘Oh,’ said Willow. ‘Show me more of the house,’ she demanded, and Kitty sighed softly and did what her boss asked.

Kitty pushed open another set of doors and they stood watching Poppy as she climbed the steps and ran around the library mezzanine.

‘Careful,’ said Willow, as she looked up at the stone vaulted ceiling and the rows and rows of old books. The large reading table in the centre of the room was big enough to seat twelve for dinner and the battered Chesterfield faced a huge and ornate stone fireplace.

‘Now this is wonderful. You must have loved this room when you were little,’ said Willow, craning her neck to take in the room. The iron spiral staircase had metal serpents winding their way up to the mezzanine. Kitty watched as Poppy flitted about like a hummingbird in her favourite tutu and a purple feather boa.

‘No, I didn’t like it much,’ said Kitty quietly. She had hated the library, with its smell of books and air of seriousness.

‘Let’s keep going,’ said Willow, and Kitty showed her the dining room and the billiard room, where the billiard table was covered in a white dustsheet.

Every room they went into Willow went into raptures over it, exclaiming over the furniture; the carpets; the chandeliers. She even managed to get excited about the small powder room downstairs.

‘I’ll find it hard to leave,’ said Willow.

‘Well, you haven’t seen the kitchen yet,’ muttered Kitty as they walked through to it. It had lain untouched since 1960, when Iris had insisted Edward do it up for her as a wedding present. The old Aga stove had been left, but everything else was avocado laminate and white cane furniture.

Willow laughed as she entered the room. ‘This is very Austin Powers.’

Kitty laughed, not because it was particularly funny but because she was relieved to get the joke. She was still ashamed for having thought Evelyn Waugh was a girl in the drawing room.

Kitty walked into the small parlour to the side of the kitchen and set the sleeping Jinty carefully down on the old Laura Ashley sofa. She covered her with the throw that lay along the back of it. ‘Alright, well let’s unpack then shall we?’ she asked Poppy and Lucian cheerfully.

‘Why don’t I unpack and you go and get the children ready for bed? You can go and choose their bedrooms if you like,’ said Willow.

Kitty took her small charges upstairs and put them in a room together in twin beds. The bedrooms were sparsely furnished. Most of the good furniture had been sold over the years to pay for bills or repairs to the house. Kitty found clean linen in the hall cupboard, although it was a little musty. She reminded herself to air it in the morning.

Willow brought the first lot of cases upstairs, which were carefully labelled with each of the children’s names in Kitty’s childish writing. ‘Crazy,’ said Willow, looking down the wide hallway with all its paintings and the doors leading off it.

Kitty unpacked the children’s clothes and put them into a large cedar dresser, and then she changed the children into their pyjamas. Lucian was silent as she led him through the motions, but Poppy was high on the smell of dust and circumstance.

‘I love it here. I don’t think we’ll ever leave. I am sure I’ve been here before!’ Poppy rattled on, and Kitty nodded and agreed as she wrestled Poppy into her organic cotton pyjamas.

Taking them to the ancient bathroom, she watched as Poppy and Lucian cleaned their teeth and then took them back inside to tuck them up in bed. ‘Willow,’ she called down the stairs.

Willow came up with more cases and walked into the bedroom. ‘Night changelings,’ she said as she bent down to kiss them.

‘I’ll go and make us some tea, OK?’ Willow said as she went downstairs again, leaving Kitty humming the children to sleep. Kitty stayed with them until they’d drifted off.

As she walked down the grand staircase Willow touched the worn balustrade. She wondered what it would be like to own this house, to have all the history that Kitty had. Not that Kitty had ever shown it; she had made a huge effort to downplay her ancestral home, although Willow didn’t remember ever asking Kitty anything personal since her employment.

As she crossed the landing and continued down towards the entrance she looked down and was shocked to find a man standing in the entrance. ‘Who are you?’ she asked
imperiously
, taking on the tone of the lady of the house.

‘I might ask you the same thing. What the fuck are you doing in my house?’

‘It’s a plant sample,’ explained Merritt to the customs official at Heathrow.

‘Right. Got a certificate for it then?’ asked the man, shaking the bag. It had a small cutting inside it wrapped in cotton soaked in water and Rescue Remedy.

‘Please be careful,’ said Merritt.

‘Sure, sure,’ said the official absently as he glanced at the certificate that Merritt handed over. ‘Effilum oxypetalsum,’ he read carefully.

‘Epiphyllum oxypetalum,’ corrected Merritt, trying not to let the disdain creep into his voice.

The man picked up the bag again. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, shaking it vigorously.

‘It’s a type of cactus,’ said Merritt, careful not to upset the officious man, who smelt of Vicks and cigarettes. He was tired and wanted to get out of the loud airport and have a shower and drink.

‘I hate cactus plants. When the wife and I bought our house there were so many, and we had them all pulled out,’ he said as he stamped Merritt’s certificate for approval.

Merritt grabbed the paper from the man, put his plant into his worn leather satchel and walked through to collect his luggage. He had hunted for this sample, a night-blooming Cereus known as ‘Queen of the Night’. It bloomed only one or two nights a year, around the full moon in May. The blooms only lasted for twelve hours or so and then it would take a full year for it to bloom again. He wasn’t about to have some tit at Heathrow who was high on the power of his job ruin his dreams of having one back at Middlemist again.

Since he had said goodbye to Kitty three years ago at the elaborate gates outside Middlemist, he had travelled constantly, designing gardens for a sheikh in Jordan, a sneaker entrepreneur in the Hamptons, and a luxury hotel chain in Bali, India and Mexico, which is where he picked up his precious plant sample. In between this he had written three books and filmed a television special for PBS in America.

Then one day, he woke up and wanted to go home. He was exhausted. Whatever he was looking for eluded him, and the thing he was trying to escape from had followed him from place to place. Middlemist had been calling him. The gardens cried for him, and he finally listened.

Returning home, he planned to head straight to Middlemist and then call Kitty. He had thought about her a lot over the past three years. She worried him, but he was not equipped to help her with what she needed. While he was still at home it had been painful to watch her struggle at school, with their father so proud of him but ignoring his daughter.

His marriage and fast divorce from Eliza had rocked his father’s world, although he had no idea why it had been so shattering to Edward. In hindsight, he saw that he and Eliza had never been a good match. He was swept away by her vivacity and ability to make small talk, both skills he severely lacked. But Eliza, it emerged, was actually a shameless social climber who wanted to be the lady of the house. She had assumed that Merritt’s family had more money than they actually showed off.

The separation from Eliza was swift, partly because he found out she had gone through not only the estate’s private accounts but his personal accounts too, but mainly after he had found her astride his best friend from school, Johnny Wimple-Jones, a gadabout and heir to an enormous property and large trust fund.

He had left Eliza and Johnny to each other, facing the disappointment of his father and the gossip of his friends. Such was his pride and shame, Merritt had refused to divulge what had happened in the marriage; not even to his father. It was only Kitty who he had told what had happened after he came back for the funeral. He still remembered her coming into his room in the middle of the night. She had sat on the end of his bed, held his hand and listened as he told her what he had discovered about Eliza. He wasn’t sure why he spilled his heart, but she was so unprejudiced about his and Eliza’s relationship that he felt himself able to tell her everything.