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She raised her glass. ‘Cheers!’
He clinked the neck of his bottle against it. ‘Cheers.’
She gave him a strange, almost evasive smile, and sipped her drink.
‘What was it you saw?’ he pressed.
‘I thought you’d seen it too,’ she said.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed De
‘Darling,’ Caro called out from the doorway. ‘Please go and get Jade up!’
‘OK, in a moment!’
‘Please go now, the beef’s going to be ruined! Tell her if she wants us to drive her into Brighton this afternoon, to see Ruari, then she needs to be polite and join us for lunch.’ Caro disappeared back inside.
He turned back to his mother-in-law. ‘All I saw was a shadow in the atrium.’
‘A shadow?’
‘I thought I had imagined it. Or that it might have been a bird flitting past or something. What did you see?’
‘Do you need to know, Ollie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I didn’t want to spook Caro out on the day we moved in, which is why I dismissed it. But now I do need to know.’
She nodded, and peered into her tumbler, inspecting the contents with an eagle eye. She poked a flake of lemon suspended among the tiny bubbles like a micro-organism. ‘I really did think you’d seen it, too,’ she said finally.
He shook his head. De
‘I saw an elderly lady in a blue dress. She appeared out of the wall on the left, glided across the room and disappeared into the wall on the right.’ She gave him a quizzical stare.
He looked back at her numbly.
‘Are you going to tell Caro?’ she asked.
‘You’ve got a lot of damned weed in that lake, Ollie,’ De
‘Grass-eating carp?’
‘Might be just the ticket.’ He took a puff on his cigar then laid it in the ashtray Ollie had provided on the table, and set his empty sherry glass down beside it.
‘It’s not a high priority – need to get the house done before we start spending money on the grounds,’ Ollie replied, and shot a glance at his mother-in-law. She gave him a to-be-continued smile in return.
De
‘A top-up, De
‘Huh?’
‘Some more sherry?’
‘Ah, no, right. I’ll wait until lunch, I’ll have a glass of wine at lunch. Have you booked a table somewhere?’
‘We’re having lunch here, De
‘Really? That’s jolly decent of them – they must be keen to sell!’ He looked around again then said, ‘Are we allowed to use the little boy’s room?’
‘Straight through the door, it’s on the left.’
‘Jolly decent of them!’ He entered the house.
As soon as the old man was out of earshot, Ollie leaned across to Pamela. ‘What do you think? Should I tell Caro?’
‘She hasn’t seen her?’
‘No.’ He took a swig of his beer. ‘Well, she certainly hasn’t said anything if she has.’
‘Have you seen anything since?’
Ollie hesitated. ‘No.’
‘It’s possible you might never see her again,’ she said. ‘I think you might find it helpful to see if you can discover any background, who this woman might be – or rather, might have been.’
‘I’ve tried googling already and doing some other internet searches on the house and the village, but so far nothing. I thought of going to the County Records Office to see if I can find anything there about the place.’
‘You’d probably do better talking to some of the older locals. There must be a few who’ve been here for generations.’
He nodded, thinking about the old man he’d seen in the lane. He’d go into the village and track him down tomorrow, he decided.
A couple of minutes later, De
‘Housekeeper?’ Ollie said.
‘Well, I presume that’s who it was. Woman in an old-fashioned dress. I said good afternoon to her and she just blanked me.’
10
Sunday, 13 September
‘It’s your birthday soon,’ Caro said, during a commercial break in the TV programme. ‘You’re going to be an old man!’
‘Yep, tell me about it,’ Ollie replied.
‘Forty! Still, you’re wearing pretty well.’
He smiled.
‘We haven’t discussed how to celebrate.’
‘I think we just do something low key until we’re sorted here. Then we could think about a big party – if we can afford it. Maybe di
They were lying naked in bed, with the Sunday papers spread across the duvet and on the floor either side of them. Downton Abbey, which they’d recorded earlier, was playing on the television on the wall. Caro had not missed an episode. Ollie kept an occasional eye on it while he worked his way through the Sunday Times sections. The windows were wide open. It was a warm, balmy night. Almost too hot for the duvet.
‘You seemed very distracted today,’ she said.
‘Sorry, darling, a lot on my mind.’ He was looking up at the large brown water stain on the ceiling. At the old, faded wallpaper, not yet stripped, at the walls not yet ready for the new paint colours Caro and he had chosen, and the bare floorboards that they had decided to have sanded and varnished, and cover with rugs. At the huge old-fashioned radiators which the plumber reckoned he could get a decent price for at an architectural salvage place. At the cracked marble fireplace. At the rusty old lock on the door. The brand-new cream curtains only accentuated the poor state of decoration of the rest of the room.
The house was warm at the moment, but in another month, with the October gales coming in, all that would change. The temperature could drop within a week or so. The heating barely worked at the moment, but to replace the system, they would have to be without heat totally for a week, the plumber had estimated. They’d given him the go-ahead to get the new boiler and replace all the piping and they’d been assured the work would be completed by the end of September. It had to be or the place would start feeling pretty miserable.
‘You mean the website? Charles Cholmondley? How do you pronounce it?’
‘Chumley.’ Ollie nodded. ‘Partly that.’
‘I think it looks great.’
‘I think the client likes it.’
‘Of course he does, you’ve done a great job – particularly considering everything else you’ve had to deal with this week! I meant to ask, did you remember to put the sign for a cleaning lady up on the village shop noticeboard?’
‘Yes – Ron, who runs the shop with his wife, Madge, said there were a couple of people they thought might be interested.’
‘On first-name terms with the locals after just a week?’ she said with a grin.
‘They’re a lovely couple. He’s a retired accountant and she was a teacher. The shop’s a labour of love – they do it for pin money.’
‘Nice there are people like that in the world,’ she said. ‘And I like that you’re getting to know the place a bit. We ought to go in the pub sometime. Perhaps see if they do Sunday lunch? We need to try to be a bit involved in the community – and there might be some other girls here around Jade’s age she could become friends with.’
‘Yes, absolutely. Maybe you could join the local jam-making class?’ he joked.
‘There is one?’
‘There was an ad in the store!’ He fell silent. He’d still not told Caro about the old lady. Fortunately, it seemed to have slipped from his father-in-law’s mind and he had not mentioned her again at lunch. But at some point soon, Ollie knew, he would have to say something to Caro. Hopefully in the coming days he’d find the strange old man again and pump him for more about the background of the apparition. If both his in-laws had seen her, and he’d seen something too, then others must have seen her as well. Presumably it was someone who had lived here in the past. Did the estate agent know about her? Was there any legal obligation for it to have been disclosed?