One Day in May Read online

  CATHERINE ALLIOTT started her first novel under the desk when she worked as an advertising copywriter. She was duly fired. With time on her hands she persevered with the novels, which happily flourished. In the early days she produced a baby with each book, but after three stuck to the writing as it was less painful. She writes with the nearest pen in exercise books, either in the garden or on a sofa. Home is a rural spot on the Herts/Bucks borders which she shares with her family and a menagerie of horses, cows, chickens and dogs, which at the last count totalled thirty-four beating hearts, including her husband. Some of her household have walk-on parts in her novels, but only the chickens would probably recognize themselves.

  One Day in May

  CATHERINE ALLIOTT

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2010

  Copyright © Catherine Alliott, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-95737-1

  For Al

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  1

  Maggie’s look of fixed concentration as we hurtled up the M40 was to be encouraged, and for a moment I pretended I hadn’t heard her last remark. Instead I simulated sleep. An in-depth analysis of my family would surely require her to take her eyes off the road, and since her lack of white van handling skills was legendary, I wanted them firmly on the Friday afternoon traffic.

  ‘Hattie?’ she barked above the lawnmower roar of the engine, not one to be ignored. ‘I said, isn’t your sister spoiled beyond belief these days? I haven’t seen her for ages, but I seem to remember she had everything she wanted even then. Didn’t you say she’d eaten one interior designer for breakfast already?’

  I sighed, realizing my pathetic eye-closing ruse was going nowhere. I also remembered that whilst it was quite all right for me to have a go at my family now and then, I resented it when my friends did.

  ‘I didn’t say she was spoiled,’ I said evenly. ‘I simply said she’s got some quite grandiose ideas. But then her taste has never been anything like mine, particularly when it comes to doing up houses. She likes everything draped and patterned and swagged, which is fine in the country, but it’s hardly you and me, is it?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Maggie snorted with derision, then looked pleased. She returned her attention to the road and leaned sharply on the horn. A vast Hungarian juggernaut had dared to cut in front of us whilst we hogged the middle lane, rattling along at sixty miles an hour, which was all we could do when loaded to the gunwales, our cabin full of fabric, sample books and furniture, the tools of our trade.

  ‘Pick a lane and stick to it!’ she roared, betraying her own rudimentary grasp of motorway driving. She flashed her lights furiously as she got right up behind him.

  I gripped the upholstery. Another white-knuckle ride. Maggie had recently admitted to an adrenalin rush when sparring with fellow truckers, and I felt it was only a matter of time before she boasted a tattoo and a wife-beater vest. At least we weren’t in France, I reasoned, where we’d clocked up most of our miles together, and where Maggie’s aggressive handling of Chalky, our white Transit van, had caused more than one monsieur to slam on his brakes, leap from his vehicle and demand an explanation. At least in leafy Buckinghamshire all we encountered were V signs and the odd McDonald’s carton flung from windows in our faces.

  ‘So why does she want us then?’ Maggie yelled disingenuously as we lurched into the slow lane and beetled illegally past the lorry. ‘Your sister.’

  ‘You know why. Hugh wants us,’ I said wearily. ‘And even Laura knows better than to flagrantly go against him. And actually, I think it’s jolly loyal of them to ask us to quote at all. Even if we don’t get the whole house, even if it’s just a few rooms, they’ll still pay squillions.’

  Maggie sat up a bit at this, silenced. When my brother-in-law had rung the shop and asked if we’d ‘cast an eye over the place’ for them, I too had been astonished. Saxby Abbey was hardly the French Partnership’s usual commission, Maggie and my habitual territory being basement kitchens in Fulham, or, at the most, a small house in Parson’s Green. But Hugh had been insistent.

  ‘Laura’s got… well, she’s got some rather extravagant ideas, Hattie,’ he’d said nervously, and very quietly, even though he’d already told me Laura had gone to the village. ‘She’s got some London decorator coming down who wants to put silk everywhere. Even on the walls, for God’s sake. I need you.’

  Small and shiny – cheeks and bald pate – he might be, but the words ‘I need you’ delivered passionately by a peer of the realm are inclined to sway one. Besides, I was very fond of Hugh. He was a dear, kind man and, when let off the marital leash, could scamper like a frisky terrier and be terribly amusing in his cups.

  ‘But, Hugh, Maggie and I do understated French charm, you know that. Shabby chic. A couple of huge garden urns and one or two baroque chairs in an otherwise bare room streaked with a bit of verdigris paint. It’s not going to be Laura’s tasse de thé at all.’

  ‘Paint?’ he’d yelped, like a Labrador after a scrap. ‘Did you say paint? That can’t cost much, surely?’

  ‘Well, ours isn’t cheap; we have it specially mixed. About thirty quid a litre?’

  ‘And a litre covers about fifty metres of wall, doesn’t it? Do you have any idea how much her silk Obsession
wallpaper is?’

  Ah. Obsession.

  ‘About a hundred pounds for one metre. And the Abbey must have… ooh… 20,000 square metres of wall space at least!’

  There was a silence as we both did the maths.

  ‘Please come,’ he’d implored at length. Which, hot on the heels of ‘I need you’ found me not just swaying but melting. ‘Come, and bring your partner too. I swear to God I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Hugh,’ I’d muttered feebly. ‘I mean, overpay us or anything. We’ll charge our usual rates. But Laura—’

  ‘Laura will be fine,’ he’d interjected, quite firmly for him. ‘Leave her to me. Oh, and by the way, your mother’s here too,’ he added, in something more like his habitual nervous tone. ‘The pair of them are flying from room to room clutching swatches and bits of wallpaper shrieking, “Yes! Yes!” as they hold them up to windows, like a couple of born-agains. Their Bible seems to be an enormous book by the prophet Bennison, which they clutch to their breasts, open reverently and dribble over.’

  I smiled; could just picture it. Mum and Laura, both tall, blonde and gorgeous. Laura in jeans and T-shirt, Mum in Bond Street’s finest and, now that it was back in fashion, fur-trimmed too, around her collar, cuffs, tops of boots… As Dad said, it was only a matter of time before it made it to her eyebrows. And boy, they’d be busy. Hastening around the Abbey shiny-eyed, discussing, conferring, holding up rolls of silk, Mum running to the lavatory when the excitement got too much for her middle-aged bladder, both thrilled to bits to be finally getting their hands on the pile, which Hugh’s parents had finally vacated, allowing Hugh, Laura and their three children to move from the tiny cottage in the grounds where they’d spent their first fifteen years of married life.

  ‘And it was only supposed to be five,’ Laura had complained to me once when she’d come to see me at my shop in London. ‘When we got married, Hugh’s parents said five, or maybe six years max, then we’ll swap, it’ll be too big for us. And, Hattie, I could have handled eight years, even ten. But now I’ve got two hulking great teenage girls hitting their heads on the beams and throwing Ugg boots up on sofas, and Charlie’s bouncing off the walls, and we’re still in the cottage!’

  Maggie had been crouched in the shop window at the time, pretending to polish a ball-and-claw sofa foot. She’d made a ‘lucky-you-to-have-a-free-cottage’ face at the floor as she’d rubbed. But I’d felt for Laura, actually. To be fair, apart from this little outburst, she’d sat firmly on her resentment as her eighty-year-old parents-in-law rattled round an enormous twenty-room house, and whilst a family of five, plus dogs, squeezed into a tiny three-bedroom lodge at the entrance to the estate.

  ‘Well, why don’t they move then?’ had been Maggie’s exasperated reaction when Laura had gone. She sat back on her heels in the window as she watched my sister go off down the street, blonde hair swinging. ‘Why don’t they buy their own house, like everyone else does?’

  ‘Because every time they decide to do that, Hugh’s parents get all batey. His mother starts muttering about family loyalty and Hugh’s father flies into a towering rage, so Hugh says they must stay a bit longer. Not upset them.’

  Maggie had harrumphed at that and resumed her dusting with a vengeance, muttering darkly about people not having enough backbone to lead their own lives. But I’d ignored it.

  I’d also looked at Laura that day, as she’d sat in the back room of my shop in Munster Road, on a shabby Louis Quinze chaise longue Maggie and I had recently hustled back from a brocante in Paris and lovingly re-covered in a few yards of thin but exquisite tapestry found in a flea market, and wondered how we’d ever reached this juxtaposition. My big sister: blonde and beautiful beyond belief, who, in June 1992 had graced a cover of Vogue that bore the legend: ‘Britain’s latest beauty’ – oh, yes, seriously good-looking. Who’d given it all up to marry Hugh; who’d said goodbye to the photo shoots and the catwalk to live in the country and have children. Who’d made a resounding success of her life; and here she was, pouring her heart out to the one who’d made pretty much a bish of everything. The one who’d failed to marry at all, let alone successfully. The one who’d scuppered her chances early on in her twenties by adopting an orphaned boy from Bosnia, thereby accruing baggage ‘no sane man would want’, as my mother had put it crisply at the time. Who’d poured any paltry money she had into a risky and competitive business – the French Partnership wasn’t the only French décor shop in Munster Road, let alone in London: French Dressing, French Affair and Vive La France all prevailed. Who lived in a tiny terraced house with a crippling mortgage at the wrong end of Lillie Road, and yet here was my sister, blue eyes filling as she sat in her Marc Jacobs coat, fiddling nervously with the socking great diamonds on her fingers, insisting she’d been the one to bog it.

  As a tear rolled down her cheek – Laura even cried beautifully, no slitty eyes and swollen nose for her – I’d passed her a tissue and moved to sit next to her: joined her on the faded pastoral scene. I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘Nonsense, you haven’t bogged it. Just give it a bit longer and the old dears will see sense. God, they’ll be incapable of getting up the stairs soon. And Hugh’s even put a Stannah stair-lift in for them at the cottage, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Which will be broken soon,’ she said with a mighty sniff. ‘The children haven’t walked upstairs since it arrived. But, yes, we have. And if that isn’t a hint I don’t know what is.’

  ‘They’ll wake up one morning and realize they can’t manage any more. Can’t carry on. You’ll see.’

  Laura had turned huge damp blue eyes on me. ‘Or maybe they won’t wake up at all.’

  ‘You don’t mean that!’ I’d gasped, knowing she didn’t. Laura was the gentlest of creatures.

  ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Of course not. You know I’m fond of them. Even if Cecily is foul to me and Lionel still scares the pants off me.’ Hugh’s parents were a formidable duo, even in their eighties. ‘But the mind works in mysterious ways, Hattie,’ she went on wistfully. ‘I don’t want to hate them. I don’t want to be this person. But I do resent them, and that’s not nice. I know I’m selfish, and many women would kill to live in a cottage like mine.’ Maggie scrubbed even harder in the window, her mouth set in a grim line. ‘It’s just… at my age, at my time of life, I expected more,’ she finished sadly, giving a little shrug.

  Ah, yes. Expectation. The route to all disappointment. Which was why I expected so little.

  ‘And Hugh won’t push it?’

  ‘No, he’s far too nice. I was the one who bought the stair-lift,’ she added guiltily. ‘So there I am, lying in bed beside him, wondering if Cecily’s motorized buggy, which she wobbles round the village on, roaring at the locals, ordering them to pick up litter, might one day hit a rut in the lane and send her soaring over the handlebars, feeling nothing as she somersaults to the ground. Or if Lionel, at six foot four, bellowing that he can’t find his whisky decanter again, might one day fail to detect the doors he ducks so assiduously, and just walk straight into one – boof. How horrible is that, Hatts?’ She turned despairing eyes.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re not actually fiddling with the brakes on the motorized buggy, or removing those tassels Lionel hangs from the door frame to remind him to duck—’

  ‘No. Never!’ She clutched her handbag on her lap.

  ‘Then thinking is very different from doing. And your guilty secrets are safe with me.’

  That had been a few months ago. And then spookily, days later she’d rung, breathless, to say that Cecily and Lionel were moving out. Not to the cottage, which Cecily had apparently always disliked and dismissed as poky and damp – join the club, Laura had yelped – but to Shropshire, to be near Lionel’s sister. They’d be gone by Easter.

  ‘At last, Hattie, we’ll be in. We’ll have the Abbey!’

  I’d almost expected her to add, ‘It’ll be mine – all mine!’ together w
ith a cackling Hammer House of Horror laugh, but she’d refrained. Then she’d reined in enough to remember her manners and added, ‘And you must come and stay.’

  Like I say, that had been months ago. And what with all the moving and hectic reorganization and settling in of her parents-in-law – plus, to be fair, I’d been to Paris on business – I hadn’t been summoned.

  But six months had passed now. Not since I’d seen her, because she came to London regularly and we always had lunch, and she’d excitedly tell me her plans for the house. But six months before I got the call from Hugh. The summons. And a tiny bit of me had thought – oh, thanks very much. Not an invitation to stay, but to work. But the thing was, I’d secretly been dying to go. When they were in the cottage we’d spent a lot of time there, my son, Seffy, and I. We’d all cram in having a jolly time, boozy kitchen suppers, the cousins littered on the floor watching television, or roaming the grounds together, and I suppose I was disappointed that an arrangement I’d expected to become more fluid when space wasn’t an issue had become static. And I also missed Laura; was hurt she didn’t miss me. I wrestled with all sorts of feelings on the end of the line to my brother-in-law.

  ‘I need you, Hattie, I really do. I can’t seem to get through to her at the moment. And she listens to you. Come for the weekend.’

  I’d licked my lips, standing as I was at the time when my mobile had rung, on a seventeenth-century console table, fiddling with a delicate crystal chandelier. The weekend. I was supposed to be quoting on a house in Battersea on Saturday.

  ‘And don’t worry, I know you decorators all charge consultancy fees these days,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ve factored that in.’ He went on to mention a sum of money so huge I had to climb off the table before I fell off.

  ‘Well, that’s extremely generous of you, Hugh,’ I said, trying not to wonder, if that was a consultancy fee, what the entire job would yield. Trying not to mentally pay off the mortgage and Seffy’s school fees.