“She won’t be in total isolation. I’m sure there’ll be kids there that she’ll get to know.”
She looked at her husband sharply. “None
you
will approve of.”
It was true that David had very high standards when it came to his children’s friends. In fact, being a perfectionist, he had very high standards when it came to just about everything.
He shifted uneasily in his chair. “I still don’t think it’s going to be that bad an experience for them.” Again he felt a familiar tactile sensation and looked down to see Ben pushing his head up underneath his hand to be petted.
“Ben will love it,” he added.
Melanie smiled wistfully. “Ya, he will, won’t he.”
“
Will?
Did I hear you say
will
? Does that mean...”
“Of course it means I’ll consent. There was never any doubt of that.”
He reached over and took her hand. “You know I love you so much.” He looked deep into her eyes. “You have no idea how much this means to me. I’ll make it up to you in some way. We’ll move where you want to move next.”
“Sure,” she said doubtfully.
“No, I mean it.”
She smiled as he continued to hold her hand, but somehow there seemed to be such a hovering darkness in the pit of her stomach that she found it difficult to imagine there being a next move, or even that they would have a future after Fenchurch St. Jude.
It was on their way to Fenchurch St. Jude that Melanie Macauley started to put the pieces of her unhappiness together. On the surface it had to do with the fact that Katy was becoming a young woman. But there was more to it than that. She had met David when they were both graduate students at Harvard. He was the pride of the archaeology department and she was working toward her master’s degree in art history. They fell in love. They got married. They had not planned to have any children, or at least not at that time.
When Melanie discovered that she was pregnant, however, it came as sort of a godsend. She had completed all of the credits necessary for her degree, and even most of her research. But she was floundering on her thesis. She was trying to prove the influence of certain obscure Parisian philosophers on nineteenth-century French painting, and although she had amassed plenty of rich ore, she found herself at a total loss as to exactly what precious metal to hammer it into.
In addition, she found herself faced with the dilemma that all married academic professionals face sooner or later, the cold harsh reality that good university positions were nigh impossible to come by, and it was too much to expect that both spouses would be offered equally desirable positions in the same geographic location. For all of her feminist leanings, she realized there was a certain horrible wisdom to one spouse taking a backseat to the other’s career. David’s work was going well and showed every promise of continuing to do so. She was adrift and unhappy in her research. And there was another person to consider, an unborn child beginning to squirm and kick within her womb. Her instincts welled up, and being a mother and a wife seemed like a marvelous oasis, a way out.
Now, however, Katy was beginning to grow up and Tuck was well on his way to independence, and she was beginning to wonder what it had all been for. She loved her children and her husband. She even loved the dog that all too often she was left with having to walk, groom, purchase food for, and endlessly let in and out. Soon enough her children would be grown, and David would still have his career but what would she have? Another dog? The prospect of another week’s grocery shopping to do? She did not regret making the decision to have a family, but she was beginning to realize that her life was nearing the end of a conveyer belt of sorts and she did not know what lay beyond. It did not seem fair. She wanted more.
All of a sudden the Volvo tilted upward and the trailer hitched behind it, carrying all of their worldly possessions, clunked loudly. They had pulled into a driveway.
“Well, what do you think?” David asked.
She looked up to see a lovely enclosure of trees, wild cherry, fir, and willow with long golden catkins and slender, pointed green fronds swaying gracefully in the breeze. And in the center of the green cathedral of trees and surrounded by wildly untended hedges and what had once been a beautiful lawn, was one of the most picturesque cottages she had ever seen. It looked like something out of
Snow White.
Its whitewashed walls were flaking and dappled with rain marks, and its quaint, steep, thatched roof was here and there in need of repair, but it still seemed like something more out of a fairy tale than a place where one might actually live.
She bit her lip, withholding her final assessment until she had seen more. “It looks like it could use some work,” she snipped.
David was unabashed. “Wait until you see the inside.”
They got out of the car, Ben, Tuck, and Katy piling out like spilled marbles.
“Wow!” yelled Katy as she stood and gazed with amazement at the cottage. Both Tuck and Ben, being less receptive to such aesthetic considerations, took advantage of the moment to run off some extraneous energy and bounded off in opposite directions.
David opened the gate in the old stone fence that surrounded the house, which creaked loudly. “Got to take care of that,” he commented.
They went into the cottage. Melanie then realized that because of its simple design the cottage had seemed deceptively small from the outside. It was really quite vast. Before them was a cavernous entrance hall, lofty and heavily raftered with huge balks of age-blackened oak. To the left was a large living room with a huge, old-fashioned fireplace dominating most of one wall, and at the end of the entrance hall a beautifully balustraded staircase led upstairs. As she surveyed the place she took in more of its details, the high, thin windows of old stained glass, the oak paneling, the stags’ heads on the walls. She also noticed that everything, the heavy and lugubrious furniture and the long-disused torcheres, was covered with a thick layer of dust.
“Does it have indoor plumbing?” she asked.
“It’s old, but it works,” David replied. He flicked a switch and an ancient chandelier clicked on overhead. “It also has electricity.”
She looked at him truculently. “It better have.”
“Come on. I want to show you the rest of the place.” They proceeded through the remainder of the house, the huge kitchen and full pantry, the gun room and den, and the five large bedrooms upstairs and servant’s bedroom downstairs. And everywhere it was the same. The cottage had once been magnificent, a story-book dream. It was conceivable that it could be so again. But it was in a staggering state of neglect. Everywhere Melanie looked there were things to be done, wallpaper to be rehung, carpets to be washed, grass and weeds to be cut, door hinges to be tightened, and runner boards to be renailed. And every place one looked in the old and rambling edifice there was an almost endless amount of dusting and scrubbing to be attended to.
They ended up in the kitchen, gazing out the back door of the house at an overgrown vegetable garden and still more unkempt lawn.
“Well, what do you think?” David asked.
She didn’t know what to say. She knew he wanted her to be happy, but she also knew on whose shoulders the brunt of the housework would fall. Instead of taking the bull by the horns she chose to be evasive. “How much did you say the Marquis whatever his name was, was willing to rent the place for?”
“That doesn’t matter. A pittance.”
“Have you given him the money yet?”
“Not to him directly. I gave it to the vicar, Mr. Venables. He functions as the Marquis’s agent.” Melanie felt a sinking feeling. She thought to herself, so there’s no backing out then. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the house. A part of it tugged at her romantic soul. She was about to turn to her husband and force a smile when she noticed that the windows in the kitchen were composed of an almost uncountable number of little leaded glass squares, each one a grimy nightmare of a cleaning job.
Suddenly Tuck and Ben charged into the kitchen, a bit of yellow fluff from the catkins of the willows caught in Tuck’s brown hair. “Mom, I’m thirsty.”
“Then go get your cup out of the car and I’ll give you a drink.”
Tuck reappeared moments later with the requested cup. Melanie turned the tap on and was pleased at least to see that the water that came out of the ancient spigot was cold and crystal clear.
She gave the glass of water to her son and then turned once again toward David. “I almost forgot to ask, what about Brad? Is he going to be living here with us?” David looked at her with surprise. “Oh, I guess I forgot to tell you. He’s going to continue to live in his tent. I’m sure he’ll be coming here to take showers and stuff, but he said he wanted to keep an eye on the site at night and make sure no one disturbs anything. I tried to convince him he would be more comfortable here, but you know how strange he is. I think he just can’t bear the thought of living with other people.”
Melanie looked aghast. The thought of Brad spending his evenings alone in a tent out on the moors and with several dead bodies so close by, no less, was horrifying to her beyond words. “
God
,” she said, her flesh crawling as if someone had drawn a dead lizard across her breast. “How can he do it?”
David shrugged. “I don’t know. It even gives me a chill, but you know Brad. He’s quiet, but he’s got moxie.”
Tuck looked up at his father curiously, but David addressed Melanie again. “So, you still haven’t said anything. How do you like the place?”
Once again she surveyed the air around her, silently chiding herself for being so phony as to pretend that she had yet to make up her mind. Unable to put it off any longer she looked her husband squarely in the eyes.
“I could love it. It has great promise, but honestly I think it will kill me to try to get it into livable condition.”
David grinned from ear to ear. “That’s why we’re going to hire someone to do it.”
Melanie looked at her husband with disbelief. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell you because I was saving it as a surprise. Because of the promising discoveries we’ve made already I got another grant. Along with the fact that the rent is so low here it means we can hire a full-time cleaning woman. And then once the house is in shape she can help with the cooking, do the shopping, take care of the kids. It’ll give you some freedom, some time for yourself.”
Melanie couldn’t believe it. One moment she had felt so depressed, so hemmed in. Now she was swept with such a sudden euphoria that tears welled up in her blue eyes. She rushed forward and embraced her husband. “You dog. You could have told me.”
David kissed her and then drew back and looked her in the eyes. “And ruin the surprise?”
She started to bill and coo girlishly as she squeezed him again. Tuck apparently found such exuberant displays of affection baffling and annoying, and he plunked his cup down loudly on the counter and once again tore back out of the kitchen with Ben, as always, right behind.
Suddenly able to view the entire proposition in a new light, for the moment Melanie put her unhappiness about being there aside and stood back and once again examined the kitchen. “Gosh, give these stone walls a good scrubbing and they’d be beautiful,” she purred. She walked over and started to tinker with the stove. Several seconds later, as it turned out, they both happened to lapse into silence at exactly the same time and one of those hushes that occasionally envelopes the world seemed to fall over the entire house. For a few moments everything was lost in the stillness, and then, distinctly, there was the sound of scurrying somewhere beneath the floorboards.
Melanie turned white as a sheet. “What was that?” David sighed patiently. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably just some small harmless animal of some sort. You know, the house has been empty for a long time. There’s bound to be a few critters taking refuge in various nooks and crannies.”
This had not been the right thing to say. Melanie turned a sort of gray color. “What do you mean nooks and crannies? You mean there may be things
in
the tiouse?”
“Nah,” David said, trying desperately to assuage her fears. “I mean there are probably only things in places that can be reached from the outside.”
Melanie grew paler still. “What if it’s rats?”
“We’ll get rid of them.”
“How?”
“I’ll buy some poison the first time I go into town.” Yes, indeed, he would, Melanie asserted, but this was still a solution too remote to offer any comfort right now. And before David was allowed to do anything else, even unload the car, he found himself going from room to room banging on all of the floors, walls, and even the ceilings, with a broom.
It was about half an hour later, while David was unloading the trailer, that Ben first started to behave strangely. At first David didn’t really notice. In the back of his mind he was aware that Ben seemed to be barking a lot and was no longer bounding around as happily as he had been, but David did not initially register the behavior as unusual. It wasn’t until Tuck came up and interrupted his work that he began to pay attention.
“Daddy, something is wrong with Ben.”
“What do you mean?” David said, continuing to vork.
“He won’t stop barking. I think he’s afraid of something.”
Grunting, David lowered the box he was unloading and looked across the lawn. For the first time he observed that the black Labrador retriever was no longer running, but had come to a complete standstill and was barking mournfully in the direction of the moors. Occasionally he would pause in his baying and sniff the air carefully, and then, as if he caught a whiff of something that he felt was of danger to the family, he would break into his barking once again.
“Ben!” David called. “What is it?”
The dog paused in his barking and looked in David’s direction, and when he saw that he had captured David’s attention, whined piteously. For a moment it seemed that he was desperately trying to convey something to David but, on confronting failure, turned and took up his curious vigil once again.
“Daddy, why is he doing that?” Tuck asked anxiously.