The House On Willow Street (4 page)

Kitty, Suki and Tess shared the delicate Power bone structure, the heart-shaped face that ended in a dainty pointed chin and the large gray eyes.

Many times over the years, Kevin had told her she was
beautiful, as if he couldn’t believe his luck in finding this aristocratic flower with her tiny frame, hand-span waist and long legs. She couldn’t quite believe him, though. She’d only believed one man who’d told her she was beautiful.

With six months of counseling behind them, Tess and Kevin had agreed on a trial separation, in case they were wrong, in case being apart would make them realize what they had after all.

“This isn’t forever,” Kevin told Zach, who’d sat mutinously, head bent down and dark curls covering his eyes.

“Bullshit,” Zach muttered, loud enough for both adults to hear. “I think it’s stupid.” He’d sounded more like his little sister than a seventeen-year-old. “You want a divorce and you’re trying to pretend to us that you don’t.”

“I’ll only be down the road in Granny’s house, in the flat at the back. She hasn’t rented it out for the summer yet, so it’s mine. Ours,” Kevin corrected himself. “You’ll see as much of me as you see of me here.”

Kitty had gone and curled up on Kevin’s lap so she resembled a small creature, nuzzling against him.

Tess had been on the verge of insisting that they forget it, abandon the whole painful business of separation, when Kitty had fixed her with a firm gaze and said: “Can we get a kitten, then?”

In the three months since Kevin had moved out, Tess had found that single motherhood was more difficult than she’d expected. Kevin had always been fairly hopeless when it came to housework, but now that he was gone, she’d realized how much another adult added to the family, even if the other adult appeared to do little apart from arriving home expecting dinner and tousling Kitty’s hair affectionately as she got her mother to sign her homework notebook. He used to put out the bins, deal with anything electrical and was the one
who went around the house at night, locking doors and checking that the windows were shut. Now that she had full responsibility for these tasks herself, Tess realized the value of Kevin being there, always kind, always good-humored, another person with whom to sit in front of the television at night. Someone in the bed beside her. Someone to talk to about her day.

In the first week of his being gone, she’d felt the relief at their having finally acted on the fact that they’d never really been right for each other and the children had been the glue holding them together. Only separation would tell them the truth.

And then the questions had come: had she been stupid? Perhaps they should have continued with marriage counseling, not decided so quickly that separation was a good plan.

Was it such a good plan, she wondered. Had been wondering for some time.

Silkie came and lay down on her feet, a signal that she was getting bored.

“Time to go, pet,” Tess said, with a quick glance at her watch. “Nearly a quarter past seven, let’s go home and haul them out of bed.”

Tess had brought Zach and Kitty up here a few times; not on her walks with Silkie, though. Instead, they’d gone through the huge, rusty iron front gates, which local kids had long ago wrenched open, and up the beautiful avenue lined with trees. She’d wanted her children to see their birthright.

“This is where your aunt Suki and I used to live with your darling granddad.”

Granddad was a bit of an unknown to both her children as he’d died before they were born. The only grandparent
they knew was Helen, Kevin’s mother. Granny Helen liked to play Monopoly, got very upset when she lost, and could be counted upon to give fabulous presents at Christmas.

Zach had been twelve the first time Tess took him to Avalon House. He’d looked at it in awe, pleading to go inside and see the rooms.

“It’s huge!” he’d said, eyes wide with amazement. “Nothing like our house, Ma.”

“I know,” said Tess cheerfully. It was hard trying to be cheerful as it hit her that, after generations of owning, Avalon House was no longer theirs. It wasn’t the size, the fact that it dwarfed their own tiny house ten times over, that made her mourn the loss. It was the sense that this had been home. This was where she’d been so happy as a child until . . . until it had all gone wrong.

Kitty had been much younger when she first took an interest in the house.

“It’s a palace, Mum,” she’d said delightedly when they arrived. “It’s as if Cinderella could arrive here in her pumpkin coach with horses and silvery plumes coming out of their hair.”

Tess had laughed at her beautiful eight-year-old daughter’s fabulous imagination; in Kitty’s world even a crumbling old moss-covered ruin of a house could be sprinkled with fairy dust and transformed into a palace.

“Why don’t we live here?” Kitty wanted to know.

Tess was used to straightforward questions. Children were so gloriously honest.

“The house was in my father’s—your grandfather’s—family for a long, long time, but the family fortune was nearly gone when your grandfather inherited it. When I was born there was only a teeny-weeny bit of money left. Big houses cost a lot because the roof is always leaking, so your
granddad knew we would have to sell. He and I were going to move to a small cottage in the village—the one we live in now—but he got very sick and died, so I had to sell Avalon House and move all by myself.”

“Oh, Mum,” said Kitty, throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. “You must have been so sad.”

Tess’s eyes had teared up. “Well, I was a bit sad, darling, but Zach came along and then you, so how could I possibly be sad when I had my two beautiful angels?”

“Yes,” said Kitty, instantly cheered up. “Can I see your bedroom, Mum? What was it like? Was it very princessy?”

Tess thought of all this now as she made her way around the back of the house, following on Silkie’s trail through the brambles. The old knot garden, created by her great-great-grandmother, was nothing more than a big mound of thistles. The walls surrounding the orchard were in a state of collapse. Tess could understand why nobody wanted to buy Avalon House; beautiful as it was, perched high on the hill overlooking Avalon and the sea, it would cost an absolute fortune to make it habitable again. Soon it would go the way of the abbey and be reduced to a pile of stones, and the past would be buried with it.

Tess pulled up sharply. Told herself there was no point thinking about the old days. The future was what mattered.

“Come on, Silkie,” she said briskly, then she turned and headed away from the house. Soon, the beautiful sweep of Avalon Bay opened out in front of her and picking up speed she strode down the drive. There was a lot to do today. She didn’t have time to get lost in the past.

Zach’s bedroom smelled of teenager: socks, some new, desperately cheap aftershave he adored, and the musky man/boy scent so different from the little-boy smell she used to adore.

“Time to get up, love,” she said, giving his shoulder a shake and putting a cup of tea on his bedside locker.

A grunt from under the covers told her he was alive and sort of awake.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes with the cold cloth if you’re not up,” she warned. She’d used the cold cloth on her sister too. Years ago, the threat of a cold, wet flannel shoved under the covers had been the only way to get Suki out of bed each morning.

Kitty was easier to wake. Tess kissed her gently on the cheek and made Kitty’s favorite cuddly toy, Moo, dance on the pillow for a minute, whispering “Time for breakfast!” in Moo’s bovine voice.

By eight, both of her children were at the table, Kitty chatting happily and Zach bent over his cereal sleepily.

Silkie, happy after her walk and breakfast, lay under the kitchen table, hoping for crumbs.

The next hurdle for Tess was making Kitty’s lunch while simultaneously eating her own breakfast and checking that whatever she’d taken out of the freezer the night before was on the way to defrosting for dinner.

“Why don’t we fall off the Earth if it’s round and it’s in space?” Kitty wanted to know.

Tess considered this. “It’s gravity,” she said. “There’s a magnetic pull . . .”

She stalled, wondering how to explain it all and trying to dredge the facts from her mind. Kitty asked a lot of questions. At least the heaven and angel phase was over, but she feared that “Where do babies come from?” wouldn’t be far away.

“Can you explain why we don’t all fall off the Earth, Zach, love?” she begged her son.

He looked up from his bowl. “Gravity, Newton, Laws of Physics. Don’t ask me, I dropped physics last year.”

“What’s physics?” said Kitty. “Is it a person who can see the future? Julia says her mum’s always going to physics. She says they might win the lottery, but only on a Wednesday night. Do we do the lottery, Mum?”

“No,” said Tess. “But we should,” she added, thinking of their bank balance.

“We could do it on Wednesday,” Kitty said, “with my pocket money.”

“You’ve spent all your pocket money,” teased Zach.

“Have not.”

“Yes you have.”

“I have money in my Princess Jasmine tin,” Kitty replied haughtily. “Loads of money. More than you.”

“She probably does,” remarked Tess, putting a plate with two poached eggs in front of her son. Zach’s appetite had gone crazy in the past year and he hoovered up food. Since breakfast was considered the most vital meal of the day, she was trying to get him to eat protein each morning, even though he said eggs made him “want to puke.”

“No puking,” Tess instructed. “You’ve got games today.”

When she’d dropped Kitty off at school and deposited Zach at the bus stop, she came home and spent half an hour tidying the house before she left for work. She loved her children’s rooms in the morning when they were safely in school. Even Zach’s teenage den, with its lurking, smelly sports socks balled up under the bed.

On all but the most rushed days, she felt a little Zen enter her soul when she went into the rooms of the two people she loved best.

The added peace came from the fact that her darlings weren’t actually there, so she could safely adore them and the idea of them—without being asked for something or told she was unfair, that all the other kids had such and such,
that really,
if she could only lend him some pocket money, an advance . . . ?

Kitty had been right at breakfast: she probably did have more money than Zach. He was forever lending fivers to other people or spending on silly things.

Kitty’s bedroom was still a shrine to dolls, soft toys with huge eyes and Sylvanian creatures with complicated houses and endless teeny accessories that were forever getting lost.

“Mum, I can’t find the cakes for the cake shop!” was a constant refrain in the house and Tess had spent ages on her hands and knees with Kitty, looking under the furniture for minuscule slices of plastic cake, with her daughter’s lovely little face anxious at the thought of Mrs. Squirrel not being able to run her cake shop.

This morning, Tess did a bit of sorting out in the Sylvanian village, then moved on to close the half-opened drawers and tie back the curtains before tidying the dressing table. There was growing evidence of the emergence of Kitty’s tweenage years with silvery bracelets and girlish perfumes in glittery flacons clustered on the table. Moo, Kitty’s cuddly cow, loved to grayness, had a place of honor on her pink gingham heart cushion and it was Tess’s favorite job to make the bed and enthrone Moo on the cushion, ready for that night.

It didn’t matter that on the way to school Kitty could loudly sing along in the car to questionably explicit pop songs that made Tess wince: as soon as it was time for bed, Kitty morphed back into a nine-year-old who liked to snuggle under her pink-and-yellow-striped duvet, hold Moo close and wait for her bedtime story with the clear-eyed innocence of a child.

Once it was all tidy, Tess gave the room one last fond glance and moved on to Zach’s room. Zach’s domain was painted a lovely turquoise color, but these days, none of the
walls were visible because of posters of bands, footballers and Formula One drivers.

The rule was that Zach had to put clean sheets on his bed once a week and run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet. Since Tess had found the Great Cup Mold Experiments under the bed, he had to rinse out any mugs on a daily basis—and he was actually very good about doing it.