‘So, do forgive me if I sound a little bit hysterical, Susan, but we discussed the ins and outs of this place right down to the phone bill and you neglected to mention that it was a shared house.’
‘It’s not a shared house, per se.’ Susan is on the back foot. ‘But there are aspects of the accommodation that are shared with Ms Buchan.’
‘Aspects?’ I keep my voice low and, I hope, threatening. Beside me Leo is lining up his DVDs in the bookcase. ‘Not that shelf, Leo, that’s where the books go.’ I try to whisper away from the phone so that Susan doesn’t hear me being nice.
‘Glad to hear you settling in,’ she says cheerfully.
‘Settling in is over-generous.’
‘It’s early days.’
Leo drops a whole box of DVDs and they shoot across the rug. It’s enough to put him off the task completely and he stomps out of the sitting room. I can only hope he stays in the apartment while I sort this all out.
‘So you knew Ms Buchan lives here: Araminta lives here. Who is she?’
‘As far as I can see from the details of the Trust, she’s a former employee turned family friend. She looked after Richard’s grandfather and then, after his death, she stayed on to take care of the place.’
‘Have we been suddenly transported to the eighteenth century? Hold on a moment, please. Leo?’ I can hear him moving around in the bedroom. We have to be careful, he could be lost for hours in this warren of a place.
‘I haven’t met Ms Buchan personally,’ the solicitor continues, ‘but I’m sure she’s very nice. She’s been with the family for decades and Colonel Hugo’s will was very firm about her keeping her place there until she no longer requires it.’
‘Until she retires?’ I try to keep the triumph out of my voice. Araminta must be past retirement age now.
‘Until she, not to put too fine a point on it, dies. She has a right to remain in perpetuity. Although it doesn’t pass on to her descendants.’
‘Does she have descendants?’
‘I don’t believe so, no.’
*
When I catch up with Leo he’s lying on his bed looking miserable. Everyone from his old school gave him cards when he left. He’s covered in them like a blanket, an eiderdown of memories.
‘Shall we work out whose is whose? Do you remember who they’re from?’
‘This is from Dean.’ Dean’s card, on floppy white paper, has two complicated gaming characters on it. The yellow one has a big ‘L’ on his front, the other – head to toe in red – has a ‘D’. ‘I can’t play TimeQuake properly now. Not without Dean.’
‘You can play online. And you’re going to make new friends soon.’
‘You always tell me to get off the computer, always, and I don’t want new friends. I want old friends. And my old house.’
Leo has been with his friends since nursery, most of them. And we’ve lived in the flat for as long as he can remember. After Richard died, when we were completely lost, we still had all that. I want that too. I had thought about day trips back to London, liaisons with friends – we could easily drive there – but we need to get used to our new lives first.
Leo starts to cry.
‘Come on, mate.’ I put my arm round him. ‘What about finding the way to the garden? We were going to do that earlier.’ Even as I say it, I’m wondering how I will move him all over again in a month’s time. I am going to have to tackle the subject, to speak to Araminta about it. There is a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Leo jumps up and grabs his trainers. His misery is forgotten, the world is brimming with opportunity. I so often wish I was Leo.
We retrace our steps to the kitchen. I bring down the perishables that we had upstairs and I put them on one of the empty shelves in the fridge. For all Araminta’s territorial attitude to the kitchen, there isn’t much in here. The bright yellow bulb shows up milk, a loaf of white bread in a sweaty plastic wrapper, the cheese and ham the fox won’t be eating any more, and clean white wire shelves: there’s plenty of room for us to stake a claim. I’ll use the same tactics with the dresser cupboard later on too.
We go back through the door we saw first thing this morning, green shoots and curling flowers framing the sunshine glowing in through its window. I allow myself a tiny uplifting of my spirits. The sunshine is beckoning, the garden looks bright against the cool shade of the corridor. This is the summer I had imagined for us.
The grounds are magnificent. The statues I could see from my window when I woke up are straight ahead of us on the wide sloping lawn. From upstairs, I couldn’t see the slope of the garden and that the lawns roll down towards the small lake, that the trees are carefully planted, architectural against the perfect carpet of grass. I look around at the trees I know from London parks or children’s books: oak, monkey puzzle, sycamore, aspen, a few more and then I run out – it would need a trained eye. Richard knew his trees, and birds – sometimes birdsong too. In time, he might have passed their names on to Leo.
‘Is this a park?’ Leo asks. ‘Are there swings?’
‘It’s our garden.’ My voice is wide with wonder, and more than a little doubt. ‘Shall we go and see if there are swings?’
The house is behind us. The back is less ornate than the front and, somehow, seems bigger and more real for that. The facade has balconies and pillars. This is different; vast and utilitarian. There are so many windows, all set squarely in the brickwork, all of them identical except some are larger than others. The sun catches on the roof and, for a moment, I’m dazzled. When I take my hand from my eyes, I see it – a glass dome rising from the centre of this, otherwise traditional, country house. I walk backwards to get away from it and fit more of the dome in my eyeline. It rises up from the house like a bubble.
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . .’ I whisper.
‘Is all of this our garden, Mum? Right down to there? And over there?’ Leo asks me with his arms outstretched. I stop staring at the glass structure and look where he’s pointing.
‘We’ll have to go and find out. I tell you what, why don’t we walk all round the house first and see if we can find the entrance to the museum?’
‘I love museums. Is there a museum?’
I almost ask him what he thinks that kitchen was. ‘I told you fifty times. It’s Daddy’s grandfather’s museum.’
Leo takes up a chant of, ‘You told me, you told me,’ meaning that he knows I’m right and can remember the fifty times that I explained it. Singing makes him walk faster and I join in his song, although that’s hard when he changes key every other line.
When we turn the corner of the house, hedging starts to line the path; to our right is woodland, dark and tangled. The gap between the trees and the house is under shadow and it’s momentarily cold. There are inviting tracks through the wood but we stick to the gravel path around the edge of the house. ‘It’s going to take us all summer to explore all this,’ I say, more to myself than Leo.
Leo gasps and I look up. A peacock struts across the path in front of us. ‘Make him put his tail up,’ Leo shouts, ‘Like Daddy did.’ He starts searching the edge of the path for a suitable blade of grass.