Elizabeth nods and Ron pours. They are on a second bottle. It is 12.15.
Ibrahim agrees. ‘I don’t think friends is the word. We wouldn’t choose to socialize, we have very different interests. I like Ron, I suppose, but he can be very difficult.’
Ron nods, ‘I’m very difficult.’
‘And Elizabeth’s manner is off-putting.’
Elizabeth nods, ‘There it is I’m afraid. I’ve always been an acquired taste. Since school.’
‘I like Joyce, I suppose. I think we all like Joyce,’ says Ibrahim.
Ron and Elizabeth nod their agreement again.
‘Thank you, I’m sure,’ says Joyce, chasing peas around her plate. ‘Don’t you think someone should invent flat peas?’
Donna tries to clear up her confusion.
‘So if you aren’t friends, then what are you?’
Donna sees Joyce look up and shake her head at the others, this unlikely gang. ‘Well,’ says Joyce. ‘Firstly, we are friends, of course; this lot are just a little slow catching on. And secondly, if it didn’t say on your invitation, PC De Freitas, then it was my oversight. We’re the Thursday Murder Club.’
Elizabeth is going glassy-eyed with red wine, Ron is scratching at a ‘West Ham’ tattoo on his neck and Ibrahim is polishing an already-polished cufflink.
The restaurant is filling up around them, and Donna is not the first visitor to Coopers Chase to think this wouldn’t be the worst place to live. She would kill for a glass of wine and an afternoon off.
‘Also, I swim every day,’ concludes Ibrahim. ‘It keeps the skin tight.’
What is this place?
3
If you are ever minded to take the A21 out of Fairhaven, and head into the heart of the Kentish Weald, you will eventually pass an old phone box, still working, on a sharp left-hand bend. Continue for around a hundred yards until you see the sign for ‘Whitechurch, Abbots Hatch and Lents Hill’, and then take a right. Head through Lents Hill, past the Blue Dragon and the little farm shop with the big egg outside, until you reach the small stone bridge over the Robertsmere. Officially the Robertsmere is a river, but don’t get confused and expect anything grand.
Take the single-track right turn just past the bridge. You will think you are headed the wrong way, but this is quicker than the way the official brochure takes you, and also picturesque if you like dappled hedgerows. Eventually the road widens out and, peeking between tall trees, you will begin to see signs of life rising on the hilly land up to your left. Up ahead you will see a tiny, wood-clad bus stop, also still working, if one bus in either direction a day counts as working. Just before you reach the bus stop you will see the entrance sign for Coopers Chase on your left.
They began work on Coopers Chase about ten years ago, when the Catholic Church sold the land. The first residents, Ron, for one, had moved in three years later. It was billed as ‘Britain’s First Luxury Retirement Village’, though according to Ibrahim, who has checked, it was actually the seventh. There are currently around 300 residents. You can’t move here until you’re over sixty-five, and the Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and repeat prescriptions every time they pass over the cattle grid.
The old convent dominates Coopers Chase, with three modern residential developments spiralling out from this central point. For over a hundred years the convent was a hushed building, filled with the dry bustle of habits and the quiet certainty of prayers offered and answered. Tapping along its dark corridors you would have found some women comfortable in their serenity, some women frightened of a speeding world, some women hiding, some women proving a vague, long-forgotten point and some women taking joy in serving a higher purpose. You would have found single beds, arranged in dorms; long, low tables for eating; a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing. In short, you would find the Sisters of the Holy Church, an army which would never give you up, which would feed you and clothe you and continue to need and value you. All it required in return was a lifetime of devotion, and, given there will always be someone requiring that, there were always volunteers. And then one day you would take the short trip up the hill, through the tunnel of trees, to the Garden of Eternal Rest – the iron gates and low stone walls of the Garden looking over the convent and the endless beauty of the Kentish High Weald beyond, your body in another single bed, under a simple stone, alongside the Sister Margarets and Sister Marys of the generations before you. If you had once had dreams they could now play over the green hills, and if you had secrets then they were kept safe inside the four walls of the convent for ever.
Well, more accurately, three walls, as the west-facing side of the convent is now entirely glazed to accommodate the residents’ swimming-pool complex. It looks out over the bowling green, and then further down to the visitors’ car park, the permits for which are rationed to such an extent that the Parking Committee is the single most powerful cabal within Coopers Chase.
Beside the swimming pool is a small ‘arthritis therapy pool’, which looks like a Jacuzzi, largely for the reason that it is a Jacuzzi. Anyone given the grand tour by the owner, Ian Ventham, would then be shown the sauna. Ian would always open the door a crack and say, ‘Blimey, it’s like a sauna in there.’ That was Ian.
Take the lift up to the recreation rooms next. The gym, and the exercise studio, where residents could happily Zumba among the ghosts of the single beds. Then there’s the Jigsaw Room for gentler activities and associations. There’s the library, and the lounge for the bigger and more controversial committee meetings, or for football on the flat-screen TV. Then down again to the ground floor, where the long low tables of the convent refectory are now the ‘contemporary upscale restaurant’.
At the very heart of the village, attached to the convent, is the original chapel. Its pale cream stucco exterior makes it look almost Mediterranean against the fierce, Gothic darkness of the convent. The chapel remains intact and unchanged, one of the few covenants insisted upon by the executors of the Sisters of the Holy Church when they had sold out ten years ago. The residents like to use the chapel. This is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle and where the whispers have sunk into the stone. It is a place to make you feel part of something slower and something gentler. Ian Ventham is looking into contractual loopholes that might allow him to redevelop the chapel into eight more flats.
Attached to the other side of the convent – the very reason for the convent – is Willows. Willows is now the nursing home for the village. It had been established by the Sisters in 1841 as a voluntary hospital, charitably tending to the sick and broken when no other option existed. In the latter part of the last century it had become a care home, until legislation in the 1980s led to the doors finally closing. The convent then simply became a waiting room, and when the last nun passed away in 2005, the Church wasted no time in cashing in and selling it as a job lot.
The development sits in twelve acres of woodland and beautiful open hillside. There are two small lakes, one real, and one created by Ian Ventham’s builder, Tony Curran, and his gang. The many ducks and geese that also call Coopers Chase home seem to much prefer the artificial one. There are still sheep farmed at the very top of the hill, where the woodland breaks, and in the pastures by the lake is a herd of twenty llamas. Ian Ventham had bought two to look quirky in sales photos and it had got out of hand, as these things do.