Page 62 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
Then, with a spurt of gravel, she swooped off in her red Suzuki Swift, leaving them to it.
‘I’ve given her a key for the back door, so the cleaners can let themselves in after today – lots of her clients are out when they clean for them,’ Carey said. ‘And the lady doing the ironing will put out the laundry to be collected and take in the clean stuff.’
‘That’s good. It was hardly one of Mrs Danvers’ more onerous tasks, was it?’
‘Mrs Bartlett is sending in a bigger team next Friday to spring clean the whole house. She says she’s been dying to “bottom” it, as she put it, for the last few years.’
‘Including the Elizabethan wing?’
‘My uncle used to get them to clean the muniment room sometimes, though he kept it locked up otherwise when he wasn’t using it, but she hadn’t seen the rest of it so I took her round. The good news is that they have a married couple who specialize in cleaning historic properties, because apparently this part of Lancashire is peppered with them. They’re very careful, use specialist products that won’t damage anything.’
‘Sounds brilliant! I bet they cost more, though.’
‘They do,’ he admitted, ‘but once they’ve given the wing a good going over, it won’t take them so long every week. I told her where the spare set of keys to the wing are: in the key cupboard in the housekeeper’s parlour.’
‘It’s all getting organized, but you’re going to have some big monthly bills!’
‘Tell me about it. Maybe we should have a treasure hunt for the Jewel of Mossby after all!’
Just after the cleaners had had their elevenses in the kitchen and gone back to work with tea-restored energy, my belongings arrived. I got the two young men to stash most of it in the housekeeper’s parlour next to the kitchen, handy for unpacking, but Granny’s Welsh dresser and the rocking chair went straight into the kitchen.
I asked them to carry the Lloyd Loom chair and laundry basket to my bedroom, where they didn’t look out of place against the Arts and Crafts ambience, unlike that dreadful blowsy flowered wallpaper.
I’d started picking bits of it off in passing the moment I moved in, so it was starting to look a bit scabby.
The heavy tea chests full of sheet glass were the last things in the van and Carey took the men down to the workshop so they could be unloaded straight into one of the back rooms.
He must have gone for a rummage round the outbuildings after that, because by the time he returned, I’d put the jewel-bright rag rug downin front of the stove, wiped the dresser and was unpacking and arranging china.
He sank into the wide, comfortable wooden rocker and sighed. ‘It already looks more like a real home in here – and any minute now, my stuff will arrive from the flat and we can spread that out a bit, too.’
Carey had furnished his flat with the carefully collected antique furniture he’d bought for the country cottage that had been both his first home and restoration project. Since both cottage and flat had been tiny, there wasn’t a huge amount of it and I was sure it would fit in.
The removal men must have stopped for lunch on the way up from London, for it was after two and the cleaners had long gone before they appeared.
We watched anxiously as they reversed carefully into the small courtyard, only inches from the grimacing sea creature disporting itself in the fountain, then carried everything in.
Carey’s desk went into the old servants’ hall that was to be our combined office/studio, along with bookcases, a sturdy kitchen table for me to work on and several boxes. The rest was stacked in the nursery suite upstairs.
When the removal men were tipped and departed we both felt totally exhausted, and Fang was about to spontaneously combust with thwarted rage because he hadn’t been allowed to bite anyone.
He’d been so good with the cleaning ladies earlier, too, apart from pestering them for biscuits …
After a cup of coffee and a toasted teacake apiece, we revived enough to start sorting out the studio. I stacked the boxes of sketchbooks, portfolios, rolls of cartoons and cutlines, my old easel and everything else I needed in the corner near my worktable and put my laptop on the end.
‘We’ll have to fight over the plug sockets till I can have more put in,’ Carey said. ‘And we’ll have a hunt in the attic for more bookshelves and perhaps a couple of cupboards when we’ve got some nice strong visitors to carry them down.’
There was enough wall space to have a giant corkboard each, and I suddenly thought how useful it would be to have a whole cork wall inthe workshop on the windowless side of the wide double end doors. I could pin up entire cartoons, even of very large windows.
Later, while Carey was starting to prepare dinner – nothing fancy, just pasta and a ready-made sauce from a jar – and I fed Fang his gourmet portion of Canine King Salmon Surprise, someone knocked at the back door.
‘I hope that’s not Ella with more bloody carrots, or we won’t just have good night vision, but X-ray eyesight,’ Carey said ungratefully.
‘If it is her, it must be some kind of peace offering, though,’ I suggested. ‘Or maybe poisoned, like the apple inSleeping Beauty.’
He went out and returned a moment later with Vicky in tow, who had now poured herself into skin-tight leather trousers and another off-the-shoulder top with a big floppy bow over one boob, as if she’d awarded it a prize.
A booby prize?
