the hall, where he threw open the double doors of a dining room. The huge walnut table was battered and chipped. An assortment of chairs was pushed back against the sides of the room. The walls looked like those of a classroom after the end of term, when all the work has been taken down, for it was studded by drawing pins that still held the corners of torn posters.
‘Soldiers were billeted here during the war. They obviously used this as their operations room,’ Patrick explained. It was almost as though the soldiers had left only yesterday. ‘It’s astonishing that the last Miss Carey left it untouched. Val hardly came in here. Sometimes he and I sat at opposite ends of the dining-room table for our meals when we fancied pretending to be grand. We would slide the salt and pepper up and down like shot glasses in a Western saloon bar and bark silly comments at one another like mad Regency squires.’
Mel laughed.
Patrick showed her a big office down a corridor where several dented filing cabinets sagged next to two huge desks and a wall of empty shelves.
‘What do you suppose this was before?’ Mel asked, gazing round. On one of the desks, Patrick had installed a computer. On the other he’d dumped half a dozen boxes of papers.
‘Probably the estate office. I read in the solicitor’s files that the Careys owned hundreds of acres of farmland round here. Most of it was leased out to tenant farmers, so I imagine a lot of the work was only admin, but until after the First War they kept a dozen acres to farm themselves.’
Closing the door of the office, Patrick led Mel back up the corridor and into a small sitting room at the front of the house.
‘It’s lovely and sunny here in the mornings,’ he said. ‘Val used it as his den – until he was bedridden and couldn’t get downstairs.’
The room looked as though it had last been decorated thirty years before. Orange and brown paper in a geometric design bubbled with age or damp. There was a , eyebrows raiseder of low flat sofa with wooden arms, a scallop-backed cane chair with a stained cushion and, by the fireplace, another reclining armchair, clearly the partner of the one in the drawing room. The grate was obscured by an old-fashioned, double-barred electric fire. Shelving units bearing books, photographs, an old hi-fi system and a large vinyl and tape collection filled the two alcoves.
‘Like being in a time warp, isn’t it?’ Patrick said, stabbing at a button on the hi-fi. The lugubrious tones of Leonard Cohen filled the air and he quickly pressed the stop button.
‘Weird,’ Mel agreed. She looked out of the window to where Patrick’s gleaming new ultramarine sports car brought her firmly back to the present.
‘You know, I think of this house,’ he said, escorting her through the kitchen to see the larder, pantry and scullery, all painted a sludgy olive green, ‘being like a dowager duchess, dreaming of the gracious past, too frail to shrug off the monstrosities of post-war decor.’
Mel eyed the beige Formica cabinets, of the same ilk as those in the Gardener ’s Cottage and nodded. ‘All in the name of progress,’ she sighed.
‘Wait till you see the avocado bathroom upstairs,’ he grinned suddenly.
Mel laughed. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, how people reach a certain period of their lives and get stuck. Your uncle decorated this house in what was the latest fashion when he moved in and stayed with it ever after.’
‘The only thing he updated regularly was the television. Do you want to see upstairs or have you had enough?’
Upstairs didn’t take long. There were six bedrooms on the first floor, sparsely furnished, and two attic rooms above.
‘I gave Irina some of the furniture,’ Patrick said, ‘and I moved some things over to the Gardener ’s Cottage when I decided to rent it out.’
‘Did anyone live there before?’
‘Val let it out to a local couple, until a few years before he died. But there was some argument
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