Property of a Lady

Then he sent a second email to Jack, saying he would drive to Marston Lacy on Friday. He might as well stay overnight again.

Michael reached Marston Lacy shortly before eleven on Friday morning, checked in at the Black Boar, and asked about the availability of rooms for Jack and Liz’s Christmas sojourn. It appeared there would be no problem; the Black Boar prided itself on providing a really good family Christmas, said the manager. A proper turkey dinner at two o’clock, and a festive supper in the evening with mulled wine and carol singing. A lot of local people came in for the evening – they made quite an event of it. This Dickensian prospect might not entirely live up to its promise, but Michael knew it would delight Liz, so he booked a double room there and then, with a small adjoining one for Ellie. On impulse, he booked a third room for himself. Jack had been fairly insistent about joining forces for Christmas, and Michael remembered that his rooms at Oriel were due to be repainted during the holidays.

Blackberry Lane, when he reached it, was drenched in gentle autumn rain and still felt as if it was caught in its own tiny shard of the past. But there were a number of large tyre tracks, which had not been there on his first visit and which presumably belonged to builders’ lorries. Michael wondered if the lane was to be resurfaced or even widened. It would be a pity to lose the feeling of having stepped backwards – of having wandered by chance into an England where there were quiet lanes with dappled sunlight, and where the cuckoo called in spring and blackberries were picked by children in autumn. (And where three-quarters of the population had no inside lavatory or piped water, and at least half of the people earned wages so low they could scarcely feed their families, and children were sent into the mines and up chimneys, said his mind.) On the other hand, it would make life easier to be able to drive to the house without getting stuck in a ditch halfway.

At first sight, the only thing different about Charect House was the large skip, which appeared to be filled with a embarrassment of riches in the form of yards of lead piping, sections of uprooted bathroom fittings, and an assortment of rotting window frames. Two lorries were parked alongside the house, and a man wearing several sweaters and a hat with ear flaps was crawling, spider-like, across the roof, doing something with a large hammer to the tiles.

Michael called out a good morning and received a wave and an invitation to go into the house, on account of it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out here, pardon the French.

As he stepped through the half-open door, there was a moment when the hammering from the roof fell into the rhythm he had heard on his first visit: that grim tattoo somewhere within the house, that let-me-out tapping. He frowned and pushed the memory away. If Charect House had ever contained ghosts or even down-to-earth intruders, they would all certainly have fled in exasperation days ago to escape the hammering and drilling, and the thudding music coming from the small stereo in the hall.

Michael negotiated the builders’ debris with care and, encountering a rotund gentleman who appeared to be in some sort of overall authority, introduced himself and explained about being a friend of the owners.

‘They asked me if I could look in to see how things were going.’ He did not say he had made a two-hour drive from Oxford for this looking-in, in case the builder thought he was being spied on.

But the builder apparently saw nothing wrong and accompanied Michael on a tour of the house, explaining, in largely incomprehensible terms, what was being done, cheerfully pointing out such mysteries as RSJs in the drawing room, new lath and plaster ceilings in the bedrooms, and insulated bonding for the electrical circuit, which, he said, you had to have in a place like this, because you were so far from your substation.

‘Ah,’ said Michael, blankly.