Quire House was efficiently signposted. It turned out to be a couple of miles outside the town centre, which was further than Antonia had been expecting. It was annoying to experience a fresh stab of panic at leaving the friendly cluster of streets and embark on a stretch of open road. She flipped the radio on, and voices instantly filled the car–a trailer for an afternoon play and a preview for a gardening programme.
Quire House itself was not visible from the road. There were double gates with stone pillars on each side and a neat sign pointed along a wide curving carriageway, proclaiming this was Amberwood’s ‘Museum and Craft Centre’, and that it was, ‘Open from 11.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. each day.’ Antonia glanced at the agent’s directions: once inside the gates she should turn immediately right and fifty yards on she would see an old brick wall, at which point she should turn sharp left and she would be there.
She turned right obediently, refusing to feel grateful for the high yew hedges which closed comfortingly around the narrow roadway. Here was the old brick wall; it looked as if it might once have had vines growing up it. Nice. In summer the bricks would be warm, and you could sit and read and dream. It occurred to her that there was all the time in the world for that now. Reading and music and dreams. Perhaps she would finally get round to reading things like Pepys’ Diaries and listening to all Mahler’s symphonies–Richard used to say her musical tastes were hopelessly unadventurous. She was aware of a sudden stab of longing to hear Richard calling her unadventurous again–in fact, to hear Richard calling her anything at all.
She swung the car to the left, and, just as the directions had said, she was there.
It was the ugliest house she had ever seen and if, as its name suggested, it had once been somebody’s idea of charity for the indigent, Antonia was glad she had not been the recipient because it looked as if it had been a very bleak charity indeed.
It was built of dirty-looking stone, which might have been attractive if the stones had weathered or mellowed, but they had not and the cottage was all hard angles–an oblong box with a no-frills roof slapped firmly onto its walls. Antonia, who had subconsciously been expecting rose-red brick, latticed windows and a garden with lupins and hollyhocks, took note of the fact that the place was sturdy and weatherproof, even down to the uncompromisingly modern windows someone had thought it suitable to install: square white frames in heavy-duty plastic. The front door, which was on the left-hand side of the house, was of the same white plastic, with an unpleasant steel letterbox like a rat-trap mouth.
But you did not live on the outside of a house, so it didn’t really matter what the place looked like. Antonia produced the key, and discovered a particular pleasure in inserting it in the lock and pushing the door open with a proprietorial air. No matter what it’s like, she thought, for the next two months it’s mine. Providing I don’t play loud music at one a.m. or hold orgies of the bacchanalian kind, no one can boot me out or come crashing in to disturb me.
There was a moment when she felt the past brush her mind, exactly as it had done while looking at the ancient watermill. Like stepping up to the windows of an old house to peer through its cobwebby panes and seeing a blurred flicker of movement from within.