One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [1]
‘Pick a lane and stick to it!’ she roared, betraying her own rudimentary grasp of motorway driving. She flashed her lights furiously as she got right up behind him.
I gripped the upholstery. Another white-knuckle ride. Maggie had recently admitted to an adrenalin rush when sparring with fellow truckers, and I felt it was only a matter of time before she boasted a tattoo and a wife-beater vest. At least we weren’t in France, I reasoned, where we’d clocked up most of our miles together, and where Maggie’s aggressive handling of Chalky, our white Transit van, had caused more than one monsieur to slam on his brakes, leap from his vehicle and demand an explanation. At least in leafy Buckinghamshire all we encountered were V signs and the odd McDonald’s carton flung from windows in our faces.
‘So why does she want us then?’ Maggie yelled disingenuously as we lurched into the slow lane and beetled illegally past the lorry. ‘Your sister.’
‘You know why. Hugh wants us,’ I said wearily. ‘And even Laura knows better than to flagrantly go against him. And actually, I think it’s jolly loyal of them to ask us to quote at all. Even if we don’t get the whole house, even if it’s just a few rooms, they’ll still pay squillions.’
Maggie sat up a bit at this, silenced. When my brother-in-law had rung the shop and asked if we’d ‘cast an eye over the place’ for them, I too had been astonished. Saxby Abbey was hardly the French Partnership’s usual commission, Maggie and my habitual territory being basement kitchens in Fulham, or, at the most, a small house in Parson’s Green. But Hugh had been insistent.
‘Laura’s got… well, she’s got some rather extravagant ideas, Hattie,’ he’d said nervously, and very quietly, even though he’d already told me Laura had gone to the village. ‘She’s got some London decorator coming down who wants to put silk everywhere. Even on the walls, for God’s sake. I need you.’
Small and shiny – cheeks and bald pate – he might be, but the words ‘I need you’ delivered passionately by a peer of the realm are inclined to sway one. Besides, I was very fond of Hugh. He was a dear, kind man and, when let off the marital leash, could scamper like a frisky terrier and be terribly amusing in his cups.
‘But, Hugh, Maggie and I do understated French charm, you know that. Shabby chic. A couple of huge garden urns and one or two baroque chairs in an otherwise bare room streaked with a bit of verdigris paint. It’s not going to be Laura’s tasse de thé at all.’
‘Paint?’ he’d yelped, like a Labrador after a scrap. ‘Did you say paint? That can’t cost much, surely?’
‘Well, ours isn’t cheap; we have it specially mixed. About thirty quid a litre?’
‘And a litre covers about fifty metres of wall, doesn’t it? Do you have any idea how much her silk Obsession wallpaper is?’
Ah. Obsession.
‘About a hundred pounds for one metre. And the Abbey must have… ooh… 20,000 square metres of wall space at least!’
There was a silence as we both did the maths.
‘Please come,’ he’d implored at length. Which, hot on the heels of ‘I need you’ found me not just swaying but melting. ‘Come, and bring your partner too. I swear to God I’ll make it worth your while.’
‘You don’t have to do that, Hugh,’ I’d muttered feebly. ‘I mean, overpay us or anything. We’ll charge our usual rates. But Laura—’
‘Laura will be fine,’ he’d interjected, quite firmly for him. ‘Leave her to me. Oh, and by the way, your mother’s here too,’ he added, in something more like his habitual nervous tone. ‘The pair of them are flying from room to room clutching swatches and bits of wallpaper shrieking, “Yes! Yes!” as they hold them up to windows, like a couple of born-agains. Their Bible seems to be an enormous book by the prophet Bennison, which they clutch