The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [174]
‘Twenty-five per cent more!’ squeaked Caro excitedly when I popped round one morning for a coffee. ‘Which means we can afford the house I've seen with the walled garden. Six bedrooms! And a Chalon kitchen.’
‘Good.’ I was thrilled for her. Knew it was genuinely what she wanted now. Knew that, when she'd crossed the line that meant leaving the farm, she'd done it in a leap. Landed on the other side without looking back. It was what Tim and the children wanted too, had wanted, probably for some time, and there'd been a collective, almost audible, sigh of relief.
‘Have you seen the new house?’ I asked the children now as they lounged across the kitchen table, methodically stripping a bunch of grapes Caro had just put in a bowl in the middle.
‘Not yet. But I know where it is,’ Jack told me with his mouth full. ‘Miles Jackson lives in the same road.’
‘Oh, it's terribly convenient,’ gushed Caro, pouring out coffee at the Aga as Tim came in. ‘The children can even walk to school.’
‘And the shops,’ Jack reminded her, spitting pips into his hand. ‘And the cinema.’
‘And Ladbrokes,’ added Henry, who nursed private aspirations to become a gambler. His father aimed a mock swipe at his head as he passed.
‘It's literally just off the Banbury Road, in Westgate Avenue,’ Caro told me happily.
‘Oh, we looked there.’ I turned, surprised, as she delivered a mug of coffee to me over my shoulder. ‘But Ant thought it was too grand.’
‘Not for us it's not,’ snorted Caro, sitting down at the far end of the table with an enormous Designers Guild samples book. ‘But you're right, it is grand. It's much bigger than your house, Evie.’
I laughed and picked up my coffee. ‘Good old Mick Arnold.’
‘And look what he's doing to the place,’ said Tim in awed tones, unrolling plans and spreading them on the table in front of me. ‘Look at this!’
I moved my mug and dutifully inspected.
‘All the barns are being converted,’ he explained, running his finger across the drawings, ‘and they all look out onto a courtyard in the middle, here.’
I went cold. ‘What – you mean like a sort of complex?’
‘Well, there'll be six of them in all, oh, and a couple of flats. Tiny gardens, obviously.’
‘Right.’ I swallowed. ‘And the farmhouse?’
He unrolled another sheet. ‘Oh, the house. Blimey, Evie, you've no idea. It's going to be tarted up beyond belief. Every bedroom gets an ensuite, and then they're digging down to make an indoor cinema, can you believe it? And there's going to be a huge extension at the back, with a gymnasium and a sauna.’
‘Christ. And what's this?’
Tim peered. Turned his head round to get a better view. ‘Not sure. Think it's a fountain.’
‘It is,’ affirmed Caro, glasses perched on her nose, flicking efficiently through pages of stripy wallpaper. ‘They're doing a sort of mini Versailles in the yard. Very tasteful, apparently; water sprouting from cherubs and all set in a cobbled circle.’
‘Yuck.’
Tim grinned as he rolled up the plans. ‘Yuck, but he's paying through the nose for it, Evie.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘And it's only a pile of bricks and mortar, after all. Not hearts and minds.’ He gently jerked his head to his children at the other end of the table, all leaning eagerly over Caro's shoulder, picking wallpaper for their teenage bedrooms off the Banbury Road.
Yes, it was only bricks and mortar, I thought as I left that day. Before I got in the car, though, I stood in the yard where the fountain would be. Gazed at the barn where Grandpa had stacked hay for a herd of eighty Guernseys, Dad for twenty, and Tim for a couple of token gestures. Rusting machinery crouched there now, looking out impotently at the three hundred acres of very average land, which no doubt would be parcelled up too, eventually, and sold as individual plots for yet more desirable homes; more ribbon development in the Oxfordshire countryside. My hair whipped around my face as I narrowed my eyes to the familiar view: the rolling hills, the