Page 60

Chapter 60

Early July 2011

Tess had been staying at Fiona’s for almost a week, helping her paint two of the high-ceilinged bedrooms. The kids had gone to stay with their grandparents and Tess had juggled the decorating project around her hours at the supermarket.

The two women had walked Baxter around the Meadows in the mornings, played their favourite songs loudly on Spotify while they worked, and abandoned any semblance of healthy eating.

They had sandwiches from Margiotta’s for lunch, and takeaways in the evening when they were too tired to do more than wash the paintbrushes.

There had been wine.

It’s mid-afternoon when Tess gets back to Library Terrace and she can see there’s a mini-skip sitting in the road outside.

The white enamel sink has been dropped in at one end and a pile of disconnected pipes and taps lie beside it.

The ancient electric cooker is upside down, its door lying open, surrounded by heaps of torn lino and wall tiles.

Georgia has obviously had a clearing crew in.

If she would just tell me these things are happening, thinks Tess.

She takes her new, not-smart, no-frills phone from her pocket and checks for texts.

Nothing.

As she walks around to the back garden she hears a new sound coming from the house.

Is that music?

The door between the scullery and the kitchen is closed.

She ties Baxter’s lead to a hook beside the back door and lifts the grocery bags onto the scullery worktop.

The long, narrow room is now sporting a variety of cooking appliances.

A slow cooker had arrived from Fiona two weeks ago, and judging by the smell of spices in the room, it’s already being put to good use.

Tess opens the door to the kitchen and is faced with a scene of destruction.

The only furniture left in the room is the kitchen table and the built-in dresser opposite the window.

Everything else has been moved out, or disposed of.

Various wires with brightly coloured insulating tape over their ends protrude from the wall.

The table has been covered with dust sheets to protect it.

Someone has embedded a claw hammer in the wall below the mantelpiece.

In the middle of the chaos, Georgia is dancing with a slim, white-haired man.

He is holding her close and they are doing a very small on-the-spot shuffle.

The radio is playing jazz so loudly that they don’t hear her come in.

The man stops dancing suddenly when he sees her.

‘You must be Tess,’ he shouts over the music.

Georgia turns the radio down.

‘Stan, this is Tess. Tess, this is Stan.’ She looks around at the bare floorboards and hammer-pocked walls.

‘We got a little carried away.’

Shouldn’t Stan be up the west coast somewhere, with his sick wife?

Tess thinks, before she can stop herself.

‘Look!’ Georgia points at a widening hole in the plaster.

‘You can see the range properly now. I thought it might be rusted away to nothing but it’s still there.

’

‘It must have had a good clean and some black lead before it was boarded up,’ says Stan, ‘and the room is dry, or it was until that pipe burst, so that will have helped too.’

Tess peers through the gap.

‘It’s huge .’

‘It is indeed.’ Georgia rubs her forehead, leaving a white plaster-dust trail.

‘And it made the best Yorkshire puddings you’ve ever had.

’

‘What are you going to do? Cover it back up?’

‘Not at all. It’s been hidden away for fifty years and I want to see it again.

It was Annie who was fed up with it and wanted some modern conveniences.

’

‘Is it usable?’ Tess has a vague memory of her nana talking about making treacle toffee on the range in the house where she grew up.

‘I’m not sure. Not with the coal we used to get, that’s for sure.

What do you think, Stan?

’

He taps the wall above the mantelpiece.

‘It would have to be smokeless fuel now. There are rules. It will depend on the state of your chimney, but maybe for occasional use it would be alright. I don’t think you’d be wanting to cook on it all the time, even if you were allowed to.

’

‘Isobel used to make some amazing meals on it.’

‘Isobel?’

‘She was the maid, or at least she was when Annie was a child. She and Annie became good friends but they were pretty competitive in the baking department.’

Tess is still none the wiser about exactly how Annie and Georgia are connected.

Stan leans to right and left to stretch his back.

‘There are three of us now. Maybe with some effort we could get the rest of that hardboard and plaster away and let the dog see the rabbit, so to speak. Might as well do it while you’ve still got that skip outside.

’

‘I bought some of those extra-strong rubbish sacks when I was doing the groceries,’ Tess offers.

‘Looks as though they’re going to come in useful.

’

Stan wiggles the hammer to loosen it, and as it comes away, another cloud of plaster dust escapes from the wall.

He passes it to Georgia.

‘Don’t go at it too hard.

With any luck we might be able to pull the rest of the board away.

’

Georgia hesitates.

‘Can I just get Baxter into the house?’ says Tess.

‘I don’t really want him left on his own outside, he might be frightened.

’

‘The famous Baxter!’ says Stan.

‘I’ve heard a lot about him.

Perhaps we can get to know one another later.

’

Tess goes back outside and unhooks the lead.

She bends down and scratches Baxter’s head.

‘I don’t want you getting splinters in your paws,’ she whispers, ‘so we’ll go in through the front door and you can sit in the drawing room.

’

She arrives back in the kitchen in time to hear Stan giving instructions.

‘Come on, lass. It’s your house, your kitchen.

You’re the only one here who remembers it, so it seems only right that you should be the one to let us see it again.

’

‘I’ll probably hit the wrong place and ruin it,’ Georgia displays an uncharacteristic lack of confidence, ‘but if you insist.’ She smacks the claws of the hammer into the board, at chest height, where the space above the oven would be, and levers the board towards her.

She does it again, and again, until there is a channel across the top, and she can push her fingers into the gap and give the board a tug.

At first nothing happens, and she leans backwards, bracing herself, legs apart, feet planted on the floorboards.

There is a cracking sound, and she starts to tumble backwards.

Stan leaps to catch her as the wall gives way and a large sheet of board and plaster fall into the room.

Through the cloud of grey dust, a huge black hunk of metal is visible below the mantelpiece at last.

Stan picks the hammer up from the floor and passes it back to Georgia.

She starts again, pulling off smaller sections of board.

Little by little, the whole range is revealed.

‘You’ll be able to use the frame for kindling if I chop it up for you,’ says Stan.

‘But first we need a brush and a shovel.’ They stand aside as he sweeps the floor slowly, sprinkling water onto the mess to minimise the amount of dust that billows up.

His floppy white hair has fallen forward and he pushes it back and out of his eyes.

Tess can see that he must once have been a good-looking man.

He still is. She drags herself back to the present and examines the range.

‘That’s quite a lump of ironwork.

’

Georgia nods. ‘It wasn’t just a cooker, it heated all the hot water when I was growing up as well.

It had to be on all year, and if it was raining we used to dry the clothes on the pulley in here.

It was cosy in the winter, but I can remember it being absolutely sweltering in the summer.

Annie was so, so pleased to have an electric cooker instead.

Nowadays we look at something like this with rose-tinted spectacles, but it wasn’t easy to manage or to keep stoked up.

There was definitely an art to it.

’

‘I expect it would polish up a treat,’ says Stan.

‘It’s a fine example of domestic engineering.

’

‘I wonder,’ says Georgia, thoughtfully.

‘When Keith boxed it in, Annie and I were away youth hostelling on the west coast; it was at the end of my second year at university and it was a treat for doing well in my exams. We already had the electric cooker so the range hadn’t been used for a while and it was just gathering dust. Soot kept falling down the chimney and Annie got so exasperated with it.

So when we were away, Keith got it all framed out and plastered.

Annie was so pleased.

’ Georgia traces a letter G in the sooty dust on the hotplate.

‘But I remember coming into the scullery from the garden on the evening we got home and they were standing in the kitchen. They didn’t know I was there, and I heard her ask if he had looked in the oven before he started the work, and he said he hadn’t.

He was quite upset that he’d done something wrong but she just hugged him and told him she thought she might have put something in it for safekeeping when she was having a clear-out one day.

And then she said that she was probably mistaken and it wasn’t important.

’

Georgia bends down and grips the handle on the oven door.

She turns it and the door swings open.

Inside is a small box.

‘What have we here then? Is a fifty-year-old mystery going to be revealed?’ She reaches for it.

‘Or not, I suppose. It might be empty.’

But when Georgia straightens up and opens the box, Tess can see that inside it is a small key.