While I Was Waiting

Rachel shook her head. ‘No, too tired. Off to have a long soak in some very hot water, thanks to you. Thank you so much for all you’ve done, Gabe.’ She smiled up at him with genuine gratitude for the first time. Their eyes met and a frisson of something, some expectation, passed between them.

He gave her an odd look. ‘No probs. Are you going to be, you know, alright on your own?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll be fine. Thank you.’

‘See you, then. Oh, and don’t forget to see to that cut.’ With that, he swung himself into his pick-up, this year’s registration, she noticed. He and his father must be doing well. And with a wave and a cloud of dust he skidded down the track.

Rachel stared after the Toyota for some time. An intriguing man. And kind. Even though he’d had a long day and was obviously tired, he’d gone out of his way to help. Unsophisticated, yes, but incredibly sensitive and thoughtful. Honest too. No game-playing there. She’d never met anyone quite like him before.

She blew out a long breath. At last she was on her own. But, somehow, now she had what she thought she wanted, the weight of her alone-ness was oppressive. Rising stiffly, she turned her back on the promise of a glorious sunset to go into the house.

‘You’ll be happy here. I was.’

The voice had her whirling around again, heart thumping. No one there. Standing frozen, Rachel listened. Nothing. She shook her head. Must have been the wind in the trees. On edge and blaming tiredness, she went into the house.

She put the tin in the kitchen. She didn’t want to look through the contents tonight. It didn’t feel right somehow, not when it might belong to someone else. And besides, she had other more pressing things to do.

Chapter 2

In the village’s only pub, The Plough, Gabe’s late arrival was met with raucous cheers. The gang had been there for well over an hour and were onto their fourth round. Gabe’s first two pints of Stella were downed in swift succession, until he felt he was beginning to catch up.

‘So where’ve you been, then, our Gabriel?’ Kevin, his best mate since school, put an arm around Gabe’s shoulders and peered into his empty pint pot. ‘Oi, Paul,’ he yelled at the man, standing at the bar, trying to chat up Dawn the barmaid. ‘Stop pissin’ about and get us another round in. Boy’s dyin’ of thirst over yere.’

Paul gestured what he thought of Kevin and returned to Dawn.

‘Wanker,’ Kevin said affectionately. ‘He’s got no chance there. She fancies you, though.’

‘Shut up, Kev.’ Gabe shrugged off Kevin’s arm and tore open a bag of crisps with his teeth. It had been a long day and he was starving.

‘No, it’s the truth. Her sister told me. Dawn fancies the pants off yer.’ Kevin grinned myopically. He never wore his glasses for a Friday-night drinking session on account of the times he’d fallen over on the way home from the pub and smashed them. ‘Mind, never met a bird with a heartbeat who didn’t fancy you.’ Kevin’s good mood left him abruptly. ‘Could do with spreading some of that Llewellyn charm around boy, to those of us who ain’t got none.’

Gabe shrank from his mate’s beer breath. God, he hated it when Kev got maudlin like this – a sure sign of too much beer drunk too quickly. He wished, not for the first time, that Kevin would learn to pace himself. For some time he’d felt he was outgrowing his old school friend. They had little in common nowadays. Gabe wanted more than just a pint on a Friday in the local. He wanted some of the big wide world that had blown in with Rachel. He loved his family and the village, but it was beginning to stifle him. If he stayed working for his father much longer, he’d end up stuck here. He frowned. Not much chance of chasing his dreams at the moment, though.

‘So where’ve you been, then?’ Kevin persisted. ‘I rang your old woman and she said you was up at that empty cottage on the ridge.’

‘Yeah, I was.’

‘Doing what, then?’

‘Getting a job costed.’ Gabe wished Paul would hurry up with the drinks. Another pint would keep Kev quiet for the next ten minutes and he was seriously getting on Gabe’s nerves. For some reason he wasn’t ready to talk about Rachel to him. To anyone. Not just yet.

‘I heard as some woman’s moved in. Some toffee-nosed tart from London. Bloody incomers.’

Gabe nodded in agreement. This was an old hobby horse of Kevin’s and the easiest thing to do with him in this mood was to go along with it. ‘Might be a bit of work coming your way though, mate. The place is in hell of a state.’ Kev’s prejudices didn’t extend to him turning down casual labouring when offered.

‘What’s she like, then?’

‘Who?’

Kevin gave a melodramatic sigh. ‘The woman what’s moved in, that’s who.’

Gabe thought back to his first sight of Rachel. He could see her so clearly that, for one mad moment, he thought she’d taken up his invitation after all and joined them in the pub. He remembered how her hair swung over her face and hid those extraordinary grey eyes, the way she hardly ever smiled, but when she did it was worth waiting for, her height and slenderness, her elegance even in dusty jeans and a baggy sweater. She’d felt exotic. There was no one around here quite like her.

She was like a long, cool glass of water, he decided, or more like an icy one, for she hadn’t been that friendly. Far too self-contained. Shame. Still, he could work on that. Kevin had been right about the Llewellyn charm. Girls liked something about him and, although he’d never fathomed out quite what, it had never failed him yet. He gave Kevin a quick glance. ‘Oh she was alright. Bit toffee-nosed, like.’

‘Bet she fancied you.’

‘Oh, shut up, Kev.’

Chapter 3

The following Monday morning, Rachel rang Mr Foster, who explained that Mrs Trenchard-Lewis had died several years ago in a local nursing home and that Rachel would need to contact the solicitors about her find. He also said that the house had been cleared and, as it was unlikely the tin contained anything valuable, she could probably keep it.

‘The house was sold complete with chattels, wasn’t it?’ He didn’t sound as interested as she thought he might be, but she could hear voices in the background and several phones ringing, so maybe he was having a busy day. She thought back to the worm-infested kitchen table and the two bookshelves that constituted ‘the chattels’. ‘Erm, yes.’

‘Well, especially as there seem to be no descendants to make a claim, I would have thought the box is rightfully yours. Do let me know if there’s anything of interest in there, I’m quite keen on local history. I do apologise, Miss Makepeace, but I must go, the office is getting rather hectic.’

Rachel thanked him and a further call to the solicitors confirmed that the tin was, indeed, her legal possession.

Over the next few days it lay on the kitchen table, hidden by the mess that had accompanied the house move. Stuff that, try hard as she might, she couldn’t find a home for. The tin and its intriguing contents remained undisturbed; she had other things to do. Rachel was desperate to get organised. She liked order and she liked everything in its place. No, she admitted to herself with a smile, she craved order and until she had everything sorted there was no hope of doing any work. And if she didn’t work, she may as well give up on the idea of living in the cottage completely; she’d never make the mortgage.

So for the next three days she toiled long hours into the night to replace the chaos and unpacked boxes with calm and organisation. On the third attempt to scrub the sitting-room floor, the first two efforts being not to her satisfaction, she sat back and grinned. She remembered, long ago, Tim claiming she was getting far too much like her mother. That her perfectionism would risk her ending up alone, with only cats for company. She didn’t need a psychoanalyst to tell her it was an attempt to live up to her mother’s intolerance to mess or dirt of any kind. Paula Makepeace was fanatical. She’d gone through dozens of cleaners, as none of them did the job to her exacting standards. No one came up to Paula’s standards – in any way – and that included Rachel. She didn’t know how her father coped.

She gave a shrug, pausing only long enough to turn up the radio, and scrubbed even harder.

Thanks to Gabe, the boiler continued to produce copious amounts of scalding hot water and, after a day’s cleaning and sorting, Rachel was only too glad of a long soak in the bath. As she lay there, listening to Radio Three and the sounds of the cottage settling quietly for the night, she mulled over what she was going to do with her new home.

The kitchen she was going to leave more or less as it was, once she’d brightened it with paint. She liked its old-fashioned, unfitted quality and the quarry tiles and wooden plate rack, which she suspected were original. She would get the old table mended; she guessed it was oak and too good to simply throw out. Her own electric cooker looked out of place, but the long-desired Aga would have to wait.

She looked around the bathroom as she idly blew soap bubbles. The tiles were pale green – not very exciting, but liveable with. The suite was old-fashioned but thankfully white and the bath was deep, with enormous taps. She lacked the power shower that had got her through so many sticky days in the city but, again, that would have to wait.

The rest of the house was, thanks to her hard work, becoming grime-free and small though the rooms might be, some good-looking floorboards had been revealed. A sander would do the trick, she thought dreamily, and then it would be the home of her dreams.

Eventually.

She put Gabe Llewellyn and his long list of expensive repairs firmly to the back of her mind and blew another bubble.

Below her, the old house shifted in agreement.

Chapter 4

In the end, it was almost two weeks later when the Toyota came revving up the track. It was another yellow spring day full of the unadulterated light that Rachel was slowly getting used to. She’d been working in the sitting room, which had a commanding view from the front of the cottage. It received good, useful light for most of the day.

She watched as Gabe and another man got out of the truck and held an animated conversation. There was much pointing at the roof, which Rachel felt was ominous. With a frown, she left her drawing board and went to greet her visitors. She opened the front door just as Gabe went to lift the rusty old knocker.

For a second his hand hung comically in mid air, then he grinned. ‘Hi. Erm, this is my dad. Dad, this is Rachel.’

The older man nodded his head in a quick greeting. ‘Mike Llewellyn. Pleased to meet you.’ They shook hands briefly. He looked from Rachel to his son and then back again. He smiled, making his eyes crinkle like his son’s. ‘Gabe said there was quite a lot of work to be done on the old place, so I’ve come to have a look myself.’

He was a shorter, wirier version of Gabe, but lacked his son’s laid-back charm.

‘Sorry we couldn’t get to you earlier,’ with this he gave Gabe a meaningful look. ‘Another job went on a bit, like.’

Ever since moving in, Rachel had done little else but clean, scrub, unpack and sort her belongings, not to mention wait around for the phone to be connected, the oil delivery to be made and for the sander she’d hired to be delivered. This was the very first morning she had felt able to sit down and do some work, real paying work, not the sketching and watercolours she found herself lured into doing by the seductive view. The last thing she wanted to do today was play host to builders. The roof would probably be fine. It hadn’t leaked once since she’d moved in, conveniently forgetting it hadn’t rained either. Rachel looked at their expectant faces, so alike in expression, and sighed inwardly. They were here now and her concentration was already interrupted. If they were quick, she could get back to her work by lunchtime. ‘You’d better come in, then, I suppose,’ she said and led them into the cottage’s sitting room.

‘This has changed a bit!’ Gabe looked around, admiringly. ‘You’ve been busy.’

Rachel followed his gaze around the room. She had worked her hardest in here, keen to get her working area organised. A rug lay over the newly scrubbed and sanded floorboards. She’d even got around to painting them – a pale yellowy cream. She’d set up her bookshelves in the alcoves on either side of the fireplace and they were overflowing with her beloved art books. She’d even had time to hang her favourite prints. A Georgia O’ Keeffe still life looked down from over the mantelpiece – the best sort of company. The room was restful, colourful – just how she liked it.

Gabe walked to her drawing board, positioned neatly in front of the uncurtained sash window and fingered her pencils. ‘What do you do?’

Rachel hurried over and nudged him out of the way. She shut her sketchbook and flipped the cloth over her drawing board. She hated people seeing her work until she felt it was finished, perfect. Or as perfect as she could make it.

‘I’m an illustrator. Freelance. I do drawings for magazines, books. That sort of thing.’ In a nervous gesture she put her pencils back into their size order and turned her back on the window, her hands resting defensively on the now safely covered drawing board.

Gabe looked at her intently. ‘Never would have guessed.’

‘What?’

‘That you were the creative sort.’

Not many people did, thought Rachel. She often wondered what it was about her that made them think she wasn’t artistic.

‘So where would I see your work?’

Rachel was beginning to feel hounded. Christ, would he let go? To fend him off she resorted to the truth. ‘Well,’ she admitted through clenched teeth, ‘Most of my bread-and- butter work is greetings cards.’

‘Is that so?’ Mike came to join them and picked up a pile of drawings due to be sent off for approval. ‘These are nice. Your mum would like these,’ he said to Gabe as he studied the watercolours of poppies and irises. ‘You’re good.’

Gabe peered at the drawings. He took one from Mike and examined it. ‘You’re really good. These are fantastic. Realistic, but you’ve made the flowers look almost like people reaching up to the sun. Yearning for it. For its life force.’

Mike harrumphed, obviously embarrassed. ‘Don’t take any notice of Gabriel, Rachel. He talks like this on occasion.’

Rachel was taken aback at Gabe’s perceptiveness. He was right; that was exactly the effect she’d been after. Another side to this intriguing man. However, she now felt thoroughly invaded. ‘Thank you,’ she managed as she snatched them back. ‘Come into the kitchen and I’ll put the kettle on. I was just about to make myself some tea.’

‘Well, if it’s all the same with you, me and Gabe’s got to get over to Ludlow later on today so we’d like a look round now. The tea can wait, lovely.’ Mike grinned his son’s smile.

She felt a knot of panic form and frowned. ‘But Gabe’s already done a quote.’

Mike held up his hand. ‘I know, but we were thinking. Place has been empty for a good few years now. Good chance the wiring’ll need doing and you might want central heating put in.’

‘I thought I’d just make do with a real fire in here.’ She looked to where her saggy old sofa, with its deep-red throws, was placed optimistically in front of the open fireplace.

Mike snorted. ‘Might change your mind come winter. Windy old spot up on the ridge, this is.’ Then he saw her anxious expression and relented. ‘Well, if you want a fire best to get that chimney swept and get that done in the summer.’

‘Oh.’ Yet another job to add to her list. It was all too much. Rachel felt her knees weaken and she sat down on the arm of a chair. It groaned in sympathy.

Gabe tugged at a long lock of hair that had escaped his ponytail. ‘Don’t scare her, Dad. Look, Rachel, as I said the other day, you can get things done in stages. Don’t have to do it all at once. I brought Dad up so as he could sort a timetable for you. He’s better at that than me.’

‘What, working to a deadline? Never been your strong point, has it Gabriel?’ Mike laughed.

Rachel saw Gabe blow out a breath. He looked tense. She wondered if father and son had problems working together. She suddenly felt sorry for him. He’d had his bubbly and genuine enthusiasm quashed and he looked defeated. Rachel knew about lack of confidence – she knew all about how hard it was to try to be the son or daughter your parent really wanted. It was something she’d spent most of her life attempting – and at which she had spectacularly failed. In their brief acquaintance, Gabe had been nothing but kindness itself and, although she suspected that the kindness was going to cost her a fortune, she found she wanted to reciprocate. ‘You’d better follow me, then,’ she said, resigned to her fate and rose to lead them upstairs.

Two hours later they were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking the inevitable tea. Rachel had never felt so stripped or so exposed. It was one thing to have Gabe look over her house when there were only packing cases in it; it was another when most of her belongings were out on show.

The two men had inspected every inch of the house. They had spent twenty minutes inspecting the wall in the back bedroom, with much tutting and discussion, and had proclaimed damp. To her dismay, they had even poked about in the bathroom, as Gabe had thought he’d seen a silverfish invasion. She bit her lip. From the way they were talking, she would have their company for some considerable time. She wondered if she was being taken for a ride but had no prior experience to go on. Her London flat had never needed any work so she hadn’t a clue if the men were talking sense or inventing jobs for themselves.

Uncannily, Gabe again seemed to sense her mood. He turned from his father and said, ‘You can ask around, for references and the like. The Garths up at the farm had us in to do a fair bit of work last year; they’ll tell you if we’re ripping you off.’

Rachel smiled at him, embarrassed at being so transparent but grateful. ‘I – ’ she began.

Mike had been poring over scribbles in a notebook and interrupted, ‘’Bout four months’ work here, more if you wants heating put in.’

‘Four months!’ Rachel sat back in disbelief. She saw her independent and solitary life leaking away.

‘Well, might take less if we do it all at once, but you say you don’t want that?’

Rachel shook her head at Mike. ‘No, and to be honest, I can’t afford to have it all done at once.’

Mike smiled. ‘Well, we don’t expect payment straight away. Trust works both ways in this game. You trust us to do a good job and we have to trust you to pay us eventually, like. We’ll better get off then, our Gabe.’ He stood and then looked down at her. ‘We’ll leave you to think it over.’

Rachel nodded. ‘I’ll get back to you. I’ll need to get a few more quotes, you know.’ God, this was so embarrassing, but this is what you did, wasn’t it? You didn’t just take on a firm of builders without checking out the competition?

Mike looked from his son to Rachel and gave a cryptic smile. He nodded.

Gabe spoke. ‘Yes, well of course you need to do that. Ask the Garths as well, number’s in the book. Get back to us when you can.’

‘By the end of next week would be better,’ Mike interjected. ‘Otherwise we might not be able to fit her in along with the Halliday job.’

Rachel had had enough. She rose decisively. ‘I’ll ring you on Friday, then. And now I think we’ve all got things to do?’

She saw them out and, before the Toyota could be heard grinding down the track, was hunting through Yellow Pages.

Later that week Rachel took a pot of mint tea into the sitting room and collapsed on the sofa in front of the fireplace. The weather had turned cloudy and it was a clammy but chilly sort of an evening. If she could trust the chimney, she’d risk lighting a fire, but remembered Mike Llewellyn’s words that it would need sweeping first. She made do with her little electric radiator and wrinkled her nose against the dusty smell as it heated up.

The cottage had a strange atmosphere this evening and she needed comfort. Last night, her heart thumping, she’d woken up to sounds outside – some kind of screeching. Common sense told her it was probably an owl or something, but it had sounded disconcertingly like a person in pain. It had taken hours to get back to sleep and she’d become very aware of being alone in a remote place. Today she had wanted to continually look over her shoulder, certain someone was there. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed in ghosts, but there was definitely a weird atmosphere in the cottage sometimes. Putting it down to tiredness, she tried to shrug off her mood and took a sip of tea. She shivered. Perhaps it would be nice to have central heating after all.

After thinking through what Mike and Gabe had said, she was resigned to the inevitable; that the house needed work. A lot of work. So she had applied herself in her usual methodical and thorough way and had tried to get some comparable quotations for the job. But her search for other builders had proved fruitless. Two firms were unable to visit for another month; another local one had managed to come and had then quoted a price far higher than the Llewellyns’; one said they were fully booked for the next three months and yet another hadn’t even bothered to reply to the messages she’d left on their answering service.‘Looks like it’ll be the Llewellyn boys, then,’ she said to no one in particular and tried to warm her hands around her mug. ‘It shouldn’t be too bad,’ she went on, forcing herself to be optimistic, ‘as long as I can find a way of working around them.’

She already had some work overdue, inevitably delayed by moving house. She was also getting far too distracted by the sumptuous countryside around the cottage. ‘I wonder if I could combine the two,’ she murmured. ‘Who would like some stunning landscapes?’

Rachel shook her head and laughed. It felt like madness talking to an empty room but, in some peculiar way, it really felt as though there was someone listening. Someone not completely unfriendly, more curious.

Her mother had always poured scorn on the thought of ghostly presences. ‘I leave the arty-farty nonsense to you, darling,’ she’d giggled, already on her second gin and tonic. ‘After all, you’re the one who claims to be artistic. That’s just the sort of rubbish you lot believe in, isn’t it?’

Rachel knew it had been the gin talking. When sober, her mother excelled in the odd, sly, caustic comment. She declared wide-eyed innocence if anyone took offence. She only really loosened up with alcohol. Rachel hated seeing her mother so out of control. She almost preferred the closed-up, sarcastic version.

She shook herself, trying to instil some sense into her head. It helped make up her mind; she’d ring Mike first thing in the morning. She lay back on the cushions, more relaxed now that she’d come to a decision, albeit an expensive one, and her eye was caught by the Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin. She’d shoved it out of the way when clearing the kitchen to paint and it was wedged between Sister Wendy Beckett and a book on Kandinsky. She’d forgotten all about it. Putting her mug down carefully, not wanting to stain the floor, she took the tin down and settled back on the sofa.

‘So, little tin, what secrets are you hiding?’ Part of her was aware of the air shifting around her as she unwrapped the book. There were the eclectic mixture of papers again, a few neatly stuck in. Some looked as if they had been cut from a diary and were covered in densely written handwriting. The photographs caught her eye. One, a wedding photograph, featured a tall man in uniform with a vibrant-looking woman at his side. They were both holding themselves very erect, looking tense. Another was of a very dashing dark-haired man on horseback, a whip in his hand and a grin splitting his face. Both photographs looked old; they were sepia-tinted and spotted with age.