The House on Cold Hill

6

Arriving back home thirty minutes later, Ollie parked alongside a battered-looking red van belonging to the builders, who had arrived early and were down in the cellar, starting work on the damp. He sat for some moments, listening to Danny Pike on Radio Sussex taking a Green Party councillor in Brighton to task over a new bus lane proposal that the presenter clearly thought was absurd. He always liked Pike’s combative but informed interviewing style.

As he jumped down from the car, he caught a flash of movement to his right. It was a grey squirrel, darting up the trunk of the tall gingko tree in the centre of the circle of lawn in front of the house.

He watched the beautiful animal climb. Tree rats, Caro called them. She hated them, telling him they stripped off the bark, and, after seeing another one over the weekend, had told him to go and buy an airgun and shoot it. He watched it sit on a cross-branch and eat a nut that it held in its paws. There was no way he could shoot it. He didn’t want to kill anything here. Except maybe the rabbits, which overran the garden.

There was a smell of manure in the air, faint but distinct. Some distance above him he saw a tractor looking the size of a toy crossing the brow of Cold Hill, too far away to hear its engine. He stared around at the fields, then at the front facade of the house, still scarcely able to believe that they now lived here; this was their home, this was where, maybe, hopefully, they could actually settle, and spend the rest of their lives. Their forever home.

He pulled out his phone and took a series of photographs in all directions. He looked at the columned, covered porch, with its balustrading above, at the two sets of windows on either side of it, then up at the rows of windows on the two floors above, still struggling to orientate himself.

To the left of the front entrance was a WC, then the door to the library. To the right was the drawing room. Further along to the left there was another toilet, before the long hallway opened out into the atrium. To the left of the atrium was the huge dining room. All these rooms had high, stuccoed ceilings. Through the atrium door to the right was the kitchen and, beyond that, the downstairs part of the extension; a pantry and scullery from which the stairs ran down to the cellar with its vaulted brick ceiling. Part of the cellar housed a long-disused kitchen with a range that had not been lit in decades, once the domain of the live-in household staff. The other end of the cellar contained dusty wine racks. One day, when their finances allowed, they would stock all those racks with wine, another of their shared passions.

He’d checked out all the rooms, briefly and excitedly, on Friday, as they were moving in. God, he loved this place! He’d taken photographs of each room. Many were in a terrible state of repair and they’d have to stay that way for a long while yet. It didn’t matter; for now all they needed was to get the kitchen, drawing room and dining room straight, and one of the spare bedrooms. Their own bedroom, which had ancient red flock wallpaper, and Jade’s, were in a reasonable condition — some work had been done on them before the developers had gone bust and also before they’d moved in. The priority at the moment was the rot, the electricity and the ropy plumbing.

He stared back at the porch, and the handsome front door with its corroded brass lion’s-head knocker, and thought back, as he had several times, to that moment on Friday when he was standing there with his mother-in-law and had seen, fleetingly, that shadow. Trick of the light, or a removals man, or maybe some bird or animal — possibly the squirrel?

He went inside, through the atrium, and turned right into the kitchen. In the scullery beyond was a deep butler’s sink, a draining board and a wooden clothes-drying rack on a rope and pulley system to raise and lower it. There was also an ancient metal pump, fixed to the wall, for drawing water from the well that was supposedly under the house, but which no one had yet managed to find.

The cellar door, at the rear of the scullery, had an enormous, rusty lock on it, with a huge key, like a jailer’s. It was ajar. He went down the steep brick steps to see if the builders were OK and to tell them to help themselves to tea and coffee up in the kitchen, but they cheerily told him that they had their thermoses and were self-sufficient.

Then he climbed up the three flights of stairs to his chaotic office in the round tower on the west side of the house. It was a great space, about twenty feet in diameter, with a high ceiling, and windows giving fabulous views, one of them onto the steep, grassy slope of the hill rising out of sight. He waded through the unopened boxes and towers of files littering the floor, carefully stepping past a row of framed pictures stacked against a wall, reached his desk, and switched on his radio to Radio Sussex. As he heard the presenter grilling the Chief Executive of the Royal Sussex County Hospital over waiting times in A&E, his phone pinged with an incoming text.

It was from one of his two closest friends, Rob, asking if he fancied a long mountain bike ride round Box Hill next Sunday morning. He replied:

He sent it and moments later the single-word reply pinged back.

He grinned. Rob and he had barely said a polite word to each other throughout their fifteen-year friendship. He sat down, retuned the radio to Radio 4, and logged on to his computer, checking his emails for anything urgent, then had a quick look at Twitter and Facebook, aware that he had not posted anything on either about the move yet. He also wanted to post some pictures of the worst dilapidations in the house on his Instagram page to show before and after. He and Caro had discussed approaching the TV show Restoration Man, but decided against because of wanting privacy.

But before any of that he had an urgent job to complete, and although the internet connection wasn’t great, it was working, sort of. His Apple Mac geek — as he jokingly referred to his computer engineer — was coming over that afternoon to try to sort it all out, but in the meantime he just had to get on with it, with an urgent deadline for a new client, the grandly titled Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, Purveyors of Horseless Carriages to the Nobility and Gentry since 1911. They traded top-end classic and vintage sports cars, and had taken several large and very expensive stands at a classic car show that was looming up in Dubai, next month, and for next year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. They needed an urgent revamp of their very dull and old-fashioned website.

If he got it right, it could open the door to the whole world of classic cars which he had always loved. He’d made a serious stash of cash from his previous website business, an innovative search site for people looking for properties. If he could repeat this success in the lucrative world of classic cars, they would be sorted. They’d have the money to do everything they wanted to this house.

He harboured doubts about the provenance of Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, as the company had only been registered nine years ago. Its proprietor was a diminutive, self-important man in his fifties. On the two occasions when Ollie had met Charles Cholmondley himself, he had been flamboyantly dressed in a cream linen suit, bow tie and tasselled loafers, with silver hair that looked freshly coiffed. It was exactly the image of him that fronted the website, the dealer standing between a gleaming 1950s Bentley Continental and a Ferrari of similar vintage.

Personally, Ollie thought the message this gave off was, ‘Come and get royally screwed by me!’ He’d tried, subtly, to dissuade him from wearing the bow tie, but Cholmondley would have none of it. You have to understand, Mr Harcourt, that the people I am dealing with are very rich indeed. They like the feeling of dealing with their own kind. They see this bow tie and they see someone of distinction.

Something really did not smell right about Charles Cholmondley, and Ollie even wondered if this was his real name. But hey, he was paying good money, which at this moment he needed badly, both for this house and, if there was any surplus, to finish the restoration of his beloved Jaguar E-Type which was languishing in a lock-up in Hove until he could clear out enough space for it in one of the garages behind the house. At the moment, with all the work needed on the house, that Jag was going to be, unfortunately, a low priority.

Moments after he had settled down, Caro phoned to ask if the plumber had arrived to start work on their bathroom, and Ollie told her there’d been no sign of him yet.

‘Can you call him?’ she asked. ‘The bloody people were meant to start work at nine today.’

‘I will, darling,’ he said, trying not to sound irritated. Caro could never get her head around the fact that, although his office was based at home, he was actually working just as hard as she was. He dialled the plumber, left a message on his voicemail, then focused on his client’s website. The radio continued in the background; he listened to it all the time he was working, either Radio Sussex or Radio 4, and on Saturdays, after Saturday Live, he loved to listen to the football show, The Albion Roar, on Radio Reverb. When there was nothing on the radio he fancied, he tuned his computer to Brighton’s dedicated television station, Latest TV.

He began surfing the sites of other classic car dealers, and became frustrated, in minutes, with the slow and flaky internet connection. Several times during the next hour he shouted at the computer in anger, and wondered just how much of his life had been wasted waiting for the sodding internet. Then, at 10.30 a.m., he went downstairs to make himself a coffee.

He climbed down the steep, spiral staircase, walked a short distance along the first-floor landing, then went down the stairs to the hall, turned right and entered the oak-panelled atrium that was the anteroom to the kitchen. As he did so he saw Bombay and Sapphire both standing in the middle of the room, their hackles up, watching something.

He stopped, curious, wondering what it was. Their eyes were darting around, right then left, then up, then to the right again, in absolute synch, almost as if they were watching a movie. What were they looking at? He stood with them but could see nothing. ‘What is it, chaps?’

The cats continued to stand there, ignoring him, hackles still up, eyes still moving together, utterly absorbed.

‘What is it, chaps?’ he said again, watching them, watching their eyes. It was giving him the creeps.

Then suddenly they both howled, as if in pain, shot out of the room and disappeared along the hallway.

Deeply puzzled, he walked through into the huge kitchen. It had a low, oak-beamed ceiling, an ancient blue four-oven Aga, a twelve-seater oak refectory table which had come with the property, a pine dresser, rows of pine-fronted fitted shelves and a double sink with a large window above it looking out across the rear lawn and grounds.

He made himself a mug of latte on the Nespresso machine and carried it back into the atrium. And stopped in his tracks.

Dozens of tiny spheres of translucent white light were floating in the air, moving across the room. They ranged in size from little bigger than a pinhead to about a quarter of an inch, and all had a different density of light. They reminded him, for an instant, of living organisms he had observed through a microscope in school biology lessons. They were grouped within a narrow band, no more than a couple of feet across and rising from the floor to head height.

What on earth were they?

Was it his glasses, catching the sunlight at an odd angle? He removed them, and put them on again, and the lights had gone.

Strange, he thought, looking around. He hadn’t imagined them, surely? To his left was the long, windowless hallway leading to the front door. To his right was the small door on the far side of the atrium, which had two glass panes, and opened onto the rear terrace.

His glasses must have caught the reflection of some rays of sunlight, he decided, as he climbed back up to his office. He settled back down to work. Just as he did, Caro rang again. ‘Hi, Ols, did the new fridge turn up?’

‘No, it hasn’t turned up yet. Nor has the bloody electrician or the sodding plumber!’

‘Will you chase them?’

‘Yes, darling,’ he said, patiently. ‘The plumber called me back and is coming in an hour. I’ll chase the others.’ Caro had two secretaries at her disposal, plus a legal assistant. Why, he wondered, frustrated, did she never use them to help out?

He dutifully made the calls then returned to his work. Shortly after 1.00 p.m. he went back downstairs to make himself a sandwich. As he entered the atrium again, he felt a stream of cool air on his neck. He turned, sharply. The windows and the door to the rear garden were shut. Then he saw tiny flashes of light around him. They were a familiar precursor to the severe migraines he occasionally suffered from. They were different from the spheres he had seen earlier, but maybe those had been another manifestation of the same symptoms, he realized. He wasn’t surprised, with all the stress right now. But he didn’t have time to be ill.

He went through the kitchen into the scullery and down the stone cellar stairs. A radio at the bottom was blaring out music, and the two builders were sitting, drinking tea and eating their lunch. One was tall, in his early thirties; the other was shorter and looked close to retirement. ‘How’s it going?’ Ollie asked.

‘The damp’s pretty bad,’ the older one said, unwrapping a Mars bar and giving a sharp intake of breath. ‘You’re going to need a damp-proof membrane down here, otherwise it’s going to recur. Surprised no one ever done it.’

Ollie knew very little about building work. ‘Can you do it?’

‘We’ll get the guv to give you a quote.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thank you. Might as well get it done properly. Right, well, I’ll leave you to get on with it. I’ve got to shoot out later and pick up my daughter from school. What time are you off?’

‘About five,’ the younger one said.

‘Fine — if I’m not around, just let yourselves out and shut the front door. See you tomorrow?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the older one said. ‘We’ve got an outside job and if the weather holds the guv may want us on that for a couple of days. But we’ll be back before the end of the week.’

Ollie looked at them, biting his tongue. He remembered beating their boss, Bryan Barker, down on price on the agreement that his workmen could do outside jobs as and when the weather permitted.

‘OK, thanks,’ Ollie said, and went back upstairs, swallowed two Migraleve tablets then made himself a tuna sandwich. He sat at the refectory table with a glass of water, and as he ate he flipped through the newspapers he liked to read daily, the Argus, The Times and Daily Mail, that he had picked up on his way home after dropping off Jade at school.

When he had finished his lunch he climbed back up to his office, relieved not to have developed any more migraine symptoms, so far. The tablets were doing their stuff. He stared for some minutes at a photograph of a white 1965 BMW going almost sideways, at high speed, through Graham Hill Bend at Brands Hatch. It was one of a series of images of the car, which had a strong racing pedigree, for sale on the Cholmondley website. Then he heard the front doorbell ringing. It was Chris Webb, his computer engineer, with an armful of kit, who had come to sort his internet out.

He let him in, gratefully.

A few hours later, after collecting Jade from school and returning to work, he heard Caro’s Golf scrunch to a halt on the gravel outside. Jade had long been up in her room, closeted with her mountain of homework, and Chris Webb, hunched over the Mac up in his office, was still hard at work sorting out his new connection. Chris looked up, mug of coffee in one hand, cigarette burning in the ashtray Ollie had found for him.

‘It’s the curvature of the hill that’s your problem,’ he said.

‘Curvature?’

‘There are phone masts on the top of the Downs, but the curvature of this slope effectively shields you from them. The best solution,’ Webb said, ‘would be to demolish this house and rebuild nearer the top of the hill.’

Ollie grinned. ‘Yep, well, I think we’ll have to go with another option. Plan B?’

‘I’m working on it.’

Ollie hurried downstairs to greet his wife, opening the front door for her and kissing her. Even after fourteen years of marriage, he always felt a beat of excitement when she arrived home. ‘How was your day, darling?’

‘Awful! I’ve had one of the worst Mondays of my life. Three clients in a row who’ve been gazumped on their house purchases, and one nutter.’ She was holding two large plastic bags. ‘I’ve bought a load of torches, as you suggested, and candles.’

‘Brilliant! We’ll put torches around the place. Glass of wine?’

‘A large one! How was your day?’

‘Not great either. One distraction after another with the builders, the electricians, the plumber. And the architect called to say that our planning application to have a new window in our bedroom has been turned down because the house is a listed building.’

‘It’s only Grade 2. Why?’

Ollie shrugged. ‘Every generation who’s owned this place over the past two hundred and fifty years has made changes to it. Why do they sodding think in the twenty-first century that now has to stop?’

‘We can appeal it.’

‘Yes — at a cost of thousands.’

‘I need that drink.’

He led the way along the hall and through the atrium, then into the kitchen. He took a bottle of Provence rosé out of the fridge and opened it. As he poured he said, ‘Want to take a walk around the grounds? It’s such a beautiful evening.’

Peeling off her jacket and slinging it over the back of a chair, she said, ‘I’d like that. How’s Jade? How was her first day at school?’

‘She’s fine. A bit quiet and still sullen, but I get the feeling she secretly quite enjoyed it. Or that it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She’s doing homework.’

He said nothing about Jade’s insistence that her grandmother had come into her room last night.

While Caro went upstairs to see their daughter, Ollie carried their glasses out onto the rear terrace, where their outside dining table and chairs were set up, and onto the lawn. Caro came back down. ‘God, it’s so glorious — if we could get the pool cleaned up we could have a swim on evenings like this next year!’ She smiled. ‘You’re right — Jade does seem to have got on OK today.’

‘Yes, thank heavens! The local pool company’s coming on Friday,’ Ollie said. ‘To give me an estimate on what it will take to replace the damaged tiles and get the heating up and running again.’

‘Good! Can’t believe how warm it is — half past six in the evening!’

The sun was still high in the sky over the fields to the west. Caro gave him a hug and kissed him. ‘I was really worried about moving here,’ she said. ‘But driving out of Brighton tonight, it was such a joy to leave the city — I think we’ve made the right decision.’

He smiled, hugged her back and kissed her. ‘We have. I just love it. I think we’re going to be so happy here.’

‘We will be. It’s a happy house!’