Jessie wishes they could make love here, right now, mark their territory. She nuzzles against the stubble of his chin.
Appalled by any display of physical affection—and attuned to it—Bella looks up abruptly and guns her gaze at her father’s right hand. Jessie feels the flinch in the contracting muscles of Will’s fingertips. She sidesteps away to make it easier for him. The embroidered hem of her skirt swishes back against her knee-length leather boots. “What do you think, Bella?” she asks, maybe a bit too brightly.
Bella burrows her eyes into the phone again. “I’d sooner hang myself from a door by a belt than move here.”
“Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel,” says Will, gamely trying to humor her. Bella’s face remains blank, violently silent.
Romy’s large blue eyes look up from the roly-poly scuttling along the floor to her mother, sensing something wrong.
Jessie’s fingers reach for her most cherished possession, the gold charm, a tiny gingerbread man, that hangs on the chain around her neck, a necklace Will gave her to mark Romy’s birth. The skin-warmed metal calms Jessie, as it always does. She’s needed to touch it a lot in the last few months as worries about Bella and the fractures in this rapidly patched-together family roil beneath the surface of her days.
“Bell Bell.” Romy stomps over to Bella, presents an offering of a roly-poly balled in her cupped hand, and grins, ever hopeful. Bella recoils and shoots one of those chilly looks at Romy that make Jessie shudder. There’s something in Bella’s gaze that is just not sisterly sometimes, not even particularly human. But she’d never say so to Will.
“Shall we hit the road then, Baby Bear?” Will swings Romy up in his arms onto his shoulders, where she sits very upright, kicking her feet like a tiny mahout. He tries to talk to Jessie as Romy covers his eyes with her hands. “I’m starving, sweetheart.”
“One last look?” Something in Jessie sinks at the thought of returning to London. She fears Applecote might vanish the moment they leave it. “I’m sure there’s a room on the top floor we didn’t see earlier. It’s probably only a storeroom or something, but I’d like to check it out. The agent rushed us past it, didn’t he, Bella?”
Bella shrugs. But Jessie remembers how Bella kept glancing back at that top floor as they all clattered downstairs.
“I now have no option at all but to feast on this scrumptious foot then.” Will starts to pretend-gobble Romy’s boot. Romy squeals. Jessie turns back into the shadowed old heart of the house, quietly amazed to hear Bella’s slouching footsteps behind her.
They take the scenic route. Jessie pauses in the old drawing room, where the light is tinged the color of Guinness and the windows furred with dust. She peers out to the weedy gravel beach of drive through the clumps of unpruned lavender and watches Will talking to the estate agent, not noticing his little girl stuffing her duffle coat pockets with stones. She hopes he’s sniffing out if there’s a deal to be done. He’s good at that, surprisingly fierce in business, given what a total softy he is with the girls. But he’s always had the two sides to him, a protective outer shell that only the people he loves ever really penetrate.
“Did someone seriously live in this place?” Bella asks, pulling Jessie back from her thoughts. She draws a road in the dust on the wooden floor with her pink Converse. “Like this? Not done up or anything?”
“They did. A Mrs. Wilde. A widow. She was here alone for decades, well into her nineties. Can you imagine? Must have been quite a lady.”
“I bet they discovered her mummified corpse watching telly, eaten by her lapdog. That’s the sort of thing that happens in the country, isn’t it?” Bella suppresses a smile. “No one can hear you scream.”
“The truth is a little less exciting, I’m afraid.” Jessie smiles back. Bella’s deadpan black humor creates little moments of connection in their otherwise fraught relationship. Jessie’s always enjoyed finding sparkly chinks in Bella’s armor. “The house just got to be too much. She took a tumble on the stairs and had to move out to a nursing home, oh, more than nine months ago. Applecote’s been on the market ever since. I just can’t understand why the place hasn’t been snapped up.”
“You can’t?” Bella asks in exaggerated disbelief.
“I just love the way it’s stopped in another era, like a pocket watch.” Jessie takes in the wide oak floorboards—really slices of tree, nothing like the reflective laminated wooden floors in their house—the William Morris wallpaper, curling away in fruit-peel strips, dotted with pale squares where pictures once hung. Included in the sale are pieces of brown furniture, bureaus, black-lacquered plant stands, even a crocheted blanket scrunched on a chair, the kind of thing Jessie imagines women once knitted together in the village hall on rainy afternoons. “Just needs a bit of a tinker and it will start ticking again.”
Bella lets out a low moan and leans back against a writing desk, making it wobble, a large glass paperweight slide along its upper shelf. She picks it up and holds it to the light, where it glints dully, like a fairground crystal ball. Jessie half expects to see Applecote’s history swirling within it: picnics, croquet on the lawns, girls in gingham.
“Dad will never go for it, Jessie.” Bella sighs, not taking her eye off the glass. “Way too much work.”
“Oh, it’s a paint job,” Jessie says, sensing as she speaks that this might be an optimistic appraisal. Her mother always did up their houses, roping Jessie, protesting, into it. Money was tight, and since there was no man about to do these things, her mother simply bought a DIY manual and did it herself, nearly electrocuting herself only once.
“It needs a bank job. Dad says it’s a money pit.”
“I’m happy to get my hands dirty.”
“Very dirty?”
“Yes. Definitely.” Jessie realizes just how hungry she is for a challenge, some kind of project, after the drift of being a stay-at-home mum to Romy. She may have overstayed her career in packaging design, frustrated by the prescriptive briefs, locked in by the usual things—habit, rent, and saving to buy her own flat, money she never used, invaluable now—but she misses its creativity and focus. And she can’t help remodeling this house in her mind, the family, too, seeing them both emerge like a three-dimensional model. “I hate those overdone country houses, anyway. A home should be a bit rough around the edges.”