Excerpt from The House on Willow Street
If a road could look welcoming, then Summer Street had both arms out and the kettle boiling.
Christie Devlin had lived halfway up the street for exactly thirty years in a small but exquisite red-bricked house that gleamed like a jewel in a necklace of pretty coloured stones.
Summer Street itself was curved and ran for half a mile from the crossroads where the café sat opposite a house which had once been a strawberry-ice-cream shade and was now a faded dusky pink.
From the moment Christie had seen the graceful curve of the street, where maple trees arched like kindly aunties over the pavement, she’d known: this was the place she and James could raise their family.
Those thirty years had gone in a flash, Christie thought on this beautiful late-April morning as she went about her chores, tidying, dusting, sweeping and wiping.
Today the sun streamed in through the windows, the house seemed filled with quiet contentment and Christie didn’t have to go to work. She loved her job as an art teacher at St Ursula’s secondary school, but she’d cut back her hours recently and was relishing the extra free time.
Her dogs, Tilly and Rocket, miniature dachshunds who had clearly been imperial majesties in a previous life, were sleeping off their morning walk on the cool of the kitchen tiles. The radio was playing quietly in the background and the old steel percolator was making the rattling death throes that signalled the coffee was nearly ready. All should have been right with Christie’s world.
And it was – except for a niggling feeling of disquiet. It had been simmering in her subconscious since she’d awoken at six to the joyous chorus of birdsong outside her bedroom window.
‘Happy Anniversary,’ James had murmured sleepily when the alarm went off at a quarter past and he rolled over in the bed to cuddle her, to find Tilly squashed between them. The dogs were supposed to sleep on their corduroy bean-bags on the floor, but Tilly adored the comfortable little hollow in the duvet between her master and mistress. James lifted the outraged dog and settled her at his other side, then moved closer to Christie. ‘Thirty years today since we moved in. And I still haven’t finished flooring the attic.’
Christie, wide awake and grappling with the intense feeling that something, somewhere, was wrong, had to laugh. Everything was so normal. She must be imagining the gloom.
‘I expect the floor to be finished this weekend,’ she said in the voice that could still the most unruly class in St Ursula’s. Not that she had ever had much trouble with unruly students. Christie’s love of art was magical and intense, and transferred itself to most of her pupils.
‘Please, no, Mrs Devlin,’ begged James, in mock-schoolboy tones. ‘I don’t have the energy. Besides, the dog keeps eating my homework.’
Panting, Tilly clambered back defiantly and tried to make her cosy nest in between them again.
‘The dog would definitely eat the homework in this house,’ James added.
Christie took hold of Tilly’s warm velvety body and cuddled her, crooning softly.
‘I think you love those dogs more than you love the rest of us,’ he teased.
‘Of course I do,’ she teased back. Christie had seen him talking adoringly to Tilly and Rocket when he didn’t think anyone noticed. James was tall, manly and had a heart as soft as butter.
‘Children grow up and don’t want cuddles, but dogs are puppies for ever,’ she added, tickling Tilly gently in her furry armpits. ‘And let’s face it, you don’t run around my feet yelping with delight when I get home from work, do you?’
‘I never knew that’s what you wanted.’ He made a few exploratory barking noises. ‘If I do, will you whisper sweet nothings to me?’ Christie looked at her husband. His hair was no longer a blond thatch. It was sandy grey and thinning, and he had as many fine lines around his face as she had, but James could still make Christie smile on the inside.
‘I might,’ she said.
From the bedroom floor, Rocket whimpered, wanting to be included in the fun.
James got out of bed and scooped her on to the duvet beside her mistress, whereupon Rocket began to smother Christie in kisses.
‘I hope I get to come back as one of your dogs in my next life,’ he remarked, heading to the bathroom for his shower.
Christie shivered. ‘Don’t even speak like that,’ she said, but she was talking to a closed door.
Thirty years in this house. How had the time passed so quickly?
‘I love it,’ she’d told James that first day, as she stood, pregnant with their second child, Shane, outside number 34, a house they could only afford because it required what the estate agent hilariously described as ‘a wee bit of renovating’.
‘You’re sure you don’t prefer the mock-Tudor heap seven streets over?’ asked James, holding tightly to little Ethan’s hand. At the grand old age of three and a quarter, Ethan’s current favourite hobbies included trampolining on his bed and wriggling out of his parents’ grasp to fling himself in danger’s path.
Christie had arched a dark eyebrow at her husband.
The heap’s front garden had been tarmacked while the back garden contained two fierce dogs who hadn’t responded when Christie instinctively reached out her hand. There was a sinister brick-sized hole in one of the upstairs windows and when James had casually asked the estate agent why there was no gun turret complete with AK47 peeking out, Christie had had to smother her laughter.
‘Call me old-fashioned,’ she told James, ‘but I somehow prefer Summer Street and this house.’
Despite the obvious dilapidation, the very bricks of number 34 seemed to glow with warmth, and the stained-glass oriel window over the graceful arched porch was in its original condition.
From where they stood, the Devlin family could see the Summer Street Café with its aqua-and-white-striped awning and paintwork. On the pavement outside stood white bistro chairs and three small tables covered with flowered sea-blue tablecloths that looked as if they’d been transported from a Sorrento balcony.
On the same side of the street