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.
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.’
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.