(1990) Sweet Heart Read Free Page A

of buildings nestling in the hollow a hundred yards away, between mossy banks that rose up into the woods on either side. The house — a different view from the estate agent’s photograph — a brick barn, and a dilapidated wooden water mill.
    There was little sign of life. The windows were dark. Water tumbled from the weir into a brick-walled sluice pond below them. It frothed angrily around the motionless wheel and slid in a fast narrow stream through thegarden, under an ornamental wooden bridge, past the barn and into a paddock beyond.
    Excitement thumped inside her, although the house was smaller than she’d thought it would be, and in worse condition. Shadows boxed on the uneven roof as the wind punchballed the trees; an L-shaped single-storey extension seemed as if it might collapse at any moment on to the coal bunker and an oil tank beside it in a bed of nettles. Then she stiffened.
    Something was missing.
    She stared around, noticing something new all the time. A bird bath, a shed, a wheelbarrow, a hen run. Two uprooted oak trees leaned against one another on the front lawn, their branches interlocked like fighting dinosaurs.
    The hollow had once been the river valley, she realised, before the river had been dammed to make the lake. Apart from the grass, which looked as if it had been cut, it was wild. There were some rhododendron bushes, a few desultory clusters of wild flowers, a small orchard.
    Something was missing.
    Her eyes were drawn to a level patch of scrub grass halfway up the bank above the barn, between the mill race and the woods. Her armpits were clammy; she felt dizzy and held on to Tom’s arm.
    ‘Are you OK?’ he said.
    Strands of hair thrashed her cheek. A bird chirruped.
    The slapping of the waves on the lake. The tumbling water of the weir. The wind in the trees. The quiet. It was touching something, stirring something, like snatches of an old tune.
    ‘Charley? Darling?’ He shook her arm. ‘Anyone home?’
    ‘What?’ She came back to earth with a jolt and felt disoriented for a moment. ‘Sorry, I was just —’ Shesmiled. ‘It’s wonderful.’
    ‘Don’t get your hopes too high. There’s someone else interested, and we might hate the inside.’
    ‘We won’t!’
    Ben tore down the drive and loped across the grassy bank.
    ‘Ben!’ she shouted.
    ‘It’s OK, the house is empty.’
    ‘Why don’t we phone the agent and tell him we’re here now?’
    ‘Let’s go and have a look first.’
    The sluice pond was deep and cold. Slime coated the wall. The thunder of water grew louder as they walked down and she felt a fine spray on her face.
    ‘We’d be wanting to pee all the time,’ Tom said.
    Further on clear water flowed under the ornamental bridge and Charley thought how on warm summer evenings they could have supper, the two of them, by the stream. Bring her mother down on fine days. Convert the barn and maybe Tom’s father could live there. If Tom and his father could stop hating each other.
    The house seemed larger as they neared it, partly because it sat up above them. The front was the pretty view in the particulars. Elizabethan, one end slanted and the other square. The plaster of the upper floor was crumbling, the wooden beams were rotten and the brickwork of the ground floor was uneven. The windows were small and differing sizes.
    They heard a car door. Ben ran back up the drive, barking. A man hurried in through the gates, short and purposeful, a blue folder tucked under his arm, hands and feet pointing outwards like a penguin. He paused to pat Ben, and was rewarded with muddy pawprints on his trousers. He hove to in front of them, puffing, a plump, dapper man in polished black loafers with shinypens in his breast pocket and alabaster skin.
    ‘Mr and Mrs Witney? I’m sorry, so sorry to have kept you.’ He leaned slightly backwards. Wind lifted the hair off his bald pate.
    ‘We were a bit late ourselves,’ Tom said.
    ‘Ah yes, tricky to find the first time.’ A