The Dream House Read Online Free Page B

Christmas, but they eventually found somewhere near the cathedral, which they decided to visit. Joyce led them round the simple Gothic edifice of mellow Normandy stone. Whilst Daisy and Sam ran round the huge cloisters, ignoring Kate’s attempts to interest them in the coloured bosses on the vaulted ceiling, Simon went off to inspect the treasury. When Joyce took the children to the shop, Kate strolled around by herself, reading the inscriptions on the tombs of long-dead bishops, trailing her hands over the carved choir stalls, hearing the heartbreaking swell of organ practice stopping and starting above. She found a little chapel tucked away by the great south entrance. The modern glass door bore a whorl of lettering – some words of T. S. Eliot:
Reach out to the silence/At the still point of the turning world
.
    That’s just where I’m at today, she thought. The still point. Where you can think. And maybe learn the answers to things that you’re searching for. Or not yet, in her case.
    Following the others into the cathedral shop she found a bookmark with the famous words of the medieval mystic Mother Julian of Norwich:
All will be well and all manner of thing will be well
. Kate bought it on the off-chance the saint was right.
    After half an hour, Simon was anxious to move on. ‘You’ll love the castle,’ Joyce told the children. ‘There are mummies and a dragon costume.’
    ‘Would it be all right if I met you all in a little while?’ asked Kate, feeling guilty about wriggling out of the childcare. On the other hand, it would be nice for Joyce to have the children. They always went to their mother if Kate was there. ‘I feel like exploring round here.’
    They arranged to meet by the market and Kate watched them go off together, Sam holding Joyce’s hand and Daisy her father’s.
    Kate ambled through the cathedral close and across a main road into a maze of narrow streets as the old cracked bells of the cathedral dropped their dissonant litany into the cool late-afternoon air. For nearly an hour she wandered, utterly enchanted by the misshapen houses, the stone churches, the myriad antique shops and quaintly named pubs. She crossed and recrossed the river, looking at the boats and the old wharves rearing up on either side. In the event, she almost missed the little shop on the corner of two streets. What caught her eye was a striking, Egyptian-patterned plate in orange and black. Next to it in the window, a naked nymph held a lamp aloft.
    Kate peered through the hatched glass to see what else was there, remembering pictures from the book about the Bright Young Things she had been working on. She saw Clarice Cliff-style tea services and, ranged along the back wall, Art Deco wardrobes and dressing-tables. The whole shop specialized in art from the 1920s and 1930s.
    What drew her through the door was a small glass display case of jewellery. It contained a beautiful link bracelet, each black enamelled square bearing a delicate Russian pattern in red and gold, large plastic red earrings with geometric designs and chunky rings. And crammed into one corner like an afterthought was a large silver pendant, its chain balled up. The oval bore a moulded relief of a young girl with flowing hair. A dove had alighted on her raised palm. Studying it, Kate was struck by a teasing feeling that it was familiar. But she just couldn’t put her finger on why.
    When she pushed open the door a little bell rang, but for a moment nobody came. Then a door banged at the back of the shop and a tall young man eating an apple slipped in behind the counter. He smiled shyly. Kate moved over to the jewellery.
    ‘May I?’ she asked, and when the young man nodded, she reached into the back of the display case and picked up the pendant. It was a locket, the size of a fifty-pence piece, she saw, turning it over. No, half a locket. The remaining half displayed a washed-out photograph of a woman’s face. Such a shame the piece was broken – the