The House Across the Street Read online

  But however painful it was to her, Charles pointed out that she had the sympathy of everyone in that court, and the prosecution barrister said that she had been both clever and brave to outwit Reilly.

  There had never been any real expectation that Reilly would hang. The anti-capital punishment lobby was too powerful and vocal by then. Katy had always thought hanging was barbaric anyway, so when she heard he’d got a life sentence she felt vindicated. Finally she was able to move forward and be just another young woman enjoying her life in London.

  London was an exciting place to be that summer of 1965. Skirts grew shorter by the week, men were growing their hair longer, and new clothes boutiques selling outrageous clothes popped up like mushrooms everywhere. There were discotheques and rock concerts to go to. For the first time in her life she was really living, not marking time as she had in Bexhill, with Saturday night at the De La Warr Pavilion the highlight of the week. She didn’t spend all her spare time with Charles, because he often had to handle cases in other cities and stayed away overnight. He said he wanted her to go out and have fun, so she did, with girls from work, Jilly and many of her new friends from the zoo.

  It was on the August bank holiday, nearly six months since she’d got away from Reilly, that Charles told her he loved her. He and Katy had gone to Southend on the train for the day, together with Jilly and her boyfriend, Guy. It was a very hot day, and Katy was wearing white shorts and a skimpy white top.

  They queued up to get on the Wild Mouse ride, a terrifying roller coaster with narrow cars so you sat behind one another rather than side by side. ‘I love you,’ he said, just as they were clambering aboard, Katy in the seat in front of him.

  It was hardly an appropriate time to make such a statement and although she had been itching to tell him she loved him for ages, she didn’t reply.

  ‘I want to marry you, too,’ he yelled out just as the ride began.

  The little cars hurtled along at breakneck speed, turning so sharply on corners that Kate screamed, thinking the car was coming off the tracks. But Charles was leaning forward towards her, she could feel his warm breath on her neck, and as the cars made their final terrifying descent, he whispered in her ear.

  ‘I mean it, will you marry me?’

  That summer Katy had already discovered that Charles had more sides than a threepenny bit. There was the calm measured barrister, a product of public school and wealthy parents; that Charles wore Savile Row suits and bought his shirts from Hawes & Curtis in Jermyn Street, spoke with a plummy accent and had impeccable manners.

  But away from the courts Charles liked to wear Levi’s jeans, desert boots and T-shirts. He listened to loud rock music, and liked what he called ‘vulgar entertainment’, meaning fairground rides and going to the dogs. He was one of the first lawyers to give up on the ‘short back and sides’ haircut, too. He could be argumentative, stubborn, and always believed he was right. But he was also tender, passionate and kind. Proposing to her on the Wild Mouse ride was typical of his sense of fun. Not for him the formal proposal on bended knee. Maybe he intended to give Katy a wild ride, too!

  Katy didn’t agree to marry him straight off. Not because she had any doubts that he was the right one, but because he was taking her away to a country hotel near Tunbridge Wells the following weekend. She had already lost her virginity to him, at his flat, just a couple of weeks after she returned to London, but this weekend in Tunbridge Wells was to be a romantic, first whole night together, and she had managed to persuade her doctor to put her on the new birth control pill. They were only supposed to give the pill to married women, but she twisted the doctor’s arm by saying they were engaged. And he agreed the pill was prudent.

  That weekend was just perfect on so many levels. Their first chance to be entirely alone, thrilling lovemaking, the weather was glorious and so was the hotel. Katy agreed to marry him the first evening there, over dinner. While wandering around pretty Tunbridge Wells on Saturday morning, looking for an engagement ring, they both felt this was the place where they would like to spend their entire married life. It was easy to get to London on the train, and easy to visit her family in Bexhill and his in Hampshire.

  Charles bought her an engagement ring, a beautiful sparkly single diamond. They decided they would get married the following spring. And they would buy a house in Tunbridge Wells.

  They found the house the second time they went to the town. It was called the Old Rectory, a large ramshackle mellow red-brick house with a veranda around the front, and a large overgrown garden. It had a slightly Gothic flavour, with arched windows and a couple of funny little turrets over the bedrooms on either side of the house. Because it was in poor condition inside, they bought it for just £2,000. An absolute snip.

  The wedding had to be delayed, and the easiest and most cost-effective way to get work done on the house was to let some of the tradespeople stay until they’d finished their work. People advised them against this. But in fact it worked like a dream, as they attracted talented, sensitive tradespeople who were not purely motivated by money. The house became like a commune, people coming and going, a fun place full of laughter and music. Charles fixed the price for each job, and Katy ran the house.

  Their neighbours referred to them as ‘hippies’, or ‘flower children’, and remarked that they all slept on mattresses on the floor and believed in free love, but neither Charles nor Katy cared. ‘Peace and love’ was in the air, and they wanted to embrace it.

  It was early in 1968, when the building work was finished, that both Charles and Katy woke up to realize they had to make changes. People were becoming dependent on them, dropping in at any time for advice, meals or a place to sleep. They couldn’t go on being responsible for other people.

  ‘It’s been great fun, but we need to have a purpose in our lives,’ Charles said firmly. ‘We always said we were going to help women escape from violent marriages. I believe that is what we must do. But first we must get married; we’ll buy proper furniture, and become respectable.’

  Katy laughed so much at the ‘respectable’ bit. At work and in court Charles was always that, and no doubt some of their snootier neighbours had been puzzled by the smartly suited man who left the madhouse each day carrying a briefcase.

  Luckily, at that time, they only had one lodger, Tom; everyone else had drifted off on the hippie trails to Morocco, India or Afghanistan.

  Charles explained the situation to him, and Tom took it very well. ‘It’s been a blast,’ he said cheerfully. He had hair down to his shoulders and, in the summer, he wore nothing but a pair of shorts, not even shoes. He had done bricklaying, plastering and some plumbing for them and he’d been with them for nearly a year. ‘But all good things have to come to an end, and you two need time alone again.’

  Tom was right, they did need time alone. They had both been working five days a week in the City, and their weekends were always full of household chores, cooking, organizing building materials, and just listening to other people’s problems.

  They both took time off in March, and spent the whole two weeks looking closely at their house, making lists of things that still needed to be done, itemizing furniture and curtains to buy, and then they spent the rest of the time in bed making love.

  Katy remembered one day sitting outside in the spring sunshine under the cherry tree in full blossom, just looking at their house. They had loved it when they’d bought it, but all this time there had been so many people about, they had been sidetracked and forgotten what the attraction was. They could see it now so clearly: the lovely old red brick, the quirky windows and turrets.

  ‘It’s waiting for a family,’ Katy said. ‘Imagine a pram out on the veranda with a fat brown baby kicking its legs. And a little boy climbing the trees while his bigger sister is on the swing.’

  ‘So three children, is it?’ Charles smiled. ‘Why stop at three?’

  ‘Let’s decide that at a later date,’ she said. ‘Now about the wedding?’

&
nbsp; ‘I thought we’d have it in June,’ Charles said. ‘That gives us time to get everything shipshape here. The garden is beautiful in summer, so we could have the reception out here in a hired marquee and get married in the local church. We’ll get caterers in.’

  It was good to hear Charles making plans again. He had been drifting for some time.

  Jilly came down to see them during that fortnight, and she was very pleased to hear they’d finally seen the light. ‘You filled the house with fun people, we had some memorable parties here, and the very best of times, but now it’s time for just the two of you.’

  Guy had moved in with her in Camden Town, and they too kept talking about getting married, but they never got beyond the talking.

  ‘How many people are you going to invite to the wedding?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ll avoid asking the hippies,’ Charles said with a smirk. ‘They might not leave afterwards.’ He looked at Katy questioningly. ‘Let’s announce that it’s family only, plus our closest friends and a few work colleagues. How does that sound?’

  ‘Just great,’ she said. ‘We can have your two little nieces as bridesmaids because they are cute. And Jilly as matron of honour.’

  That was just how it was. They got the house tidied up, bought proper furniture, and the wedding day went splendidly. Katy wore a very simple, cream satin long dress, and the little bridesmaids and Jilly wore pink. Pat was Charles’s best man, and Albert gave Katy away. Even Edna came up from Broadstairs.

  Yet rattling around in a big house on their own wasn’t really their style. So, soon after the wedding, Katy spoke to the almoner at the local hospital and to a couple of social workers, telling them she was willing to help any women anxious to escape from violent marriages.

  It began with a trickle – one woman and her baby, who only stayed for five nights before returning to her husband – but then it was two, three, and upwards. Sometimes they had as many as eight women, with up to sixteen or so children between them.

  For Christmas of 1968 they had only two mothers, Pat and Gwen, with five children between them. Charles said that to see those children’s joy at opening their stockings and pulling crackers, safe and relaxed, away from their violent fathers, more than made up for the mess and noise they created.

  It gave Katy even greater satisfaction to see Pat and Gwen, two women who had only bonded through shared adversity, become real friends and soon afterwards set up home together with their children. She had a strange feeling that Gloria was looking down and applauding.

  Katy gave up her job in the early part of 1969, as the number of women coming to them grew. Often these women had been badly hurt, and however much they hoped for a secure home, even one room, they needed help and nursing until they were able to cope again.

  Sometimes there were as many as ten children on mattresses in one room, and their mothers were packed like sardines in other rooms, too. Katy would go to jumble sales or beg women’s groups like the WI or Mothers’ Union to donate both children’s and women’s clothing to her, as so often the women fled their homes with nothing more than what they stood up in.

  She became accomplished at persuading greengrocers and bakers to let her have any goods left at the end of the day. By talking to some of the more affluent women in Tunbridge Wells she persuaded them to have coffee morning to raise cash for the cause, too.

  Charles, meanwhile, gave free legal advice to the women who needed it, sometimes reclaiming the family home for them or seeing that their husbands were charged with grievous bodily harm.

  People often remarked that they didn’t understand how Katy and Charles could let their home be taken over by others – meaning, without saying, by women from very rough backgrounds.

  Occasionally Katy would look at Charles and wish he’d say it was time to stop, they’d done their bit. But he wouldn’t because, like her, he felt they must carry on. They were the only safety net for these women. There were a few hostels opening up by then, but Katy heard they were often frightening places, where women would turn on other women. The children had been through enough; maybe it was crowded at the Old Rectory, but it was a real home, and the children soon learned to treat it with respect.

  Katy found it had its rewards too: supporting women like June who, in turn, helped others just as she had once been helped; seeing frightened mothers finally get a safe place of their own to live; knowing they’d shown children that violence in the home is always wrong, and that they weren’t somehow responsible for the bad things.

  Then just before Christmas of 1971 Katy realized she was pregnant. She’d dreamed of it, she’d hoped for it, and had even begun to think her role in life was to be a kind of universal aunt forever.

  ‘Can things get any better?’ she said to Charles the same night she’d told him, as they were going to bed.

  ‘Yes, and they will when we’ve filled this house with kids,’ Charles laughed.

  Now, as Katy sat in the kitchen caressing her bump and thinking about the past, she wondered if Hilda had felt the way she did today, when she was nearly due.

  Oddly enough, for all Hilda’s cantankerous attitude, she had been remarkably enthusiastic about Charles and Katy’s plan to open the house to beaten women. She often came and stayed for a week or so; she would give the older children lessons on cake making, clean everything in sight, and polish the windows till they shone. But the most unexpected thing was seeing her with small babies. She really loved them, and she would rock one in her arms for hours, given the chance. Which was why Katy wanted to know how Hilda had felt when she was due.

  She felt compelled to ring and ask her.

  They had never spoken about Katy’s birth before; Rob’s had been mentioned, but not hers.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Hilda said. ‘It’s not like you to call me in the middle of the afternoon. Are you having pains?’

  ‘No, Mum, I was just sitting here in the kitchen stroking my tummy and talking to the baby, and I wondered if you did that with me.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said, without even a pause for thought. ‘I used to tell you what the weather was like, what I was having for tea. Everything.’

  ‘So you didn’t resent me, then?’

  ‘Of course not. To be honest, in the last weeks of the pregnancy I went into a kind of bubble. I was happy, nothing outside affected me. I had my letters from Albert – he’d tell me all the things we’d do together when he got back. I used to daydream about us walking you in a pram down to the park. Things may have started badly, dear, but once I felt you move inside me, I knew I was going to love you.’

  That was all Katy had wanted to hear. Charles had been right. It didn’t matter who her biological father was.

  After she put the phone down she continued to sit. The kitchen felt cool in the hot weather; the red quarry tiles were a joy to walk on when it was hot, even if they were a devil to polish with Cardinal.

  All at once she felt a great sense of calm wash over her, a feeling that all was right now in her world. She did still watch her neighbours from the upstairs windows, and wonder about their lives. Charles sometimes called her Keyhole Kate, the nosy character in The Dandy comic. Actually, she wasn’t really nosy, she only wanted reassurance that the families in her street had happy lives.

  She and Charles would go on welcoming battered women and their children at the Old Rectory. Maybe they’d only have one or two staying at a time, rather than the hordes they’d had in the past.

  She would invite her mother and father here often – she wanted them to grow close to the new baby.

  She didn’t even think about Ed Reilly any more. That whole sorry saga was one she’d put to bed when he was sent to prison.

  But then she’d been lucky, just as her mother had been. They’d both found good men who didn’t want to bully them, who treated them as equals.

  She stroked her stomach again. ‘If you are a girl, make sure you pick a man like your father,’ she said. ‘And if you are a boy, I’m going to t
rain you to be perfect husband material.’

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Louise Moore and Yasmin Morrissey of Penguin Books for all your help, support and, above all, your boundless enthusiasm. I couldn’t have done it without you both.

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