Bridge To Eternity

CHAPTER FOUR-1

CHAPTER FOUR

It took a while for Audrey to find the right key and a bit of courage to push open the heavy oak door and enter the dark, echoing hallway. She searched for a light switch and was rewarded by the flickering of a neon strip, incongruous within the Victorian setting. She dragged her suitcases into the hall and pushed the front door to until she heard the latch click in its keep. Immediately, she was subsumed by a pervading silence and a biting chill.

She waited a few moments as her eyes adjusted to the artificial lighting and to stiffen her resolve. Ahead, she knew from the plans she had seen on the agency’s website, was a kitchen and laundry facility.

Leaving her bags in the hallway, Audrey went behind the stairs and followed a dark corridor until she entered a large kitchen which clearly had not seen much modernisation since the Second World War. She found a Bakelite light switch and sent power along old wiring. Neon tubes hummed and flickered into life, illuminating a white tiled room with an ancient cast-iron coal-burning range and a separate hob with six gas rings.

On the far side of the kitchen, below high windows was a deep, ceramic butler sink with separate hot and cold brass taps. Audrey turned on the hot tap, and icy water ran over her fingertips. Next, she checked the hob – there was gas, but no spark to ignite it. She made a mental note to buy a long-stemmed lighter. Prior to completion of the sale, she’d insisted the gas hob was checked by a heating engineer and was pleased to see a gas safety certificate left on the heavily marked, wooden worktop.

The lights flickered, and for a moment Audrey feared she would be spending her first night in darkness. She had not wasted money having the electrical wiring checked as she knew it would not pass muster and needed to be replaced in its entirety.

Off the kitchen in the laundry room, she discovered two 1980s Bendix washing machines. She remembered as a child, her mother had been particularly proud of her Bendix. Audrey tested them both for power and was pleased to see the glow from two dim red lights. She opened the doors and checked the drums. In one, she found a few blue-and-white rugby socks and some strange-looking under garments. Audrey held one up to the light.

‘Interesting. A jockstrap. I think you’ve come to the end of your useful life.’

She emptied all the old clothes out of the drum and onto the floor, closed the door and set both machines to a rinse cycle.

Next, she turned her attention to the boiler. It was a vast oil-fired Paxman, at least fifty years old. Although it had been serviced prior to completion of the sale, the engineer stated in his report that it was not fit for the twenty-first century, and he could not supply a safety certificate. Audrey decided to wait until morning before trying to fire it up. She would definitely need heating when winter set in.

Leaving one suitcase in the hall, Audrey grabbed the lighter of the two and reached for the burnished handrail. Perhaps it was the additional weight of the heavy bag, but each step Audrey took was accompanied by a creak of welcome – or warning – by the old wooden stairs. At the top of the first flight, Audrey was presented with a wall-mounted sign with aged gilt letters stating that the lavatories were to the left. She turned right and headed up a short staircase that led to a long corridor. On her left was a closed, panelled door. She turned the knob and pushed, but the door held fast. In the gloom, Audrey found another light switch, and filaments within a dusty bare bulb hanging from a plaited flex, lit up to provide a dim glow. Out of her handbag, she withdrew the heavy bunch of keys and sighed at the quantity.

‘We have the front door, and possibly the back door.’ She inserted the third key on the bunch and gave it a twist.

‘Well, thank you. Somebody has applied logic.’ She turned the knob and swung the door open, its dust-encrusted hinges groaning.

Fading daylight, through sun-damaged, moth-eaten drapes, revealed a room that was clearly once the house’s grand drawing room. A magnificent, marble fireplace, long since cold, stood against the left wall and was one of the room’s few original features. Bare floorboards, bowed and worn by years of pounding by pupils, squeaked with surprise as Audrey crossed to the window. She attempted to pull open the perished curtains, but the frail material came away in her hands. With her back to the window, she examined the room, deciding whether to make it her base, her bedsitting room.

She looked up and admired the ornate ceiling, with its plaster rose and fancy cornicing, and wished she was sharing the experience with Duncan. Missing him came in waves, and it was at moments like this she felt the pain of loss the most. She yearned for his relaxed company, his wit, his wisdom and, most of all, his love and, she admitted, his love-making. Her sons would not wish to think about that aspect of her life, but Audrey was not prepared to say adieu to one of life’s great pleasures quite yet, although many of her women friends seemed to relish the moment when they could shut down that particular department. Their loss of desire puzzled Audrey; hadn’t they worn the same mini-skirts she had in the 1960s? Hadn’t they stripped off their bras and danced through the summer of love smoking pot to Scott Mackenzie? Hadn’t they spent Saturday afternoons in record shop listening booths swooning to The Beatles, The Stones, The Troggs and The Kinks? How could their tastes have changed so much? Was bridge really better than an enthusiastic husband, even one bolstered by Viagra? Audrey sighed. She loved her friends, but she didn’t miss their endless talk about money, house prices, and ticking off the next item on their bucket list.

The low sun was casting angular shadows across the stark walls as Audrey stared at the fireplace. She could almost hear the chatter of boys, sent away by their parents to an outward-bound school, far from home and far away from anyone who really cared. She shivered at the thought and determined to get on with moving in. She felt the drawing room was too big for a bedroom but ideal for a sitting room which, of course, the original architect had designed it to be.

It took another hour and fifteen minutes of heaving her suitcase and examining various former dormitories before Audrey settled on a room at the top of the house that still had a working ceiling light. Bare floorboards led her eye to a tiled, cast-iron fireplace with a scorched grate. There were four narrow iron beds with thin stained mattresses and a sash window with flaking paint and panes coated with dirt. Although there were no curtains to speak of, Audrey was not concerned as only a passing falcon would be able to spy on her thin frame.

She opened her suitcase, pulled out fresh sheets and made up a bed nearest the door. She searched the room for blankets and found a pile in a high cupboard above a bookcase full of classic-looking dusty tomes, clearly overlooked by cleaners for decades.

Audrey selected a blanket from the pile, and when shaking it out, she noticed a faded crest identifying the school: Hawksmead College. She placed the blanket on her top sheet but decided one was not going to be enough. She pulled down several more that she discarded as they had moth holes but found one in the middle of the pile that looked good enough for the time being, until she could buy a duvet. She was just unfolding it when she heard something drop on the floor. She looked down and, to her horror, saw her gold wedding ring roll along a floorboard towards the window. Unable to move fast enough, she watched it reach a gap between the boards and slip from sight.

Audrey dropped the blanket and rushed to the spot where the ring had disappeared. She put her eye to the gap, but the light was too poor for her to see. She got back up and looked around for her handbag. In it, she retrieved her phone and went back to the spot where she had last seen her ring. She turned on the phone’s torch and shone it between the boards. Light reflected from several sixpences, shillings and decimal coins that had obviously met the same fate as her ring. Although the narrow light beam did not pick out her ring, she was confident it would be safe until she could get the floorboards lifted.

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