Free After the Fall by Charity Norman Page B

Kit.
    Allan squinted skywards, calculating. ‘About twenty acres—I’ll show you the boundary later. It’s leased to your neighbours and they’re happy to carry on the arrangement if you don’t want the malarkey of running stock yourselves. There’s a dam—that’s a pond to you. Yards and a woolshed up here. They’re pretty run-down, but the house has been reroofed in the last five years.’ He smacked his hand against the doorframe. ‘It’s solid.’
    He watched unsurprised as a hen—feral, presumably—scurried out from behind a scrubby bush and sprinted under the house. The twins shrieked and tore after it, but Allan didn’t even comment. ‘The original station ran all the way to the sea.’
    He stood back to let us in. Charlie and Finn abandoned their chicken hunt and hurtled into the cool interior. I heard the demented clattering of feet on stairs. Sacha followed, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
    The place made me think of Gone with the Wind : high ceilings, wooden panelling and prehistoric plumbing. It had polished floors and a wide staircase for flouncing down in a red taffeta frock. The back door led into a kitchen with grim 1970s lino, a pantry and a laundry. Upstairs, three of the five bedrooms opened onto a balcony that ran right along the front, looking out to sea. The boughs of a spreading magnolia touched this balcony, even scraping the roof. Directly below, a deep verandah edged two sides of the house. It called for wicker chairs and potted ferns; for sundowners and a gramophone playing into the night.
    ‘Cold,’ warned Kit, resting his hand flat on the kitchen wall. ‘It’s just made of wood, really. No central heating.’
    ‘No insulation either,’ said Allan, who clearly thought us off our rockers. He hadn’t given up hope of selling us a concrete cake tin in suburbia. ‘This stuff on the wall is called scrim. It’s not even plaster. You’re looking at building materials from the eighteen hundreds.’
    We heard the squeak of the twins’ jeans as they slid down the banisters. ‘We’ve bagged our bedroom,’ declared Finn.
    ‘Did you see those smaller trees right beside the verandah?’ asked Allan. Crouching down to the boys’ height, he cupped his hand and spoke in a stage whisper. ‘Be covered in lemons later. Great for fights. And the best thing— don’t tell Mum—is you have to pee on’em sometimes! They love the nitrogen.’ The conspirators sniggered and sneaked outside to fertilise the lemon trees. I followed Allan across the hall and into a large sitting room. Sacha was standing in a bay window, one knee resting on the red velvet cushions of a window seat. The room was dominated by a heady cacophony of scents: a century of wood polish, wet grass and a strong, exquisite fragrance that turned out to be daphne bushes in flower.
    ‘The parlour,’ said Allan. ‘In the early days they would have kept this for best.’
    Sacha looked thoughtfully across a bedraggled orchard, piling her hair up on her head. ‘Horses,’ she said. ‘There, see?’
    Following her pointed finger, I spotted five horses way up on the northern side of the valley, grazing peacefully beside a stand of Lombardy poplar.
    ‘Why all the imported trees?’ I asked Allan. ‘Walnut, beech, poplar.’
    ‘Those early settlers were homesick. They brought as much of the Old Country with them as they could. Mind you, most of it should have been left at home. Gorse and blackberry—to say nothing of rats, cats, dogs, ferrets, rabbits . . . Tragic, really.’ I reckon Allan was a bit of an eco-warrior under his Jimmy Neutron hairdo. He jabbed his chin at a fence. ‘Tennis court over there. Seen better days, but nothing a bit of white paint won’t fix.’
    Sacha let her hair go, and caramel ringlets cascaded around her face. ‘The boys would love it here.’
    ‘What about you, though?’ I asked her. ‘It’s miles from town, from friends, clubs and things. You’ll have a long bus ride to