Free The Dream House by Rachel Hore

a search for somewhere to call home.

Chapter 5
     
    July 2003
     
    ‘Who would have thought we had so much stuff?’ Kate said, surveying the wall of boxes waiting in the living room to be stowed in the van. ‘Where in this house did we keep twenty boxes worth of books?’
    ‘No idea,’ said Simon, shaking his head. ‘When I moved here eleven years ago, I got everything in a small Bedford van. One more problem having a wife and two children has added to my life.’
    Moving day had dawned at last – a grey drizzly Wednesday at the beginning of July. In the end, the moving chain had all clicked into place, but the Hutchinsons were having to go earlier than planned. Simon had managed to get today, Thursday, and Friday off, but was expected back in the office on Monday morning for a meeting at nine o’clock sharp.
    A huge removal van had edged its way down Queensmill Road at eight o’clock that morning into the space Kate had pre-arranged with the council. She had spent the previous week piling into cardboard boxes the portion of their clothes, toys and other possessions that they intended to take with them to Joyce’s, storing those boxes out of the way in their bedroom. Today, the removal men were packing up everything else, including all their furniture, and driving it to a storage depot in Beccles. There it would stay until the Hutchinsons found a home of their own.
    ‘Never mind what we’ve got already, I’m going to make you buy a whole lot more,’ Kate teased Simon. ‘Once we find our dream house, this scruffy old suite will have to go, and we’ll need proper garden furniture and a formal dining table and chairs.’
    ‘Remind me to leave my credit card in London then,’ said Simon waspishly. ‘And do you think the kids would notice if we left half their toys behind?’
    ‘Oh yes, they’d notice. Daisy made me promise they’d all go to Granny’s and not into store.’
    ‘Good thing Mother’s got a huge shed then, isn’t it?’
    Tasha had taken Sam and Daisy out for the day – London Zoo was the plan. Later, she was due to take them back to the Longmans’ house where the Hutchinsons would all stay the night, then that would be goodbye.
    Tasha was off with her boyfriend Rob the following Friday for a year abroad. The thrill of it all had not stopped her bursting into tears at various points during the previous week – which had unsettled Sam rather – but she had shown the kids picture books of Australia and promised to send them lots of postcards and bring them back toy koalas. ‘No, I want a crocodile,’ shouted Sam. ‘A biting one.’
    Liz had pleaded to be allowed to throw a farewell party for the Hutchinsons, but Kate had stubbornly refused.
    ‘I can’t face the fuss, Liz, kind of you though it is. The party at the office was ordeal enough and you gate-crashed that.’ The marketing director, Emma, had organized drinks and canapés downstairs at a nearby wine-bar one sultry evening during Kate’s final week, and Kate had been overwhelmed at the large numbers of well-wishers from the office who had squashed into the hot little cellar room in pursuit of free food and drink. She hadn’t been the centre of such attention since her wedding day and, melancholy after too much champagne, she wept copiously on Simon’s shoulder in the taxi home because she was leaving all these lovely people who had insisted on how much they would miss her and had contributed to the generous Habitat token they gave her as a present. The next day they looked at her in the lift as if to say, ‘What, are you still here? I thought we got rid of you last night!’
    ‘No, Liz, we’ll just say goodbye to people individually and slip away. It’s not as though we won’t be seeing everyone lots – we will.’
    And, indeed, there had been a month of going out for drinks or dinner or Sunday lunch with friends and acquaintances. ‘It’s a bit like Christmas,’ joked Simon. ‘There’s this kind of desperation to