Read Online One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson - Free Book Online

he saved for something better. He had been as obsessive and crazed as every other house hunter in the city, poring over the property listings, pouncing off the starting blocks like a sprinter for the viewings on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
    He fell in love with the Merchiston house as soon as he walked in the door one misty October day. The rooms seemed as if they were full of secrets and shadows, and the fading afternoon light had shone dully through the stained glass. Opulent , he had thought. He had a vision of how it must have been once, heard it echoing with the laughter of old-fashioned children, the boys wearing striped school caps, the girls in smocked dresses and white ankle socks. The children were conspirators, thinking up merry japes in front of the nursery fire. Everywhere the house was busy with life: a maid who washed and scrubbed willingly—no class resentment—and who sometimes aided and abetted the children in their japes. There was a gardener, and a cook who prepared old-fashioned meals (kippers, blancmanges, cottage pies). And overseeing everything a loving pair of parents, gracious and good-tempered, except when the japes got out of hand, at which time they became stern and solemn arbiters. Father commuted every day and did something mysterious “at the office” while Mother threw bridge parties and wrote letters. On darker days Father was mistaken for a criminal or a spy and the family was forced into temporary hardship and poverty (Mother pulled it all off magnificently), before everything was explained and restored.
    “I want it,” he said to the woman from the solicitor’s office who was showing him around.
    “You and ten other people who’ve put in notes of interest,” she said.
    She didn’t understand that when he said, “I want it,” it wasn’t a simple statement about house buying, about surveying and bidding and paying, it was a cry from the heart for a home. After an itinerant army childhood, a boarding-school adolescence, and a staff cottage on the grounds of the Lake District school, he craved his own hearth. At university he had once done one of those word-association tests for a fellow student’s psychology module, and when he was presented with the word “home,” Martin had drawn a complete blank, a verbal space where an emotion should have been.
    When Harry, his father, retired from the army, their mother had tried to persuade him to return to her native Edinburgh but failed miserably in her mission, and instead they had gone to live in Eastbourne. It turned out (no surprise really) that Harry was temperamentally unsuited to retirement, temperamentally unsuited to living in one place in a solid three-bedroom terrace with a nice white-wood trim, on a quiet street five minutes from the English Channel. The sea held no attraction for him, he took a brisk walk along the beach every morning, but its purpose was exercise rather than pleasure. It was a relief to everyone, especially his wife, when, three years after he retired, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of an argument with a neighbor who had parked his car in front of their house. “He never accepted that it was a public highway,” their mother explained to Martin and his brother, Christopher, at the funeral, as if that was somehow the cause of his death.
    Their mother lacked the will to leave Eastbourne, she had never been someone with any sap, but both Martin and Christopher gravitated back to Scotland (like eel or salmon) and lived about as far as they could get from her.
    Christopher was a quantity surveyor, living beyond his income in the Borders with his neurotic, bitchy wife, Sheena, and their two surprisingly pleasant teenage children. The geographical distance between Martin and his brother was small, yet they hardly ever saw each other. Christopher was uneasy company, there was something stilted and artificial about the way he navigated his route in the world, as if he’d observed