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Chapter 1
‘What do you think, Dad?’
‘Well, I will have to talk it over with your mother.’
Alice raised her eyebrows, wondering what was going on as she headed to the front door and picked up a letter the postman had put through the letterbox. She glanced into the lounge as she passed by. Jeffrey was standing with his back to the door talking to their daughter, Freya. She cast her gaze down at the letter. It was from another estate agent vying for their custom. No sooner had they instructed an estate agent to sell their home than all the local agencies had got wind of it. Alice stopped a few paces from the lounge and stared at the letter, thinking of a recent conversation she’d had with her only child.
‘Why can’t I be like you?’ Freya had said.
‘Because everything, including marriage, involves work, and you’ve never really wanted to work a day in your life,’ she’d replied.
She rolled her eyes at the memory. She’d regretted what she’d said the moment it came out of her mouth. It wasn’t true. Much to Alice and her husband’s surprise, Freya had followed in her mother’s footsteps and taken a degree in archaeology and anthropology. She’d continued beyond either Alice or her husband’s qualifications and earned herself a master’s degree. She was now doing a research thesis on the Middle East for a PhD. What Alice had meant by that comment about being workshy was that Freya still hadn’t got a full-time job, and she was in her mid-twenties. She had volunteered at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge while doing her thesis, but she wasn’t interested in a teaching position.
‘Then what are you interested in?’ Alice had barked at her one day. The expectation was that with her qualifications she would go into teaching.
‘I don’t know. I want to do something exciting like go on archaeological digs in the Middle East and have adventures and make discoveries,’ Freya had replied.
Alice remembered thinking that Freya hadn’t changed. She sounded like a nine-year-old. But then again, Alice recalled being where Freya was now, imagining she’d be on an archaeological dig in Egypt, unearthing something amazing, like an undiscovered Egyptian tomb. What she’d found instead was a fellow teacher, her husband Jeffrey, and a job teaching classical civilisation at the local high school. It was awful to diminish people’s dreams, but she wondered when Freya would realise that at some point she’d have to get her head out of the clouds and find an ordinary job like everyone else.
Alice sighed. She’d thought Freya had turned a corner when she’d met Theo, a newly qualified solicitor working at a law firm in London. He’d been on a stag do in Cambridge with a friend, the groom-to-be who lived in the town, when he’d bumped into Freya in the street. He’d been drunk. It hadn’t been the most auspicious start, but the next time they’d met had been at his best friend’s wedding. It had turned out that Cambridge was a small world for Freya and Theo; they had a mutual acquaintance – the bride-to-be. And so, like all good romances, their relationship had started at a wedding. It wasn’t long before they’d moved into a flat together and Freya had found a job. It was only part-time, but it meant she could continue her studies and they could save for their own wedding.
Then disaster had struck. Theo had been made redundant, their savings had run out, and they’d had to give up their flat. With his parents living hundreds of miles away in Spain, and the bills mounting up, the only option had been to move in with Freya’s mum and dad two months ago. Now, Alice felt railroaded into a decision that was not of her choosing – selling the family home to give her daughter and future son-in-law that all-important deposit to get on the property ladder once they both had full-time jobs.
But then again, how could she say no? Their house in Cambridge, which they’d purchased over thirty years earlier, soon after they’d both qualified in teaching, was now worth a lot of money, even though they hadn’t updated it in years. After a splurge in the eighties, the kitchen, bathroom, and their old furniture were now very dated. The problem for Alice was that things were moving at a pace she hadn’t imagined when they’d marketed the house just a month earlier.
Secretly, she had been hoping they wouldn’t get a buyer. It had shocked her when an offer had appeared on the table within a day of their first viewing. Had they put the property on the market priced too low? That had been her first thought. But the estate agent had reassured her that if there was lots of interest, then a potential bidding war was possible.
Alice didn’t like the thought of a bidding war. It sounded very cut-throat – not at all how they had bought the house. She remembered that they’d had two viewings with a lovely family member whose mother had passed away. It had all been very laid back. They had put in an offer a week after their second viewing, having mulled over all the pros and cons. The offer had been accepted, and the process had begun. No bidding wars, or gazumping, or investors to compete with. Just a family home being sold to a young couple starting out in life, looking forward to their future and raising a family in the house.
Jeffrey was hoping to get enough money out of the house sale to give their daughter a good leg-up on to the property ladder. Alice didn’t disagree. But she was wondering what they would get out of the sale. Where would they live? And how much money would they set aside from the sale for a new home and their retirement? They were only sixty, and they had always known that they had the house to fall back on and sell to fund their retirement plans, although she’d always hoped it wouldn’t come to that – and she hadn’t thought they’d be funding their daughter in their lifetimes.
Alice smiled at Theo, who was emerging from the kitchen eating a slice of toast. At least that was one bright spot on the horizon. ‘Job interview?’ She looked him up and down. Alice was so used to seeing her daughter’s fiancé in jogging pants and a t-shirt that she did a double-take. Theo was wearing a suit jacket and tie.
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m hoping this is the one.’
Her smile faded. Unfortunately, she’d heard that one before. A newly qualified solicitor, he’d been made redundant from his first job as the firm restructured. It was a case of first in, first out. His small redundancy payout had kept them going, along with Freya’s wage from her new part-time job at the museum where she had previously volunteered.
‘Good luck.’
Theo finished his slice of toast and Marmite as he walked upstairs. He still had jogging bottoms on, but the interviewers wouldn’t know that. The first round wasn’t being done face to face, but online. Alice shook her head. How things had changed. In her day, when she had first started out at work, she recalled going along to just one formal interview for a position.
Alice glanced at the briefcase by the door and frowned. Some people might imagine there were legal papers in that case. She knew better. Theo volunteered for a charity, doing pro bono work. It was something he was passionate about. He often said that if he won the lottery, that was what he’d do full-time – use his legal knowledge for the benefit of others without worrying about a wage.
In between his pro bono work, which she knew he enjoyed, Theo fancied himself as a writer. Alice shook her head as she watched him walk up the stairs. She thought he should consign that dream to a point in the future, even to retirement, when he could afford to spend time writing.
Alice could speak from experience – not hers, but Jeffrey’s. Her husband had dreamed of being a novelist before he settled down and faced reality; very few writers made any money, let alone earned a full-time wage from their endeavours. The trouble was that the news always highlighted the rare exceptions who hit the big leagues with their break-out novel. Alice knew it was her husband who encouraged Theo’s interest in writing – Jeffrey’s teaching career had been in creative writing.
Alice hadrecently retired from teaching after her subject, classical civilisation, had all but disappeared from the curriculum, along with the dwindling number of secondary school students who wanted to study it. When she was still teaching, her hobbies in her spare time had been her pets and painting. She had always left work at the school gate.
Her dream to pursue a career in archaeology had been left behind completely. With few lecturing positions available, and a reluctance on her part to commit to further study once she and Jeffrey had bought their house (even though she’d known back then that she wouldn’t get a position at a university without at least a master’s degree), she’d taken a teaching post as a stopgap. It had turned into anything but. She had fallen into teaching in a secondary school, and that had been where she’d stayed, although it wasn’t something she’d naturally enjoyed.
Her husband’s career had been another story.He had desperately wanted to be a writer. He’d had a book of short stories published, but that was it. In an argument years earlier, when he was struggling with his first novel and coming to the realisation that it would never happen, she’d thrown the old saying at him, ‘Those who can’t, teach.’ He wasn’t cut out to be a novelist.
Teaching creative writing had therefore seemed especially apt in her husband’s circumstances. It had started out as a temporary job. In the end, it had become a career he loved, with a little bit of regret thrown in that he would never be a writer of the material he taught.
Jeffrey still taught creative writing part-time at a local further education college, and he’d been the first to encourage their daughter’s boyfriend to write when he’d got to know Theo and realised he was a kindred spirit.
Alice wished Jeffrey hadn’t planted an impossible dream in Theo’s head. She stared wistfully up the stairs, thinking about Freya. To get a mortgage, the young couple were reliant on Theo getting his foot back in the legal door. Her daughter wasn’t getting a full-time job any time soon. Unlike Alice, Freya was pursuing her dream of becoming an archaeologist. From BA to MA, she was now registered for an MPhil in Archaeology at Cambridge, with the intention of progressing on to complete a PhD.
