Night Music by Jojo Moyes Page B

the little valley as they tramped across the wet gravel to the front door.
    The smell hit them first, the cold, musty odour of long neglect; subtle hints of hidden mould, exposed damp and wet rot mingled with the fresher air of outside. A holdall slung over her shoulder, Kitty let the stench seep into her nostrils with a mixture of appalled fascination and disbelief.
    This was worse than she could possibly have imagined. The hallway was floored in cracked lino, patches of which had worn away to reveal an indeterminate surface underneath. Through an open door she could make out a front room, whose walls were covered with a print that looked as if it dated from the Victorian era, and a rickety painted sideboard of the sort found in a 1950s kitchen. Two windows appeared to have been broken and boarded up, half blocking out the daylight. From the ceiling a wire hung without a fitting, let alone a bulb.
    It didn’t look like a house one could reasonably live in. It didn’t look like a house that had ever been lived in. Now she’ll see, Kitty thought. She’ll have to take us home. There’s no way we can stay here.
    But Isabel gestured to her daughter. ‘Let’s have a look upstairs,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll find the kitchen and make a cup of tea.’
    The two upper floors were barely more reassuring. Several bedrooms appeared to have been shut off for years. The air held the chill of disuse, and in places the wallpaper was peeling away in strips. Only two seemed remotely habitable: the master bedroom, nicotine-yellow, which still contained a bed, a television and two cupboards of tobacco-scented clothes, and a smaller room beside it, which had been decorated in the 1970s, perhaps two or three decades more recently than everywhere else. The bathroom suite was cracked and limescaled, and brackish liquid sputtered from the taps. The landing creaked underfoot, and trails of droppings suggested the presence of mice.
    She’s got to see, thought Kitty, as she and her mother confronted each new horror. She’s got to see that this is impossible. But Isabel apparently didn’t. Every now and then she would mutter something like ‘A few nice rugs . . .’ as if she was talking to herself.
    Kitty counted perhaps three rusting radiators in the whole house. And on the top landing, a piece of the ceiling was missing, revealing a skeletal structure of struts and plaster through which a slow but constant drip made puddles in the bottom of a strategically placed tin bath.
    But it was the kitchen that made Kitty want to weep. If a kitchen was supposedly the heart of a home, this one said the house was unwanted, unloved. It was a long, rectangular room with filthy windows along one side, set a few stone steps down from the ground floor. It was dark and infused with the smell of stale fat. An old range cooker stood beside the sink, its lids dulled, grey and sticky with some unidentified collusion of substances. To the other side of the room there was a free-standing electric stove, not quite as filthy but bearing the same signs of abandonment. There were a few 1950s-style units, but the shelves that lined the walls held a random assortment of cooking implements and packets of food, sprinkled with dust, mouse droppings and the occasional petrified corpse of a woodlouse.
    ‘This is lovely,’ said Isabel, running her fingers along the old pine table in the centre of the room. ‘We’ve never had a decent-sized kitchen table, have we, darling?’
    Above them the removals men thumped and heaved some unidentified piece of furniture. Kitty stared at her mother as if she were mad. The house was like something out of a war zone, Kitty thought, yet her mother was wittering on about pine tables.
    ‘And look,’ Isabel said, from beside the sink, as a tap coughed into life. ‘The cold water’s running clear. I bet it tastes fabulous. Isn’t water meant to be better in the country? I’m sure I read that somewhere.’
    Kitty was too upset to