He padded down to the kitchen and it was only when he was there that he turned on the light. A half-empty bottle of single malt and a glass with an inch of water from melted ice stood on the counter, accusing him. He had let Gemma go to bed ahead of him, saying he had wanted to catch up with his emails – which was true. But it had also been an excuse to squeeze a few last drops of pleasure out of the weekend. If he were one of his patients, he would interrogate himself as to how much he was drinking. And like most of his patients, he would lie.
He flicked the kettle on and set about making himself a cup of coffee. If he turned on the grinder, he would only wake up the entire house. He would have to make do with instant. It didn’t matter. Was it too early for a cigarette? He hadn’t told Gemma that he was smoking again, but he wasn’t going outside, barefoot, in his pyjamas. He waited for the kettle to boil. Forget the endless paperwork, the patients and his room at the surgery that backed on to the A316 with the traffic rushing past and the smell of exhaust fumes. Don’t worry about Mrs Leigh. What mattered right now was the driveway used by all the residents of Riverview Close. Think about the meeting! It was happening tonight: a chance to come face to face with Giles Kenworthy and settle all the grievances that had been mounting up from the day their new neighbour had arrived. The noise, the parties, the ugly camper van, the smoke from the BBQs – but worse than all of these, the shared driveway. It had become an obsession with him. He knew it was ridiculous, but he was sure the challenge of getting in and out of it was the real reason why Richmond felt so alien to him.
Everything had been fine when he bought Gardener’s Cottage, the second-largest house in the close. Or rather, when Gemma had bought it. It was her money that had made it possible, her success as a jewellery designer running an international business with boutiques in London, Paris, New York and Dubai. The three-storey house stood on the side furthest away from the entrance. To reach it, you drove through the automatic gate, past a line of terraced cottages and then round the top of a circle of grass and flower beds in the centre of the courtyard: effectively a roundabout with its own one-way system. Everyone travelled anticlockwise.
Things became more complicated, though, as Dr Beresford approached his own home. There were three garages in Riverview Close and, perhaps sensibly, the architects had built them out of sight, round the backs of the houses to which they belonged. The problem for Dr Beresford was that he shared a narrow driveway which led off from the roundabout and ran a short distance between the side of Gardener’s Cottage and the garden wall that belonged to Riverview Lodge before coming to a fork at the end: left for the Beresfords, right for the Kenworthys. Both families used this same stretch of gravel to reach their garages, but if Giles Kenworthy parked outside his own garage, it made it almost impossible for Dr Beresford to drive past and enter his.
The Kenworthys, who had come to Riverview Lodge seven months ago, had a two-car garage of their own. Unfortunately, they owned four cars. As well as the Porsche, there was a Mercedes, a Mini Cooper driven by Lynda Kenworthy and a Pontiac LeMans cabriolet, an absurd (and wide) classic car from the seventies. They had also parked a white VW camper van in the space next to their garage. It had never moved from the day it had arrived and for Dr Beresford it had become a skulking monster that he couldn’t help noticing every time he went into his bathroom.
Giles Kenworthy worked in finance, of course. He was one of those people who made money out of money but did nothing for anybody around them. He didn’t save lives, for example, or go into schools to lecture children on healthy eating. But that wasn’t what bothered Tom Beresford. It was the man’s extraordinary sense of entitlement, his utter lack of kindness or empathy. How many times had Tom explained he needed to get in and out whenever he wanted, that he might have to reach his surgery for an emergency? Kenworthy always had an excuse. It was late. I was in a hurry. I was only there for half an hour. You could have got past. But he never listened.
Tom Beresford had taken legal advice. As it happened, one of his neighbours – Andrew Pennington – was a retired barrister and he had examined the management contract they had all signed. The entire driveway, including the section that led to the two garages, belonged to all six houses in the close, meaning that any costs for its maintenance and repair were divided between them. Burrow into the small print and you would discover that everyone was legally obliged ‘to be considerate and not block the driveway from other users’. But what did that mean, exactly? How did you prove a lack of consideration? And if one person was being wilfully obstructive, what could you do about it? Andrew Pennington had advised patience and negotiation.
But it was driving Tom Beresford mad.
He went over to the kitchen window and pressed his face against the glass, looking obliquely out. He saw it at once, exactly where he had expected it to be: facing his garage, its bright green backside visible where the front wall ended, jutting into the middle of the drive. The rage he felt at that moment was almost physical, a wave of nausea and tiredness that shuddered through him. Much of it was caused by his work, the twins, Mrs Leigh, the form-filling, the hours, the bills, the complete helplessness, the sense of being adrift in his own life. But above all it was Giles Kenworthy’s car. It wasn’t fair. He had spent his entire life helping other people. How could one man treat him with such contempt?
They were going to meet tonight. Everyone who lived in Riverview Close. There was to be a reckoning.
For Tom Beresford, it couldn’t come soon enough.
3
Despite its name, Riverview Close had no view of the River Thames.
It stood in the grounds of a former royal residence, Rievaulx Hall, built in 1758 for Jane Rievaulx, a less well-known mistress of King George II. According to contemporary reports, the original house was something of a rarity: a Palladian villa that managed to be asymmetrical and ugly. It was perhaps no surprise that its architect, William de Quincey, eventually died in a prison that, by coincidence, he had also designed. Nothing remained of the old house. It had been damaged by fire in the early nineteenth century, left abandoned for almost a hundred and fifty years and finally bombed in 1941 by the Luftwaffe, who had done the entire neighbourhood a favour by getting rid of what had become a well-known eyesore. At some time during all this, Rievaulx had been distorted into Riverview, either because the locals had no time for fancy French names or simply because they were unable to spell it properly.
What had been left of the estate was an irregular patch of land just off the Petersham Road, separated from the River Thames by a thick ribbon of woodland, with the towpath on the other side and no glimpse of the water, not even in winter when the branches were bare. Even so, the misnomer had stuck and when the area was finally developed with six new houses, the largest of them standing in the footprint of the original villa and two others built where the gardener’s cottage and the stables had been, Riverview Close was what it was called.
The architects had decided on a deliberately picturesque design using traditional stock brick that might have characterised an English village, along with Dutch gables, sash windows and plenty of flowers and shrubbery to help the new owners forget that they were on the edge of a major city and, indeed, in the modern world. Once the gate swung shut, the close lived up to its name in every respect. It was a tightly knit community. In fact, it was almost hermetically sealed. Yes, you could still hear the traffic crawling up and down Richmond Hill – particularly in the morning and evening rush hours. But the sound was counterbalanced by birdsong, the whirr of weekend lawnmowers, the occasional snatch of Bach or Sidney Bechet through an open window. Everyone knew each other. Everyone got on.