The Country Escape. Jane Lovering

      2

      I have no idea how I managed to get Poppy to leave off cuddling the horse and go to school. She probably decided it was better to go and be able to boast about the pony that turned up in her field, than to stay at home with her mother being heavily disapproving at her. Either way, she dragged her uniform on and went to stand in the lane, where the minibus picked her up, together with a bunch of others from local farms, and dropped them all down in the village of Christmas Steepleton, from where they were all collected by the larger school bus. It was, as Poppy repeatedly told me, ‘a drag’, and if I’d been any kind of mother I wouldn’t have removed her from her natural London habitat. Where her Starbucks addiction and her desire to try on every outfit in Oxford Street had been close to bankrupting me, but I hadn’t mentioned that. I’d just told her that her dad and I finalising the divorce meant that the flat had to be sold, and the amount of money it gave me had just about been enough to buy Harvest Cottage and move to the Dorset coast.

      Guilt, I told myself. Not just the thing making the outside of that inexplicable deserted caravan shiny. I looked out of the kitchen window, where the sun was busy highlighting the fact that nobody had dusted or cleaned for what looked like a decade, across into the orchard. The pony was grazing as though he hadn’t seen grass for weeks, although the width of him indicated he’d been extremely well fed up to this point. His black ears stuck up from the overlong grass that hid the rest of his face, looking like two skinny crows having a conversation, and the rest of his black-and-white-patched body seemed relaxed. I had a brief thought about laminitis, reasoned it was too late in the year for him to be affected, and went back to cleaning. He wasn’t doing any harm, and it was possible that the caravan’s occupant had just popped down to Steepleton to get some shopping. My lane was on the way, sort of, if you didn’t mind squeezing between the overhanging oaks that lined it, before it climbed up and over the hill to join the main road and begin a final – and, in a horse-drawn caravan, probably fatal – drop down into the village. In the other direction lay another steep descent, a narrow ford and then miles of meandering grey tarmac, broken by weeds and salted with farm trackways, before it met the Bridport road.

      Yes, that would be it. Someone had gone shopping and hadn’t realised that Harvest Cottage was now occupied. After all, it had been empty for nearly five years, apparently, following a disputed bequest. Nobody had technically owned it, so nobody could sell it, and it had sat here in its damp fold in the Dorset hills with dereliction becoming an increasing likelihood. Once the whole ‘who inherited the cottage’ had been sorted out, it had hit the market just at the point that Luc and I had sold the flat. I’d been left with my half of the proceeds, enough to outright buy the little place. Luc had… actually, I wasn’t entirely sure what Luc had done with his half. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need to know. We were divorced. We only needed contact to talk about Poppy.

      I suddenly realised that I’d been scrubbing so hard that I’d washed a layer of paint off the kitchen wall to reveal that a previous owner had thought that pale green was a suitable colour scheme for a room that already let in bilious levels of light. It would have been like cooking inside someone’s hangover. I tipped the bucket of filthy water down the sink, which gurgled in a way that let me know that blockages were probably only a carelessly disposed-of teabag away, and saw the pony bring his head up sharply from the knee-level grass. He was staring around the corner, towards what was only my front door because it was at the opposite end of the cottage to the kitchen door.

      There came a couple of raps on the woodwork. I was sure the windows rattled through the whole building.

      ‘That had better be caravan person,’ I muttered, wiping my hands down my front because I hadn’t found the kitchen towel yet. ‘And they can just pack that bloody animal up and go.’

      I realised that the knocker had clearly thought the cottage was uninhabited when I threw open the door and the figure, shadowed by the overgrown blackcurrant bushes, jumped. ‘Bloody hell, it’s haunted!’

      ‘No, it isn’t. You knocked, I opened the door. Why would you knock if you didn’t think anyone was here?’

      ‘Politeness?’ The voice was male, but the darkness of the combination of undergrowth, overhang and the fact I’d come from a brightly lit room to the shadowy front of the cottage, meant that he was just an outline. ‘I’ve come about the caravan.’

      ‘No need.’ I was already turning away. ‘Just hitch up your horse and go, and I’d appreciate it if you’d remember that I live here now and didn’t really like waking up to your horse eating my lawn.’

      It wasn’t, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, a lawn. But I thought it made me sound suitably disgruntled with cause.

      ‘Er, okay.’ The man shuffled from foot to foot. ‘Only I think we’ve got a problem.’

      I turned back and squinted at him. ‘My only problem is that there’s about fourteen hands of piebald eating my garden. Maybe you’d like to remove him? Before he gets as far as the rhubarb?’

      There was an oppressively sweet smell from the branches that had been crushed by the man’s passage up the garden path from the tiny front gate. It smelled a little like cat pee mixed with jam and I reminded myself to find out what kind of hellish horticulture was planted near the gate, and rip it out. Eventually.

      ‘That’s kind of the problem.’ The man had a trace of a Dorset accent, still alien to my London-attuned ears. ‘It’s not my van. It belongs to Granny Mary, but she was taken ill last night, passing by this place. She stopped and put Patrick in your paddock before she called an ambulance, but she’s up to Bridport hospital and they think she’s had some kind of stroke. She called me and asked me to come and check up on Patrick. I wonder if you’d mind keeping an eye on things until she can get back to pick it all up?’

      Oh, Lord. Maybe this was why my Streatham friends – none of whom had visited yet, despite the fact that they’d all said they’d come down for weekends – had warned me about life in the sticks. All this ‘up in everyone’s business’?

      ‘Look, I’m not sure…’

      ‘It’s Patrick, really. I don’t know how bad this stroke is – she’s still communicating but I think it would take more than that to shut Mary up. I had her on the phone for an hour this morning to make sure I knew what to do. In fact, I think even death would have a tough job slowing Mary down. I reckon she’ll be running round Steepleton as a corpse, trying to make sure everything goes her way.’ There was a pause. ‘Yeah, that’s not a great image, now I come to think of it, sorry.’

      A blackbird sang into the resulting silence.

      ‘Well, I’m sorry, but the horse can’t stay.’ I wiped my hands down my front again. ‘We’ve