The Country Escape. Jane Lovering
could find him a new residence before then.
The sun was dropping fast now. September twilight was thicker here where there were no street lights, no nearby conurbations to illuminate the sky. Trees slid into outline; inside the cottage Poppy turned on her bedroom light and a beam of yellow spilled out across the side of the house as I left Patrick to his dreaming and went back in.
One of the reasons – one of the many reasons, I suspected, most of which I hadn’t found yet – that Harvest Cottage hadn’t been snapped up as a holiday home was the awkward crookedness of the layout. It looked as though it had once been a cob and thatch pig house, but added to and extended over the years in a variety of materials, so that it now resembled something that the Weasleys from Harry Potter might have lived in. The north-facing porch, which meant any visitor was incognito in the mossy, damp front entryway, the hallway so narrow that we’d had to post the sofa into the front room through the window, in pieces. The staircase, which, contrary to all convention, didn’t go up against one wall, but was freestanding up the middle of the cottage. Two bedrooms and a bathroom that seemed to have been an original hayloft, all randomly arranged, and beamed in such a way that any quick movements meant a banged forehead and a lot of swearing. I’d already learned to crouch and scuttle around the place, like an obsequious servant. It was bizarre.
But, I reminded myself as I threw some wood into the range cooker to heat up for dinner, it was mine. Luc might not approve of its smallness, but then the man had been brought up in apartments in a chateau, he’d find Buckingham Palace a bit crowded. He probably thought I was mad, moving to Dorset, but here it was affordable and there was countryside. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed countryside until I saw Harvest Cottage. I’d thought I wanted city streets, blue emergency lights and sirens filling up the night; people coming and going at all hours and a Waitrose around the corner. Poppy’s school only a short Tube ride away, all the attractions and occupations of museums and galleries and exhibitions at the weekends.
Whilst here… here was the wind in the trees. Birdsong, grass, and, if you listened very carefully on still nights, the gentle exhalation of the sea moving against the distant cliffs. There was a small bay within walking distance, out of the cottage and across several fields of short-grazed grass and barley stubble, down a steep cliff path. A tiny patch of shingly sand and rock pools, which sloped suddenly to take your feet and leave you bobbing in the icy water, shrieking and gasping. Poppy, of course, loved it. And hadn’t been down there since we moved in.
The range bubbled and I put a pan of stew across its hotplate. The range heated the water for the cottage but made no noticeable dent in the chill that crept across the stone floor as soon as the sun went down, because of the air coming in through the leaky windows. I winced at the draught and made a note that we’d need thick curtains at the very least, before winter. The windows needed replacing, as did both chimneys and one wall, but we’d get through this year first. Once I’d got a job, we could think about renovating the place rather than just redecorating and firefighting the woodlice, who seemed to regard Harvest Cottage as their own personal property and thoroughfare.
The blackbird, in the hedge now, sang the night in. I wondered whether blackbirds ate woodlice.
5
A couple of weeks went past. I held off doing any painting, but did manage to unpack some of the boxes that had travelled with us from London, the contents of which looked horribly urban in this tiny, thick-walled space.
I tried to arrange the asymmetrically striped black and white cushions on the sofa, so that they looked comfortable, rather than like the ‘room accents’ they were bought to be. If this room had an accent, I mused, it would be rural Dorset, not the sharp and edgy that we’d gone for in the two floors of the five-storied old Georgian town house that had provided our accommodation in London. There, bare floors and exposed woodwork was a statement that said, ‘I can afford to cover all this area in lavish carpeting and internal walling, but I am carefully choosing not to.’ In the cottage, bare floors were necessary until we got the damp under control and exposed woodwork was what was left where the paint had flaked off. It was very different. Two of the brambles from the orchard had climbed in through the pantry window and, despite my regularly cutting them off with the scissors, kept infiltrating the shelving, and every time I opened the door it was like The Day of the Triffids. I couldn’t wait for autumn to really get under way and stop the relentless growth.
Patrick was still in the orchard. Apart from one brief text from Gabriel Hunter checking up on him and telling me that the cottage was ‘a possible’ for location work, I’d not heard from him. Poppy continued to hate her new school, doing homework intermittently and, according to the notes in her planner, not really applying herself to any of the subjects she’d chosen to study.
‘I chose last year!’ My accusations that she wasn’t working hard enough were not warmly received. ‘Pasty Greggs was really cool! Now I’ve got Miss Thompson for music and she makes us listen to Beethoven! That’s, like, against my human rights and stuff.’
Poppy had no idea what she wanted to do when she left school. Apart from being a YouTube star, or a vlogger/influencer, there weren’t many careers that interested her, and her monied father’s attitude to life being ‘you can just float around doing what interests you, making little bits here and there and being largely supported by your family’ really wasn’t going to take her very far, unless she was going to specialise in following bands across the country and take A levels in ‘interesting hair colours’.
‘Got an A in French though,’ she pointed out, thrusting a pile of notes under my nose. ‘So, there’s that.’
‘You’ve been bilingual since you could talk – it’s hardly an achievement!’
Poppy sighed. ‘Don’t take it out on me that you’re stuck here all day. I didn’t ask to move to the Depths of Despair, did I? We could have still been in London, you’d have your teaching and I’d be getting all As and still going out with Damien!’
The door refused to slam. It was slightly too big for the frame and had to be dragged across the floor in order to close, but the slam was implicit. ‘And it’s not hormones!’ was her passing shot as she stomped upstairs to a more satisfactorily slam of her bedroom door. ‘You’ve ruined my life!’
I stood under the bare bulb in the living room and took several deep breaths. I’d already had a lengthy phone conversation with a couple of old friends back in town, who had only managed a small amount of sympathy with me; their jobs were over-pressured and fraught and they clearly imagined life in the countryside to be very different from the reality. I really couldn’t ring them back to complain about my teenage daughter. My best friend, Lottie, was struggling with nursery school placements for her small son and juggling her teaching job on top, Arlene was dealing with a sick mother and resentful husband and Basia was on stress leave and contemplating a return to Poland. Here I stood amid the silence of my bought-and-paid-for cottage – a wailing daughter didn’t really score that highly in the tension stakes.
But I wanted to talk to somebody. Apart from some exchanges about the weather in the supermarket in Bridport, and the encounter with Gabriel, I’d barely spoken to a soul since we moved in. Patrick was not a great conversationalist, and had nudged me hard enough to spill my tea when I’d sat on the van steps and tried to interest him in the trials and tribulations of life. So, when my phone rang, I grabbed it with an out-of-proportion gratitude.
‘Ah, there you are.’
The gratitude dissipated quickly in the face of my mother’s disapproving tone.
‘Hello, Ma.’ A long pause. ‘How are you?’
‘I am well.’ Another pause. ‘And you? Are you safely moved to… Dorset?’ The slight gap told me that she’d had to look up my new location, probably in her little red book. ‘I’m just telephoning to tell you that I’m off to Sydney next week, probably won’t be back until Christmas. You know, in case you needed me.’
I perched