A cottage full of secret.., p.20
A Cottage Full of Secrets, page 20
‘Over the top,’ Euan said, slightly grimly.
‘It’s not that bad.’ I put my mug down. ‘And I’m here to hold your hand.’
Euan stood too. ‘Figuratively?’ he asked. ‘Or literally?’
I reached out and gently removed some of the dead leaves from his hair. ‘Oh, both, I think. Don’t you?’
His body was firm with the fitness of walking miles across undulating fields, and the beardy stubble was soft against my face as he put both arms around me and held me while his lips made very definite contact with my mouth. It started as a soft and fleeting kiss but developed into something deep and hot until I was enveloped in a kind of pulsing darkness. I had my eyes closed but little purple lights kept bursting behind my eyelids and my breath was catching so far down my throat that it didn’t feel as though it was leaving my lungs at all. If it hadn’t been for the knowledge that Jonty and Mike were poised and ready for Euan out in the paddock, I would have hurled myself backwards onto the kitchen table and stripped.
‘Better get out there,’ I finally broke off to whisper. ‘Jonty’s wound up ready.’
‘He’s not the only one,’ was the slightly gruff reply. ‘Hell’s teeth, Tamzin, you pick your moments.’
‘Go on.’ I gave his shoulder a slight push. ‘I’m following with Brack. He’s going to get all twitchy at the sight of the camera, so I’ll need to get him settled. Go and be professional.’
‘Professional. Yes.’ Euan took a couple of very deep breaths. ‘Right.’ He turned and headed for the door, then stopped. ‘Tamzin…’
‘What?’ I was hunting for Brack’s lead amid the maps and papers that Katie had left piled on the side. When I looked up, he was watching me with a very slight smile.
‘Nothing.’ And Euan was gone, slipping out of the back door with the silent, fluid movement that reminded me of foxes, of deer, of hares running across fields with the wind.
I smiled to myself and carried on searching. Katie had started sorting papers chronologically; maps were interspersed with photographs and census results in a fault zone of layers sliding into one another. The picture of Stella cooking in this kitchen slithered to the floor and I bent to pick it up, twisting it to meet the light as I did so. Whenever I’d looked at this picture before, I’d concentrated on the kitchen, being most interested in its ‘then and now’ differences. Stella had just been the centrepiece, the reason for the photograph, in her enveloping apron and wielding the laundry tongs. With her stretched smile and her worried expression that looked, to my prejudiced eye, as though she’d been bullied into having her photo taken. Had I read my own past into hers?
But now, with my concentration and the glinting rays of the sun coming full in at the window, I thought I saw something else on Stella’s face. It looked very much as though there was a fading bruise on her cheek.
Survivor knows survivor.
‘Please be happy now,’ I whispered to the picture. ‘Please be living in a thatched cottage with a brood of grown-up children visiting you every weekend.’ My fingers were so tight around the flimsy card that they were bending it. ‘Don’t let him have won.’
‘Tamzin!’ Jonty was calling over the fence. ‘We’re ready for the fox!’
I found Brack’s lead and snapped it on. He trotted along with me eagerly enough when I opened the door, with his nose up, wrinkling and flaring as he scented the air. Jonty was keen to make the three-legged fox a star, so his hoppy trot across the garden from the back door was being filmed from Euan’s patio with a long lens. Fortunately, I didn’t need to feature as more than a pair of legs. I had the feeling that my contribution to Brack’s continued welfare was probably going to be airbrushed out of history by Jonty, and they’d make it sound as though Euan had hand-raised the fox, but I didn’t really mind. Brack would be famous in his own way and if… no, not if, when, I had to tell myself sternly… when Brack went to Nicola’s animal sanctuary, he would be a publicity magnet.
Out in the garden, with Euan being filmed sketching away, leaning on the fence that separated our properties, Brack looked restless. He kept looking up, scenting the air and prowling, obviously eager to slip his harness and leg it for the dangerous lure of other foxes and life in the wild. When filming was over and Jonty and Mike had packed everything back into the Land Rover and popped in for yet more tea, I knew it was time.
I rang Nicola, feeling as though I was betraying my best friend. After the call, I had to go and stand outside for a while, staring into the hedge and trying not to cry. It was the best thing. Of course it was. He needed more than I could give him. But I loved him. And I had nothing else.
‘Hey.’ Euan was suddenly there, standing beside me.
‘It’s going to be so empty without him.’ I didn’t look at Euan. I didn’t want to see sympathy because it would break me into a weeping heap, and I worried I might go back on my decision.
Euan leaned his back against the garden wall behind us and followed my gaze. ‘You could get a dog,’ he said. ‘I had a spaniel once. Sarah hated him.’
‘I’m not ready for a dog,’ I said. ‘I need to get rid of the smell of fox first.’
‘Hmmm.’ Then he was in front of me, just a shadow with the sun behind him. ‘It’s the right thing, Tamzin. You know it is. For him and for you, but it just doesn’t feel like it yet.’
‘I know.’ My voice was tiny and choked.
‘We’ll do it together. Tomorrow, you said?’
‘Yes.’ Still very quiet, the word came out with a few tears. ‘I can’t keep him safe any more.’
‘Tamzin.’ The bulk of the hug was comforting. The smell of the outdoors came more strongly from Euan than from the actual outdoors around me. His skin smelled of crushed grass and ditches and his hair of leaves and blossom. ‘We can still visit him. He won’t forget you, you know that.’
My only answer was a little squeak. I was crying too hard to find any words, but crying into Euan’s green coat was infinitely better than crying alone.
‘Come on.’ Euan tugged at my sleeve.
‘Where?’ I gradually unpeeled myself from his front, wiping my face on my forearm and trying not to look as though I was composed entirely of snot and redness. I was so far past wanting to make a good impression on Euan that it wasn’t even a distant memory, but I still had some pride left.
‘Just come.’ And he was away, walking off up the lane.
‘But Katie will wonder…’
‘Katie will think we’ve gone up to the woods for an undisturbed shag. Anyway, she’s packing, didn’t you see her? I think she’s got a date with Jonty down in town and he’s muttering something about wanting an assistant for the rest of the week, when they go down to Wales.’
I found myself hurrying after him, scuffling through the mud ridges of the track, where the tractors had left patterns in the earth like the marks of a giant snake’s passing. ‘But she’s a genetic counsellor! What does she know about assisting a wildlife film unit?’
Euan stopped suddenly and turned around. ‘You and I made complete changes to get away,’ he said, quietly. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’
‘Oh.’ I stood for a second, listening to the cacophony of birdsong from the hedges and trees. There was no other sound, just nature, being loud. ‘Yes. You’re right.’
‘Of course I am.’ He gave me a dark sort of smile. ‘It’s nice to know I can be, now.’
One day, I thought, as we started off up the hill again, one day he’d tell me. In dribs and drabs, little fragments of the mosaic of a life, we’d share what had been done to us; what had made us into the people we were. But for the present, the people we were now was enough.
‘This way.’ Euan helped me squeeze through a hedge and we followed it down, the ditch now green with weedy water, down to where the channel poured into a gulley, dropping several feet in a waterfall of liquid mud. We crossed here and plunged into the wood at the bottom of the valley.
‘Where are we going?’ I whispered. There was something about this cathedral of trees, now they had leaves that blocked the sky, that made me feel I wasn’t quite welcome.
‘Just this way. Now, stop here.’ Euan waved me into a space behind a particularly prickly holly bush, and motioned at me to keep down. He crept on a few paces and pulled a handful of something from his pocket, cast it out onto the mossy woodland floor a few metres ahead of himself, and then dodged back behind the bush with me.
‘Very good,’ I whispered. ‘Lovely throwing action.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But why… oh.’ Quietly, as though they’d been there all along and were just coming into focus, a badger and a fox appeared. ‘It’s like The Animals of Farthing Wood!’ I hissed, delighted.
‘Sssssh.’
The badger was looking at the fox in grumpy acknowledgement, like a resident of a town looking at a tourist. The fox ignored the badger and started rooting around whatever Euan had thrown, gobbling eagerly, until the badger, clearly worried that he was missing out, also began nosing through the moss and snuffling up edibles. After a minute or two, the badger stomped off to be surly elsewhere and the fox sat back and stretched. Then it yipped, a high, imperative call and, after a second, a succession of small furry heads popped up from the far side of the clearing. Three half-grown cubs and another adult fox leapt down from beneath the roots of a tree and joined the first fox, sniffing out any leftover scatterings and rolling after one another in the lengthening shadows of early evening.
‘This is how Brack should live,’ Euan whispered. ‘And he can, at Nicola’s. She’s got the space, the other foxes.’
I watched as the darkness shaded their fur. Five foxes, eating, playing, communicating. Euan was right. This was what Brack would have. I shouldn’t feel guilty, he wouldn’t miss me at all, it would just be me missing him, and I could deal with that.
‘Come on. We’ll go back.’ Gently Euan pulled me from the bush, raking my skin with holly prickles as I went, and we clumped our way back through the now-dark woodland and the mud. The moon was rising over the stomach of the hill as we emerged back into the field and two deer were highlighted by its white light. They raised their heads and looked at us, then bounded away in high leaps until all we could see were their pale rumps curvetting along the hedge-line and then vanishing through the undergrowth. The moors rose to the sky on the horizon, but I didn’t see them as threatening now. They were just more scenery, more of the things that contributed to making Euan who he was.
The cottages stood proud on the hill as we approached. Euan’s was dark and mine had lights out of every window, competing fiercely with the moon for illumination of the paddock. ‘What did you throw down for the badger and the foxes?’ I asked idly, as we walked down the trackway towards our homes.
‘Mix of raisins and mealworms.’ Euan flicked me a quick look.
‘You’ve got mealworms in your pockets?’ I moved half a step further away from him.
He shrugged.
‘Yes,’ I answered myself. ‘Yes, of course you have. Of all the people I would expect to go around with maggots in their clothing, you top the list.’
‘Well, at least you think about me. And that’s good.’
‘But maggots!’
He shrugged again. ‘Lots of things eat maggots. And raisins, I feel you are overlooking the raisins.’
I stopped suddenly and burst out laughing. It was slowly starting to dawn on me how much I liked Euan. Obviously, kissing him had been a bit of a giveaway, but this was more than lust, more than a superficial enjoyment of the way he looked, and an admiration of his talent. It was an acknowledgement of his weird, offbeat kindness, so unlike Dominic’s relentless desire to conform.
And he’d taken me to see the wild foxes. Just to make me feel better about having to let Brack go.
‘What’s the matter? It’s fine, no more maggots. Well, not many. Well, some.’ He was looking at me closely, bending slightly so that he could search my face with eyes that were very dark in the moonlight.
‘You will come with me? Tomorrow? To… to drop off Brack? I think I need someone to make sure I don’t chicken out.’
‘Of course.’ Simple. Matter of fact, as though it were unthinkable that he could have let me go through that alone.
‘Well, I’d better go in. Katie looks like she’s communicating with ships at sea with all those lights on, and it’s my electricity bill, so…’ I tailed off. I couldn’t believe how reluctant I was to leave him. ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow.’
He reached out and touched my hair, very gently. ‘There’s time,’ he said. ‘Always time.’
‘Yes.’
‘And, perhaps, that therapy we talked about. To make sure we don’t drag the past with us?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered again, enjoying the touch of his fingers on my hair.
He didn’t say anything else. He just smiled and gave me a little nod, then walked round to his front door, a cool shadow under the beaming light of the full moon.
I went inside to help Katie pack and only slightly enjoyed her shrieking fit when a mealworm fell from my hair onto her duvet.
21
‘You can come back any time you want, you know. I mean, I’ll miss you. If you ever – I mean, if it doesn’t live up to your expectations, or you don’t enjoy it, you can come back here.’
Katie just gave me a pitying look. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m going to give Jonty a go, he might not be forever but he’ll be a great way of getting Dom out of my system. And as for the job, well, I can get genetic counselling work again if I want to. But for now—’ she closed the door and settled herself in the driver’s seat of her car, ‘a change is as good as a rest, isn’t that what they say? Oh, and let me know what Jill’s mum says about the people who lived here before. I’m ridiculously invested in your cottage story. I left the file of all the stuff on the kitchen table – you never know, you might get a book out of it!’
That’s not a bad idea, I thought, waving until her car was nothing but a puff of dust hitting the distant metalled road. If I could find out what happened to Stella, make her story central to the cottage’s history, it would give a book a shape. A beginning, a middle and an end. Yes, not a bad idea at all. All that research, all those things left behind; the tattered fabric in the old suitcase hidden away, the sweet wrappers and the photographs, they could all give shape to the story. And, hopefully, Jill’s mum could flesh Stella out for me. Maybe I could even meet up with Stella and find out a bit more about how life had been here, back then. Yes. Something to work towards, something to occupy me.
I carefully didn’t look at Brack, in his travelling cage under the table. I couldn’t meet his eye, in case I saw any sense of betrayal there.
‘Has she gone?’
Euan arrived at the back door. No coat today, just a linen jacket and jeans and, thankfully, shoes. He looked rumpled and lived-in and attractively solid, not unlike the cottage itself, come to think of it.
‘Yep, she’s just left.’
‘Good. I mean, she’s nice, but a wee bit on the predatory side for me. You and she were a bit “hawk and hare” – I might have to paint that.’ He slouched in and leaned against the wall. ‘Brack all ready? Suitcase packed?’
‘Stop it. Yes, he’s under here in his cage. He seems very calm about everything.’
‘A new life.’ Euan smiled. ‘Are you ready?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’ And I wasn’t just thinking of Brack. There were possibilities encompassed by Euan, possibilities that made me shiver in a pleasant way, especially with the way he looked here in my kitchen, as though he belonged.
‘Right.’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘It’s right. You know it is.’
I thought about the wild foxes out there in the wood. Having cubs and digging and foraging properly for food rather than just searching out lumps of meat in a run, that was what Brack needed now. Company. Communication that he understood.
‘Yes.’ My voice sounded small, and I had to shake away the tears that kept trying to break through. ‘Let’s go.’
Nicola was the no-nonsense type of person whom I couldn’t have cried in front of if I’d wanted to. Her brisk capability was a great antidote to sentimental goodbyes, and Brack looked so happy to be decanted from his little cage into the section of the huge paddock that Nicola had cordoned off for him.
‘We’ll just give him this bit for now, so he can meet the girls through a safe fence,’ she said, giving the very firmly attached wire divide a good wobble. ‘Proper introductions and all that. We don’t want fighting. Once they’re used to one another, we’ll take it down and they can all run together.’
Brack was sniffing up and down the fence line. One of the vixens cautiously tiptoed close to the wire and stared at him. Noses rose and sniffed the air and eyes met, then both Brack and the vixen slunk off in different directions to pretend to be interested in other things.
‘That looks hopeful,’ Euan said.
I couldn’t answer. My throat had widened to allow the lump of tears to get as far as my tongue. My little fox. Whenever I looked at the adult Brack nosing his way now through a clump of grass in the hope of something crunchy, all I could see was the tiny damaged fox kit that I’d rescued from the men with dogs, bleeding and crying. His cold little nose under my chin, nudging at me for food when I’d got him home. Bathing the stitches on his poor, bald stump after the operation. Those trusting amber eyes, following me around the room when he’d been confined to a cage to stop him moving.
But now, here he was, adult, ready to move on. Scenting the air with his head high, turning towards the adjoining pen with the two vixens in again. Needing more than I could give him.
‘It’s all right,’ Euan said, his voice very quiet. ‘You’re allowed to be sad for you. You can be happy for him at the same time.’
Life, in a nutshell.
I wanted to ask Brack if he’d miss me. If he’d wonder where the human who gave him lovely food and occasionally cuddled him tight had gone. I wanted to ask if he’d miss being stroked or curling up in front of a fire. But Nicola’s pragmatism and Euan’s confidence that it was the right thing wouldn’t let me. It would be admitting that I’d domesticated Brack beyond survival, and I really hoped I hadn’t.
