A cottage full of secret.., p.21
A Cottage Full of Secrets, page 21
‘I know,’ I said and my voice sounded small and weak. ‘I know.’
‘Give him a week or so to settle, then you can come back and visit him whenever you want.’ Nicola sounded a little softer now. ‘Honestly, he won’t forget you. I’ve got a goose around here somewhere, raised by a family who found her as an abandoned gosling. They come up once a month and she’ll flap in from wherever she is on the farm to nag them for titbits. She’s been here for fifteen years.’ She looked at Brack, who had peed confidently up against one of his fence posts. ‘He’ll always be your fox.’
Euan and I watched Brack for a few minutes longer. He didn’t seem to feel at all abandoned. He dug several small holes, ate a worm and some of the scraps that Nicola and her team had put in the run to help him get used to his new home, and then strolled off into the long grasses, where he curled up in the sun and showed every sign of being unconcerned enough to sleep.
Euan was watching me as though he wanted to capture my every expression on paper. As though he were photographing me in his mind for later. ‘Take me home,’ I said, eventually, still with the tiny voice. ‘Otherwise I may never leave.’
He took the keys from my outstretched hand and gently steered me towards the car. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Brack was going to leap to the wire and howl as I left, but he stayed where he was, tidily curled with his nose on his tail and just watched me go with a typically inscrutable expression. ‘The house is going to feel empty,’ I said.
‘And smell nicer.’
‘Well, there is that.’ I glanced at Euan, fiddling with the driver’s seat to get it far enough back for his legs. ‘But he was out in his run mostly, until he escaped. So the worst of the smell has worn off.’
‘I got you something.’ Euan said it in a rush, almost as though he were worried about my reaction. ‘Not to replace Brack, never that. But something to take care of.’
‘Euan, you—’
‘I just wanted to take that shadow away. Dominic left his shade on you, you know. I’m sure Sarah left hers on me, that’s why I think therapy would be good. Like, it’s nothing solid, nothing tangible that you can point to and say that’s the effect they had, but just… just something. Shade. And you lose it a bit when you’re caring for Brack so I thought… anyway. Yes.’
He’s bought me a puppy, I thought, and felt my heart sink a little. I’d told him, hadn’t I? That I wasn’t ready for a dog yet. I needed a bit of time to get used to living without something constantly behind me. I mean, I’d love a puppy, of course, but – I’d told him. Not yet. And he hadn’t listened.
Euan presumably put my quietness down to leaving Brack. He didn’t try to jolly me out of it, he just let me look out of the window as he drove my car back to the cottages. I was thinking of Brack too, of course I was, but there was that little bit of me that was trying to work on my expression so that I wouldn’t look disappointed. I wanted to believe that Euan listened. But a dog would mean he didn’t. That he had his own beliefs about what I needed and he was going to impress them on me.
‘Great. It’s arrived.’ Euan nosed the car onto the verge. ‘I told them to put the box in my kitchen for now. Come on in.’
I didn’t want to face the Bracklessness of my own cottage just yet, so I followed him. I couldn’t hear any puppy-type sounds and my heart rose a little. Maybe a kitten? I could probably cope with a kitten.
On Euan’s kitchen table stood a box of annoyance. It thumped, occasionally, in an irritated way.
‘This,’ he said, indicating the box, ‘is for you. Open it carefully and be prepared to slam it shut again very, very fast.’
I regarded the box with a mixture of disturbance and terror. ‘It’s not poisonous, is it?’
Euan grinned. ‘No. But it’s cross.’
The box bumped across the table a few centimetres. I cautiously went over and lifted a flap. ‘Oh, God, it’s dinosaurs!’
Now Euan laughed. He came over and took the box from me, carrying it outside to Brack’s now deserted run. ‘They’re ex-battery hens. Rescued from destruction by a lady I sometimes paint for. She’s just had a new delivery and she’s given me these three.’ He held the box out to me now. ‘For you. To nurse back to proper chickenhood. They’ve barely been outside in their lives and they really don’t know how to chicken. That’s where you come in.’
We opened the box and let the traumatised hens out. They were largely bald, but feathers were regrowing in patches, giving them the look of small velociraptors with a bad case of evolution. ‘I don’t know anything about hens,’ I said, feeling almost as discombobulated as the chickens evidently were.
‘You didn’t know anything about foxes either,’ Euan said brightly. ‘And they don’t need too much in the way of input. Food and protection and that’s about it. Plus, you get eggs.’ He looked dubiously at the motley crew, with their pimply skin and scraggy feathering. ‘Probably. Eventually, anyway.’
The three hens stood as though shocked by the outdoors. I’d had to tip them out of the box and they hadn’t properly righted themselves. One sat as she’d landed, wings half outstretched and crouched as though she expected an explosion. The other two seemed traumatised by the feel of earth under their feet.
I knew how they felt. Survivor knows survivor.
‘Thank you,’ I said, turning to Euan. ‘For everything.’
He did the half-shrug thing again and a couple of slow blinks. ‘I thought – well, they don’t take too much looking after.’
So he had listened. Not just to my words, either, but to what ran underneath them.
We stood together outside the run. The boldest of the hens pecked experimentally at the wall and took a few shuffling steps forward. The other two watched her as though waiting to see if some terrible fate was about to descend, but not reassured when it didn’t.
‘Jill said she’d come up and get the run into shape for them tomorrow.’ Euan carried on looking at the chickens. ‘I had to tell her what I was planning, I hope you don’t mind. I just thought it was best if I ran it past someone else in case I was doing something stupid.’ His attention on those birds was so rapt that I could only assume it was because he didn’t want to meet my eye. That caution, that lack of belief in himself, nearly broke my heart, and as my heart was already still swollen and sore from leaving Brack, that feeling came to the surface riding on a raft of tears.
‘Euan.’ It was a whisper. But something in it made him tear his eyes away and then I found myself wrapped in his arms, in his jacket, in him.
‘Because I don’t trust myself any more,’ he whispered. ‘I second guess and I avoid and I am just so afraid all the time. That was what Sarah did to me, but I am trying, I really am, to get over it.’
There was nothing else I could do but hug him back, hard. Hoping that my feelings came over in the embrace and the tears and that, if he could read a wild animal well enough to paint it, he could also read me.
We stayed like that for quite some time. Even the hens got bored eventually and, with weak little scutters and the occasional flap, took themselves off to the safety and security of the enclosed house part of the run, which Brack had ignored in favour of sleeping in the grass. I hoped Euan was taking as much comfort from me as I was getting from him. Something in the solidity of the hug gave me a renewed hope for the future – and that tiny fizz of potential that Katie had set off with her research into the cottage was helping.
I could write a book. I could. I could. Contrary to what Dom had always told me, I was beginning to feel I could do anything.
22
Stella, May 1971
I can’t sleep. I’m just, oh, I don’t know. I want to tell someone, but who do I tell? Jeanette and Jackie both look at me funny now cos I go everywhere with Andy. He says they’re just jealous because they are with Dean and that Paul lad with the lazy eye and neither of them can drive and Andy’s got his own car. Andy takes me to the coast and we sit on the sand down at Scarborough and he’s got this book of poetry that he reads to me and he holds my hand and tells me that I’m his little Star-Girl. Makes me all shivery just remembering.
He makes me feel like I’ve done nothing. Like I’ve got nothing to talk about because he’s so clever and he just knows stuff. He was reading this poem and I asked who wrote it because it’s all about a boat on a lake or something, I didn’t really understand some of it, and Andy told me it was Wordsworth and I remember him from school. So I said that he wrote stuff about the Lake District and he came over and got married just near Scarborough and could we go up to the church and see? Then Andy got a bit funny and slammed the book shut and said it was just a stupid poem and he didn’t want to go into any stuffy old churches on such a nice day. Well, it made me feel a bit strange at first. Like I was when I first met him, all shy and not knowing what to say, and then Andy went all quiet and I said I was sorry a few times but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He just kept staring out at the sea and I didn’t know what to do. So I told him that he could kiss me when we got back to the car, if he wanted, if we could park somewhere that we could be sure no one who knew my parents could see, and he cheered up then. He got really chatty about his job, how the boss is getting to really rely on him and he’s sure he’s going to get promoted to senior mechanic soon and he’ll get a rise and how he’s thinking it would be a good time to settle down.
Then we parked in this lane. And we kissed for hours. Well, not hours, because I’d told Dad I’d be home by nine and I know he doesn’t really like me going with Andy even though Andy’s always really nice and polite and respectful to him and calls him ‘sir’. He even brought Dad a bottle of his favourite whisky last time he picked me up. So, we’re there, and we’re kissing and I can tell Andy wants to put his hands down the front of my blouse and do stuff, but I won’t let him. And then… well, and then Andy says, ‘We should get married’! And I was so astonished, I think I gawped like a carp. I said something like, ‘But I promised Mr Harris when I took the job that I wouldn’t be leaving to get married for years and I’d need to save up a bit first,’ and Andy just laughed. He laughed and laughed and he said, ‘You won’t be working when you’re my wife. Being married to me would be your new job,’ something like that, anyway. And the way he said it, all kind of low and hot, like Ryan O’Neal in Love Story, made me feel all prickly and kind of odd, like I really wanted him to kiss me again.
So, Andy’s going to talk to Dad. He said he wants to do it all official, to ask for my hand and everything. I just know what everyone is going to think. I mean, we’ve only known each other a few months, but Mum told me what men like to do to you and how I’m absolutely not to let anyone put a hand on my ha’penny until I’ve got a ring on my finger because we don’t want any more shame on the family like when my cousin Margaret had to go away to the country for six months and came back a widow with a baby. And I promised her that I wouldn’t, but – well. But if I tell them that I just really, really want to marry Andy; that he’s so kind and he loves me, well, he must love me, he calls me his Star-Girl and he wouldn’t say that if he didn’t love me, would he? He looks a lot like Ryan O’Neal, and Mum and I cried buckets at that film, so I know she will be on my side.
Besides, I know their secret, and if they won’t let me marry Andy, I’m going to tell them that I know. It’s really funny, actually, but I know they won’t want anyone else to know, and that’s the real reason that they moved to Thornton from out near Helmsley way, because they had to get married because Mum was expecting me. I only found out by accident when I was talking to Gran before she died. She was getting a bit rambly and not always sure who she was talking to and she said, ‘Course, you never had much of a wedding, did you, Eileen?’ cos she thought I was Mum. Then she went on about them announcing their engagement on the day the old king died and I thought she was mistaken, being old and confused and all. But then I thought about it and some of the things that Mum had let slip, like everything being all draped in black when Dad proposed to her and how she thought it was a sign. She stopped and then pretended she’d made a mistake and she’d said everything should have been draped in black, but I knew. The old king died in the February and I was born in July. And I came top of our year in maths, I could work that one out.
So anyway. I might be getting married to Andy! I borrowed some of Mum’s magazines this evening, I told her I wanted to look at the recipes, but really I wanted to look at the wedding fashions special…
23
Jill arrived next morning in a van laden with equipment and her mother.
‘Thought I’d bring up some paint charts so you can choose some proper colours, with official guidance,’ Jill said cheerfully, putting the kettle on without thinking about it. ‘And I want to make that run completely fox-proof, but from the other side, if you see what I mean, now you’ve got hens.’
I was sitting at the kitchen table, the sun hadn’t made it over the roof to the back of the house yet, so it was slightly shadowy, but that suited me. My first full day without Brack, and I didn’t want it to be a day where I was outdoors, missing him. Inside, with the weather not quite knowing whether it wanted to be summer or to reprise winter, that was fine. I didn’t feel the lack of the little furry follower so much. I’d phoned Nicola already, to be told that Brack was eating well, had touched noses with one of the little vixens and, if things continued to go well, Nicola was going to let him run in with them tomorrow. He didn’t, she said in a tone of slight but kind amusement, seem to be pining for me too badly.
‘Oh, and this is my mum, Janet. Mum, this is Tamzin who, fairly evidently, lives here now, or is a really audacious squatter.’
Janet did not at all look like a woman who would even entertain the idea of her daughter having a toy boy and, apart from the tan, I wouldn’t have guessed at the ‘Greek’ element either. She looked like an older and more rounded version of Jill, with cropped grey hair and a comfortable cardigan. She looked around the kitchen and then came to sit opposite me at the table.
‘Yes, I remember this place,’ she said. ‘My mum grew up friendly with Diana Williams, she lived on the end when she was a girl and Mum used to take me to visit Diana when I was little, she lived with her mum then, in Pickering.’ Janet glanced around the room again. ‘After the place got pulled to ruins. They used to tell me about weekends, when they were at school and Diana’s dad would let them help on the farm, well, I say “help”, it was probably mostly giggling at the farmhands. It will have been just after the war, place was already going to pot.’ She sighed. ‘And then when it was a holiday cottage and they needed a housekeeper, well, I already felt like I knew the place after hearing Mum and Diana go on.’
‘Sorry.’ Jill swung around with the tea mugs in her hand. ‘Mum does like to talk. I should have primed you. Tea.’ She doled the mugs out onto the table. There was an extra one.
‘Katie’s gone,’ I said, nodding at the mug.
‘Oh, it’s not for her.’ Jill sat confidently next to her mother, cupping her hands around her mug. ‘It’s for him.’
At that precise moment, Euan appeared, passing the window and giving a little tentative tap at the back door. I stared.
‘Is this some kind of psychic connection?’
Euan rustled into the kitchen in the green coat. He’d obviously been out somewhere drawing because he had moss staining along one shoulder and the hems of his trousers were damp. His hair was dishevelled and full of unspecified pollen and he’d never looked more attractive. ‘We use phones,’ he said mildly. ‘Jill and I do talk, you know. I don’t exist in stasis when I’m not around.’
He picked up the spare mug and sat beside me. The kitchen felt full of life and people, and I realised I wasn’t missing Brack as much as I’d been afraid I would. Maybe that was why they’d chosen now to do this, to take my mind off things? I looked at them, Euan with his paint-stained hands wrapped around his mug and Jill making ‘that needs fixing’ faces at the wobbly chair leg underneath her, and felt a little detonation of warmth inside me. I had friends. More than friends, in Euan’s case. People who cared.
After my time with Dominic, the isolation and his insistence that he was all I could rely on, it made little bubbles of potential fizz through my bloodstream. There was a life without him. And here it was.
‘Go on, Mum,’ Jill said. ‘Are there any biscuits, Tam? I have to keep her sugar levels up or she starts talking about knitting patterns and other people’s grandchildren.’
‘Top shelf,’ I said, although I didn’t know why, Jill knew perfectly well where the biscuits were and was, in fact, already halfway to the cupboard. ‘But yes, Janet, please tell me everything you know about this place. I’m fascinated.’
I didn’t want to raise the potential of writing about the cottage. Not yet, while it was such a new idea.
Euan had dropped his head forward and was picking dried cerulean blue off a fingernail. ‘We’re interested in Stella,’ he said and opened the cardboard file that Katie had compiled of all the cottage information. The pictures of Stella were no longer filed away in that nebulous date order, they were on the top of the sheaf of papers, and one slipped out. ‘Did you know her?’
Janet looked down at the picture. It was the one of the wedding, Stella with her proud, reckless face and her carefully formal bouquet, next to the narrow-faced young man in his tight suit. The orangey wash that age had given the photograph made the event look sunny and glowing with possibilities. She sighed.
‘Stella Watson,’ she said. Her tone was absolutely unreadable. ‘Yes. She was, what, six, seven years older than Diana and me, of course, but round here everyone knows everyone and she used to babysit me and your uncle Don when we all lived in Thornton, growing up.’ Janet turned the photograph, as though, hologram-like, it would enable her to see Stella’s face more clearly. ‘Nice girl. It was terrible, what happened.’
