Behind me, Brack stretched, yawned and got up to saunter towards the door. Then he peed on it.

  Yep, I really needed to find that stopcock.

  4

  Later, I drove cautiously into town.

  I had an odd, dislocated feeling driving along roads where the hedges didn’t loom over single-track roads from high banks. Here in Yorkshire, the roads, narrow as they were, ran along the edges of big wide fields, feathery green with sprouting barley. The sky wasn’t squeezed into glimpses of cloud or blue between hilly horizons, instead it curled overhead and seemed limitless. Even the town, now my nearest shopping centre, was different. No huge sprawling new developments, just tidy little rows of ancient buildings, where the shops looked as though they had once been someone’s front room, given a bigger window and a wider door.

  There were, reassuringly, no artisans to be seen. Even the shops which sold paint were utterly practical, displaying rows of tins with no recourse to shading or colour-wheels. They looked far more as though they were used to selling to people who wanted to paint over stains and do up the shed, rather than highlight feature walls, and they’d have no truck with anyone who wanted to ‘ombre’ anything.

  I went a bit overboard and started buying things with such abandon that shopkeepers called people in from the back room to watch. I bought paint, brushes, wood stain, several tins of something I wasn’t quite sure about but was told it would make my floor look ‘reet loveleh’. I also bought some overalls, industrial-grade rubber gloves and a scraper. I think someone sold me a rubber doorstop and two rolls of electrical tape at one point, but I was beyond caring by then. I loaded up the car, which sagged alarmingly over the back wheels, and drove back to the cottage, ignoring the scary slopping noises from the boot and every indication that my rear suspension was dragging on the ground.

  Then I realised, again, that I needed water. I was going to have to bite the bullet and talk to my neighbour.

  I unloaded the car very, very slowly, in the hope that he might come out and ask what I’d been buying, or even offer to help me carry some of the more unwieldy items but he didn’t, which wasn’t really a huge surprise, given his thus far unsociable nature. Once the car was emptied, I hovered about outside my front door for a while, pretending to myself that I was admiring the view of the bare, thorny hedge and the field opposite, then pulled myself together and walked out of my front gate and through next door’s. I tapped cautiously just above the ‘No Callers’ sign and then took several precautionary steps backwards, so I was halfway down the path by the time the door opened.

  ‘It says “No Callers”.’ The voice came through the gap. Deep, slightly cracked, as though I’d woken him.

  ‘Yes, I know it does, I just—’

  ‘What’s so difficult to understand about it? No, the negative. Callers, people knocking. No Callers. The exact opposite of what you are, in fact, doing.’

  But he hadn’t shut the door. Maybe he was enjoying keeping me out here in the cold. ‘I need to know where the stopcock is and I thought you would be able to tell me,’ I said quickly, in case he decided to slam the door. ‘The estate agent told me to ask you,’ I added, in case he thought talking to someone this adversarial through a tiny sliver of part-opened door was my way of enjoying myself. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have disturbed you.’

  ‘Oh.’ The door edge wavered.

  ‘My name’s Tamzin Jones,’ I said, although I had no idea why I either wanted or needed to introduce myself.

  ‘The stopcock is under the manhole, just outside your back door,’ he said. The door was beginning to close.

  ‘Thank you. Oh, and would you happen to have the number of a local handyman? Only I need to build a run outside for Brack… for the fox, and I don’t have a lot of tools.’ It suddenly occurred to me that I should have invested less in internal decoration and more in practical building materials, but it was too late now.

  A moment’s silence and the edge of the door, which was all I could see, jiggled a bit.

  ‘I’d prefer a female handyman, well, person, but I don’t know if there are any out here.’ I was gabbling a bit now. ‘I don’t want just any strange man wandering around in my house when there’s only me and it’s quite isolated out here. Isn’t it?’ I finished, although I didn’t really need his confirmation of the isolation of the only two houses for miles.

  A bit more of a pause, then the gap opened wider, and he stepped into it. Not actually over the threshold, but at least I could see who I was talking to now. ‘The cottages weren’t always isolated, there used to be a farm up here,’ he said. ‘There’s a bit of the old farmhouse left in your garden.’ He pointed to the overgrown bramble thicket which clumped in the middle of the patch of ground at the side of my house. It waved back. ‘But I haven’t got any phone numbers to hand. Of handymen.’ Another pause, then, ‘Sorry,’ added swiftly and rather breathlessly, as though he’d been poked in the ribs by the Ghost of Good Manners.

  Encouraged by this beginning of a conversation, when I hadn’t spoken to anyone properly in a while, apart from to say, ‘Have you got it in a bigger tin?’ I opened my mouth to ask more, but he’d already gone back inside and closed the door. The ‘No Callers’ sign fluttered with the force of the closing.

  ‘Thank you!’ I shouted, in case he was standing just inside the door with his ear to the wood. No answer. Not even a twitch of the curtain.

  I wondered what he was doing in there. Euan McGillan couldn’t be much older than me, although I’d again seen a trace of a grey streak in the stubble he’d chosen to wear for today’s appearance, and he’d been wearing ordinary jeans and a shirt, not pyjamas or anything else that would lead me to believe he’d just got out of bed. Besides, he’d been making a cup of tea in the kitchen earlier. So, was he sitting there watching Midsomer Murders DVDs or glued to conspiracy theories on YouTube? When I went back inside my own front door, I leaned against the wall for any sound clues, but there was nothing. For all I could hear, he was propped up in the corner behind the door, waiting with a shotgun for the next person who violated the ‘No Callers’ sign.

  But he was not my problem. What was my problem was a bathroom and a front door that a fox had peed all over, and the fact that I hadn’t had a shower since Truro. So I went in search of the elusive, but apparently present, stopcock.

  Later that day, I made a start on the painting. It was rapidly dawning on me that the rooms had been painted magnolia for a reason – that reason being that, once the sun moved out of them, it was really quite dark indoors. I’d tried the classy grey colour I’d planned on painting the living room on the wall over the log burner, but the lack of light made it look as though I were trying to camouflage a battleship. The forest green I had been going to put on my bedroom walls was going to make waking up an interesting experience, I'd worry a trail of breadcrumbs had lured me into the woods and birds had covered me with leaves. The less said about the pale yellow eggshell paint I’d got for the skirting, the better. Brack had already had a fair go at making them that colour with bodily fluids. Maybe Dom had been right. Maybe I didn’t have an eye for colour. Maybe I was doomed to live in a house that resembled a primary school painting competition.

  I gave up on the painting and opened my laptop. I’d got the internet up and running, which made me realise how much I relied on it for my contact with the real world. I was sitting in front of half a dozen unopened emails, which I suspected all wanted to sell me exclusive executive houses, when there was a rattle and slide at the front door. The sound sent Brack slithering off under the kitchen table, ears flat and tail lowered, and I had to spend a couple of minutes reassuring him back out again before I could go and investigate.

  There was a piece of paper lying just inside the door as though it had come through the letter box weighted with disappointment. It was thick paper, much folded, and on opening I found it held a scrawled series of numbers and a block printed ‘HANDYWOMAN’. Euan McGillan must have shoved it through rather than knocking and giving it to me. Maybe he’d seen the paint tins.

  I didn’t know whether to feel relieved that he didn’t want any more contact with me than I wanted with him, or slightly affronted at the peremptory note and delivery system. So I settled for a sort of middle-ground mild annoyance tempered with gratitude, and phoned the number scribbled on the paper. ‘Jill’ said she could come in the morning for an initial visit where we could decide what needed doing and she could quote me. I felt a bit lighter by the time I hung up.

  Things were moving. Things were happening. There was the painting. And my meagre furniture took longer to arrange in the tiny rooms than I’d ever thought possible, mostly because there was so little space it was like an exercise in geometry trying to get sofas out of the way of opening doors and yet not right where you wanted to walk. The bed was circling the bedroom like a caged tiger, first against one wall, then the other, then under the window and back to the first wall again as I tried to find a configuration that wouldn’t mean having to climb over the headboard if I needed to go downstairs in the night. I didn’t manage to give the rooms any ‘accents’ other than the broad Yorkshire they’d presumably come with, and left ‘pops of colour’ as the noise it made when I opened the tins of paint.

  Finally, I went outside to properly survey the rest of my purchase. The estate agent’s pictures really hadn’t done the place any favours. No wonder I’d been able to offer slightly low on it and get my offer accepted. In the pictures, the white-painted stone of the front had looked grey and tired, the cottage and its neighbour had seemed huddled into the landscape. In real life, the two houses rose proudly, gleaming in the sun. The incipient spring had caused bursts of growth to green up the front garden, although I feared that most of the greenery was weeds, and I found that the back garden had a gate concealed among the rose bushes that led out onto the area at the side. The ‘paddock’ was delineated by a wire fence that sagged like a bad line drawing, containing about half an acre of tussocky grass and, in the centre, the bramble patch around the jutting bricks.

  I put Brack in his harness, which he hated, but it at least gave him the freedom to wander and sniff, and we walked out to investigate the brambles. They were just starting to unfurl some leaves, which emerged cautiously from the tangled skein of stems, like tiny green noses protruding to check whether it had stopped snowing. I walked around the clump, while Brack dived in and out, mousing for all he was worth and then rolling around on his back in the sun, his long, black-stockinged legs waving among the uncut grass as he writhed over the cushions of grass and moss.

  There were definitely walls in there. I could see the way the bushes had wound their way around the structures, using them as support and shelter from the wind, almost sentient. One wall, maybe a gable end, still stood around eight feet high, but the rest seemed to have fallen into rubble or been pulled by undergrowth down to lesser heights, standing like snaggle teeth in a green grin. In some places, the brambles were so thick that I couldn’t see any trace of building, but by pacing around the clump I estimated that they delineated a building that would have been reasonably large. Didn’t Mr Misery say that it had been the old farmhouse? Which meant that this stretch of ground that was now pocked and rutted with grass that didn’t look to have been mown for years would have been the farmyard, with our cottages forming the western side. I gazed across the wire fencing into the field where the cows had bunched themselves together at the far end, under a tree, lazy tails swishing at early flies. There was no trace of the other side of the farmyard there, and no sign that any buildings had once formed the eastern range. There must, once, have been barns, stables, sheds, even if only to shelter the yard from the east wind. I wondered how long ago it had fallen into ruin.

  Brack dug a small hole and ate a worm. It was disgusting, like watching a two-year-old eat spaghetti, but I’d got used to it. He’d found the uneven ground slightly hard going, his remaining hind leg having to do the work of two, and he was clearly tired now, curling himself down in the bleak sunlight to watch me. His stare was disconcerting, unblinking and amber, as though he was summing me up and trying to work out my most vulnerable points for a swift and decisive attack.

  ‘Maybe we could build your pen around these walls,’ I said, mostly to hear a voice. ‘It looks like it might be the sort of place to attract mice and rats and things.’

  Brack just carried on staring. I often had to remind myself that he was a fox, not a dog. He didn’t learn words in the way a dog would, or respond to communication. He showed me a degree of affection, but it was the affection of something that knew it relied on me for food and safety, not the enthusiastic affection of a creature born to domestication. I briefly rehearsed the idea of getting a dog but one look at Brack, relaxed at my feet, and I knew it wouldn’t be fair. And if I got a cat, he’d either dismember it or the two of them would team up against me in a competition of comparative disdain and vague contempt and I’d had enough of that to last me a lifetime.

  With a tug on the fox’s harness, I turned to go back through the garden into the cottage. The wind was cold and I wanted to light the wood burner to check that it worked, and there was still unpacking to do. As I turned, I could once more see into the windows of both cottages. Downstairs, the wide kitchen windows overlooked the gardens, and upstairs the window of what was my spare bedroom had a view that cleared the hedges and gave out onto the fields and presumably, once the low cloud dissipated, the moors.

  My eye caught a fleeting movement at the upstairs window of the next-door cottage. Just a flicker of white shirt below a flutter of hair. Euan McGillan had been standing at his window and had moved out of sight as I’d turned round. Had he been watching me? I’d moved to get away from that. The feeling of being watched, of every movement scrutinised and noted and used against me. That was the whole point of this tiny cottage on the top of a hill with nothing around but wind-bleached grass, waving tendrils of bramble and a herd of placidly unaware cattle. I hadn’t counted on a next-door neighbour, omnipresent and staring at me with an expression of grating resentment, like a particularly miserable minor god.

  I straightened my back. Well, sod him. I had every right to be here, this was my house, my garden and my scrubby little patch of land. I drew my shoulders back a bit further, then realised that this looked as though I was showing off my boobs, and slumped them down a little way. Then I looked down at Brack, who had the wind rippling his fur into red-brown surf. ‘Shall we go in or have another walk around?’ I asked him, loudly enough to have been heard by anyone who might have been listening in and wondering whether they could drive me under cover by lurking behind half-drawn curtains. I knew as I said it that it was utterly pointless. The windows may have been old, but they were double-glazed and I doubted that Mr McGillan could have heard me anyway, even had he been listening, with the way the wind whipped the words from my mouth and sent them wheeling down the valley. But it made me feel better. More in control.

  Brack’s inscrutable eyes told me he had no opinion either way, so I strode across to the garden gate, as much as one can stride when walking over unevenly humped grass, rutted and pitted with years of over and undergrowth. There was no sign of any more movement from that window. I kept half an eye on it until I’d gone inside but the room beyond the window was just a dark square, like a closed eye.

  I was arranging things on a shelf the next day, wondering how far it was to the nearest artisan, when there was a knock on the door. Brack, curled in front of the log burner, just twitched his tail.

  ‘You could at least bark,’ I said to him, futilely. ‘Or howl.’

  Tail twitch again. I sighed and opened the front door, first quickly checking that there wasn’t anything unpleasant obviously in view. Brack had pooed between the bathroom and the kitchen earlier, and I didn’t want casual callers to get the opinion that I lived in squalor.

  ‘Hi, I’m Jill Ferry, you wanted me to take a look at making a run?’

  The lady standing on the doorstep, trying to shield herself from the wind inside an enormous utility jacket, had short black hair that stood up from the coat’s collar like a brush and the kind of weathered face that could be any age from thirty to sixty.

  ‘Blimey, it’s a bit whiffy, did a beast get in while the place was empty?’ She swung her head back so that the fresh air could take away the smell of fox. ‘Nobody’s been in to clean since Mrs Watson died, and that’s been a good six months.’ She sniffed, and I couldn’t tell if the sniff was disapproving or just trying to rid her lungs of the smell.

  ‘Er, no, that’s my fox. Which is why I want a run built.’ I stood back and waved her into the gap between the front door and the only place the sofa would fit, which formed a small enclave before the room proper.

  ‘Oh yes, I see.’ Jill caught sight of Brack, who stood up and stretched, then settled back down in front of the log burner, a respectful distance from the flames but close enough to feel the benefit. ‘Pet, is it?’

  ‘Not really, and he’s not used to being in the house quite this much. He needs to be outside.’

  She sniffed again. ‘You’re telling me.’ A practical, and obviously experienced, eye took in the wall I’d tried the grey paint on. It had dried to a somewhat streaky finish because I’d begun to doubt myself before putting a second coat on and now had a heavy-duty military hardware look. ‘I see you’re experimenting with colour.’ She said it in the tone of one who’d had to put right a lot of ‘experiments with colour’ and couldn’t see what was wrong with having everywhere magnolia anyway.

 

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