by cass green
This is nothing like the country idyll Neve had been hoping for.
It’s more like a fortress.
She’s too exhausted, achy and in need of coffee to feel as frightened as she had the night before. But she can’t stay, that’s quite clear. This was a mistake. As usual she has run headlong into a situation without thinking through the consequences.
This thought ferments like sour milk as she gets her soap bag and goes into the bathroom. She will have a shower, phone Lou, then think about what to do next.
The bathroom is cleaner than she thought, she now realises. Once she has flushed the disgusting toilet and swirled some of the pungent yellow cleaning fluid lurking at the back, it’s quite acceptable in here. There is even a stack of clean, fluffy towels in an airing cupboard and she peels off her musty, sleep-worn clothes with a feeling of gratitude for this gesture.
The bathroom is empty of toiletries, apart from a brand new plastic dispenser of soap, and a bottle of bleach and a cloth that sit to the back of the toilet. Checking for a cord and a switch, she is relieved that it isn’t an electric shower. Standing under the powerful jet of water she closes her eyes, allowing her clenched, tense muscles to unknot. Frothing shampoo into her hair, she then begins to shave her legs and armpits. It’s pure habit, but the sensation of sloughing off the old so she can emerge, brand new, is pleasing too. She begins to feel her spirits rise a little.
Padding back to the sitting room and her case in a towel, she shivers and quickly dresses in clean underwear and socks, but with all the layers she wore the evening before. The radiators don’t seem to be up to much, despite the clanking sounds they make at regular intervals.
Her eyes are drawn to her phone and a guilty feeling tugs at her. She really ought to have called Lou last night. But it was late when her phone finally came to life again.
Her stomach rumbles and she almost cheers when she discovers the scrunched remains of a half-eaten chocolate bar in the depths of her handbag. She devours it in two bites while she frets about the problem of topping up the meter and getting some provisions in for later. Sipping cold water from a delicate china mug she found hanging on a hook above the sink, she wonders where she will find some manner of corner shop.
There must be something, surely? She simply needs to investigate the area and it will be fine, she is sure. She can do this. She is a grown woman. With a cottage.
But first there’s something she must do. Taking her water back to the sitting room, she sits in the same spot and pulls the blanket over her knees to get comfortable. As her thumb moves to find Lou’s number, the phone comes to life as if by magic.
The screen tells her it’s Lou.
‘Oh hey,’ she says, ‘I was just—’
‘Where the hell are you?’ Her sister’s voice is nasal and thick, her tone clipped.
‘You won’t believe what has happened,’ she says, ‘I only got here last night and then my phone was dead and—’
‘—so your phone was dead for an entire day and an evening,’ says Lou. It isn’t a question. ‘It’s so dead that you couldn’t even send me one little text, just one line so that I know you’re alive?’
‘Lou, c’mon,’ she says with a laugh that sounds hollow to her own ears. ‘Of course I’m alive, I mean, what did you think I’d—’
But Lou isn’t going to allow her to finish any sentence. She is off again, shouting now. Neve has to hold the phone away from her ear in what might have been a comedic way, in other circumstances.
‘What did I think?’ she yells. ‘I thought all sorts of terrible things! I thought you might have even gone and done the same thing that bloody woman did! Thrown yourself off a bridge!’
Neve lets out an irritated breath. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit melodramatic? I did leave you a note!’
‘Saying what?’ Lou’s voice has a hysterical edge now. Neve winces. ‘Saying nothing at all! I had no idea whether you were leaving for good, or something bad had happened to you, or anything at all!’
‘Look, if you’ll let me speak for a moment, I’ll tell you what’s happened, alright?’
Sulky silence thickens on the other end of the phone. Lou blows her nose, loudly.
‘Okay, so that woman? Isabelle Shawcross?’ Saying her name out loud in the quiet house feels strange and uncomfortable. Neve swallows and continues. ‘Well … you won’t believe it but she has only gone and left me her cottage.’
‘What?’ snaps Lou, her tone disbelieving. ‘You only met her for five minutes. How can that be true?’
Neve suppresses a sigh. Who would make up a story so outlandish?
‘It’s a special sort of bequest,’ she says patiently, parroting Laura Meade. ‘A donati morto … can’t remember the name. But it’s all legal. And anyway, it’s in Cornwall and everything was shit at work yesterday because of the Germans – I think I’m losing my job – so I walked out and decided to come here and check it out. And like I said, my phone died and then I had all sorts of trouble finding my way in here in the dark and it was only this morning that I was able to call.’
Silence.
‘So let me get this straight,’ says Lou thickly after a moment or two. ‘You walk out of a job maybe, oh, days before getting a redundancy package, but let’s put that to one side, and you head off to a dead woman’s house on your own without telling anyone?’
‘Yes! But what the hell, Lou? It’s no skin off your nose.’ Neve is sharp now. It’s too early for all this judgy stuff. Lou can be so superior. ‘What’s your problem?’
There is a pause.
‘My problem,’ says Lou, quietly, ‘is that I haven’t slept for six months. I’m surrounded by snot and nappies and I feel so ill and bloody pissed off that I could just walk out on the lot of them, and then I have to worry about you, as usual, because having two needy children of my own isn’t enough.’
Stunned, Neve manages to stutter, ‘That’s not fair!’
‘Isn’t it?’ Lou’s tone is so bitter that Neve actually recoils. She has never heard her sister like this before.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lou continues, ‘I forgot that we always have to make allowances for Neve. We always have to laugh it off when she is selfish and self-centred, and, and …’ Lou bursts into tears ‘… and everyone always runs around making things better but they never do that for me, do they! It’s typical that you should get given a bloody cottage for doing precisely nothing!’
‘Look, Lou …’
‘Oh forget it,’ says Lou nasally. ‘It’s always been like this. Mum and Dad let you get away with murder and now it doesn’t even occur to you to behave any other way.’ She blows her nose again. ‘Enjoy your cottage. If you make any other major life decisions maybe you can do me the common courtesy of at least dropping me a text.’
She hangs up.
Neve’s hand trembles as she puts her mobile on her lap.
It was like there were a thousand grievances that had been lining up inside her. How long had she been carrying all that around?
Neve’s mind shifts unpleasantly to the night their father died.
The sisters had hugged in the horrible little hospital room they had been led to by the nurse, who said they should wait there while their father was ‘sorted out’.
Neve remembers now that Lou murmured, ‘You weren’t there. I couldn’t find you,’ in a voice thick with tears. She kept saying it, but never mentioned this again afterwards.
Was that it? She couldn’t help not getting the messages.
And this is completely different.
Guilt mixes with indignation now. She is a grown woman, as Lou is always telling her.
She no longer has Daniel. If she wants to take off somewhere alone at no notice, then surely that is her right? Surely that’s the whole point of not being weighed down by babies and mortgages like Lou. She’d chosen those things; Steve with his boring hobbies, and the two babies. It wasn’t Neve’s fault that Lou was struggling now. It wasn’t her fault that she had b
een given a cottage by a complete stranger. She doesn’t even want it, not really.
The carriage clock ticks in the thick silence that surrounds her.
Neve stares up at the barred window and suddenly feels that the room is very small, the walls squeezing in. She needs to make a plan; to get an idea of where she is and how she can get around.
She picks up her phone and taps Google, but there’s still no 4G. She didn’t notice anything about wi-fi in the folder. She goes to the kitchen and flicks through it again, ignoring the stuff about bin timetables and septic tanks, trying to find the properly useful part about getting online.
But there’s nothing. Neve lets out a breath. No television and no wi-fi? This is surely more than anyone could put up with.
She puts on her coat and goes to the front door to check the temperature outside. The sky is grey with thickening clouds above the trees.
She wishes she had something waterproof to wear as she pulls on her hat. Then she remembers seeing the wax jacket on the coat rack.
But when she goes to the hall and looks at it hanging there, missing the shape of the dead woman who once wore it, she can’t bring herself to put it on. So instead she shrugs on her fake fur and pulls on her boots.
There’s bound to be a bus stop, she thinks and, picking up the large bunch of keys to the house, she opens the front door and steps out into the chill air. She can’t spend another night here without food for a start.
She’ll work something out. She’ll have to. It’s not like she has anywhere else to go. She can’t go back to Lou with her tail between her legs. She just can’t.
16
Outside, Neve forces herself to walk a few steps before turning to get her first, unadulterated view of the cottage.
She lets out a long, slow breath. Comparing it to the old cricket pavilion at school had been optimistic, she now sees.
The building is a blunt, grey rectangle, painted in a drab, scabby covering that is flaking off like dry skin. The two front windows, obviously covered in bars from here, seem to stare back at her from under a glowering, low-slung roof. It looks as though it may have been built in the 1950s, rather than the nineteenth century, as she’d imagined when she first heard of the place. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the rose-clad, whitewashed property of Neve’s imagination.
Petty Whin Cottage is, quite simply, hideous.
Disappointment tumbles coldly inside her.
As she casts her gaze to the right of where she stands, she sees there was once a reasonable garden here, even to her untutored eye. There are two flower beds, edged by rockery. But everything is overgrown and tangled, as if nature is gradually creeping closer to the house, ready to swallow it up in green, subterranean light.
Thanks for sodding nothing, Isabelle, she thinks and heads quickly towards the gate through to the lane.
Better to get moving.
At least it is daylight now.
Neve looks across at the trees lining the other side of the lane. No way of telling how far the woods go. The words of the old nursery rhyme drift into her mind.
In a cottage in a wood
A little old man at the window stood.
Saw a rabbit hopping by
knocking at the door.
‘Help me, help me, help me,’ he said.
‘Before the hunter shoots me dead.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, get a grip,’ she says aloud and hurries down the lane to the main road, shivering inside her coat.
She’s tempted to drown out her thoughts with music while she walks and her fingers toy with the earbuds in her bag. But this is such an unfamiliar place and she has no idea, really, where she is going. She walks on, quietly congratulating herself for doing the sensible thing for once.
When she reaches the main road, she stops and looks around uncertainly.
She thinks the taxi driver turned right into Stubbington Lane last night, so Cador is … back that way? But there was nothing there as far as she could tell.
Neve begins to walk in the opposite direction, down the steep hill.
A low mist clings to the horizon, giving the view an almost unearthly feel. She pulls her collar higher around her neck against the chill, damp air. Every breath feels like it is being sucked through a cold sponge and her cheeks are soon wet from the tiny droplets in the air.
It is bitterly cold and her toes inside her boots are starting to tingle with pins and needles. She quickens her pace a little.
At least there is a pavement. She is grateful for it when the occasional car thunders past and misses it sorely when it disappears and she has to walk at the side of the road.
Fields on both sides melt into the smudgy horizon.
It is ten minutes of walking before she comes to a couple of houses, set back from the road by driveways. They are the first signs of life in this vista of fields and grey, grey sky.
It really is the middle of bloody nowhere.
A few minutes on she sees a sign showing somewhere called Polmeath is one mile to the right. A village, surely? Trying to ignore the nagging worry that she may get completely lost, Neve sets off at a steady clip down the road. It is a bit narrower than the one she has been walking on, potholed and muddy. She walks close to the hedge and shoots nervous glances over her shoulder, looking out for any cars that may come barrelling this way.
The road begins to rise and she is sweating now under all her layers, puffing with the effort of the climb.
When, finally, she reaches the brow of the hill, she sucks in her breath.
The sea.
The colours are bleakly beautiful. The water is gunmetal grey with tumbling white-tipped waves. It almost merges with the ominous clouds gathering at the horizon. The sky has a lilac tinge like something unearthly is boiling there. Neve pictures a giant hand pointing through the clouds; a Michelangelo finger offering its judgement on her. This image makes her chuckle to herself, and feeling energized by the sight before her, she pulls a deep, clean breath of salty air into her lungs.
A slice of sunlight pierces the cloud just then, bathing the sea in a spray of gold light that feels like a gift just for her.
She says, ‘Oh,’ out loud and pushes her hands deep into her pockets, rocking on her heels a little as she takes it all in.
Mournful cries of seagulls fill the air and Neve looks up to see them wheeling and twirling above. She feels a powerful urge to walk on the sand now and begins to hurry down the hill towards the sea.
There’s a sign pointing to a coastal path and Neve picks her way down a steep zigzag that’s treacherous with mud and stones. Her boots keep sliding beneath her and nettles and sharp jaggy plants catch at her fake fur coat, and, once, her hair. This, she realizes, is not the way most people get to the beach.
But finally she is stepping down onto the damp sand and looking around with a half-smile.
The wind is much stronger down here. Neve watches the suck and pull of the waves as they claw at the shoreline.
There’s an old rowing boat back near the cliffs. It is tipped on its side, encrusted with barnacles, streaked with brown rusty stains and frilly with colonies of seaweed. Narrowing her eyes against the chill wind, she sees that there are recesses all along the cliff. Caves?
She loved rock pools and caves as a little girl. It was something she did with Lou for hours and hours. She pictures bringing Lou and the girls here in the summer and realizes, for the first time, that she has imagined staying at the cottage for any length of time.
This is good for me, she thinks. All this sea air will blow away the crap in my head. I can be a new person.
But it’s as if someone has pressed some cosmic switch now because the sky begins to close in like an immense bowl of smoky glass. Deciding she can come back to the beach for a proper walk another time, she begins to hurry back up the path and towards the road just as the first fat drops of rain start to plop onto her head.
This detour now feels like a mistake, and grimly Neve heads back
to the main road, thighs aching with the climb. As she reaches the top, she pauses, rain running down her face. The thought of being in that place with no lighting, no television and no decent food is more than she can bear. Neve resolutely quickens her pace. Surely she’ll come to the village at some point soon?
The road is narrower here and Neve carefully walks along the muddy grass bordering it. As she reaches a curve in the road, a lorry comes careening around a corner so fast she cries out and almost throws herself into the bushes.
Shaking with shock and the effect of the cold mizzling rain soaking through her coat, she trudges on for what feels like an impossible amount of time. She passes fields where cows crowd the gate and regard her sorrowfully, as though even they’re wondering why she is so stupid as to be walking along this road.
When she sees the sign for somewhere called Marak, her heart leaps. It’s not where she intended to go when she started this walk, but any village will do now. She pictures a roaring fire and a ploughman’s lunch. Maybe some chips on the side. She’ll have a hot chocolate too, or, no, maybe a hot toddy. She’s earned it.
Walking past a farm and several semi-detached bungalows with a 1950s look set back from the road, Neve stops, heart speeding up as she contemplates the terrible possibility that she has just experienced Marak in its entirety.
She’s mourning bitterly for the cosy pub that never was as she turns and walks back the way she came. At least she will end up back at the cottage this way but it has been an entirely wasted journey.
The rain whips her face and plasters her hair against her head.
Cars pass, hissing on the wet road.
Neve hates Isabelle Shawcross now; hates her for killing herself and leaving Neve her stupid, ugly cottage with its weird window bars and lack of wi-fi. For fooling her into thinking coming here was a good plan.
But what other option does she have? Daniel doesn’t want her; Lou hates her right now and Miri isn’t the only close friend she has lost to motherhood in the last couple of years. She has no skills, no job. And Lou was right; what was she thinking, walking out of PCC without even bothering to wait for the redundancy package she must surely have rights to?
