In a Cottage, In a Wood

by cass green

  ‘Oh …’ Neve feels colour creep up her face. ‘Right, well, that’s good then. Thanks. I mean, come in.’

  He nods a little suspiciously and then glances down at Jarvis, who pushes past Neve to nose at his legs, whole body wagging with his tail.

  ‘Um,’ says Finn, ‘would you mind?’

  Neve looks at him blankly for a moment and then says, ‘You don’t like dogs? Oh, alright, hang on.’

  Grabbing Jarvis by the collar, she pulls him with difficulty through to the kitchen and then out the back door.

  Then she shows Finn where the bathroom is and hovers by the door as he lifts off the cistern lid. He takes off his heavy jacket to reveal a light blue T-shirt. His arms are covered in fine dark hair that looks soft to the touch. Neve attempts to concentrate on what he is doing.

  Finn looks up. ‘When I say I’m a plumber, that’s not strictly true,’ he says. ‘I’m more about your general building, odd jobs. But I know my way around most plumbing issues and I know when to call in the experts.’

  ‘Right,’ says Neve. ‘Well, that’s fine. I don’t have a working toilet at the moment and I’m a bit desperate. I mean,’ she adds, hurriedly, ‘desperate to get it sorted it out. I’m not … desperate.’

  Finn nods slowly as though she has spoken words of great wisdom but she sees the side of his mouth crinkle in a hidden smile as he peers inside the cistern.

  ‘Oh well,’ he says, ‘that’s not very helpful, is it?’ as if to himself and reaches inside.

  ‘What? What’s wrong with it?’

  He doesn’t reply for a moment, then holds up a round thing she has some dim memory her father referring to once.

  ‘Is that the … ballcock?’

  The word ‘cock’ seems to fill the room like a huge inflatable, bouncing off the walls and then gently settling between them. She blushes again and frowns, irritated at herself.

  ‘It is indeed,’ he says in his soft brogue. ‘And it looks very much like someone has partially disconnected it.’

  ‘Eh?’ says Neve. ‘Why would they do that?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘No idea,’ he says. ‘There is literally no reason why you would do that if you wanted to have a working toilet.’

  She thinks about the wodge of material she had found in there when it was overflowing. When she tells him about this he makes a face.

  ‘Show me where it was,’ he says. Neve comes into the room. She is far too aware of the solid heat of his presence in the small bathroom as she leans over and indicates where she found the scrunched-up material.

  ‘Have you had squatters in here or anything, no?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose there might have been.’ She thinks about what Sally said and the state of the house when she arrived. ‘You wouldn’t think you’d get that sort of thing out here.’

  Finn smiles a little. ‘I think you get squatters everywhere,’ he says. ‘But my only explanation for the toilet is that someone has deliberately sabotaged it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says in a small voice, picturing the headless magpie. Then she remembers the business with the locks the other evening.

  Suddenly cold, she rubs her arms and shivers.

  I hate this place, she thinks.

  Finn regards her steadily. ‘You must be a bit cold, are you not?’ There’s that smile again, slow and steady.

  It’s only now that Neve remembers the back of her dress is still hanging open and with a gulp of embarrassment she reaches behind her back in a vain attempt to hold the two sides together.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘I’ll just … I’ll …’ and she hurries off to the bedroom, where she pulls off the dress, almost breaking the half-open zipper in the process.

  When she comes back to the bathroom, trussed up from neck to ankle in a woollen jumper and the dirty tracksuit bottoms, with a hoodie over the top for good measure, Finn is flushing the toilet. It is making a beautifully normal sound now.

  ‘That’s you all done,’ he says.

  ‘Oh God, thank you. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Let’s call it twenty,’ he says.

  Relieved it isn’t more, Neve hurries to get her purse.

  Despite her embarrassment at the whole open-dress thing, Neve suddenly feels a powerful desire to get him to stay as she hands him one of the twenty-pound notes Richard gave her that morning.

  ‘I would ask whether you could also take the bars off these windows,’ she says with a high-pitched laugh, which even to her own ears sounds like a taut wire being twanged. ‘But with people sabotaging my bog and bringing me gifts of headless corpses, I’m not so sure!’

  Finn’s eyes widen.

  ‘Headless whats now?’ he says. She makes a rueful face and then tells him about the dead bird.

  He listens intently until she has finished and then seems to be chewing over her words.

  ‘Well, you know I’ll bet you anything it wasn’t the same magpie,’ he says. ‘Have you actually checked whether the first one was where you left it?’

  A rush of sweet hope pulses through her. ‘Well, no,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even think of that!’

  ‘Betcha that’s what happened,’ he says. ‘And even if that one has gone, this is the countryside.’ He says it with a vaguely critical air that surprises Neve.

  ‘You not a country person then?’

  He makes a face. ‘God, no,’ he says, ‘I grew up in Dublin. Why, did you think all Irish people lived in farmyards?’

  ‘Oh, no, I mean …’

  ‘I’m only messing with you,’ he says with a grin. ‘Now then, do you want me to mend that kitchen window? Might not be until tomorrow …’

  Neve beams in gratitude.

  ‘I won’t be able to match what was there in terms of period glass,’ he says and Neve assures him this is fine. They walk back to the front door together and as he goes to open it, he hesitates.

  ‘Look, you may have plans,’ he says, ‘but there’s a folk night on at the Hope tonight. I’m going. Want to come along?’

  Neve is so surprised she doesn’t respond immediately.

  ‘I mean, if you like folk …’ he says.

  ‘I do like folk,’ she lies.

  Rain has begun to fall steadily from angry-looking bunches of clouds. Once Finn has gone, she hurries to the back door to let the dog inside. Jarvis is huddled on the doorstep and shoots into the kitchen, patterning the floor with muddy pawprints. Grumbling gently, she goes to the bag Richard provided and finds a smelly dog towel, which she uses to dry the animal, nose slightly crinkled. She orders him into his basket then, and, clearly in fear of being banished into the rain, Jarvis obediently walks over to it, turning in a couple of circles before settling down and curling his nose in towards his tail.

  Neve puts on the washing machine, finding soap powder under the sink, and goes back into the bedroom to address the mountain of clothes on the bed.

  As she continues to sort through the clothes she is almost giddy at the thought of not having to spend an evening here alone tonight.

  She walks to the dressing table and looks at her own reflection.

  Then she glances at her phone. Nothing from Lou. Still no message from Sally.

  It must have slipped her mind, and anyway, it’s all sorted out now.

  ‘Okay girl,’ she says. ‘Go and have a drink with him. You don’t have to go crazy.’

  25

  By the time Neve has tried on, then taken off, several of Isabelle’s dresses, she is sweating.

  All her clothes, apart from one long-sleeved top and the grotty trousers she has on, are in the wash now. It feels wrong to wear Isabelle’s clothes. But what choice does she have?

  In the end she settles on a plain white vest top and a soft woollen cardigan in pale turquoise with tiny pearl buttons.

  Wearing it, she feels like a slightly different Neve. Someone plucky and resourceful, but feminine too. Maybe this is her new country persona. Lou will get a surprise when she sorts this
place out and then sells it at a massive profit, she thinks, making a mental note to find an estate agent to come and do a valuation at some point soon.

  Feeling more cheerful now, she slicks on some dark red lipstick and flicks eyeliner along her lids in a feline swoop. Regarding herself in the mirror, she decides she looks just fine.

  Neve half-heartedly begins to eat a bowl of cereal, while standing by the sink. She thinks about what Finn had said about the toilet. The first night she hadn’t paid much attention to the plumbing. Everything felt old-fashioned and clunky. Will had commented that something seemed wrong when he’d called last night. So it was entirely possible that something had been done to the toilet before she even moved in.

  This wasn’t a great comfort, but it was something to cling onto. Then there was the whole magpie thing. She stops eating and puts down the bowl. The memory of the rotten smell is still too easy to conjure.

  Finn was probably right about the bird, she thinks now. But she decides not to look, just in case.

  After feeding Jarvis, who seems to inhale his dried food in one go, she muses on what to do with him tonight.

  Do people leave dogs in houses for an evening, or was it like children, where you had to be present? It’s the kind of basic knowledge Neve feels ashamed not to possess but she decides that Jarvis is going to have to come with them, whether Finn likes it or not.

  She attempts to watch an episode of Game of Thrones on her iPad while she waits but the endless bloodshed keeps making her picture the raw wound where the magpie’s head should have been.

  When her phone rings, she is so surprised that it takes her a moment to place the sound. The signal is so poor it seems she has inadvertently identified the one place it works; on the corner of the kitchen table.

  She doesn’t recognize the caller’s number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, my name is Georgia McColl, I’m with an estate agency in Truro called Salter McColl?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Neve, ‘hi.’ She remembers the file on Richard’s table now.

  ‘I believe you might be thinking about putting your cottage on the market?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Neve again, and, suddenly aware that she sounds quite thick, hurriedly adds, ‘how did you get my number?’

  ‘From your neighbour, Mr Shawcross? I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind my calling?’

  Neve feels a flash of annoyance at this. But the woman sounds so friendly and it was on her to-do list anyway.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, that’s alright.’

  A couple of minutes later, when she hangs up, she feels a sense of satisfaction.

  Georgia McColl is going to come around the day after tomorrow to do the valuation. She had pressed for tomorrow, but Neve felt she needed to get the place in some sort of shape first.

  This is the right thing to do. The grown-up thing.

  It isn’t long after that she hears a knock on the door and gets up, disturbing Jarvis, who had been lying next to her. The dog pants nervously and watches her as she pats her hair and goes to the front door, trying to look as though she was barely aware of the time.

  Finn does that little smile, like he is in on a joke no one else understands. She can’t decide whether it is really annoying, or whether it makes her want to rip the clothes right off him. It’s perhaps a little bit of both.

  He’s wearing the same woollen jacket from earlier and a pair of black jeans. She can see a deep blue shirt under the collar of the jacket and he smells of something with a subtle citrus zing that sends a little swoop into her stomach.

  ‘How’re you?’ he says, Irishly, and she grins.

  Jarvis tries to poke his head between her legs, which brings her abruptly back to herself. ‘Um, yeah, so … the dog,’ she says expectantly. Finn stares blankly back at her.

  ‘He’s coming with us,’ she says, raising her chin a little. If he makes a fuss about Jarvis coming to the pub then he’s clearly a jerk.

  But Finn gives a little nod and gestures towards the opening into the lane where his car awaits. She can’t tell whether the corner of his mouth is turned down sourly or not.

  26

  The pub is in a village about ten minutes’ drive away.

  Neve thinks her mother would have been proud of her subtle interrogation skills because by the time they are pulling into the car park, she has ascertained the following things about Finn.

  1. He moved here from Southampton because his ex-wife grew up in the Forest.

  2. She left him a year ago and is now living with a banker in London.

  3. He doesn’t really like to talk about any of this.

  At last Neve has come across something in the countryside here that matches her expectations. The Hope is whitewashed, with beams and horse brasses on the walls. There’s even a roaring fire and the whole atmosphere is one of cosy welcome.

  Jarvis is glued to Neve’s legs and she almost stumbles over him as Finn asks what she’d like to drink.

  She considers asking for a Coke. She knows exactly what will happen if she gets drunk tonight. The stresses of the last few days mean her inner bad genie is dying to get out. Does she really want these locals to see her like that?

  On the other hand, she isn’t going to be living here. She’s only staying long enough to get the house sorted and get her head together.

  ‘I’ll have a large Sauvignon Blanc please,’ she says, pushing down the thought that she didn’t end up finishing that bowl of cereal earlier.

  It’s ten o clock.

  The folk duo, called Hebrides, have moved from their own delicate ballads to crowd pleasers such as ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘Brown Eyed Girl’.

  The main singer is a tiny woman, with pre-Raphaelite curls and pale Celtic skin. She closes her eyes, transported, when she sings in her clear high voice. The singer is accompanied by a bald, chubby man with a beard who plays a variety of instruments, including a fiddle, with astonishing speed and skill.

  At some point people get up and start dancing. Neve is sure it wasn’t her who started it but by ten thirty she is swinging arms and singing joyously to ‘Sally MacLennane’ by The Pogues.

  Red faces swing in and out, mouths opening and closing as people sing along. Neve feels a sense of belonging to all of them, from the old man clutching his pint at the bar with a grim expression as he tries to ignore the loud music, to the middle-aged woman in the bright pink top whose round freckled breasts are almost popping out as she dances. Then there is Finn. Sexy Finn.

  Sexy Finn who has drunk Diet Coke after Diet Coke all evening, while she has had … some glasses of wine. She’s not sure how many. She’s been too busy dancing. But Finn hasn’t really moved from the same seat.

  She dances over to him and gives him a coquettish little beckon with her curled finger. He smiles tightly and shakes his head. Singing along to the music, she grabs hold of his hand and tries to pull him to his feet but he’s so heavy and all that happens is she stumbles a bit and ends up next to him on the bench seat.

  She can see Jarvis’s black nose from his position curled under the bench and she feels a powerful wave of affection for the dog too. He’s a lovely, lovely dog.

  And Finn is a lovely, lovely man. He just needs to loosen up a little bit, that’s all. She gazes at him for a moment and then, for no obvious reason at all, the axis of the world shifts a little and there’s a sour curdling feeling in her stomach.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says as the room begins to perform an impossible feat of movement and nothing is where it is supposed to be any more. ‘Feel a bit …’

  There is a strong hand under her upper arm now and she is almost levitating outside, where the cold air slaps her around the face. Groaning, she bends over with hands on her knees until the world stops its nonsense and behaves again.

  Finn says nothing. She stares down at the domes of his toes in the brown boots as the feeling of nausea passes.

  ‘Oops,’ she says, ‘I was only going to have one.’ She starts to laugh
and Finn thinks it’s funny too because he’s smiling at her, but a bit distantly in a cool way that’s suddenly so sexy it makes her groin squeeze. Who wants to stay in the pub anyway? She can do what she wants. She doesn’t live here. She never asked Isabelle Shawcross for the responsibility of this cottage in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  Might as well enjoy it while she is here.

  She moves closer to Finn and sees his eyes narrow a little in a way that is almost unbearable. He’s not as tall as her usual type but that’s okay because his lips are almost exactly opposite hers and she wonders why she hasn’t always gone for men his height when it makes for such excellent kissing engineering. And she’s closing her eyes and her lips are touching his softly.

  But it’s all wrong. Instead of the sweet mashing of mouths she is expecting, there is only air.

  Opening her eyes, she sees Finn is standing back and gazing down at car keys that have emerged from his pocket. And she smiles because she gets it now. He’s thinking that they can’t do it here, not in a car park! They’ll go back to the cottage and it will make the miserable place feel a bit more welcoming. Like christening it.

  But Finn is saying something now and it sounded very much like, ‘I think I’m going to take you home, Neve.’

  It’s clear he doesn’t mean ‘take you home and shag the life out of you’ and she says, simply, ‘Oh,’ then, ‘Why?’

  He blows air out through his cheeks and shakes his head.

  ‘You’re maybe more of a party animal than me,’ he says. Then, ‘Maybe I’m just not ready to be dating.’

  Neve stares back at him. Who uses the word ‘dating’?

  But somehow the words in her head have freed themselves from the architecture of teeth and tongue and palate and she says them out loud, accompanied by a snort of derision.

  Finn scowls at her. A lurch of discomfort at the awkwardness of this exchange cuts through the fuzz of drunkenness.

  It has all gone wrong.

  ‘Right,’ she says in what she hopes is a dignified voice. ‘Can you take me home?’ The word, ‘home’ feels like a mockery as she follows his disapproving back to the van.