Miranda’s Family

Chapter Nine

Ryan Sinclair was now waiting for the finalisation of the purchase of the country cottage. At last he would own a home of his own, fully own it with no mortgage owing.

He raised a clenched fist in a gesture of triumph at that thought, then finished packing his final bag of odds and ends early, and grinned as he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop smiling like a happy idiot all day once he’d left here.

He glanced round with a scowl now replacing the smile. He’d been longing to leave this cheapie rented flat for months, cheap partly because it was small but mainly because it was on the edge of a busy and very noisy industrial area of the town. He’d vowed when he came to live here, so that he could save more money, that his next home would be in the country, somewhere quiet and pleasant.

He didn’t anticipate having any regrets about moving away from London, whatever people told him, and he beamed at the smoky morning suburb as he put the final box of household possessions into the back of the four-wheel drive. Not long to put up with this now, only a few minutes hopefully.

He patted the vehicle as he closed the boot. He’d traded in his ancient little runabout and bought this vehicle second-hand a few months ago because it seemed a better bargain to buy a two-year-old car with low mileage than a brand-new one which would instantly have lost a huge chunk of its value once he put it on the road. This one had had very low mileage, which had made it even more of a good buy.

All he needed now was a phone call to say that the settlement to pay for his new home had gone through this morning as expected. He wasn’t moving out until that was done and dusted. They’d promised to do it early in the day, so he was waiting impatiently for confirmation and then he’d set off.

When his phone rang, he answered at the second ring and the woman who spoke to him was curt and to the point, ending the call as soon as she’d told him that the sale had now been completed in every detail and thanking him in a formulaic way for his custom.

‘I’ll be out of here within ten minutes,’ he said aloud as he ended the call. It was actually only seven minutes, he noted in amusement as he got into his car. He blew a farewell derisive raspberry noise in the direction of the four-storey, old-fashioned block of flats and set off, not even turning his head to look back as he went round the corner.

He drove out of London in a leisurely way, heading towards the tiny village of Fairford Parva in beautiful Wiltshire and occasionally singing along with the radio. He could just about hold a tune, but knew he didn’t have a particularly sonorous voice. But who was there to hear him?

‘Farewell, rat race and bustle!’ he yelled as he drove between hedges and fields for the first time.

‘Hey, world, take note! I need only take on jobs that suit me from now on,’ he yelled a little later. He laughed at himself but as the words echoed in his mind as well as in the car, he liked what they were proclaiming so much that he shouted them aloud once more.

He had been longing to get away from urban life for a few years and he was doing it at last. He had dreamt of moving into the peace and quiet of a cottage in a small village. It didn’t matter where it was in England as long as it was a small place and surrounded by attractive countryside, not traffic and harassed-looking people. He’d wanted his new forever home to look out over the natural world and it did.

After the break-up of his one and only attempt at a permanent relationship, he’d worked extra hard and lived super frugally for over four years to give himself a secure financial basis for making this move. There would be no mortgage or rent to pay from now on, nor ever again if he could help it. He’d live sensibly and carefully, making sure he never did anything that brought him into debt and jeopardised his hard-won freedom. He’d take on a few job contracts here and there to make a living and the rest of the time he’d do what he wanted, which was paint pictures of rural scenes and wildlife.

For the past few months he’d kept an eye on the property sales websites online, especially those featuring homes with a little land attached in parts of the country where the house prices were generally lower. His vigilance had paid off big time and he’d managed to snap up a small cottage cheaply because it was rather dilapidated, without needing to take out a mortgage. And he’d done it a few months earlier than he’d expected. He had actually danced round his tiny flat when he heard that his offer on it had been accepted.

This cottage had the additional benefit not only of a large garden at the rear but a strip of arable land beyond it available for a modest extra sum. Its narrowness and lack of a view had apparently put buyers off, but he hadn’t hesitated to buy it because it had been neglected for years and the ground wasn’t loaded with pesticide residue. He would be able to grow a lot of his own food from now on without using dangerous chemicals.

In his opinion, organic food tasted nicer as well as being better for you, though many people told him it didn’t taste any different. He didn’t bother to argue about that.

He intended to live in this cottage, grow as much of his own food as possible organically and continue running a small IT consultancy online. You could do so much online these days and he wouldn’t have to live in the city to show himself as available for enough smaller jobs to provide the money he needed to live on.

He was particularly skilled at sorting out smaller problems for people without good technical skills and creating inexpensive little websites quickly for them from a portfolio of simple templates he’d built up over the past few years. He also did all sorts of smaller IT repair jobs on request and did them well, if he said so himself.

Two of the things he thoroughly enjoyed about his new way of working were firstly, the interest of doing a variety of tasks and secondly, actually meeting in person the people who needed his help. He didn’t intend to work for a narrowly focused high-tech company ever again, especially one that was extremely competitive and wanted to own you body and soul, twenty-four-seven, as well as using your know-how to make a lot more money that they didn’t share with you, however good the innovations you’d produced for them might be.

When he’d left a company like that as the first step towards making his dream come true, he’d found he could earn more than he’d expected in the niche he’d sussed out and had therefore been able to make this lifestyle change even earlier than his original plans had suggested. How wonderful was that?

He’d have time for his art from now on, perhaps even manage to sell more of his paintings of the small creatures and delicate plants most people didn’t even notice as they walked past them in the countryside. He hoped to find some interesting scenes to paint.

Then he arrived at Fairford Parva and forgot everything else as he turned into the village from the main road and drew up in front of his new home. The sun was shining brightly and every window seemed to twinkle a welcome at him, even though these windows needed a good clean.

‘Hello, Daisy Cottage,’ he said softly, switching off the car engine and smiling at the attractive little building set in narrow gardens at the front, with most of its land behind it. OK, so the house needed the front door painting and various small renovations on other parts, but it was still basically attractive. He sat for a few more moments with the car door open, finding it wonderful how quiet it was round here at this time of day.

Then he wondered why was he sitting here for so long instead of going inside his new home and got out of the car, striding along the path that cut the front garden neatly in two. At the old-fashioned door he stopped to pull the key out of his pocket, unlocking his new home slowly and reverently, but not going inside yet. Instead he stood staring in at the living room into which the front door opened. No fancy hallway here but he had plans to build a small entrance porch himself. Oh, he had all sorts of plans!

It felt to him as if the cottage was telling him how lovely it was to see him moving in here at last. And wasn’t he an idiot to think like that? He stayed in the doorway, wanting to take in every tiny detail, inside and out, and make this place his own emotionally from now on.

At last he walked slowly into the living room, remembering the phrase ‘take seisin of’, which he’d found in a historical novel and never forgotten. He loved collecting unusual words and phrases. That was one of his minor passions, as well as taking photos of the small world of insects and tiny animals that most people moved past without noticing or caring about the smaller creatures humans shared their world with.

Today those three words echoed in his mind, sounding exactly like what he was about to do: take seisin of Daisy Cottage and its gardens. He’d invest love and toil into it to make it look and feel well-cared-for again.

He didn’t wish to spend his whole life working on a computer, though he enjoyed doing it part of the time, especially when he was truly helping people solve problems that were messing up their lives. He intended to create a new and more varied way of living for himself here in the country, partly painting, partly working on digital stuff.

As he walked back outside, he waved his clenched right fist in the air in a gesture of happy triumph, then looked round guiltily, not wanting to seem an idiot to his new neighbours. But there was no one else around at this end of the village street.

He stared inside, smiling slightly. He’d bought the contents of the cottage for a bargain price from the family of the old lady who’d lived here – well, all except for the two sagging single beds with stained mattresses, which he’d asked the vendors to remove. The double bed in the largest upstairs room, the one at the front, had been immaculate, thank goodness, and something told him that this particular room and its bed hadn’t been used by her much, if at all.

Perhaps the old lady had preferred the view from the rear windows from bedrooms too small to comfortably house a double bed. It certainly had a very attractive outlook from them.

There was only one bathroom at the moment but then, there would only be him using it, so who cared?

He’d paid a local business to do a thorough clean and then shampoo all the carpets and upholstery. The cottage now felt and smelt fresh even if it still looked shabby.

He intended to put an en suite bathroom in the attic, doing most of the work himself, and to use that area as the master bedroom eventually. It already had dormer windows, one looking out onto the village street at the front and the two rear ones looking over the grounds of the larger house next door at the rear.

He was fairly handy with tools, thanks to his uncle, and would be able to do a lot of the modernisation and repair work himself. He’d enjoy that, take his time, do it slowly and carefully.

At the rear, his kitchen also looked out at the nearby ‘big house’, as locals called it. This stood well back from the rest of the houses, hidden away on a couple of acres or so of land. But as Ryan’s extra strip of land ran along one side of its couple of acres, he had an excellent view of the place from there as well as from the sitting room as well. He didn’t know who owned it but it was a very pretty house, a ‘gentleman’s residence’ rather than a manor house. It seemed to be hiding away from the world, though. Was that just an illusion or had it been positioned and built with that purpose?

From one of the smaller bedroom windows he also had a view of a small patch of woodland at his side of the grounds. The real estate agent had told him it was a carpet of bluebells in spring. He’d just missed seeing it this year unfortunately but was looking forward to seeing it next year and hoping to get some good photos out of it to translate into paintings later on. The two he’d done of bluebells had sold easily.

So this cottage might be small but it was well situated for what he wanted from his life. The only thing that marred the view was a shabby cottage at the rear of the land belonging to the big house. It was situated at the same side of the grounds as his own home.

It wouldn’t have taken much to put a lick of paint on the peeling front door or to tidy up the garden but no one seemed to have made the slightest attempt to do anything to it.

He’d been told by an older woman he’d got chatting to at the village shop that the other cottage had been rented out for years to a guy who didn’t join in anything that was going on in the village, and who even did most of his food shopping elsewhere – when he was at home, which was only about half the time. The chap’s car received a lot of loving care, though, as Ryan had already seen for himself, and he apparently went away in it quite often for a few days at a time. He also made a lot of unnecessary noise at intrusive hours of the day or night with his comings and goings.

When showing Ryan round, the real estate agent had shown similar signs of disapproval, gesturing towards the run-down cottage and grimacing, then saying in tones of distinct disapproval, ‘The guy who’s renting that doesn’t seem to associate with any of the locals, so you’d probably be wasting your time trying to get to know him. And I’m told he goes away a lot.’

Since his move here, Ryan had seen other people grimace at one another when the guy came into the shop and to his astonishment shoved his way to the front of the queue. He’d never seen anyone actually do that before but when he commented people just said it was a good thing, because it got rid of ‘that oik’ more quickly. And anyway he hardly ever did any shopping there.

And why was he thinking of such a nasty oik on this lovely sunny day? He smiled. He’d never heard anyone except his grandfather use that old-fashioned insult but it was now how he thought of the fellow.

Ryan returned the wave of a woman three doors away as he carried another bundle inside. He’d found the other people in the village easy to chat to, not pushing to find out about his life but letting time reveal one part of it or another when a relevant subject cropped up. And they mentioning things about themselves or the village occasionally too, gradually teaching him about his surroundings.

He went out to his four-wheel drive for another box and took a moment or two to look along the road. The village was hardly more than a small hamlet and consisted mainly of this single higgledy-piggledy street of houses dating from several eras, which was perhaps the reason they weren’t all positioned in the usual straight line.

Apart from the village shop there was a pub called The Jolly Monk, and both of them were set back a little way from the main street with car-parking space in front of them. The place was perfect as far as he was concerned! He could walk to the pub for a pint occasionally, or to the shop if he didn’t intend to buy anything too heavy, for which he would use his car because he wasn’t going to risk damaging his back by lumping heavy stuff around.

Ryan went indoors again and moved slowly through the cottage, pausing now and then to study some detail. Everything showed very clearly that the house had previously belonged to an old person because the furniture he’d bought with it was not only old-fashioned but well-used and the seats were higher than those of modern furniture.

He didn’t mind the latter because he was tall enough to prefer higher seats, so he would manage with these pieces for a while. Anyway, his happiness wasn’t dependent on fancy furnishings or inviting people round for fine dining at dinner parties, and as for wearing suits and ties again, forget it! What he craved were peaceful surroundings, a peaceful life and the visual beauties of nature. Though he hoped to make a few friends here, if he was lucky.

But as to the modernisation of his new home, it’d have to wait. Not only did he want to avoid further depleting his savings but he wasn’t sure yet exactly what he wanted to do to his new home long term – except repaint the front door. That he’d do quite soon because its shabbiness annoyed him.

He sat down in the big armchair, rocking it gently to and fro and finding it extremely comfortable once he got rid of the lumpy, mostly threadbare cushions that been piled on it any old how. The chair was upholstered in a plain dark maroon material that nearly matched the nearby elderly sofa. The chair must have been reupholstered recently because it wasn’t showing any signs of wear and tear like the other items. Perhaps it had been her favourite seat.

He would allow himself to spend a little money on a colourful new cushion or two at the local market or wherever he could find them to brighten up the chair and the old sofa, but he didn’t intend to spend a fortune on new furniture.

No need to be efficient with his time now. He could sit here all day if he wanted. He let out a long, happy sigh as he stared round the living room and contemplated his future. He would set up his office next door in what was supposed to be the dining room. He could push the small but solid mahogany Victorian dining table to one side and use it as a second desk, leaving enough room for his own modern office equipment, which would clash visually with the old furniture but too bad.

He would set up his painting things in the old-fashioned sunroom at the back of the house for the time being. It wasn’t overshadowed by trees so was light and bright, which was the main thing he needed. Someone had removed all the furniture from it quite a while ago judging by how dusty the floor had been, but that suited him because that left just enough room for his own art equipment.

He would be able to fit his easel, the stand that held all his small pieces of equipment and his big storage cupboard in there but nothing much else. The room was smaller than he’d like but he could make do with that because it was still a lot bigger than the flat had been.

Nodding approval of how everything was feeling so far, he went back into the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards and drawers. The appliances were very old-fashioned and he would definitely need to buy some new cooking equipment as well as a big modern fridge-freezer. But the ugly little green plastic dining table and four matching chairs standing in the space near some French doors that led out to the rear would do just fine till he got round to updating this whole area and putting in a new and much larger conservatory at the other side of the rear to use as his studio.

It wasn’t as if he was going to be giving dinner parties or even inviting people round for drinks. He’d been there and done that with his one try at having a live-in partner. He wished Sadie well, but the two of them had proved quite quickly that they were not meant to live together, fond as they were of one another. She couldn’t understand why he wanted quiet weekends and time with his painting. He didn’t want to go out drinking till late and lie in bed till late. He was an early to bed, early to rise sort of guy, and his body fell asleep on him if he tried to keep going till late.

After only a few months the two of them had agreed to separate. They’d shared out their few joint goods and chattels amicably enough, then gone their own different ways.

Sadie was working somewhere in France now, he’d heard, but wasn’t sure where. He had her emergency email address but he doubted he’d ever use it. He didn’t think she’d contact him again, either, because she too was getting on with her own style of life and someone had told him she was shacked up with a new guy. Good luck to them.

After he’d carried the remaining boxes and miscellaneous bits and pieces from his car into the cottage, he locked the place up again and drove to the village shop, where he introduced himself to the owners as a new and, he hoped, regular customer.

He knew food items would cost him more if he shopped here but he’d save part of that extra cost by using less petrol and getting things done more quickly if he didn’t have to drive several miles to the nearest big supermarket.

Not that he’d have to be quite as careful with money and time in the same way once he’d moved into the cottage he’d bought. But after seeing a friend drop dead at the age of thirty-five, he didn’t intend to waste a minute of his life. It had taken him a few years to get over the shock of losing Guy so suddenly and it had seemed unfair for him to die so young, especially when he’d been a keep-fit freak.

Anyway, the local shop would do fine most of the time and those big supermarkets could manage without his contribution to their profits while this smaller business would genuinely benefit from his regular custom, he was sure. Sadly, these days small shops often had rather a struggle to stay viable, especially those in places as remote as Fairford Parva.

He nodded to the shopkeeper and walked round studying the contents of the shelves and displays. He was delighted to find that they sold frozen ready meals which the owners made themselves. He picked up one of the slim boxes and studied its contents, pleased that it looked to be adequate in serving size. Then he read the list of other ingredients, even more pleased that unlike some commercially mass-produced ready meals, it didn’t contain any of the mock flavourings he regarded as being bad for human bodies.

After that he got chatting to the male half of the husband-and-wife owners, who told him he’d been a cook in Bristol before he got married and settled here after his wife inherited the shop. He promised Ryan that their own food was as free as was possible from artificial flavourings without having to charge a fortune for it. They had several regular customers for whom they made meals to order in batches ready for freezing, and any of the others who bought them would be happy to vouch for the taste and food quality.

‘I’m confident enough of our product to give you one as a free sample,’ he ended. ‘Just choose the meal you fancy most and it’s yours.’

‘And I’ll put our menu in the box with your other purchases,’ the female half of the owner duo added cheerfully.

‘I’ll definitely be interested in that,’ Ryan told her. ‘I enjoy cooking sometimes but don’t want to do it every single day.’

They were also happy to order in one or two other items especially for him. He loved curries and spicy food, and enjoyed making his own, but needed some proper spices not to mention packets of dried poppadums, of which he was very fond. He explained to the proprietors that boxes of ready-cooked poppadums like the ones on display went a bit stale by the time he’d eaten all those in one packet, but he’d got cooking the dried poppadums as he needed them down to a fine art using his microwave.

The male proprietor immediately asked for the exact method and time it took to cook them, and gave him a free packet of poppadums in return for the tip of a way he hadn’t tried before.

Ryan enjoyed this bargaining and sharing session, which you didn’t get in big stores, where it was hard enough to gain the attention of an assistant who often looked bored, let alone to find the items you really wanted among so many. Some of the old-fashioned approaches were actually more efficient and productive for individual customers than the modern approaches to selling, he reckoned.

By the time he left the shop, Ryan had bought a pile of basic foods, ordered other things he’d need regularly to be brought in for him as special orders and made an excellent start on getting on good terms with the owners. He was pleased to leave them both beaming after ‘call me Greg’ had helped him carry several boxes of purchases out to his vehicle.

If their homemade food was good, he’d order some regularly once he got a new freezer because work often came in sudden hectic spurts when you were the sole operator of a small consultancy. And anyway, even though he was not so helpless that he couldn’t feed himself decently enough when needed, he simply didn’t want to cook every single day.

He smiled as he always did when thinking of that sort of thing, remembering his mother. He wasn’t one of those fools who called themselves adults but couldn’t look after their own basic needs. Well, she hadn’t allowed him to grow up without what she called ‘the necessary life skills’ like cooking and washing the clothes you’d dirtied.

But he also preferred to be independent for his own self-respect. His girlfriend hadn’t been nearly as good a cook as he was and had wanted to eat out all the time, which wasn’t a good way to save money to buy a house.

He stood in the front doorway of his cottage once he’d put all the food away, breathing with immense pleasure air that really was fresh. He took the time to stare along the village street, first one way then the other, assimilating more details. It was as pretty as he remembered. And the pub was only about a hundred yards along from his cottage with a sign outside saying The Jolly Monk. It was a lovely old building, black-and-white-timbered in the upper half. The car park had two or three vehicles in it, early as it was.

After that Ryan went inside again and began to move some of the pieces of furniture around into what felt like more comfortable living patterns for himself. That was one of the things he and Sadie had disagreed strongly about, how to arrange the contents of their joint living space. Strange how much the other partner’s ways about that sort of thing had annoyed them both.

Then he forgot about her and the past, smiling as a small bird landed on the outer windowsill, a perky little thing. ‘You’re welcome here any time, little sparrow,’ he told it and listened with delight as it sang a little chirruping song for him. There was a bird table near the house at the back and he guessed the old lady had enjoyed feeding the birds and watching their antics.

He’d make a bigger bird table and photograph its small visitors sneakily, which would probably give him ideas for a few paintings. They might be good sellers too if he managed to catch the perkiness and charm of his first little visitor, which was what his mother had always called ‘a tiggy little bird’. He was getting better not just at painting but at selecting a scene or creature that would appeal to people likely to buy original paintings.

He had seen two little groups of people further along the street standing gossiping and had watched them for a few moments. He loved watching people at any time. The ones in each group looked to be on very good terms with one another, smiling and gesticulating as they chatted. A quartet had gathered at one corner of the pub car park and three others were standing outside the open door of one of a group of a few small terraced two-up, two-down cottages, laughing heartily at something.

He hoped he’d make a few genuine friends here, not just mere acquaintances. He wasn’t into boozing and partying but he did enjoy the occasional glass of beer or cider at a pub and cosy little chats with neighbours like the ones going on here down the road.

He gave another happy sigh. Yes, Fairford Parva looked as if it might satisfy his lifestyle needs very nicely.

Then he went back to sorting out more details of how his new home could be re-organised, and dumping two ugly ornaments that had been lurking in a corner into a bag he was planning to fill with similar items and take to the nearest charity shop. He wasn’t into mass-produced cute pottery children, let alone allowing them to stand on his mantelpiece, and absolutely loathed the way their unrealistic rosebud lips were pursed into tiny unconvincing mouths.

He didn’t know exactly what he’d be into from now on. Life, the universe and giving new experiences a try, perhaps – as well as having more interactions with the small animals and birds he loved to paint.