Chapter 1 Country Retreat
Country Retreat
It was a chilly March morning, but despite that, I’d opened the window to let in the pale golden sunshine and to air the sitting room.
My cat, Mrs Snowboots – so called because her four white feet stood out against her black coat – had taken advantage of the fine day to go out into the small front garden.
She was timid and elderly, so wouldn’t stray on to the lane, which was little more than a tarmacked loop of track from the main road and served only my house and a farm at the other end, where it rejoined it.
I sat on the wide window seat and wished I could as easily open a window in my head to let out all the bad memories and thoughts … and the flashbacks to the accident: especially those.
The click of the gate latch jerked me back to the present and I looked up quickly, wondering who my visitor could be. Mrs Snowboots quickly slid back in through the window, with an indignant hiss.
It certainly wouldn’t be Will, at any rate, now I knew that he didn’t so much have feet of clay, but of caked mud. I just hoped it wasn’t the police, coming back again to question me about the accident …
I shuddered, hoping I’d never have to relive that dreadful night again. The flashbacks and nightmares were more than enough to cope with.
But to my relief my visitor was neither of those, for round the lilac bushes came the familiar figure of Eli Graham, my neighbour, accompanied by his black and white collie, Dash.
Although he was my nearest neighbour, Eli lived over half a mile away, in the direction of the village of Mossing, and his arrival always sent Mrs Snowboots into flight. She was sheltering behind me now, still hissing like a sputtering kettle.
It was Dash she didn’t like, even though he only wanted to be friends. I suspected she’d had brushes with less friendly dogs in her previous life, before we found each other at the cat rescue centre.
I leaned over to open the window wider and, as my sleeve brushed the pot of blue hyacinths next to me, they released their heady fragrance.
Eli came to a stop a few feet away and Dash immediately sat down and leaned against his legs, looking up at his master adoringly.
‘What light from yonder window breaks?’ he said sardonically in an accent that was still Brummie, even after living in the Bedfordshire countryside for over forty years.
He was a tall, square man with ruffled short white hair, bright sky-blue eyes and a permanently weather-beaten complexion from working on his smallholding. He wore, as always, dungarees under a rough, tweedy jacket with sagging pockets.
I managed a smile, even if it did feel as if I was forcing cardboard into intricate origami.
‘Hi, Eli. I wasn’t expecting you – or anyone else, come to that.’
‘Well, I need to know what you want delivered tomorrow, Ginny, don’t I? Seems like it might have changed.’
‘Delivered?’ I repeated stupidly. Could it really only have been a fortnight since I’d last seen Eli? But then I realized it must be, for it was ten long days since the accident, followed by Will telling me he was leaving for good, as I now knew he’d already planned to do, while he still could.
‘But the lockdown, Eli?’ I said. ‘I mean, we aren’t supposed to go anywhere or see other people, are we?’
‘You can see them, Ginny, so long as you don’t go near them,’ he assured me. ‘And the hens keep laying – they don’t know any different – and I suppose we all still need to eat.’
‘I expect we do,’ I agreed, although I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever feel hungry again.
Eating, since the day I broke up with Will, had meant brief fuelling stops, mostly cereal or toast, forced down with endless cups of Earl Grey tea.
I was now running short on that, too; it was definitely time I pulled myself together.
Eli delivered eggs, honey and a box of vegetables every fortnight, although since Will had left soon after he’d brought the last one, most of it was still mouldering in the veg rack.
‘I saw a van go past over a week ago and wondered if you’d moved back to London to sit out the lockdown, but Josie said no, you were still here, but on your own.’
Josie was the postwoman … and in the country, however isolated you are, there are always people watching what you do. Or perhaps it’s just because it is so isolated that everyone takes a keen interest in the smallest details of each other’s lives?
‘No, it was Will who was moving his stuff back to London, and he’s not coming back.’
Eli regarded me for a moment, not without sympathy, then said practically, ‘So you won’t be needing two dozen eggs and the large veg box then?’
I shook my head. ‘A dozen eggs and a small one, please – and a jar of honey,’ I said, for, after all, I might feel like cooking and eating at some point, and Eli’s produce was all organic and far better than anything from a supermarket.
‘I’ll leave them on the step tomorrow, then. Put out any empty boxes for me.’
‘OK, and the money, of course. Do you want me to leave that in a bowl of vinegar?’
The sky-blue eyes stared at me. ‘Why would I want my money smelling of fish-and-chip shops?’
‘It’s what they did at the time of the Black Death. It was supposed to kill the germs.’
‘I think I’ll just take my chance with the money, thanks,’ Eli said. He made a note of my order in his notebook and then tucked it away in the front pocket of his dungarees, the pencil attached to it with a bit of string hanging over the top and swinging like a pendulum.
‘I was starting to worry that Will might bring the plague here with him when he came back for the weekends,’ I confided.
‘And I couldn’t understand why he was leaving it so late to move everything he needed here and start working from home, because I’m sure you can design computer games anywhere, even if the broadband here is a bit slow. ’
I stopped, wondering why I was telling Eli all this, but it just sort of bubbled up and gushed out.
‘I witnessed a bad road accident a few days ago and … a woman died in it.’
‘Was that the one over near Old Warden?’ he asked with interest. ‘Nasty – they said in the local paper that the woman who died was a well-known artist, but I can’t say I’d ever heard of her and I’ve forgotten her name now.’
‘Annie Ashwin,’ I supplied. ‘I had heard of her, and also I once met her husband, the poet and bestselling literary novelist Rhys Tarn, at a publisher’s party.’
Of course, I hadn’t at the time realized he was married …
I paused and swallowed hard. Realizing who the woman in the crash was had somehow made it all so much worse.
‘I came on the accident just after it had happened and she was still alive. It was a terrible experience, Eli. When I got home I was in such a state of shock that I tried to get hold of Will in London, to see if he could come home … and that’s when the fiancée of the friend whose spare room he’s supposedly been renting during the week told me he’d moved out months ago to live with another woman. ’
‘Bastard,’ said Eli consolingly. ‘Didn’t deserve you.’
‘When he finally answered his phone, he said he’d intended moving out of the cottage that weekend anyway and would be bringing a van to take his stuff back. So I said he’d find it all in the garage and I didn’t want to see him.’
‘Better without him. He was a fish out of water down here,’ Eli said, which was true. Will had spent every weekend playing computer games or watching endless box sets and complaining that you couldn’t get take-away food delivered to Wisteria Cottage.
‘You give me a ring, Ginny, if you need help with anything.’
‘You are so kind – thank you!’ I said gratefully, feeling a sudden rush of hot tears to my eyes.
I blinked them back and managed another smile – or a near facsimile of one. I’d come to depend on Eli quite a bit since I’d bought Wisteria Cottage a few years before. He knew all the local news and was a fount of knowledge about gardening matters, while I had been a complete novice.
‘I’ll be off, then,’ he said, and Dash immediately stood up, tail wagging, as if he understood every word Eli said, which he probably did.
*
I suppose I’d unburdened myself to Eli because there just wasn’t anyone else to tell, other than my cat, and while Mrs Snowboots was a good listener, she was a bit wanting in the advice department.
Of course, there was Evie. I usually call my mother by her Christian name (unless I want to annoy her, when I call her Ma) because she is the least maternal woman you could ever meet, but she had, quite literally, flown in the face of reason, setting out on her latest lecture tour of the States a few weeks ago.
She was a well-known academic. ‘Feisty feminist art historian Evie Chase’, as the tabloids called her, after a TV series she made called Reassigned Brilliance, in which she conclusively proved that ten major artworks ascribed to men had actually been created by their female – and lesser known – contemporaries.
She was extroverted, brilliantly clever, argumentative and confrontational, all the things I most definitely was not, so that I was always deeply thankful that, being still technically married to my father at the time of my birth, she had, in a quixotic moment, registered me as Ginny Chase Spain.
I’d quickly dropped any mention of the name Chase, especially when my first children’s book was published.
My American father never knew about me and died when I was about two.
Evie’s idea of a bedtime story had been to tell me my father was a kind of obscure genie, who had vanished into a bottle and never came out again.
But later she opened up a bit about one crazy summer she spent in New York, when she had fallen in love for the first – and last – time, with my handsome, romantic-looking poet father, Leigh Spain.
Then, as she put it, somewhere between the wedding in what passed for a registry office over there, and the hotel where they were to entertain a few friends to a celebratory dinner, before flying off to Bermuda on honeymoon, she realized she had made an error of judgement.
‘It was as if I’d been in a dream and woken up.
The clincher was, when we went up to the honeymoon suite to change and he fell on the drinks cabinet instead of on me.
I mean, I didn’t mind coming second to his muse – because he was a very good poet, after all – but I wasn’t playing second fiddle to a fermented beverage!
So I told him I had a headache and would take some aspirin and follow him down in a little while.
Then I picked up my bags, left for the airport and was on a flight to London before he or any of his equally lush friends had thought to check up on me. ’
It was made clear that I was an unexpected and late bridal gift, arriving just before her divorce came through, but having, as she put it, popped me out between a lecture tour and the completion of a new book, she installed a competent nanny in her London flat and carried on her life exactly as before.
As they came up for sale, she had bought the flat next to hers and the basement and expanded into them.
I’d been curious about my father as I grew up. Evie gave me a book of his poetry, which she said was very good even if the author proved to have as much emotional depth as could be contained in a teaspoon.
That had made me wonder if writers and artists could create work that was deeper and more emotionally complex than they were themselves.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Evie, when I asked her in one of the rare moments when she was both at home and giving me her full attention. I supposed, being an art historian, she would know.
‘In your father’s case,’ she had added, ‘it was in vino veritas.’
Now, sitting there on the window seat at Wisteria Cottage, my thoughts seemed to have wandered a long way back, to the time when Liv, the cool, competent young woman originally employed by Evie as my nanny, had provided the core stability in my life as I grew up, and Evie came and went like a minor hurricane.
Liv was still there in the London flat, and now the lynchpin of Evie’s existence, since she had become housekeeper, PA and so much more over the years.
While I knew Liv was fond of me, despite her undemonstrative nature, if I had told her about the accident and Will leaving me for someone else, she would simply have urged me to close up the cottage and move back to the London flat before lockdown began, while everything in me was urging me in the opposite direction: at the moment, all I wanted was to shut myself away with my cat and possibly never come out of my burrow again.
Confiding in Eli had done me good, however, and I could feel the dark clouds lifting.
I thought of Dorothy Parker and how she said we might as well live, although that was written about suicide, which was not an option that had ever appealed to me. I mean, there’s no certainty you’ll like the next place any more than this, is there?
I could feel myself coming back from the shocked, cold, shivery state I’d been in for the last ten days and I determined that I was never going to slip back there again.
It was as if I’d been moving in a muted black-and-white world and now, quite suddenly, a tide of warmth and colour had rushed back in.
I looked around the usually cosy sitting room, seeing it clearly for the first time in days, and found it cold and forlorn.
The small log burner held only long-dead ashes and there was a litter of empty glasses and mugs on the coffee table. My stock of home-made wine had taken a bit of a hit.
When I stacked all the crockery on a tray and took it through to the kitchen, I found that in little better state. The sink was piled with dishes, the fridge empty of fresh food other than a hard nub of Parmesan cheese and a couple of covered bowls containing furry green mould.
‘Grow your own penicillin, the new cottage industry,’ I said to Mrs Snowboots, who had followed me in.
As to my little studio off the kitchen, I hadn’t even opened the door since everything had happened. I did now, hoping to let creativity flow back in.
Mrs Snowboots called me back with a few pungent-sounding remarks that were probably to the effect that I needed to get a grip – and she was quite right.
‘It’s just you and me, kid,’ I told her in a mock cowboy drawl, reaching for a notepad and a pen to make a shopping list.
‘Now, what super-expensive gourmet cat dinners would you like to turn your nose up at next week?’