Chapter 13
It wasn’t really a path, it was just a track that had been beaten down through the leaf-dropping brambles and the ropes of nettles, clambering over tree roots and windfall branches.
It probably felt longer to me as I was carrying Tilly, who had stopped crying and started staring around her, occasionally grabbing out to grip at a whippy stem as it flicked past.
Ross held branches aside and walked slowly, so I couldn’t rage at him.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to rage at him anyway or whether there would be any point; there was something very contained about Ross Ventriss.
As though you could bounce bowling balls off his personality.
All his anxiety seemed to be self-generated and saved for worrying about Elm Cottage and its outcome, rather than searching around for something to attach to, which was reassuring in its way.
He was also wearing very practical large boots, walking gaiters and practical trousers tucked in under that big jacket.
Just as well, given the fact that lumps were still dropping away from him like chains from a newly launched ship.
I felt my face get hot again with the embarrassment of having a small child and all the unpredictability that involved.
‘You will have to say sorry to Ross, Tils,’ I said to her as we negotiated another fallen branch. ‘You shouldn’t have thrown the leaves at him, and made him all muddy.’
I didn’t mention the horse poo. I had enough to contend with without all the two-year-old amusement that the word poo could generate and I definitely didn’t need her shouting ‘Poo!’ on repeat, with glee.
I changed my grip and shifted Tilly to my other hip.
Ross held an enormous stick aside to aid my passage.
I had no idea how I would have managed this walk alone, but then I probably wouldn’t have even tried it alone.
Why would I? There was no planet in this solar system on which going for a walk carrying a small child would ever be anything other than hard work.
If Tilly didn’t go under her own steam, we didn’t go.
And yet, here I was, trudging through a maze of obstacles and enough mud to clog my boots and double my bodyweight. Why? Because Tilly had been bribed with biscuits? Curiosity? Or just because Ross seemed… because he made me feel… because he was there?
‘Ah, here we are.’ We finally burst from the undergrowth like something out of I’m a Celebrity and into a clearing at the edge of the wood.
Beyond the immediate trees I could see farmland: a field edged by stone walling and occupied by ponies, which curved gently upwards to where the moors stammered into existence in occasional patches of dried heather and stunted gorse.
A short run of trackway had been created as a spur from the actual road, which I could see off to one side.
This was mostly made from broken brick and a yellow dust, and was deeply rutted with lorry tyre tracks, and led to a couple of huge metal containers, as though a merchant shipping vessel had passed by and dropped some of its load, incongruous and smugly man-made among the nature and pastoral background.
Beside them was a small hut, to which Ross led us, unlocking the padlock and swinging the door open with what seemed to be pride.
‘This is my site office. The containers are where I’m storing a lot of the gear, ready to get started.
’ He went into the shed. It contained a collection of garden chairs, a portable radio, stacks of random paperwork and a kettle sitting on a gas camping stove which reminded me uncomfortably of Isobel’s facilities, and smelled of hot wood and damp newspapers.
‘It’s where the guys come for a brew when they’re delivering or waiting for me to tell them what to do next,’ he went on.
‘Yes.’ I followed him into the hut and, after a quick risk assessment about electricity, glass, rodents, protruding nails and bags of poisonous chemicals, put Tilly down with relief. My spine felt bowed sideways. ‘Very nice. Why are we here?’
‘Biscuits!’ Tilly chimed in, seeing a packet on the little folding table. Ross undid the packet and handed it down.
‘Oh, no, you have to…’ I tried, but it was too late. Tilly took an enormous handful of the biscuits and then crawled under the table to eat them. ‘…ration them,’ I ended, feebly. ‘Tils…’
‘Just biscuits,’ Ross said cheerily. ‘She’ll be fine and I can talk to you.’
‘While my daughter ingests enough sugar to fuel a marathon runner,’ I said, mutinously.
‘She’ll be fine,’ he said again. ‘Look.’
There followed a few moments of paper shuffling, some muttered swearing and the kind of sotto voce monologue carried out when you are trying to find something but need your vocabulary to consider the others in the room. ‘Ah, here it is.’
He waved a page at me. I tried to focus on it. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ The paper went down onto the table, which shifted slightly. ‘It’s a pre-emptive sketch.’
‘I can see that. What of?’
Ross stared at me for a moment. I registered his long eyelashes, dark stubble, that the bitten lip had healed, as I returned it.
Our eyes stayed locked for longer than was surely necessary, then he glanced back down at the paper and spread it flat with the weight of his palms. ‘Yes, sorry again. I forget that real people don’t see architectural drawings in the same way as I do. ’
Real people? Did he usually associate with aliens? Or, an even worse thought, imaginary people?
‘I have no idea what I’m looking at. It’s just a drawing,’ I said, and took a biscuit from the packet on the table, almost without thinking, stared at it, thought, I’m making progress.
In the life before, I would have wondered whether David had put something in this.
‘Just a little something to help you sleep,’ he would have said as I drifted, unable to keep myself or Tilly safe. Then I bit it.
‘It’s what I’d like to do with this area, once Elm Cottage is under way.
’ Ross turned the paper ninety degrees and I could suddenly understand what I was looking at.
‘Originally I was going to sell it again, get rid of the containers, tidy up, make good, flog it on. But then I thought… why not keep the containers? Turn them into a little house?’
I stared at the drawing and then up and out of the grubby cobwebbed window at the two shipping containers which squatted in the leafy murk beyond.
‘Would that work? Wouldn’t it be a very little house?
And what about… electricity and plumbing and all that, won’t that be prohibitively expensive to get out here? ’
From under the table came a muttered ‘’Spensive.’ It was a word Tilly had heard a lot in her short life.
Ross looked out of the window too. ‘You’re being… what’s that thing?’
‘Practical, down to earth, realistic?’
‘No, not that. Unimaginative. Can you not see it? A little cabin-type of place, all self-contained? It wouldn’t need to connect to the mains, and I’d never get planning for that out here either.
It would need to be entirely self-sustaining, towable so it would rate as a caravan for planning permission, and eco-friendly.
’ He turned around and brought up his phone, tapped a few words and showed me the screen. ‘Like this.’
I saw, in glorious technicolour and probably rather more sunlight than this location would ever get, a selection of small buildings that looked like the offspring of a horsebox and a shooting lodge.
‘I could turn the containers into something like this,’ Ross went on. ‘Compost toilet, solar panels for power, it could be completely off grid, which means no need to connect to services.’
‘Compost toilet,’ I said faintly, having vague childhood memories of camping expeditions with my parents. ‘That sounds…’
‘Oh, it’s all very modern and clinical now.’ He hastily closed down the page. ‘Very efficient. No buckets down the bog.’
I stared outside again. Despite the fact that it was only lunchtime, the sky seemed to be darkening already, the fog pulling all the light out of the day. Mist swirled down among the low level branches like curious ghosts peering in at us. Distant birds cawed desolately.
‘And all this is relevant why?’
Ross bit the side of a nail. I suppressed the urge to push his hand away from his mouth.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps I could offer this place to Isobel? There might be a few weeks with no accommodation, while I get the team onto Elm Cottage, but as soon as that’s going I can spare a few people to start putting this together. Do you think she’d like it?’
I thought about Isobel and the shambolic room she lived in. ‘Can I have another look?’ I asked. ‘At what you want to build?’
More hasty fumbling. ‘Of course. It wouldn’t be exactly like these, of course – there would be more flexibility – but size-wise and fittings-wise, they’d be fairly similar.’
There were hundreds of pictures, mostly featuring smiling people, immaculate kitchens and bathrooms, enormous double beds with wide glass windows giving views over thousands of deserted acres.
I tried to superimpose these on the rusty shed-like containers and the site squeezed between trees.
‘Well,’ I said dubiously. ‘They do look nice. And she could keep the birds.’ I shuddered at the thought of one of these pristine dwellings filled with beaks and scaly legs, all the flapping.
‘Would you ask her? You can show her this, if you like?’ Ross held out the sketches towards me, but they were still just so many pencil lines.
‘I could show her this page.’ I pointed at his phone. ‘If you give me the URL. It might mean more to her.’
‘That would be brilliant.’ Ross smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘And you’d still pay me five thousand pounds?’
Under the table, Tilly sneezed.