CHAPTER FIVE
On Thursday, the day after Zak departed for his gran’s, I left the café in the very capable hands of Maddy and Katja and drove over to Bogg House.
Zak was planning to spend some time with his gran over the weekend before getting down to work. The house felt strange without him, but he’d be home the weekend after that and I was already looking forward to us spending some family time together.
Mindful of promising him I wouldn’t go over to Bogg House on my own, I’d asked my friend Primrose if she wanted to come with me, and she’d immediately given me an eager ‘yes’. But then she’d called later saying that her little boy, George, was under the weather and running a temperature, and she didn’t want to leave him with her mother-in-law as she’d planned to do.
I’d told her we could do it another day but I’d come off the phone feeling quite deflated.
I’d seen the perfect sofa, heavily discounted in a sale, and I wanted to measure up to see if it would fit where I was envisaging it would go. If I waited another day, it might no longer be in the sale, and I couldn’t justify paying the full price for a piece of furniture that would invariably suffer the wear and tear of normal family life – especially with a new baby to increase the mess and chaos!
So I’d decided that in the interests of saving money (Zak would surely approve of that?), I would just nip over to the house myself. I could be in and out in a jiffy and what Zak didn’t know wasn’t going to worry him.
On the way over, I thought about the advert I’d put in the village store window and on-line.
I still hadn’t had a single response and it was Rori’s last day on Friday. I’d left her busily preparing for a party of four who were arriving the following afternoon, cleaning two of the shepherd’s huts and organising the towels and fresh bed linen.
For the first time, I felt a stirring of panic.
How would I cope on my own if I still had no assistant by the weekend?
*****
I heard the mechanical roaring noise from the main road, even before I arrived at the lane leading to Bogg House. The teenagers were out on their quad bikes again in the neighbouring field. Just three of them this time.
I brushed off a little prick of irritation. Nothing is ever perfect.
When I arrived at the house and parked by the gate, they all stopped and looked over at me. I gave them a cheery wave and as I walked through the gate, I did my best to shrug off the whistles and shouts and raucous laughter that followed me.
‘Live and let live’ had always been my motto. Who was I to spoil their fun, which was hopefully perfectly innocent? We would be neighbours and the last thing I wanted was to be branded unfriendly.
But once inside, I didn’t linger. I went straight into the living room with my tape measure. The phone signal here was a little dodgy and it would be getting dark soon – and I was starting to see what Zak meant about not wanting me to be on my own with no one to help in an emergency.
I quickly measured up for the sofa, delighted to find that it would fit perfectly into the space opposite the fireplace. I’d place an order as soon as I got home, just in case the sale price ended at midnight. Smiling, I trailed my hand along the beautiful vintage tiles of the old fire surround.
Our fireplace!
I could still hardly believe that this gorgeous property was ours.
The tiles were looking dull and grubby right now, but once cleaned up they would look spectacular. On a whim, I hurried into the kitchen and dampened an old towel that was lying by the sink so that I could rub at the tiles and reveal the true colours beneath the grime.
The result was even better than I’d thought, the vibrant colours shining like jewels as a result of my hard work. But after a while, I realised the afternoon light was fading fast – we weren’t as yet connected to a power supply – and it would soon be time to pick Maisie up from her best friend’s house, where she’d gone after school.
Running upstairs, I looked out over the neighbouring field and was relieved to find that it was deserted now, the quad bikers gone. The only sound to disturb the peace of the countryside now was the occasional hoot of an owl and cry of a wild animal which I thought might be a fox. I made a mental note to brush up on my knowledge of the countryside. Mum always used to be able to tell me the names of all the trees and the flowers and fruit in the hedgerows, and I wanted to be able to do that for Maisie when we lived here – and for the new baby in due course.
Using my phone light to guide me, I made my way back to my car.
As I neared the tree by the gate, the silence was broken by an unearthly sound that was shockingly close. I stifled a shriek and my heart thundered in my ears – almost as loudly as the wise old owl perched in the branches above me, who’d chosen that exact moment to hoot at me.
Laughing softly at my ridiculously melodramatic reaction, I stepped out into the lane – and then I really did shriek, as I collided full-force with someone standing by the gate . . .