Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I can’t do another day on my own.
The cottage is cold. The fire went out in the night, and the kitchen smells of dead ash and the damp that creeps in through the stone walls when the heating hasn’t been on.
I stand at the window and look out at the hills, and they’re beautiful – green and grey and streaked with low cloud – but I don’t care.
I don’t care about the view, or the fresh air, or the walking paths, or any of the things that are supposed to make isolation feel like a retreat instead of a punishment.
I’ve been here five days and I’ve spoken to one person.
Last night I sat in this kitchen and had a full conversation with a teapot because the silence had me wanting to climb out of my skin.
I need a human being. An actual, living, breathing person who isn’t me.
So I pull on my boots and my coat, lock the cottage, and walk.
The path over the hill is familiar now – I’ve done it enough times that my feet know where the ground dips, where the mud collects, and which stones are loose on the steep bit near the top.
The sky is overcast but dry, and the wind has dropped since last night.
The sheep scatter as I come over the ridge, bleating and offended, as if I’ve interrupted something private.
On the other side, the valley opens up, and Jeff’s farmhouse sits in its fold of hill, grey stone, slate roof, and the thin line of chimney smoke I’ve come to think of as a signal – someone’s home, someone’s warm, someone exists.
I knock on the front door. There’s a pause, then the sound of a chair scraping and a dog barking – a single short bark, more announcement than threat – then the door opens and Jeff is standing there in a checked shirt, corduroy trousers, and slippers, with a tea towel over one shoulder and a look of mild, pleasant surprise on his weathered face.
‘Kim,’ he says, as if we’ve known each other for years. ‘Come in, come in. I’ve just put the kettle on.’
The kitchen is the warmest room I’ve been in since Alex left.
There’s an Aga against the far wall, dark green and radiating a steady, bone-deep heat that hits me as soon as I step through the door.
A wooden table takes up most of the space, scarred and scrubbed and covered at one end with a newspaper, a pair of reading glasses, and a half-finished crossword.
The dog – a border collie, old and grey around the muzzle – lifts its head from a bed by the Aga, decides I’m not interesting, and puts it down again.
‘Sit yourself down,’ Jeff says, already reaching for mugs. ‘Milk and sugar?’
‘Just milk, thank you.’
I sit at the table and let the warmth settle over me like a blanket.
The kitchen smells of toast and woodsmoke and something sweet – fruit cake, I think, or scones – and there are photographs on the windowsill, small, framed snapshots of a woman with dark curly hair and a wide smile, standing in front of this house, holding a lamb, sitting on a gate with the hills behind her.
In every picture, she looks like she’s about to laugh.
Jeff follows my gaze as he sets the mug down in front of me.
‘That’s Margaret,’ he says. ‘My wife.’
‘She looks lovely.’
‘She was.’ He sits down opposite me and wraps both hands around his mug – big hands, rough and brown, the knuckles swollen the way hands get when they’ve spent decades working in cold weather. ‘Forty-one years we had. Not bad going, is it?’
‘Not bad at all.’
He talks about her easily, without the stiffness people sometimes get when they mention someone they’ve lost, as if the grief has been worn smooth by time and handling and has settled into something he can carry without it cutting him.
Margaret loved the garden. Margaret sang in the church choir even though she couldn’t hold a note, and the vicar was too polite to tell her.
Margaret made the best bara brith in the valley, and he’s been trying to replicate it for three years and hasn’t got close.
He’s starting to think she left a secret ingredient out of the recipe on purpose so he’d always miss her cooking.
‘She’d have liked you,’ he says, pushing a plate of cake towards me.
‘She always said the cottage brought interesting people. We had a painter one summer – watercolours, out on the hill every morning in all weathers. Margaret used to take him flasks of tea. And a couple from London who thought they wanted the quiet life and lasted about four days before they drove to Brecon for a pub lunch and didn’t come back until nightfall. ’
I smile. ‘I can understand that.’
‘Can you? Getting a bit much on your own up there?’
The directness of it catches me off guard.
I take a sip of tea to buy myself a second, and when I put the mug down I find him watching me with those pale blue eyes – not prying, just attentive how people who live alone learn to be, because when you only get one visitor a week, you pay attention to them.
‘A bit,’ I say. ‘It’s very quiet.’
‘It is that. Takes some getting used to. Margaret struggled with it when we first moved here – she’d grown up in Swansea, you see, streets and buses and neighbours you could hear through the walls.
Took her a good six months before the silence stopped bothering her.
Said it was like learning to swim – you have to stop fighting it before it holds you up. ’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it.’
‘That was Margaret. I just stood in fields and grunted.’
I let out a laugh that comes from somewhere real rather than somewhere polite, and it surprises me.
Jeff grins and cuts me another slice of cake without asking, and I eat it because it’s good – dense and sweet and studded with raisins – and because saying no would feel like turning down more than cake.
We sit for a while. He tells me about the sheep, which are due to be moved to the lower field next week.
He tells me the stream floods if the rain keeps up, but not badly, and not as far as the cottage.
He tells me there’s a footpath along the top of the ridge that leads to a Bronze Age cairn, if I fancy a longer walk, and that the view from up there on a clear day stretches as far as the Beacons.
It’s so normal. So beautifully, boringly, blessedly normal that I want to sit at this table for the rest of the afternoon and let this kind old man talk to me about sheep and footpaths and his wife’s bara brith until the world outside stops being frightening.
But the question has been waiting since I knocked on the door, and eventually, I can’t hold it any longer.
‘Jeff,’ I say. ‘Were you up on the hill last night? Near the ridge, above the cottage?’
He frowns. ‘Last night? No, love. I was in bed by nine. The dog gets me up at five, so I’m no use after dark. Why do you ask?’
‘I thought I saw someone. Up on the ridge, looking down towards the cottage. A figure, standing there.’
He doesn’t dismiss it. He doesn’t laugh or wave his hand or tell me I’m imagining things, which I’m grateful for, because I’ve had enough of men telling me what I did and didn’t see. He thinks about it, tipping his head, and then he nods.
‘Could have been a few things,’ he says.
‘There’s a gatepost up there that catches people out – it’s at an odd angle and in the dark it looks like a person, especially if the cloud’s low.
And the sheep get up on the ridge at night sometimes.
They don’t move much when they’re settled, so from a distance they can look like – well, like all sorts.
I’ve been here forty years and I still do a double take at the odd one now and then. ’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘That makes sense.’
‘You’re safe up there, Kim. I promise you that.
There’s nobody for miles. The nearest house after mine is the Evanses’ place.
That’s a good three miles down the valley, and they’re in Tenby this week visiting their daughter.
You’ve got me, you’ve got the sheep, and you’ve got the odd fox. That’s your lot.’
He says it warmly, and I know he means it as comfort – you’re alone, but you’re safe alone, and the aloneness is a feature, not a threat.
And part of me takes that in and believes it, the same way I believe the gatepost and the sheep and the low cloud play tricks.
Of course that’s what I saw. I’m a woman who’s spent the past week wired with fear and suspicion, sleeping badly, checking locked doors twice, jumping at wind.
My eyes turned a fence post into a figure because that’s what frightened eyes do.
But the other part of me – the part that knows about the blue curtains and the messages and the man who turned up at my birthday party and held my wrist – hears Jeff say there’s nobody for miles and feels the bottom drop out of my stomach.
Nobody for miles. No neighbours. No passing traffic.
No street lights, no CCTV, no police station round the corner, no Alex on the other side of the bed.
Just me and a locked door and a cottage at the end of a gravel track in a valley where the nearest help is an old man in slippers who goes to bed at nine.
Jeff must see something shift in my face, because when he reaches across the table and tops up my tea from the pot, his voice goes gentler.
‘It does take some adjusting,’ he says. ‘The dark out here is a different beast to what you’re used to, I expect.
But you get into a rhythm with it. Light the fire early, close the curtains before sunset, give yourself something to do with your hands.
Margaret used to knit. I do the crossword.
Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it keeps you from sitting there listening to the wind and letting your imagination run off with you. ’
‘Good advice,’ I say, and I mean it, even as the cold feeling in my stomach refuses to shift.
We talk for another twenty minutes. He shows me a photograph of Margaret at their wedding – young, dark-haired, laughing, holding a bouquet of wildflowers she’d picked herself that morning because the florist had let them down – and the fondness in his voice when he describes her dress makes my throat ache.
Forty-one years. I’ve had thirteen with Alex and I might be about to lose them.
This man had forty-one and lost them to something nobody could have prevented, and he’s still here.
The dog gets up from its bed and pads over and rests its chin on my knee. I scratch its ears, and it closes its eyes, and for a moment everything feels all right. Warm kitchen, hot tea, a gentle dog, a good man. The world outside can wait.
But it can’t. It never can.
I stand and thank him, then carry my mug to the sink.
He waves me away from it – ‘Leave that, I’ve got nothing else to do’ – and walks me to the door.
The collie follows us and sits on the step, watching me with that alert, tilted gaze that border collies have, as if it’s assessing whether I’m going to do something interesting or just leave.
‘Thank you, Jeff,’ I say. ‘For the tea and the cake and – just for being kind. It’s been a lovely afternoon.’
‘Any time. I mean that.’ He leans against the door frame, folds his arms, and looks at me.
There’s something in his expression that’s hard to name – not worry exactly, but a gentle attentiveness, as if he’s noticed I’m carrying something heavier than boredom and has decided not to ask what it is.
‘If you ever need help, Kim – anything at all, day or night – you come and knock. I don’t care what time it is. I’d rather you woke me up for nothing than sat up there on your own wondering whether to bother me.’
‘Thank you,’ I say again, and my voice catches on the word, which I cover by zipping my coat and turning towards the path.
‘Get back before the light goes,’ he calls after me.
I raise a hand without turning around, because if I turn around he might see my face, and my face isn’t holding up the way I need it to.
I climb the hill. The wind picks up as I reach the ridge, cold and damp against my cheeks, and I stop at the top and look down at the cottage below – white walls, blue door, the track winding away to the lane, the fields spreading out on either side like a green sea with nothing in it.
Nobody for miles. That’s what Jeff said. Nobody for miles, and he meant it as reassurance.
I cross the ridge and start down the other side, and the farmhouse disappears behind me. The cottage gets closer, the sky already dimming at the edges.
If you ever need help…
I want to believe that’s enough. I want to believe that a kind old man with a kettle and a collie and a bedtime of nine o’clock is enough to keep me safe in a place where nobody would hear me scream.
But I think about the shape on the ridge, the messages, the way Ross’s thumb felt against my pulse, and I pull my coat tighter and walk faster. The cottage door has never felt so far away.
I hope I won’t need Jeff’s help.
I hope it won’t be too late if I do.