Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
NO REGRETS was the heading on page two of my journal.
It was an instruction to embrace my new direction, and not to chicken out of my decision, even as I received multiple messages from my London friends and colleagues, all along the lines of ‘if you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life’.
No regrets , I told myself when I packed up my possessions in the silent flat on a January afternoon, considerately vacated by Sean so he could go to an ‘er, meeting’, which I suspected was a date, from the amount of aftershave he was wearing. I had taken as many boxes as I could fit into the back of Rose’s car, so I was selective: books, photographs, an ornament, a set of bath towels. All the time holding in my emotions, so tense that I felt as though my stomach and chest were bound tight in an iron corset.
I took the train to my new home and the weather steadily got grimmer and wilder as we journeyed from the softer landscape of the south to the wilder landscape of Northumberland (I was going to rewild it, so no problem there). I sat in the train, eating chocolate and watching the scenery change to a different kind of beauty, as though I was watching a film. ‘Is that a tattoo?’ the girl sitting next to me said at the slogan ‘no regrets’ I’d written on the inside of my wrist in biro as a reminder. I shook my head and smiled.
Fi met me at the station, and I saw the look of concern on her face as she opened her arms, enveloping me in a warm, incredible hug. ‘Just in time,’ she said, leaning back, taking my face in her hands and inspecting me as if she was looking for signs of damage.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to smile as brightly as possible. ‘Down, but not out.’
She drove me through narrow, winding lanes to the estate cottage I’d been allocated as a job perk. It was an impossibly sweet Neo-Gothic cottage built of pale grey stone, with mullion leaded windows. As I got out of the car, open-mouthed, I stared at its steep gables and fish-scale roof tiles. There were even gargoyles on the guttering. ‘It’s not as big as it looks,’ said Fi, handing me the key. ‘Basically one-up, one-down – it’s 40 per cent attic. But it’s cosy downstairs. I’ve had the woodburner going this morning.’ The door opened onto the main living area, a sitting room with a kitchen area at the back. The flagstones were grey and smooth, the walls plastered in a buttercream colour, with a navy blue sofa by the fireplace, and a pine coffee table and bookshelves. My boxes were sitting in the middle of the floor, having been brought up by van overnight. I went straight to the one marked KETTLE and cut through the tape with my new door key.
Fi had put milk and a home-made lasagne in the fridge and a poinsettia on the counter to welcome me. ‘I didn’t know if you wanted to come round to ours this evening, or settle in?’ she said, as I hugged her in thanks. I could see how carefully she was watching me, as though I was one of those ornaments that you had to pack in a box with the words ‘THIS WAY UP’ and ‘FRAGILE’ emblazoned across the box.
I glanced at the ‘no regrets’ on my wrist, which had already started to fade. ‘I would love to come over tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But tonight, I’ll unpack a bit, get settled.’ I was determined that I wasn’t going to be a burden; that despite the last few months of her mainly seeing me on video calls either sobbing, or mascara-less from having sobbed, this marked the beginning of a new phase. Strong Anna, capable Anna. She nodded, gave me another hug, and put on the kettle, just to delay her departure a few more minutes. I loved her for that.
I had a week to unpack, carefully building a small pile of self-help books on the floor of my bedroom and placing some more ‘guest-friendly’ novels on the small pine bookshelf in the living room, just in case anyone dropped by in future. I made a lot of tea and ate a lot of biscuits as I washed my crockery and cutlery, layered throws on the sofa, and decided where to place my various framed photos: one of me, Rose and Mum; a framed compilation of photos of friends; and some arty landscape shots I’d taken of various woodlands and marshlands near London where Sean and I had spent weekends escaping the city. I remembered how I’d initiated those walks, although he’d been happy to potter along with me as we’d discussed this and that, including playful mentions of our imagined future: where we would raise our family and what kind of dog we would get. Inspecting our relationship from a distance, I wondered whether he’d been in as all-in as I had been; if our positions had been reversed, I couldn’t have imagined leaving him. Then, just when I had started hating him a little bit, I would remember the feeling of our hands clasped together, the sound of his laugh as we argued playfully over what kind of house we wanted. As I put the pictures on the wall, they helped, in their own quiet way; in the shots of trees silhouetted against the sky, or of water reflecting cloud, I caught sight of the essential Anna who had always been there, and still remained, even though so much of my identity felt stripped away.
The first night, I was kept up by the sound of mice scampering around above my bedroom in their lofty palace. So I put the bedside lamp on and got my journal out to write action bullet points, which then morphed into a shopping list:
Establish daily meditation practice, beginning with five minutes .
As you meditate, practise ‘Sean’ becoming smaller and distant in your mind. He can start off full size but should end up like a tiny stick figure, waving his arms on the horizon .
Start the day with hot water infused with lemon juice .
Buy humane mousetraps .
After a week of dozing, rearranging cushions and eating lavish meals at Fi and Richard’s, my first day of work arrived. Fi picked me up and took me to the office by car, even though we’d walked the estate route once on my week off. ‘You should arrive in style on your first day,’ she said with a smile. ‘Also, it’s a muddy walk after all the rain. We need to break you in gently.’
The office was in the front corner of the manor house of Stonemore, a Neo-Classical mansion house a few hundred yards away from the ruins of a Real Life Castle. The Mulholland family had built the house in the late 1700s when the castle became too uncomfortable to live in. Its facade was impressive: built of honey-coloured stone, two vast fluted columns flanked the front entrance and its steps, with symmetrical lines of windows running either side. It looked out over a pristine carriage drive and a deer park. Its whole appearance gave the impression of precision and order; I wondered where wildness would find its place here.
It sounds glamorous, working in a mansion, but there were drawbacks, which I discovered within fifteen minutes. Air temperature: roughly the same inside as it is outside. Number of insect and mouse traps: many. And then there was Tally, who appeared as soon as I walked in the door, and was if anything even more brittle than when she’d interviewed me. She was the collections manager, which meant she was responsible for every single bit of art and furniture in the place, as well as all the volunteer guides. But she gave the impression that her purview (her word) extended to the entire running of the estate.
My desk faced hers, with Fi’s desk at a right-angle between us. It was a big enough room – painted an institutional cream, but with lots of pictures on the walls and about four different antique carpets layered over the floorboards. Callum had an office next door. I realised immediately that my new colleagues and I were going to be spending a lot of time in close quarters.
‘The kettle’s over there, the blue mug is yours, the loo is first on the right down the hall,’ Fi said, hawkishly watching her inbox update as she took her coat off. Then she double-clicked something on the screen, picked up the phone and dialled a number. ‘When you say water ingress, do you mean a leak or a flood?’ she said sharply, kicking off her trainers and putting her work heels on. ‘Bear with me, I’ll be there in five minutes. Anna,’ she gave me a bright smile, ‘I’ll be back in a little while to get your computer set up for you, there’s just something I have to deal with.’ She was out the door in a moment, heading off through the innards of the house.
Sixty seconds after I’d settled into my desk chair, Tally narrowed her eyes and asked if Fiona had fully briefed me about the etiquette at Stonemore. At interview, she had identified gaps in my knowledge about this kind of thing. Did I know how to address Jamie Mulholland, 8th Earl of Roxdale?
I’m afraid her imperious look was like a red flag to a bull to new, negative, me. ‘By his name?’ I said. She looked as though she was going to implode, and shook her head in a way that should have been stern but made me want to start laughing. ‘Just call him my lord,’ she said, in a tone that was soft but severe. ‘My lord .’
I didn’t dare say I’d never heard of him until the day of my interview. To hear Tally talk, you’d think we worked for the king of England. It’s all about correct form and the sense that the earl is very important . I said it didn’t really matter what I called him, especially as it seemed I was never going to actually meet him. She gazed through me, as though I was dematerialising in front of her very eyes.
‘We do things differently here, Anna,’ she said. ‘Whatever you did in London , it doesn’t apply here.’
I smiled neutrally. She’d have to warm up eventually, right?
I felt positively jubilant when Callum took me out onto the estate that morning. We drove away from the house and its Neo-Classical neatness into the wilder part of Stonemore, bumping and jolting in an ancient green Land Rover. I loved this side of the place immediately: the expanses of heather, the vast hills, the wind-battered trees. The occasional shaft of sunlight on the browns and greens of the hills and the swiftly moving, constantly changing clouds. Callum parked the Land Rover beside a stream, the clear cold water running fast around grey boulders and rocks with a rushing sound that was astonishingly loud in the silence. The beautiful but unsparing landscape seemed to both match my state of mind and lighten it. And it was as far from my old life as it could reasonably be.
‘What d’you think?’ asked Callum as we looked out at the landscape we were going to be shaping and caring for together. And I felt a little tremble run through me – something like joy, and anticipation, which I quickly slapped down with a take it slow, don’t overinvest .
‘It’ll do,’ I said, and smiled at him.
‘Glad to hear it,’ he said, and handed me back into the Land Rover in a way that made me feel positively fluttery.
On my return to the office, I was enjoying my sense of calm as I settled down at my desk and took possession of the laptop Fi had got for me (‘There’s no IT helpdesk,’ she said cheerily, ‘just me.’). Despite Tally’s evident suspicion of me, I was still very much in a ‘no regrets’ state of mind about the place in which I’d chosen to rebuild myself. I was searching the drawers of my (enormous, Victorian) desk when I became aware that someone else had entered the room, and looked up.
A tall man with short blonde hair and piercing blue eyes stood a metre from my desk, hands jammed into the pockets of his green waxed jacket (I made a mental note to buy one – it was clearly the uniform). I’m not going to deny it, my first thought out of the gate was – he’s hot . The second thought was – he’s grumpy . He stood there like an unhappy spirit blown in from the hills (if spirits could be that, er, ripped), wearing an ancient cable-knit jumper and black cords with boots that were caked in mud. And there was no doubt about it – he was glaring at me.
‘Er, hello?’ I said.
‘Will you be warm enough in that?’ he said, unexpectedly.
I mean, he was right. I was wearing a thin cotton blouse layered over a green vest top and black jeans, trying to look smart, and it was nowhere near warm enough. But there was something about his tone, a general dismissiveness, that riled me.
‘I’ll be fine, thank you,’ I said crisply.
‘Lord Roxdale!’ Tally had re-entered the room and almost dropped her William Morris print mug on the floor, decanting some of her tea onto the aged Axminster carpet.
He flicked a glance at her then looked back at me and narrowed his eyes. ‘I take it you have everything you need, apart from a coat,’ he said.
Dear lord, I thought the hopelessly rich were meant to be incredibly polite. Wasn’t that meant to be their saving grace?
‘Actually, my lord ,’ I said, with a glance at Tally, ‘perhaps we could meet to discuss priorities, and there are a few things I need, some stationery—’
Meaning: a whiteboard, some multi-coloured Post-it notes, coloured highlighters. I’d almost had a panic attack when I realised there was no stationery cupboard. So I have an addiction . No one’s perfect.
‘Tell Fi.’ He was already turning away. ‘I’m told you had an assistant in your last job – will you be able to manage without one?’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘We all muck in here.’
I doubt that , I thought silently, then realised from his expression that this was probably written all over my face. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said brightly, with a definite subtext of screw you .
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, don’t come to me if you’re not,’ he said, and departed with a slam of the door.
I sat back down at my desk, waiting for my pulse to return to normal. And that’s when I regretted coming to Stonemore. Because that was the moment I realised I was working for the most miserable man in Northumberland.