Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
‘What was so crazy was that they acted like I was being the unreasonable one,’ she exclaimed to Matt on the phone.
‘Maybe they just got carried away by the news that Jamie’s coming back. And you said Paul had been drinking.’
‘He had a glass of champagne in his hand. And, yes, his speech was slurred, but it’s always like that now – I don’t think he was drunk. And Rosemary – she was just completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Like I was that duck whose neck needed wringing – unfortunate, but it had to be done.’
‘Well, I’m glad you were firm with them,’ Matt said. ‘In my experience, people who say “name your price” immediately start haggling if you do. If Paul and Rosemary want to come back with a better offer, that’s up to them, but I think otherwise we simply don’t respond.’
‘You wouldn’t ever do it, though, would you?’ she said anxiously. ‘You wouldn’t sell Trade Cottage?’
‘Well – never say never and all that—’
She interrupted him. ‘I do say it. I mean it, Matt. I’m not leaving here. They’ll have to carry me out feet first.’
After he’d rung off, she went outside, to the terrace.
The pale autumn sunshine was warming the stone table where, only three months before, she’d sat and eaten samaras with Rosemary and Paul, and they’d made that extraordinarily generous offer of the house’s contents.
But, in hindsight, had that been, perhaps, the first sign they weren’t really relinquishing Trade Cottage at all – that, on some level at least, they’d still expected to be in control of who lived in it, and how?
Below her, the woods were just starting to turn golden, the first hues of autumn. But the fields beyond were still green, and the sheep contentedly grazing them as white as ever. Behind her, Trade Cottage’s flint facade glimmered in the sun, a wonderful mosaic of greys and browns.
Perhaps it was the request to buy Trade Cottage back, or perhaps it was those awful rats, or both, but she felt, for the first time here, under threat – the same stomach-churning sense of homesickness and vertigo as when her mother announced they had to move somewhere cheaper.
She placed her hand on the flint wall, feeling its reassuring solidity, its centuries-old permanence. Don’t worry,
we’re not selling, she told it in her head.
We’re here forever. Without thinking, she leaned forward and kissed the shining, glossy centre of one of the flints.
The gesture was answered immediately by a strange surge of ecstasy, almost as if the house was embracing her in return.
She recalled Rosemary telling her that her children had caught her once doing the same thing, and that she’d told them they were too young to understand.
But Kate did understand what it was to love a place, and, unlike Rosemary, she had no intention of relinquishing it.
‘Don’t respond,’ Matt had said, and she could see the logic in that.
But, as the day wore on, she realised she couldn’t just leave it.
Not when she and Rosemary had been, such a short time before, so incredibly close.
And surely that couldn’t only have been because Paul and Rosemary wanted children next door they could pretend to grandparent.
Rosemary had genuinely become her friend.
This all started with a letter. It had been perfect – everyone had said so.
It had persuaded Rosemary and Paul that she and Matt were the right people to live in Trade Cottage.
She just had to convince them – well, convince Rosemary; she didn’t really care about Paul – for a second time, and perhaps they’d come to their senses.
She sat down at the captain’s desk and wrote.
She remembered the first time she’d been in this room, the neat piles of cards and envelopes.
She didn’t have proper stationery like that, just her laptop and a printer, so those would have to do.
She wrote quickly, the words flowing out of her again.
She completely understood Paul and Rosemary’s situation, she explained, and that, in their shoes, she might well have asked the same question, in case anything had changed.
But she reminded them why they’d chosen her and Matt to buy Trade Cottage in the first place: it was because they’d fallen in love with it, just as Rosemary and Paul had, forty-odd years before.
And it was precisely because she and Matt loved it so much that they couldn’t possibly contemplate selling, not even for Jamie. She wrote:
I know this may put a strain on our friendship, and that’s the very worst thing about it.
But you should know that another reason I couldn’t sell is because, wherever we lived, I’d never find such a special neighbour.
I very much hope that, when the dust has settled, we’ll go back to being friends again.
All my love, Kate.
She drove the long way round to The Old Tennis Court.
The big electric gate was closed. Next to it, the Ring doorbell glowed, the tiny lens staring at her like the beady eye of an old teddy bear.
She almost pressed the button, but it would have seemed odd to summon Rosemary to the door only to hand her a letter.
She folded her sheet of A4 and pushed it into the letter box’s yawning mouth.