any visitor was incognito in the mossy, damp front entryway, the hallway so narrow that we’d had to post the sofa into the front room through the window, in pieces. The staircase, which, contrary to all convention, didn’t go up against one wall, but was freestanding up the middle of the cottage. Two bedrooms and a bathroom that seemed to have been an original hayloft, all randomly arranged, and beamed in such a way that any quick movements meant a banged forehead and a lot of swearing. I’d already learned to crouch and scuttle around the place, like an obsequious servant. It was bizarre.
But, I reminded myself as I threw some wood into the range cooker to heat up for dinner, it was mine. Luc might not approve of its smallness, but then the man had been brought up in apartments in a chateau, he’d find Buckingham Palace a bit crowded. He probably thought I was mad, moving to Dorset, but here it was affordable and there was countryside. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed countryside until I saw Harvest Cottage. I’d thought I wanted city streets, blue emergency lights and sirens filling up the night; people coming and going at all hours and a Waitrose around the corner. Poppy’s school only a short Tube ride away, all the attractions and occupations of museums and galleries and exhibitions at the weekends.
Whilst here… here was the wind in the trees. Birdsong, grass, and, if you listened very carefully on still nights, the gentle exhalation of the sea moving against the distant cliffs. There was a small bay within walking distance, out of the cottage and across several fields of short-grazed grass and barley stubble, down a steep cliff path. A tiny patch of shingly sand and rock pools, which sloped suddenly to take your feet and leave you bobbing in the icy water, shrieking and gasping. Poppy, of course, loved it. And hadn’t been down there since we moved in.
The range bubbled and I put a pan of stew across its hotplate. The range heated the water for the cottage but made no noticeable dent in the chill that crept across the stone floor as soon as the sun went down, because of the air coming in through the leaky windows. I winced at the draught and made a note that we’d need thick curtains at the very least, before winter. The windows needed replacing, as did both chimneys and one wall, but we’d get through this year first. Once I’d got a job, we could think about renovating the place rather than just redecorating and firefighting the woodlice, who seemed to regard Harvest Cottage as their own personal property and thoroughfare.
The blackbird, in the hedge now, sang the night in. I wondered whether blackbirds ate woodlice.
5
A couple of weeks went past. I held off doing any painting, but did manage to unpack some of the boxes that had travelled with us from London, the contents of which looked horribly urban in this tiny, thick-walled space.
I tried to arrange the asymmetrically striped black and white cushions on the sofa, so that they looked comfortable, rather than like the ‘room accents’ they were bought to be. If this room had an accent, I mused, it would be rural Dorset, not the sharp and edgy that we’d gone for in the two floors of the five-storied old Georgian town house that had provided our accommodation in London. There, bare floors and exposed woodwork was a statement that said, ‘I can afford to cover all this area in lavish carpeting and internal walling, but I am carefully choosing not to.’ In the cottage, bare floors were necessary until we got the damp under control and exposed woodwork was what was left where the paint had flaked off. It was very different. Two of the brambles from the orchard had climbed in through the pantry window and, despite my regularly cutting them off with the scissors, kept infiltrating the shelving, and every time I opened the door it was like The Day of the Triffids. I couldn’t wait for autumn to really get under way and stop the relentless growth.
Patrick was still in the orchard. Apart from one brief text from Gabriel Hunter checking up on him and telling me that the cottage was ‘a possible’ for location work, I’d not heard from him. Poppy continued to hate her new school, doing homework intermittently and, according to the notes in her planner, not really