The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,40

darkness that was so thick I could practically cut pieces out of it as I stepped outside with the bucket slopping cold water on my feet.

Patrick’s hay net was still full, so I topped up his water, gave him a pat, and left him for the night, grazing contentedly on the slope that his hooves hadn’t turned into mud. There was something so solid and reassuring about the smell and sound of him that I almost relaxed. But only almost, in the same way as I could almost hear the squeaky chirrups of woodlice egging one another on to slide down the wall, or almost imagine that Gabriel had looked at me with more than the amusement of a local for a displaced Londoner.

I followed Poppy’s example, and went to bed.

9

The days began to fall into a pattern, although it was a pattern so complicated that William Morris would have pronounced that it gave him a headache.

My alarm woke Poppy and I in time for her to drag herself ready for school. Once she was on the bus, I would open the doors and air the cottage, feed Patrick, and await the film crew. Sometimes I’d get a text from Keenan or Gabriel saying that they were going to film elsewhere while the conditions were right, on which occasions I’d spend the day doing laundry or scanning the job adverts or tweaking my CV and sending it to local teaching agencies. I also developed a worrying tendency to bake, mostly because it warmed up the kitchen and made the place smell less like a deserted shed in some woods somewhere.

On other days the crew would turn up at nine, and I’d watch the filming, which brought me into contact with both Davin and Larch, the leading couple. Both gorgeous, both incredibly argumentative, although mostly only with each other, and both prone to being rather ‘starry’, although Davin was a lot better when Tansy came with him, and he made a great cup of tea. Larch could be sweetly childlike sometimes, and I’d taught her how to sew buttons on, a skill she’d acquired with the same delight as I imagined someone learning to do advanced algebra.

Gabriel and I slid past one another. He was busy scoping out some sites for filming inland, near Beaminster, so I didn’t see much of him until the Saturday morning. Poppy had stayed overnight at Karen’s to work a trial shift in the café (‘It’s fine, Mum, Rory’s going to sleep on the sofa and I can have his room,’ almost as though she didn’t believe I’d ever been fourteen or known any sixteen-year-old boys), so I’d woken up late to a tap on the front door, and Patrick neighing.

The weather was the kind of grey misty fog that seemed to drift in from the sea increasingly often now we were well into autumn. It was like having net curtains up at all the windows, and the lack of light had pushed me to oversleep quite dramatically.

‘Hello?’ I poked my head around the door, chastity-dressing gown clasped around my body.

‘Er, hi.’ It was Gabriel. ‘Sorry, am I disturbing you?’

I opened the door to let him in. ‘From doing what? I’ve got no job and the highlight of my days is watching Larch and Davin argue.’

‘Well, you were…’ He waved a hand to take in my pyjama’d form. ‘You might have been entertaining guests.’

I led the way through to the kitchen, which, on this damp and grey morning, was practically underwater. The table shone with a film of damp and the kettle had beads of condensation forming along it. ‘Entertaining? I’m not exactly dressed to do a song and dance act, am I?’

He blinked at me. ‘I meant… you know. In bed.’

The penny dropped and I had to turn away to fill the kettle to cover my suddenly hot cheeks. ‘Oh. No. No entertaining of that nature goes on in here. Of any nature really, although I did rewatch series one of Stranger Things yesterday.’ I let the tap run longer than I should have and water spurted out of the kettle.

‘Oh. Good.’ Behind me I heard Gabriel pull out a chair, feel the slightly slimy dampness of the wood and decide to leave sitting down for another room. Or house.

‘“Good”? You don’t want me to have any entertainment?’

‘I just meant that this would be harder if there was, you know—’ a glance upwards at the ceiling ‘—someone else here.’

He blinked at me again. The mist