The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,76

those who desperately wanted ponies and couldn’t have them. I’d have traded my Pony Club membership and three Welsh Section Ds for their family life and friendship groups. ‘I wanted to write children’s books,’ I said, each word individually groped for. ‘I wanted to write books for people like me.’

‘You’ll have to have a go, then.’ Karen stood up and started clearing the table. ‘And you’ll have to come out with us lot now and then. Bunch of us girls from here and Landle and Steepleton, we gets together every now and then up at the pub on the Bridport road for a few gins and a laugh. You’d have a great time. And you can tell us all about your books.’

‘Writing books for children won’t earn me enough to keep the cottage ticking over though.’ I stood up too. ‘I have to go back to teaching to keep the bills paid.’ I didn’t mention going out to the pub. It was the first time anyone had offered me friendship that wasn’t contingent on having a daughter the same age, or working at the same place, or because I had a rich exotic husband, and I needed to think about it. Maybe savour it a little. Karen wanted to be friends with me. It was a new concept.

Karen sighed. ‘Yeah. But it’s nice to have dreams, isn’t it? You won’t be a mum all your life, after all.’

I thought about that on the drive home, through the wild night. After I’d dropped Gabriel at Thea’s flat in Steepleton, where the wind was swiping the tops off the waves and sending foam the height of the houses on the seafront, I drove slowly up over the steep clifftop road, mulling over Karen’s words.

She was right. I wouldn’t always be a mum, and the end of that particular section of my life was coming into view remarkably rapidly. Poppy’s first ten years had seemed to last an eternity; I remembered fretting about the loss of freedom, my inability to put her down and go on with life as it had been before. But I’d been so young… so young. Little more than a teenager myself when she was born, I’d not really got a handle on all that life had to offer. I’d spent so much of it either trying to please my mother or trying to appease her that I hadn’t really had chance for a good look round at all the potential.

And now that chance was beginning to glimmer over the horizon. Karen had been right about other things too. I wasn’t really a committed teacher. I hated the paperwork, the hours of marking and report writing, and, whilst I enjoyed the actual standing-in-front-of-a-class part, I didn’t flatter myself that I had any particular flair for it. Teaching in a private girls’ school wasn’t really a preparation for huge inner-city comprehensives, so I lacked that edge of flexibility.

I turned the car down the little lane towards the cottage and the wind died to a thrashing and roaring in the treetops as we reached the protection of the curved shoulder of the hill. Some of the trees were still hanging grimly on to foliage, as though in denial of the coming winter, and leafy branches whipped to and fro in a parody of life over my head. Detritus littered the lane, some quite large lumps of tree dotted the road surface and I had to steer carefully around them, the tyres crunching over acorns and chestnuts as I went.

The cottage was invisible in its absolute darkness, but a glimmer of light spilled out from between the curtains of the caravan. It illuminated the outline of Patrick, who had tucked himself against the hedge, head down, seeking whatever shelter was afforded by the tightly packed hawthorn near the gate.

I hated to admit it, but it was quite nice to know that someone was out there. That, should Mr Coombes’ ghost be dragging itself forlornly around the hallway of Harvest Cottage, at least there was someone to hear me scream. I parked the car in the pull-in space, climbed over the gate and went in through the back door to the relative warmth of the kitchen. The front door seemed too far away from the light, the hedges just a little too overgrown, and, even though I was absolutely positive there were no such things as ghosts – well. The back door was nearer.

I didn’t turn on the light. The switch was at