The next morning, the atmosphere over breakfast was pretty frosty but Eleanor chattered away as normal, deciding that the best thing to do was to ignore Dan’s low mood and wait for it to go away.
After clearing up the dishes, Eleanor grabbed her hat and boots. “Ready for walkies? I thought we could take the dogs up on the moor today.” She turned to her husband, hoping to bring a smile to his handsome face. “If we’re lucky, we might spot Maureen’s ghost ship.”
“Actually, I think I’ll go for a run along the beach instead, if you don’t mind. Can you take Crumpet with you?”
“Of course, darling. Whatever you prefer.”
Daniel nodded and went upstairs to change, returning a few minutes later in his jogging gear. Eleanor smiled, admiring her husband’s slim figure encased in a sports top and shorts despite the chilly spring air. When they first got together, she had made a brave attempt at jogging but soon came to the conclusion that her running days were over. In her twenties she had loved to pound the London streets, especially running along the South Bank, which was entirely free of trendy cafés and tourists in those far-off days. Since then her body seemed to have shifted around and certainly wasn’t built for speed any more. Bits of her jiggled alarmingly, so she decided to give up running and take up something like crochet or felt-making, activities less likely to remind her of her saggy bits. Of course, she hadn’t done this either and instead stuck to walking and reading for exercise.
“Enjoy your run.” When Eleanor put her face up for her usual morning kiss, she was sad when Daniel seemed to give it grudgingly.
After Dan had left, Eleanor grabbed her keys and headed out. It wasn’t yet 8am, but she liked to go out nice and early before it became busy with other dog-walkers. She herded the two dogs into the vintage campervan that was her guilty pleasure and drove out of town and up to the moor. She never tired of the road, which curved up behind the town through narrow, shady lanes before reaching an area of high, open land known locally as the Top.
She parked in her usual spot then walked along the path, enjoying the crunch of gravel under her feet. The weather was blustery and the wind whipped in off the sea, tossing strands of hair across her face until she extracted a woolly hat from her pocket and pulled it firmly down over her head.
Walking along, hands tucked in her pockets against the cold, she thought about her life. She knew her stance over the house business was making Daniel unhappy, but she didn’t know how to resolve it. What was wrong with her?
Before she and Dan married she’d generally been happy, but there were times when she had felt lonely, despite the presence of friends and family. She’d missed not having a husband around and the lazy comfort of being married to someone you knew as well as you knew yourself.
After a few months in Devon, Eleanor had succumbed to pressure from her mother and made a feeble attempt to meet someone. Connie was a huge advocate of online dating, having found her beau Harold that way. Eleanor’s efforts at finding love were less successful: she’d had a date with someone called Ted who spent the whole evening telling her why printed books were dead. Eleanor wasn’t averse to a lively discussion about the future of the book trade, but when Ted insisted that bookshops were a waste of time she made her apologies and slipped out while he was arguing with the waiter about the bill.
The second man she met had clearly used a photograph that was at least ten years old and which made him look considerably taller and thinner than he was. Again, she could have put up with it if he’d been pleasant and hadn’t spent an hour talking about his ex-wife and telling Eleanor how much better she herself would look if only she lost a couple of stone and dyed her hair blonde.
The only hints of romance in her life pre-Daniel were two recent encounters with her long-lost French boyfriend, Christophe Vauban. She and Christophe had spent an intense few months together in their early twenties, but seeing him again after two decades had made her realise that love is twenty per cent attraction, thirty per cent luck and fifty per cent timing: Christophe had been perfect for her in her youth, Alan was the right person to marry and have children with, but Dan was the only man she wanted now and she felt incredibly lucky to have met him.
With Dan, it was as though everything finally fell into place. She had someone to share things with again: a person she could talk to for hours, who enjoyed reading, long walks and good food. They didn’t always agree and Daniel had different tastes from her in many ways, but those differences meant their life was never dull. And for the first time in many years she experienced a true passion that stirred her mind as much as her body.
Eleanor stopped at the cliff edge, watching as waves rushed to and fro onto the rocks below. The power and motion of the sea excited and soothed her at the same time: there was something comforting about the regular rhythms of the tides yet the strength of the water as it chipped away at the stone was frightening, too. She thought about the tales of ships lost along the coastline and shivered.
She turned away, watching the dogs as they scurried along. Bella was head down and tail up following the scent of some small creature under the heather while Crumpet the terrier poked her head down every hole in search of rabbits.
Eleanor breathed in the honeyed scent of gorse, which always reminded her of Ambre Solaire: spring was definitely here and summer would not be long in following.
Up ahead, she caught a glimpse of a brand-new building. This was a house and meditation centre designed by Freya, Daniel’s ex-wife. The building was set far enough back from the cliff top not to cut off the public footpath and to avoid collapsing into the sea the next time rough weather claimed a bit more land for the ocean, as it did with alarming frequency.
The complex was too far away for Eleanor to see it well, but from a distance she could make out what would become a “green” roof sloping back towards the town. She had to concede that Cruella – as she was known to Eleanor and her sister – was a damn good architect: planting banks of pink and purple heather on the roof meant that the building would be almost invisible from the sides once the plants had grown up. At the front, the opaque glass and polished copper of the sweeping semicircular wall reflected the sea and sky, so the entire building would soon merge into the landscape.
The damned woman was talented but, best of all, she was now based in London out of harm’s way. It was Freya who had divorced Dan, so Eleanor had no reason to dislike her or feel jealous, but she was wary. It had taken many months for Daniel to reconcile himself to the break-up and his first wife still mattered to him a great deal.
Freya was a woman who liked to be in control, and Eleanor always worried a little when she knew her predecessor was in town. She knew from Daniel that Freya popped back occasionally to check on progress at the building site but was generally happy to leave the day-to-day work in the hands of her project manager.
The house and meditation centre had been commissioned the year before by an ageing rock star who went by the name of Bill “Fingers” Widget. Bill had enjoyed a long and successful career as the front man of Tryll Spigot, a band better known for ear-shattering volume than catchy melodies. Bill’s arrival had caused quite a stir, but Combemouth residents had gradually taken him to their bosom and were now rather proud of their celebrity resident.
The building was evidently going to be a beauty and no doubt lots of Bill’s show biz friends would flock there to meditate and “find themselves”, but Eleanor couldn’t help chuckling at the thought of how much the smelly cliff-top goats and inquisitive ponies who lived on the moor would enjoy nibbling Freya’s carefully arranged vegetation.
She put her head down as the route took her close to the end of the drive, concentrating instead on the pale stones under her feet. The last thing she wanted was to bump into Freya who – as well as being annoyingly talented – also had the unnerving capacity to look chic even at 8am.
Eleanor turned away, following the well-trodden path that looped up and around the headland. It was quite a climb and she was distinctly out of puff by the time she reached the top and could collapse onto a handy rock, the dogs panting at her feet.
It was a stunning spot from where she could look up and down the coast for miles in both directions. To the east, the land fell away towards Combemouth; to the west, a chain of scallop-shaped bays edged the land, disappearing into the distance. Eleanor closed her eyes, raising her face skyward. If she could choose to live anywhere, here on the Top would be a pretty good spot. She loved the fact that it was different every time she came: the sea, the sky and the plants beneath her feet were constantly changing.
Her heart sank slightly as she remembered the issue that was spoiling things between her and Daniel. He was the most important person in her life and she knew it was important to sort things out between them.
“Come on girls – it’s time we did some work.” She clambered to her feet and set off down the rough path at a clumsy jog, the wind at her back making the return journey much easier than the ascent. Looking towards Bill’s house, she caught a flash of red through the trees and recognised the car: Freya was in town.