1

It was a miracle. I had navigated the town’s one-way system without taking a single wrong turn. And this had to be the right road out because I’d just passed Tesco Express, which I remembered Nick telling me was the last chance to pick up a pint of milk before you hit bandit country. As the houses petered out and the last streetlight of the town dwindled to a pinprick in my rear-view mirror, darkness fell like a cosh across the windscreen. I flicked the headlights onto full beam and turned the radio on. The syrupy late-night jazz made me feel like a character in a film. I imagined the panning shot, following my little car along the contours of the valley – the heroine, driving with trepidation into her new life. Nick had wanted to come up and fetch me, but I’d told him no. I didn’t want to be mollycoddled. Not any more.

A dilapidated signpost reared up from nowhere and, unsure whether I had read it right, I made the split-second decision to take the turn-off anyway, pitching the Renault downhill into a tunnel of green. Branches closed over my head and the hedgerows rattled the sides of the car, their abundant spring leaf-growth a sickly green in the halogen. I followed the lane through all its labyrinthine twists and turns and was starting to wonder whether I might after all have gone wrong, when I came to the derelict barn that marked the start of the hamlet. The cottage was around the next bend. With a surge of relief, I pressed the accelerator, saw – too late – a brief flash of orange in the headlights, braked hard, felt a dull thud; drove on.

‘I think I hit a fox.’

I stood on the doorstep, trembling. This was not the homecoming I had planned.

Nick pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I didn’t even see it.’ I could feel my voice starting to break. ‘I thought it was a branch, but it can’t have been because look…’ I raised my palm to show him a rusty smear of blood across it.

‘It wouldn’t have felt anything,’ he said briskly, ‘I wouldn’t worry. Come here…’

He drew me over the threshold into a welcoming hug, but I held myself a little aloof, torn between the gut-melting desire his presence still, in spite of everything, evoked and a reluctance to sully his pristine clothing with my bloody hand.

‘What if I only injured it?’ I fretted. ‘It might not even be dead…’

‘Come on, Kaz…’ Nick said, with slight impatience, ‘this is the countryside. Foxes are ten a penny here. The farmers hate ’em. You’ll be a local hero.’

He tilted my chin upwards with his knuckle and pressed his mouth on mine and I forgot about the fox and let my lips cling to his as if it were the kiss of life, which, in a way it was. When at last he signalled, with a volley of little kisses and a cancelling stroke of his finger across my cheek, that it was time to stop, I sighed, and turned to the room for the first time.

‘Wow!’

I had only seen the cottage once for half an hour after the vendor had moved out, leaving the ghostly silhouettes of her mock-Regency furniture on walls that needed a lick of paint. They had had the lick of paint and more. Oak floorboards gleamed in the lamplight. Fat church candles flickered on the deep sills of the curtain-less windows. Familiar items of furniture mingled with new ones I didn’t recognize. The place looked like a photo-shoot for Ideal Home.

‘You’ve been busy,’ I said.

‘I wanted it to be nice for you. You don’t mind that I chose things without you, do you…?’

He stooped slightly and looked into my eyes.

I shook my head with an amused grimace. Why should I mind about that? For the past four months, I had barely been able to choose what clothes to wear, what meal to eat, what TV channel to watch. I don’t think I was going to have a hissy-fit about whether he’d gone for Buttermilk or Dimity on the skirting boards.

‘That’s lovely,’ I said, nodding towards a scuffed leather armchair.

‘Local antique shop,’ Nick said smugly. ‘It’s the real deal, not one of those naff reproduction ones. Would have cost twice as much in Shoreditch.’ I had to suppress a smile at my alpha male husband’s unexpected knack for home-making. He had even had the rug cleaned. Or perhaps it just looked better in front of the rustic wood-burning stove than it ever had beside our ugly Victorian fireplace at home. I needed to stop calling Trenchard Street home. This was home now.

I struggled to subdue a wave of nostalgia for our old life. We never got the house right, in nineteen years. It had been a mish-mash of stuff – my parents’ teak dining table surrounded by Nick’s Swedish wishbone chairs. Nick’s carefully chosen abstract artworks jostling my folksy wall hangings. We didn’t see eye to eye about décor but somehow between his minimalism and my clutter we created a home. I’d preferred it when we’d just got together and the place was full of toys and IKEA tat, but as the boys grew up and Nick started to entertain his clients, good taste began to prevail. My quirky Mexican candelabra disappeared, to be replaced by a tasteful stainless steel job, and the Klippan sofa ended up in a skip. Yet the more our home became Nick’s home, the less at home he seemed. Funny that. I sometimes wonder if I was too much of a pushover. Perhaps he’d have respected me more if I’d put up a fight – stuck to my messy ways. Because things had got pretty messy anyway.

I glanced again around the open-plan cottage – glow of firelight over lime-washed walls, stacked logs and plumped cushions; a background scent of something grown up and aromatic.

‘What do you think?’ Nick asked.

‘I love it!’

He made to kiss me again, but I waved my bloody hand at him, more cheerfully this time, and he took me by the waist and steered me towards the kitchen. Here too, he had judged things perfectly. Belfast sink, maple work surface, slate grey Aga, concealed spotlights. And running along the back wall, a triptych of dormer windows, sleek dark mirrors, behind which lurked who knew what. I watched the reflection of my hand-washing in their black panes, foaming suds carrying away a wisp of pink under the state-of-the-art mixer tap. Nick handed me a threadbare tea towel – the one from way back, featuring ham-fisted portraits of Ethan and all his Year One classmates. I dried my hands, taking care not to sully the corner featuring the giant-headed alien that was our son, then rearranged the cloth with satirical precision over the hanging rail of the Aga.

‘I’m surprised you let this stay,’ I said, indicating the old-fashioned four-door oven.

‘It’s a little piece of history,’ said Nick. ‘I’m not a complete philistine.’

‘I could have sworn it was brown.’

‘I had it re-enamelled.’

‘You did not!’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do.’ I clutched his forearms eagerly and felt him tense up.

‘The colour’s gorgeous. It’s just… you re-enamelling an Aga.’

‘Not literally me.’

‘Even so…’

‘The estate agent was really helpful. Recommended local people. The grey was her idea…’

I bet it was, I thought. I bet she had you on speed-dial. I’d met her once myself – Marnie – sugar-coating on a will of steel. Boob job. I had to stop thinking like this.

Nick handed me a glass of champagne and we clinked rims.

‘To us,’ he said.

He held my gaze, his eyes full of remorse. I wanted to tell him it was OK; that I had forgiven him. I welled up and he turned away, perhaps in shame, perhaps in exasperation. I watched him bend down to put the bottle back in the fridge, his shirt riding up to reveal the ragged birthmark on his lower back. I could have traced the shape of it with my eyes shut.

‘We’ll never live it down, you know,’ I said, straining after the playful tone of our earlier banter. He stood up again.

‘What?’

‘Us. Here with… that. I jerked my head towards the Aga. Wait till Dave and Jude see it.’

‘They’ll be jealous as fuck,’ he said. ‘They’d kill for a place like this. London’s over.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said.

‘They would,’ he insisted. ‘They’re miserable. Jude hates her job. Dave only stays for Arsenal. If they hadn’t remortgaged they’d move out in a heartbeat. They’re in denial.’

I smiled doubtfully, wondering if it wasn’t Nick who was in denial. Moving to the country had never been part of his game plan. He used to come out in a rash if he had to stay in a gîte for a week when the boys were young, so the idea that he’d suddenly become a convert was a bit of stretch. Still, a fresh start had been called for and this one was as good as any.

‘Why shouldn’t we live somewhere nice?’ he continued, bullishly. ‘Not that Jude and Dave will admit it’s nice. They can’t afford to. Not even to themselves.’

‘Nick!’ I laughed, incredulously. ‘They haven’t even got here yet.’

‘They don’t need to. I could see it in their eyes when I showed them the brochure. You poor bastards, they were thinking. Forget about having a life. It’ll be tribute bands down the Corn Exchange for you from now on. Good luck with multiculturalism. Good luck with buying a gram of coke.’

‘You don’t do coke.’

‘I know, because I don’t need to blot out the misery of my desperate urban existence. That’s what I mean. Denial.’ He seemed to notice, at last, that he’d been ranting, and had the grace to look a little sheepish.

‘Anyway,’ he brightened, ‘Shall we do the tour?’

I followed him up the open tread staircase, gratified to see that he’d given my blue slipware bowl pride of place on the landing window ledge. I touched it for luck on my way past.

‘Study,’ he said, standing to one side so that I could put my head round the door. ‘Had to double up some of the books.’

I nodded and backed out again.

‘Bathroom,’ he announced unnecessarily.

‘Nice mirror,’ I said in surprise. ‘Where’d you get that?’

It was an ornate antique French job – not Nick’s style at all. It hung opposite the claw-footed cast-iron bath, making the otherwise poky room look bigger and grander than it had any right to.

‘It was here when we looked round,’ he said, frowning, ‘don’t you remember?’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said quickly, ‘So it was. It just looks much better now you’ve done all this…’ I waved vaguely at the freshly painted walls.

‘She charged me over the odds for it really,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Not my scene, but I remembered you liked it…’

‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said, resting my cheek on his shoulder, ‘thank you.’

Nick inclined his head towards mine, and the tarnished mirror made Siamese twins of our reflection. He planted an absent-minded kiss in my hair, and I counted the seconds until he broke away again.

The first time he’d kissed me, I’d needed to come up for air. I suppose it wasn’t completely unexpected – he’d been giving me the eye ever since our bit of banter at the bar earlier in the evening. And every time he’d looked across at me, I’d had to look away quickly and pretend I hadn’t been ogling him back. I’d been telling myself the classy-looking blonde on his table might just be his date, not a permanent fixture, but I knew in my heart I was kidding myself. He had ‘married’ stamped through him like Brighton rock. It had got to that time in the evening when they put the lights down and cranked up Whitney, so rather than be a wallflower, I’d scrounged a ciggie off someone at my table and ducked outside. I’d been scrabbling in my bag for some matches, when his lighter flared by my cheek.

‘Oh, right, thanks,’ I said.

He lit his own cigarette and, crossing one arm over his midriff, propped the opposite elbow aloft and smoked it as if smoking were its own art form.

‘So…’ he said, after a while.

I glanced sideways at him, cursing my lack of small talk.

‘… Lunch next week.’

It wasn’t even a question.

I raised a quizzical eyebrow, hoping to convey much. That I was not the pushover he thought I was; that I was not into married men; that I might, in fact be busy next week.

I had only just put the cigarette to my lips when he leaned across and took it off me, tossing it, along with his own into the parched grass around one of the pegs securing the marquee. For a second, as his lips met mine, it occurred to me that the whole lot could go up. I didn’t care.

‘Shower’s a bit rubbish,’ Nick said now, stepping away from me just that bit sooner than I’d hoped. ‘Like being pissed on by a gnat.’ He demonstrated what looked to me an average flow. ‘I think we should get a bigger head.’

I imagined us in the steamy cubicle, water thundering down, hair plastered to our cheeks, bodies entwined…

‘OK,’ I said.

‘And last but not least, the master bedroom,’ he said, opening the door with a flourish.

I cast a greedy eye over the bed, which seemed to stretch like a small continent between the threshold of the room and the wide sash window on the gable wall.

‘Great view to wake up to,’ Nick said.

‘I remember.’

I did have a vague recollection of a wooded hill rising gently from behind the house, but I wasn’t sure whether I had seen it in the pages of the brochure or in real life. It had been a big selling point, the hill.

‘His ‘n’ hers hanging, like you wanted.’

He opened the doors of the built-in cupboards, in which every conceivable category of possession had its niche, from sportswear to handbags, jewellery to hats, the advantage of this approach being that the rest of the room retained its pared-down, monastic charm; the disadvantage, that the opening of the doors forced us back against the side of the bed, making it difficult to remain upright. In another life, we might have reached for one-another’s hands before falling back, like felled trees, onto the pristine duvet.

‘I know it’s small…’ Nick said.

‘No, I like that about it.’

‘… But it’s got everything we need.’

‘The blind’s nice.’

‘And if we just get in the habit of putting stuff away…’

I thought of our bedroom in Trenchard Street. The Lloyd loom chair, buried beneath piles of clothing, the dressing table, so cluttered with beauty products that I could barely reach for my hairbrush without causing a tsunami.

‘Definitely.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I said, as he made his way back down the landing.

‘Am I?’

‘Ethan’s room?’ I said, with a perplexed smile, my foot poised on the bottom step of the attic stairs.

For an instant he looked confused.

‘Oh, yeah. Go and have a look if you want.’

‘Aren’t you coming…?’

He shrugged and followed me up.

The door stuck a little as I pushed it open, breaking the seal of the fresh paint. I switched on the light and a bare forty-watt bulb illuminated a spartan space, empty except for two single beds and a cluster of unopened packing cases.

‘Singles?’ I turned to Nick with a bemused look.

‘I thought that’d be more practical,’ Nick said, evasively, ‘in case…’ He gave me a defensive glance.

‘In case Gabe wants to stay,’ I supplied. A pained look crossed Nick’s face.

I should not have sounded so grudging. Gabe was Nick’s son. The fact that he was pushing thirty and had just bought a flat of his own, courtesy of a whopping loan from his father should not, I supposed, preclude him from feeling welcome in our house. Surely Ethan should take priority though? It must surely still be his room, not ‘the boys’ room’ or ‘the spare room’. It would be hard enough persuading our disaffected young son back to this sleepy hamlet after his gap year, without making him feel like a guest. I don’t know what I had expected. Blue and white striped walls? A miniature basketball net? Ethan was nineteen now. A man. All the same, the emptiness, the sterility of the room could not have contrasted more starkly with the care Nick had lavished on the rest of the house.

I thought of Ethan’s old room in London. It had been a health hazard, the way teenage boys’ rooms often are – you went in holding your breath and hoped you could retrieve the five mouldering coffee mugs from under the bed before you had to gasp for air. It had accumulated grunge the way a bat cave accumulates guano, his interests over the years evidenced in layers, like relics in an archaeological dig, from Harry Potter to Stormzy, ammonites to condoms. But beneath the rank whiff of adolescence and the deliberate affronts to political correctness, I had always been able to detect the little boy he had been – not just in his football trophies or the dog-eared Pokemon cards at the back of a drawer, but in the clean, underlying tang of goodness.

‘Oh well,’ I said, coming out of my reverie, ‘if he gets himself a girlfriend, I suppose we can always push the beds together…’

I turned around to find Nick gone. How long had I been standing there? Two minutes? Ten? Had he left because I’d offended him or had he merely got bored of waiting? I felt a flutter of anxiety in my stomach. How graceless I’d been; how boorish to pick holes because the furniture wasn’t just so in every room. He’d gone to so much effort everywhere else; made such a beautiful job of it.

‘Nick?’ I called anxiously, hurrying down to the first-floor landing.

‘Better get a move on if you want some of this fizz,’ he called back, his tone friendly and relaxed.

‘Coming!’

I clattered down the last flight of stairs, relieved, chastened, grateful.