Bacon, tomatoes, sausages, mushrooms. Eggs any way. If poached, they were perfectly done in silicone pouches, and if scrambled, they were buttery and soft. With a simplified breakfast menu, Lucy had been up and running again for several months, and business was looking good.
Fortunately, one of her earliest guests had been a reviewer for a travel website, and through his glowing report a flurry of bookings had kept her going throughout the winter and well into spring. A characterful thatched cottage in a quaint and thriving West Yorkshire village, he had written. It’s one of those places where you find yourself pretending you live there. You want this to be your local high street with its quirky shops including, amazingly, a shop selling nothing but cookbooks. No wonder people come from far and wide – Rosemary Cottage is a perfect home-from-home.
He had even sent someone along to take photos of Lucy, beaming brightly in the garden at the cottage’s front door. If she hadn’t known the truth, she might have looked at the picture on the website and thought, ‘Well, she has it all with her picture-perfect life.’
Affecting a cheery smile, she had formulated a way of minimising the risk of any awkward questions from guests about her personal situation. Lucy was aware that no one wanted to arrive at their B&B to learn that the host’s husband had died in a road accident a little more than a year before. No – it had to be all perky chit-chat, attentive service and reams of recommendations for local delights. Part of Lucy’s job was to convey the impression that, at Rosemary Cottage, all was right with the world.
‘Such a beautiful day,’ she remarked one bright and sun-filled April morning as she brought out a pot of fresh coffee to her guests in the dining room. Graeme and Amanda were a couple in their early thirties who had seemed notably affectionate with each other – touchy-feely and cuddly – when they had arrived last night.
‘It’s lovely,’ Graeme agreed. ‘We’re so lucky.’
‘It’s our first time away without our little boy,’ his wife Amanda added. ‘So it’s kind of a big deal to us.’
‘Oh, that’s pretty special,’ Lucy said. ‘How old is he?’
‘He’s just had his first birthday.’ Amanda’s eyes met hers, and Lucy detected the flicker of curiosity that she had started to recognise recently. The couple had already met Marnie and Sam first thing that morning as Rikke had breezed in to take them to school. It was always the women who picked up on what was perhaps a slightly odd situation; Lucy apparently running things alone, with no mention of a partner.
‘It’s lovely to get some time together, just the two of you,’ Lucy added.
‘It is.’ Graeme nodded and grinned. ‘We so appreciate it.’
‘How old are your two?’ Amanda asked.
‘Sam’s seven, Marnie’s nine,’ Lucy replied, and there it hung – that pause again, holding a silent question: so, are you running things here by yourself? When they’d first moved here Ivan had been working away during the week, and there’d been no such flicker of curiosity then. But then, Lucy would have dropped him casually into conversation: ‘My husband works in Manchester’; ‘Ivan’s back this evening. Hopefully you’ll meet him later.’
And these days – at least where her guests were concerned – her husband had become unmentionable.
When Amanda and Graeme had headed out for the day, Lucy spruced up the downstairs rooms, threw in a load of laundry, peeked in at Marnie’s devastated bedroom, felt instantly depressed, and decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather by getting stuck into weeding the garden instead. Although she still missed Ivan on so many levels, sometimes it was the practical issues that hit her hardest; someone to do stuff, to reach up to high places and lift heavy things, even to twist off a jam jar lid. But it was the parenting side mostly – having someone to share all the worries, the joys and basic hard graft; to whisk the kids off for a few hours at the weekend to give her the peace to tackle a few jobs or, occasionally, sink into a bath with a magazine. Although she was hugely thankful to friends like Carys, who certainly helped out – and she hoped she reciprocated sufficiently – it wasn’t quite the same.
After a couple of hours’ gardening she stood up, brushing the soil from her gardening gloves as she cast her gaze along the blaze of colour that stretched all the way from the house down to the shed at the bottom of the garden. There were swathes of pale pink sweetpeas and deep red peonies. A climbing rose that clung to the gnarly garden wall – the one Lucy, James and the Linton kids had scrambled over as children – was such a glorious deep yellow that she couldn’t help feeling uplifted whenever she glimpsed it in bloom. She cut some flowers and took them inside, placing the vase of blooms on the windowsill next to the framed photo of Sam and Marnie as a baby and toddler. Until recently, there had been a wedding photo there too. But one morning, a lone, robust hillwalker type – who wore her bobble hat to breakfast, and smelt of Deep Heat – had spied it and asked, ‘So, is your husband involved much with the B&B, Lucy? Or is it really your thing?’
‘Oh, um, we lost him, unfortunately,’ Lucy said quickly, unprepared for such a direct question (it was fair enough though, particularly as she still wore her wedding ring; there hadn’t seemed any reason for her to take it off). ‘There was a road accident,’ she added.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman said, looking alarmed. ‘I didn’t realise. I mean, I shouldn’t have—’
‘No, really, it’s okay.’ Lucy’s cheeks blazed, mostly from embarrassment at making her feel uncomfortable. Her guest also blushed, as if it were catching, and there had been an excruciating few moments during which Lucy had babbled. ‘We’re managing all right, you know. We’re just getting on with things. You have to, don’t you? So, um, would you like some more toast? Or maybe another pot of tea?’
‘Oh, no, I think I’m all done, thank you,’ she said, clearly wanting to scuttle out of the house and run for the hills. As soon as she’d left, Lucy had snatched the photograph and taken it upstairs to her room. When the children asked where it had gone, she had explained, ‘It’s on my bedside table now. I like seeing it before I go to sleep.’ Feeling oddly disloyal, she had gone on to remove all traces of Ivan’s existence from the ‘public’ parts of the house.
If the children noticed, they didn’t say anything and life went on, hectic and full, leaving Lucy little chance to brood. She barely had time to dwell on the attic that still needed clearing out – or even Ivan’s wardrobe, for that matter. Everything was still as he’d left it. One day she’d deal with it all.
Lucy was aware that, on the outside at least, she probably seemed like any other normal mother. Perhaps she appeared to be even more capable and gung-ho than most with her open-door policy when it came to welcoming the village children into her home. For the most part, she was buoyant and brimming with energy: ‘Hero Mum,’ as Carys had called her recently, when she had hosted a sleepover for seven children during the Easter holidays. However, she would still wake up some mornings to experience a fresh wave of devastation on realising that Ivan wasn’t beside her.
It infuriated her that this still happened. When would she be able to trust herself to just wake up and know? But she refused to allow herself to be pulled down by her grief. Ensuring that life was as full as she could possibly make it had become her way of scrambling through the days.
These days, Lucy rarely mentioned Ivan to anyone, apart from when the children wanted to talk about their dad. She had no desire to go over the details with anyone – which was why, when she spotted James Halsall in the village one bright and sunny afternoon, she was tempted to dart into the greengrocer’s to avoid him.
Too late. He’d already seen her, and waved, and she waved back as if she’d only just spotted him. As he strode towards her, she arranged her expression into what she hoped looked like a genuine smile.