The cottage was for sale: the estate agent’s post was wedged into the peaty earth of the narrow border, sheltered by the low wall that fronted the lane, and the board was framed by the leaves of the rowan tree whose white blossoms were faded now and drifted down to the grassy verges. Kate, on her way to supper with Nat and Janna, braked sharply and sat staring at the small stone house. Its outward appearance had not changed much since she’d first seen it thirty years ago: the outbuildings had been renovated – work she’d been unable to afford – and the cottage had been given a new slate roof but the whole effect remained one of stability and character. The grey stone walls seemed to have grown out of the earth along with the ancient apple trees and the aquilegias; the robin, hopping upon the flagged path, was surely a descendant of the little family that nested each year in the ivy that clung tenaciously to the holly trees in the hawthorn hedge.
Kate leaned forward, staring up at the board as if it were a portent: a message for which she’d been hoping. How strange that this particular cottage should come on to the market now, at this particular moment when her life was in a state of confusion and grief, when she was considering putting her own house up for sale, though she had no idea where she should go. Thirty years ago she’d fallen in love with this cottage and plunged headlong into the purchase of it with that supreme confidence that comes with the knowledge of absolute rightness. Even now she could remember that first reaction to it and was surprised to discover that she was experiencing those same feelings again: delight, excitement, a sense of a new direction in her life.
Back then the cottage had been a place of shelter through the unhappy months of the breakdown of her marriage: a secure base for her children after the years of moving between the naval bases. Here, away from prying eyes and gossip, she and Alex had made love: such loving as she had never known before. There had been so much to talk about to him, so much to share . . . even now she couldn’t understand why their relationship had foundered so disastrously.
The tractor, rumbling round the bend in the lane, caught her unawares; she hastened to pull into the gateway to let it pass and then drove on towards Horrabridge where Nat and Janna were waiting for her.
‘You’ll never guess,’ she said, hugging them and accepting a glass of wine, unable to wait a moment before telling them. ‘My old cottage is for sale. I simply can’t believe it. It was the first place I ever owned . . .’
The words came tumbling out – the coincidence, the memories – and she laughed and shook her head in turn, unable to contain this wild, new excitement.
Janna caught her infectious exhilaration all in a second. ‘Your old home? Where you brought up your boys?’
She entered completely into Kate’s delight, easily able to identify with her amazement at the coincidence, as ready as Kate was to believe in signs and portents. To Janna, a home, any home, was a sanctuary and this must be a very special place, she could quite see that.
‘Imagine,’ she marvelled, ‘falling in love with it all those years ago and then finding it again now, just when you’ve been wondering what to do and where to go. And all those memories of the twins growing up . . .’
‘I think it’s been a holiday home for the last few years.’ Nat was more prosaic. ‘I’ve noticed that through the winter it’s often got that shut-up look about it and then at Easter and in the summer you see signs of life.’
‘I wonder if it’s been changed inside.’ Kate tried to imagine it. ‘I shall phone the agents in the morning. It’s so odd that I should come that way this evening. I’d been for a walk up on King’s Tor, you see . . .’ She told the story again and then laughed with vexation. ‘Sorry. I’m being an absolute twit. Let’s forget it. How are you both?’
Bundling away her excitement, containing it in a secret place where she might dwell on it later in private, Kate concentrated on the two of them. Janna had the air of a languorous cat: even the wild lion-hair, springing mane-like around her small head, looked sleek. Her lips curved contentedly upward, even as she leaned to pour the wine, as if she were possessed of some ineffable joy that couldn’t be hid. This evening she wore a flame-coloured sarong, knotted round her narrow hips, and a black halter-top that barely concealed her tiny breasts. All her movements were languid and assured, yet there remained something vulnerable in the sharpness of her shoulder-blades and her bare, thin, fragile feet.
Kate, glancing at Nat, was aware of tension: there was no joy here. His eyes were inward-looking, his lips compressed, and the heaviness of his spirits was manifested in the tremendous effort he was making to join in with the conversation. Janna seemed unconscious of his gloom, wrapped as she was in her own happiness. Hearing Kate’s story about the cottage had given it a kind of lustre, an added brilliance, and she was away into one of her own stories of being on the road. She perched on the arm of Nat’s chair, leaning against his shoulder and, as she talked, Kate was shocked into a sharper awareness. There was an unconscious possessiveness in Janna’s attitude; she touched Nat’s hair and then his arm – such a light, brief caress but with a new, sweet confidence – as she told her light-hearted, amusing tale. And all the while her body language was telling a separate story of its own: its fluid, newly fulfilled grace communicating quite as clearly as any words.
She got up to go back into the kitchen – none of the familiar waif-like hesitation in her movements now; instead the serene certainty of the mistress of the house – and Nat reluctantly raised his eyes at last. He was clearly uncomfortable, unable to meet Kate’s gaze openly or to speak out freely, and Kate remained silent out of confusion and politeness.
‘So,’ he said dully, at last, ‘do you think you really might make an offer for the cottage?’
His words, apparently heaved up with an effort from his heavy heart and falling weightily into the silence, filled her with a foreboding that inhibited her and she was relieved when Janna called out that supper was ready.
Kate slept badly that night. Thoughts about the cottage distracted her from her anxieties about Janna and Nat but her head seethed with so many other images and ideas that, to begin with, she couldn’t sleep at all. She’d resisted the temptation to drive home past the cottage – it would be foolish to go so far out of her way simply to stare at it again – but she simply couldn’t prevent herself from thinking about it.
As she let herself into her own house she was seized with a sudden compunction, almost as if she were contemplating infidelity, and she looked around her big, warm kitchen with a kind of placating anxiety. She loved this house, of course she did, but she must try to be rational about it. Now that she was alone it was too big for her and she couldn’t afford to maintain it. The cottage, on the other hand, would be perfect: small without being poky, economical to run, secluded but not remote. It seemed surprising, remembering it with the enthusiasm that she felt for it at this moment, that she’d ever been prepared to leave the cottage at all. It had been her brother, she reminded herself as she switched off lights and locked up, who’d broached the idea that they should pool their resources and share a house: her boys were growing up, she was beginning to take the dog-breeding more seriously so as to supplement her income, and Chris needed a base in the UK. This project offered both of them advantages they couldn’t supply by themselves. Kate required extra space, both inside and out, and Chris, who was an electrical transmissions engineer and worked abroad a great deal, longed for a proper home to which he could return for holidays.
Lying in bed, staring wakefully into the shadowy spaces, Kate tried to remember if the bitter ending of her affair with Alex had still been raw enough to make her brother’s idea even more appealing. Chris’s suggestion had certainly come at the time when she’d been trying to come to terms with losing Alex, searching for ways to make a new beginning. Chris understood her dilemma: his own marriage had recently ended in divorce and he’d asked he if might come to stay with Kate for a week’s holiday. They’d taken the twins for long walks over the moor, to the coast at Torcross to swim, to Dartmouth to look at the boats, to the cinema in Plymouth. The twins, who had grown up in fear of their father and seen Alex as a threat, had been so responsive to their uncle, so natural and easy with him, that Kate’s own tension and anxiety had gently and quietly unravelled. Even now, she could recall the true happiness of that holiday, the blessed absence of stress or strain: uncomplicated and fun. His proposal that they should share a house, coming at the end of that idyllic week, had seemed the answer she’d been seeking. It would be a relief, after her unhappy marriage with Mark and the turbulent affair with Alex, to have a simple, undemanding relationship with her sons and her brother.
It had been the right decision, Kate told herself now. Through the following years, with the twins at Blundell’s School and then at university, she and Chris had achieved stability for the boys and a refuge for themselves: a home where the four of them could grow and heal. It had worked for ten years – until Chris, having fallen in love with a delightful Japanese girl in America, had decided to get married again and settle with her in Florida. An unexpected legacy had enabled Kate to buy him out and, a few months later, she’d met David.
Kate stirred restlessly, pushing back the light quilt and sitting on the edge of the bed. These early morning hours were the worst: bringing with them heart-rending memories of the past and terrors of the future. The room was lit with the soft radiance of starlight and from the uncurtained window she could see the distant shoulder of the moor, hunched blackly against the brilliant night sky. No sleeping David, now, to curl up against for comfort: no familiar sound of dogs rustling and snoring in the kitchen below.
‘Can’t sleep?’ he’d ask drowsily. ‘Who is it this time? Giles, is it? He’s a good fellow, old Giles. Takes his time and likes to know where he is before jumping into things but he’s going to be OK, I promise you . . .’
Memories of his warmth and humour crowded at her shoulder and she allowed herself to open her mind to them just a little, peering back half-fearfully at those painful reminders of her loss.
David had come from another world, challenging her to step free from her self-imposed isolation and showing her how to begin to be fully alive again. She still believed that those ten years with the dogs for company, with the twins away at school and Chris’s periods of leave infrequent, had been a time of welcome and necessary respite but, even before Chris had remarried, she’d begun to feel lonely. It was so strange that her first meeting with David had been by pure chance; that their connection should be through a mutual friend who had died tragically. Of course, it was precisely because of their sharing in this tragedy that they’d been able to skip swiftly over the usual rules of convention and talk honestly together about their own lives and that of the dead woman, Felicity Mainwaring.
Feeling the milk-warm night air flowing over her bare arms, breathing in the scent of honeysuckle, Kate leaned at the open window remembering how David had talked about his affair with Felicity. He’d admitted that he’d misjudged her, underestimating how deeply she had loved him, and so had left her with such disastrous results. His grief and guilt had been very real and Kate had comforted him, painting in a wider background and describing their lives as naval wives together, so that he could see Felicity’s tragedy in its proper perspective and as a series of events in which his own part was a small one. What had surprised her was exactly how much he had grasped from her word-picture of those past years regarding her own unhappy marriage. As she looked down into the silent, silver-washed garden, Kate recalled his second visit: six months later, on Christmas Day. The twins were away from home – Guy with his father in Canada and Giles with his girlfriend up-country – and she’d been alone for the first time at Christmas. How empty and quiet the house had seemed: how pointless the decorations and the tree. She’d been glad of Cass’s invitation to lunch but the houseful of family and guests and the extravagant celebrations had merely underlined her own loneliness. It was strangely ironic to think that it was Felicity, with her characteristic bluntness, who’d once pointed out that she’d been a fool to give up Alex for the sake of the boys.
‘The twins will go away and leave you,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll be left alone. You should have thought of that.’
Turning away from the window, resisting the slide into self-pity, Kate remembered David’s intuitive sympathy and ready understanding that Christmas Day. How easy it had been to talk to him: how quick he’d been to see through her layers of protective colouring to the essential truth – and how hard she’d fought against him in the following months. He’d forced her from her carefully built shell of fear and made her painfully alive again. Now, curled on her side with her face in her pillow, she regretted how strongly and how long she’d resisted him.
‘Love is not enough,’ she’d told him fiercely. ‘It doesn’t overcome all the obstacles and make up for everything. Twice I thought it would. It’s taken me years to learn to live alone. To risk it – me – again is a luxury I simply can’t afford.’
‘You’re so certain it won’t work? Don’t you love me at all?’ he’d asked her – but she’d avoided the second question.
‘I don’t see how it can. You in London, me here. I hate cities. You’d be bored rigid in the country . . .’
Yet he’d persuaded her to confront her fear, to take the opportunity to create a new life with him and, now that he’d gone, it seemed that it was time to do it all over again.
One thing was clear: she must stop thinking about David and resist maudlin excursions to the past. Those paths led only to grieving and inaction, and she must make a real effort to look forward; to take some decisions about her future. In her mind’s eye she saw the cottage, snug and homely with its familiar rooms and sheltered garden. Excitement rose within her, banishing grief, warming her. Surely this was the answer for which she’d been hoping? If she were brave enough to take this step then other decisions might automatically fall into place.
Stretched out again on her back she allowed her imagination and memory to lead her, room by room, through the small stone house. Presently she slept.