by Unknown
Also by Fiona Walker
French Relations
Kiss Chase
Well Groomed
Snap Happy
Between Males
Lucy Talk
Copyright © 2003 by Fiona Walker
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK company
First published in paperback in 2004 by Hodder & Stoughton
The right of Fiona Walker to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 349 0
Book ISBN 978 0 340 68231 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette Livre UK company
338 Euston Road
London NWl 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For Hans and Christian,
who prove that some happy endings
begin a whole new chapter.
‘Leave it – leave it. LEAVE IT!’
Ellen struggled to keep control of the jeep as Snorkel scrabbled around beneath her legs, trying to extract her ball from the footwell. A moment later, and a white clown’s face looked up between her knees, red ball in mouth, mad blue eyes imploring.
‘Not now, Snork,’ she pleaded.
The ball was dropped lovingly on to her thigh, leaving a trail of wet slobber behind as it rolled down her bare leg and toppled into the footwell once more, settling under the brake pedal.
Having fallen asleep on the passenger seat after her ham sandwich and loo break at Taunton Deane Services two hours earlier, the collie had only just woken up again, and was desperate to have a run-around and play a game. But because they were so close to the end of their journey, Ellen didn’t want to stop.
‘Miaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeooooooow!’ Fins complained from his wicker basket, redoubling his efforts to escape. He had been trying to chew his way out since setting off from Cornwall, with no loo break and no in-car ball game to break the monotony. The basket on the back seat positively vibrated from inside while at the same time rocking to and fro as Ellen negotiated the narrow, winding lane.
She’d forgotten just how many hairpins and illogical dog-legs there were in the lanes here, all relating to ancient rights of way and field systems that had long since been abandoned in the wake of modern farming. Unlike North Cornwall, with its twisting tunnels of high-banked lanes, the Cotswolds had low stone walls over which she caught regular glimpses of ripening crops and grazing stock, making it easy to lose concentration. Even the woods were different, she noticed, as she dropped down a steep hill into a forest – the trees were tall and proud and let in far less light through their canopy. Compared to the bright sunshine outside, it was like driving into a cool, dark cathedral. She pushed her dark glasses up into her hair.
Snorkel let out a series of frustrated whines as she scratched frantically for her ball. Fins hissed and wailed as he munched at the wicker. To drown the din, Ellen turned on the radio, but the local station she’d tuned into hours earlier had long since faded to white noise. She pressed the scan button to find something else, then realised there was a tape in the deck and flipped it out to see what it was.
It was one of Richard’s old compilations, lovingly put together to set the mood for long drives across Europe in search of surf.
Her eyes misted and she slotted it carefully back in, not pushing hard enough to engage the ‘play’ mechanism. She wasn’t ready to listen to it yet. Nor was she ready for the song that started blasting out of the speakers when the auto-tracker found a station at last. It was Men at Work singing ‘Land Downunder’. Ellen tetchily punched off the power switch.
At that moment, her phone started ringing. As she reached out to grab it from the dashboard, she glanced up at the road just in time to see the sharp right-hand bend appear through the dappled shadows. She was driving way too fast to take it safely, but it was too late to brake, so she was forced to wrench the steering-wheel round, bite her tongue and pray that they didn’t hit a tree. With the car on two wheels, they bucketed round, kicking up leaf mulch and dirt from the verge, the back end of the jeep fighting to find any grip. The ringing mobile phone slid along the dash and fell into the passenger-door glovebox. Fins’ basket fell on to its side with a furious squawk of protest from its occupant. Snorkel cowered in the footwell, bracing herself against the steering column and inadvertently sitting on the accelerator pedal.
Miraculously the car stayed on the road.
Ellen let out a whoop of exhilaration as they careered around. ‘Sorry, guys!’
It was then that she spotted the tiny unmanned level-crossing just ahead. The warning lights were flashing red. The barriers were coming down.
She screamed and punched her foot hard on the brake only to encounter the hard, rubbery resistance of a ball trapped beneath it.
‘Bugger, bugger, BUGGER!’ Ellen tried to kick away the ball and kicked Snorkel by mistake.
Yelping and trembling, Snorkel threw up a partly digested ham sandwich on to Ellen’s trainer.
‘I am not going to die with dog sick on my foot!’ Ellen screamed what might have been the last words of her life.
Left with no choice, she grabbed for the handbrake with both hands and hauled it back, immediately putting the car into a lurching, sideways, uncontrolled slide towards the lowering barriers. She closed her eyes and braced herself as the seatbelt punched the air from her lungs.
A moment later, she was aware of an unnerving silence. No wailing cat, whining dog or droning engine, and certainly no super-fast train rattling along the track to wipe her out – just a beep-beep-beep warning from the level-crossing and the ding-ingle jaunty tune of her mobile ringing.
Very cautiously, she opened her eyes. The jeep had come to a halt at an acute angle just a few inches short of the now-closed barriers, its engine stalled.
She wound down her window and took a deep breath of air, grateful to be alive. Outside, it smelt of pine needles and burning rubber. Just audible above the crossing warning and the phone ringing, she could hear wood pigeons purring fatly from a tree far overhead. From the depths of the upturned cat basket, Fins heard it too and managed a greedy if traumatised little hunting call.
Ellen started to laugh.
She reached for the phone, checking that Snorkel was still all right. The blue-eyed collie had her ears glued nervously to the back of her head and was still looking decidedly nauseous, but seemed in one piece, still sitting on the accelerator. Looking back between the front seats as she reached across them, Ellen saw that Fins’ basket was now upside down behind the passenger seat, but four little white paws were already thrashing angrily out of four separate holes, so she guessed he hadn’t broken anything. He was certainly giving full-blooded cries of protest once more.
‘Miaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeooooooow!’
‘Yup?’ She took the call.
‘Hello? Hello? Ellen, is that you? What is that noise?’
Ellen gently shifted the wicker cat basket the right way up, rolling her eyes as she realised who was calling. She might have guessed.
‘Hi, Mum.’ She lifted the basket on to the back seat once mor
e and slid her finger through the mesh door to give Fins a comforting stroke.
‘Where are you?’ demanded Jennifer.
Fins glared back at Ellen through his basket’s door, shook himself all over as he adjusted to being the right way up again, then took a vicious swipe at her.
‘At the railway crossing,’ she picked up the roll of kitchen towel that had landed on the floor too and swung back into the driver’s seat, ‘on the lane that goes past the abbey, you know?’ She was very proud that she had found the ‘hidden’ lane so easily after all these years.
‘Why are you going that way?’ The line crackled, but there was no mistaking her mother’s critical tone, with which Ellen was all-too familiar having lived with it both as daughter and, at one time, as pupil too.
‘I didn’t want to get stuck in the traffic in Lower Oddford – there’s always coachloads of tourists milling about and double-parked hire cars on the bridges.’
‘Nonsense. It’s never that busy. And it’s much quicker that way.’
‘Well, I’m here now.’ Ellen unrolled a hunk of paper with one hand and reached down to scoop up the regurgitated ham sandwich, watched by two guilty blue eyes. She blew Snorkel a forgiving kiss before carefully putting the unpleasant bundle into the empty plastic wrapper. Then she fished around underfoot to find the ball, struggling to pull it from beneath the brake pedal.
‘. . . always get stuck at the crossing that way,’ her mother was saying. ‘Your father says the signal that triggers the lights is just outside Addington Junction, so one has to wait ages unless it’s an express. Then there’s . . .’
As soon as she’d freed the ball, Ellen was almost flattened by Snorkel, who took this as her cue to leap out of the footwell and start playing again, trying to snap the ball from her hands. ‘Get off, you soppy bitch!’ She laughed.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Jennifer demanded archly in her ear.
‘Not you, Mum, the dog.’
‘Oh no – you haven’t brought that smelly creature of Richard’s with you?’ Her horror was audible. ‘Why didn’t he take it with him?’
‘To Australia?’
‘Well, it can’t stay in the house.’ She sniffed.
‘She’ll have to.’ Ellen ruffled the tufted ears, which had now sprung forward and were pointing at her jauntily as Snorkel stood bridging the gap between the two front seats, front paws on Ellen’s leg.
‘It must sleep in the old dovecote,’ Jennifer insisted. ‘A dog in the house will put purchasers off. They smell and they’re unhygienic.’
Ellen said nothing, pressing her nose to Snorkel’s soft coat. She still smelt of the sea from her early-morning swim at Treglin Mouth – brackish and salty. A few grains of sand remained trapped between her pads and in the feathers on the backs of her legs. Ellen closed her eyes and breathed deeply, tears worryingly close as she said another silent farewell to her beloved coast.
‘You should really be heading into the village on the Oddford road, you know,’ her mother was lecturing. ‘You have to pick up the keys from Dot, remember? And the Orchard Close estate is on the way if you’d chosen that route.’ Jennifer Jamieson was the sort of woman who drew maps of the supermarket aisles to plan the most efficient route from fresh fruit and veg to Ernest & Julio Gallo.
‘I think I can spare the diesel to detour and pick them up,’ Ellen said patiently.
‘You’re running very late. I told Dot you’d be there in the morning.’
Why was her mother such a worrier? she wondered. She could imagine her in Spain, checking the clocks every ten minutes, subtracting the hour difference, and looking critically at the phone waiting for it to ring.
‘It’s not yet midday.’ She squinted up at the corridor of hot azure sky above the railway track, in the centre of which the sun blistered like a magnifying-glass on an inflatable blue lilo. ‘We set out before seven, but we had to stop for a wee.’
‘We?’
‘It’s a natural bodily function. C’mon, Mum, you’re the biology teacher.’
Jennifer tutted irritably. ‘You know exactly what I mean. We as in, you and . . . who else?’
‘Me and the animals.’
‘The animals and I,’ Jennifer corrected automatically. But she was clearly relieved that her daughter hadn’t brought one of her scruffy surfer friends along with her. ‘Pets are such a bind. It’s cruel to drag them from pillar to post. Honestly, Ellen, how you think you’ll be able to go globe-trotting with the responsibility of—’
‘I’ll find them homes,’ Ellen assured her, not wanting to get into this conversation while sharing a car with her beloved charges. ‘We had someone lined up in Cornwall, but it fell through.’
‘Hmmm.’ Jennifer was unimpressed. ‘Well, please do try to restrict any damage they might cause to the cottage. It’s so important to maintain an atmosphere of clean, calm tranquillity.’
‘Miaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeooooooow!’ Suddenly Fins’ head popped out from one of the holes he’d been chewing, much to his own surprise, it seemed. Wide-eyed with fright, he gazed around the inside of the car, then decided to pull the rest of his body through. But being a distinctly overweight cat, he ended up thrashing around like an overheated health-spa client trying to escape from a steam cabinet.
There was a familiar two-toned toot in the distance. The train was approaching at last. Ellen started winding up the window. ‘Mum, I have to go – I’ll call you from the cottage, okay?’
‘Don’t forget the alarm code. Nine zero zero five three, as in Goose—’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘And make sure Dot gives you the keys to the bunkhouse as well as the cottage.’
‘Yes.’
‘And—’ Her mother’s voice was drowned as a three-carriage train came clattering past. The volume it generated probably wasn’t very great in the scale of things, but because the jeep was almost on the rails, it rattled and shook as though being attacked by a thousand baboons in a wildlife park.
Snorkel started barking excitedly, tail whirling. Fins’ head promptly disappeared back into the basket. Ellen threw the phone back on to the dash and started the engine.
They were soon climbing back up through the woods and out on to the natural shelf half-way along the slope that ran from the Hillcote side of the ridgeway down into the Lodes valley. This was more familiar territory to Ellen. She remembered coming up here one long-ago white Christmas to toboggan, and another time to walk with her father when his doctor had advised him to take regular exercise after his first heart-attack – he had not imagined that Theo Jamieson would interpret this as ten-mile hikes three times a week. She recognised the strange, steepled barn belonging to Brook Farm and the little stone bridge that crossed the brook.
‘Woooooooof, wooooooahhhhh! Wooooof ! Woof, WOOF! Hooooooeeeeeeaaaa! WOOF!’
Now that she’d started barking, Snorkel had decided singing was a much more entertaining game than throwing her ball around under Ellen’s feet. Sitting on the passenger seat, she barked and howled delightedly, revelling in the power of her own lungs.
‘Okay – five minutes.’ Ellen pulled up beside a little green footpath sign, engaged the four-wheel drive, and reversed the jeep right up on to the thick verge until it was under an ivy-clogged hedge, which would afford Fins some shade.
Snorkel spun round and round on her seat, barking all the more as Ellen reached for her baseball cap and jumped out of the car.
It was blindingly bright outside, the sun flame-throwing scorched heat on to the landscape. Although high up, only the faintest of breezes moved the sweltering air. Whichever way Ellen turned her face to catch it, it was nothing compared to the cool, briny wind of the Cornish coast.
The backs of her thighs felt sticky and creased from so long crammed into the leather seat. She rubbed them as she walked, tugging her shorts out of her bottom, then following suit with her knickers. The home-made frayed denim cut-offs were little more than hot pants and had a nasty tendency to ride up, but they we
re great for driving long distances because they had a tough seat yet left the whole length of her legs free.
As she climbed up the footpath behind an eager Snorkel, her T-shirt was soon wringing with sweat. She was about to tuck it under her bra when she remembered she wasn’t wearing one, having over-efficiently packed it the night before. Instead, she gripped the hem and fanned in air as she walked, a habit she’d had since childhood.
The path ran alongside a huge field of ripening rape and up to a derelict Dutch barn. Ellen longed to run it to shake off the static of her long journey, but she didn’t want to overexcite Snorkel who always took running to mean four miles along a beach and lots of stick-throwing.
Instead she let the dog pounce on butterflies in the hedgerow and trudged up to the barn before turning back to look across the valley, eyes shaded by baseball-cap peak, sunglasses and one hand, yet still narrowed against the light.
She couldn’t deny its beauty, however landlocked and far from the place she thought of as home.
The horseshoe ridge, which curled round from behind her to wrap the entire valley in its sleeping dinosaur embrace, had a broad, bony back crested with the needles of distant woods and coppices, and a single tall aerial mast that she didn’t remember from previous visits. High in those marl hills lay the multitude of springs that fed the twisting, curling river Odd. Here and there lay tiny honey-stone farms and hamlets, creamy brown snails clinging to the leafy flanks, changing little over the years and barely touched by development.
At this time of year the valley was a riot of acid greens and yellows. It reminded Ellen of the vegetable terrine Richard used to make on special occasions, a hundred contrasting horizontal stripes of pea-green pasture and yellow-pepper crops, divided by spinach-dark hedgerows and dotted with black-olive woods, all dusted with a sprinkling of paprika poppies.
Its sheer breadth always struck her afresh when she visited. In Cornwall, the valleys were smaller and deeper, like the bed Snorkel made from her green bean bag, twisting and twisting around until she’d formed a deep, comforting hollow into which she packed herself as tightly as possible.