by Unknown
But the Lodes Valley bed had been made by a huge pack of hounds that liked to sprawl out nose-to-tail on a vast, lumpy, green-striped mattress, stretching their legs along its many plateaux, burying their noses in the dips and hollows, chewing corners from the upholstery and hiding treats and bones among the pillows. And the juiciest bone lay in its green centre.
There was Oddlode, by far the biggest of the valley’s few villages, lying on the crossroads that was formed by the wriggling Odd and the arrow-straight railway line – although the two were only distinguishable from where Ellen stood by the darkline of trees that flanked them. With its Cotswold-stone church spire and clusters of tawny cottages and grand houses, Oddlode looked, from a distance, like the ultimate cliché village jewel. Jennifer Jamieson certainly described it as such in her rather florid home-produced brochures that had, for many years, attracted families to holiday in Goose Cottage. ‘Picture an exquisite brooch. At its centre is a sapphire set in a flawless emerald. That is Oddlode village green and its duck pond. Surrounding it is the gold filigree of tiny Cotswold stone cottages, breathtaking in their intricacy. That is the heart of Oddlode.’
Over the years Ellen had kept her visits to a minimum, but she knew it wasn’t quite the crown jewel of the Cotswolds her mother made it out to be. Compared to picture-postcard Lower Oddford, Oddlode was an ungainly ugly sister – less touristy, hard-working, riddled with conflicts.
Her parents had moved there soon after she left her childhood home in the Quantock Hills to take up her place at Exeter University. It had long been Jennifer’s dream to live in the Cotswolds, and the family had headed inland to holiday in the neighbouring Foxrush valley many times, always staying in the same guesthouse. For years, indulgent Theo Jamieson had assured his wife that they would live there one day. Having patiently waited until her daughter finished school, Jennifer bade farewell to Gorsemoor Comprehensive the same summer as Ellen, resigning as deputy head and taking a far less well-paid job teaching part-time at Market Addington sixth-form college.
This had hardly seemed to matter because the move was funded by Ellen’s father finally agreeing to work from his company’s London office, a transfer he’d long been offered but had thus far managed to resist.
When they lived near Taunton, it had taken Theo just fifteen minutes to drive to work. The train from Oddlode station to Paddington took an hour and a half, and then it was another half-hour by crowded tube to get to Chancery Lane. From the Cotswolds, the quickest journey into work he could hope for was over two hours.
Ellen calculated that her father, in transit for four hours a day five days a week, had spent over four thousand hours on a train before he had his first heart-attack on the six fifteen from Paddington to Hereford and Worcester. That was four years after the move, and he had spent five solid months of the time sitting on a train. By then Jennifer had spent just as much time – and a great deal of money – doing up the outdated if pretty Goose Cottage, converting the attics into bedrooms, having en-suites fitted and a utility extension added. It was to be her dream cottage.
It took a further thousand hours on a train for Theo to have his second heart-attack – the one that almost killed him on the Central Line between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road; the crowds around him had thought he was drunk. By then Jennifer had converted Goose Cottage’s thatched barn into a carport with a guest suite above, had spared no expense in getting the garden landscaped, and a fitted kitchen, complete with shiny blue Aga.
Ellen and Richard had been surfing off the Costa de la Luz when it happened, staying in a run-down Spanish campsite with a host of other travellers. It had been weeks before she found out how ill her father was. Tanned and impossibly healthy, she’d returned to find him sitting in a part-landscaped garden that he’d part paid for, reading the horror story that was his bank statement. The doctors had told him to find a less stressful job, take more holidays, take it easy – it was that, or take out life insurance in the certain knowledge that it would be cashed in before many more months were up.
Jennifer was haunted with guilt. While Theo recuperated, she took in paying holiday guests who stayed in the expensive barn guest suite and were fed full English breakfasts cooked on the expensive blue Aga. The money helped, but it wasn’t enough for Theo to give up work.
Her father spent a further two thousand hours on a train before he retired. These journeys were mercifully uninterrupted by another heart-attack, although the doctors said this was more by luck than by design. He had finally stopped renewing his season ticket after he had spent six hours in an operating theatre undergoing a triple heart bypass. By then he had paid for his wife’s dream cottage and saved up a small fund for early retirement.
He’d also managed to take a few more holidays, mostly in Spain, which he’d wanted to explore further after Ellen’s vivid descriptions of the unspoiled coasts she and Richard had discovered far from the tourist trail. Like his daughter, Theo loved the sea. It was on one of these holidays that he had fallen in love with a ramshackle finca high in the hills above the Costa Verde, on the market for the same price as a second-hand Jaguar. Soon afterwards, the Jamiesons became a one-car couple with a second home. The same year, Market Addington sixth-form college was amalgamated with nearby St Jude’s secondary school and Mrs Jamieson, commonly known as ‘Bismarck’ (because she always gave abysmal marks) was offered early retirement.
Which was when, by a curious twist of fate, Jennifer and Theo Jamieson’s life took on uncanny parallels to their daughter’s, although Ellen’s mother refused to admit it. For the past four years, the couple had spent summers and Christmases in the Cotswolds, the rest of the year in Spain wrestling with local bureaucracy and builders as Theo created his dream retirement villa overlooking the sea. Goose Cottage was let as a holiday home while they were away and, because Jennifer’s expensively enhanced dream cottage appealed to every tourist’s idea of a Cotswold village idyll, it was rarely empty. The money paid the Spanish builders but, as always with the Jamiesons, there was little cash left in the pot.
Just days before Theo’s beloved finca was declared fully restored, his restored heart staged a protest. It was only a minor attack, the Spanish doctors concluded. A warning bell. Enjoy your home, Señor, they said. Travel less. Put your feet up on your beautiful terrace beside your beautiful pool with the beautiful views across to the sea. Do what all the doctors have been telling you for years.
With their modest combined pensions topped up by holiday-rental income, the Jamiesons knew that they could not really afford to keep both the finca and the cottage, but neither wanted to relinquish their dream.
Jennifer wailed and cried and fought with everything in her armoury to keep Goose Cottage, the lifelong fantasy that had almost killed her husband in the making.
Theo put up a sterling fight. He wanted to stay in Spain. He loved the climate, the golf and the people. He had never enjoyed the petty-mindedness of Oddlode and, because he had spent so much of his time there travelling to and from London, he’d never fully joined in village life as his wife had. To retire to Goose Cottage would mean continuing the B-and-B to provide an income, and he hated strangers tramping around when he was trying to read the Telegraph over breakfast.
He offered his wife a compromise. They would sell Goose Cottage and buy somewhere smaller in the village – perhaps one of the little cottages that nestled to the south of the green, once alms-houses and peppercorn-rent artisan cottages, now beloved of weekenders and young couples intent on turning a profit. Goose Cottage was far too large for them anyway, and Ellen and Richard showed no signs of starting a family . . .
That was when Jennifer woke up and realised that her dream had never really come true. She didn’t particularly like Oddlode any more, either. Not modern Oddlode, with its unfamiliar faces, its youth drug problem, its constant threats of development and, most especially, the way she was now perceived as an old-guard bossyboots. She loved her dream cottage, and she loved the magnificent manor,
the noble church, duck pond, post-office stores and olde-worlde pubs. It was the people she didn’t like nowadays. So many old friends had moved away, and she’d alienated the few who remained by being absent so often that she missed the day-to-day gossip – also because her fabled archness and snobbery had ripened rather than mellowed with old age. Perhaps most tellingly, to be seen to ‘downsize’ to a smaller cottage in the village would crucify her. In Spain, high up on their hill in the beautifully restored finca, she and Theo were king and queen of the castle.
So when Jennifer found out how much Goose Cottage was worth – almost exactly ten times what they had paid for it eleven years earlier – she was left in no doubt that they should sell. If it went for the asking price, they could afford to visit Oddlode in pure luxury, staying in nearby Eastlode Park – one of the most expensive country-house hotels in England – for a fortnight every year for the rest of their lives without denting the capital in the investment accounts.
But Goose Cottage had not sold for the asking price: it hadn’t sold at all. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to buy Jennifer Jamieson’s dream.
At first, they blamed the market – putting a property up for sale in the first week of January was bound to mean a slow start, however much Jennifer had wanted to spend one last Christmas there before selling. Yet almost six months later, it had attracted just one laughable offer, so low that when he received the fax, Theo had suggested to the agents that they had mistakenly left off a zero.
The Jamiesons were baffled. Property in Oddlode was like gold dust because the railway station made it possible to commute to London. The junior school was reputedly the best in West Oxfordshire and had a ferocious waiting list: it was far too small to accommodate every pupil whose eager parents longed for their child to be taught there. For-sale signs rarely stayed up in Oddlode for more than a fortnight. Goose Cottage was often talked about as ‘the prettiest in the village’. Why didn’t anyone want it? The agent – the best in the area, everyone agreed – seemed equally baffled.
The Jamiesons needed to get to the bottom of the problem, but Theo’s health made travelling difficult and neither relished the prospect of returning to Oddlode. In fact, now that her mind was made up, Jennifer flatly refused to return to see her dream cottage on the market. She had said her farewells at Christmas, contacted a reputable removals and shipping company, who were poised for action, and that, as far as she was concerned, was that. She refused to let Theo travel alone. But with no holiday rental from Goose Cottage now that it was for sale, things were desperate.
Which was where Ellen came in. Unlike Goose Cottage, the Shack (a far less des. res., built from a flat-pack and perched jauntily on a clifftop) had sold before the agent’s brochures were printed. It had sold before either Richard or Ellen was ready, before they had divided up their few possessions, found homes for their pets or applied for their visas, in Richard’s case to Australia, in Ellen’s to the World.
Detouring via Oddlode en route to the World would not have been on Ellen’s travel itinerary had she found time to write one, but saying no to her mother was not an easy option. She could use her time there to plan her trip, Jennifer pointed out. She could treat it as a holiday, enjoy the cottage – she’d hardly stayed there, after all.
They both knew why. Jennifer’s hatred of Richard had made those few stays uncomfortable. Her obvious jubilation that the relationship was over was so infuriating that Ellen longed to tell her to get stuffed. She’d always disliked twee, over-perfect Goose Cottage and blamed it for her father’s ill-health. She had eventually agreed to go there for her father’s sake. She could have stayed in Cornwall with friends until she was better organised, but she had known that, sooner or later, Theo Jamieson would defy his wife and come home to try to sort things out. She hated to think of him away from his precious Spanish coast, stuck in a village he disliked, living in a house that had almost killed him in the making.
She planned to make her stay as short as possible. She would get the cottage sold, find homes for Snorkel and Fins, plot out her trip, book her first flight, pack her rucksack and leave. With any luck, it shouldn’t take more than a fortnight.
Back at the jeep, Fins was looking out of the hole in his basket again, his swivelling head resembling a fluffy black and white periscope.
While Snorkel jumped back into the car, Ellen quickly checked the surfboards on the roof rack, still annoyed at herself for not taking the money that Foley’s Sports in Bude had offered her for them. By telling them to shove their paltry hundred pounds where the sun didn’t shine, she was still lumbered with the last thing that a Cotswold tourist needed. By contrast, she’d taken fifty pounds for her bike from Trisha at the pottery, and now wished she’d held on to it for a few more weeks. The lanes here were cycling heaven and she needed to stay fit.
Her T-shirt was dark with sweat now and felt disgustingly clammy. She grabbed the top bag from the boot and dug inside it for a fresh one. She checked around – there hadn’t been a car in sight the entire time she’d been walking, so she was hardly worried – then quickly set about swapping, forgetting that she was still wearing a baseball cap, anchored to her head by the ponytail pulled through its back. With her face full of hot, wet cotton and her arms trapped above her shoulders, Ellen swung her head around irritably, trying to get the neck of the T-shirt beyond her ponytail and the cap’s peak.
Of course, that was the exact moment when the first traffic the lane had seen for twenty minutes rounded the corner. And it wasn’t any old traffic. It was a huge lorry with three surprised faces lined up at the windscreen. Ellen knew this because it drew level just as she broke free of her wrestling hold.
Amazingly, her dark glasses and baseball cap had stayed on, affording her a degree of anonymity, if little modesty. She had no choice but to brazen it out. Holding the T-shirt to her chest, she saluted them as they passed. She didn’t even get a beep in return. On the rear of the lorry was emblazoned ‘Horses’.
‘Welcome to the Cotswolds,’ Ellen told Snorkel and Fins, as she pulled on the fresh T-shirt, ‘where legovers happen from mounting blocks, going out on the pull means clay pigeon shooting, and sharking is what American tourists call the prices in the antique shops.’
Orchard Close was a tidy, modern council estate built of Cotswold stone. The residents took a great deal of pride in it, and most of the immaculate little front gardens were a triumph of psychedelic geometry as rectangular flower-beds overflowed with primary-coloured blossoms, like ballpits in a children’s playground. Which was why the few unkempt gardens stood out. And of those, the Wycks’ was by far the most disorderly. Nettles and sedge swayed at waist height to either side of Ellen as she let herself through the broken gate and made her way gingerly up the uneven path, anxious not to get stung on her bare legs.
Loud drum ’n’ bass was thumping out of a top window, which was, she saw, not open as she’d first thought but simply missing an entire pane of glass. When she knocked on the door, a thunderous bark made her step back. A moment later something that appeared to be the size of a small rhino started throwing itself bodily against the other side of the door, snarling madly.
Ellen decided to wait a safe distance away, noticing as she retreated that one of the downstairs windows was broken too, the smashed pane patched up with cardboard and gaffer-tape. Several ancient bicycle wheels and half a lawnmower were propped up against the wall.
The drum ’n’ bass kept thumping, but nobody came to the door. Bracing herself, she knocked again, but there was no reply. The barking rhino let out a demented howl and tried to eat her through the letterbox, foiling Ellen’s plan to take a peek through it.
She looked up at the glassless window and shouted, ‘Hello,’ a few times. Nothing.
A group of kids who’d been practising BMX tricks on the road when she arrived had cycled up and were now studying her thoughtfully as she hung around the Wycks’ front door wondering what to do.
‘You Wycky’s new girlfriend?’ asked one
.
Ellen gave him an ‘uh?’ look over her shoulder. She hardly thought she looked like the type who would go for Reg Wyck who, from what little she remembered, was about sixty, wore the same stained overalls everywhere, looked like Lester Piggott and had the easy conversational patter to match. ‘Is he in, do you know?’ she asked, picking her way back towards the gate. ‘Or Dot, maybe?’
‘Dot ain’t there – saw her leave a while back, din’ we?’ said one of the bikers, who was checking out the jeep. ‘Nice motor – what are those things?’
‘Surfboards.’ Ellen grinned.
‘Cool!’ The boy dropped his bike so that he could climb up to take a better look, driving Snorkel mad as she jumped between the seats inside trying to scrabble her way out and make introductions.
‘Oi – look all you like but don’t touch, okay?’ Ellen warned cheerfully, glancing back at the house. ‘Is anyone in there?’
Another of the boys, who was staring at Ellen’s long, tanned legs in the same awe-inspired way as his mate was staring at the surfboards, nodded mutely. Then, to prove a point, he put both little fingers in his mouth and let out a shrieking whistle. The rhino dog took this as a cue to throw itself at the door even more violently, growling and snarling so much it sounded as though it was ripping apart a mud hut. A moment later, the drum ’n’ bass was cut and a head appeared through the missing window.
Ellen’s memories of Dot and Reg might have been vague but she knew that neither had a buzz-cut, a pierced eyebrow and a home-made blue-ink tattoo on their neck.
‘Whatdyawant, Kyle?’ He glared at the boy.
‘Lady here to see you, Wycky,’ Kyle shouted. From the fear in his voice, Ellen thought, ‘Wycky’ was clearly a force to be reckoned with. And, having been asleep, he looked as though he was in a very bad mood.
‘Eh?’ He yawned widely, showing a lot of gold teeth, before noticing the jeep, then Ellen, and blinking hard to make sure he really was seeing what he thought he was.