by Helen Slavin
“Well let’s toast them too shall we?” Her eyes had a bright sparkle to them as they glanced round at each of her companions. Teacups were raised.
“To the Way sisters…” Scruffy Liz announced. “Good luck to them!”
“They’re going to need it,” said Alizon, the woman in red.
3
The Key
Cob Cottage was built, as its name suggested, from cob, its walls bore the fingerprints of anyone who had, quite literally, had a hand in its making. Each time the occupants had required a new pantry or bedroom, a bathroom or utility space, they had gone down to the shore of the lake to fetch water to mix with the cool reddish-brown earth. Dried reed, horsehair, grasses, all provided extra bind, and extra history, in the mix. The cottage was neither round nor square, it didn’t have angles or sharp corners. As a little girl, Emz had called the corners ‘swerves’ because as she had pointed out, that was what the building did.
The cottage sat on a small rise just above the shore. The garden ranged around the back and sides of the property, not that there were any boundary fences. Where the garden ended the trees of Havoc Wood began. It would have been a completely fairy-tale scene save for the fact that at the moment you could hear the traffic growling by on the new Castlebury dual carriageway.
“It’s very noisy.” The young woman was beginning to irritate Charlie, a process she’d begun even before she clambered out of her high-end car. Charlie was prejudiced against the shiny white expense of such a vehicle. Its tinted windows shut out the wood.
“It’s quiet inside.” Charlie was struggling. She didn’t understand this; Cob Cottage was wonderful, the way you entered and sank into its welcoming heart with the kettle on and the lake glistening beyond. It was quiet inside; soft and quiet and home. Charlie had drifted off, now she pulled herself back to the harsh reality of holiday letting. It was clear from her expression that the woman was not convinced.
“It’s noisy outside though. Can’t you hear the traffic? How can I sit outside and look at the lake with that noise?” She squinted across at the trees as if they were in a conspiracy to hide the road from her.
“Shall we go on inside?” Charlie was out of her comfort zone. It was usually Anna who did the meet and greet on changeover day but today she was working, catering a wedding at the Castle Inn. Charlie took a step towards the door.
In the neat new bathroom, she demonstrated the macerator and the new shower and explained the whole off-grid septic tank situation.
“What do you mean the water’s from a stream?” The woman looked horrified.
“It’s filtered and UV treated. Fresh and refreshing…” Charlie couldn’t understand what was happening. To her, Cob Cottage looked like the most cosy and welcoming place on earth. Her heart rate slowed the minute she saw the place and a soothing calmness overcame her. Why wasn’t this happening to this guest? She was glaring at Charlie, her brow furrowed and furious-looking.
“Wild water. No chemicals.” Charlie felt inspired, of course, plug the organic-rustic angle! Their guest did not look convinced.
“Oh. Okay.” Charlie noticed that the holiday lettee was a tight-knitted sort of person, thin and folded up, her arms crossed, fists clenched, shoulders slightly pulled inward as if she was cold and she suddenly understood the woman. She was here for a break, to get away, Cob Cottage had not yet worked its magic. Charlie smiled self-consciously.
“…and through here…” she moved into the main living area. The round window, which was almost floor to ceiling, looked out through a curved oak frame to the lake where currently the water glittered, rose gold in the afternoon sunlight. Charlie was quick to move to the double doors and swing them open to the porch before realising as she did it that there was still the faint drift of traffic noise.
“There’s the traffic again. The town is a town too, not a village. It’s busy.”
Charlie considered the centre of Woodcastle and its small population of cars and people. It could be admitted, it was busy on market days, but even then it was busy with stalls.
“It’s a market town.” Charlie conceded.
“Not really in the country is it?” the woman commented as she turned away. Her gaze did not lift to the lake, the shore, the heron stalking in the reeds. Instead she was looking at the furnishings with something like disapproval.
“There’s no through road near here and you saw how quiet Old Castle Road is as you drove here.” Charlie was trying hard. Old Castle Road was quieter now because all the traffic used the dual carriageway.
“Is it rush hour?” The woman glanced at a heavy watch and Charlie felt something give inside her. This whole idea the Way sisters had had of renting out Cob Cottage for holidays was just not working. It was now September and although they’d only had five bookings since their grandmother’s death in July, each had been fraught, and they’d already had one refund situation that Charlie didn’t want to relive.
“Perhaps it might be better if you stay in a different cottage in another location?” Charlie could not think of another solution, in fact, to Charlie this was the only solution. Go away. The woman’s glance snapped up to Charlie’s face.
“What?”
“I can issue you a refund if you’d like, and you haven’t brought your bags in yet…” To Charlie this seemed a positive solution, but the guest looked upset. Anna was so much better at this.
“What are you talking about?” She was looking really pale and shaky now. Charlie ploughed onwards.
“I can’t stop the traffic noise. It is what it is. I have no control over it. I was just suggesting that if you aren’t 100% happy with the cottage then you could leave. No obligation.”
Charlie felt strained. It would be a pain to refund the money and there you go, another week would be lost, unless of course they could get a late booking. She’d be in trouble but what else could she offer? The young woman, whose name she’d forgotten, looked shaken.
“Where else could I go?” Her brow furrowed so heavily it looked as if someone had stepped up and permanent-markered the lines onto her face. Charlie felt odd… not sick exactly but something rolled inside her and smoothed over her irritation.
“If the wind is in another direction you won’t hear the road, just the jackdaws and the woodpeckers,” her voice was soft, “…let me show you the kitchen…” and, with a smile that took at least three hundred calories of effort, Charlie moved towards her favourite part of the cottage.
The kitchen looked out on the rear side of Cob Cottage through three windows, one sort of a rectangle, the others two halves of a circle, across the garden and into the trees. As Charlie and the young woman entered through the archway from the main room, the sunlight dappled softly across the wooden drainer by the deeply burnished copper sink. Emz had called in on her way to work that morning and so the table was set for a vintage tea with their grandmother’s old mismatched china, a cluster of teacups decorated with flurries of flowers and worn gilding. Anna had baked so there was the usual welcome basket of fresh bread and cake.
“So… welcome basket. Home-baked cake and bread. There’s tea and coffee and some fresh milk in the fridge. There’s a supermarket in town…”
“I passed it.” The woman did not look at Charlie, she was looking out of the window.
“Oh good. Good.” There was something else, something tickling at the edge of Charlie’s brain that she couldn’t quite reach. Whatever, Anna would remind her later probably.
“If you’re interested there’s a farmer’s market in town.” That was it, Anna had mentioned the market. Charlie was running out of steam now and she wanted to take her leave but for some reason, some instinct that whispered to her, she found herself unable to move, even in the onslaught of the awkward silence. The guest, what was her name? Charlie tried to remember the piece of paper with her details printed on it. Could she fish it out of her pocket now or would that look rude? The woman was staring intently at the wood, as if, at any moment, a wolf might step
out. Charlie glanced through the window. The sunlight shifted behind clouds for a moment and there was a shadowing across the garden. Where before the spaces between the trees had been shafts of sunlight, now darkness pushed in.
“If you need anything, anything at all…” Charlie could hear her own voice, the weight and importance that she was giving this sentence, as if she was offering an Emergency Service helpline. What was wrong? “I mean anything… then our contact details are in the welcome pack.”
“The wood. Is it public? Are there rights of way?” the woman asked anxiously. Charlie smiled again, burning another two hundred and fifty calories this time. “There are for you because you’re a guest. The wood belongs to the cottage, it’s private, so no, you won’t have a load of hikers rambling by your window. Don’t worry about that.”
The woman turned to look at her. Charlie thought she looked tired and afraid.
“I’m Charlie by the way…” Charlie offered her hand. The woman looked down at it and then away to the wood.
“Okay. Good.” And turned back into the living room.
Charlie hesitated. Well, she was rude, but who cared as long as her credit card hadn’t been declined? Was there anything at all that Charlie had forgotten? She mentally riffle shuffled her various to-do lists. If they were lucky they wouldn’t have anything more to do with this woman apart from hoover up after her next Saturday. What was her name? Oh, stuff it. Charlie took a glance round the kitchen, nicked a bread roll from the welcome basket and followed her guest.
“Right. Okay. I will leave you to it then,” she said and put the fob of cottage keys onto the coffee table. “Enjoy.”
As Charlie half ran back to her own vehicle she thought that might seem mission impossible.
* * *
After they inherited the cottage the Way sisters had not known what to do with it. Several times they had come to stay there themselves, certainly Charlie had used it for a few days in early August after a big fight with Aron. She had been left feeling bitter and very twisted and she could not face heading home to her flat overlooking Market Place, or even to her mother’s house where she knew her sisters would be and would want to talk it over. Charlie needed time and she’d spent it at Cob Cottage.
But it had been cold and dark when she got there, alone, and it felt wrong.
It was Anna who suggested they might rent it out for holidays. It needed to be lived in.
“Why holidays?” Charlie had asked. They had met up at the Cottage to discuss its future and were sitting around the table, each reluctant to head off anywhere else.
“I don’t know. Do we want to sell?” The question was asked but they all already knew the answer to that.
“And permanent tenants could be a pain.”
“Exactly. I thought if people are here for their holidays they could be a total arse and it wouldn’t matter, they’d be gone in a week…” Anna sounded bright and breezy about the plan. Once again, the cottage was helping her, making her focus and that was not a bad thing.
“Or two at the most,” said Emz. The sisters had all liked the theory of this and Emz had added after some thought, “and people are happy on their holidays.”
Charlie thought of the week she had spent in Lanzarote with Aron where the mood had generally been as black as the famous island sand, but she said nothing.
Unwilling for strangers to sit in their favourite chairs they had stored their grandmother’s possessions in their mother’s double garage. They had scoured junk shops and flea markets and fitted the place out. Emz had sewn all the cushions and throws and everything was soft and comfortable, splashed with colour here and flowers there.
Perhaps it could work. It needed bedding in, that was all; the problems they’d had were teething troubles. Plus, the changeovers gave them all the opportunity to head over to the cottage and hang out there. If there was no immediate changeover they often had a sleepover there themselves and afterwards felt rested and recharged. It was a wrench, having strangers occupy their space, but, for now, they did not know what else to do.
* * *
What Charlie loved was that she could smell the brewery before she saw it, the bitter hoppy scent quickly informing her of how they were doing. Drawbridge Ales was a small local microbrewery based at the Old Forge. The forge itself was ancient and picturesque but the site had the added advantage of a range of more modern outbuildings and workshops that lent themselves to brewing and, if they didn’t, gave them leeway for improvements with the planning office. As Charlie pulled in at the gates she could hear the water from the nearby stream rushing by, thirsty.
As usual Michael Chance, Charlie’s boss and owner of the brewery, was not sitting at the desk, instead he was stooped over the keyboard, engrossed in whatever admin task had popped up while he was en route to another part of the brewery. Paperwork was stacked like a small child’s fortress around the desk.
“You’ll do your back in,” was Charlie’s greeting. He looked up.
“Hmm?”
“Bending like that. Sit down.” She pushed the rickety office chair towards him.
“Hmm.”
Charlie flicked through the nearest stack of paper and filed a few items in the quite aged and slightly rusting filing cabinet. It proved quite a task, the sheer pressure of squeezed in paper was reaching critical mass.
“Did they email about the ETA for the new filing cabinet?” Charlie asked, and as she did so she glanced through the window across the courtyard to where Rick Trigg thought he was having a sneaky fag outside the brewing shed.
“I’m thinking we should look at buying a bottling plant…” Michael said, wincing as he straightened up from the computer keyboard.
And so, Charlie’s real day started.
4
Confetti
Anna thought that she must have slept at least a little last night because she had, this morning, woken up. It seemed a logical conclusion, but it wasn’t borne out by how she felt, wired and too bright and no more rested than before.
“Here.” Her mother pushed a plate of hot toast across the worktop, the plate screeching against the glassy granite surface. “Don’t reject it. It’s carbohydrate and you’ve got a long day ahead of you.”
The two women exchanged the briefest of glances and Anna ate the toast as her mother pottered about the kitchen.
Their mother’s new kitchen was a blank space of metal and marble. It looked like a space station designed by the Snow Queen. Every surface was white or silver, except for the starry black granite of the island. This was not a kitchen for wooden spoons or grubbied-up tea towels declaring that you’d been to ‘Cromer’. There were no jolly colourful tins or kilner jars filled with green lentils or jam. Tea was in an airtight jar in the cupboard above the kettle, an appliance which Anna thought might have been a prototype their mother was working on for NASA.
“You slept in the chair again,” her mother said. Anna ignored the comment, but her mother continued. “Is there something wrong with the bedroom?”
It had become a sort of habit, for Anna to arrive at her mother’s house and by whatever roundabout route, via the kitchen, through the garden doors, she ended up in the double garage where Grandma Hettie’s furniture was being kept. She had freed up a chair one evening, the old spoonback one covered in a linen fabric softened over many years, sat in it and the next moment had found herself waking up.
She had attempted to sleep in the guest bedroom assigned to her. Several times. Each time she woke from a restless rest and somehow, in the dark, gravitated downstairs to the garage and the spoonback chair. She did not sleep much deeper there, but she had fewer nightmares.
“I fell asleep.” Anna confessed.
She watched as Vanessa sliced the ham that she’d brought home from the Inn last night. Where the three sisters all picked at, or hacked with the breadknife, any roast chicken or cooked ham that might be in the fridge, their mother was shaving the hank of meat with the kitchen equivalent of a scalpel. T
he delicate sheets of savoury meat, Anna had roasted it with apples and maple syrup, were placed onto geometrically precise squares of industrial bread, joined by tissue-thin discs of tomato and a papery piece of cheese before being sealed in a pop-it bag and entombed in a plastic lunch box. It resembled a forensic sample.
“I might be late… well actually there’s no ‘might’ about it, I will be late tonight.” Vanessa shoved and crammed a variety of green vegetation into the blender and began to blitz. “Morten and Hernandez have finally got the regulator tweaked on the wind tunnel so we’re all systems go today,” she shouted over the screeching of her smoothie. “Did Emz want a lift, d’you know? Only Charlie won’t be here tonight.” The blender ceased its screaming suddenly as if shocked at this news. Vanessa sluiced the nutritious green sludge into her flask. “Will you be able to pick her up?”
Anna shook her head.
“Doubt it. She’ll have to walk. Or cadge a lift off Winn…” Anna could not finish the toast but toyed with it a while as if to convince her mother that she would. “I won’t be done at the Inn till late.”
Her mother nodded. It was assumed that Anna would be staying here. There was no question that she might perhaps go to her own house, it was not a topic her mother mentioned. She had fallen into a house-sitting sort of habit that fitted with her mother’s own busy schedule.
“Where’s Charlie going tonight?” Anna asked.
“Aron is back from Glasgow.” Mother and daughter locked glances once more for just a second but made no comments. Vanessa zipped up her rucksack.
“Right. I’m off…” Anna nodded as her mother made a move to the door. She did not expect her to make the slight detour around the island for a hug, tight and strong. For the few seconds it lasted Anna felt small and safe. “See you later, love.” And her mother was gone.