‘I’ll take my chances. A bit of action wouldn’t go amiss,’ said Beth, making them both giggle.
‘So how exactly are you planning this escape from country life?’
‘Oh, it’s simple,’ Beth said, pulling a face. ‘All I have to do is find someone to take over the village shop, move our stuff to Mum’s place, and we’re sorted.’
‘Surely it’s not that hard to find someone to take over the shop?’ Hannah followed the Facebook page for Beth’s shop. It seemed like the hub of the little village community, and her cousin clearly ran it with military efficiency.
‘You’d think.’ Beth shook her head. ‘But Little Maudley is a bit – well . . .’
‘Stuck up?’ Hannah hadn’t visited for years, but what she remembered of the village was a picture-postcard community with not a single stem of lavender out of place.
Beth snorted and shook her head. ‘Particular is the word I was going to use. They have a lot of opinions about everything.’
‘But it is lovely.’
‘It is. But there’s a weird arrangement where I’ve got the lease on the post office building, but the shop sort of belongs to the village.’
‘How does that work?’
‘It’s a co-op. Long, very complicated story. Anyway, Flo runs the cafe – so that bit is fine – and I run the shop. We’ve even got an author-in-residence.’
‘Very posh. How come?’
‘She moved to the village a couple of years ago after she got divorced – fell in love with it after reading about the telephone box library. Anyway, she’s got two kids at secondary school and can’t get any work done at home, so she comes and sits at the table in the corner of the cafe and writes.’
‘That’s so gorgeous.’ Hannah rested her chin in her hands and – definitely feeling the effect of the wine – closed her eyes. It sounded like the life she’d always dreamed of, and yet somehow she was stuck in a semi-detached 1930s house in suburban Manchester with a husband who hadn’t even texted to see how the funeral had gone, and . . .
‘You could always come and run it.’
Hannah’s eyes snapped open.
‘What?’
‘Oh my God.’ Beth sat up and clapped her hands together, excitedly. ‘I was joking, but – actually, it’d be perfect. You want to get Ben away from those dodgy lads. There’s nothing like that goes on in Little Maudley.’
‘From what you’ve said, there’s nothing goes on in Little Maudley full stop,’ Hannah teased.
‘Well yes, that’s true as well, but – oh, this is a genius idea – Phil travels for work, right?’
‘He does.’ The tiniest glimmer of excitement was kindling somewhere deep in Hannah’s stomach. She could feel it warming her – or was that the wine?
‘So,’ Beth said, building on her idea, ‘it doesn’t actually matter where he lives, because he doesn’t have an office to commute to, does he?’
‘Well, no . . .’ Hannah said slowly. ‘No. He doesn’t.’
‘Come and see the shop tomorrow on the way home.’ Beth looked about fourteen again, her face lit up with excitement. ‘Will you?’
The thought of escaping to an idyllic Cotswolds village was heavenly. Hannah visualized the rolling fields and a blue sky studded with fluffy white clouds, and the warm honey stone of the cottages that nestled into the hill surrounding the beautiful old church in Little Maudley. Living there would be like living in an episode of some heartwarming Sunday-night TV drama.
And then she shook herself, and reality asserted itself once again. That sort of thing didn’t happen to her.
‘I can’t just turn our lives upside down and move us to a village in the Cotswolds on a whim.’
‘Why not? Life’s short,’ Beth said, shaking her head. ‘Seriously. Look at our family history. Both our mothers died young. We could have popped our clogs by the time we’re seventy. Do you want to spend the rest of it wondering what might have been?’
Hannah exhaled, slowly. For another moment, she let herself imagine how it would feel if, for once in their lives, she and Phil did something because she wanted to, not because it was good for his career, or because they were doing the right thing. There was absolutely no way she could just up sticks and move to another part of the country. Or was there? They’d done it lots of times in the past. Yes, she had friends in Manchester, but it wasn’t like emigrating to Australia or something.
‘Fine.’ She put her glass down on the table and crossed her arms decidedly. ‘I’ll come tomorrow and have a look. But just a look.’
Beth did a fist pump of delight. ‘Yes.’
‘Just a look!’
‘I reckon our mums would be impressed.’ Beth raised a glass and chinked the edge of Hannah’s almost empty one.
‘Maybe.’ Hannah chewed her lip, thoughtfully. She was already thinking of all the reasons it couldn’t possibly work. By tomorrow, she’d have managed to convince herself it was just a pipe dream – but for now, she decided, she’d go with it. If nothing else, it had made Beth happy, and that mattered most of all, today of all days.
Chapter Two
There were two phones on the kitchen table and both were buzzing insistently. Jake picked them up, switched them both to silent and tossed them back onto the scrubbed oak where they slid like bobsleighs, colliding as they crashed into a glass bowl full of gleaming red apples.
The kitchen was spotless – thanks to Jenna, his cleaner – which meant there was absolutely nothing to do. He picked up an apple and bit into it, gazing at the view of rolling Cotswold countryside that stretched out before him. It was a far cry from a council estate in Manchester, where he’d spent his childhood kicking a ball about in the narrow close between the rows of red-brick houses after school. Or – he gave a rueful smile, thinking of his attendance record – instead of school, sometimes. Most of the time he’d dodged class, preferring to hang out with the older lads from the estate who’d finished at sixteen and were supposed to be on youth training schemes. That had mainly meant hanging around, drinking rank-tasting cheap cider and catcalling any girls who happened to pass by the scruffy patch of grass where they all congregated.
Imagine if Tommo could see him now. He hitched a hip up onto the kitchen counter and surveyed the room. There was – as was de rigueur in the Home Counties – an Aga, a massive lump of steel that made the room unbearably baking hot in summer and somehow managed to be completely unreliable when it came to cooking anything. Two shiny white Belfast sinks, complete with expensive satin chrome accessories. An island, shelves stacked with tasteful white crockery. Diana, his most recent ex-girlfriend, had spent months getting the place sorted to her taste – which suited Jake, who didn’t really have any opinions on which tiles they should use as a splashback or whether they should go chunky or smooth for the glassware. He’d gone along with it, because he was still reeling from the shock of walking away from the game.
Lots of players approached their career as a pyramid: they started at the bottom, climbed their way to the peak and then headed back down through smaller teams, not caring about the money or the plaudits but just wanting the chance to do what they loved. But Jake’s shock injury had put paid to that. He reached down, absent-mindedly rubbing the side of his shin. The freak accident in a game against Manchester United had made front-page news – the internet devouring the hideous, sickening moment when two players collided with him at the same time in a sliding tackle that ended everything. Months of physio had made it clear he would never make it back to the top of his game, and so he made the executive decision to walk away, let his team find another defender and retire gracefully.
‘I’ve met someone else’ wasn’t really part of the deal. He’d loved Diana, almost. She was pretty and efficient, even if she did have a steely determination that made him feel slightly odd. She was the perfect woman for a player to have on his arm – sleek blonde hair, tall, leggy, always immaculately dressed. The sort of woman that twelve-year-old Jake would have had eyes on stalk
s for.
‘Someone else where?’
‘Does that matter?’ She’d popped a cherry in her mouth and smiled beguilingly, which made him feel uncomfortable.
‘I don’t suppose so.’ He’d shrugged. ‘I just – I thought we were a thing?’
‘We were,’ she said, ruefully. ‘But I met Adam, and . . .’
Adam Leyland was captain of another Premier League team. Tall, with close-cropped black hair and a slightly menacing air (he’d been red-carded on more occasions than his manager cared to recall), there’d been no love lost between him and Jake. One night at a sponsors’ dinner he’d made a beeline for Diana and made it pretty clear that he’d set her in his sights. She’d feigned innocent obliviousness, but he’d noticed that after that she’d started keeping a close watch on her phone and her nights out with the girls had increased twofold. And then the accident had happened, and when he was rushed into surgery she’d been nowhere to be seen. His agent had promised – as he was wheeled away, blanching with pain and yet completely out of it on gas and air – that he’d get hold of her while Jake was under.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ Max had said later, pushing a hand through his slicked-back pale blond hair. ‘Tried everywhere, couldn’t get an answer. I spoke to Charlotte and she said she thought she was off on some silent retreat.’
Jake had closed his eyes, still nauseous from the anaesthetic, and slipped back into unconsciousness.
You’d have thought that losing your career would be enough to contend with – that, and the stuff from his past that was always lurking at the edges, waiting to pop up and ruin everything – but no. The next day, Diana had appeared at the private hospital on the edge of Oxford where he was recuperating in a room that would put a five-star hotel to shame. She’d blushed prettily and placed a hand-tied bunch of flowers on the side table, fiddling with the ribbon that held them together, then turned to face him.
‘Sorry, honey, I was—’
And in that split second he knew. ‘. . . With Adam Leyland?’
‘On a mindfulness retreat,’ she finished, lamely. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a way that reminded him of when they’d first met, and he felt a knot tighten in his gut.
He raised an eyebrow. He was propped up on a stack of pillows, his knackered leg still raised and pinned in three places. He felt puffy and agitated and desperate for a workout to help clear his head, but of course the chances of that were non-existent.
And then it had all spilled out. The thing about Diana was, she was an uncomplicated soul – what his friend Gerry, who worked in the city and had a mind like a sly, calculating ferret, would have called more beauty than brains. So it seemed perfectly logical to her that she’d met someone else and now was the time to pursue it, even if it was right in the middle of Jake’s entire life falling apart.
So here he was now, looking around the kitchen that was decorated to her specification, wondering if he should rip the whole lot out and start again. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it; even now, when the sponsorship deals and the exciting evening invitations had dried up, he still had enough money in the bank, not to mention tied up in wisely chosen investments, not to have to worry about being skint ever again. It was a strange feeling. But even so, there was always a nagging fear that something might go wrong. Every time he picked up his wallet and pulled out his card to pay for something, a fleeting reminder of how it had felt growing up would rise, the feelings starting in his gut and filling him with a gnawing discomfort that maybe all this was ephemeral, and one day he’d end up back in Manchester in the tiny boxroom where he’d started.
Football was a fickle game, and he’d had enough of it. Eighteen months on, he’d recovered to what any normal man would consider full fitness – but to an ex-pro footballer, he was still constantly irritated by what he couldn’t do rather than satisfied with what he could. Talking of which – he checked his watch – it was time to get out for a run.
He pulled on his trainers and headed out down the long, tree-lined drive. Thick post-and-rail fencing had replaced the rusting iron that had been there when he bought the house three years ago, and behind it grazed a flock of sheep belonging to Jack, the farmer who rented the fifty acres that had come along with the house. Back in the past, the house had boasted a stable yard, a working dairy farm and a collection of farm workers’ cottages where the employees all lived. Those had dwindled away over the years following the war, but Greenhowes was still known as the Big House to the residents of Little Maudley, the nearest village.
During the Second World War the house had been requisitioned and used as a hospital for injured servicemen, with its owners happily mucking in and doing their bit to help men who’d been broken apart in ways that made Jake’s double break and countless pins look like a walk in the park. But after that, the family who owned it had fallen victim to death duties and crippling maintenance bills. Eventually, when the heir of the estate had been faced with a bill for a new roof that would have completely cleaned him out, he’d simply walked away, claiming bankruptcy. After that, the place had stood empty for almost ten years.
There was something about the dilapidated, filthy, totally unloved manor house which had appealed to Jake. He’d been advised to invest in property – and his last contract had seen him earning more money per day than anyone in his family had ever known in a year. Even if he’d known where she was, it was too late to help his mother – nobody could do that, it seemed. But he’d already set his aunty Jane up in a villa in Spain where she lived quite contentedly with Shaun, her second husband, and an assortment of sleek vizslas who lay about by the side of the pool with their tails wagging contentedly. She wanted for nothing, which after the years she’d spent working as a cleaner to pay for his football boots and his game subs was the least Jake could do.
His cousin Lisa was living in an expensive detached house on an estate in Cheshire, where she was experiencing the whole WAG lifestyle by proxy. She’d featured in The Real Housewives of Cheshire and ran an exclusive and high-class beauty therapy clinic as her business, with not a perfectly smooth and beautifully coloured hair out of place. Her forehead, Jake reflected with a smile, was also perfectly smooth, thanks to an overly enthusiastic Botox administration by a new nurse at the clinic. She’d come on FaceTime the other day and it had been a good five minutes before he’d been able to stop crying with laughter at her frozen expression.
He took a left at the top of the drive, heading up the hill towards the far edge of the village. It was the edge of summer – just at that point in July where the leaves hadn’t yet begun to fade and curl at the tips, and the sunlight was bright and yellow and clear. Stepping away from the game had given him time to notice things he’d never had a chance to before, and he revelled in it.
He’d fallen for the character of the old place and chosen the workmen who were charged with renovating it accordingly. He didn’t want the cheapest or the fastest – he wanted people who could see the bones of the house and wanted to restore her (in his head, somehow, he knew that Greenhowes was female) back to her former glory. And so it had happened, piece by piece: ancient wooden balustrades polished with loving hands back to a soft gleam, the wooden fire surrounds and their tiled mantels glowing in winter as logs crackled in the grate. It was almost there, now – the perfect combination of comfortable old house style and all mod cons.
It had been almost perfect, until that night. Then he’d broken his leg, lost his job, lost his contract, lost his girlfriend. And now here he was, living mortgage-free in a house big enough for a family of ten, all by himself. Or he had been, until—
As if he’d summoned her, the phone rang again.
‘Where are you?’
Sarah’s voice came through his airpods. He kept a steady pace, running up the hill towards the village, determined that he wasn’t going to be interrupted this time.
‘Just out for a run.’
‘I’m feeling a bit – stressy.’
He
puffed out a breath and tried to keep his pace. But he could already feel the tug of responsibility pulling him back towards the house and a moment later he paused, putting fisted hands to his eyes in frustration, and turned on his heel.
‘I’ll be there in five.’
‘Thank you,’ said a whispered voice.
Chapter Three
It wasn’t often that Hannah had a night of uninterrupted sleep in a hotel room – in fact, she reflected, sitting in the hotel restaurant looking out over the terrace and the ever-present cows, she couldn’t remember it ever happening before. She and Phil had been together since their teens, and then Ben had come along. Despite their closeness, her mum hadn’t been one to offer much in the way of childcare – always busy with work or socializing – and so they’d tended to operate as a fairly tight-knit band of three.
So last night she’d lain starfish-shaped and luxuriating in the middle of the huge king-size bed and then woken in her own time at eight thirty this morning, not wondering about school runs or PE kit or lunch money. She didn’t even have a headache, which was miraculous given how much wine she and Beth had put away.
See you at the shop whenever.
The message from Beth was waiting on her phone. She felt a bit uncomfortable. There was no way of getting out of it, not without hurting her cousin’s feelings. But the truth was that she’d woken up knowing that last night’s conversation had been one of those ridiculous ‘what if we won the lottery?’ chats that you know will never lead to anything. She had a home in Manchester – Ben had school. Phil wouldn’t contemplate a move, not even for a second. There was no way she could expect the whole world of their little family to revolve around one of her whims, no matter how amazing it would be to live in a picture-perfect village and run a little shop.
Now, though, eating her bacon and eggs, she felt the possibilities stir in her head. She’d never asked for anything in the course of their fifteen years together. She’d been pliant and easy-going, dealt with Phil’s moves and coped admirably with everything life had thrown at them. Maybe it was her time now, with Ben aged fifteen and on the verge of growing up. Maybe she’d have a look and allow herself the luxury of imagining what it would feel like to live another life. It couldn’t do any harm, could it?
The Village Green Bookshop: A Feel-Good Escape for All Book Lovers from the Bestselling Author of The Telephone Box Library Page 2