odd, instinctive gesture, I put my hand on my stomach. ‘I love children,’ I remember Mark saying when I told him I was pregnant.
Lucien climbed out of the back of the car, smelling of crumbling chocolate and hot skin. Still sleepy, he held my hand and pointed to a grey squirrel, skulking up the trunk of the great oak tree. Our eyes followed it up through the branches until we lost it amongst the gilt-edged leaves, light falling like dappled water on dry ground at our feet. A police car or ambulance was making its way up a main road somewhere over towards Middleton.
‘You can’t always hear the road,’ said the estate agent, keen to market the dream. ‘It depends on the wind.’
‘But that must be westerly,’ I concluded, taking my evidence from both the sun and the Welsh hills.
‘Westerly? Probably,’ he conceded. ‘That’s certainly where the prevailing wind comes from. But I bet you can hear a pin drop at night.’
Screech owls, I thought, and barking foxes.
I asked where the nearest neighbour was. Oh, he was saying, miles away and can’t see another house; but in truth, I was already feeling the distance between this place and the rest of the world and wondering if I could manage that. Maybe I looked to him like someone who wanted to escape. Much later, Sister Amelia would certainly reach the same conclusion the moment she met me.
A heavy velvet curtain hung inside the front door, which the agent held to one side for us, like a stagehand. It didn’t take long to look around. There was the back passage, the kitchen and Rayburn unchanged since the 1960s, Mark’s study – well, the room that he made into his study – and the little sitting room with a wood-burning stove, the one which we had to replace after the chimney fire. From there, we went upstairs and crowded into the small bedroom and the tiny bathroom and then in here, the main bedroom with the view, this alchemy of a view. Well trained, the estate agent left us to it and Mark felt for my hand and pulled me closer, kissed me once, slowly, on the cheek and I felt him breathe in deeply, as if he could taste oxygen for the first time in a very long while.
‘Just about enough room for Angie and Lucien,’ I said to Mark as we stepped apart. We both knew my daughter well enough to know that our home would always need to be big enough for both of them, and not just physically.
‘I love it,’ said Mark. I hadn’t heard him as enthusiastic about anything since before the tribunal. ‘A place to start again,’ he said.
Lucien loved it too, running up and down the creaking staircase, opening cupboards in the kitchen, peering into the fireplace. The sunlight coming through the bay window was showing up the cracks in the banisters, the stains on the carpet, the damp patches on the ceiling, but the place itself felt solid as though it could contain whatever we poured into it.
‘Ready to take a look outside?’
We followed the agent up to the ‘Stone outbuilding with electricity and water, currently used as a garage/barn. Scope for development’. If the old lady had owned a car, it was clear she had never put it away in there, jumbled as it was with stepladders and spades, broken sun-loungers and coal buckets without handles. No problem to upgrade it for a holiday let, we agreed; no problem to convert it into temporary accommodation for displaced family.
Along one side of the barn were neatly stacked and recently split logs.
‘How long had the old lady lived here?’ Mark asked.
The agent didn’t have the answer to that, but he did know that since her husband died, a lot of the land was let out to a neighbouring farmer, who had also been lending a hand, with the wood, that sort of thing. ‘They’re a tight-knit bunch round here, but the Taylors, they’d always help you out if you were in a fix, I’m sure.’
The synonyms for tight-knit must be interesting, I thought. Introspective, xenophobic? At what point does tight-knit become hostile? The agent was explaining that the letting agreement ran out on 31 March the following year.
‘Thirty acres of field and woodland. Just the right size,’ Mark commented, as if there was such a thing as a right size for a piece of paradise. It sounds small, thirty acres, for the havoc it has caused. We visited the orchard, picking up apples and pears which were feeding the worms, wondering at the old fruit cages hung like discarded hairnets over strands of growth, sticks leaning at odd angles like old-fashioned hairpins. The vegetable garden showed signs of more recent work.
‘Look at this, Mark.’ Lucien had his small hands clasped around a fat marrow which had obviously continued swelling all summer, oblivious to the death of its planter. With a huge tug, it broke off the plant and he fell backwards. ‘Can we take it home? Can we eat it?’
‘It’s not ours, Lucien,’ I said.
‘It’s a good size, considering how little rain there’s been,’ said Mark.
‘Who’s going to mind? Give it a good tug and Mummy can carry it for you,’ said the agent.
It was a familiar error, which Lucien corrected. ‘This is my granny. My mummy’s away at the moment.’
‘Well, your granny certainly doesn’t look old enough to be a granny,’ smarmed the agent.
Lucien stared at him, crossly. ‘Well, she is,’ he insisted. ‘Everyone’s always doing that,’ he said to me, as hand in hand we went over to join Mark who, like an art lover in a gallery, was drinking in the burnished woods, mentally clearing brambles, thinning poplars, planting Spanish chestnuts where the pines had fallen in a strong wind, like spilled pencils in a dark classroom.
We told the estate agent that if it was OK with him, we would eat our sandwiches there, under the oak tree. We promised to call, and he talked the talk about quick sales and all the usual nonsense in a housing market dried out by a lack of faith in the future.
Mark called after him; there was just one thing he had forgotten to ask. ‘What about the water?’
‘It’s got its own supply. It’s not connected to the mains and doesn’t need to be. A well has kept this place going for a couple of hundred years. I can’t see it failing now.’
I pointed out that now might be just the time it would fail, since there had been so little rain for so long.
‘Obviously,’ he conceded, ‘you need to get a professional opinion. But it’s not called The Well for nothing.’ He went on to tell us about the water table. That was what made the land so good. Look at it. In fact, as far as he was concerned, we were probably better off here with our own supply than being linked up to the mains and suffering all the shortages and standpipes and allocations everyone had had to put up with for the last couple of summers.
‘Anyway,’ he gesticulated away to the west where the wind was bullying the clouds, ‘most forecasters think the drought’s coming to an end. This winter will be one of the wettest on record, they reckon.’
We believed him because we wanted to.
The dust hung in the air long after he had disappeared. I got a bag out of the back with some sandwiches and crisps we had bought from the service station. We sat on a rug, Lucien cross-legged and upright and Mark struggling as always to organise his long legs which had been forced to live under a desk for almost twenty years. We passed a bottle of water from one to another, sipping judiciously, listening to the repetitive sheep and the blackbird warning us off, and then suddenly, spontaneously, we both burst out laughing.
