and Lucien were meant to turn up on our last morning in London to wave us goodbye.
I checked my phone.
‘She’s not coming. You can never rely on her. Come on, we need to get going.’ Mark, sitting in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers on the wheel, the packing cases in the vans and me, standing like a plastic figure in an empty dollhouse.
‘Two more minutes?’ I pleaded.
As I was driven away – rather, as we were driven away – I craned my neck. There was still no sign of her and the street was empty as if someone had just wiped our story from the whiteboard.
That evening, after the removal men had gone and we had done all we could for the first day in our new home, he gave me two presents: the first was the glass heron – even then it seemed impossibly fragile, its beak as sharp as an icicle, its neck a script in italics; the second was a bottle of vintage champagne which we had been given some time ago in London and had agreed we would put away until our silver wedding anniversary.
‘You don’t think we’re jumping the gun? We only hit twenty-two last month,’ I laughed.
‘Who cares? We’re never going to have a bigger reason to celebrate than this.’
I wiped my hands on my jumper. ‘A bottle of fizzy piss breaks the bank now. That stuff must be worth a fortune. Besides, I’m not exactly dressed for the occasion.’
‘You’ve no idea how beautiful your bum looks in your dust-covered leggings with your particularly appealing unkempt hair,’ he replied, digging out a couple of beer glasses from a packing box.
‘Not to mention your unintentional designer stubble.’ He looked gorgeous to me at that moment, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt covered in grime, the tight-suited man well and truly consigned to the charity shop.
‘Come on, outside,’ he called.
She hadn’t texted. I put the phone down before Mark could catch me checking it.
He balanced the glasses on the fence post under the oak and popped the cork, sending lambs scuttling out onto the cold hillside.
‘To us!’ said Mark.
‘And to The Well!’
It was bitter outside so we finished the rest of the bottle in bed, like we used to when we first fell in love, and suddenly it all felt right, I really believed we had left the worst of it behind and the future, like my screensaver, was green and blue and beautiful. I embraced my reclaimed, revitalised man, my husband, my Mark.
You have no new messages, the phone said.
It was the best year, our foundation year. We had spent hours and hours in London timetabling the dream and agreed that we should take year one slowly, learn a little, live the idyll. The Taylors, the neighbouring farmers mentioned by the agent, were a sort of umbilical cord to the unfamiliar world of our new rural community, lending us equipment and expertise with equal generosity. Our first lambs came from Tom Taylor, skidding down the ramp into the field and looking as bewildered by the beauty as we had on our arrival; I was so bewitched by their innocence I almost failed to close the gate in time and Mark, more familiar with office paraphernalia than trailers, struggled to fix the bolts. We were city-weak and street-feeble in those days. Then there was Bru, our beautiful puppy, one of the litter from Tom’s border collie bitch; he became our therapy dog from the moment he bounced into our lives and chewed my gloves until the moment he was gone, taking his healing powers with him.
This is something I can hardly admit to myself, but there were times in London when the sight of Angie at the door had made me want to close the curtains and pretend I was out, but when we moved to The Well, if I had had a Union Jack, I would have run it up the flagpole to show we were at home in our castle, I would have instructed the guard to throw open the gates for her. She finally came to stay, just for a few weeks before the festivals began, and it was Tom who showed Lucien how to feed the orphan lambs with a bottle, holding on tight with both hands as they tugged at the teats. Getting the hens in at night, that was another of Lucien’s favourites, a lengthy and ridiculous pastime which involved us flapping more than the birds. We got battery hens which needed rehoming, but their experience of prison seemed to have left them wholly incapable of dealing with the outside world; they were decidedly resistant to being shut up and ill inclined to ever lay eggs again. But it was fun.
Every morning, Mark used to stand in the doorway with his mug of coffee and point at the distant hills. ‘No one,’ he used to repeat like a mantra, ‘no one for miles and miles and miles.’ Company wasn’t much of a problem for Angie, not only because she had Lucien and all over the world children are a passport to conversation, but also because it seemed that once you had a dealer, you had a whole network of acquaintances. I was the one who was struggling, taking my first faltering steps at building a social life: yoga in the village hall with two enormous women who ran the post office in Lenford and a Portuguese au pair from the large house by the river; cinema club at the Assembly Rooms; a wine tasting at a local vineyard, whose crop was one of the few that didn’t seem to suffer from the lack of rain.
‘Give it time’, Mark used to say, when I despaired of ever making new friends, ‘small steps.’
One such small step was our invitation to dinner at Cudecombe Hall with Lord and Lady Donaldson, apparently a sort of rite of passage for any incomers, so that they could be weighed up – and definitely found wanting in our case. After a lot of braying and barking around the long dining-room table about the state of the gardens in the dry summer and what a hell of a job it was keeping the horses watered, the conversation turned to the forthcoming Lenford Foxhounds Hunt Ball.
His Lordship turned to Mark. ‘Now, tell me, who do you hunt with?’
‘My wife and my dog,’ replied Mark, catching my eye over the table and winking while the other guests tittered in a sort of nervous recognition of what they hoped must be a joke.
‘We’ve got to post that,’ I said as we laughed uncontrollably all the way home. ‘I’m sure Lord D. doesn’t use social media.’
We had set up a Facebook page in the name of The Ardingly Well, mostly as an easy way of keeping in touch with everyone in London, because it turned out we didn’t pop back as often as we thought we might. Our photo album might as well have been entitled ‘An Exhibition on Paradise’, except we were hardly Adam and Eve. Neither of us was strong enough to lift a bale of straw, although actually we were growing upwards and outwards, firming up individually as well as a couple. I noticed it one day when I was standing Lucien against the kitchen doorframe and marking with a pencil and a date how tall he was compared to the first night he ever slept there. As a joke, I stood Mark up against the woodwork and flattened down his now rather wild hair with my copy of the Vegetable Gardeners Handbook.
‘Has Mark grown?’ asked Lucien.
‘Oh yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because now I have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him. And he’s changed colour,’ I added. Lucien looked particularly puzzled. ‘He always used to look a bit yellow in London,’ I explained.
‘But now he’s gone brown,’ observed Lucien. ‘Like me.’
Our technical competence did not develop as quickly as our tans or our muscles. Mark had no idea how to reverse a trailer, despite having been the parking king of southwest London, and I was
