is never a bad thing. And you never know, you might love it.’
The very thought led to a great wave of nauseous claustrophobia engulfing her and she had to pull away from him. Going over to the big seventies dressing table she unclipped her earrings and put them down on the veneer surface, the reflection in the big circular mirror showed Seb’s profile ‒ wide eyes gazing out across the fields of wheat that she knew from her quick glance earlier was accented with red as the moonlight picked out the poppies. She couldn’t miss the wistful look on his face, the softening of his lips.
She wanted to say, ‘One year, Seb. Don’t get any dreamy ideas. It’s not going to happen.’ But she wasn’t in any position to lay down the rules. The fact that they currently had nothing was her fault. The dream she had been pushing had broken, now it was Seb’s turn to try his. And the feeling was like having her hands cuffed behind her back and her smile painted on her face like a clown.
He turned to look at her. ‘Think of it like a holiday,’ he said with a half-smile.
She thought of her vacations, two glorious weeks somewhere with an infinity pool, cocktails on the beach, restaurants overlooking the sea, basking in blazing sunshine. Or there was schlepping round Skegness with her dad in the rain as a teenager. At the moment, this was more the latter.
‘I’m going to have to shower, I’m too hot,’ she said, peeling off her silk tank-top, wondering whether if she just hung it by the window, the little dots of sweat would dry and not stain.
The bathroom was tiny, the grouting brown, the ceiling cracked where the steam had bubbled the paint. She pulled back the mildewed shower curtain and found herself perplexed.
‘Seb!’ she called.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s no shower.’
‘No shower?’
‘No shower.’
He stood in the doorway and laughed, ‘You’re going to have to learn to bathe.’
‘Who doesn’t have a shower?’ She whispered, biting the tip of her finger, feeling suddenly like a pebble rolling in a wake, her façade teetering.
‘Primrose Cottage, honeybun.’
Oh she knew it was going to be called something dreadful like that.
‘Home sweet home.’
‘I lay awake most of the night.’ She said this without moving, as if her limbs were tied to the sheet. ‘And do you know what I could hear?’
Seb was standing at the end of the bed in just his boxer shorts, drinking a glass of water.
‘No, honey, what could you hear?’ He raised a brow, waiting for it.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. Not a sound. Just total and utter silence. And do you know what I could see?’
‘Let me guess…’ He smirked.
‘Nothing.’ She started to push herself up the bed. ‘I could see nothing. It was black. Pitch bloody black. I couldn’t even have made it to the bathroom if I’d needed to. I couldn’t see my fingers in front of my face.’
‘I think that’s nice. Cosy.’
‘It’s like being in a coffin buried underground. Where are the street lights? Where are the cars? What does everyone do after ten o’clock? Does no one go out?’ She was so tired she wanted to just bury her head under the pillows. The engulfing darkness of the night had made what was bad seem worse. ‘I thought the countryside was meant to be being ruined by motorways and lorries and flight paths.’ Seb gulped down the last of his water as she pulled the sheet up towards her chin. ‘I didn’t hear any bloody planes,’ she said. ‘At least an animal would have been good. A fox or an owl or something. Anything. A cow mooing would have sufficed.’
‘Anna, are you going to get up?’ Seb said, going over to a suitcase to pull out a shirt he’d ironed before they’d left the Bermondsey flat. Always prepared for every eventuality, she thought. Some Scout motto or something. She saw him look at his watch as she rolled herself in the sheet and turned away so she could stare at the crack in the wallpaper join. The little leaves didn’t match up. She thought about the clean white walls of their old place, the wooden floors she padded across to make a breakfast of yoghurt and plump, juicy blueberries.
‘You’ll be late for work,’ he said, looking down at his buttons as he did them up.
While Seb had landed his dream job of teaching at Nettleton High, getting back to his roots as he put it, Anna was about to begin a new career working in a little antique shop that her dad had pulled in a favour for. If her memory served her correctly, it was a grubby hovel that she had had to sit in as a child while he haggled the price of his wares up before he took her to ballet lessons. It was going to pay her six pounds fifty an hour.
‘Come on, get up and we can have coffee in the village before I have to go to school.’
‘Do you think there’s a Starbucks?’ she asked, brow raised.
‘You know there isn’t a Starbucks.’ He rolled his eyes.
‘It was a joke!’ she said, heaving herself up. ‘You have to allow me a joke or two.’
‘You have to allow me some semblance of enjoying this.’
‘I am!’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying, I promise.’
He didn’t look at her, just fumbled around in his suitcase trying to find his tie. She bent down and fished one out of the side pocket of a different bag and went over and hung it round his neck.
She thought about the look on his face when she’d told him that The Waldegrave had gone into administration. That all their money was gone. Everything. That even just the loss of the fifty percent deposit was actually the whole shebang. That she hadn’t been exactly truthful about the extent of the cost.
And he had turned to the side for just a fraction of a second, clenching his face up, all the muscles rigid, shut his eyes, taken a breath. Then he’d turned back, eyes open, squeezed her hand in his and said, ‘It’s OK. It’ll be OK.’
She turned his collar up now and laced the tie underneath, knotting it over and looked up at him and said, ‘I will try harder.’
He shook his head and laughed, ‘All I want to do is have coffee with you before my first day of school.’
‘And that, my darling,’ she said with a smile, hauling the sheet further round her like a toga, squashing the part of her that wanted to sneak back under the covers, and kissing him on the cheek, ‘Is all I want to do, too!’
He raised a brow like he didn’t quite believe her but was happy to go with it.
Driving to the village, Seb had trouble
