owner was home – a retired nurse who didn’t mind this young couple knocking on her door – and she invited us to look around. The cottage was hopelessly run-down, the roof sagging, the wallpaper curling at the edges, yet there was magic there.
‘Imagine living here,’ Flynn had said when we were alone, turning me to face the view, wrapping his arms around my waist, chin resting on my shoulder. ‘We could do it, couldn’t we?’
The money from my advance had just landed in our account, and Flynn had some savings from a family inheritance.
‘Yes, I think we could. But Cornwall? What about your job?’
‘I can be a tree surgeon anywhere,’ he’d said. ‘I think this is where you want to be, isn’t it? Near your sister, near Drake.’
I thought of Fiona cradling her new son; I thought of our mother’s dream to own a house overlooking the sea; I thought of the chances of stumbling across this cottage, finding the owner home. It seemed serendipitous.
‘Yes,’ I’d said to Flynn. ‘It is.’
Twelve weeks later, we had the keys. We moved in, sleeping on a mattress on the floor while we made plans. A lick of paint. A wood burning stove. New curtains. Fresh carpet. It was everything we’d need.
Now, as I swim looking up at the towering house on the cliff top, I wonder if we’d stuck to the plan – if the idea of the house hadn’t overtaken me – whether our marriage would have had a better chance of surviving.
Here I am alone, with a house I can no longer afford, and a career that feels like it, too, is teetering on a cliff edge.
My feet look bloodless and pale against the dark rock as I climb the cliff steps, shivering beneath my dressing gown. My hair hangs wetly at my neck and I am already anticipating the warmth of the shower.
As I follow the narrow path alongside the house, a plastic bag wheels past on the breeze, brushing my bare ankle. I grab for it, but a gust lifts it out of reach, parachuting the bag beyond me. Hurrying after it, I come to the end of the path and halt.
The driveway is scattered with litter. Used kitchen roll, empty tins, plastic containers, and cereal boxes are strewn across the gravel. Sheets of newspaper dance in the gusts, several more pinned against the fence line. A crumpled page from a notebook rolls past me. At the edge of the driveway, the recycling bin lies on its side, lid open. Although the wind is blowing, I know it isn’t nearly strong enough to upturn a bin.
I hurry across the drive, gravel cutting into my feet, and with some effort, I manage to right the bin. I re-knot the belt of my dressing gown, then begin gathering the litter. My wet hair whips around my face, leaving trails of fresh salt.
As I push my hair back from my face, I have the growing sensation that I’m not alone.
Across the lane, I spot Mark standing in the doorway of his parents’ house, a cigarette held between his fingers.
‘Foxes,’ he calls.
He stubs the cigarette against the wall, then turns and disappears inside the house.
I stand there, open-mouthed. Did that just happen? Had he – a grown man – upturned my bins?
I half-laugh, staggered. Is this a reaction to the house build – a retaliation for compromising the view from their family home? I think of the awful visit six months after we’d bought the house, as I unrolled the architect’s drawings across Frank and Enid’s kitchen table.
‘You said renovate, not rebuild!’ Frank exploded, colour bursting into his cheeks.
When I’d worried about the neighbours’ reaction, friends reassured me that No one owns a view! Any other buyer would do the same! Although they were right, it didn’t lessen the guilty heat that crept up my neck.
Enid had moved towards the kitchen window, heavy-knuckled hands worrying the edge of her cardigan. She looked out towards the sea as if her time with the view was waning. If there’d been a moment when I was close to reconsidering, that had been it.
I finish collecting the litter, then drag the bin back into position at the end of the driveway. If I were Fiona, I’d go over and demand an apology from Mark, but I don’t have the energy for a confrontation.
My novel, I think. That’s what I need to focus on.
Setting myself at my desk with a steaming coffee and salt-damp hair, I am ready. I open the drawer to grab a pencil – but can’t find one. I pull the drawer right out, trailing my hand through the mess of pens, Sharpie markers, Post-it notes, and glue sticks. There is a hole puncher, a calculator, a pot of drawing pins, a lighter for my oil burner – but no bloody pencils.
It’s a stupid detail, but it bothers me: I always have spares.
I tramp downstairs and locate a pencil from the depths of my handbag. I’m tetchy by the time I return to my writing room. I open the window, settle myself for a second time. I keep a well-thumbed dictionary on my desk and I watch as its cover lifts in the breeze, pages fanning.
Something doesn’t feel quite right. I try not to indulge the feeling – I don’t want to become one of those writers who demand a certain ambience to create – but I can’t shake the thought that something is off-balance.
Then I realise what it is. The dictionary. It is usually secured by a paperweight – a beautiful glass globe that my mother bought on a hiking holiday in Malta three years before her death.
‘It looks like it’s caught the sea inside,’ she’d told me, a wistful look in her eyes. I always keep the paperweight on top of the dictionary – but oddly, it is now positioned beside it.
I pick up the paperweight, turning it through my fingers, feeling its solidity and coolness against my palms. Daylight catches in the silver flecks, making it shimmer like the surface of the sea. As I rotate it, my skin catches on something jagged.
Lifting the globe towards my face, I see the crack – a chip no greater than the length of a fingernail.
I can’t remember damaging it.
There is something unsettling at the back of my mind, a sense of discord. I pace for a moment, trying to work it loose.
Then I seize on it: the jagged shard of glass that punctured my foot. It’d looked like a tiny, lethal icicle. The same colour as this.
I hurry from the writing room, descending the stairs, fingers gripping the paperweight. Pushing open my bedroom door, I go straight to the wastepaper basket at the foot of my mirror. Digging through it, I pull out a parcel of tissue.
Opening it carefully, I remove the dagger of glass I’d found embedded in the carpet.
I press the missing fragment against the paperweight.
Like a key slipped into a lock, it is the exact fit.
When staying in someone else’s house, one would have to be incurious not to wonder about the owner. There are clues
