you could, like, live out here and I could have the cottage.’
‘Nope.’
‘It would be great though! I could have my friends down to stay from school and it would be fantastic and cool and you’d be out here to… to keep an eye on us and cook and everything. But far away, obvs.’ She waved a hand. ‘It’s just all really old-fashioned. Perfect for you, Mum.’
At the sight of all the activity around the van door, Patrick’s head came up and he whinnied a short, high sound. His neck arched like a destrier and he trotted across the orchard towards us, mane and tail flowing out behind him and his big, feathered legs swishing the grass. When there was no sign of his owner coming out of the van, he slowed to a walk and nudged the shafts with his pink nose.
‘Poor lad. He misses her.’ I gave the firm shoulder an absent-minded pat. The smell of warm horse, newly munched grass and the faint overlay of leather was horribly familiar in a way that made me feel a bit sick. ‘I hope Gabriel can find somewhere for him to go soon.’
‘Can I have my tea out here?’ Poppy sat on the steps. ‘It’s nice. I’ve had geeky little year eights trying to talk to me all day. I guess they don’t see many people round here that they aren’t all related to. They all want to know what London is like, poor bastards.’
‘Poppy…’
‘Sorry. But they are. Oh, and Dad rang, he’s down this way, said he’d pick me up from school tomorrow and take me out for dinner.’
‘That’s very nice of him.’
She looked in my face, searching for a trace of sarcasm maybe, but losing interest with the typical attention span of the fourteen-year-old. ‘You haven’t done much painting.’
‘Well, no.’ Again, I began telling her about Gabriel and the possibility of the cottage being used as a location. I didn’t know why; she hadn’t listened the first time. But when I mentioned the word Spindrift, she turned away from her patting of Patrick, with a dramatic slowness that I was clearly meant to notice and remark upon.
‘Did you say they might want to film Spindrift here? Here?’ She pointed to the cottage, as though I might have thought she meant the county of Dorset in a less specific way. ‘Really?’
‘Well, I haven’t said yes yet, but it would be a way to get some money in before we need to start lighting fires and—’ I stopped talking because Poppy was currently giving me a stare that indicated that her entire face might fall off any moment now.
‘Oh. My. God,’ she enunciated. ‘Do you know what this means? No, cos you’re really old and you only watch programmes that have, like, antiques and stuff in. Oh. My. God. I have to go and tell Shawnia and Emily-Rose.’ She fumbled in the pocket of her half-worn coat for her phone. ‘This is big stuff, Mum. This means Davin might come here!’
‘Who the hell is Davin?’ I asked her retreating back, but was answered with nothing but the excited squeals of her reconnection with whichever of her London friends had answered first. Patrick looked at me. He had unsymmetrical black markings, so one eye had a rakish pirate patch while the rest of his face was almost completely white. This white head sat on a black neck, which devolved into a body with random large black continents spread over a grass-stained white sea. His mane and forelock were long and contained varied examples of local flora and his feet were the size of the blue plaques you get outside houses where interesting people have lived.
‘Please tell me you aren’t broken to ride,’ I whispered to him.
He cocked a lazy black ear, and tipped a hind leg to rest on its hoof edge. He looked as though explosions could happen and he’d still stand here, resting, with his lower lip all droopy and a bee tangled in his forelock. Broken to ride or not, it could only be a matter of time before Poppy decided to try sitting on him. I hoped Gabriel could find him a new residence before then.
The sun was dropping fast now. September twilight was thicker here where there were no street lights, no nearby conurbations to illuminate the sky. Trees slid into outline; inside the cottage Poppy turned on her bedroom light and a beam of yellow spilled out across the side of the house as I left Patrick to his dreaming and went back in.
One of the reasons – one of the many reasons, I suspected, most of which I hadn’t found yet – that Harvest Cottage hadn’t been snapped up as a holiday home was the awkward crookedness of the layout. It looked as though it had once been a cob and thatch pig house, but added to and extended over the years in a variety of materials, so that it now resembled something that the Weasleys from Harry Potter might have lived in. The north-facing porch, which meant any visitor was incognito in the mossy, damp front entryway, the hallway so narrow that we’d had to post the sofa into the front room through the window, in pieces. The staircase, which, contrary to all convention, didn’t go up against one wall, but was freestanding up the middle of the cottage. Two bedrooms and a bathroom that seemed to have been an original hayloft, all randomly arranged, and beamed in such a way that any quick movements meant a banged forehead and a lot of swearing. I’d already learned to crouch and scuttle around the place, like an obsequious servant. It was bizarre.
But, I reminded myself as I threw some wood into the range cooker to heat up for dinner, it was mine. Luc might not approve of its smallness, but then the man had been brought up in apartments in a chateau, he’d find Buckingham Palace a bit crowded. He probably thought I was mad, moving to Dorset, but here it was affordable and there was countryside. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed countryside until I saw Harvest Cottage. I’d thought I wanted city streets, blue emergency lights and sirens filling up the night; people coming and going at all hours and a Waitrose around the corner. Poppy’s school only a short Tube ride away, all the attractions and occupations of museums and galleries and exhibitions at the weekends.
Whilst here… here was the wind in the trees. Birdsong, grass, and, if you listened very carefully on still nights, the gentle exhalation of the sea moving against the distant cliffs. There was a small bay within walking distance, out of the cottage and across several fields of short-grazed grass and barley stubble, down a steep cliff path. A tiny patch of shingly sand and rock pools, which sloped suddenly to take your feet and leave you bobbing in the icy water, shrieking and gasping. Poppy, of course, loved it. And hadn’t been down there since we moved in.
The range bubbled and I put a pan of stew across its hotplate. The range heated the water for the cottage but made no noticeable dent in the chill that crept across the stone floor as soon as the sun went down, because of the air coming in through the leaky windows. I winced at the draught and made a note that we’d need thick curtains at the very least, before winter. The windows needed replacing, as did both chimneys and one wall, but we’d get through this year first. Once I’d got a job, we could think about renovating the place rather than just redecorating and firefighting the woodlice, who seemed to regard Harvest Cottage as their own personal property and thoroughfare.
The blackbird, in the hedge now, sang the night in. I wondered whether blackbirds ate woodlice.
5
A couple of weeks went past. I held off doing any painting, but did manage to unpack some of the boxes that had travelled with us from London, the contents of which looked horribly urban in this tiny, thick-walled space.
I tried to arrange the asymmetrically striped black and white cushions on the sofa, so that they looked comfortable, rather than like the ‘room accents’ they were bought to be. If this room had an accent,
