The Little Cottage in the Country. Lottie Phillips

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СКАЧАТЬ shacked up with some bird from the PR department, but she held back. She reminded herself that she had what she wanted: her children. Nothing mattered but them and he had threatened, not that long ago, to take her to court for access to his children. Anna wouldn’t give him any room for manoeuvre.

      She had hung up.

      After receiving the news from her aunt’s solicitor, she had a good cry in the privacy of the loo (where she often escaped, glass of wine or Bailey’s in hand, for a moment’s peace).

      She had adored her aunt. Flo had been a dear friend as well as surrogate aunt. The immense sadness that threatened to overwhelm her was tinged with a sense of hope. They could escape London and the poor state school. Within minutes, she was online checking out the Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ merits of Trumpsey Blazey Primary and reading about all the various clubs and village traditions they could be part of. There was even some giant pie-rolling competition. She chuckled at the thought of how much fun it all sounded.

      Once Anna had had a quiet cry in the loo, she grabbed the twins’ hands and they danced and danced around their poky kitchen until Anna thought maybe she would jinx her luck by showing no remorse for her aunt’s passing. And so she solemnly toasted Aunt Flo with a Thomas the Tank Engine beaker. She knew neither Freddie nor Antonia really understood, but they affably joined in.

      Anna could see the cottage so clearly in her mind’s eye; although, she realised guiltily, she had been so caught up in her own downward spiral of barely scraping by, that she had only exchanged letters with Aunt Flo in the last two years and had last visited the cottage ten years ago, Aunt Flo preferring to come up to London to visit.

      She brought her mind back to the here and now as she scanned the small row of houses on the main high street, her heart lifting in anticipation at each house plaque she read. Anna thought she remembered the house standing gleaming and proud at the head of Trumpsey Blazey. Half an hour later, and with no one around to ask, she tried to bring up Google Maps on her phone. It was pointless as she couldn’t read maps, but she hoped for some sort of epiphany moment where all those years of orienteering the Bristol Downs at school would come into their own. Public-school education was character-building, her father had claimed when she phoned home asking – no, begging – to go to the local state comprehensive.

      ‘Dad, I hate it.’

      ‘You can’t hate it. You’ve only been there a week.’

      ‘Yeah,’ she had moaned, ‘but they sent us out into the countryside with nothing but the clothes on our backs and a map and compass.’

      ‘Weren’t you just on the Downs? I remember doing the same exercise when I was at the school.’

      ‘Yeah, but we had no food for hours. It’s clearly illegal and some form of child abuse.’

      ‘How long were you out there for?’

      ‘Two hours,’ she had wailed, thinking she might have broken him this time. ‘Then we were allowed back for tea.’

      She had been greeted by the sound of a long, dead dialling tone.

      Not dissimilar to the one she was hearing now. Not dead – but no signal, to her mind, was as good as dead. ‘Bloody hell. What is the bloody point of a mobile if you can’t be bloody mobile with it?’

      ‘Mummy, bad word,’ Antonia said.

      ‘What word?’

      ‘Buggy.’ She meant ‘bloody’.

      Anna looked back at her daughter, who always achieved an enviable look of disgust that Anna one day hoped to mimic when she was telling them off.

      ‘Sorry,’ Anna said, exhaling deeply. ‘Only I can’t find it.’

      A tap on the window made her jump and she looked outside. That Horatio person stood holding his horse’s reins and peering in at them. She rolled the window down.

      ‘Hi,’ she said.

      ‘Are you lost?’

      ‘Aren’t you meant to be with the hunt?’

      ‘Yes, but I’m taking Taittinger home.’

      ‘Pardon?’ she said, trying to hide her smile.

      He looked at her disbelievingly. ‘Am I speaking a foreign language?’

      She inclined her head. ‘Not far off.’

      ‘Tatty,’ he indicated the horse, ‘needs to go home.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘It looks like you’re lost. Maybe I can help?’

      ‘We’ve just moved here.’ She lifted her chin. ‘I haven’t been here in over ten years and can’t remember where the house is. I inherited it from my aunt.’

      ‘What’s the name of the house?’

      ‘Primrose Cottage.’

      His look changed to what she could only read as: pity? ‘Oh.’ He tried to recover and smiled. ‘Yes, everyone’s been wondering who was moving in there.’

      ‘Well, where is it?’ She fought off the rising irritation at this man’s ability to make her feel so ridiculous. He seemed so supercilious considering she had only just met him; but, she knew, it was also because she hated to ask for help.

      He pointed towards a narrow lane leading up towards a small cottage on the hilltop. ‘There.’

      ‘Brilliant, thank you.’ As she put the car in gear, he leant in.

      ‘Look, I wonder if we might have a chat sometime soon.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps a coffee tomorrow? I…’ He stopped, as if grasping for words.

       Was he coming on to her?

      ‘Yes, maybe.’ Her mind raced with excuses. ‘If I’m not planting…’ She tried desperately to think of something country-esque and settled on vegetables. After all, she knew it wouldn’t be far off the truth: how hard could it be to grow vegetables? She would be the embodiment of The Good Life. ‘Potatoes,’ she announced triumphantly.

      He smiled knowingly. ‘Ah, that old chestnut, planting potatoes.’

      She nodded firmly and started to move off, leaving Horatio with his horse and a strange look of amusement on his face. The lane leading to the house was steep and rough.

      ‘Right, let’s go and see our new home.’ She drove along the bumpy lane to the house, about a quarter of a mile from the bridge, and at the top she stopped, her heart sinking. The downstairs windows were covered in ivy and the garden entirely overgrown with weeds. She could have cried if it weren’t for the sight of Horatio and Taittinger walking up the hill in her rear-view mirror.

      ‘Oh, why can’t he get lost?’ Horatio’s pity must have stemmed from his knowledge that the house was in need of that man off the daytime-telly home-improvement programme. Anna vaguely remembered a female presenter prancing manically from one room of tea-slurping builders, showing their bum cleavage, to another. All before said frilly СКАЧАТЬ