A Cottage Full of Secrets: Escape to the country for the perfect uplifting read

1

Stella, September 1973

I can’t bear it. I can’t bear that I’m going to have to leave my cosy, lovely little house. I’d done the garden up all nice and got the first harvest of beans in, too.

He’s right, I can’t be the kind of wife he wants me to be, I forget things, I put things in the wrong places, I can’t keep the place clean. Now I don’t want to touch anything in case I get it wrong. I’m scared to tidy because it’s not right, or I arrange the drawers all back to front and what I clean is not enough or too much or I use the wrong cloth. So now all I can do is walk around, looking at everything I made to turn this into a nice home for us.

I have to make a choice. Stay and keep being wrong all the time, or leave when everyone has done so much for us. I know he loves me. I know he does. But last night I was afraid of him, even when I knew what he was saying was right. I can’t bear it to keep being like this, but on the other hand I can’t keep on letting him down. Everyone’s going to be so disappointed in me for not sticking it out. I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You stand by your man. But I’m making him unhappy and angry all the time. So I’ve decided. I’ve packed up as many of my things as I can, just some clothes and bits, and I’ve hidden the suitcase down in the ruins of the old house – he’ll never think to look there. I’m going to get the bus to Kirkby, just like I would on a normal market day to do the shopping. Then I’m going to go to Jeanette’s house. I’m going to tell her everything and hope she’ll help me – her Dean has a car and he could come up one day and pick up my suitcase if I tell him where it is. I can’t take it on the bus. Someone might see and tell him and he might get to me before I can get away. It’s hidden, he won’t find it and spoil all my best things like he does sometimes when he’s in a mood.

Once I’ve got my stuff, I’ll go to Auntie Evelyn’s. I can get the bus from Pickering down to York and stay there until Auntie can talk to Mum and Dad. They are going to be so disappointed in me. We’ve never had a divorce in the family and the wedding was so expensive, I’m not sure Dad’s finished paying it all off yet. But, in the meantime, I can stop with Auntie Evelyn and she’s always saying how she could get me a job up in Rowntree’s, with her. She won’t mind me being separated from my husband. Dad always says she’s far too modern for her own good. But if I tell her how I’m just not good enough to stay married, how I keep letting him down and how I haven’t dared ask Dad about the house deeds yet, and if I tell her about the pictures – well, I think she’ll be on my side.

But I hate having to leave. I love my little house – the peace and quiet with the birds singing and sometimes the foxes and badgers running out over the fields. I’d got it all cosy and nice. I’d just finished re-covering the settee again. It’s funny, but it was the settee that made up my mind; I really liked that yellow stripy material which made the room look all bright and sunny. But he said it was horrible and it made his eyes hurt. He said I’d better do it again in a nicer colour and I was to show it to him first before I started. And I was so busy saying sorry that I forgot that he’d been watching me do all the sewing every evening, making all the covers. It was only when it was finished that he decided he didn’t like it. But he could have said, could have stopped me wasting all those weeks stitching and making my fingers sore because I can’t find the thimble and daren’t ask him because he’d shout at me for losing it. That was when I knew…

Anyway, I’d better get my face on before I go. There’s a bruise over my eye and Bob will be driving the Wednesday bus and I know he will notice if I don’t get my foundation right.

I have to be gone before he gets back and finds out what I’ve done – I broke open the door to his wardrobe this morning. The door was locked and I don’t know where he keeps the key, so I took the little axe that we use to chop up the wood for the fire. I chopped, chopped, chopped my way into that wardrobe until it was splinters and jagged old bits of wood. Then I got the axe again and I chopped into his suitcase, because that was locked as well, and I put the lot down on the fire. I’m not supposed to light the fire, with it being warm, but I’ve stopped caring what he’ll say now. And I burned all of them.

It’s a strange feeling, not caring. I’ve cared so much for the last two and a half years. Cared and tried and tried so hard to do everything right. But now I feel like I’m lighter. Like I’m going to be able to go back to doing all the things I loved before; dancing and seeing my friends and Mum and Dad. So it sort of doesn’t matter that I’m not a good wife, because I can go back to being someone’s daughter and someone’s friend.

I’m going to get my life back.

2

The two cottages stood comfortably together where the track petered out into tyre marks and dust, like a couple of plump maiden aunts at the end of the world. One had curtained windows, a neatly lawned garden and a front door with a large ‘No Callers’ sign drawing-pinned to it, curling around the edges. I pulled my car onto the verge in front of the other cottage, where the bare windows gave the place a vaguely surprised air, like over-plucked eyebrows. As the car engine ticked itself cool, I looked for the first time at my new home and sighed. From his cage in the boot, Brack yipped impatiently.

‘Yes, all right. I’m getting out. Look, this is me, getting out.’ I opened the car door and put one foot out onto the mud of the verge. A wind so cold as to almost be brittle snapped around me, and I hastily retreated to the warmth inside the car, carefully built up over hundreds of miles of my tuneless singing, and Mint Imperials. ‘In a minute. Just let me take in the scenery.’

In fact, there was nothing particularly scenic about the view. I’d been assured by the estate agents’ website that the cottage offered a ‘panoramic view of the Yorkshire moors’ but this was not, currently, evident. All it offered from here was a view of a gravelled-over front yard containing some pots of dead, dry stuff, the muddy lane, and then, over the other side, a thorny hedge.

‘Welcome to Yorkshire,’ I muttered. To be fair, my vision of Yorkshire thus far had been gleaned from the tourist brochures, which had mostly featured Whitby and a lot of heather. There had also been quite a lot about fish and chips. Apart from a clump of purple flowers on the far bank, none of these things had so far been in evidence, so I was already inclined towards disappointment in my destination.

Brack yipped again and dug at the side of his cage. I turned around to make sure he wasn’t hurting his paws in his desperation to be out of the metal box that had contained him for longer than he was used to, and when I turned back, there was a man standing at my car window.

He had his arms folded in the age-old ‘what do you think you are doing here?’ posture, and an unshaven face that was not wearing a ‘welcome to the neighbourhood, here are fresh baked goodies and a timetable for the local rubbish collection’ expression.

His sudden arrival made me jump. Still, there was nothing to be gained by antagonising the natives, so I wound down my window half an inch and smiled cautiously up at him. ‘Hello.’

He squinted into the car. ‘That’s a fox,’ he said.

My immediate instinct was to say, ‘Oh my God, it was a spaniel when I put it in the car, what kind of witchcraft is this?’ But I didn’t. I just said. ‘Yes. I know.’ Because I did. And then, because I was worried that I’d sounded a little short, and I’d learned to always account for my movements. ‘I’ve just bought the cottage. I’m moving in today. We’ve come up from Cornwall.’

Horrible little staccato sentences, but the non-reaction of the man at my window was beginning to worry me. He could be planning anything, from ripping me from the driver’s seat and hurling me over the hedge to – well, actually, I had no idea. Apart from the generalised frown, his expression was giving nothing away. Maybe he’d been overcome with Mint Imperial fumes?

I cautiously pressed the button to lock my door and hoped he hadn’t seen me do it.

‘This is Yorkshire,’ he said, finally, as though he believed that I might have taken a wrong turn up the M5 and currently be labouring under the belief that this was Taunton. There was a pause, in which I neither confirmed nor denied that yes, this was indeed Yorkshire, and I was at the correct destination. ‘That’s a long way from Cornwall.’

‘Yes,’ I said, again stating the absolutely obvious.

My lack of witty repartee brought our conversation to a close. With another squint into the car, the man unfolded his arms and began to walk away, back toward the house with the unwelcoming sign tacked to the door. He stopped just before the gate, looked back at me and said, ‘I hope your furniture lorry isn’t going to block the lane. I need to go out in an hour.’ Then he was gone, closing his front door behind him with an echo that seemed to indicate that the inside of his house was devoid of anything except him and his attitude.

I looked at Brack and Brack looked at me. ‘Well,’ I said, but had nothing to follow up with.

From somewhere behind came the sound of a van struggling its way up the unpaved lane, lurching over the ruts and through the winter puddles that were just starting to dissipate under the spring sun. The acceptable bits of the rest of my entire life were heaving into view, rolling like a tea clipper in a gale and probably smashing all my china in the process. I couldn’t stall any longer, I had to get out of the car and open the door before the removal men left all my furniture in the front garden.

Brack’s amber eyes followed me through the gate, up the mossy path and to the front door, I could feel them. He was pretty sanguine, for a fox, but even he would be wondering what the hell was going on and what I meant by ripping him from his nicely established territory in the back garden of our house near Truro and relocating to the wilds of Yorkshire. I couldn’t even begin to explain. Especially not to a fox.

The front door creaked aside and let the rays of sun come past me straight into the room, like an opportunistic salesman. The puff of air that met me smelled old. Of old things in old rooms. Dust and furniture polish and warm wood and the frowsty smell of somewhere that needs the windows to be opened more often. The front door opened directly into the living room; ahead of me was another door which led to the staircase, and was slightly ajar, giving a tantalising glimpse of a steep narrow flight leading upwards. Beyond, on the ground floor, lay the bathroom and the kitchen at the back. I’d memorised the estate agent’s particulars, since that had been all I had to go on as I’d bought this place without ever seeing it in real life. Somewhere, out past the kitchen, there was a garden. And, presumably, this much-vaunted ‘view of the moors’, although, as the estate agent had clearly had to stretch themselves descriptively to cover the ground floor, ‘extensive living area leading to private bath and toilet, giving on to comfortable farmhouse-style kitchen’, I wasn’t holding my breath. There wasn’t much else you could say. ‘Not a right angle in the place’ sounded woefully prejudicial, if accurate. All the pictures had been those optimistically stretched ones that had made the place look like a goldfish bowl with impossible perspectives. The external pictures had been taken in deep winter and shown mostly grey skies, a cutting frost, and the cottage, bleakly deserted.

I walked through, surprised at the length of the living room, the location of the ‘private’ bathroom and the size of the kitchen at the back. The sun shone through and showed me the garden, long and thin, rolling slightly downhill to fields at the back. Over the threadbare hedge, I could see the top half of Mister Misery sullenly pegging out washing on a hideous rotary line, which put me off going out to explore, and I turned around to see the removals men struggling my sofa in through the narrow front door.

‘It’s all labelled,’ I said helpfully, as they tilted the sofa at an improbable angle to get it to fit inside.

The first removal man looked at me over his shoulder with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It had been a long drive, though.

‘It’s the size of our little ’un’s doll’s house. I think we’ll work it out, m’dear. You put the kettle on, we’ll have you sorted.’

I found myself halfway to the kitchen before I remembered why I was here. Remembered that I’d promised myself not to jump to comply with a man’s every whim. That was not who I was now. ‘I’ll leave the teabags and milk here,’ I said, sidling past them as the sofa finally slid into the room like a difficult birth. ‘You help yourselves. I’m going to get Brack – the fox – out of the car.’

The two men exchanged a look that told me they’d got me down as ‘bonkers single woman with exotic pet’, and sighed, but I nipped past and back down the slippery verge to the car, where Brack was sitting up in his travel cage, paws neatly together and an expression of patient incomprehension on his pointed little face.

He wasn’t a pet. But I couldn’t begin to explain the complicated relationship the fox and I shared, not to two men who struggled with three-dimensional geometry and spatial awareness. Brack, me, the whole of the past five years – all stuff that I wasn’t going to even start to put into words. Not yet.

This cottage was my new beginning. A small, narrow-doored and inconspicuous one, but mine.

3

After the removal men had gone, I was filled with the urge to make the cottage ‘mine’. I had spent an unreasonable amount of time and money in the last few weeks on house renovation magazines and interior design websites. Of course, these had all featured eighteen-bedroomed houses in picturesque places like Berkshire, with handy little local emporiums selling exquisite artisan furniture, and usually a stream in the garden. This was more of a bargain basement version, I thought, as I stared around at the bare floors; two bedrooms and a puddle on the patio, but there was still a lot I could do with it.

For example, the fireplace. Someone had fitted a modern log-burning stove with a fire surround in shades of Old Pondwater meets Silage Clamp; with swirly tiles like a muddy Rorschach test. That needed to go, but a few experimental tugs told me that I’d need proper equipment – a bit of rocking and my fingernails were not going to do it. It was so hideous, I was almost prepared to take to it with my shoe and a chair leg, but restrained myself. Then there were the floorboards, they could be treated and polished and, with a few coats of paint more colourful than the present magnolia, the whole place would have more character.

I stood back and stared again. Yep. There was a lot I could do. But then the words I’d heard so often over the previous years echoed in my ears. ‘Really, darling? You don’t have much of an eye for colour, do you? And that table – far too big for the space. You’re not going to buy that, are you, it’s dreadful!’ All said in a tone that I’d heard as loving, as creative. Words I’d reassured myself weren’t meant to hurt me, but to stop me making expensive mistakes. But that was then. This was now. I could paint this cottage purple if I wanted to. Take up the floorboards and lay fake grass indoors. Leave the fireplace where it was and decorate it with glitter, hang a disco ball from the ceiling beams.

I thought of the reaction to that, and grinned to myself. Then I went and made another cup of tea.

My first night in the cottage was strange.

I had electricity, the estate agent had arranged to have that turned back on for me, but I couldn’t find the stopcock to turn on the water, so I was having to ration the water in the tank in the loft. Once that was empty, that was it. I went to bed unshowered, feeling itchy with sweat from moving furniture into the most appropriate places. While the removals men had put it into the rooms, they’d dumped it all in the middle and I spent most of the evening shoving beds and tables into workable locations. My room, the front bedroom, was so small that, once the bed was in, the chest of drawers had to stay on the landing. The back bedroom, larger and looking out over the garden, was going to be my office as it would, presumably, be quieter.

Quieter. Ha! I lay in bed and listened to the silence whistling in my ears, broken only by Brack’s occasional shift and whine. Until I got him a run built outside, he was overnighting in the bathroom, where the easy-clean floor would hopefully not smell too badly. Brack was a wonderful companion, but unhousetrainable, and the smell of fox tended to get everywhere.

There was the odd bump and thud from the wall that connected me with Mr Next Door too. The walls were thick, the cottages were old enough to have been built when two feet of solid stone was put between neighbours, and I hadn’t heard a whisper from him all evening. No TV blaring, no resounding farts, no voices muted just below the level of hearing the actual words, so all you heard was a mutter and half-shouted laughter. None of that. Just the isolated clonks from the wall. I wondered, as I lay in the absolute darkness with the familiar duvet pulled up around my ears, what that dark man with the grey-streaked stubble was doing in there and whether I dared knock on his door tomorrow to ask where the stopcock was for my cottage or whether I’d just wash in buckets of rainwater from now on. He hadn’t been exactly friendly. And I’d been slightly disconcerted to find that my neighbour was a man who appeared to be single, even if that single status was unsurprising given his general air of unwelcoming irritability.

I pulled the duvet higher. He wasn’t anything to do with me. I could just ignore him. Plus, he might actually have a wife or girlfriend who’d just gone to visit her mother or was on a shopping trip to somewhere with actual shops. Or perhaps he had a boyfriend? And anyway, I’d probably hardly ever see him – after all, he must work, mustn’t he?

I restlessly heaved to face an unfamiliar wall. No street lights. No traffic. It was like sensory deprivation, only dustier, and with more magnolia paintwork. I never thought I would find myself missing the seagulls that had squawked and stomped on my roof at all hours, or the endless trundle of traffic on the hill outside.

And everything else? Did I miss that? I didn’t know. A resounding ‘no’ came first to mind, but then the good things came crowding in, stamping and stumbling over the bad so that my heart ached with loss and my dreams were full of tears.

I slept and woke in stuttered sections through the night to a final waking with the early sun sliding in through the curtains that had been left in the house by the previous occupants, along with some isolated bits of furniture and a stupendously impractical cooker. I sat up in bed and stifled the flash of claustrophobia. This was it now, this five-roomed house perched against its neighbour in the wilderness of fields, with frantically singing birds outside and the rustle of wind in the treetops. Thinking of the neighbour made me realise that I was going to have to grit my teeth and knock on his door and ask about the stopcock. But first I got up and went down to the kitchen, where I used bottled water to make myself a fortifying cup of tea.

Then I went and had a look around my new property.

Both cottages had a patch of land at the side, presumably where previous cottages had once formed a small terrace. The estate agent had called it a ‘paddock, with the possibility of extension (subject to planning permission)’ but on the evidence, only if you wanted to build a conservatory in which to breed giant carnivorous plants. My ‘paddock’ had a huge tangle of overgrown brambles in the middle, a skein of ragged twigs menacingly groping for the sky, forming a clump so dense that the whole thing had a look of a Doctor Who monster about it. Amid this, there was a hint of a wall still standing, jutting the occasional brick through the tendrils of snagging growth, looking like a drowning arm sticking above the water. I gave it a cursory examination. No doubt it would be a useful space, as soon as I got hold of a flame thrower and weedkiller so strong it was banned on four continents.

The other side, next to the other cottage, the patch of land was cleared, neatly fenced and contained a wooden, open-fronted garage. Funny, I thought. My neighbour hadn’t looked like the sort of man who would go in for tidy fencing. He’d definitely given me more of the razor wire-and-landmines vibes, with his anti-social stare and folded arms. Plus his eerie silence last night, that wasn’t natural either. I wondered if I’d upset him with my noisy furniture arranging and off-key singing. Although, if I didn’t find out about the stopcock soon, it wouldn’t be the noise that