Hidden Cottage (2 page)
‘Tattie,’ Jeff had said in response to Mia relaying the news, ‘what sort of name is that? What is she, some kind of potato?’
‘It’s short for Tatiana,’ Mia had replied. ‘I think it’s nice.’
‘More like short for something very affected.’
Her husband had no time for affectation or anything of an ostentatious nature. Nor did he believe in ‘pussy-footing about’, as he called Mia’s reluctance to speak her mind. He wouldn’t have held back with this woman; he would have come right out with the truth and informed her that she was choosing the wrong hat. Moreover, he probably would have said that a dustbin lid would flatter her more. ‘The trouble with you, Mia,’ he regularly said, ‘is that you’re much too middle-class and polite for your own good.’
An hour later Mia had shut up shop and was letting herself in at the back door of Medlar House: her commute took all of forty seconds.
Four years ago when Daisy, the youngest of their children, had left for university Mia had had the idea of converting the unused barn to the side of the house into a light and airy space from which she could run her own business. Jeff had been sceptical. ‘You really think the demand is out there?’ he’d asked. Mia knew, from listening to friends bemoaning the difficulty of tracking down the perfect hat to complete an outfit for a special occasion and how wasteful it was to buy something that would only be worn once or twice, that the demand was most definitely there. She was proved right. From day one, after Jensen had helped her to create a website to promote the business, Mia’s Hats was a success. Women came from miles around to her showroom in the village of Little Pelham, where, in a relaxed and welcoming environment, she gave them the opportunity to try on as many hats and fascinators as it took to find what they were looking for. With changing rooms on offer, she encouraged her customers to bring their outfits with them so that nothing was left to chance. She had recently extended the service and started selling handbags and costume jewellery as well.
She opened the fridge and focused on dinner that evening, not that it was going to tax her too much. At Jensen’s request she was making his favourite meal – corned beef hash followed by apple crumble. It was hardly the last word in haute cuisine, but when she’d asked him what he wanted for his birthday dinner, he’d said, ‘The usual, of course, Mum.’ It was what he always wanted her to make; it had been his meal of choice as a young child.
There had been many times in his life when Jensen had been averse to choice and to change, to the extent of making him seem awkward and obstructive. As his mother, Mia knew all too well his faults and failings, but she also knew that at heart he was fiercely loyal to those he cared about. He might have an odd way of showing it, but that was just his way.
As she peeled the potatoes, Mia thought of this day thirty years ago when she had given birth to Jensen. She had been nineteen years old, alone and terrified. Well, not entirely alone – the delivery room in the hospital had been buzzing with activity: there had been the midwife, a doctor and two junior doctors, one of whom had been Chinese. Even now she could remember that the doctor had been wearing absurdly large-framed spectacles and a blue and yellow bow-tie. He’d been the epitome of a pompous ass as he’d questioned the junior doctors on the procedures currently being performed on Mia. The midwife had rudely shoved him out of the way just as Jensen had made his appearance into the world. When she had been allowed to, Mia had hugged her newborn son close and tearfully promised him the world. A tall order given that she had no husband, few friends and no support from her parents.
But look at me now, she thought wryly as she put the saucepan of potatoes on the hotplate of the Aga. A husband, three grown-up children, a successful business and a beautiful home that when she was nineteen she could never have dreamt of living in.
They had moved into Medlar House ten years ago; the previous owners having bought it from the Church of England and renamed it. With Jeff’s new job basing him in Milton Keynes, the picturesque village of Little Pelham on the Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire border had been the perfect location for the family. It had a good school close by for Daisy – Eliza was then away at boarding school and Jensen was at university – and offered the family a chance to put down some roots in an idyllic country setting. They had moved house three times in the preceding decade, each time because Jeff had tired of his current job and had traded up to something bigger and more challenging, and more financially rewarding. The ten years they’d been at Medlar House was the longest Mia had lived anywhere.
But last year Jeff had sprung another move on her and announced that he’d been offered the job of divisional managing director of a large Swiss engineering company and that his office would be in Brussels.
‘A job offer like that doesn’t materialize overnight,’ she’d said with a sinking heart. ‘How long has this been going on for?’ She’d sounded like a wife asking how long her husband had been seeing another woman.
‘For the last four weeks,’ he’d answered.
‘Hmm . . . and you didn’t think to tell me when the proposal first came up?’
He’d had the grace to look guiltily shamefaced. ‘I was waiting until the final details had been thrashed out. You know how these things can drag on; I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.’
‘Have you accepted the job?’ she’d asked.
Silly question. Of course he had. ‘I’m fifty-five, Mia,’ he’d said. ‘This could be my last big hurrah. And wait till I tell you about the financial package. We’ll be set for the rest of our lives.’
‘I thought we already were.’
‘Don’t be like that. I’m doing this for
us
. So that we won’t have to worry about the future.’
More concerned about the present, about losing the life she had created for herself within the village, she had said, ‘I’m sorry, Jeff, but I can’t do it. I want to stay here. What would I do in Brussels?’
‘You could do what you do here. Or better still, take it easy and have some fun. Just think; we could bob over to Paris for dinner whenever we liked. We could go to Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bruges. You’ve always wanted to go there, haven’t you?’
‘What about the children?’
‘Oh, Mia, they have their own lives now. Which means we can have
our
lives back. We can start to enjoy ourselves.’
As much as he tried to sell the idea to her, Mia wouldn’t budge. It was one of the few times in their marriage that she said no to Jeff. In the end he reluctantly accepted her decision but still went ahead and took the job, saying that since the flight was such a short one it would be a manageable Monday to Friday commute and he would divide his time between Brussels and Little Pelham quite easily. He found himself a furnished one-bedroom apartment in the centre of Brussels, just off Avenue Louise and a short walk from his office. Mia stayed there a couple of times with him when he moved in, but she hadn’t returned.
She would never openly admit this, least of all to Jeff, but she liked the new routine they had settled into. She enjoyed having some time to herself. She particularly enjoyed the peace and sense of calm being alone gave her.
She glanced at her watch. Under normal circumstances she would take with a pinch of salt Jeff’s promise that he would catch an earlier flight home to be here for Jensen’s birthday. However, in this instance he was picking Daisy up in Luton where she now lived, and if there was one thing he would never do, it was go back on his word to Daisy.
Eliza was not a daydreamer, for the simple fact she didn’t have the time to daydream. As a technology consultant for Merchant Swift – recently named Global Technology Leader of the Year – her every waking moment was as good as accounted for and duly charged to the client.
But recently occasional bouts of daydreaming had started to slip into her busy schedule. Usually she spared these diversionary thoughts no more than a nanosecond of her precious time, but this evening, sitting on the packed rush-hour train out of Euston, bone-weary and unable to keep her eyes open, she granted herself the luxury of dwelling on the most persistent of her daydreams, that of Greg being a permanent and long-term fixture in her life.
The first time this thought had popped into her head she had been shocked. She wasn’t that kind of girl. Marriage. Kids. Lunch boxes and school runs. That wasn’t for her. But meeting Greg had changed something in her. Her long-term perspective had been altered. Having him in her life made her consider things she had never considered before. And that terrified her.
She had lived the greater part of her childhood inside her head, which in turn meant her natural inclination was to be a loner, so sharing her space, her feelings, her hopes and dreams with another person was uncharted territory. But she had begun to do that with Greg. In some ways it had felt liberating and exciting, and in other ways it scared her rigid, flew in the face of all she’d understood about herself.
She had met Greg four months ago on a flight from Frankfurt where she had been visiting a client. They had got chatting after she had dropped one of the reports she’d been reading and he’d picked it up for her. By the time their plane had landed at Heathrow, they had exchanged mobile phone numbers and arranged to meet for a drink two days later. The drink had turned into dinner and the following evening they met again. Within ten days of meeting, they were officially ‘seeing each other’ and reeling with happy disbelief, Eliza confided in her closest friend, Serene, that she was in a relationship. A special relationship.
Strictly speaking she was in a long-distance relationship as Greg worked in the legal department for a group of venture capitalists based in New York with an office in London. He spent about a third of his time in the London office and the arrangement suited Eliza perfectly. She didn’t cope well with a twenty-four-seven boyfriend. Her last boyfriend had never understood the demands of her job or appreciated that at times she needed to be alone.
But Greg understood this need in her because, as he said of himself, he was wired the same way. At thirty-three, he was older than her by seven years and she liked that his age and experience gave him a depth of maturity that most men her age didn’t possess. He had been briefly married – ‘We were much too young, didn’t have a clue what we were doing’ – and the marriage, by mutual agreement, ended within a year. ‘We were very grown up about it,’ he said. ‘No recriminations on either side.’
She might not see Greg as often as a conventional relationship would allow, but when they were together, they were truly together. Instead of staying in a serviced apartment as he used to before they met, he now stayed with her in her rented ground-floor flat in Victoria Park. It was really only big enough for one person, but since Greg didn’t live there full time, they just about coped with the lack of space. She loved waking in the morning with him in her bed and had reached the stage when she felt his absence when he wasn’t there.
As brief as their time together was, it had what she called the ring of authenticity to it. Better still, they never argued or bickered over the trivia, as most couples did, but then that was probably because they saw one another so infrequently they didn’t have time to get bogged down in the tedious minutiae of everyday life. There was no silly talk about whose turn it was to put the bin out or empty the dishwasher: it was her flat, so those were her jobs as far as she was concerned.
Lately Greg’s trips to London had become increasingly more erratic and often arranged or postponed at the last minute. Which meant it was difficult to make plans. She had wanted him to come with her this evening to meet her family – a terrifyingly big step for her – but he hadn’t been able to make it. ‘Another time,’ he’d said on the phone when she’d explained about her brother’s birthday.
She had been surprised at the extent of her disappointment and had heard herself saying, ‘But there won’t be another time like this, Jensen will only be thirty once.’
He’d laughed. ‘While that’s undoubtedly true, it’s the most illogical thing I’ve ever heard you say. Your brother’s age has no bearing on my meeting your parents.’
‘It’s just that it’s a special occasion and I’d like you to be there with me,’ she’d said defensively, knowing that she was sounding needy, something that was pitifully out of character for her.
‘I promise you I’ll meet your family the next time I’m over.’ He’d laughed again. ‘You can’t imagine how much I’m looking forward to them vetting me.’
She had relaxed then herself, grateful that he had diffused the moment for her. ‘They’ll love you,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. After all, I’m a man who couldn’t hack his marriage after only a few months. That’s not exactly going to impress them, is it?’
‘Everyone’s allowed to make a mistake. And my father is in no position to judge anyone else when it comes to commitment.’
Eliza snapped open her eyes. The man sitting next to her had jolted her arm hard. He was either oblivious to disturbing her or he simply didn’t care, but having put his laptop away into a large bag, he stood up and without a word reached for his jacket from the rack above. Through the window she could see they were approaching Watford Station. Hopefully no one would get on and take his place.
Her wish was granted and she once more relaxed and closed her eyes as the train picked up speed. But this time her thoughts weren’t of Greg, they were of her family and what lay in store for the evening. And the weekend.
The last time they were all together was for Christmas, although Jensen had managed no more than twenty-four hours and had left early on Boxing Day after he and Dad had argued over the stupidest of things. But that was par for the course. She hoped there would be no arguments tonight, that their father would behave and not goad Jensen as he often did. She couldn’t bear that for her brother. Not in front of his girlfriend.
As soon as Eliza had heard from Mum that Jensen was bringing someone called Tattie to his birthday dinner, she had rung her brother. But typically he hadn’t answered. She had then texted him, but again he hadn’t responded. Communication wasn’t his strongest suit. But then he would have known all too well that she was only getting in touch to interrogate him. Mum had said that she had no idea as to how long Jensen had been in the relationship – like Eliza, Jensen played his cards close to his chest – but for him to want to introduce this girl to the family, there had to be something special going on between them.
