Hidden Cottage (5 page)

Daisy raised her eyes, clearly taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You said that work was dull and mundane a few minutes ago – why’s that?’

‘Yes,’ their father joined in, ‘I thought you liked that job. I went to a lot of trouble to get it for you.’

‘I know you did, Dad, and I am grateful. It’s just that—’

‘It’s just what?’

‘I don’t like it very much. If you really want to know, I hate it.’

Jeff looked shocked. ‘Mia, did you know about this?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard. Why didn’t you say something before now, Daisy?’

‘Because I knew Dad would tell me there’s a recession on and I should be grateful for having a job, blah, blah.’

‘But not if it’s making you unhappy, darling.’

‘Mum’s right, Daisy,’ said Eliza. ‘No job’s worth that. Have you got anything else in mind?’

Daisy chewed on her lip. ‘We-
ll
. . .’

Uh-oh, thought Jensen, here it comes. Here comes the shocker, just as he’d suspected. And perhaps this was the moment when the evening would turn on its axis.

‘The thing is,’ Daisy said, ‘and you promise you won’t get angry with me, Dad?’

‘Of course I won’t. Just so long as I’m sure you’ve really thought it through.’

‘I have. Trust me I have.’ She paused. ‘It’s Scott,’ she went on, ‘my flatmate. He’s going back to Australia and has said I should go with him, that I’d easily find work there. The job market is heaps better there than it is here.’

‘
Australia?
Daisy, you can’t be serious.’

‘It’s a great opportunity, Dad. There’s nothing here for people my age. Nearly everyone I know who graduated when I did can’t get work. They’re all stuck at home on benefits getting more and more depressed.’

‘But you’ve got work.’

‘I know. But it’s not what I want to do. I hate it. I absolutely hate it and it’s making me miserable. Is that what you want for me?’

‘Of course it isn’t. It’s just the first step, the first rung on the ladder. Everyone has to start somewhere.’

‘Where in Australia are you thinking of going?’ asked Mia.

Daisy swallowed, her eyes dark against her pale, anxious face. She looked so worried Jensen felt genuinely sorry for her; she must have been dreading making this announcement. ‘Sydney,’ she murmured. ‘That’s where Scott’s from originally.’

Jensen watched their father carefully rearrange his facial expression, replacing shock with his standard look of indulgence when it came to Daisy. Shaking his head, he said, ‘Daisy, I can absolutely see the attraction. I really can. You think the grass will be greener, but take it from me, it won’t be. Now come on, admit it, you haven’t thought this through at all, have you? It’s nothing but a sun-filled dream that your irresponsible housemate has put into your head.’ Smiling, he reached across the table to pat her hand, but Daisy snatched her hand away.

‘No, Dad, you’re wrong. And I knew you wouldn’t take me seriously. It’s what you always do. You patronize me and rubbish anything I come up with.’

‘Sweetheart, that’s simply not true.’

‘It is true! It’s what you do all the time. It’s why I need to get so far away from you!’ She let out a small cry and pushing back her chair, she rushed from the room.

In the awkward silence Daisy left behind her, Jensen glanced at Tattie and thought, welcome to my world.

Chapter Seven

Expect the unexpected
.

Twice now in one day Owen had experienced something out of the ordinary. First the racing sofa, and then, as if waiting for him, a peacock had been standing guard at The Hidden Cottage when he’d arrived.

As welcoming committees went, it hadn’t been the friendliest; the peacock, on seeing Owen step out of his car, had let rip with an ugly screech and put on a dramatic show of male supremacy with its magnificent plumage.

‘Hey, why don’t you put your feathers away and give me a hand?’ Owen had told the bird as he’d carried what little luggage he’d brought with him up to the house. The peacock had given him a long hard stare with its beady eyes and then shaken its tail feathers some more and screeched some more. To which Owen had responded with, ‘Pardon my bad grammar, but in the words of Shania Twain, that don’t impress me much.’

The peacock had made its feelings vocally very clear for the next five minutes, plainly regarding Owen as a no-good interloper. ‘Right, fella,’ he’d said when he’d had enough of the awful din and addressed the bird in his sternest voice, ‘if you and I are going to get along, we have to get things straight from the outset. You may have treated this as your patch in the past, but this is my home now, which means my rules apply. You either accept that, or you ship out. Got it?’

The bird must have decided these were terms it couldn’t accept and had sloped off into the bushes with its tail feathers lowered, leaving Owen to get on with letting himself into the house and savouring the moment of his long-awaited arrival.

Now, several hours later, having explored and unpacked the few things he’d brought with him and cooked himself a supper of bacon and eggs, he topped up his glass of red wine, put on a fleece and went outside. In the fading light, as he stood on the veranda, the wooden floor creaking beneath his feet, he breathed in the soft honeyed night air. I’m here, he thought. I’m
really
here. It might not seem much to anyone else, this significant moment, but for him it was beyond special. He couldn’t really put it into words. It was an emotion. And when all was said and done, could you really put an emotion into mere words?

He could just imagine some of his friends rolling their eyes at such talk, but he’d always been a soppy old devil; he couldn’t be trusted to watch
Bambi
without making a fool of himself. Bea, his ex-wife, used to say it was one of his most endearing qualities. When he’d told Bea about his plans to come here, she’d wished him well. ‘I hope it turns out to be everything you want it to be,’ she’d said. ‘I expect an invitation to come and visit.’

While he regretted their marriage had come to an end, he treasured the good relationship he and Bea had managed to maintain in the three years since the divorce. She had remarried eighteen months ago and was now the mother she had always wanted to be. Her new husband, Steve, was a thoroughly decent guy and Owen was happy for Bea.

Children had been one of those things both he and Bea had been keen to have, but after extensive attempts to get pregnant – let no one call him a slouch in that department! – they had sought professional help only to discover he was at fault. ‘Not at
fault
,’ the doctor had corrected Owen when he had used the word, ‘just deficient in sperm.’ Whichever way the diagnosis was served up, the net result was that Owen knew he couldn’t do the one thing that had become so important to Bea, and with her body clock ticking loud and fast, the pressure between them grew. They discussed endlessly the options available, such as adoption and donor sperm, but never quite reached the point of committing to either.

He would never know for sure, but Owen couldn’t help but wonder whether, had they been able to have a child together, they would have heeded the warning signs and realized sooner that their marriage was suffering because they were working too hard?

Well, they hadn’t, and it was into their jointly owned business that the two of them poured both heart and soul. From his own point of view, it felt as if it was the only thing he could get right.

Four years after graduating from university, where he and Bea had met, they had given up their jobs – he had been a trader in the City and Bea had been a solicitor – and together they started running a mail order business for ski wear. They called it ObeSkiWear and being keen skiers themselves, they knew what worked and what didn’t. When the internet took off, they began selling online and that was when things went stratospheric and they were working crazy hours. And failing to conceive a child.

The combination of working too hard and not being able to do what all their friends were doing so effortlessly was not a good mix. But ultimately it was the pressure they were under to sustain the success of what they’d created that was their undoing. What had once been their ‘baby’, conceived in their spare room, had grown into a monster that demanded all their time and energy. From their warehouse and office in Crawley, they were constantly travelling, attending trade shows, meeting new suppliers and designers, carrying out stringent quality control, devising new marketing strategies and most importantly ensuring their customers were always happy and would come back for more.

When they took the step to open some stores in carefully selected towns, friends who had known them for many years began to voice their concern, namely that he and Bea looked to be on the verge of burnout and that they couldn’t continue living at the frantic pace they were. The most vociferous voice of concern had come from Owen’s oldest friend. It was an opinion that Owen had dismissed as a severe case of the pot calling the kettle black because Rich, who still worked as a trader in the city, regularly put in a fourteen-hour day and often looked like hell whenever they could spare the time to see each other.

But being the man he was then, Owen refused to admit anything was wrong and even when he and Bea decided to call it a day on their marriage, he was convinced they could continue working together. Bea humoured him for about a year, but around the time that Owen’s mother died, when she met and fell in love with Steve, she announced that she wanted out, saying she wanted to create a new life for herself, a life that included a family.

It was then, when Owen was trying to summon up the strength to continue without Bea, that one of France’s largest ski clothing and equipment retailers made an approach to buy them out. There had been a time when he and Bea would have told them where to stick their money, but not now – now they gave the proposition all their consideration. It took months and months of legal wrangling to form an agreement, with Owen and Bea wanting cast-iron assurances that their current employees, some of whom had been with them since the early days, would not lose their jobs. Finally an agreement was reached to the satisfaction of all parties, but being the pathologically sentimental idiot he was, Owen had had a lump in his throat when he’d signed the forms last November. He and Bea might have suddenly become absurdly wealthy overnight, but he had felt bereft.

While Bea got on with her new life with a new husband and child, Owen had felt as if he had a resounding nothing to get on with. No job. No wife. No family. Thank God for his friends! Because it was while spending most of the winter on the ski slopes, having rented a chalet in Chamonix for three months, and inviting friends to join him whenever they wanted, that he realized one very important thing: he now had to get on with his life and chase his own dream.

He had no idea what the outcome would be of returning to Little Pelham, but as he sat down cautiously in one of the seen-better-days garden chairs the previous owners had left behind and tuned into the quietness of the evening, it felt good. It felt like home.

On his return from Chamonix, back in March, going through some of the boxes of his mother’s things – a task he’d deliberately put off – he’d found one of his old school books from his time at Little Pelham Junior School. He’d had no idea that his mother had kept it, but flicking through the pages and coming across a picture he’d drawn of The Hidden Cottage he’d realized that it matched perfectly the exterior of the house he’d dreamt of for all these years, and it set him thinking. Which in turn had him turning to the internet and browsing the various property sites.

His search was restricted to one small area: Little Pelham. There was nothing that interested him – just a couple of small cottages for sale. He signed up to receive regular updates and to his amazement, less than a fortnight later, he received notification that a new property had come on to the market in the village; it was The Hidden Cottage.

Not surprisingly the photographs showed an interior that he didn’t recognize – after thirty-four years it was only natural that the place had been changed and extensively modernized – but there was no doubt in his mind what his next step had to be. Without even going to see the house, he made an offer, instructed a solicitor and a surveyor and the deal was done.

Rich declared him as having more money than sense and finally going off his rocker, but Bea had reasoned that even if it proved to be a mistake, what did it matter when it was a mistake he could easily afford to make? Admittedly it was the most wildly impulsive thing he’d ever done, yet it felt entirely right.

Just as it had felt right to put off coming to see the house until today when he moved in. He had planned it that way to ensure maximum effect; he had wanted to capture all of his emotions into one sharply focused moment.

With that thought uppermost in his mind, he stared out from the wooden veranda that covered the full width of the back of the house and absorbed the cloistered tranquillity. The light had gone now and low in the inky-black sky, the moon shone down, skimming the tops of the trees, its reflection caught in the stillness of the lake.

He’d first come across The Hidden Cottage a few weeks after he and his parents had moved to the village. It was a Saturday afternoon, his father was working and his mother was ironing, and with nothing to do, he’d gone for a walk. He’d nosed around the allotments watching the old men at work, then followed the path up through the fields, and then slipped through the barbed-wire fence and entered the woods. He’d followed the slope down and kept on going, thinking about what he’d heard some of the other children in his class saying, that no one ever came out of the woods alive because there were witches who lived on the other side of it. He knew what they were saying was rubbish, but as he emerged into a sunlit clearing and found himself in front of a small lake perfectly reflecting the trees around it, he almost believed he’d stepped out of the real world and into some kind of magical place. Maybe a witch did live there, he’d thought as he walked cautiously towards the water.