Out of Step (2 page)

Embarrassment flooded through him. She must have seen him staring at her like a bloody voyeur! He quite forgot, in his haste to retreat, what he’d planned to say. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘er, sorry, but my lane isn’t actually a right of way…’

She looked him straight in the eye – she had very fine green ones – and seemed a lot less flustered than he was.

‘Oh … I do beg your pardon. So, how am I supposed
to get here, then? This is the public path, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is. You have to go down the road to the sailing club. It’s only about…’

‘A mile that way?’ She gestured with a pencil.

‘Yes. Sorry … I…’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Now I know, I won’t intrude upon your patch again.’ She looked put out.

‘It’s OK,’ Rob said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He felt firmly in the wrong, but unable to rectify the situation. ‘Um … bye, then.’

It was only when he had got back to the steadiness of his empty cottage that he thought, Damn! And I never even looked at her drawing. What a total prat.

Nell usually chose to draw and paint out of doors on Mondays for two reasons: first, she had half of that day in lieu every time she had to work on Saturday mornings, and secondly there were generally fewer people out and about on Mondays, so she suffered less ill-considered appreciation from each passing art critic.

From the day that she discovered the secret cottage, she was loath to go anywhere else. It seemed to her to be the most perfect place imaginable, and there were enough subjects, both landscape and still life, to keep her going for years. The two-storey house itself was very simple: a door in the middle with a window on either side downstairs, three windows upstairs, and a chimney at each end. The roof was clay-tiled, and the walls had not been whitewashed for so long that they’d had plenty of time to accumulate botanical hangers-on: several large patches of a dark fungus and a general wash of green algae. The paint was peeling on the window-frames, and there was a scuff mark on the front door where someone was clearly in the habit of kicking it.

But for all its lack of sophistication it didn’t look unloved, and people clearly lived in it. There was a dusty
Land Rover parked outside, and a small child’s tricycle and yellow lorry in the centre of the open turning space. On the left of the cottage a vegetable garden flourished; organic, judging by the weeds, the pile of old lorry tyres and the overflowing compost heaps. There were half a dozen huge sunflowers, three of which had faces carved on to their central discs – two eyes and a smiley mouth each – probably done with a spoon! Nell was entranced. Then out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement from an upstairs window and felt as though she’d been caught prying. She turned abruptly and left.

A week later she decided to go back again, taking her painting gear. As she walked past the cottage, she glanced up at the bedroom window and saw a man sitting there, presumably working since he was staring fixedly at something in front of him. She noticed that he looked youngish and had dark curly hair – a Heathcliff type, she thought, but he’s probably only five foot nothing when he stands up. Men are usually disappointing.

She went past swiftly so as not to give the appearance of snooping, but she had time to see that the back of the cottage was very close to the water with only a strip of grass and a metre-high stone wall to defend it against flooding. There was a small wooden jetty too, but it looked unused and derelict. It was high tide but today the river was not full. Presumably in the winter it could be a torrent, as its name suggested. She wondered if Heathcliff lived there all the year round. From a buddleia bush a robin sang its intermittent autumn song, dropping the clear notes into the still air. She could hear the distant bumping and crashing of a flail mower as a farmer cut his hedges, but here all was calm. Nell wondered where the children were.

She walked further along the river path leaving the cottage behind her, and kept going past the detour behind the sailing club until she could see the whole of the river
mouth. Then she sat herself down on her camp stool and prepared to compose her view of it. On its left were the dunes, piled up by the westerly winds in ridges, ever advancing inland. On its right were grassy slopes, broken at their foot by modest cliffs, on the eminence of which rose the forty-foot tower of the Thrushton folly, greyly self-important and as out of place as a speaker at a Trappist picnic.

Dragonflies hawked overhead as she worked. Puffy white clouds condensed high above and cobbled themselves together into a mackerel sky. Rain in twelve hours, Nell thought. At last. She stayed for as long as the light would allow, and by the time it had changed too drastically, she was confident that she’d got enough on canvas to be able to finish it at home.

The painting eventually turned out well, and she was encouraged to want to do more, but it was a whole month before she managed another Monday by the estuary. Sibyl had been feeling guilty about all the summer Saturdays Nell had volunteered to work, and was insisting that as the proprietor of
ARTFUL
^L
, she herself must man the little shop in Boxcombe for the foreseeable future in order to give Nell ‘proper’ weekends in which to ‘take up any good offers that are going’. Sibyl had never liked Martin, but had tactfully kept silent until after he had moved out of Nell’s house and taken himself off. Dear Sibyl, Nell thought affectionately. Dear Elly’s Ma, what would I do without you?

So it was early October before Nell returned to the cottage, determined this time to do a drawing of the house itself. She hadn’t long been there, and was getting on famously with the light behind her illuminating the scene quite perfectly. The wind tousled her hair as she worked and she was glad of her warm sweater, but glad too to be distanced from the unnatural heat and humidity of the preceding summer, which had rendered her exhausted
and apathetic. This was the best of English weather, cool but bright – and one of those days when everything went right.

She looked up with narrowed eyes to take a line on the gable end of the cottage, and there he was – Heathcliff himself – walking down the path towards her. Even at this distance, she was sure it was him because this man was wearing a red sweatshirt of the same colour as the one she’d seen him in as she’d passed under his window earlier. It was obvious too that he was considerably more than five feet tall. He’d better be nice, she thought, shading a dark area confidently with a soft pencil, because if he isn’t, he’s got absolutely
no
business to be living in
my
ideal home …

Now it’s mid-October, Nell thought on Saturday morning, I can sit and draw outside at weekends without being pestered by trippers, so I’ll go today. But I’ll have to carry all my stuff in a rucksack or something, because it’s going to be a long walk – nasty possessive
selfish
man!

Looking at the Landranger map that morning, she had decided not to drive as far as the road to the sailing club, but instead to try the track going down by Thrushton Hall leading to Eely private moorings. She expected to find a locked gate barring her way but the one at the bottom was open – maybe because it was out of season – and she was able to drive right down to the river and park there unchallenged. The gardens of the big house, she could now see, ended in a substantial riverside quay but it was empty of boats. In the opposite direction the Torrent was now narrow enough to be crossed by an old bridge in two high stone spans.

I think I want landscape today, Nell thought. I wonder what’s across there.

She leant against the stone parapet and looked both ways with binoculars, up river through the spruce forest, and then downstream towards the little tree-filled island and beyond. She could see the wood around Bottom Cottage but not the house itself, and wondered if Heathcliff was in there still staring resolutely forwards, amidst all these wonderfully distracting surroundings. She decided he must be looking at a computer screen and was most probably a teleworker, newly arrived. He’s bound to have a totally unrealistic romantic view of the
countryside, and after just one lonely, river-lapping,
wuthering
winter, he’ll up sticks and leave. Then, she thought – dropping bits of grass into the water and watching them be drawn sluggishly upstream with the rising tide – then
I
shall buy the cottage, and I shall let people use my lane if they want to, and I shall keep all my books upstairs so I shan’t panic if the river floods, and I shall live frugally, happily, ever after … Mmm. But in the meantime…

As she walked on, the spruce woods gave off a musty fungal smell after the recent longed-for rain, and Eely Creek, when she came to it, also smelt autumnal and decaying, but with the sharp, dank odour of anaerobic mud, a whiff that Nell had come to appreciate because to her it was redolent with memories of happy days watching waders, drinking tepid coffee out of a Thermos, and sharing broken chocolate biscuits. Martin had scoffed at birdwatching, so they hadn’t done any. This new freedom was intoxicating.

She breathed deeply and loitered beside the half-dozen houseboats moored there – the long boats without masts that she’d seen from the top road. Most were pretty dingy but the last one was a gem: carved and painted like a gypsy caravan in reds and greens, and with all the appearance of a permanent home, with a wide gangplank that had railings like a bridge, and tubs of still-flowering petunias on either side.

How lovely, Nell thought. I must draw that too.

She might once immediately have wished to live in such a whimsical place, but not now. She walked on, across a small wobbly suspension bridge over the thin Eel tributary and found herself on the wooded coastal path that ran downstream above the south bank of the Torrent. If she continued along it, she would be able to look across the river and see Bottom Cottage without having to run the risk of encroaching on anyone’s ungenerously
defended territory. The thought appealed to her, and she walked briskly until she came to a clearing in the trees where a rough meadow went right down to the water’s edge. The sky had clouded over. Nell hoped the rain would hold off until she’d had time to do a decent sketch.

It did. From this direction, right opposite, the cottage looked even more appealing, sheltered as it was on three sides by trees and with the open hill rising behind it, hedged and fenced into fields full of greenly recovering grass. The drought was over, at least for now. Nell made colour notes at the margin of her sketch pad and was concentrating so hard on getting them just right that she was unaware of the arrival of an elderly farmer in an old pick-up, until he stopped it right beside her and leant out of his window.

‘All right, that is,’ he offered, gesturing.

‘Oh.’ Nell’s instinct was always to hide her drawings, but politeness forbade. ‘Thanks.’

‘Do a lot of this artistic stuff, do you?’

‘Whenever I can, yes. I didn’t know you could get a vehicle down here though.’

‘Four-wheel drive, see. Collecting up my sheep off the head.’ He gestured towards the dog in the back, and the close-cropped headland projecting out of sight into the bend of the river.

‘Oh, I see. Not a public right of way, then?’

‘No, but you can come down over my yard any time you likes. Don’t let the missus see ee though.’ He cackled. Nell smiled cautiously.

‘Bottom Cottage, that be,’ the old man went on. He put out a wide, calloused hand and Nell gave him the pad so he could study her drawing more closely. ‘I could tell ee a thing or two ‘bout that. Oh yes.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Ooooh, goings-on – shoutings – swearings. Sound of it carries right acrost the water some days, but I don’t
reckon they knows that or they wouldn’t do it, now would ’em?’

‘I suppose not. So who lives there?’

‘Oh, she’s gone now. Took herself and the two kiddies off to the town, she did. ‘Twas either that or have ’em taken off her by the Social.’ He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t stick it even three year. I s’pose ‘twasn’t so surprising – her with her fancy townie ways and her high heels! Stands to reason, doanit? He’m all right though. Everybody do like him. He must bin there goin on ten year now. He keeps hisself to hisself but he’m no bother to nobody. If you knows what I mean?’ Nell reached for her sketchbook and took it back. ‘Yes, he’m all right, be Rob Hayhoe.’ He had a sudden bright idea, and patted his door as if to emphasise it. ‘I reckon he’d buy that picture off you. You wants to give him a try?’

Nell made a point of remembering the name, but waited until after the farmer had driven away, his collie bouncing from side to side in the open back of the pick-up, before she carefully wrote it down under her bottom colour notes –
Rob Hayhoe
.

‘That’s a really unusual name,’ Elly said, full length on Nell’s sofa. ‘Hey! What if he’s related to Malachy Hayhoe?’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, come on, Nell! The sexy actor who plays the senior surgeon in that TV hospital thing.’

‘The slimy one?’

‘The distinguished, caring,
luscious
father-figure, yes.’

‘I hope not, for his sake.’ Nell made a face.

‘But if he
is
,’ Elly said, ‘it might be a good career move for me to meet him.’

Nell was sceptical of her friend’s recently expressed desire to become an actress, assuming it was just the latest in a long line of short-lived passions, but she said, ‘Go
ahead. I’ll give you a map reference.’

‘That’s no good. You’ve got to come too, for moral support.’

‘Oh no.’ Nell was adamant.

‘Please, Nell. This could be really important to me.’

‘Why? Why the sudden desire to act?’

‘I just know it’s for me. I could do it.’

‘Then go on your own! You’re not exactly shy after all.’

‘Can I take your drawing of his cottage to sell, as a pretext?’

‘Oh, all right, but he won’t want it.’

‘Yesss!’ Elly punched the air.

Nell regarded her with affection. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known her, and her mother. She just wished she could grow to be as fond of Elly’s husband … ‘What would Paul say?’