The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (43 page)

‘So looking to move to Bodmin, are we?’ he asks.

Hyper aware that I don’t want to slot into the cliché of London professional moving to the moors, I slip into my thickest Irish lilt. ‘I am so,’ I say. ‘I think it’s beautiful down here. Though I’m just really having a mosey around today. Having a peek to see what’s on the market.’

‘It’s all become royt pricey,’ he says, yanking at Boris’ training collar. ‘All these strangers buying everywhere for holiday homes. A crime it is. No offence meant.’

‘Well if we do buy here, it won’t be a holiday home, that’s for sure,’ I say, grimacing inwardly at my invention of a ‘we.’ And then I think of Guinness, and decide that I haven’t lied after all.

‘They’re building houses all over now, but it doesn’t stop the prices going up, oh no.’

We round a huge privet and the house in the photo appears, complete with for-sale sign. It’s a pretty, white-painted bungalow. Again, it’s much smaller than I thought.

‘This is the one isn’t it?’ the man says, glancing at my printout, and forging on.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, this is it.’

Spotting a woman at the rear of the property, I pause and try to grab my guide’s arm to bring him to a halt. ‘This is fine,’ I say. ‘I only wanted to have a peek.’

‘Nonsense,’ he says, already waving. ‘Maggie? Maggie!’

The woman stands and places a hand in the small of her back, that universal gardening gesture, then shades her eyes and waves. The dog barks and when the man releases the lead it tears around the house and jumps up, putting its paws on her shoulders.

As we near the house, I see that it has a fairly extensive vegetable patch at the rear – not much growing right now, but clearly these rows of cloches and bean-poles are Maggie’s pride and joy.

As for the house, though, despite its supposed three bedrooms, the entire thing can’t be much bigger than my flat.

Just as the dog-man says, ‘I found this lassie out in the lane. She wants to buy your house,’ I raise my eyesight and look beyond the end of the garden and see that I don’t want to buy it, I really
don’t
. Just beyond the furthest limit of Maggie’s garden is a parked bulldozer, and beyond that, at far as the eye can see, the hillside has been divided into swathes of tiny plots. At the top of the hill, on the horizon, Barrett are building hundreds of tiny, red brick houses. And as the red corrugated tubes poking from the earth reveal, they are clearly heading this way.

‘Hello,’ Maggie says, removing a gardening glove and holding out a hand. ‘The agency usually calls before visits – there must have been a mix-up.’

For half an hour I pretend out of politeness to be interested in Maggie’s pretty little house, a pretty little house soon to be surrounded by a hundred Brookside Closes, a pretty little house with ceilings so low that if I were to put on a pair of Jimmy Choos – I know, I know, there would be little call for them here – but if I did put on a pair, I would only be able to pace up and down lengthwise between the beams. Walking across the room would require either a shoe change, or a stoop.

I wave goodbye to the dog-walker and slump into my car.

I know about house-hunting, of course. I know from experience that nothing ever lives up to unreasonable expectation, and that finding the right house is as much about slowly tapering that expectation as anything else . . . But even with that knowledge, those first visits, that initial realisation that it’s going to have to be smaller, and uglier, and more remote or if not, noisier than imagined . . . well, it’s always just a tiny bit soul-destroying.

I sit in the car and watch the hill to my right as it turns a deep, dark grey, and figure I can make out a slanting texture in the light that indicates that it’s already raining up there. I wonder, for a moment, if I could really imagine myself living here? And the only answer I can honestly give myself is, ‘No.’

I glance back at my list of properties and decide that number three in Tregony is a bit too far for today, and settle for a final peek at number four, the house on the hill, if I can find it.

Ten minutes later, I’m just driving past the
Welcome to Bolventor
sign, and I can already see the house to my left. It’s not immediately obvious how to reach the lane that leads to it, but as I drive around in ever decreasing circles, I start to become seriously excited. For this house is in a completely different category from the others.

‘So where’s the problem?’ I mumble, as I park the car in a siding a hundred yards below the house and climb out.

The sky is now blackening and a chill wind is humming vaguely in my ears. I wish I had brought a hat.

I look up at the house. It’s big – at least three bedrooms I’m guessing, though of course I don’t have the details with me.

It’s another white painted farmhouse, though this time with two storeys and a slate roof. It dominates the landscape in all directions, and I wonder if someone is already watching me from behind one of the blackened windows. A VW van is parked on the gravel drive and smoke is drifting from the chimney. For some reason I decide that the presence of a VW hippy bus rather than the classic Land-Rover Freelander implies a far nicer class of person inside.

As I start to walk past the wooden fence separating the land from the lane, the sun suddenly dips below the cloud-line, bathing the side of the house in a warm, pink glow, and I think,
God! How beautiful!

I stride nonchalantly past the house as if on a mission to somewhere else, though I doubt anyone would be convinced . . . the lane clearly doesn’t
go
anywhere else.

As I pass the big bay window, despite feeling something of a voyeur, I peer into the uncurtained lounge. The right-hand wall is entirely covered with book-cases and a man of regular build in jeans and a simple grey hoodie is standing with his back to me, staring, I think, at the flames from the log fire. The walls of the room flicker and jump as the light shimmers.

And then a woman appears in the doorway opposite holding two cups and says something to the man, and then frowns and nods at me, and he turns, still grinning from some previous remark, and I snap my head back to where I’m headed and hurry on down the lane.

My heart is racing, but not from being caught out . . . My heart is racing because that house is
my
house. That house is exactly the house I imagined. In fact, it’s more my house than I ever imagined, only I couldn’t know that until I had seen it. And the woman – that woman holding her cups of tea, or soup, or hot chocolate, or whatever it was – was my height, and my age. Other than her pregnant belly, she looked
just like me.
And the guy in the hoody, the man with the easy stance and the wry smile looked exactly as I always imagined the missing boyfriend would be. Just for a moment, I feel like an impostor has stolen my life.

I walk briskly for a few hundred yards, and then, when the first drop of rain strikes my forehead, I spin around and walk back the other way, debating what to say if the woman from the house comes out to ask me why I’m there, or if the guy comes out to offer assistance to this lost, non-pregnant double of his wife.

But the curtains are now drawn so I take a deep breath of the fragrant wood-smoke and, imagining this other-me inside my house, settling in front of my log fire, with my baby inside, and my smiling boyfriend
be
side, I walk briskly, and then as rain starts to fall from the sky, run,
alone
, to my car.

The Matrix

As I head back to Plymouth, and then on homeward, I wonder what choices I have made to bring my life to this point . . . I wonder, more specifically, what might have happened if I had moved to, say, Plymouth or Bournemouth instead of London, how different my life might have been. For the first time ever, I wonder if my fragmented, catastrophic love-life might not be a symptom not of what I do, but of where I live . . . if it might not be the trade-off for having chosen the excitement of the capital over the stability and relative calm of a smaller, more rural place. After all, somewhere along the line, there has to be a reason my body-double ended up with the baby and the log fire and farmhouse and the lover, whilst I ended up with the career and the gay friends, and the parties on E and a wardrobe full of Jimmy Choos. Without a doubt part of the cause is me. But maybe, just maybe, part of it is geographical as well.

I remember Darren telling me that waiting to do things until the right person came along was a mug’s game, and I wonder if perhaps
he
should had gone to live somewhere else instead of quitting the planet entirely. Might he not have found a better way of living in Cambridge or Edinburgh or France even – one which he found more satisfying? In Darren’s memory, perhaps I should now find out? Because if London really
is
the problem, then I need to find out now. A couple more years in this rut and my options, both marriage and baby, and career-wise will have narrowed to
none-at-all.

As I come out of Exeter, I realise that I have taken a wrong turn, but recognising the town of Brampford Speke signposted ahead as one of the Cornish Cow sites, and figuring that a few photos of cows will add to the illusion of a busy, fruitful business trip, I carry on up the A377.

After a few miles and a few turns I find the sign:
Cornish Cow: Brampford Speke
, and turn onto what is little more than a farm-track.

It’s only as I park the car in front of a vast grey steel barn that it crosses my mind that not only are there no cows in the fields but that again, we aren’t in Cornwall here . . . Brampford Speke is well within Devon. Is there, I wonder, anything Cornish about Cornish Cow?

I grab my camera and the portfolio and cross the muddy car park to the only visible door, dwarfed in the middle of the vast grey frontage.

There are no signposts, no secretaries, no farmers and most notably, no cows. For a moment I wonder if this isn’t a factory or depot rather than a farm, but then the wind changes and the stench of slurry hits me, and the sound of a cow, and then cow
s
plural, reaches my ears.

I open the door and step into a hallway. It stretches the length of the building with a doorway every thirty yards or so. And then a door a few hundred yards to my left opens and a farmer appears wearing overalls and wellington boots. He looks at me, pauses for a moment, blinks as if he maybe can’t believe his eyes, and then starts to stride towards me.

‘Hello?’ he says, his voice rising at the end of the word. His frown looks more like
What the fuck are you doing there?
than anything else.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘My name’s CC Kelly.’ I offer him a hand but he just frowns a little more and ignores it. ‘I work for an advertising agency and we’re preparing a brief for Cornish Cow,’ I say. ‘I met Roger Niels this morning in Plymouth, and I was just driving past and I saw—’

‘Sorry, you’re telling me this because?’ he says, his aggression thinly veiled.

‘Well, because I met Mister Niels in the offices I couldn’t get any photos of the cows. So I was just wondering . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but no. I don’t know you from Adam, and this is a sterile unit. You’ll have to come back another time with proper authorisation.’

I nod and fake a smile and move to his side as I open the portfolio, more intrigued now than ever to see behind those doors. Something about this guy’s demeanour is profoundly unsettling.

‘Here, have a look,’ I say, starting to leaf through the mock- ups. The man folds his arms across his chest, and I think,
This really isn’t going to work.
But then he uncrosses his arms and reaches out to stop me turning the page. ‘That one’s cute,’ he says, nodding at Darren’s cartoon cow with a milkshake. The man is almost smiling. Breakthrough!

‘Ah, OK! You like that one?’ I say. ‘That’s useful. A few people have said they like that one best, but it’s good to get the opinion of someone in the business,’ I add, flattering him intentionally.

I leaf through the remaining images and then say my parting shot, ‘So surely you could let me take just a couple of shots? Just something for the guys in Creative to work with?’

He looks at me sour-faced.

‘I’ll be less than five minutes. Less than
two
minutes? Oh go on . . . Please?’ I bat my eyelashes at maximum speed.
‘Pretty
please?’

The man snorts and caves in. ‘OK,’ he says, glancing at his watch. ‘But you need to be out before four because there’s a shift- change then, and I don’t want to get into trouble.’

‘Brilliant,’ I say, winking at him.

‘Of course,’ he says, leading me to one of the doors, ‘if you want cows in fields, you’d be better going to the show farm in Gwennap.’

‘The show farm?’

‘Yes. They have a smallholding in Gwennap. Because this place is just a ZG unit.’

‘Of course,’ I say as knowledgeably as I can manage. I’m suddenly feeling more like an undercover detective than an advertising exec. We pause in front of a shelf of wellington boots, and the guy nods at my feet.

‘You’ll need to take those off I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘As I said, it’s a sterile unit.’

‘For diseases and things,’ I say.

‘Exactly.’

I remove my trainers and put on a pair of oversize wellingtons and follow the man through a foul-smelling foot-bath, and then we push through a scratched heavy plastic curtain, and I freeze with the shock of the sight before me.

For this cowshed is truly vast. In fact, the term cow
shed
really doesn’t do it justice. I look around as I slowly take in the details: cows as far as the eye can see, cows in perfect rows, packed in, side by side – cows on concrete, cows in four inches of their own excrement.

‘God!’ I say. ‘How many are there?’

‘About four hundred,’ he says. ‘Three hundred and seventy, to be precise. Thirty are in the calving pen.’

‘Of course,’ I say.

‘But they’ll be back tomorrow,’ he says.

‘Tomorrow? Right. And the babies? Sorry, the
calves.
I can’t see any here.’

‘The heifers will be reared for here in a different unit. And the bull-calves go to Europe.’