Authors: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
And whatever it is, I hope it gives you pleasure, and makes you think often of
your loving,
Gaga.
There followed a flurry of intra-family phone calls.
‘It’s true, she’s sent the same to me, God love her.’
‘Has she gone crackers, do you think?’
‘Denise thinks she’s having a spiritual house-cleaning.’
‘I think she means just what she says.’
Kate’s mother said, ‘I’ve spoken to her, and she’s determined. No, there’s nothing wrong with her, as far as I know – she’s not at her last knockings, or anything. I told her it was folly to give away all her money when she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll live, but you know how stubborn she is, once she gets an idea. She wants to give you all the money while she can still have the fun of seeing you spend it, and that’s that.’
Kate’s father said, ‘She’s got enough to live on, and there’s always us. We wouldn’t let her starve. Enjoy it, pet. It’s what she wants. I don’t see why she shouldn’t do what she likes with her own money. She owes nobody anything.’
And Denise – aka Sister Luke – said, ‘You can’t take it with you. Gaga knows that all right.’
When she had got over the first shock, Kate showed the cheque to Lauren and Jess.
Jess whistled. ‘You are
kidding
me! A hundred and twenty-five thousand? It’s a bloody fortune!’ Then she laughed. ‘I know what I’d do with it!’
Lauren said, ‘It’s a serious amount of money. You need to think about this. There’s no point in investing it with the stock market the way it is, and deposit accounts pay nothing these days.’
‘Sensible cow,’ Jess said. ‘I was thinking of a fabulous car or a fabulous holiday. Even better, both.’
‘Bricks and mortar’s the only way to go,’ Lauren insisted.
‘Of course I thought of that first. But it isn’t enough to buy a house or a flat,’ Kate said.
‘Not unless it was in the back of beyond,’ Jess agreed.
‘It’d make a hefty deposit, though,’ Lauren said. ‘Which would bring the mortgage for the rest within reach.’
They rented the flat together: buying had never been an option for any of them. Property in London – and most other places they’d want to live – was just too expensive.
‘Still, that wouldn’t be much fun for her grandma,’ Jess pointed out. ‘Just putting it down on a flat.’
‘She could tell her all about the hunt for the right place,’ Lauren said. ‘String it out into a story. Anyway, it’s Kate’s money now, and she has to use it wisely, whatever her granny says. She’ll never get another windfall like this in her life. Take your time and think about it carefully, Kate.’
‘I’ll certainly do that,’ Kate promised. ‘Though I agree with Jess, I’m not sure using it wisely is what Gaga has in mind. I fancy she wants me to have wild adventures.’
‘You can’t just blow it!’ Lauren said, shocked.
‘No, of course not. But I’m going to take a couple of hundred out of it to take you two out for a slap-up celebration. That’ll be something to tell her, at least.’
But the thought had already come to her that she could use the money to get away. She had wanted a complete change, to escape from the scene of her shame, from Mark, and from London, where, because of her job, she was always likely to bump into him or hear his name mentioned. Yes, escape! She just had to think how best to achieve it. It was true, as Lauren said, that she’d never get a sum like this again, and she didn’t want to fritter it away: she wanted something to show for it at the end, and it was also true that bricks and mortar were the best investment. It could be her only chance to get on the property ladder.
Gradually an idea began to form, nebulously at first, around Jess’s words, ‘the back of beyond’. How to get away, but not blow the money? How to have a complete break, but be able to come back?
And then she saw the advert.
Exmoor’s River Burr wound its way through probably the most beautiful valley in England. Brawling in winter, burbling in summer, it tumbled over rocks between steep valley sides draped with hanging woods that rose up to the open moors, Burford Hill on one side and Lar Common on the other. At the end of the valley, the contours softened to a gentler, more open country, and here, where the Burr met the Elder Brook, there was a complex junction: a crossroads of two main roads (or as main as they got in that part of the world) and a minor one, all of which also bridged both waters. Here the village of Bursford had grown up. With the two arched stone bridges and the backdrop of the woods it was extremely picturesque, and only its remoteness kept it from being a hot tourist attraction and consequently getting spoilt.
The other side of Kate’s family, her father’s side, came from Exmoor – Jennings was an old Exmoor name. She had spent happy childhood holidays there, but Granny and Grandpa were much older than the Irish grandparents – her father had been the youngest of a long family – and they had died when she was about ten or eleven, so the holidays had stopped and she had hardly been there since. But she treasured memories of the wonderful greenness, the rolling hills and wooded folds, the little stone villages, the wide open moors and the wandering ponies.
And she remembered stopping in Bursford for an ice cream from the Post Office stores, always a highlight of any day out. So when, while idly looking through the property section of the newspaper, she had seen the name, her attention was caught and she homed in on the advert.
Exmoor National Park: Little’s Cottage, School Lane, Bursford. Period two bedroom cottage in need of renovation. Mains services. £119,950.
It wasn’t much to go on, but there was the coincidence of the place, which she knew, and the price, which was within her grasp. She felt a shiver on the back of her neck as though Fate was directing her towards it. Anyway, it would cost nothing to find out. She hadn’t thought about Exmoor and her childhood holidays for a long time, but now she did, the images came tumbling back into her mind, fresh and alluring. What could be more different from her present life, more completely the change she craved?
All the same, it was probably a crazy idea, so she wouldn’t say anything to Lauren or Jess yet. She would just ring up the estate agents, Stinner and Huxtable, first thing the next morning, and see what happened.
John, a young man with an indoor pallor and a rather shiny suit, met her at Taunton station and drove her to the place.
‘You do understand,’ he asked, giving her an anxious glance, ‘that you wouldn’t be able to develop the site at all? There’s absolutely no chance of getting planning permission in the National Park.’
‘Yes, it was explained to me,’ she said.
‘Because I was afraid a lot of people might get a bit excited about the five acres,’ he went on.
‘I promise I’m not excited by the five acres,’ she told him. But she sort of was. The more extensive details that had been sent to her said that the cottage came with five acres of adjacent land, described as ‘rough grazing’. She had always wanted to own land. The thought of standing on a stretch of England and being able to say ‘this is mine’ seemed a bit like a fairy tale. She was sure Gaga would approve. Hadn’t ‘land hunger’ sent the Irish wandering to every corner of the globe?
‘It’s not even really grazing now,’ John went on. ‘You see, the Browns, who last lived there, kept chickens on it and sold the eggs. After he died his wife stayed on but she didn’t do any of that. She got rid of the chickens and just lived on her pension and let everything go. Well, up there, if you leave grazing, the heather and bracken come back in no time. It’s all gone back to the wild. It’d be a stiff job clearing the scrub, and even if you did, it’s not a big enough area to do anything much with, unless you wanted to keep a pony.’
He looked at her questioningly.
‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ she said. ‘It’s the house that’s my main concern at the moment.’
‘I see. Well, I don’t want to put you off or anything, but it’s not a very pretty cottage, and when Mrs Brown died, she’d been on her own in there a long time. It needs modernizing. And it’s a bit grotty. Well, a lot grotty, really.’
‘You want me to turn around and go back without seeing it?’ Kate suggested humorously.
He looked embarrassed. ‘No, of course not. I’m only saying that I hope you haven’t got your hopes up too much, because coming from London and everything, you might think …’
‘My father’s family was from round here,’ she interrupted quickly. ‘My grandparents lived in Exford. I used to visit them when I was a kid.’
It was amazing how his face cleared. She wasn’t a townie, so she was all right. ‘Oh, then I ’spect you know Bursford.’
‘Yes, I remember it well,’ she said, and he relaxed almost exaggeratedly, like someone in a drama class.
The journey was only about thirty miles, as she had established from a study of a map before she left home (it was only ten miles from Minehead but there was no railway to Minehead any more). Still, it took more than an hour, partly because of the narrow winding roads of the latter part of it, and partly because of John’s nervous driving, which made him view even the clearest bend like a dangerous animal poised to spring.
But at last they drove over the first bridge (‘That’s the Elder Bridge,’ John said helpfully), turned sharp right, and reached the crossroads and the second bridge (‘The Burr Bridge’), and there they were, in the heart of the village. There were the handsome stone-built houses, clustered around the scrap of green she remembered so well, with the red telephone box and the bench where you could sit and look at the burling river while you ate your ice-cream.
Next to the green was the same old tin-roofed garage with its single petrol pump outside – did they still sell petrol? The square tower of the church poked up beyond the houses down the left arm of the crossroads, backed by the woods that rose up to the skyline. The two pubs, the Blue Ball and the Royal Oak, faced each other across the wider of the two roads which, having sprung over the Burr Bridge, curved round the flank of the hill and wandered off, up over the high moors towards Exford.
Kate ran down her window and stuck her head out. She could smell the damp woods and the green freshness. She could hear wood pigeons and jackdaws, and the muted roar of the weir that held back the Elder waters for the mill, which was down the right arm of the crossroads, and even in her day had been converted to a private dwelling. As they stopped at the crossroads while John consulted the map, they were not holding up the traffic because there wasn’t any: they were the only car in sight that was not parked. A girl on a bay horse clattered past them, giving them a curious look, and turned left. Kate stared at the pretty jumble of houses and knew she had lost her heart. It seemed unchanged since her childhood, and how many places could you say that about?
‘Right,’ said John, and he put the map aside, and drove on. They went along the Exford road and turned left at the first turning past the Royal Oak, called School Lane. The school was still there, a Victorian, red-brick, ecclesiastical kind of building which was now obviously a private house. Beyond that the road sloped steeply up, with small houses and cottages on either side, and at the top, John stopped alongside the three-foot-high stone wall on their left. Behind it was the cottage.
Here the road ended in a T-junction with a track, on the other side of which were the open moors. Kate got out of the car, drew in a deep lungful of the air, clean and sharp and with a brown hint of peat in it. She stared across the track at the expanse of heather and bracken rollicking away for miles and miles, all the way to the sky, heard the profound silence under the small nearby sounds, and felt she would never be able to tear herself away from this place.
‘But why didn’t you tell us where you were going?’ Jess complained from the kitchen where she was making cheese on toast. ‘We could have come with you.’
‘I didn’t want to tell you about my plan in case you thought I was crazy.’
‘We
do
think you’re crazy,’ Laura assured her kindly. ‘We won’t think it any less for not having seen the place. Don’t you see, as it is our imaginations have been left to run wild.’
‘Yes, we really need to inspect the place,’ Jess agreed.
‘To make sure you’re not being rooked,’ Laura concluded.
Kate laughed. ‘I may take that from you – but from Jess, who thought the really cheap Prada bag on that market stall might be genuine?’
‘You never let go of that one,’ Jess complained, coming in with the tray. ‘I didn’t buy it, did I?’
‘Only because we wouldn’t let you.’
‘But it was pretty. It would have gone so well with my new coat.’
‘Not at that price.’
‘You just said it was cheap.’
‘Not cheap enough.’
Jess plonked the tray down on the coffee table. Three plates of toasted cheese and three mugs of hot chocolate threaded their smells into the warm air, a bulwark against the cold wet evening outside. ‘So tell us,’ she said, ‘all the details. I hope you took photos?’
‘I did, but they’ll only depress you. It isn’t very pretty – not cute and picturesque.’
The large garden was overgrown – well, that was probably an understatement. It was a horribleness of brambles and nettles, ivy and convolvulus, through which the occasional plant thrust forlornly, begging for rescue. The cottage was square and plain, with the maroon paint peeling from the filthy, cobwebbed windows, and grass sprouting from the gutters. But it was at least stone-built.
‘And the roof is sound,’ Kate said quickly at this point in her exposition. That had been a major relief to her. ‘In fact, all the fabric is sound, though the chimney probably wants repointing. But that’s not a big job, just painstaking. I can do that.’
‘
You
can? How come?’ Jess said, sinking her teeth into the first slice.
‘My dad’s a builder. I thought I’d told you that.’
Jess waved a hand. ‘It doesn’t follow,’ she said indistinctly.
‘Well, it was pretty tough for him, having five daughters and no son, and I was the tomboy of the family, so he took me with him and taught me stuff. I used to help him on Saturdays and school holidays. I can do it all, pretty much.’