Lots of Love (2 page)

‘I think I can spare the diesel to detour and pick them up,’ Ellen said patiently.

‘You’re running very late. I told Dot you’d be there in the morning.’

Why was her mother such a worrier? she wondered. She could imagine her in Spain, checking the clocks every ten minutes, subtracting the hour difference, and looking critically at the phone waiting for it to ring.

‘It’s not yet midday.’ She squinted up at the corridor of hot azure sky above the railway track, in the centre of which the sun blistered like a magnifying-glass on an inflatable blue lilo. ‘We set out before seven, but we had to stop for a wee.’

‘We?’

‘It’s a natural bodily function. C’mon, Mum, you’re the biology teacher.’

Jennifer tutted irritably. ‘You know exactly what I mean.
We
as in, you and . . . who else?’

‘Me and the animals.’

‘The animals and
I
,’ Jennifer corrected automatically. But she was clearly relieved that her daughter hadn’t brought one of her scruffy surfer friends along with her. ‘Pets are such a bind. It’s cruel to drag them from pillar to post. Honestly, Ellen, how you think you’ll be able to go globe-trotting with the responsibility of—’

‘I’ll find them homes,’ Ellen assured her, not wanting to get into this conversation while sharing a car with her beloved charges. ‘We had someone lined up in Cornwall, but it fell through.’

‘Hmmm.’ Jennifer was unimpressed. ‘Well, please do try to restrict any damage they might cause to the cottage. It’s so important to maintain an atmosphere of clean, calm tranquillity.’

‘Miaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeooooooow!’ Suddenly Fins’ head popped out from one of the holes he’d been chewing, much to his own surprise, it seemed. Wide-eyed with fright, he gazed around the inside of the car, then decided to pull the rest of his body through. But being a distinctly overweight cat, he ended up thrashing around like an overheated health-spa client trying to escape from a steam cabinet.

There was a familiar two-toned toot in the distance. The train was approaching at last. Ellen started winding up the window. ‘Mum, I have to go – I’ll call you from the cottage, okay?’

‘Don’t forget the alarm code. Nine zero zero five three, as in Goose—’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘And make sure Dot gives you the keys to the bunkhouse as well as the cottage.’

‘Yes.’

‘And—’ Her mother’s voice was drowned as a three-carriage train came clattering past. The volume it generated probably wasn’t very great in the scale of things, but because the jeep was almost on the rails, it rattled and shook as though being attacked by a thousand baboons in a wildlife park.

Snorkel started barking excitedly, tail whirling. Fins’ head promptly disappeared back into the basket. Ellen threw the phone back on to the dash and started the engine.

They were soon climbing back up through the woods and out on to the natural shelf half-way along the slope that ran from the Hillcote side of the ridgeway down into the Lodes valley. This was more familiar territory to Ellen. She remembered coming up here one long-ago white Christmas to toboggan, and another time to walk with her father when his doctor had advised him to take regular exercise after his first heart-attack – he had not imagined that Theo Jamieson would interpret this as ten-mile hikes three times a week. She recognised the strange, steepled barn belonging to Brook Farm and the little stone bridge that crossed the brook.

‘Woooooooof, wooooooahhhhh! Wooooof ! Woof,
WOOF!
Hooooooeeeeeeaaaa!
WOOF!’

Now that she’d started barking, Snorkel had decided singing was a much more entertaining game than throwing her ball around under Ellen’s feet. Sitting on the passenger seat, she barked and howled delightedly, revelling in the power of her own lungs.

‘Okay – five minutes.’ Ellen pulled up beside a little green footpath sign, engaged the four-wheel drive, and reversed the jeep right up on to the thick verge until it was under an ivy-clogged hedge, which would afford Fins some shade.

Snorkel spun round and round on her seat, barking all the more as Ellen reached for her baseball cap and jumped out of the car.

It was blindingly bright outside, the sun flame-throwing scorched heat on to the landscape. Although high up, only the faintest of breezes moved the sweltering air. Whichever way Ellen turned her face to catch it, it was nothing compared to the cool, briny wind of the Cornish coast.

The backs of her thighs felt sticky and creased from so long crammed into the leather seat. She rubbed them as she walked, tugging her shorts out of her bottom, then following suit with her knickers. The home-made frayed denim cut-offs were little more than hot pants and had a nasty tendency to ride up, but they were great for driving long distances because they had a tough seat yet left the whole length of her legs free.

As she climbed up the footpath behind an eager Snorkel, her T-shirt was soon wringing with sweat. She was about to tuck it under her bra when she remembered she wasn’t wearing one, having over-efficiently packed it the night before. Instead, she gripped the hem and fanned in air as she walked, a habit she’d had since childhood.

The path ran alongside a huge field of ripening rape and up to a derelict Dutch barn. Ellen longed to run it to shake off the static of her long journey, but she didn’t want to overexcite Snorkel who always took running to mean four miles along a beach and lots of stick-throwing.

Instead she let the dog pounce on butterflies in the hedgerow and trudged up to the barn before turning back to look across the valley, eyes shaded by baseball-cap peak, sunglasses and one hand, yet still narrowed against the light.

She couldn’t deny its beauty, however landlocked and far from the place she thought of as home.

The horseshoe ridge, which curled round from behind her to wrap the entire valley in its sleeping dinosaur embrace, had a broad, bony back crested with the needles of distant woods and coppices, and a single tall aerial mast that she didn’t remember from previous visits. High in those marl hills lay the multitude of springs that fed the twisting, curling river Odd. Here and there lay tiny honey-stone farms and hamlets, creamy brown snails clinging to the leafy flanks, changing little over the years and barely touched by development.

At this time of year the valley was a riot of acid greens and yellows. It reminded Ellen of the vegetable terrine Richard used to make on special occasions, a hundred contrasting horizontal stripes of pea-green pasture and yellow-pepper crops, divided by spinach-dark hedgerows and dotted with black-olive woods, all dusted with a sprinkling of paprika poppies.

Its sheer breadth always struck her afresh when she visited. In Cornwall, the valleys were smaller and deeper, like the bed Snorkel made from her green bean bag, twisting and twisting around until she’d formed a deep, comforting hollow into which she packed herself as tightly as possible.

But the Lodes Valley bed had been made by a huge pack of hounds that liked to sprawl out nose-to-tail on a vast, lumpy, green-striped mattress, stretching their legs along its many plateaux, burying their noses in the dips and hollows, chewing corners from the upholstery and hiding treats and bones among the pillows. And the juiciest bone lay in its green centre.

There was Oddlode, by far the biggest of the valley’s few villages, lying on the crossroads that was formed by the wriggling Odd and the arrow-straight railway line – although the two were only distinguishable from where Ellen stood by the darkline of trees that flanked them. With its Cotswold-stone church spire and clusters of tawny cottages and grand houses, Oddlode looked, from a distance, like the ultimate cliché village jewel. Jennifer Jamieson certainly described it as such in her rather florid home-produced brochures that had, for many years, attracted families to holiday in Goose Cottage. ‘Picture an exquisite brooch. At its centre is a sapphire set in a flawless emerald. That is Oddlode village green and its duck pond. Surrounding it is the gold filigree of tiny Cotswold stone cottages, breathtaking in their intricacy. That is the heart of Oddlode.’

Over the years Ellen had kept her visits to a minimum, but she knew it wasn’t quite the crown jewel of the Cotswolds her mother made it out to be. Compared to picture-postcard Lower Oddford, Oddlode was an ungainly ugly sister – less touristy, hard-working, riddled with conflicts.

Her parents had moved there soon after she left her childhood home in the Quantock Hills to take up her place at Exeter University. It had long been Jennifer’s dream to live in the Cotswolds, and the family had headed inland to holiday in the neighbouring Foxrush valley many times, always staying in the same guesthouse. For years, indulgent Theo Jamieson had assured his wife that they would live there one day. Having patiently waited until her daughter finished school, Jennifer bade farewell to Gorsemoor Comprehensive the same summer as Ellen, resigning as deputy head and taking a far less well-paid job teaching part-time at Market Addington sixth-form college.

This had hardly seemed to matter because the move was funded by Ellen’s father finally agreeing to work from his company’s London office, a transfer he’d long been offered but had thus far managed to resist.

When they lived near Taunton, it had taken Theo just fifteen minutes to drive to work. The train from Oddlode station to Paddington took an hour and a half, and then it was another half-hour by crowded tube to get to Chancery Lane. From the Cotswolds, the quickest journey into work he could hope for was over two hours.

Ellen calculated that her father, in transit for four hours a day five days a week, had spent over four thousand hours on a train before he had his first heart-attack on the six fifteen from Paddington to Hereford and Worcester. That was four years after the move, and he had spent five solid months of the time sitting on a train. By then Jennifer had spent just as much time – and a great deal of money – doing up the outdated if pretty Goose Cottage, converting the attics into bedrooms, having en-suites fitted and a utility extension added. It was to be her dream cottage.

It took a further thousand hours on a train for Theo to have his second heart-attack – the one that almost killed him on the Central Line between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road; the crowds around him had thought he was drunk. By then Jennifer had converted Goose Cottage’s thatched barn into a carport with a guest suite above, had spared no expense in getting the garden landscaped, and a fitted kitchen, complete with shiny blue Aga.

Ellen and Richard had been surfing off the Costa de la Luz when it happened, staying in a run-down Spanish campsite with a host of other travellers. It had been weeks before she found out how ill her father was. Tanned and impossibly healthy, she’d returned to find him sitting in a part-landscaped garden that he’d part paid for, reading the horror story that was his bank statement. The doctors had told him to find a less stressful job, take more holidays, take it easy – it was that, or take out life insurance in the certain knowledge that it would be cashed in before many more months were up.

Jennifer was haunted with guilt. While Theo recuperated, she took in paying holiday guests who stayed in the expensive barn guest suite and were fed full English breakfasts cooked on the expensive blue Aga. The money helped, but it wasn’t enough for Theo to give up work.

Her father spent a further two thousand hours on a train before he retired. These journeys were mercifully uninterrupted by another heart-attack, although the doctors said this was more by luck than by design. He had finally stopped renewing his season ticket after he had spent six hours in an operating theatre undergoing a triple heart bypass. By then he had paid for his wife’s dream cottage and saved up a small fund for early retirement.

He’d also managed to take a few more holidays, mostly in Spain, which he’d wanted to explore further after Ellen’s vivid descriptions of the unspoiled coasts she and Richard had discovered far from the tourist trail. Like his daughter, Theo loved the sea. It was on one of these holidays that he had fallen in love with a ramshackle
finca
high in the hills above the Costa Verde, on the market for the same price as a second-hand Jaguar. Soon afterwards, the Jamiesons became a one-car couple with a second home. The same year, Market Addington sixth-form college was amalgamated with nearby St Jude’s secondary school and Mrs Jamieson, commonly known as ‘Bismarck’ (because she always gave abysmal marks) was offered early retirement.

Which was when, by a curious twist of fate, Jennifer and Theo Jamieson’s life took on uncanny parallels to their daughter’s, although Ellen’s mother refused to admit it. For the past four years, the couple had spent summers and Christmases in the Cotswolds, the rest of the year in Spain wrestling with local bureaucracy and builders as Theo created his dream retirement villa overlooking the sea. Goose Cottage was let as a holiday home while they were away and, because Jennifer’s expensively enhanced dream cottage appealed to every tourist’s idea of a Cotswold village idyll, it was rarely empty. The money paid the Spanish builders but, as always with the Jamiesons, there was little cash left in the pot.

Just days before Theo’s beloved
finca
was declared fully restored, his restored heart staged a protest. It was only a minor attack, the Spanish doctors concluded. A warning bell. Enjoy your home, Señor, they said. Travel less. Put your feet up on your beautiful terrace beside your beautiful pool with the beautiful views across to the sea. Do what all the doctors have been telling you for years.

With their modest combined pensions topped up by holiday-rental income, the Jamiesons knew that they could not really afford to keep both the
finca
and the cottage, but neither wanted to relinquish their dream.

Jennifer wailed and cried and fought with everything in her armoury to keep Goose Cottage, the lifelong fantasy that had almost killed her husband in the making.