A Place in the Country (2 page)

She had been given a key by a tired-looking and completely disinterested woman. Ignoring the small gas fire sputtering fitfully in the “lounge,” she had carried her bag up the spindly staircase, Issy clomping behind, lugging her own.

“It'll be lovely,” Caroline had said, hopefully, unlocking the door to their room and taking a look. There were two narrow beds with green silky coverlets and thin blankets that promised no warmth. The single pillow on each bed had a washed-out green polyester case. A table with a brown plastic top and a single drawer stood between the beds, with the smallest bedside lamp Caroline had ever seen. Reading in bed would be impossible unless you held the lamp up over your head, plus the ceiling light had the kind of round shade that exposed the bulb, blinding you. The room had the damp chill of a place long unused.

“Bloody hell,” Issy said, not even putting down her bag.

“Oh, it's not so bad,” Caroline replied, but she knew it was terrible.

“Mom!” Issy pleaded. “Let's just go back to London.”

Caroline noticed she had not said “let's go home.”

They stood there for a minute while Caroline thought. She had paid in advance and couldn't really afford to go anywhere else. Besides, this was Oxford on a weekend, places were bound to be full. Last time she had stayed here, what seemed decades ago, they had been at the Randolph, comfily old-fashioned and warm, with a bar and a suitably proper air of “belonging” about it. The thought of her past life trailed through her mind, as she knew it must her daughter's. This place was the end of the line. They absolutely could not stop here.

She grabbed her bag, nodded and said, “You're right. Let's go. But we can't just turn around and go back to London. We'll take a look at the countryside. We can drive back later, after the traffic eases up.”

Issy hefted her bag over her shoulder and led the way back down the stairs. There was no one at the counter in the tiny hall so Caroline simply left the key and they walked out.

And that's how later, they'd ended up having a cream tea in pretty Burford, and were now driving through wet countryside while Issy texted the friends she had left behind in Singapore when her mother had uprooted her, and made her what Issy now called “a displaced person.”

Guilt wrapped Caroline with a chill deeper than that of the hotel room. It was all her fault.

She swung the car into a narrow lane, past an enormous house glimpsed behind iron gates with rampant lions on the stone gateposts; past a couple of fields where the long grass bent sideways under the buffeting wind, with the most miserable-looking wet sheep Caroline had ever seen. But then she had never really
looked
at sheep before, maybe sheep always looked miserable, wet or dry. Chestnut-colored cows turned their heads surprised when Caroline suddenly stomped on the brakes so hard they squealed, and Issy shot forward and dropped the iPhone her father had bought her when she was still considered his daughter.

“Sorry,” Caroline said, getting out of the car. But she was looking at the
FOR SALE
sign and an old stone barn, set right next to the river.

It was not “love at first sight.”

 

chapter 3

“Oh, Mom,”
Issy said, in what Caroline recognized as her “what the hell are we doing here” tone of voice. Why
were
they here? In the wind and the rain in England when they could have stayed in Singapore with James and had a nice life.

She pulled her woolly scarf tighter over her hair, took off the red pointy glasses she always wore because she couldn't see much farther than her nose, and wiped the rain off them. Truth to tell, she had no answer. A soggy English field with wet sheep and cold-looking cows was a long way from the Disney version of English country life. Hadn't the sun always shone in their past in Singapore? And when it did rain, didn't it come down with monsoonlike force for a few hours, then blue skies and warm breezes returned, transforming streets back from rivers, returning the market stalls to their usual glory of golden fruits, and the “hawker” food stands to their fragrant, tempting, mouthwatering goodness, with their handmade noodles and barbecued meats, their Chinese-style shrimp and Malaysian curries. You could eat at any hawker stall in Singapore and feel you'd had the best meal of your life. The rainy English high street cream tea suddenly seemed a bad exchange.

“Well,” she said, as cheerfully as she could manage. “I think it looks charming.” Was she
crazy
? It looked like a stone barn that had seen better days stuck next to a muddy-looking river, with only a single and currently brown-leafed tree to soften its rectangular, workmanlike outline. “It's for sale,” she added. “Maybe we should take a look.”

“Why?”

Her daughter was asking the question Caroline knew she should have been asking herself. Sometimes Issy was so like her father it took her breath away. Those deep-set eyes, the frown between her brows, the straight, almost aggressive nose. She had her mouth though. Not that that was too good a feature: a touch too wide, a touch too full, and a whole lot too vulnerable. Her daughter wasn't really “pretty,” not yet anyway; she was all scowls and skinny legs and long brown hair. One day, though, she might be, when she got rid of the attitude and that haunted look in her big brown eyes. Looking at her, Caroline suddenly had a brain wave.

Brain wave? Crazy
was more like it. But that's the way she had always been; acting on impulse, jumping in with both feet, and almost always in over her head. Her life was one cliché after another. That's how she'd gotten married in the first place.

She grabbed Issy's hand, and said, “Come on, let's take a look at it,” and marched her daughter, feet dragging in her new green wellies, along the rutted once-graveled path that led between the fields to the gray stone house.

Caroline knew houses were not normally
gray
in Oxfordshire; they were built from the beautiful, honey-colored, Cotswold stone. She guessed this one was so wet it had simply given up and turned gray with defeat and age. It stood on a slight rise almost directly on the narrow muddy bit of river that snaked in a curve around it before doubling back again. It was rectangular with a small outbuilding, and close-up somehow looked more solid than it had from a distance. The rain had stopped but Caroline could hear the sound of rushing water.

Leaving Issy standing in front of the barn, forlorn and wet as the sheep, she walked round the corner of the house to a terrace where a low stone wall separated land from water. To her right the river picked up speed and tumbled over a small weir. She didn't know whether it was the pretty, frothy weir, the rushing river, or the stone terrace, but suddenly she could imagine herself, on a calm summer evening sitting on that low stone wall with a glass of wine in her hand, watching the tiny tributary flowing peacefully past. Why, she wondered wistfully, when people dreamed their dreams, was the weather always blissful and there was always a glass of wine.

She told herself sternly to stop. She had a daughter she was bringing up alone; she did not have money; she did not have a job; she did not have a husband. Responsibility sagged her shoulders when she realized, as she had only too often recently, that she was no longer that fun, free girl who'd met the man of her dreams. She was no longer the wife with a lovely home in Singapore and time on her hands.

She had given up cursing in front of her daughter (though she had heard Issy use a few choice words on the phone when she thought her mother wasn't listening. Didn't she know mothers
always
listened; how else were they to know anything, since they were never told?). So she merely said, “You're right, honey. This place isn't meant for us. Maybe we'll go to France, be near Grandpa and Grandma.”

Caroline's parents had recently sold up their London home, right before she could have used it. A free London base would have been perfect. Or would it? Issy running around London the way she was now? A city school? Good kids? Bad kids? Sighing, Caroline thought life was so much easier when you lived it young and alone and made decisions based only on what
you
wanted.

“Mom, look.”

While Caroline was gazing dreamily at the river Issy was standing in front of the barn. The tall wooden doors, gray as the wet sheep, were clasped by a rusty iron bar. It wasn't what she was pointing out though. Above the doors was affixed a painted sign. Worn and weathered though it was, Caroline could still make out the words
Bar, Grill and Dancing
.

Dancing? Here?
The mind boggled.

“Who do you think came here, Mom?” Issy asked, suddenly interested. “I mean, like— Well, there's no one around.
Nothing.
”

“True.” Caroline ran her hand over wood she'd bet had been here for a very long time. “Bar and Grill and Dancing” were a long way from this barn's beginnings.

“Locals,” she guessed. “Maybe people from Oxford, you know, students.”

“
Drinking and driving?
” Issy wrinkled her nose.

Caroline congratulated herself that at least her fifteen-year-old knew right from wrong.

“I expect they drank Cokes,” she reassured her. “But just look at this door. How old can it be?”

“Too old.” Issy turned away.

Caroline knew she was remembering her home in Singapore, filled with sunlight and the freshness of new architecture, cool marble floors and wooden doors that closed properly and never squeaked, as she knew these would.

“Dad wouldn't like this place,” Issy added scornfully, sending a death knell through her mother's heart. It had been a year since the divorce, a year and a half since they had left. Occasionally, James texted his daughter. He never phoned though, never spoke to her, too afraid, Caroline guessed, of her emotions. Or maybe his own.

Like so many women before her, even when Caroline had known her marriage was falling apart, she'd made the mistake of staying for the sake of her child. She had asked herself what if James married again? What if he had other children? What if he cut Issy out of his new life? How could she do that to her daughter, simply because
she
had made a mistake and married the wrong man?

Anyhow, for Caroline, it had also meant giving up on love: on her home, her security. It meant responsibility. It meant being “alone.”

She had found out about the other woman in the usual way: hotel bills from places James wasn't supposed to be; odd phone calls; a receipt for a pair of expensive earrings; too many nights away from home, and she had picked up her pride, picked up her kid and walked out. Leaving did not mean she didn't love James though. She still did. Probably always would.

The adrenaline of anger only got her through the first few days, the first few weeks. Then, when the adrenaline simmered down and life took on some semblance of normality, she finally had to acknowledge that knot of fear in the pit of her stomach. “Responsibility” was a big word, and now it was all hers. James was supposed to pay child support, school fees, dentist bills, and so on, and some months he did and some months he didn't.

First, they'd gone to live with Caroline's parents in Chelsea, just before they'd sold it in favor of a cottage in France. After that Caroline rented a tiny flat while Issy went to a local school, paid for by Caroline's father until James was finally court-ordered to actually pay for his daughter's education. And also pay the lump sum—very small for a sixteen-year marriage—settled in the prenup. Fool that Caroline had been to sign, but what did she know? Then she was a woman in love and that was all she'd cared about.

So now here the two of them were, escaping the confines of their small rented London flat with a weekend out in the country, inspecting a run-down barn on the edge of a river with a sign that said
Bar, Grill and Dancing,
and a door that had to be at least two hundred years old, with a view of a field of cows and sheep, and a gravel driveway that was half mud. And she was suddenly actually thinking about buying it. It must have been the wonderful idea of people “dancing,” as well as the pressure of her daughter's longing for a home. Anyhow, she knew it had to be cheap, in this condition and in the middle of nowhere, and they desperately needed a real roof over their heads.

“I know I'm crazy,” she said, taking Issy's cold hand in both hers. “But I seriously like it.”

“Ohh,
Mo-om
.” Issy sounded so like her, Caroline laughed. And then Issy said, “Ohh,
Mo-om,
” again and pulled her hand away.

“Don't move,” she said in a low voice. “Don't speak, Mom. Do not make a sound.”

Caroline's eyes, behind her pointy red glasses, swiveled to watch Issy as she crept toward the river, as softly as anyone could creep in green Hunter wellies that squelched loudly. She saw her kneel in the wet grass. Saw her hand reach out, touch something dark. It did not move.

Then, “Ohh,
Mo-om,
” Issy said again in a choked voice, that sent Caroline running to her side.

Issy picked up the dark blob of a kitten and held it toward her, so tiny, and so wet it must have been dredged from the river.

“Oh,
Mo-om,
” she said, choking on her tears, clutching it to her chest; eyes pleading. “Can I keep it?”

What else could Caroline say but “yes.” At least now she would have something to love.

And that's how they acquired Blind Brenda, the cat whose pale ice-blue eyes turned out to be completely sightless, though of course Caroline only got to know later, after the enormous vet bills.

 

chapter 4

It was five o'clock
that same evening when she pushed open the door of the Star & Plough in the village of Upper Amberley. A fire blazed in a cavernous grate and Mexican straw sombreros were hooked on the wall in some sort of weird decorative theme. An air of coziness locked out the chilly night. She and Issy stood there, dripping water all over the just-mopped stone-flagged floor. They were both so bedraggled the pleasant woman behind the bar immediately took pity on them.