Chapter One
“You’re free!”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Oh, come on,” said Hannah. “You were buried alive in that place. How long’s it been? Ten years?”
“Eleven. Since we both graduated. And I was very lucky to get that job.”
“But ask yourself honestly—will you keep in touch with any of them?”
Jess sighed. She had worked daily with the unlikely ragbag of personalities in Bourton-on-the-Marsh Library. But even on the day it closed its doors for the last time she knew, beyond the fondness of familiarity, she had nothing in common with any of them. Not really.
“Exactly,” said Hannah, smug in victory. “You’ve lost nothing.”
“What? I’ve lost my job.”
“Sure, but it’s just a job—and a boring one at that—and it’s not like you’ve . . .” Hannah faltered.
“It’s not like I’ve got anyone to support,” Jess finished for her. It was true, she didn’t. Not anymore. It had been a year of crushing losses, as her friend knew better than anyone.
“You know you’ve always got me,” said Hannah, stoutly, shoveling another spoonful of mush into her baby’s face and then turning back to face the screen, seeking eye contact.
This was their near-daily ritual, with Hannah on the screen propped on the dresser in the kitchen and Jess sitting at the scrubbed pine table having her pre-supper glass of wine.
“It was so lovely having you at the funeral,” Jess remembered, wistfully. “Such an amazing surprise.”
“Where did you think I’d be?”
“I thought you’d be eleven thousand miles away. Seeing as you are.”
“Thank God for airlines and the internet,” said Hannah, raising her mug of coffee in acknowledgment of Jess raising her glass. “I do feel virtuous drinking coffee while you’re knocking back the vino.”
“Oi, less of the value judgments. When I start drinking wine for breakfast you have my permission to be officially concerned.”
“So, what will you do? Nothing keeping you in Bourton-on-the-Marsh now, is there? It’s about time . . .”
“It’s my home. I’ve got the house.”
“It’s time to move on,” said Hannah resolutely. “What would Mimi say? ‘Home is where you lay your hat.’ She always wanted you to go off and explore the world. Now’s the time.”
“‘Pastures new,’” agreed Jess, doubtfully. “That’s what she used to say.”
“Exactly. ‘Pastures new.’”
Jess was what her grandmother Mimi had always called a home-grown lass; Bourton-on-the-Marsh born and bred. Mimi was from France originally and Papa had always proudly declared that you could take the lass out of Paris, but you couldn’t take Paris out of the lass. “Mimi” wasn’t her name really, but it was the closest a two-year-old Jess could get to Mémé—French for Granny—and, in the end, it was what everyone called her. Mimi had settled in the UK without a backward glance after falling in love with Papa all those years ago. Her grasp of English became near perfect and her French accent almost consumed by flat middle England vowels. That said, Mimi may have submitted to life in a small market-town far from home, but she certainly didn’t capitulate. Her sometimes humdrum life was enlivened—as were the lives of all around her—by her relentlessly Parisian attitude; no outfit was complete without a jaunty scarf, no supper, however light and casual, was presented without a single bloom in a slim vase and a glass of good red wine. She was never without a slick of her signature bright-red lipstick and she had the permanently exciting—unsettling—tendency to give the impression she was just about to embark on a huge adventure.
Jess’s life, on the other hand—with one, huge exception—had followed a pre-ordained path from local school to local college to local university and then, straight from there, to a local job in the local library: all safe, safe, safe. God, she was boring. Predictable.
As usual, Jess and Mimi did everything they could to avoid dangerous introspection over “that point” in her life: the event, just before her fourth birthday, which was so terrible it still had the power—nearly thirty years on—to stop a conversation in its tracks. This was why none of her colleagues in the library had known. She had barely any memory of her parents now, relying instead on the stories Mimi told her throughout her childhood. These stories were never about the car crash, of course. Instead, they were about when her mother was a little girl and how very like her mother she—Jess—was. The stories would generally finish with a rhapsody about what an extraordinary blessing it was for Mimi to have the privilege and pleasure of raising her daughter’s child. To turn such a cataclysmic event into an opportunity for something good was typical of Mimi’s relentlessly positive outlook. Despite Mimi’s best efforts, though, these tragic events scarred Jess’s impressionable four-year-old psyche, teaching the tiny girl that devastation inevitably followed joy just as night followed day.
As the years passed, there came a time when only Mimi, Jess, and Hannah—Jess’s close friend from school—knew the crash story. Now, it was just Hannah and Jess.
Unlike Jess, Hannah had pulled herself free from the cloying mud of Bourton-on-the-Marsh four years ago; first, heading off backpacking and then staying to set up a brand-new life with her handsome New Zealand vet husband, leaving Jess becalmed in what Hannah referred to as Nowheresville.
At that point, Jess still had Mimi, of course.
Most people would have despaired at Mimi’s terminal diagnosis. Jess did; it confirmed her theory of disaster growing out of happiness. Mimi didn’t. She wouldn’t, and—thanks to her relentlessly positive attitude—even Jess found moments of pure joy in Mimi’s final months. There were weeks, days, sometimes just minutes, when the older woman’s intense euphoria at being alive had infected Jess with a courageous optimism. At other times, the thought of facing the future without Mimi at her side filled her with stark terror. She did her best to put that to one side, to live in the moment, savoring the intensity of the time they had left together. Freed from the grueling treatments that had become futile, Mimi felt better than she had in an age. She made use of the renewed bursts of energy, using the time to clear steadily through decades of collecting, the silting-up with possessions that human beings do, without thought, whenever they live their lives in one place.
Every day Jess arrived home from work to two piles inside the front door, one for the charity shop and one for the dump. Occasionally she protested at Mimi expending her strength on such things, but her grandmother had been adamant.
“The last thing I want is for you to deal with this when I’m gone,” she said repeatedly. But when it came to the books, Jess tried to put her foot down.
“You always told me books were sacred,” she insisted, the first day she came home and found them by the door. Her voice wobbled only very slightly as she fought back sudden tears.
Mimi noticed, of course. She put out her hands and cupped Jess’s face lovingly. In that moment, the tears Jess had kept hidden inside welled up and ran as if they would never stop, making rivers down her cheeks. Mimi cooed words of comfort, kissing her forehead and wiping away the tears with her thumbs.
“Don’t worry, ma chérie,” she had said. “All the books that matter are still here. They are yours to keep, and to take with you wherever you go.”
“But I’m not going anywhere,” Jess protested.
“Not now, but you will, and when you do—when you are ready—you will unpack these boxes and it will be like I am standing there beside you; all our memories, all our precious times together, wrapped up in these books . . . Trust me. You’ll see.”
But Jess did not see. She could not see how nearly thirty precious years spent with Mimi by her side could possibly be contained in the ten smallish boxes, each with Books in Mimi’s distinctive copperplate handwriting on the sealed lids. How could any inanimate object possibly compensate her for the absence of the woman she had centered her life around? God knows she’d learned when she was four that people who constituted your whole life could be ripped away from you in an instant. At thirty-two she should be so much more able than her four-year-old self to make her way in the world alone. Some days—most days—it didn’t feel like it.
Since Mimi died, the ten boxes had remained untouched, crouching in the corner of the newly decluttered sitting room in the little house they had shared for all those years. Jess allowed her grief at the loss to surface only in tiny increments. It was like a caged animal liable to consume her if she gave it too much freedom; and this, her own form of grief management, definitely didn’t include exploring any of the ten boxes—simultaneously her most precious and most distressing possessions.
After the comforting rituals of her lonely evening were done, Jess lay in her cozy, deeply familiar little bedroom, staring at the vast night sky through the skylight. She could have moved into the big room at the front of the house, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. And now she never would, because Mimi was right. There was nothing keeping her here. Being a librarian in Bourton-on-the-Marsh was no longer an option and being a librarian anywhere else was a doubtful ambition; council funding cuts and the digital age were making traditional librarian skills increasingly obsolete. It was a case of evolve or die.
What would she do? And where would she go?
The hours of the night ticked by as she turned the problem this way and that, like a puzzle box, needing examination from every angle, hoping for the nudge or prod that would make it spring open.
By dawn, she knew.
The wait for nine o’clock seemed to last forever. By the time she could legitimately leave, she had polished the old range, done a load of washing, emptied the dishwasher, and swept the kitchen floor, even getting the little brush out to go under the dresser. A fitted kitchen would be easier to keep clean but not nearly as cozy, she and Mimi had always agreed.
Finally, the radio announced the nine o’clock news and Jess—her head muzzy with lack of sleep—was off down the high street to the estate agents.
She agreed to get the sale off to a flying start with an open house that Saturday. When slick Dave, the manager who wore a shiny suit and a large gold signet ring, proudly announced there would be at least six couples attending, she decided to absent herself rather than see strangers peering critically at her home. She couldn’t bear to think of them turning up their noses at the solid deal furniture, the worn kitchen table where she and Mimi had sat to cook, eat, and do homework over the years, where Mimi had taught her how to knit and sew—Jess had been terrible at both—and where she and Mimi had just sat to talk, cradling mugs of tea, on rainy afternoons or late into the night. These potential buyers might dismiss her life together with Mimi, and that was fine, but she wasn’t going to stay and watch them do it.
For a change Betsy, the battered old scarlet Mini Cooper that Mimi had adored, started immediately and by the time the first viewers arrived, Jess was miles away, driving with no purpose in mind other than to spend the day enjoying her thoughts and the glorious late winter sunshine, with its promise of spring.
Her instinct took her toward the West Country.
She had such happy memories of holidays there with Mimi, eating fish and chips on the seafront, watching as the seagulls regarded them beadily with their sharp yellow eyes and wheeled above and around them with menacing intent. When Mimi became ill, the camping holidays had stopped. There were plenty of great places you could get to and back in a day. When Mimi became too frail to walk the world shrank again, this time to places providing an easy drive, a nice garden with level access, and an on-site tea room serving a decent cup of tea.
That was then. Freedom beckoned today. Within a couple of hours, she was passing Bristol and then continuing on down to Exeter, wending her way through Dartmoor toward the little fishing villages on the south coast, shedding care and responsibility as she went. The weather was ominous now, though; the scudding clouds were crowding together, blotting out the light in the thin, blue February sky. Jess came to the brow of the hill she and Mimi loved for the spectacular view, but today she climbed to the peak, the engine laboring; and then she groaned. There was a tailback going right into the valley and beyond. It wasn’t just slow, it was stationary. In a reflex action, Jess indicated left and swooped into a side turning she had never noticed before.
Chapter Two
Middlemass 1 mile, Portneath 5 miles, read the sign as she whizzed past it.
“Right,” said Jess aloud. “We’re going to Middlemass until that mess sorts itself out.”
Quickly the road narrowed, and she found herself bowling along a lane with passing places, bounded by a steep bank and hedge either side. Hopefully, there would be a café or a pub. She could do with a coffee after her early start.
She turned a corner in the narrow lane, coming unexpectedly across a village in the valley below. Initially it looked unhelpfully small—nothing more than a hamlet—but then the road widened, scattered houses became cheek-by-jowl, and she found herself at a terrace of pretty Georgian buildings; the first three housing a launderette, a dentist’s, and a strange-looking shop selling metal detectors, each with its own bay window. The shop next door, which proclaimed itself the post office with its bold white lettering on a red background, was closed and empty. There was a large For Sale sign fixed in the window.
In contrast to its emptiness, right at the end of the parade there was a general-purpose shop with a metal rack of potted plants outside, hyacinths and cyclamens, the only plants to welcome—or at least tolerate—the chilly February wind. The shop window was packed high with boxes of soap powder, tins of soup, and—randomly—a tangle of shrimping nets. There was a double buggy, parked outside the door, with an older child at the front and a baby sleeping in the back. The older child—a boy of perhaps two years old—was completely absorbed in trying to work out how to undo his harness. He looked like he might succeed at any moment, Jess noted with mild concern as she crawled past, checking her mirrors anxiously.
On the opposite side, Jess noticed, there was a pair of tiny, semi-detached cottages crouched on the edge of the road, their pale green–painted front doors no more than five feet high. They were like doll’s houses, she thought, each with dinky and impressively tidy front gardens, planted with serried rows of crocuses and the first green shoots of daffodils already pushing their way up past them.
Jess wondered whether to stop and inquire about a café, but the two older women in headscarves, coming almost simultaneously out of the neighboring doors, looked fierce and she didn’t dare.
Rather than reaching some vibrant epicenter with the facilities Jess wanted, the settlement then petered out, until, rounding another corner, she arrived at an enchantingly pretty duck pond, edged with rushes. It was inhabited by a surprisingly large number of ducks, some of them snowy white, and two of them apparently just about to launch themselves kamikaze-style into the road.
Worried about running them over, Jess slammed on the brakes, fumbled a gear change, and stalled, right on top of a branch in the road which took it either side of the pond.
She couldn’t be worse placed, with the little car straddling the junction. She tried the ignition, which spluttered encouragingly and then died. So close. She tried again, getting a more half-hearted splutter this time, and again, nothing. Damn. She must have flooded the engine or whatever that thing was, she vaguely knew about. She was pretty sure you had to wait a few minutes and then try again. It would be fine.
She got out and contemplated pushing the car to the side of the road, but—at barely five feet tall and under eight stone—she had no chance of moving it on her own. It couldn’t matter, surely? This was such a tiny place and the houses clustered around the pond all had a blank, closed air.
Forcing herself to quell the anxiety rising in her chest, she looked around her.
She hadn’t seen a red telephone box for years in Bourton-on-the-Marsh. This one, on the grassy verge studded with primroses, had a For Sale sign lashed to it. For sale to who, exactly? Surely, even in this rural backwater, they were no longer in use? Everyone used smartphones, even Mimi. Especially Mimi.
Out of curiosity she pulled open the phone box’s heavy door.
The stench of stale urine hit her like a punch in the face. She reeled back, letting go of the handle to cover her nose and mouth.
“Ugh, grim,” she said aloud faintly, gasping for a lungful of clean air as—thankfully—the door slowly closed.
Backing away, her feet pitching her off-balance on the boggy earth, she nearly fell backward up the steep verge.
Regaining her balance, she climbed up the primrose-studded bank, which was verdant with grass and definitely squelchy. Great. Her shoes were now rimed with mud. A bit of additional height improved the view further, though, and despite her cold, wet feet Jess was enchanted. The pond, with its weeping willow and bulrushes, was surrounded by an extraordinarily picturesque array of houses; she admired a handsome Victorian villa, with a grand porch and stained glass in its front door. It stood proud, its formal symmetry marred by an overgrown lawn littered with a scooter and a discarded bike. Next to it she could see a sweet little red-brick house with a charming cottage garden and frilly green-painted bargeboards outlining its eaves. Beside that was a rambling, gnarled old cottage with blackened beams, wonky windows, and a shaggy thatch that had seen better days. Inside, she could hear a small dog barking insistently and metronomically. He might have been barking at Jess, but she suspected he had been barking for longer than that. He had probably forgotten what started him off and now he had forgotten to stop.
Completing her circle of observations, she turned to look at the house behind the wall she was leaning on and her heart skipped a beat.
The cottage was ridiculously picture-postcard cute and neglected, all at the same time. It sat at a comfortable distance from the telephone box. Like a child’s drawing in its simplicity, the whitewashed cottage had a low wooden front door in the middle with two pretty casement windows either side and two more directly above. Jess was breathing fast. It was magical. Mesmerizing. The garden was overgrown but already, delicate snowdrops and crocuses bejeweled the overgrown grass in a circle under the naked magnolia tree. A bare rosebush was splaying inelegantly with a sagging stem, leaning gratefully on the stone wall, much like Jess was doing. She felt the sharp flint and the rough mortar beneath her fingers, noticing the rose had hooked her with its thorns as if it were drawing her in. Easing herself free and looking around guiltily to see if anyone was watching, she pushed open the peeling wooden gate, letting loose a screech of protest from the rusty hinges. She was drawn, as if compelled, down a narrow brick path, green with moss.
Her jeans bottoms and shoes were quickly soaked by the long grass collapsing defeated onto the path, and she squelched slightly as she arrived at the stone slab steps leading to the front door. It was sheltered from the weather by a simple wooden canopy with a leaded roof but, even so, the heavy wrought-iron knocker was rusted, leaving fox-red tears streaking the peeling green paintwork. She raised a hand to knock, and then noticed the door was ajar.
Without thinking, she pushed. It opened with a creak and a young woman standing leaning on the wall inside visibly started.
“Yikes! Hi!” she said, brightly, springing upright, her hands flying to smooth precisely cut bobbed blonde hair, framing a sweet, wide, childlike face.
Jess’s initial impressions were of a low-ceilinged, oak-beamed room with an unlit wood-burning stove in the fireplace. There was a worn, pink carpet on the floor and the whole room smelled noticeably of damp. Behind the woman was a doorway to another room which seemed to be the kitchen, and beyond that, a window giving a glimpse of the back garden.
“I’m Lottie,” the young woman said, coming forward, hand outstretched. “Do you not have a brochure?” She glanced down at Jess’s empty hands as if puzzled.
“A brochure for what?”
“The sales details for the house,” said Lottie, putting her head on one side.
The For Sale sign on the phone box at the front made a lot more sense now.
“Is it yours?” asked Jess.
“God no,” said Lottie, with a shudder. “I wouldn’t be seen dead . . . It’s in a right state.”
“So, you’re the estate agent?” said Jess.
“I am!” Lottie agreed, happily. “Uh-oh, hang on, I wasn’t supposed to say that—the bit about it being in a right state.”
“It’s refreshingly candid,” Jess said, her lips quirking up in a quick smile.
“This is my first open house,” admitted Lottie. “Actually, it’s my first week in the job. Things haven’t been going that well, if I’m honest.” Lottie had a faraway look on her face. Jess guessed there might have been a few unfortunate examples of Lottie’s straight-talking that week.
“I thought it was the phone box for sale,” Jess said.
“I know! Right? Actually, that might explain why no one’s looked round the house . . .”
“No one?”
“Nope. Uh-oh, hang on, can we pretend I didn’t say that either?” Lottie looked stricken.
“Don’t worry, anyhow, I was just passing, but—the funny thing is—I might be looking for a house to buy.”
“Perfect!” Lottie beamed. “Can I show you round?” she clasped her hands together pleadingly. “It’ll be good practice.”
“I probably can’t afford it. I mean, I don’t know what houses go for around here, but I doubt . . .” Jess took the proffered sales details and glanced at the price. “Hmm. Actually . . .” she said, looking around the little room they were standing in with renewed interest. “I kind of could, maybe . . . Go on then. A tour would be lovely.”
Lottie looked thrilled and opened her mouth to reply.
“Is that your car?” came a deep voice, loaded with irritation, from beyond the open door.
The figure darkening the doorway was well built—actually, very well built—with broad shoulders and wavy, dark hair, silhouetted against the light.
“Ah,” said Jess with a start. She had forgotten. “The Mini is mine,” she admitted.
“So, what do you call that, exactly?” said the man, coming into the room. “Does that pass for parking where you come from?”
“I—no—I’m not parked . . .”
“You’re telling me. That’s some rare talent, you’ve got there, blocking two roads simultaneously. Please tell me you’re not considering moving in. I dread to think you’ll be doing that all the time.”
“I am thinking of moving in, actually,” said Jess, who wasn’t at all. Not until that moment, anyhow. “In fact, I am right in the middle of a viewing, if you don’t mind.”
“I do, rather,” he said, mockingly echoing her tone. “Could you possibly park and then view—if it’s not too much trouble?”
He had her there. “Actually, I might have broken down. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. If you would be kind enough to give me a moment, I was just waiting for it to . . . get over itself,” she finished lamely, giving Lottie a sheepish smile and then brushed past the man hurrying back to her car.
“You were waiting for your car to ‘get over itself’?” he asked, incredulous as he followed her down the path.
She ignored him and unlocked the door, climbing in. Saying a silent prayer, she turned the ignition. Nothing.
“Let me,” he said brusquely, holding the door open for her to get out.
Watching him climb in was like watching a clown riding one of those miniature bicycles. His knees had to go either side of the wheel, with the roof barely clearing the top of his head.
“You’ve run out of petrol,” he observed, scathingly.
“Ha! That’s where you’re wrong,” she snapped. “The petrol gauge is broken. It reads ‘empty’ when it’s full.”
“I’m guessing it reads ‘empty’ when it’s empty too,” he said.
There was no challenging his logic. Then she remembered: her routine was to fill the car at the same time as her Saturday trip to the supermarket. It was an unshakable habit of hers. She used to do it with Mimi. She would have done it today, only this time she had set off on her road trip without even stopping to think. How could she have been so idiotic? The uncommon spontaneity she had congratulated herself on this morning was punishing her now.
Aware of being watched by this frankly rather judgmental man, she suppressed the urge to strike her forehead with the palm of her hand, but his smug countenance made clear that her facial expressions had already told the story.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Perhaps you could direct me to the nearest garage? ...
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