LITMIR.BIZ

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lanes which skirt the boundaries of private estates of long-dead lords of the manor; lanes which make long detours seeking out old stone bridges, following the packhorse routes, from market to market. Mark preferred the satnav, but as we got close to our destination it let him down.

      ‘Where the hell are we? You’ve got the map.’

      ‘Don’t shout at me. This was your idea, traipsing around the middle of nowhere looking for a bolthole!’

      Silence.

      Me. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that.’ I turned the map upside down and squinted. ‘I think it’s back the way we came.’

      Mark attempted a three-point turn in a gateway with a ditch on either side. He wasn’t an angry person when I met him – purposeful was how other people used to describe him – but the allegations which had led to his dismissal had really got to him and his fuse was shorter, even by then. We crawled slowly back up the hill until we saw the footpath sign with just the symbol of a man with a pack on his back and a stick in his hand and no named destination.

      We turned in and Mark stopped the car, took his hands off the steering wheel and held them in the air, like a priest. There was no sight of the cottage itself; it was not that, rather it was the circle of the world running in a blue rim around us which left us breathless. Far in the distance, hills upon hills shadowed each other to the north and the west until somewhere, far out of sight, they sank into the Atlantic. The closer ridges on the other side of the valley were forested and in that heavy autumn light, the conifers were charcoal etchings, smudged against the dust gold of the recently harvested fields below them. To the east, the amber land was mainly scorched pasture, hedged and squared by centuries of farming and behind us, the bleak scree of the Crag.

      ‘Have we arrived yet, Granny R?’

      ‘Yes, Lucien, we have arrived.’

      The track ahead of us was a dotted line awaiting our signature. There it is, we said to each other, as we spotted first the barn, then the mottled red brick chimneys rising up from the Victorian stone cottage, and suddenly we were children together, going on holiday and the squabbling in the back seat suddenly stops as the cry goes up from the first one to see the sea. There it is! Look at it! We’re here! We signed up the moment we stepped out of the car, but we didn’t know what for.

      The estate agent was waiting for us, propped up against a bright red 4x4 and smoking.

      ‘Shouldn’t do that really,’ he said, squashing the cigarette under his deck shoes, ‘not with the fire risk nowadays.’

      We shook hands. He seemed to me to stare a little too long at Mark, then withdraw his hand a little too quickly. I felt the familiar increase in my heartbeat; there had been times during the Mark’s hearing in London when I had been very afraid of what people might do. There had been other cases like his in the press, in other towns when the public had forgotten the concept of due process and taken things into their own hands. I looked over my shoulder, back up the drive. Maybe there is nowhere to run to, I thought.

      But the estate agent had turned his attention to his car and the moment was gone. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ he joked over-loudly, stroking the bonnet, apologising for the state of it, what with the car washes closed and the hosepipe ban.

      Breathing deeply to control my voice, I humoured him. ‘Think we’re more likely to get a donkey. What per cent did they say petrol had gone up this year?’ I asked.

      ‘One hundred and twenty!’ He called the words as if it was a darts score.

      Mark engaged in manly talk about clearance room and low ratio gears; I could see he was impatient to look around, but he was good like that, putting himself out to make other people feel at ease and his charm was dismissing whatever doubts the estate agent might have had. That was what he did with me when we first met, the morning after a party, in the last term of the last year, exams over and the future waiting somewhere beyond the overdraft and cleaning the fridge to get the deposit back. I was sleeping in an armchair, someone else’s overcoat covering my bare shoulders, and when I woke up there was a tall, dark, slightly foreign-looking gentleman offering to get me a coffee. He came back and never left me again. We spent that night together, we spent the rest of term together, and we altered our plans and spent the summer together. Four months later I was five months pregnant and we were at the registry office. We went from young to old very quickly.

      The slam of a door brought me back. The estate agent was getting the details out of his car, disturbing a lone, white butterfly which had settled on a late-flowering buddleia by the gate. Everything is out of season this year, I thought, and where has the time gone, I wondered, all caught up in the past, and look at us now, moving to the country as middle-aged people do. In some odd, instinctive gesture, I put my hand on my stomach. ‘I love children,’ I remember Mark saying when I told him I was pregnant.

      Lucien climbed out of the back of the car, smelling of crumbling chocolate and hot skin. Still sleepy, he held my hand and pointed to a grey squirrel, skulking up the trunk of the great oak tree. Our eyes followed it up through the branches until we lost it amongst the gilt-edged leaves, light falling like dappled water on dry ground at our feet. A police car or ambulance was making its way up a main road somewhere over towards Middleton.

      ‘You can’t always hear the road,’ said the estate agent, keen to market the dream. ‘It depends on the wind.’

      ‘But that must be westerly,’ I concluded, taking my evidence from both the sun and the Welsh hills.

      ‘Westerly? Probably,’ he conceded. ‘That’s certainly where the prevailing wind comes from. But I bet you can hear a pin drop at night.’

      Screech owls, I thought, and barking foxes.

      I asked where the nearest neighbour was. Oh, he was saying, miles away and can’t see another house; but in truth, I was already feeling the distance between this place and the rest of the world and wondering if I could manage that. Maybe I looked to him like someone who wanted to escape. Much later, Sister Amelia would certainly reach the same conclusion the moment she met me.

      A heavy velvet curtain hung inside the front door, which the agent held to one side for us, like a stagehand. It didn’t take long to look around. There was the back passage, the kitchen and Rayburn unchanged since the 1960s, Mark’s study – well, the room that he made into his study – and the little sitting room with a wood-burning stove, the one which we had to replace after the chimney fire. From there, we went upstairs and crowded into the small bedroom and the tiny bathroom and then in here, the main bedroom with the view, this alchemy of a view. Well trained, the estate agent left us to it and Mark felt for my hand and pulled me closer, kissed me once, slowly, on the cheek and I felt him breathe in deeply, as if he could taste oxygen for the first time in a very long while.

      ‘Just about enough room for Angie and Lucien,’ I said to Mark as we stepped apart. We both knew my daughter well enough to know that our home would always need to be big enough for both of them, and not just physically.

      ‘I love it,’ said Mark. I hadn’t heard him as enthusiastic about anything since before the tribunal. ‘A place to start again,’ he said.

      Lucien loved it too, running up and down the creaking staircase, opening cupboards in the kitchen, peering into the fireplace. The sunlight coming through the bay window was showing up the cracks in the banisters, the stains on the carpet, the damp patches on the ceiling, but the place itself felt solid as though it could contain whatever we poured into it.

      ‘Ready to take a look outside?’

      We followed the agent up to the ‘Stone outbuilding with electricity and water, currently used as a garage/barn. Scope for development’. If the old lady had owned a car, it was clear she had never put it away in there, jumbled as it was with stepladders and spades, broken sun-loungers and coal buckets without handles. No problem to upgrade it for a holiday let, we agreed; no problem to convert it into temporary accommodation for displaced family.

      Along one side of the barn were neatly stacked and recently split logs.

      ‘How

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