Starting over, p.1
Starting Over, page 1
Starting Over
Wendy Lewis
© Wendy Lewis 2014
Wendy Lewis has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Extract from Town and Country by Wendy Lewis
CHAPTER ONE
A strange, fleeting moment of foreboding and black despair swept over me as I met Martin’s eyes across the breakfast table. This was supposed to be our new start, an attempt to repair our dwindling finances and a marriage that I felt, anyway, was beginning to go nowhere. He must have noticed something for he stretched out a warm hand and covered mine.
‘It’ll be all right, Fiona. This is just a slight hiccup in the proceedings. I will make it all right. It will all be sorted out in no time at all and we will be back in the cottage.’
I wanted to believe him - I really did but, before I could reply, there was an unnerving cracking and splintering sound from outside, followed by a rumbling crash which made us both flinch.
His mouth tightened slightly as he rose from the table. ‘I’ll just go and see what that was.’
As I got up to go with him, Rory, our red miniature smooth-haired dachshund, heard the postman’s van and leapt up onto the bench seat which ran round the living room area at one end of the mobile home, from there he could see out of the window. He was joined by Lola, a silver dapple smooth-hair, the other member of the pack; more than one dachshund constitutes a pack we had found. The mobile home - we had quickly tired of this mouthful and demoted it to a caravan - was parked in the orchard which ran up the side of the hill. This acre of mature apple trees, with damsons and greengages growing in its surrounding hedge had been a huge plus point in our decision to purchase the old cottage.
The two dogs began a deafening tirade of canine abuse directed towards the postman, through the window. He glanced up at the two raging, fang-filled faces, then left the elastic-banded pile of mail perched on the gate post. The wind from his passing van, as he pulled away, lifted the bundle just enough to ensure that it slid off and flopped down into the muddy gateway.
Martin had slipped out of the door, before the dogs realised it was open, and gone across to the cottage. On the way he picked up the mail and absently placed it back on the gatepost; his entire concentration was on the house ahead of him…or what was left of it.
I concentrated on trying to pacify the dogs who gave up as soon as the postman was out of sight behind the trees, only for him to re-appear halfway up the hill, where he paused to exchange a few words with John, the farmer from next door, who was checking the sheep he was running in the field adjoining the orchard. I watched them turn towards our cottage and didn’t think it was necessary for them both to be pointing at it, but I suppose it was quite a novelty, most people around here were renovating their houses: Martin was managing to demolish parts of ours. It needed larger rooms, he had said.
This move to Deepwell Cottage had followed two miserable years during which the business of our small pub had declined, and Martin had helped it sink by gradually drinking more of the whisky than we were selling. Situated right out in the countryside, the drinking and driving ban had seriously reduced the number of customers and we had finally sold up while there was still some equity in the place, and moved to the cottage which had been empty for eighteen months. The idea was that we would do it up and sell at a substantial profit. Then move on to do the same again, hopefully in the same area as this move put us much closer to Martin’s eighty year old mother, Lily who, in spite of gradually going blind with macular degeneration, still insisted on living alone in her bungalow. Martin intended to do most of the work on the cottage himself…he watched a lot of house-renovation programmes on the television. When we had arrived, four weeks ago, the place was at least habitable and kept warm by a solid fuel Rayburn in the kitchen, a bit messy to operate, but cosy.
The wind rocked the caravan slightly as I collected the plates and took them over to the sink. I straightened the cushions which the dogs had disarranged on the bench seat, and then ran water into the sink, conscious of the fact that all of these actions were displacement activity to defer the moment when I would have to look out of the window which faced the cottage.
I watched the water level in the sink carefully, and turned off the tap when the left hand side was two inches below the rim. The right hand side was four inches below the rim, which made for rather awkward washing up in the left half of the sink to benefit from the deeper water. The reason for this was the argument which Martin had had with the men who delivered the caravan. He had quite a cutting tongue when roused and could be slightly scary, especially when he’d had a few drinks.
The men had suggested that his chosen site was too steep; he had insisted that it would not be a problem, with the result that after dropping the lounge end of our temporary home directly onto the muddy ground, they had jacked up the bedroom end to its full extent, which wasn’t enough and resulted in a fall of eighteen inches from the lounge to the bedroom. Martin had shouted at them, insisting that they place paving slabs under the extended legs to raise that end. They had shouted back, saying that he should have provided a sensible base in the first place, and got into their low-loader and driven away, leaving him standing in the orchard waving a fist at their departing vehicle. The driver’s hand had come out of the window with two fingers raised and Martin had stormed into the caravan, staggering slightly on the sloping floor, and demanded that I write to the firm and complain.
‘Why me? Why can’t you write to them?’ I had asked.
‘Because you’ll be better at it. By the time I have finished with them, they’ll never come back,’ he said.
They never did, anyway.
‘Don’t worry, my love. It will only be for six weeks or so, then the cottage will be ready to move back into,’ he had promised.
He came back through the orchard gate, picking up the mail on the way. Before he could shut the door behind him, the dogs escaped and set off after the postman - very ambitious of them because he was at least three miles away by now. Fortunately Martin had shut the gate and they had to make do with investigating an old rabbit hole under the hedge.
‘You let them out. If they get stuck, you can dig them out,’ I said.
‘Oh! They’ll be all right. If they can get in, they can get out,’ he said.
‘Okay, so what was the bang?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, really. Just a loose bit came down.’
‘It sounded like quite a big bit.’
‘Yes, well it would probably have had to come down anyway.’
‘How big?’
‘Well, part of the end wall, actually.’
‘The end wall!’ I did look out of the window now. It saved a few minutes of questioning him as to which end wall.
We had fallen in love with this place when we had first seen it. It still had the old well in the front garden. Perched halfway up a hill overlooking a wooded valley and small river, the cottage was built of stone with a rather tired-looking thatched roof. On the ridge of the roof, the thatcher had fashioned what must once have been a proud cock pheasant which, by the time we bought the cottage looked as if it had lowered its head to peck at grain, and not made it up again. The wind had worn away its tail-feathers to a stump. Now it had vanished. And so had the ridge it was standing on. I had wanted to have the thatch re-done, and we had spent an evening arguing the merits of beauty over practicality, with him quoting fire risks and expensive insurance at me. In the end, I had reluctantly agreed to a new slate roof.
Martin had spent the three weeks after we had moved in, crouched over the kitchen table drawing plans for the modernisation, and pacing round the house measuring things, and grumbling at my inability to comprehend the brilliant nature of his design for a completely new drainage system.
With his new-found expertise as a builder, he had taken a sledge-hammer and demolished the wall which divided the two small reception rooms, to make one large sitting room which would look out over the valley. I suppose it was pure luck, really, that we had decided to shop in the nearby town the following afternoon, and taken the dogs with us.
We had arrived home to find John, the farmer and our nearest neighbour, parked outside in his ‘pick-up’ truck, waiting for us.
‘You can come and stay with us while you get sorted out,’ he said.
‘That’s very kind of you, but we don’t mind a bit of dust,’ I said.
‘There won’t be much dust,’ he said. ‘The rain’ll soon settle that - but you’re going to find it a bit draughty with that hole in the roof.’
My stomach had somersaulted. Martin had gone pale and said: ‘Oh my God!’
‘Apart from that, the cottage was pretty sound,’ John said. ‘Thatch needed re-doing of course, but I would have thought the timbers were okay. You’ll have to sue your surveyor. He should have insisted on putting in an RSJ. Anyway, I must get on. We do bed and breakfast at the farm and we have nobody in at the moment. Betty says you are welcome to stay with us till you’re sorted. We don’t mind dogs.’
I’d wrenched my eyes away from the unbelievable mess in front of me: ‘Thank you, John, and thank Betty for me. It’s very kind of you, but I think we’ll take a room at the pub for tonight while we sort things out.’
Apart from his initial remark, Martin hadn’t spoken. He gave John a rather sickly smile as he climbed into the pick-up and started the engine. John drove a few feet before stopping and winding down the window: ‘Ring Harry Pearce, he’s in the book. He’s got a JCB and will help clear that lot up.’ He waved, and pulled away.
‘Well, we’d better see what we can salvage in the way of clothes and toothbrushes, then,’ I said, to try to bring Martin out of his state of shock.
‘Aren’t you going to shout at me?’ he asked. His eyes flicked to the sledgehammer still propped beside the back door.
‘What’s the point? And, anyway, it looks as if it’s going to rain. Oh, and what’s an Irish Jay?’
‘Rolled steel joist,’ he’d muttered, leaving me not much the wiser.
After giving them a short run, I put the dogs back in the car and we scrambled about in the ruins of our new home, rescuing things and beginning to understand how a bombed out refugee in London must have felt during the war. We’d managed to unearth the wardrobe, which was still intact, and save some of our clothes, but the ominous creaks and groans from the upper floor soon had us out of the building and driving up to the Wheatsheaf Inn in the village. I’d sorted out our accommodation while Martin sat in the corner of the bar with a stiff whisky, his mobile phone and a copy of the Yellow Pages open at Caravans, Motorhomes and Trailers.
We had spent that evening in the pub, trying to avoid searching questions from the villagers as to why a cottage which had stood quite happily for four hundred years, had suddenly collapsed just after we had bought it. They ‘couldn’t understand it. It had always been so sound’. We learned quite a lot about the generations of villagers who had lived there over the centuries. It was haunted, of course, by old Davey who had hanged himself in the well. Nobody seemed to know why he had done this and some put it down to ‘attention seeking.’ It seemed he was still at it, and you could hear him moaning and the rope creaking as he swung round in the breeze, every Michaelmas.
‘When’s Michaelmas?’ Martin had whispered to me.
‘I don’t know…something to do with daisies, I think,’ I’d answered.
‘I said when, not what,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Oh, never mind.’
We had moved into the caravan with a sigh of relief, as soon as it had been delivered the next day.
***
Now, a week later, I dragged my eyes from the pile of rubble that had been part of the end wall, and turned away from the window as Martin moved towards the door of the caravan, carrying his mobile phone.
‘The reception’s better out here,’ he said as he went down the steps. He had built the steps using breeze blocks and a brand new, expensive spirit level. They were absolutely level and he was very proud of this, but viewed from a few feet away, their ‘absolute levelness’ only accentuated the lopsided nature of the dwelling they led up to.
He came back after a few minutes.
‘I’ve rung Harry. He said he thought that might happen - wonderful thing hindsight. He’s on his way up here with a couple of blokes, a digger and some wooden props. We’re going to have to shore-up the whole thing before we start re-building the wall. We’d better stay away from it till then. I don’t think it’s very safe.’
‘That’s probably the understatement of the year,’ I said.
A sudden burst of excited barking reminded me that the dogs were out and I went to collect them before Harry arrived and they felt duty-bound to attack his JCB. They had already had one heart-stopping go at it when he had come to help with clearing out the collapsed thatch. The bonfire that had made was still smoking slightly in the corner of the orchard.
As I pulled the unwilling dogs back into the caravan a rather unpleasant thought struck me. Up until now we had been using the bathroom at the house, rather nervously I admit, but it was downstairs and was a sort of lean-to addition to the original cottage, but it was situated on the end wall, the corner of which had collapsed. Now that small luxury was out of bounds we would be reduced to the porta-loo in the caravan, and I knew whose job it was going to be to empty that - but where?
I mentioned this to Martin who was standing at the garden gate waiting for Harry.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘I know, I’ll lift up the drain cover, you can empty it down there. Don’t worry darling, it won’t be for long.’
I just knew it was going to be my job. ‘How long?’
‘Just six weeks, or so.’
Where had that ‘or so’ come from? ‘No,’ I said.
‘No, what?’
‘I am not marching down to the drain every day carrying that thing, for a start its heavy.’
‘You don’t have to lift the whole thing. Look, I’ll show you,’ he said.
‘I don’t want a lesson in loo-emptying. Can’t you plumb the toilet in the caravan into the sewer, if you know where it is? Surely you only need a pipe or something.’ I’m a bit vague about the finer workings of sewers: ‘And the shower,’ I remembered.
‘This is a nuisance. I had hoped we wouldn’t have to use those. I didn’t really want to spend the time on plumbing that lot in,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to dig a trench to the main sewer.’
‘Get Harry to do it with his digger,’ I suggested.
‘No, I can do it. Don’t need to pay Harry to do something I can manage.’
Well, I thought, he couldn’t do a lot of harm digging a trench.
CHAPTER TWO
The hill leading up into the village was steep, very steep and the tarmac surface was pitted and worn away by the effects of torrential rain which had swept down it over successive winters, breaking away the edges of the road as the water raced to the bridge and through a drain into the river. My pedalling became slower and slower until after standing on the pedals to force the last three turns, I gave up, got off the bike and walked. Martin had laughed and said I was mad when I insisted on buying the old ‘sit-up-and-beg’ ladies bicycle at the antiques salvage yard we had once visited. The bike was identical to the one my mother used to ride and which she had passed down to me as soon as I was off the three-wheeler. Dad had fixed wooden blocks to the pedals so that I could reach them and I had loved that bicycle. I loved this one for its nostalgic properties, but not quite so much for its ride-ability. It was somewhat deficient in gears, but it was going to get me fit.
As I struggled up the last quarter of a mile to the village square, and the baker’s shop where already I fancied I could smell the new bread they baked on the premises, Martin drew up alongside me in the car and wound down the window.
‘I’ve got to go and see a man about some tiles,’ he said. ‘Can you make sure you are back by ten-thirty, the Kubota’s coming; tell him to put it in the orchard.’
‘Kubota?’ I queried, struggling to take enough air into my sore lungs to speak. But I was too slow, he had wound up the window and driven on to avoid the tractor heading down the hill towards us. The driver waved to me and smiled at my bike. Here we go again, I thought. Between us we were rapidly turning into a source of amusement and entertainment for the locals. I patted the bike on its wickerwork shopping basket and told it not to worry - I loved it.
