Kitabı oku: «In a Cottage In a Wood», sayfa 4
A black Labrador bounds in after him, heading for Neve and burying its face in her crotch.
‘Oh!’ she laughs and fusses with its ears in an attempt to distract it.
‘Jarvis!’ the man barks. The dog, ignoring him, leans its considerable weight against Neve’s legs, almost pushing her over. She grins but when she glances up, sees that Laura Meade is bright red. She keeps looking between Neve and the man, and the receptionist, one after the other. Then she seems to gather herself.
‘Richard,’ she says coolly to the man. ‘Didn’t we cover everything earlier?’
‘Don’t suppose I left my bloody phone in here?’ Richard’s voice is rich and fruity, like an old Shakespearean actor’s.
Laura looks at the receptionist, who is taking all this in with bright-eyed avidity. She shakes her head.
‘I’m afraid not,’ says Laura.
‘Bugger. Better try the bank then,’ he says with feeling. And then he’s gone.
Neve sees a look pass between Laura and the woman on reception, whose eyebrows are almost at her hairline, and wonders what she isn’t getting about this whole scenario.
‘Apologies for that,’ says Laura now, gesturing towards some double doors behind the reception desk. ‘Do come through.’
Neve follows the solicitor into her office, and the door is shut.
10
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ says Neve five minutes later. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to swear. Sorry.’
She picks up the glass of water she was offered on arrival into the office and puts it down again, sloshing a little onto her trousers as she does so.
Laura Meade regards her with an expression she can’t quite read.
‘I assure you, I’m not,’ she says. ‘Look, I appreciate this is a shock. It is why I wanted you to be here in person. I thought this had to be a face-to-face conversation, rather than being discussed by letter or over the phone.’
‘But how?’ Neve blurts out, her voice too loud. ‘I mean, how can she have given me a fucking cottage? Sorry. But how? She didn’t even know me.’
Laura nods patiently.
‘It’s a special type of bequest,’ she says, ‘that can be made separately from a will. It applies when someone dies intestate, like Isabelle did, and is known as donatio mortis causa.’ She pauses. ‘Basically, it’s a deathbed gift.’
Their eyes meet and both look away at this uncomfortable term then Laura continues crisply. ‘There are a few basic requirements for this to be legally binding,’ she says, ‘and they have all been met, however unusual the circumstances may be.’
‘But why me?’ says Neve after a moment.
Laura sighs. ‘We can only guess that she wanted to make this bequest to the last person she saw before she took her life.’
Neve thought of the envelope, clutched in Isabelle’s thin, white hand.
She never even saw it fall to the ground when she’d dropped it a couple of minutes later. The shock of the other woman climbing up and throwing herself into the cold, dark water had thrown it violently from her mind. ‘What exactly was in the envelope?’ she says.
Laura lifts a coffee cup to her lips and takes a sip before placing it carefully back on its coaster.
‘It contained the deeds to the cottage, plus a written note. You may remember she also recorded a message into her phone, confirming your name, just before …’ she clears her throat ‘… just before she did it.’
‘God,’ says Neve quietly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’ After a moment, she adds, ‘Did you know her?’
Laura seems to lose her professional veneer for a moment and makes an anguished face.
‘We were at school together, years ago, but we weren’t really good friends. She was …’ she pauses. ‘She ran with a bit of a different crowd. I hadn’t heard from her in years. Then … well, then we received this.’
Neve chews her lip.
‘I can’t take it, anyway,’ she says.
‘Why not?’ Laura slightly tips her head to the side.
‘Because!’ Neve lets out a humourless, stressed laugh. ‘Because it’s not right. And what do her family say? Don’t they mind?’
Laura looks down at her skirt and brushes something off before looking up at Neve again. The shutters are back down now.
‘She only has a brother,’ she says. ‘And …’ she pauses. ‘I have no idea whether he wanted it or not.’
Neve shakes her head in wonder.
‘I just can’t understand why someone would do this though, with a complete stranger. I mean, why not leave it to, I don’t know, Barnardo’s, or Battersea Dogs Home or something? Why a random person on a bridge?’
Laura sits back in her seat with a sigh.
‘We can’t possibly know what was going through her head now,’ she says, wearily. ‘But she clearly had a desire not to be alone when she killed herself. Maybe she just wanted to say thank you, retrospectively.’
‘Well, it’s the saddest bloody thing I’ve ever heard.’ Neve’s eyes fill with hot tears and she swipes them away, furiously. ‘I wasn’t even that nice to her,’ she says. ‘I was impatient to get home. All I did was say I’d stand her a night bus and ask where her coat was.’
‘Well,’ says Laura, her gaze fixed on Neve’s face. ‘All we can assume is that this is more kindness than she would have had otherwise. Maybe it was enough.’
There’s a pause. Neve swallows and finds a tissue in her handbag, which she uses to blow her nose, more loudly than she intended.
Laura pushes an A4 padded envelope across the table towards her.
‘This really is happening quite legally, Neve,’ she says in a gentle voice. ‘You own Petty Whin Cottage and everything in it. It’s all yours now.’
11
Neve walks robotically back to the station afterwards, all thoughts of having a wander around Salisbury and finding somewhere cheap for lunch forgotten. She has a strong desire to get straight on a train and try and make sense of what has just happened.
She’s lucky with trains and is able to run for the Waterloo-bound one that is just leaving.
Finding a table to herself, she begins to investigate the contents of the envelope. There’s a bundle of papers, including the details of a lease. At the bottom of the envelope there is a small keyring in the shape of a dog, with a grubby suede covering that is worn away in patches, revealing carved wood underneath. It looks ancient, thinks Neve, spreading out the lease document and studying the address.
Petty Whin Cottage
Briarfield
Stubbington Lane
Cador
Near St Piron
Cornwall
Neve reaches for her phone and taps the Google app, before typing the name of the cottage into the search box. There are no entries for the property, but she learns that the odd name comes from a yellow flowering plant native to the area.
Cornwall.
She’s never been there. She’d wanted to ask Laura Meade if the cottage was by the sea, but it didn’t seem right. It might have sounded as though she actually wanted it. But the very word makes her picture blue skies, roses climbing up the front of a whitewashed cottage. Healthy sea air. Her heart rises a little, despite herself.
There isn’t anything much online for Cador, except, worryingly, a headline from the Cornish Times about a drugs bust. Neve assumes it is too tiny for mention, but St Piron seems to be a small town that’s a few miles from Truro.
Next she Googles the name ‘Isabelle Shawcross’ and after a couple of unhelpful entries about an American law professor she sees a news story from a site called West Cornish Life.
Christmas Suicide of Local Woman
A woman has died after apparently jumping into the Thames on 21st December. Isabelle Shawcross, who grew up in the St Piron area of the county, was 34 years old and left no husband or children. It is believed she had been living in Australia for some time before returning to the UK. The police say they are not treating the death as suspicious, but the coroner has yet to fix a date for the inquest. Her brother, local landowner Richard Shawcross, was unavailable for comment.
Searching further, she finds only a black American woman called Isabel Shawcross on Facebook and nothing else.
Bizarre. Isabelle seems to have been someone with almost no internet presence.
Neve finds herself tapping the words ‘cottages for sale, Cornwall’ into Google.
On the Rightmove site a list appears and she begins to scroll through it, quickly finding an astonishing difference in the range of house prices here, from a run-down two-bedroom cottage at £75,000 right up to places going for several million.
But right now, £75,000 sounds like a miraculous, almost magical amount of money. All of a sudden, Isabelle’s last words appear in her head … ‘And keep it, if you can bear to,’ and the back of her neck prickles.
When the train pulls into Waterloo station, Neve drains the last of the warm gin and tonic, her second on the train, and begins to gather her things.
Over the course of the journey, she has made a series of plans:
1. Sell the cottage immediately. Pay off debts. Get own flat.
2. Say NO to cottage. How can I possibly accept???Find a way of contacting Isabelle’s surviving relative. Hand over cottage.
3. Sell it. Sell. SELL.
Walking across the concourse at Waterloo towards the tube station, at first Neve ignores the man pointedly staring at her, taking him to be a creep. But when she hears her name she looks at him properly and feels her stomach plummet.
It’s Fraser from work, gazing at her with a triumphant expression.
‘Well,’ he says, as commuters stream past them in both directions. ‘Looks like you have made a full recovery.’
‘Does, doesn’t it?’ says Neve. She has to stifle a yawn that rises from nowhere. She’s suddenly very, very tired.
‘I think we’d better have a word tomorrow, don’t you? A little chat about responsibility?’
He’s so pleased with himself that his face has turned the colour of ham. Neve sighs.
‘Bugger off, Fraser,’ she says, just as another man comes to stand right next to him, his expression one of injured puzzlement.
Without waiting to hear a reply, Neve turns away and hurries to the tube.
She can’t face going home.
Everything is buzzing inside her now. The tiredness has turned into a wired energy. She needs to go out, to do something. To find a way to make sense of the mad day she has had.
On the Northern Line, she makes the snap decision to get off at Camden station. She’ll go to the pub where she and Daniel used to hang out. There’s bound to be someone there who wants to have some fun. There might be a live band. Maybe Daniel will even come along. She can pretend it’s just like old times.
It turns out that most of her old crowd are there. By ten o’clock she’s standing outside, smoking a joint with her back against the wall and laughing so hard she almost starts to pee.
She’s with a drummer called Bick, a friend of a couple of years. No one knows where Bick comes from, exactly. He has a strange accent that is part American and part Scandinavian. He is six foot five and his shaved head gleams like polished ebony. Tribal scars nubble his cheekbones and rows of earrings stud his upper lobes. His sexuality is what he refers to as ‘fluid’. He’s the most beautiful man Neve knows.
She has told everyone about the cottage over the course of the evening.
Most agree that she must sell up straight away. A tiny, birdlike girl called Darcy, an ardent clubber, is of the opinion that Neve should go and live there. There was some talk of jam-making and a mass visit from them all at a date in the summer. Also possibly a music festival in the ‘grounds’. Everyone, including Neve, is hazy on the specifics but it sounds like the best idea for a while.
Bick is talking now and Neve smiles soppily up at him.
‘I think I love you, Bick,’ she slurs and puts her hands on his chest, raising her mouth to kiss him. But Bick steps back, laughing.
‘Neve, honey, I absolutely would, don’t get me wrong. But you’ve had a very weird day and I think you need to go home.’
Deflated, Neve stands back and almost falls off the kerb.
‘I’vegotafuckingcottage,’ she says as one word.
‘I know you have, darling. I know you have.’
A few minutes later he folds her into a taxi with assurances to the sceptical driver that she isn’t going to be sick. Neve manages to pass on Lou and Steve’s address. But when they reach the junction of Camden Road and Kentish Town Road, Neve leans over and gives new instructions, filled with a sudden second wind.
The driver eyes her warily, then changes direction.
A few minutes later, the car pulls up outside Daniel’s flat. The flat that was once hers and Daniel’s.
She pays the driver with the money Bick had insisted she take and stands on the pavement, staring woozily up at the top floor. A fox appears from the alleyway next to the house and regards her brazenly before slinking away. There’s a car alarm going off on the next road along.
Swaying slightly on her feet, she wishes fervently now that she hadn’t thrown the keys back at him during a fight. All she wants is to creep in and go to bed. She wouldn’t even bother him; she’d only sleep on the sofa. It seems so reasonable that she could do this. Who could possibly object to her sleeping on their sofa?
But there is no option other than to wake him up, now she’s here.
She wobbles up the steps and peers at the row of buzzers. Funny how unfamiliar it looks in such a short time. Focusing hard on not missing the target, she presses her finger squarely onto the buzzer and keeps it there. Then she removes it and does it again.
‘Hello?’ Daniel’s sleepy voice crackles from the intercom. She feels a happy rush that he is so near and she will see him within mere moments.
‘S’me!’ she says.
‘Who?’
Neve pauses, frowning.
‘S’Neve,’ she says a bit less cheerfully.
There’s a silence.
‘What do you want?’
Neve sways and tries to concentrate on what’s happening. This isn’t working out as she had expected.
‘To go to sleep,’ she says honestly and pushes the door, confident that it will have been released.
Nothing happens so she buzzes again and, a few seconds later, it opens and reveals a stony-faced Daniel.
He’s wearing an old T-shirt she has always loved, which says Revolution is Just a T-Shirt Away in white letters on black, faded to soft grey now, and pyjama bottoms. His hair is tousled and hangs over his eyes and he’s grown a small beard since she saw him last. He’s never looked more attractive and desire floods her entire body, hot and quick.
‘Neve? What the fuck?’ he says as she moves quickly and snakes her arms around his back. She breathes in the familiar smell of him and feels her groin squeeze in anticipation.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she says and starts to nibble and kiss his neck. ‘Let’s just forget about all of it. I have a cottage now.’
‘What?’ Daniel tries to step back. ‘What the hell are you talking about? And get off me, Neve, you’re completely wrecked.’
Neve slides her hands around his waist and over his firm buttocks, looking at him impishly through her lashes. She can feel the beginnings of a hard-on against her stomach as she pulls him closer and he makes a small sound in his throat. She’s not sure whether it’s a sound of being turned on, or a disgusted ‘tut’.
‘Not too wrecked,’ she says in a low voice. ‘We were always good together like this, weren’t we? Remember, I know what you like.’ She tries to peel his pyjama bottoms down and is suddenly thrust backwards so hard she almost falls down the steps.
‘Stop it!’ yells Daniel. ‘Just fucking stop this!’
‘Danny? What’s happening?’
A sleepy high-pitched voice seeps from the staircase and Neve stares over his shoulder to see a girl she recognizes from the pub, standing behind Daniel. She’s wearing one of his T-shirts and coils of blonde hair spill over her shoulders. Yawning like a cat, she then blinks hard at Neve.
‘What’s going on?’ she says, awake now. ‘What’s going on, Danny?’
‘Danny! No one calls him Danny! Who the fuck are you to be standing there like that and calling him fucking Danny?’
And with that she bursts into violent sobs.
Danny regards her with a look that makes her actually clench her toes inside her shoes.
‘Just go home, Neve,’ he says. ‘You’re only embarrassing yourself. You need to accept things and move on, alright?’
12
Neve remembers several things as her alarm clock, which by some miracle she managed to set last night, goes off with the intensity of a road drill next to her.
1. She was given a cottage yesterday.
2. She went to Daniel’s and humiliated herself.
3. When she got back to Lou’s she threw up in the bathroom.
4. Then she cleaned it up.
She definitely cleaned it up. Didn’t she?
Scrambling out of bed, she smashes her knee into the frame in her haste, and swears. She pulls on a hoodie with shaking hands and, thrusting open the study door, heads down the landing to the bathroom.
Lou is just emerging through the door. She is wearing rubber gloves and holds a bucket filled with cleaning products.
‘Lou, I’m so sorry, I swear I meant to sort that out.’
Lou regards her younger sister. She doesn’t look angry. She looks exhausted. Her nostrils are inflamed and red, her skin porridge-coloured.
‘You didn’t do a very good job,’ she says in a flat monotone. ‘Luckily I went in there first. Steve’s having a lie-in.’
‘Lou, I really am—’
Maisie begins to wail.
‘Forget it,’ says Lou and her voice is sharp now. ‘Just forget it, Neve.’ A surge of shamed affection for her sister washes over her and she goes to touch her arm but Lou pushes past and goes down the stairs.
It takes two paracetamols, a double strength ibuprofen and a triple espresso to give Neve the physical means to be able to walk into the office just before nine. The pounding in her head is more muted now, but her stomach occasionally shivers with nausea and her hands are shaky.
She vows to belatedly sign up to whatever the Dry January thing is on Facebook later. Dry half-of-January has to be better than not doing it at all.
The morning creaks by a second at a time and she tries to bury herself in admin jobs that have built up since the start of the week.
Mid-morning, Fraser and a couple of the other editors sweep into the office, and the sleepy energy instantly changes. This is partly because they are all wearing suits; even Fraser looks quite dapper in a dark blue pinstripe, despite the cut being a good fifteen years out of fashion.
Neve weakly turns on her smile of greeting, which slips when she sees the mean shine in Fraser’s eyes and notices the man he is showing into reception. Small and bespectacled with close-cropped grey hair, it’s his companion from Waterloo yesterday.
‘Miss Carey,’ says Fraser brightly. He has never called her this before. He somehow manages to make it less respectful than if he had used her Christian name. ‘Can you please organize for some coffee in the conference room?’
‘Yes, sure,’ she says, even though she isn’t supposed to leave reception. The party of five men sweep past her and she notices the stranger frown at her, in obvious recognition from the day before. Her heart gives an anxious jolt and she feels clammy sweat beading her hairline. She grabs the bottle of Diet Coke on her desk and takes a long swig.
One of the picture editors, a shy young woman called Edie who wears 1940s-style clothes, comes into reception then. She stares at the retreating backs of the men, chewing her red-lipsticked bottom lip; brow creased.
‘Edie,’ hisses Neve. ‘What’s going on?’
Edie comes over in her neat little dress covered in sprigs of cherries, thick tights and 1940s sandals. Her blonde hair is twisted into victory rolls at the side of her head. She fixes large pale eyes on Neve and makes a face of dismay.
‘That’s Holger Meier,’ she says in a low voice. ‘He’s one of the directors from Brahmen Klein.’
‘Shit …’
Brahmen Klein is a huge European media company. She’s been too preoccupied to think much about the rumours in the office. Now all she can do is remember the shocked expression on the face of this man, who has power over her future, as she told Fraser to ‘bugger off’.
‘Oh God,’ she says. Edie sighs.
‘Yeah. I’d better get back to updating my CV,’ she says. ‘I suggest you do the same.’
Neve doesn’t make the coffee.
Instead, she thinks about the moment Isabelle Shawcross whispered hot breath into her ear; breath that was on a countdown to being her last. She thinks about the fact that she is going to lose her job; if not today, then soon.
She thinks about last night, and Christmas, and the reception she is going to get from Lou and Steve when she gets back.
She understands that Daniel is now part of her past and will never be in her future again.
The switchboard begins to light up in front of her and she watches it as though from behind a sheet of glass. Then she picks up her coat and handbag, and leaves the building for ever.
Lou is out with the girls at one of their classes when she gets home. She is struggling under the awkward weight of a bunch of flowers that cost more than £40, bought after transferring the last of her dad’s money into her current account. They’re a mix of gerbera in bright purples and yellows. She knows that Lou loves gerbera.
She carefully arranges them in a vase on the kitchen table, making sure she wipes up the spills of water she leaves in the process, then hunts for paper and a pen. All she can find is a drawing pad of Lottie’s, covered in stick people and attempts at cats in crayon, and a felt tip pen. Finding a sheet that leaks colour through from the drawings on the other side, she rips it out and begins to write a note.
Lou and Steve. I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done for me. I’m really sorry I’ve been such a nightmare. I do love you, whatever you might think. xxN
Then she takes the duvet cover, sheets and pillowcases she’d taken from the sofa bed that morning and tips them into the linen basket. Getting the vacuum cleaner out of the hall cupboard, she gives the room a thorough clean.
She can’t take everything but she’ll think about that later. This is only for a few days, to get her head together. She manages to stuff a surprising amount into a small wheelie case and a rucksack, which she hoists onto her back, wobbling under the awkward weight.
A few minutes later, she leaves the flat, closing the door with a quiet click behind her.
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