Page 6 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
‘It’s all right,’ she said, forcing herself to meet Leo’s worried gaze. ‘No harm done. Maybe, in future, wait until your guests are home and knock to warn them, rather than doing your best impression of a burglar. I mean, you’re wearing a striped T-shirt and everything under that hoodie!’ Suddenly overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the situation, Rory burst out laughing and found it difficult to stop. Especially when Leo glanced down at himself, the penny dropped, and he began to chuckle.
‘All you need is the black eye-mask!’ Rory added, through her gasps of laughter.
‘And maybe a sack?’ Leo added.
It was a couple of moments before they both calmed down, and Rory found herself thinking that Leo’s invasion of the chalet had broken the ice more effectively than their stilted first greeting on the doorstep of Roseford Villas.
‘Well,’ Leo said, when the laughter had died down. ‘I guess I’d better leave you to it.’ He looked at her for a couple of heartbeats. ‘Goodnight, Rory.’
‘Goodnight, Leo,’ Rory replied. ‘And thank you for the, er, bathroom accessories. It would have been a bit awkward if I’d got out of the shower tomorrow morning and not had any towels. Or any loo roll, for that matter!’ Her face burned. What a subject to bring back up…
‘If you need anything else, you know where I am.’ Leo brushed a hand through his wavy dark brown hair, and Rorynoticed a few threads of grey nestled amongst the generous mop that hadn’t receded too much over the years. She also noticed the laughter lines around his eyes, and how they softened his gaze as he looked at her for a little longer.
‘I do,’ she said softly. ‘Take care.’
Leo gave her a nod and then headed out through the chalet’s front door. Pushing herself off the counter, where she’d been leaning, Rory couldn’t help but track his progress across the lawn as he walked back to Roseford Villas. His long-legged lope, something she’d always loved about him as he’d fallen into step with her on their many walks around the village where they’d lived, seemed a little uneven now. Arthritis? An injury? Curiously, she watched him a little longer. Time had a lot to answer for, she thought, but she was pleased, as she got herself ready for bed, that some of the awkwardness between them had dissipated.
8
The next morning, Rory awoke to a chorus of wild birds living it large in Roseford Villas’ grounds. So used to being woken by the traffic in her flat in York, she relished the birdsong for a little while, listening to the many melodies breaking above the roof of the chalet, and basking in the early-morning sunlight that filtered through the curtains of the bedroom as they blew gently in the breeze. Despite her worries about intruders last night, she’d kept the bedroom window open to the night air as she slept, and it promised to be another beautiful Somerset day.
She couldn’t help thinking about the encounter with Leo the previous evening. While he’d been a bit of an idiot to choose to check things that late, it had been nice to laugh with him after the awkwardness on the doorstep. It had reminded her of a time when they’d had far fewer responsibilities, when they were just two teenagers who thought their love would last forever. Twenty years of life had intervened to make them different people, but she’d seen a flare of who Leo used to be in his gaze when he’d shared the giggle. It would certainly make their interactions much easier now, she hoped.
All the same, she needed to focus on the reason she was here. She wasn’t due to get into the archives at Roseford Hall until Monday, so she had the whole of Sunday to prepare her workspace, get her notes in order and set up the document on her laptop that would, she hoped, be the working draft of her novel.
It was funny how easy it was to shrug off the ‘Rory Henderson, teacher’ persona and assume the ‘Rory Dean, author’ one. She already felt different, and excited, liberated by a change of pace and scene. And much as she adored teaching, she felt the pleasurable ripples from a new pool of inspiration lapping around her, and she longed to dive in.
However, she knew well enough that jumping in feet first to anything often wasn’t the best approach for her. She’d started and abandoned projects so many times, and she wanted this one to stick. This was why she’d marked out this time alone, after all. It was a scrimped and saved for luxury that she couldn’t afford to waste.
After showering and grabbing a quick breakfast (the chalet had included a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, some locally produced strawberry jam, butter and tea bags in its welcome pack), she began the methodical process of arranging her workspace.
It was soon apparent that the small table in the kitchen was going to have to double as a desk as well as an eating space. Feeling a touch frustrated – Hyacinth Cottage had had its own antique mahogany desk under the window, looking out into the small, perfectly formed back garden – Rory swallowed her irritation and made the best of it. If she had to pack things away at the end of each night, so be it. She carefully arranged her laptop, notebooks, pens and blue light glasses and then sat back on the not-very-comfortable bench seat that served the table. Fighting her own sense of disappointment, she glanced aroundto see where the nearest power socket was to keep her laptop charged, and let out a long, frustrated sigh. It was right over the other side of the countertop, and too far away to have her computer plugged in while she worked at the table. She couldn’t even move the table closer since the bench was fixed to the wall.
Trying valiantly to ignore those irritations, she fired up her laptop and opened the novel-writing software she’d spent some time playing with during her last break from school. The document was good to go, she had some preliminary research notes and a bare-bones outline, and now she had the physical space (and the headspace) to begin the first draft.
Nothing happened. For half an hour, she alternated between staring at a blank page and doom scrolling the social networks. Absolutely no words appeared.
Huffing in annoyance with herself, she pushed her laptop away and decided that a coffee and a bit of fresh air was in order. She was just tidying up her makeshift desk space when the topmost notebook from the pile she’d brought with her caught her attention. With its turn-of-the-millennium design, with pastel-coloured flowers printed on the cardboard cover, it contained so much that she’d anticipated would help her bring the idea of her novel to fruition. Flipping over the first page, she felt that awful mixture of fascination and embarrassment when she began reading the impassioned prose of her sixteen-year-old self.
How simple that world now seemed! Musings on friendships, love, things she’d seen on television and read, and all before a time when social media became the equivalent of writing things in longhand. Catching her breath as she saw the familiar, looping ‘L’ that signified she was going to spend some time writing about Leo, she turned the page, and there he was – longish hair in the same style as Kevin Richardson from theBackstreet Boys, confident smile beaming out from the pages, fashion choices as first-decade-of-the-noughties as they came.
Memories she’d been keeping on the back burner, ready for the very moment when she’d have time to draw on them for inspiration, seemed to bubble to the surface. Perhaps it was coming face to face with Leo again that had done it, but she found herself revelling in the pages of her teenage diaries. Gradually, embarrassment gave way to fascination as she rediscovered the person she’d been in her teens. Yes, a lot of it was self-indulgent nonsense when seen through the eyes of her adult self, but there’d been a spark there, a sense of optimism thatit would be all right, that seemed irrepressible. The dates, some time before she’d found out that Leo was moving to the other side of the world, bore that out. Their happiness, their desire to be young, have fun, discover things about themselves and each other, reeled out through the pages and pages of looping handwriting. Rory found herself immersed in the raw, undoubtedly naive prose of her adolescence. Surely, she thought as she read further, she’d be able to draw on this for inspiration?
Putting down the diary once again, feeling energised, she tapped the mouse pad on her MacBook Air and once again faced the blank page.
But, to her intense frustration, ideas seemed to flee her brain as fast as the dragonflies flitting across the lawn outside. What was wrong with her? She’d been thinking about this for weeks, months, years, even. Why couldn’t she write? What else did she need?
Rory huffed out a breath and, in resignation, closed the laptop. What would she tell a student in this position? How many times had she heard ‘I don’t know what to write’ in response to her peering over a shoulder and seeing nothing but a blank page? She’d take a moment to think and then give them five prompts, straight off the top of her head, and encouragethem to write one of them down, make a story out of something they knew. She was well aware that she should take her own advice, but she felt… constipated. If literary constipation was a thing. She smiled at her own self-indulgence. If she’d given herself ten minutes of her lunchtime at school, she’d have jumped in and got on with it. So, what was stopping her now?
Perhaps it was the weight of all that expectation, the fact she’d been planning this forages, and now it was here, she had absolutely no idea how to approach it. The other problem was, she realised with a start, that while she thought she’d be writing a historical time travel novel, known in the business as a timeslip, at the moment, after her encounter with Leo last night, and now having dipped back into her diaries, she felt entirely too much as though she were living in one.
9
Leo had become an early riser when he’d moved to Australia. The bus that would take him from home to his school, some miles away, arrived at 7a.m., on the dot, and years of having to drag himself out of bed, walk the half mile to the bus stop and then endure the forty-five-minute journey had trained him not to linger in bed. It was a routine that, when he’d started university, he’d maintained, and it came in handy when he’d joined the university rowing team, whose training hours were even earlier.
After the accident, he’d spent months in a hospital bed, which had almost broken him of the habit, but when he’d been discharged, he’d been determined to maintain as much of his prior regimen as he could. This came in particularly handy now he was in charge of the B&B, as many of his guests rose with the dawn and requested breakfast early before heading off on their holiday adventures.
He was showered and dressed by six fifteen most days, and, when the B&B was empty, either cracking on with his physiotherapy or going for a gentle run. When there were guests, he’d be in the kitchen, sorting out the breakfast that his auntand uncle prided themselves on. This morning, with no guests in the house, and only Rory in the chalet, he went through the stretches that had become part of his morning regime ever since the car accident that had changed his trajectory in so many ways. Raising his arms above his head, he felt the familiar pull in the muscles of his back, the tautness of scarred skin, and imagined, as he always did, the shift of the metal that had been implanted in his spine. There were good days and bad days, but today felt good. Today felt easier.
