Page 28 of The Price of Love
Cal looked at me sideways. ‘You’ve clearly thought about it.’
‘Well, when I was here with Ash, I wondered how you’d get a car down. How did your great-aunt manage?’
Cal turned his attention back to the path, down which he was edging slowly. ‘Oh, she carried everything. On her back. Built like King Kong, my great-aunt, thighs like a set of welding equipment.’
‘Cal,’ I warned.
‘Oh, all right. She had a pony and trap. The ultimate in four-wheel-drive.’
We rounded the last bend and stopped, by silent agreement, to take in the sight of the tiny white cottage stamped in the green field. A few late daffodils fluttered flags of yellow in the grass, puffs of cloud scratting about overhead. ‘Wordsworth would have wet himself,’ I said.
‘Wordsworth never had to pick up the maintenance bill for picturesque.’ Cal gave a sigh and leaned against the gate. ‘If any of the Romantic poets had ever had to contend with damp courses, they would have taken to writing obscene limericks.’
‘I dunno. I always suspected Coleridge would have been handy with a routing tool.’ I leaned alongside him, arms on the top bar, chewing my lip. ‘Cal, are you sure you want to sell?’
‘No. But, ach, sometimes everything’s wrong, you know?’ Briskly he pulled himself off the gate. ‘Right. Let’s go and find the old bitch, shall we? Are you going to be all right? I mean, she’s hefty, and she’s got a whole circus of tricks up her . . . what I shall have to describe, for now, as a sleeve.’
‘If you’d really thought I couldn’t handle her, you wouldn’t have asked me to come along, would you?’ I asked with impeccable logic. ‘Lead the way. If not the goat.’
We found the goat, a Toggenburg improbably enough named Winnie, grazing in the orchard next to the house. It was a fairly simple matter to grab her by the leather belt she wore around her neck and haul her through the gateway. Throughout the whole experience, Winnie maintained a typically goatlike expression of aggrieved surprise and only tried to injure me seriously once. I, however, had trained up on small, evil ponies, every one a semi-professional in maiming, and steering a goat presented few problems to a woman who has once rolled a Shetland down an embankment.
‘That was incredible.’ Cal spoke from the safety of the sidelines, as Winnie, with a look of execration in her satanic eyes, peed all over my foot, then trotted to the river, managing to drink whilst still staring at us from under her eyebrows.
‘Thank you.’ I squelched my way out of the field. ‘And for my next trick, I shall smell of goat’s piss all the way home.’
‘You don’t have to. If I get the Aga lit, you could have a bath.’
‘Have you got a towel?’
‘In the car. Oh, and if you’re going up, there’s a cool bag in the boot with some food and drinks in.’
‘Anything else? I mean, if I say I fancy listening to some music, are you going to tell me that you’ve got the Manchester Philharmonic in the glovebox?’
‘Er, no. But there is a digital radio under the passenger seat.’
‘Oh, aren’t you the well-equipped one.’
‘Never had any complaints yet,’ Cal said archly.
I rolled my eyes at him and started the soggy-socked process back up the hill towards the parked car. The sun was shining through the leaves, lime green with newness, which made it feel as though I was walking along the bottom of a river. A feeling which the silence and the occasional stickleback dart of small birds only enhanced. In the time it took me to riffle through the vehicle’s contents (loads of clothes and CDs, two bottles of beer, an unopened packet of condoms and more rubbish and wrappers than I would have believed a Micra could hold), only two cars and a tractor passed the lane end.
I trotted back down to the house with the fluorescent pink cool bag under one arm and a striped beach towel under the other, to find that Cal had managed to fire up the ancient farmhouse range which occupied the kitchen like a rusty squatter.
‘Give it an hour or so, then we’ll have more than enough hot water for you to get clean. Pass me the lunch, I’ll pop the bottles in the stream to cool down.’
While he was gone I had an in-depth look around the little house. Okay, it smelled of damp and cabbagey old ladies but . . . ‘This really could be a lovely place,’ I said, descending the vertical, and banisterless, staircase. ‘That front bedroom with those beams, it’s perfect.’
‘Used to be mine, when I was a kid. If you open the cupboard in the corner, there’s a secret set of ladders leading to the attics.’
‘And the views. How much land comes with the place?’
Cal looked at me quizzically. ‘Why the interest?’
I was suddenly ashamed. Whilst I’d wandered upstairs my imagination had taken over and I had seen the master bedroom all fitted out, the smaller back room painted pink, carpeted and with a tiny cot taking pride of place. Outside I could almost have sworn that I had seen my future self trailing a lazy finger over knee-high herbs in an area currently occupied by the spitting-mad goat. Even the archaic bathroom fixtures had a kind ofCountry Livingcharm. ‘I think the place has potential, that’s all.’
‘Yes, it’s potentially a house. Slightly unfortunately it isn’t one at the moment. Look, I’ve got some work to do. Would you like to cruise around the acres for a bit? I won’t be long and then we can have some lunch.’
‘Do you need a hand with anything?’ There was a short pause during which I had time to wish I could bite my tongue off.
