Page 6 of The Christmas Retreat
November 2022
October finally blew itself out, but only after blasting the fat balls out of the spring holders attached to the bird table and playing billiards with them across the little square of lawn at the back of the house.
Mrs Snowboots would have watched the skittering fat balls with fascination, but my poor old cat, after fading away like an ancient snapshot before my very eyes, was no more.
While her death was not unexpected, finding one morning that she had quietly passed away in her sleep had still been a shock and it would take some time for me to come to terms with her loss.
Eli had helped me bury her beneath the sweet-scented rose just outside the studio window … but now, looking down at the solicitor’s letter in my hand, I wondered if I would still be here when the rose flowered next summer.
Suddenly I fully understood the phrase ‘reality check’, because I was aware that dark clouds had been gathering over my head without my even noticing them, secure in my idyll.
In fact, when I looked back on the last couple of years, it was odd how little I remembered about what I’d done during them, other than vignettes, such as watching badgers in the woods at dusk, or Mrs Snowboots trying to wash the baby rabbits that emerged on the lawn in spring. The annual seasonal round of making jams, chutneys and fruit wines, of bottling plums from the old tree, was a blur … as were the happy hours spent working in my studio, lost in the fantasy world I’d created inside my everyday one, like one of those carved ivory Chinese puzzle spheres whose inner layers could be turned separately, worlds within worlds.
I suppose, as the old sundial in the middle of my lawn said, I remembered only the happy hours, so perhaps that was why what memories I had of working in the studio always showed the golden sun slanting through the window, where Mrs Snowboots lay in its warmth, sleepily watching me.
In fact, I now realized that, without meaning to, I’d become the nearest thing to a recluse possible in this day and age.
Of course, I’d wanted a quiet country life. It had been the seclusion of Wisteria Cottage that had first drawn me to it. Once the gardener’s cottage by the rear gates to Brocklebank Hall, it had been sold off early in the last century, along with most of the estate, after the house burned down, and now what was left of the grounds, mostly woodland and rampant shrubbery, had gone wild.
Eli’s smallholding was the closest neighbour in one direction, and the farm up the long track at the further end of the narrow lane that ran past the cottage, in the other.
Eli said if the grounds of the Hall hadn’t been so overgrown, or the wrought-iron gates to both entrances not only rusted solid but padlocked, I could have walked across to thevillage of Mossing in about twenty minutes, since it cut off a great loop of road. I could still get into the grounds, however, because there was a gate at the end of my garden, beyond the fruit garden behind my tiny lawn and rose beds.
It was like having my own Secret Garden – or secret Wild Wood. It provided endless inspiration for my Hedgehoppers book series and a playground for Mrs Snowboots, until the last few months, when age had finally slowed her down and she preferred to doze comfortably inside.
Wisteria Cottage had been in need of considerable renovation when I found it, but, thanks to Evie having invested the money from the sale of Granny’s Cornish cottage for me when she’d died some years back (I barely remembered her tall, austere and disapproving presence, although most of the disapproval was for Evie – they had never got on because my mother was too much of a free spirit), I could afford to buy it outright and get the main structural work done to it before I moved in.
Evie hadn’t even told me about the money until I’d finally finished my graphic design course and Will and I had broken up for the first time, and I suspect the latter fact had a lot to do with it, because she never liked him.
Will and I had met as students on the same course, but he had left early to set up a computer game business with his friend Simon, which wasn’t a total surprise because his interests had moved increasingly in that direction, while mine had focused on illustrating – and later writing. Computer game graphic design was a world away from the Chinese brush painting and Japanese woodcuts that inspired me to develop my own style of minimal line and bold washes of colour.
Evie had refused point-blank to put any money into Willand Simon’s business when I asked her, and I’m sure she kept back the information that she had that nest egg squirrelled away for me in case I gave it to Will instead of buying a property of my own with it.
Evie assumed I’d buy a little flat somewhere in London, but without Will there was nothing to keep me there. I’dalwayssecretly longed to live in the country, despite most of what I knew of it having been culled from Liv’s collection of very old children’s novels, where the adults were always off stage and the children had wonderful adventures. At last I could have one of my own!
I’d bought the cottage even though Evie and Liv had done their utmost to dissuade me.
‘You don’t know anything about the country,’ Liv had pointed out practically. ‘You may well hate it.’
‘I’ve read a lot about it and I think I’ll love it,’ I’d said stubbornly.
‘You’re too young to hide yourself away in the middle of nowhere,’ Evie’d objected. ‘You can’t become a recluse at twenty-five.’
‘I can if I want to! Anyway, I won’tbea recluse, because friends will come and visit, and I hope you and Liv will, too.’
‘Not to stay – the countryside gives me hives. I thrive on exhaust fumes and London dust,’ Evie declared. ‘What would I do in the country? And it isn’t Liv’s thing either, even if I could spare her.’
She might have added that she found her life too interesting and absorbing to waste it in what was to her an alien and boring environment, and she never wasted time on things that bored her.
Liv’s idea of a holiday was an upmarket coach tour of stately homes and museums in the UK or abroad, so I knew Evie was right about that, too.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ll find to do down there, onceyou’ve finished doing the cottage up like an oversized doll’s house. I mean, it’s a cultural desert,’ Evie had added, baffled.
‘But it will be the perfect environment for writing and illustrating my books. I’ve already got an idea for a new series, set in the country, and for slightly older readers.’
I’d been so lucky that the picture book I’d written and illustrated as a final piece for my graphic design degree had been accepted by the first publisher I’d sent it to, with a contract for three more.Mrs Snowboots Saves Christmashad been a surprise bestseller.
‘There is that,’ Liv had conceded. ‘From a child you were always in a world of your own, scribbling your little stories and drawing the characters, with no idea of time passing.’
