Page 95 of The Christmas Retreat
Arwen
29
Having Kittens
Although Evie and Kate vanished back upstairs to work after breakfast on New Year’s Day, and Opal and Verity hadn’t come down at all, the rest of us seemed to have decided to take the day off and go out.
Timon and Nerys were meeting friends for lunch, and Toby and Pearl were going into St Melangell, where most of the shops opened on a Sunday, including a silversmith where they thought they might find an unusual engagement ring.
‘I prefer silver to gold,’ Pearl explained.
‘So do I,’ agreed Nerys. Since she was always wearing big silver and semi-precious jewellery, that wasn’t a huge surprise!
‘There’s that lovely clothes shop where I got my new tunics and those velvet Mary Jane shoes,’ I suggested to Pearl. ‘That’s worth a look in.’
‘Good idea, because I feel like branching out into other colours than green. I’m not sure how it came about that Opal and I became so addicted to one colour.’
‘Well,Ican’t talk, since I rarely wear anything but black,’ said Nerys.
Just then, Max Prynne rang Rhys’s mobile to suggest he take me over to look at the West Lodge that morning. Cariad elected to come with us.
It was a lovely winter’s day, cold and lightly frosted under a clear, pale cerulean-blue sky, so we decided to walk by way of the cliff path.
It wound its way up and down, through tussocky hillocks of gorse and hawthorn and small spinneys of wind-bent trees. There wasn’t even a breeze today, so I could hear the sea shushing against the cliffs. I’d only walked this path once before, when I went into the village to do some Christmas shopping, and I hadn’t taken much notice of the little lodge house that stood where the end of the cliff path met the road.
A pair of wrought-iron gates stood open and, just inside it, there it was, a typical, small square stone lodge. With a pang I thought of Wisteria Cottage, although West Lodge didn’t have its chocolate-box prettiness of whitewashed walls and thatched roof.
It looked like a child’s drawing of a little house, with windows on either side of the door, where Max awaited us.
He unlocked it, and we followed him into a little hall, with doors to left and right and a steep stair going upwards between.
‘I’m afraid it has electric storage heaters rather than central heating,’ he said. ‘It was modernized in the eighties, so it’s not exactly up to date, but a new kitchen was built on the back, with a bathroom over it, and the old kitchen turned into a dining room. But I’ll let you explore on your own,’ he added with a grin as Cariad ran past him, flinging open doors.
It wasn’t much smaller than my old home, with a parlour that opened into the dining room, which I thought could become my temporary studio because the kitchen was just bigenough to squeeze a table and a couple of chairs into and the view from the window was of shrubbery and trees.
‘No garden,’ said Max, who had followed us in. ‘If you spend your days working as a gardener on the estate, you don’t want to come home in the evening and start on your own garden.’
‘I suppose not,’ agreed Rhys. ‘But if you miss gardening, Ginny, I’m positive Tudor would welcome any help in the kitchen garden at Triskelion!’
‘I might take you up on that. I love the walled garden there – even in winter it’s quite magical – but then, all walled gardens seem to have that air about them.’
‘And so do quarry gardens, I always think,’ put in Max.
Cariad, who had vanished upstairs, now came thundering down again and insisted we go and look at the bathroom.
‘It’s pink!’ she said. ‘The toilet and the bath and the basin and everything.’
And she was right, because they were all an odd shade of sticking-plaster pink.
‘I think you could call that colour of bathroom suite retro,’ I said.
Other than this, there were two bedrooms and that was it, apart from an airing cupboard with a cylinder in it.
‘There’s a couple of sheds outside and the old outdoor toilet,’ Max said. ‘The cooker runs on Calor gas. The cylinders are outside and have to be changed from time to time.’
‘So did the one in my old cottage, so I’m used to that,’ I said. ‘So long as I have something to cook on and there’s a bit of heat and hot water, I can manage.’
‘So, are you going to come and live here?’ asked Cariad eagerly.
