‘Too many tourists. But there are plenty of out of the way places. I stayed up there as a boy, it’s where we had our last family holiday before my father left us. I always wanted to go back.’
‘You mean — you’d like us to take a break up north?’
‘It’s not the Arctic Circle. Who wants to spend fifteen hours at an airport when air traffic controllers go out on strike? Even with all the motorway jams, the Lakes are only a few hours’ drive away. Where better to get away from it all?’
‘Doesn’t it rain a lot?’
‘You know what they say in the Lakes? There’s no such thing as bad weather. Only bad clothing.’
She laughed. ‘Okay, you win. I’ve never been there before, not even as a kid. My parents used to take us to France every year. Besides, I was never keen on Wordsworth and all that. We had daffodils in our front garden at home, they were my mother’s pride and joy. I never saw any need to visit Grasmere to see them in their thousands.’
‘There’s more to the Lakes than rain and daffodils. Forget Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter. Think Coleridge, think De Quincey, think…’
‘All right, all right, any moment now you’ll be reliving battle scenes from Swallows and Amazons.’ She was laughing already and he knew he’d persuaded her. ‘Okay, I admit it. When I was a kid, I couldn’t help liking Arthur Ransome’s books. And it’s silly, travelling the world and ignoring your own back doorstep. Even if I don’t get the chance of a tan. Let’s do it.’
Now here they were in Tarn Fold. Talking about junking their jobs, their homes, and moving up here. Unreal, but so was the whole of their affair. They had fallen for each other in the course of a single evening. He’d met her at a party thrown by his publishers at Soho House. At seven that evening they were strangers; they parted next morning as lovers. Her spontaneity was a gift. It turned him on, the way she let herself be swept by a tide of passion.
‘I just can’t believe…’
‘You must believe,’ she said quickly. ‘Swear to me you won’t change your mind?’
‘I swear,’ he said. ‘You know I wanted you to share this place with me.’
She put her head on one side, as though trying to decipher an inscription in Sanskrit. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’
‘You’ve never come here with me before.’
Taking a pen out of the pocket of her Levis, she scrawled the estate agent’s name and number on the back of her hand. ‘Fine, we’ll call at the branch and arrange to view.’
He couldn’t help grinning. ‘You really are set on this, aren’t you?’
‘Once I start on something,’ she said, ‘nothing will stop me.’
It wasn’t precisely true. A month ago she’d begun to write a novel, about some other young journalist who lived in Islington and suffered from lesbian harassment, but she’d never made it beyond chapter one. Last night in the hotel she’d talked of pitching a feature to a broadsheet about alternative therapies. Over breakfast, she wondered about yet another variation on a favourite theme: Diana: how she taught us to get in touch with our emotions.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘we’d better get a move on. We mustn’t lose out.’
She skipped off towards the car and he tramped after her in a blissed-out daze. Anyone would think they were both high on something.
‘This whole valley is a Shangri-La,’ she said as they left Tarn Fold behind. ‘If only the people here were immortal. It’s too beautiful a place to die in.’
He switched on the CD player and started humming to Norah Jones. Anything to avoid talk of death. As they passed through Brack, he pointed to a window above the front door of a large pub on the main street. The Moon under Water. From it hung a ‘bed and breakfast’ sign.
‘That was my room,’ he said. ‘I shared with my sister Louise. She kept me awake, telling me stories from a book my parents bought us. Legends of Lakeland, it was called. Tales about stone circles that came to life and rivers that wept.’
Beyond the church, the road narrowed. Purple aubretia and white alyssum spilled from cracks in the walls. On the verges, poppies were starting to bloom. A lane led off to a squat pele tower that formed the centrepiece of Brack Hall, another curved towards the hall farm and the fell beyond. He remembered clambering halfway up to Priest Edge with his father, to an embankment within which an irregular pattern of marked-out footways was all that remained of a hut village constructed by ancient Britons. According to Ben Kind’s books, fewer folk lived in the valley now than during the years BC.
‘My father and I used to roam around here while my mother and sister went into the town to shop.’
‘Your old man was a policeman, you told me. Was that difficult?’
‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘I was fascinated by the stories he told.’
‘But your mother, did she have a tough time?’
He hesitated. ‘The week we came home, he told mum that he was seeing someone else. The affair had been going on for some time, but she didn’t have a clue. He might have walked out sooner, but the holiday was booked and he didn’t want to wreck it for all of us.’
‘And you never saw him again?’
‘No, my mother would have regarded it as a betrayal. Louise backed her to the hilt. We both had to promise never to speak to him again. It was a long time before I broke my word.’
By evening, Miranda’s plans for the cottage were well advanced. They were staying in a hotel on the outskirts of Keswick, halfway between shimmery Derwentwater and the brooding heights of Skiddaw and Blencathra. The restaurant occupied an airy conservatory and over their meal they’d watched the sunlight streaking the lake, then marvelled at a sky so red as to delight even the gloomiest of shepherds. The dinner would have had Egon Ronay drooling. As they drank a final glass of Chablis in the low-beamed bar, Daniel felt light-headed, as if a hypnotist had put him in a trance of happiness. Viewing was scheduled for half-nine tomorrow. No one else had put in a bid. For Miranda that meant the cottage was as good as theirs.
‘Did I ever tell you I’ve written for home magazines about interior design? The importance of lighting and colour and stuff.’
He waved at the ‘to-do’ list she’d scrawled on the hotel notepaper, and her lavish sketch of their redesigned living accommodation. Already everything was planned out in her mind. The bothy could provide additional guest accommodation and she’d decided the barn could be split into two offices: his and hers. In their new lives they could work from home and be together all the time.
‘You saw how rundown the place is,’ he said. So far words of caution had blown away like leaves in a gale, but he dreaded her distress if it all fell through. She cared so much about everything. In her vulnerability, if nothing else, she reminded him of Aimee. ‘The garden’s bad enough; who knows what a survey might show?’
‘Come on, loosen up. Anything can be fixed.’
‘It’ll cost a small fortune.’
‘Have you checked house prices here? You could buy a mansion for the cost of a terrace in Islington. Well, almost. Anyway, we’ll have plenty of cash to spare when we sell our old homes. Money isn’t a problem.’
He swung back on his chair and tried another tack. ‘Country living is different. Winters are hard. Ever tried unblocking a septic tank?’
She giggled. ‘I’ll learn to love it. Hey Daniel, relax. This is going to be wonderful. Trust me.’
The ruddy-faced estate agent smelled of bacon and burned toast and looked like a prime candidate for a coronary. Tubby and panting and over-dressed in tweed suit and camel coat, he was yet naked in his desperation to earn commission on the sale. A fast man with a superlative, he didn’t seem to realise that all he needed to do was to let the cottage and its setting sell themselves. The sun gatecrashing through the faded blinds was so strong that Daniel needed to shade his eyes. The cottage hadn’t been occupied for months; although the windows were flung open, a mustiness hung in the air. Who cared? One glance at Miranda’s face was enough to tell him that Tarn Cottage was everything she’d yearned for. It’s going to be all right, he said to himself. We can make it happen.
Wherever they looked, work needed to be done. The window-frames were rotten and the cellar was a damp dungeon cluttered with chunks of coal. The bedrooms were dingy, the bathroom a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Doors creaked and the staircase railing twitched neurotically at a touch.
