Hidden Cottage (10 page)

A retired civil servant – something ‘big’ in the Treasury, of which she never spoke – Muriel Fulshaw was, as she described herself, the village battleaxe and self-appointed general pain in the backside. She was also a governor of the school and a formidable opponent of political correctness. She stood on nobody’s ceremony, preferring instead to tread on their toes or get up their nose. She was the principal village activist and relished any sort of skirmish, whether it was a fight to keep the allotments and not let the Church sell the land, as they had with the vicarage, or to fight the council over their latest madcap scheme to save money.

Yet as fond as Mia was of both Georgina and Muriel, she had never shared with either of them anything of a personal nature regarding her marriage. There was a commonly held belief in the village that Jeff Channing was an all-round good egg. He was sufficiently charming with the women to make them like him and equally matey with their husbands so as not to make them jealous or suspicious of him around their wives. It seemed needlessly cruel to prick the bubble of his worth in Little Pelham.

On top of that, Mia had her own self-worth to consider. Her pride forbade her from admitting to anyone that she was unhappy. Why tell anyone that her life was nothing but a brazen deceit? As her mother had said to her often enough, ‘You’ve made your bed, and now you must lie in it.’ Her mother had written the book when it came to unhelpful clichés.

‘Now then you two,’ Muriel said, after Mia had given a highly edited version of her weekend, ‘what have you heard about Owen Fletcher, the new man who’s moved into The Hidden Cottage? Do you have a source of knowledge other than the Parrs? Because frankly I’m fully up to speed with everything they know.’

Georgina offered up what she knew by saying that for some unaccountable reason the children at Sunday school had decided he must be a rich footballer.

Muriel dismissed this with a shake of her head. ‘And what would a wealthy footballer be doing living in The Hidden Cottage? It’s not half grand enough. Mia, what have you got for me?’

‘Only that Eliza and Daisy actually got a look at him in the shop on Saturday and they said he was “hot”. That was the word Daisy used at any rate.’

Georgina smiled. ‘I like the sound of him, and I could like him even more if I knew he was single.’

Muriel laughed. ‘In that case, we need to be proactive. We need to welcome Mr Owen Fletcher to the village, let him know that we’re a friendly bunch and not one of those villages where you’re an outsider until you’ve lived there for fifteen years.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asked Mia with a smile, winking at Georgina, ‘as if we can’t guess.’

‘I advocate we knock on his door and interrogate him thoroughly,’ Muriel replied.

Chapter Twelve

With the crummy state of the offices, it was a miracle anyone could be creative here. Or was the idea that the small team of designers, so starved of beauty, would keep sane by escaping the ugliness of their surroundings and immerse themselves in imaginary idylls of splendour from which they dreamt up fabulous furniture, anything but face the reality of this ghastly hellhole?

The place was a mess. Carpet tiles held down with brown packing tape, paint falling off damp crumbling walls, windows too high to look out of, cobwebs strung between light fittings like forgotten Christmas decorations, the temperature either stifling or freezing cold. It was as depressing as depressing got. It was a hideous prison.

But Daisy was about to break free. Another five days and she would be out of here. Gone. No one would miss her. No one would wonder how she was or what she was doing. She would be as forgotten as the cobwebs above her head.

She had handed in her notice last week, something she hadn’t told her parents. But that wasn’t the only omission, or rather the only lie she had told. She’d had to do it; of course she had. Dad wasn’t ready for the whole truth yet. One shock at a time was best. Once she was in Australia, the rest would follow – when she was safely thousands of miles away.

Scott disagreed. He subscribed to the school of thought that dumping all the news in one big truck-load was the way to go. Easy for him to say, when it wasn’t him dealing with Dad. He had offered to be there with her, but she had said no, she would do it alone.

When Scott had met her at the station he hadn’t rushed to ask how it had gone – he knew her too well. He knew to take his time. Crowd her and she shrank; that was how he described the way she behaved when she felt under pressure. And so he had distracted her by telling her how he’d helped their elderly neighbour – Mrs Balfour – find her cat that had been missing for several days. Scott had found it shut in a garden shed, three doors down. ‘My hero,’ Daisy had said with a smile. And meaning it.

Back at the flat, putting the kettle on, she’d given him a rundown on how her father had taken the news. ‘And before you ask, no I didn’t tell him the really important bit.’

‘Ah,’ was all Scott said as he leant back against the worktop while watching her dither over opening a new box of peppermint tea or settling for green tea.

‘I just couldn’t do it all in one go,’ she said. ‘I know you think I’m a coward, but I really couldn’t—’

He’d hushed her with a kiss. ‘You’re not a coward. I’ve never once thought that.’

From the other side of the partition, a phone rang. It rang and rang. Just as it always did. She knew that Julienne, the very worst receptionist in the world, was there at her desk; Daisy could hear the girl’s long acrylic nails clawing at her keyboard. And never would Daisy be convinced that it was important work that kept the annoying girl from answering the phone. Julienne was as lazy as she was stupid and came to work only to finance her hectic social life and then post comments about it on Facebook.

Ring, ring. Ring, ring
. It was like Chinese water torture. If it went on for much longer, Daisy would answer the wretched phone herself!

Finally the phone stopped ringing and in the ensuing hush, Daisy felt herself relax. She was wound too tight, just as Scott had said. ‘You should have got it all over and done with,’ he’d said when she’d kept him awake during the night with her tossing and turning.

She could, of course, have played her trump card. The old Daisy would have done it in a flash; she would have threatened Dad that he would make her ill again if he couldn’t be reasonable. But she was trying to be a new Daisy. She wanted to be taken seriously as a young independent woman who was strong and able to make her own decisions, and mistakes. She didn’t want to be the old Daisy who’d been a daddy’s girl – that wasn’t her any more. She wanted to be like Eliza. Eliza had always been able to do exactly what she wanted without Dad ever interfering in her life.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The last time Eliza had brought home a boyfriend, Dad had been spectacularly awful to her and the boyfriend. It had been back when Eliza was still at university and Dad had taken one look at Eliza’s boyfriend and said, ‘Well, Dave, you’re an improvement on the last one, I’ll give you that much. But between you and me, he wasn’t difficult to beat. Poor devil, he’d been thoroughly whacked with the ugly stick.’ In the awful silence that followed, Dad had looked around at them all and said, ‘I’m joking.’ He’d shaken Dave’s hand hard and said, ‘You knew I was joking, didn’t you, Dave? Course you did. Only someone very stupid would think I wasn’t joking and you’re not stupid, are you, Dave?’

In one easy and outrageous step he’d as good as called the poor guy stupid and ugly. Mum had been furious with Dad later – Daisy had heard them arguing when she’d been upstairs in her bedroom. They had been arguing a lot then. In fairness to Dad, Dave hadn’t been much of a looker, but that was beside the point. Not surprisingly they never heard of him again from Eliza. But now Eliza was prepared to risk going through the same humiliation again. She had told Daisy that just as soon as Greg’s busy diary had a free slot, she was going to take him home. Whoever this Greg was, Eliza must have enormous confidence in him and believe he was made of stronger stuff than Dave.

Just as Scott was.

Daisy had told herself a million times that Scott was more than equal to the challenge of meeting Dad, and he’d repeatedly assured her that there wasn’t anything anyone could say that would alter his feelings for her.

She had met Scott when she’d answered his advert online –
Easy-going-in-touch-with-his-feminine-side-Aussie seeks flat-mate
. He’d worded the advert like that because he didn’t really want to share with a bloke. Blokes, he said, were unreliable and as messy as hell; he was the exception, he’d added. As it turned out, her only opposition had been about a thousand gay men. She’d liked him instantly, but not in a fancying kind of way – he was ten years older than her, so was well out of her sights. He was also seeing someone at the time, a girl he worked with in the company where he was a project engineer. Mum and Dad met him when they helped her move in and even Dad gave his grudging consent, viewing Scott as someone who was rock steady and would look out for his daughter and not make a move on her.

Things changed, though, when out of the blue Scott’s girlfriend broke up with him. For the first time in her life, Daisy found herself in the position of comforting someone else, of being useful to someone. From there, things just sort of developed between them until eventually they both realized they were in love with each other. Being with Scott had made her happier than she’d ever been in her whole life.

None of which she’d so much as hinted at over the weekend. OK, again that wasn’t wholly true – she’d hinted to Eliza that her going to Australia was only half the story, that there was more to come yet. So typical of Eliza, always so reserved and circumspect, she hadn’t pressed Daisy for any further details.

Being with her sister at the weekend had made Daisy realize just how much she would miss her when she left. She would miss Jensen too. Time was when the pair of them would have been only too happy to see her move to the other side of the world, but things changed between them when she’d been ill. Jensen had been unexpectedly kind and caring towards her during that period; he’d talked to her in a way no one else did, openly and candidly. He’d even joked with her that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of saving her life only for her to blow it now.

He was referring to when they’d been on a family skiing holiday in Austria. Jensen and Eliza had wanted to ski on their own and when Daisy had pestered to go with them and not with Mum and Dad, Dad had agreed so long as Jensen looked after her. ‘Watch out for your sister,’ he commanded. ‘Don’t let her out of your sight.’

‘Babysitting again,’ Jensen had muttered bad-temperedly.

‘I don’t need babysitting,’ Daisy retorted. ‘I can ski as well as you and Eliza. If not better.’ It was a boast that was blatantly untrue, but Daisy, being thirteen years old, wanted to prove she wasn’t the irritating little sister they made her out to be.

They’d been skiing for about thirty minutes when they got off a chair lift and Jensen said he needed the loo. Eliza said she’d go as well. ‘How about you, Daisy?’ Daisy shook her head and popped another piece of chewing gum into her mouth, despite being under strict instructions not to chew gum while skiing. She watched them remove their skis and rest them against the rack, along with their poles. They’d just taken off their gloves when she said, ‘I’ll see you at the bottom then!’ And off she went, knowing they wouldn’t be able to catch her up. That would show them! She skied as fast as she could, determined to prove that she was easily as good as them, that she didn’t need babysitting. Her recall of what happened next was like a dodgy pirated DVD – there were breaks in the film and what she could actually remember was fuzzy. But apparently, so intent on looking over her shoulder to make sure her brother and sister weren’t catching her up, she nearly collided with a snowboarder who’d shot out of the trees to her right. She managed to avoid hitting him, but lost control and skied into a tree. When Jensen and Eliza reached her, she wasn’t breathing and her lips had turned blue.

Somehow Jensen knew what to do. He turned her over and thumped her as hard as he could, again and again, until finally the gum she’d been chewing flew out of her mouth. Meanwhile someone else had summoned help and within no time she was being taken down the rest of the slope on a stretcher and Eliza had called Mum and Dad on her mobile. At the hospital she was told her helmet had saved her head from being cracked open, but what had saved her life was the quick thinking of her brother. Dad had been full of gratitude at the hospital, but later back at their hotel Daisy overheard him saying to Mum, ‘But I expressly told Jensen not to let her out of his sight. What the hell did he think he was doing?’

‘For God’s sake, Jeff, can’t you just once acknowledge your son did something good? Something which, frankly, had he not done, Daisy would have died.’

‘All right, all right. Don’t go on about it. I still think that if he’d done as I asked—’

‘
Jeff!
’

If Dad could be as grudging as that with someone who had saved her life, how would he treat a man who not only wanted to take her away to the other side of the world, but wanted to marry her? Because that was her big secret she was keeping from her family: Scott had asked her to marry him and she’d said yes.

The phone began to ring the other side of the partition.
Ring, ring. Ring, ring
.

Realizing she was being as lazy as Julienne, Daisy put Scott and her father out of her mind and got on with some work. But not before asking herself the big question: why did any of this matter to her? Why did she still feel, after all these years, after all the counselling she’d had, that her father’s opinion in any way mattered?

Chapter Thirteen

‘Good afternoon, Mr Fletcher. You’ve heard of the Witches of Eastwick; now meet the Witches of Little Pelham.’

From his doorway, Owen worked at keeping the surprise off his face. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ he said, addressing the woman who had spoken.