‘Not on your nelly. That looks like hard work!’
‘It is.’
‘That’s good stone, that is. Are you going to reuse it?’
‘You bet we are. But not here. We’re going to use it to repair the house and build an extension.’
Walter admired the young man’s vision as he talked him through their plans.
‘The biggest problem is getting materials on site. The track from Dulcie’s farm onto the mountain needs to be tarmacked, and that’s going to cost a fortune.’ Adam looked so down in the mouth, that Walter’s heart went out to him.
He scratched his whiskery chin. ‘I’ve got an idea. There’s a forestry track that runs up through the trees over that way.’ He pointed to a dark green patch of conifers that had been planted decades ago and had now grown to maturity.
The trees flanked the sides of a hill a fair distance from the old farmhouse, but the logging road running through them was hard-packed gravel and wasn’t nearly as steep as the track above Dulcie’s farm.
As Walter described it to him, Adam’s expression brightened. ‘I’ll take a look right now,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come with me?’
‘No thanks, lad. I’m knackered. I’ll have a quick cuppa with Maisie while she tells me what she’s going to do with those sheds once they’re built, then I’m off home.’
‘I can give you a lift, if you like?’
Walter shook his head. ‘You get on and check out that old logging road. I got up here by myself – I’ll make it down by myself.’
He had a feeling he would regret not taking Adam up on his offer, but he was nothing if not stubborn. And he probably had more pride than was good for him. But, darn it, he hated being thought of as old and incapable, and he wanted to make himself useful.
Hopefully, he had done that today, and if that was the case having stiff joints and aching muscles tomorrow would be a small price to pay.
CHAPTER TWO
‘That’s all of it,’ Amir announced, holding onto the attic ladder with one hand and balancing a cardboard box on his shoulder with the other. He set it down carefully on the landing, alongside the others, and dusted his hands off.
‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’ Beth asked hopefully. Anything to delay having to sort them out.
‘I’m alright thanks, Mrs Fairfax. I’d better get on. I’ve got lectures this afternoon.’
Beth tried to press a twenty-pound note into his palm ‘for his trouble,’ but he refused that as well, so she waved him off, thankful that her neighbour was so kind. She never would have managed to get up the attic on her own.
It was a long time since she’d seen what was up there, but from what she remembered much of it was junk.
As she opened the flap of the nearest box, she couldn’t for the life of her work out why she had hung onto an old iron that didn’t work, or that vase, considering she had never likedit. Beth anticipated that she would be making several trips to the household waste recycling centre, and she was quite looking forward to it, as she’d never been there before. Not surprising, since she’d only recently bought a car.
She chuckled as she remembered the look on Dulcie and Maisie’s faces when she’d rocked up at the farm in it at Easter. Dulcie had feared that she was going to insist on staying longer than the fortnight she’d planned, but her middle daughter needn’t have worried; Beth hadn’t had any intention of staying. And she had no intention of staying now, not when she would have a home of her own in Picklewick.
A twinge of conscience pricked her: she hadn’t told her children what she’d done. She would have to at some point, but not yet, not until it was irreversible. Actually, it was irreversible now, since she had given notice on this place and had taken out a lease on her new one. There was no going back. But she was nevertheless reluctant to tell her kids. Jay, in New Zealand, probably wouldn’t mind, but the girls were a different matter.
She honestly didn’t know what their reaction would be. She hoped they would understand that she missed them. All three now lived in Picklewick, so was it so wrong for her to want to be near them?
As she settled into her task of sorting out more than three decades of living in this house, Beth prayed they wouldn’t be too upset. She knew how irritated they could get with her, and she didn’t mean to be annoying, but no matter what she did or said, one or the other of them would get cross.
At times she felt like she was the child and Nikki or Dulcie was the parent. Not so much with Maisie, because her youngest still acted more like a teenager than an adult. Although, to befair, since Maisie had met Adam, she was less fifteen and more twenty-five, which was her actual age.
Aw, look, Nikki’s first pair of proper shoes!
A wave of sadness enveloped Beth, both for the time long gone and for her firstborn who was now a mother herself. And a smidgen of guilt followed quickly in its wake as she realised that she hadn’t kept any of her other children’s first pairs of shoes. And neither had she filled in their baby books the way she had diligently filled in Nikki’s. It didn’t seem fair to hang onto Nikki’s baby things when she hadn’t bothered to keep anything belonging to the others.
Not wanting to lose the shoes completely, she took a photo of them before she added them to the pile meant for the charity shop. She decided she would take photos of anything else that she didn’t intend to hang onto but wanted to remember.
Despite looking forward to a new home and a new life in Picklewick, Beth would be sad to leave this house. Her children had been born here. Not in the house itself, of course – they had all been born in hospital – but this was where she had raised them. It held so many memories, some happy, some not so happy, and some downright horrid, but every single one was a piece of the mosaic that made up the picture of her life with her children.
