So I set off for Elm Cottage on the Great Boot Hunt with high hopes for being able to persuade Isobel to leave at the same time. If I could get all this sorted today I could be five thousand pounds better off by next week. Maybe I could do some Christmas shopping? And have a look at places to rent? Tilly and I could be in our own home by Christmas, if I could find somewhere that would take six months’ rent up front instead of all the usual bonds and guarantees. It would buy me six months to find a proper job to keep paying the bills anyway.
Again, the village I drove through on my way was almost deserted. I passed two women riding horses so large that they looked as though they should have been ploughing the fields rather than galloping over them, but the women were chatting and didn’t spare me a second look. There was nobody else about on those wide verges or in those blank windows.
On to the start of the woods, the first sparse trees, as though the forest had been getting in practice, gradually increasing until the trunks were so close together that looking through them was like reading one of Tilly’s pop-up books. Everything hidden. Evil concealed.
Familiarity helped. I pulled into the rutted verge and stopped the engine in the general stillness and almost oppressive silence. Even the trees weren’t moving today, although a sticky carpet woven across the road from fallen leaves showed that they had had plenty of agitation recently. The road stretched, hooded by branches, in both directions, untravelled. It felt a little like someone had put matting down in a railway tunnel.
Between the trees, Elm Cottage hung, nailed to the background with its swaying roofline and gappy windows. Vegetation sprawled up the walls and over the roof as though the house had been extruded through the ground, rather than built, and the blocks of local stone that comprised the walls had a worn, second-hand sort of look to them.
This was not a nice place. Why on earth was Isobel Isherwood even here?
I locked my car and walked onto the footstep-muffling layer of leaves that took me into the wood. Brambles, now reduced by autumn to no more than brown razor wire, dragged at me and held me back and the silence was almost sinister. No birds sang though, for which I was grateful. I was already on high alert, I didn’t need avian intervention to make me more nervous. The air held the mouldy-fruit smell of decaying leaves, which intensified as I forced my way between bushes and clumps of grass towards the cottage.
Amid the more startlingly coloured of the leaves a yellow object shone. One of Tilly’s lost boots lay on its side, looking disconcertingly like a Teletubby trap for unwary wildlife. I picked it up and went on.
The front door was slightly ajar, but the silence had wrapped itself around the house and got right up the hallway, so I tiptoed through the doorway and only stopped to announce myself when I got to that closed door at the end.
‘Hello? Isobel? It’s Libby Douthwaite again. I’m looking for my daughter’s wellingtons.’
My words echoed off the silence, which was as solid as a wall. There was no acknowledgement of my presence, either human or bird, and I slumped in relief. She’d gone and taken her dreadful pet collection with her. All I had to do now was make the front door secure and the five thousand pounds was as good as in my pocket.
I spared a momentary thought for the run-down image of Ross Ventriss: his chewed nails, his uncut hair and his unshaven face. The image came with a short stab of regret – completing this job would mean that I wouldn’t see him again. I sidled along the hallway up to the closed door, berating myself as I went, because it shouldn’t matter to me whether I saw Ross Ventriss once a fortnight or never again in my entire life. He was just a person. Just my employer, for what that was worth. I was the single mother of a toddler and I had no right to find a man attractive in any way at all. In fact, after David, it was surely surprising that Icouldfind a man attractive. That particular relationship had hadAversion Therapywritten all over it.
So, I thought, as I pushed gently at the door which led to the terrifying room at the end of the hallway, why the hellwasI thinking of Ross Ventriss? Because he’d been nice to me and Tilly? Because he was the absolute antithesis of David de Winter, with his nervous walk, his random conversation technique and his general air of not having paid any attention to his appearance since 2004? Seriously, was that all it took these days to get me – just don’t be David de Winter? Honestly, I despaired of myself sometimes.
Tilly’s boot hung heavily in my coat pocket as I nudged the door open even further while cautiously keeping most of my body behind the wall. Nothing flew out and nobody shouted. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Isobel didn’t speak. So, like a cartoon villain, I slid around the door frame and oozed myself into the room, cautious for the presence of quiet birds.
There was nothing there. No, not quite true. The room bore the scatter of paper, the random sticks of furniture – a chair, a mattress on the floor, tattered sofa and some bookcases – and that careless toss of feathers that I’d seen before. But there were no birds, no Isobel Isherwood, no signs that anything living had been in there within memory. The boot in my pocket tapped me on the hip as though reminding me of its lost brethren and I bent to scan the floor more closely. There, peeping coquettishly from behind the disembowelled couch, was the bright yellow rubber top of the missing boot. I got down on all fours to grope in its direction and was thus stretched full length on the floor when Isobel came into the room carrying a bucket of water.
She didn’t see me at first, but I saw her, shouldering the door fully open so she could haul the huge pail inside, then she hefted it up onto a piece of furniture that had evidently once been a desk. I gripped the boot and slid my way backwards, whereupon Isobel saw me and startled back a few steps, slopping water across the tabletop.
A hot blanket of shame and embarrassment folded over me. The house mightbelongto Ross, but it was herhomeand here I was lying on the floor of her evident bedroom as though I had every right to be here.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, from the floor. ‘There was nobody in and I came to get my daughter’s…’ I held the last wellington up like a trophy. ‘There was nobody in,’ I repeated, trying not to notice Isobel’s shocked look. Then, ‘Ididshout,’ ignoring the fact that I hadn’t really shouted at all, because I hadn’t wanted to attract the attention of any birds that might be in the place.
Isobel relaxed, finally, and gave me a raised-eyebrow look. Then she fumbled beside her and pulled out some paper and her pen.
You were that desperate for the boots?
‘Yes. Tilly – my daughter – lost them both yesterday and it’s been raining a lot. I don’t want her going round with permanent wet feet.’
Another look. I registered now that Isobel had long greying hair held in a plait that ran over one shoulder, and her clothes were a mixture of ancient farming wear and what looked like charity shop finds. An overlarge hacking jacket with leather-patched elbows overlaid a hand-knitted sweater and she wore an Indian print skirt over corduroy trousers. Her feet were in a pair of enormous walking boots that seemed to have been cast off by a giant.
Would you like a cup of tea?
The question was so odd that I had to read it twice before it made sense. Tea? Here? In this shell of a house with no amenities? I couldn’t have been more startled if a ghost had floated through, patted the mouse-eaten sofa and offered me a sit down and a bun.
‘Er. Yes please.’ Then the little stab of guilt familiar to any mother whose children are temporarily elsewhere, particularly when that child’s father looms over everything like a vengeance-filled deity. ‘But I can’t stay. Tilly is at the park with my friend, and I have to get back for her.’
You could bring her here. I like children. Boiled, for preference.
I stared at the message again, my mouth going slack and dry as I read it twice to make sure. A moment of hasty scribbling went on, and then:
That was a joke.
Relief pulled my face into a smile that I wasn’t certain was deserved and I sat down on the sofa, much of which was just stuffing without benefit of cover to contain it. The pink striped material had obviously once been expensive, but that had been about a century ago and now it only served to counterpoint the feathery innards.
‘Tea would be nice, thank you.’ I finally found my manners. ‘But I really do have to get back for Tilly. She can be hard work and Tia’s already got her own children to manage.’
