‘Just biscuits,’ Ross said cheerily. ‘She’ll be fine and I can talk to you.’
‘While my daughter ingests enough sugar to fuel a marathon runner,’ I said, mutinously.
‘She’ll be fine,’ he said again. ‘Look.’
There followed a few moments of paper shuffling, some muttered swearing and the kind of sotto voce monologue carried out when you are trying to find something but need your vocabulary to consider the others in the room. ‘Ah, here it is.’
He waved a page at me. I tried to focus on it. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ The paper went down onto the table, which shifted slightly. ‘It’s a pre-emptive sketch.’
‘I can see that. What of?’
Ross stared at me for a moment. I registered his long eyelashes, dark stubble, that the bitten lip had healed, as I returned it. Our eyes stayed locked for longer than was surely necessary, then he glanced back down at the paper and spread it flat with the weight of his palms. ‘Yes, sorry again. I forget that real people don’t see architectural drawings in the same way as I do.’
Real people?Did he usually associate with aliens? Or, an even worse thought,imaginarypeople?
‘I have no idea what I’m looking at. It’s just a drawing,’ I said, and took a biscuit from the packet on the table, almost without thinking, stared at it, thought,I’m making progress. In the life before, I would have wondered whether David had put something in this. ‘Just a little something to help you sleep,’ he would have said as I drifted, unable to keep myself or Tilly safe.Then I bit it.
‘It’s what I’d like to do with this area, once Elm Cottage is under way.’ Ross turned the paper ninety degrees and I could suddenly understand what I was looking at. ‘Originally I was going to sell it again, get rid of the containers, tidy up, make good, flog it on. But then I thought… why not keep the containers? Turn them into a little house?’
I stared at the drawing and then up and out of the grubby cobwebbed window at the two shipping containers which squatted in the leafy murk beyond. ‘Would that work? Wouldn’t it be averylittle house? And what about… electricity and plumbing and all that, won’t that be prohibitively expensive to get out here?’
From under the table came a muttered ‘’Spensive.’ It was a word Tilly had heard a lot in her short life.
Ross looked out of the window too. ‘You’re being… what’s that thing?’
‘Practical, down to earth, realistic?’
‘No, not that. Unimaginative. Can you not see it? A little cabin-type of place, all self-contained? It wouldn’t need to connect to the mains, and I’d never get planning for that out here either. It would need to be entirely self-sustaining, towable so it would rate as a caravan for planning permission, and eco-friendly.’ He turned around and brought up his phone, tapped a few words and showed me the screen. ‘Like this.’
I saw, in glorious technicolour and probably rather more sunlight than this location would ever get, a selection of small buildings that looked like the offspring of a horsebox and a shooting lodge.
‘I could turn the containers into something like this,’ Ross went on. ‘Compost toilet, solar panels for power, it could be completely off grid, which means no need to connect to services.’
‘Compost toilet,’ I said faintly, having vague childhood memories of camping expeditions with my parents. ‘That sounds…’
‘Oh, it’s all very modern and clinical now.’ He hastily closed down the page. ‘Very efficient. No buckets down the bog.’
I stared outside again. Despite the fact that it was only lunchtime, the sky seemed to be darkening already, the fog pulling all the light out of the day. Mist swirled down among the low level branches like curious ghosts peering in at us. Distant birds cawed desolately.
‘And all this is relevant why?’
Ross bit the side of a nail. I suppressed the urge to push his hand away from his mouth. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps I could offerthisplace to Isobel? There might be a few weeks with no accommodation, while I get the team onto Elm Cottage, but as soon as that’s going I can spare a few people to start putting this together. Do you think she’d like it?’
I thought about Isobel and the shambolic room she lived in. ‘Can I have another look?’ I asked. ‘At what you want to build?’
More hasty fumbling. ‘Of course. It wouldn’t beexactlylike these, of course – there would be more flexibility – but size-wise and fittings-wise, they’d be fairly similar.’
There were hundreds of pictures, mostly featuring smiling people, immaculate kitchens and bathrooms, enormous double beds with wide glass windows giving views over thousands of deserted acres. I tried to superimpose these on the rusty shed-like containers and the site squeezed between trees. ‘Well,’ I said dubiously. ‘They do look nice. And she could keep the birds.’ I shuddered at the thought of one of these pristine dwellings filled with beaks and scaly legs, all the flapping.
‘Would you ask her? You can show her this, if you like?’ Ross held out the sketches towards me, but they were still just so many pencil lines.
‘I could show her this page.’ I pointed at his phone. ‘If you give me theURL. It might mean more to her.’
‘That would be brilliant.’ Ross smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘And you’d still pay me five thousand pounds?’
