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‘I’m definitely going to get him to fix you up with someone,’ Nina warns. ‘This can’t go on.’
‘Please don’t,’ I beg. I know what Nina’s like when she gets a bee in her bonnet.
The other thing about Gerry is that he constantly leads Nina a merry dance. Twice she’s caught him out having affairs with other women and twice she’s taken him back, but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. In all honesty, I’m not sure that Nina does any more. It’s a mystery why she sticks with him at all. She says she doesn’t want to fail but I don’t think it’s her that’s doing the failing.
‘I’m fine. Really,’ I assure her. ‘Absolutely fine. A quiet night in is just what I need.’
‘You have too many quiet nights in, woman.’ With that, she tuts, but lets me pack my bag and go home on my own.
I kiss her on the cheek. ‘See you tomorrow, hun.’
‘Yeah. Unless I win the lottery,’ she mutters. ‘Then I’ll be outta here.’
Funny, it’s the only way I can see myself getting out of here too.
My drive home takes me about fifteen minutes. When Paul and I split, I bought myself a little cottage called, enterprisingly, Little Cottage, in one of the villages that’s halfway between Buckingham and the encroaching metropolis of Milton Keynes. When I say little, I mean little. But it’s mine. All mine. Paul and I had rented a furnished place all the time we were together, which made parting quite painless. There was no home to sell, no valued possessions to bicker over, but suddenly on my own again, I wanted to feel settled, put down some roots.
We’d always lived in the town but I decided I wanted something different, more rural. After much trawling around the area, I picked out Nashley as top of my list of ideal villages. A month later and this house came onto the agent’s books. It took all of my meagre savings to put a deposit down on this place and I have a mammoth mortgage which is quite daunting to face on my own. Still, every night when I turn the corner or, like on this cold October night, the beams of my headlights illuminate Little Cottage, my heart squeezes. The village is as tiny as my home. There’s a quaint pub, a much-used village hall, one shop-cum-post office that’s always under threat of closing and, well, not much else. There’s a scattering of twee, thatched houses around the green, a small duck pond with suitably pretty ducks, and on the outskirts there are a few bigger houses – one that used to be the rectory to the medieval church and a very stately Manor House.
A lot of the people who live here were born and bred in the village, the rest are incomers like myself. A few are city types who commute to London everyday and are rarely seen, especially in the winter months.
I park up outside the house and breathe a sigh of relief. Now it’s just me, my cat, Archibald the Aggressive, and no one else to worry about.
My cottage is on the far left, the end one of a terrace of three. The front door opens straight into a miniscule living room with low, low beams. Original. I’m only five feet, three inches tall and yet I feel as if I permanently have to duck. There’s not a straight wall, floor, door or ceiling in the whole place. The fireplace, complete with a gorgeous wood burning stove, takes up most of one wall. A sofa, a comfy armchair and my telly are shoehorned into the rest of the space. There’s a separate dining room, also small, that was added as an extension some time during the seventies. I couldn’t hold a banquet in there but you can at least stand upright. The kitchen is slightly bigger and higher too, with room for a small table. There’s a utility room that was originally the outside loo, but someone knocked the wall down and now it houses my washer and dryer as well as doubling up as a bit of an office. Upstairs there’s one bedroom and a bathroom. That’s it. But it suits my needs and I adore living here.
Opening the door, Archie winds around my feet mewing pathetically. Don’t let that cute look fool you though. My cat would have your arm off as soon as look at you. Very few people get through his door and don’t lose some flesh to Archibald. He likes nothing better than to lurk on top of the kitchen cabinets and then pounce on the shoulder of unsuspecting visitors and sink his teeth into their neck. I’m thinking that he might have been a vampire in a former life or is currently training to be one.
He was a feral cat when I met him. Perhaps he was once someone’s pampered pet who, out of choice or out of necessity, was living rough in the fields at the back of my cottage. Perhaps he simply sank his fangs into soft skin once too often and was banished. I got used to him prowling my small garden, deftly and stealthily picking off the sparrow population. When I started to put down food for him in an attempt to keep the birds off the menu, he tentatively edged nearer to my back door. A few months later and he was brave enough to come into the house. Now he lives here and happily curls up on my bed at night but it’s not a joke that I have a ‘Beware of the Cat’ sign on my front door. Strangers send him into a hissing, spitting frenzy.
