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After she and Harry had eaten breakfast, she made sandwiches and put the freezer packs from her cool box into the rusty old freezer in the barn, next to the washing-up sinks, so they’d be frozen again when they got back from their day out. The cool box wasn’t as good as a fridge — or even a trough of cold mountain water — but it was better than nothing.
‘Come on then, Harry. Let’s go and find my old cottage, and then the little lake, shall we?’
The sun was peeping through between the clouds as he set off happily up the path beside her, running ahead and running back again, singing a song of his own devising. She didn’t listen to the lyrics too carefully — never a good idea with Harry’s songs — as they seemed to involve the word “titty” rather a lot. She hoped it was Swallows and Amazons which was inspiring him and not what Matt had seen last night.
The track was exactly as she remembered. Once they had passed through the farmyard there were ancient, grey stone walls on either side which must have been there for generations, built by ancestors of the Thompsons, perhaps. From the track a wooden stile climbed over the wall and led to the main public footpath up to Elder Fell. It was only a couple of years old, by the looks of it; when she was young the stile had a broken bottom step she would avoid standing on. “Mind the wobbly bottom” her mam used to say, wiggling her own bum, and she would laugh and laugh. Then the lane narrowed and turned a corner, and when you turned the corner, you could see the cottage on the right-hand side …
There it was. From a distance it looked as if nothing had changed, the little, white-walled cottage as much a part of the landscape as it always had been.
‘That’s it, Harry! That’s the cottage where I used to go with Granny Jen.’
‘Can we go in?’
‘Let’s go and have a look.’
There was the gateway where they used to leave the car, and there was the spot behind the wall where the wheelbarrow for luggage used to be kept … oh goodness, it was still there, or at least the remains of it were. The handles appeared to have been snapped off at some point and it was useless now, rusted and overgrown.
Now they were closer to the cottage, she could see it, too, had suffered. The gutter was full of weeds and was hanging down in places; the white paint was peeling and stained with patches of mould; the window to the right of the door, the old dining room window, was boarded up. A lump rose in her throat. A large hasp with a rusty padlock secured the door. There was no way they were going to see inside.
‘Sorry, Harry, it’s all locked up.’
They went round the back of the cottage and Amy tried to see in through the kitchen window, but the curtains were pulled across, shreds of material which had once been floral cotton. The back door was also padlocked, and from the look of it, nobody had been inside for a long, long time.
‘Look what I’ve found!’ Harry shouted. Beside the back door was the old stone trough with the spring still trickling down into it. Smiling, she scooped a handful of the water, just as she’d done with her mam when she was little, and drank it. The taste was the same, cold, clean, pure water straight from the spring.
‘It comes out of the crack in the rock there, see? Sometimes, I used to put my whole face in it, it’s meant to be good for your skin —’
Harry plunged his head straight in and came up coughing and spluttering, his hair soaked and water dripping everywhere.
‘Oh, Harry!’
‘I drank the water with my whole head!’ he announced, grinning.
‘So you did! Come on then, let’s go to the tarn. You mustn’t drink the water there, mind, sheep might have had a wee in that.’
It wasn’t as warm as it had been first thing, and no sooner had they reached Loverswater when a light drizzle began to fall, but the rain didn’t stop Harry. He’d been promised a day playing in the tarn, and that was what he was going to have. He stripped down to his trunks, regardless of the cold, and went straight into the water, paddling in the lake happily, oblivious to the chill of the water, though when Amy dipped her toes in, it was cold enough to take her breath away. Maybe they’d leave swimming for another day.
At this end Loverswater wasn’t deep. The Thompsons’ son Peter had moved some of the stones to level it out and make a safe spot where their visitors could swim; she remembered Mam telling her about it. That was the last year they had come, the summer her mam had taught her to swim there, making sure she never went too far out. Jen had been a strong, experienced swimmer, sometimes swimming right out into the middle of the tarn where she would float on her back for ages, looking up at the mountains and the sky. Amy would think she’d gone too far away and would call for her to come back again, and her mother had come, every time. She looked at Harry and smiled at how the world had come full circle.
Instead of swimming, they balanced a small rock on top of a bigger one and took turns trying to shy it off with pebbles. In his younger days she’d always let Harry win games, but these days he could win comfortably by himself and she didn’t have to fail on purpose. She showed him how to skim stones and they did this for nearly half-an-hour, until her feet were numb and she climbed out of the water to let him play by himself while she sat on the bank behind him and looked around.
At the side of the tarn two huge boulders leaned together, creating a kind of natural shelter from the elements. If you squinted at them with the light coming from the right angle, they looked almost like a heart. It was possible to hide away between them and keep dry with a roof of solid rock above. This had been their picnic place when she was little, and her mother would tell her tales, as they ate their fish-paste sandwiches, of the star-crossed lovers who met in that very spot and then drowned in the cold waters. Amy used to shiver with fear when she looked at the dark water in the deepest part of the tarn, afraid she’d see their pale ghosts floating there. As an adult, she suspected it was her mum’s way of preventing her from swimming out of her depth.
The drizzle wasn’t stopping. ‘I’m going to sit under those rocks and keep dry,’ Amy told Harry. ‘When we get back to the tent, remind me to tell you Granny Jen’s ghost story about this tarn.’
‘Ghost story? Yeah!’ Harry paddled off through the water, seemingly oblivious to the weather.
Sheltered under the rocks she pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked herself away to watch as he splashed in the shallows a few yards away, pretending to be a boat. It wasn’t long before he’d had enough.
‘Mam! I’m hungry! What’s for lunch?’
‘It’s only half past eleven.’
‘Can’t we have lunch now?’
‘I guess we can. Wrap yourself up in a towel and come in here under the rocks. We’ve got tuna sandwiches.’
