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‘Several times. Vastly over-rated,’ Matt winked at Amy. ‘Lake District is way better.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Harry’s voice echoed out of the tent. ‘Otherwise, Mickey Mouse would live here.’
* * *
After tea, the rain was still falling, and the temperature had dropped by several degrees. Even Amy wasn’t sure she wanted to go for a long walk tonight.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, slightly nervously, as they set off along the old track up the valley. If she found herself alone with Matt again she might not be able to control things, but as long as the boys were with them that wouldn’t happen.
‘Not far.’ He led the way, the boys following behind them talking about Darcey-Mae.
They halted outside the cottage. The rain had stopped, and though it was still cloudy the sky was brighter than it had been. It was easy to imagine life still went on inside, to remember her mother at the front door calling her in from the garden for tea.
‘Can we stick our heads in the water again?’ Harry asked.
‘No. Not today. Why don’t we go and have a closer look?’ From his pocket Matt pulled a key ring with a rusty old door key and a padlock key which he held up in triumph.
‘You’ve got the cottage keys?’
‘I thought you might like to have a look inside, Harry, see where your mum and your granny used to stay. I went and had a word with Mrs. Thompson while you were still in Keswick and she lent me the keys. She says it’s all still sound, though it might be dirty. It’s a while since anyone’s been there.’
The padlock opened easily; the main lock was stiff, and the door stuck in the frame, but Matt pushed it open with his shoulder. As the door swung open, the sun burst through from between the clouds, flooding the little stone cottage with light. For one brief, crazy moment Amy imagined her mother looking down and lighting her way inside.
‘Thanks, Matt! This is amazing!’
‘Yesterday — you understood what it meant to me to get out running. I wanted to say thank you. Go on! Go inside, see if it’s what you remember.’
It even smelled the same, the cool, green smell of damp slate floors with a hint, even after all this time, of woodsmoke ingrained in the very fabric of the beamed living room.
‘Come on, Harry, hold my hand. This is where we used to sit in the evenings.’ Though most of the furniture had gone long ago, some things were still there; there was the little wooden cupboard that had held the visitors’ books beside the fire, and even the harmonium still stood in the corner, though when the boys tried it, damp and age had rotted through the bellows and it made no sound except the hollow rattle of the pedals against the frame. To the right of the front door was the boarded-up dining room they’d never used; forbidding, upright furniture and a tiny window had made it a dark, cold space that had been left to the spiders and the mice. At the back of the house the low kitchen in its single storey lean-to was the least changed of the rooms; the old stove still dominated it and the kitchen table stood in the centre on the slate floor which had been worn away around it by generations of cooks. It must have been made in the room because the table would never fit through the door to remove it again.
The boys ran round the house in next to no time and declared it boring.
‘I don’t like it in here. It’s all old and crumbly. Can me and Oliver go and play outside?’
‘Yes, but be careful, and don’t put your head in the water if we’re not there,’ she said. ‘Don’t be naughty, will you, Harry?’
‘We’re going to climb on the stile.’
Only a few days ago she would never have dreamt of allowing her son to go and play unsupervised with Oliver Sutherland, but things were changing with every minute the two boys spent together.
‘Thank you so much for arranging this,’ she said to Matt when the boys had gone and the house was still and quiet. ‘I know this place must look like nothing to you, but it’s amazing to think it’s still here, still just as I remember it, like it was when Mam … when Mam and me …’
She was struggling to complete the sentence. Silently Matt handed her a tissue and she dabbed at her eyes. As they climbed the stairs the noise of the boys playing grew fainter and fainter. The stair carpet had been removed and the wooden stairs sounded hollow and creaked as they climbed. Upstairs the house smelled more strongly of damp, and some stains on the wall at the top of the stairs suggested the roof might be leaking. Motes of dust hung in the light from the dirty windows.
‘I know it’s seen better days, but I was sure it would’ve been turned into something I wouldn’t recognise — extended, modernised, a fitted kitchen, a proper upstairs bathroom — and yet here it is. Mam could walk back in here tomorrow and she’d remember it all.’
‘It must be hard, knowing she’s never going to.’
‘I thought I was getting over it, getting used to her not being here.’ Amy opened the door to what had been her bedroom, now empty save for the old dressing table under the window. It had bare floorboards and peeling whitewashed walls, a huge space where the high, lumpy bed with the stripy mattress had once stood. It had once been covered with old-fashioned woollen blankets and a knitted patchwork coverlet. Perhaps that was where her own love of textiles had come from; she could still remember the feel and scent of the rough wool of the blankets, the faint smell of sheep still clinging to them. The scent of the Lake District, the scent of her childhood.
‘Grief catches you in strange ways, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘I miss Mam so much.’ Tears crept down her face, but her loss must be prosaic compared to his. She fumbled in her pocket for the tissue he had given her and wiped her eyes again. ‘You must miss Stella so much more.’
‘I do miss her, of course I do, but ...’ He followed her along the landing with its lumpen white wall, rounded with the shapes of the massive stones underneath the plaster. The last door stood ajar, leading into what had once been her mother’s bedroom, furnished with an old metal bedstead, a washstand with a mismatched jug and ewer her mam used to wash in the mornings sometime, and an ornate, carved cupboard which could have been centuries old. Now there was nothing there: no washstand, no cupboard, no bed, and no Mam.
‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ he said as she looked round the empty room.
