I thought I’d be horrified that Aidan had vanished up to London again, but honestly I wasn’t that bothered. I seem to have hit my stride here for the moment. I’m not saying for one second that I wouldn’t rather be back in London, but it’s not feeling quite like the life sentence I’d imagined. Maybe it’s Rommel – he really is a very companionable dog. Maybe it’s knowing Jane is on the other end of the phone. Maybe it’s having Ben around. He’s being fantastic, he really is. He’s not only going to do the kitchen but is going to help out on the rest of the house restoration. He says he can’t do all of it but – as is the way with all workmen – he Knows People. He’s also promised that he’ll take me over to the reclamation yard so I can have a say in the materials. To be honest, I’d just as soon let him get on with it (I really don’t have a clue or an opinion on one type of wood over another) but it will make a trip out, and he’s good company.

I’ve been digging over the old kitchen garden, taking over where Aidan gave up. I’d forgotten the steady rhythm of the earth – how you can’t hurry a garden. We seem to have an abundance of thrushes here, and blackbirds and the usual robins, strutting around full of self-importance.
In the evenings I’ve been getting on with Fi’s jumper. I’ve even started writing! I was hoping to write some standard chick-lit (apparently there’s a competition in Cosmo magazine) but at the moment it keeps veering off into a sort of sub-M R James ghost story. Ah well, at least I’m doing something.
I wouldn’t say I’m sleeping well though. The house still creaks and groans and scratches itself – but I’m trying to ignore it. Ear-plugs help a lot or I let myself drift off to sleep with my iPod on shuffle, wending its way through Joy Division, The Passions, Magazine and Young Marble Giants.

Aidan phones, but he sounds distant and distracted. I understand that. He’s in one world; I’m in another. The irony is not lost on me that it should be the other way around. He was the one who wanted the country life; I was more than happy in the city. But presumably it will sort itself out. The country teaches patience, if nothing else.

I could barely believe that a whole week had gone by since the last knitting circle. But Wednesday rolled round again and I woke up early, very early. Now the mornings are light, it seems wrong to be inside, so I get dressed warmly and take Rommel out for a stroll. Yesterday I made my way into the village and then out again, down the lane called Holloway. Presumably it had been an old hollow way – an ancient trackway carved by water, not human endeavour. Some of them date back to the Iron Age, so this could be a pretty ancient place. The original way had obviously been widened into a land, but it was still very narrow and I hoped we wouldn’t meet anything driving along it. The banks were steep, mossy and pricked with primroses and violets. The hedge line had grown out many years ago and the trees arched up high. In summer it would be like walking down a deep green tunnel. But for now there was light enough.
Suddenly there was a break in the bank and a five-bar gate. Rommel shot through it. I waited and then gave a low whistle but he didn’t come. The gate was padlocked so I climbed over, into a broad field. It was in poor nick, with large clumps of gorse and a spreading pall of dead bracken. If whoever owned it didn’t sort it out soon, it would be useless as grazing.
As I walked further in, I noticed a caravan – a smallish white one, clearly not abandoned as someone had strung a line of washing from it to a nearby hawthorn.
The door opened and, don’t ask me why, I dropped down behind the nearest gorse bush. The grass up-close was dew-spangled, each blade beaded.
The caravan door opened slowly, almost slyly, and out came a woman, short, dumpy, edging backwards down the steel ladder, feeling her way gingerly with toes clad in plimsolls. She seemed middle-aged, in her fifties perhaps. Her hair was short but springy, like a really bad perm. Baggy tracksuit bottoms bunched around the ankles, a shapeless sweatshirt appliquéd with horses – grim, grim, grim. But when she turned around I realised she was young – and familiar. It was Maura, from knitting. Her face was actually almost beautiful in repose, calm with wide cheekbones, full lips and large deep-lidded eyes. She stood quite still, like an animal sniffing the air. I thought for one awful moment that she could tell she was hiding there, and I tucked myself still further into the prickled bush.
She kicked off the plimsolls, like a small child. She tensed her toes around the step and then flexed upwards, like a ballerina at the barre. Then she spread her toes, raising them one by one in turn, a Spanish wave of toes. Finally she rose up on one foot and slowly pranced from one foot to the other, as if she were a show pony. She jumped lightly down the steps and looked back at the caravan with a look of…..what? It was hard to tell from that distance but I wondered if I could detect irritation, frustration, even malice. Fanciful.
Then, without warning, she turned abruptly and ran at the circle of grass in front of the caravan. One moment she was running, the next she was circling through the air, hands down into the dew, legs arcing through the morning. And again and again, perfect cartwheels across her grass stage, leaving imprints of fingers and toes, curious animal tracks.
It was so graceful, so perfect, I raised my hands automatically to clap. But stopped dead, as she collapsed on the grass, pummelling her fists into the mossy turf. Her face was contorted in a rictus of fury and despond. I realised all of a sudden that she was screaming, screaming silently over and over again.
Rommel suddenly appeared at my side, nosing my hand. Not caring if I got wet, I crawled away.



I was late getting to the Knitting Circle. Everyone was already sitting and knitting – in what felt like a rather uneasy silence. Judith looked furious and was stabbing her needles as if she were trying to murder the scarf she was knitting. The others looked plain uncomfortable. There were a few subdued ‘Hello’s’ but that was it. I grabbed a chair and placed it next to Jane, sat down, got out my work and let my clickety-click needle rhythm blend in with the established percussion. I snuck the odd glimpse at Maura and she looked grim. Her eyes were red and puffy and she had definitely been crying.
When the time came for coffee I put down my sleeve and followed Maura to the kitchen with a brisk, ‘I’ll give you a hand.’ Jane shot me a glance but I just gave her a shrug.
There was obviously something very wrong but I figured she wasn’t the type to just blurt it out. How wrong can you be?
‘That bloody Judith,’ she snarled, the minute I shut the door, slamming teacups onto saucers. ‘She won’t bloody let me be.’ Swearing sounded funny from Maura – she simply didn’t seem the type and it felt put-on somehow, as if she were a kid trying it out for size, trying to shock her parents.
I gave what I hoped was an ‘I know what you mean’ look.
‘What did she do?’
‘Look, it’s obvious I’m upset but when Jane asked if I was OK, I said yes, I’m fine. Really firmly. She backed right off immediately, because she’s got the sense to do that. But Judith, oh no. She couldn’t let it lie, could she? On and on about how we’re a group; how we support each other; how we should share our problems. I don’t WANT to share my problems. I’m sick to death of everyone talking about my problems. Thanks to bloody Judith the whole bloody village knows about my problems. I’ve made the mistake of unburdening my soul to her before, and before you know it, everyone from foul bloody Grace to bloody Saul in the bloody pub are making sympathetic noises about poor bloody Maura and her pathetic bloody husband.’
She paused to draw breath and I put coffee in the cups, keeping very quiet, not daring to say a word in case it interrupted the flow. Small chance.
‘They laugh about us behind our backs. They do. They all do. Our place was called Folly when we bought it and they think it’s funny that we want to change it. They think it’s funny that we can’t get decent workmen to do the work and that we’re living in that bloody caravan…’

I kept very quiet – if she only knew I’d been crawling behind the gorse bushes watching her.
‘They think Jeremy’s a joke.’ Jeremy? I looked quizzical.
‘My husband. He’s not exactly the most practical of men. He doesn’t make great choices when it comes to workers. Everyone knows ours spend all their time down the bloody pub, drinking the money we give them.’
Heck. That’s tough. I thought of Ben and said a silent prayer to the God of Good Builders (hopeful branch).
‘Anyhow, I yelled at Judith. Told her to mind her own bloody business.’
Oh, good on you girl. Not such a wet blanket then.
She sat down on a stool and looked bleakly at me.
‘I read in some magazine that well-matched couples look like each other. Do you believe that?’
I said I wasn’t too sure but that you shouldn’t believe all you read in women’s magazines.
‘It’s just that Jeremy and I are so different. He’s all long and gangy and I’m….well……’ she grimaced…. ‘all short and squat.’
‘Well, opposites attract…’ I said inanely.
‘Not any more,’ she said, staring at the floor. ‘I think I’m falling out of love with him. In fact, I don’t think I can bear him. His hips are too wide. I hadn’t noticed that when I first met him but now I can’t stop noticing it. Is that awful?’
‘Er, no. I don’t know.’ What the heck was I supposed to say? But I did sort of know what she meant. Wide hips aren’t a good look on a man. Thought it could have been anything really – the way he smiles; the way he butters his toast; the way he fills the dishwasher, the way he keep vanishing up to London (OK discard the last one). But when love dies, Lord it does it in the most humiliating ways. But what was I supposed to say next?
‘I want to leave him.’
Oh heck. I heartily wished someone would come out to the kitchen. Heaven only knows we’d been there long enough. But they obviously weren’t fools; I’d been left with the proverbial hot potato and it was singing my fingers.
‘Well. I suppose if you feel like that…..’
She took one anguished look at me and then burst into heaving sobs.
‘But I can’t. I bloody can’t. I’m pregnant.’