In a Cottage In a Wood

She doesn’t tell anyone about it over the next week. Miri never seems to be around and she knows exactly what Lou would say. She’d go on about ‘the right thing to do’ and guilt trip Neve like she always does. So she leaves it, not expecting to hear anything further.

But a week later, another letter arrives in the post.

Dear Ms Carey

Further to my letter of 15th January regarding the estate of the late Miss Isabelle Shawcross, we would be extremely grateful if you could call the office. We urgently need to discuss a matter that relates to these instructions.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

L. Meade (Solicitor)

This time the person who has signed the police slip has written, We would be grateful if you could attend to this. We cannot pass on personal information under The Freedom of Information Act 2000 but this is no longer a police matter and we have limited resources in terms of fielding enquiries. Thank you for your consideration.

Neve is in the hallway, having arrived home from work as she opens this one.

Sighing, she takes her phone into the study to make the call.

Two days later, she is on a train to Salisbury.

The solicitor wouldn’t explain over the phone. But she insisted it was in Neve’s interests to come to the office to discuss this in person. ‘In your interests’. Those were the exact words. It’s all very mysterious.

Neve drains the last of the coffee she bought at Waterloo and looks out of the window as the tightly packed buildings of south London change to Surrey commuter towns and then green fields.

She has a book, something Lou has foisted upon her, which looks a bit worthy, and a copy of Grazia, which she can’t be bothered to read either. Squeezing her earbuds into her ears, she plays Tom Odell on her phone and tries to settle into the journey.

Neve would have liked to have done this the above-board way.

But there was simply no chance that she would have been allowed a day off so soon after the Christmas holidays. So at seven a.m. she had sent her direct boss, office manager Kate, a short text saying, So sorry. Food poisoning from a curry! Bleurgh! Been up all night. Better stay close to a toilet today!

Which, thinking about it, might have sounded a bit desperate. Daniel, who was a maestro at telling lies like this, always said she needed to keep it simple. But being naturally honest, she always felt the need to embellish.

The bad night’s sleep part was true anyway. She’d been lying in bed worrying about money the night before. Neve managed not to think about money too much, as a rule. It was a necessary evil, and that was all. She had no real desire to be rich, but she wasn’t someone prepared to rough it either. She and Daniel had spent a few nights in a squat when they were first together and she vividly remembered how miserable it had been, lying in a smelly room and feeling colder than she had ever been in her life.

But yesterday she’d had another automated text from the bank, reminding her she had reached her overdraft limit and now being charged £1 a day for further withdrawals. The ticket to Salisbury was paid for on her credit card, but that was coming close to being maxed out.

And the worst thing was, she couldn’t tell Lou how broke she really was.

When their father had died, eighteen months ago, the sisters had inherited a small amount of money each – £15,000. It would have been more, but for him having been persuaded into taking out a bad mortgage arrangement on his property.

Lou had put her share into a university account for the children. Neve had had every intention of saving at least some of it, but she had two big credit card bills to pay off at the time.

And then she and Daniel had really needed a holiday. They’d gone off to Spain for the Benicàssim music festival and had a brilliant time. Well, what she could remember of it, anyway. Parts of it were still a bit of a blur.

But somehow, within five months, her bank statement was showing her the impossible information that she had just £500 left in her savings account. Neve feels so ashamed at how she has ripped through her inheritance that she has been clinging onto this £500, determined not to spend it unless it is something that her dad would have thought appropriate, which most definitely ruled out credit card bills. When she and Daniel were together, they somehow muddled through. Now it looks as though she is going to have to dip into this small pot of money after all.

Neve had gone from her A levels to a job as a live-in au pair in London, working for a rich American couple with a pre-teen daughter. She had only to ferry the girl, Tabitha, to various activities and clubs and do a minimal amount of housework. Everyone told her she’d lucked out and she knew it was true. Then she met Daniel and when the Schwarzes located back to Colorado, she moved in with him.

She’s never really had to look after herself before, or live alone.

And she is on borrowed time with Lou and Steve.

When they were children, Lou used to harbour small resentments about the division of the parental affection. Neve was always the one having accidents or requiring medical attention when they were little: contracting a serious stomach virus that required hospitalization at two, falling out of a tree and breaking an arm at five, smashing a tooth after tripping over a paving slab at eight. Their parents used to joke that they would settle down for a family picnic somewhere and within moments Neve would have been stung by a bee, or fallen in the stream. Somehow this used to be seen as endearing when she was younger.

She wasn’t confident this was how Lou saw it even then.

These thoughts are still swirling corrosively in her mind as the famous spire of Salisbury cathedral finally comes into view. It is a crisp blue day and as she steps out of the station and begins to follow the directions from Google maps on her phone, she starts to feel more positive.

Soon she finds herself in the big market square, packed with stalls selling fruit and vegetables, children’s clothes or mobile phone accessories. A jumble of pointed roofed buildings line the top of the square. Neve checks the address once again on the letter. Heading across the square, she finds herself outside a modern-looking shopfront with tinted glass and a sign bearing the name ‘Beswick, Robinson, Carter, Meade’. A man in overalls is currently washing the large windows and he moves to one side with a grin as she heads towards the door.

Pushing it open, she looks around a small reception area. A middle-aged receptionist with blonde coiffed hair and bright pink lipstick sits at a curved reception desk.

Neve says, ‘Hi, I have an appointment with …’ but the receptionist holds up a finger imperiously and lifts the receiver to her ear. She smiles brightly at Neve as she speaks to the caller.

‘Beswick-Robinson-Carter-Meade-solicitors-how-may-I-direct-your-call-today?’ she says all in one breath, still beaming at Neve, who shifts on the spot.

Finally, she has the woman’s attention and a few moments later is directed to wait in one of the chairs for visitors.

The square leather chairs are very low to the ground and Neve settles her five-feet-nine-and-a-half frame into it awkwardly, knees to the side. The glass coffee table is covered with copies of The Lady and Country Life. She pretends to study her phone while she waits.

After a few moments she hears her name and looks up to see a woman about her own age smiling coolly down at her.

Her glossy red hair is twisted in a neat knot on top of her head and she wears a white silk top and a tight black skirt with high heels. Neve feels a stab of something uncomfortable. She always feels wrong-footed by uber-professional people like this. Really, she’d been hoping the solicitor was some middle-aged twinset and pearls type. She wouldn’t feel any need for comparison then, she thinks, placing her hand over a mark on the knee of her trousers she’s just spotted.

‘Miss Carey?’

‘Yes.’ Neve gets up with difficulty from the low chair and shakes her proffered hand. She always finds this ritual odd when between women. The other hand is small and cold and perfectly dry. Her own feels sweaty and ham-like in comparison.

‘I’m Laura Meade, would you like to—’

Before she can finish her sentence they are all distracted by the door to the street opening with almost violent force.

A tall bear of a man with curly dark hair bursts in and looks as if he has forgotten why he’s here. Bright blue eyes peer out of a chubby, unshaven face. He’s wearing some sort of brown corduroy jacket, baggy trousers of an indeterminate colour and wellies that are thickly rimed with claggy brown mud.

A black Labrador bounds in after him, heading for Neve and burying its face in her crotch.

‘Oh!’ she laughs and fusses with its ears in an attempt to distract it.

‘Jarvis!’ the man barks. The dog, ignoring him, leans its considerable weight against Neve’s legs, almost pushing her over. She grins but when she glances up, sees that Laura Meade is bright red. She keeps looking between Neve and the man, and the receptionist, one after the other. Then she seems to gather herself.

‘Richard,’ she says coolly to the man. ‘Didn’t we cover everything earlier?’

‘Don’t suppose I left my bloody phone in here?’ Richard’s voice is rich and fruity, like an old Shakespearean actor’s.

Laura looks at the receptionist, who is taking all this in with bright-eyed avidity. She shakes her head.

‘I’m afraid not,’ says Laura.

‘Bugger. Better try the bank then,’ he says with feeling. And then he’s gone.

Neve sees a look pass between Laura and the woman on reception, whose eyebrows are almost at her hairline, and wonders what she isn’t getting about this whole scenario.

‘Apologies for that,’ says Laura now, gesturing towards some double doors behind the reception desk. ‘Do come through.’

Neve follows the solicitor into her office, and the door is shut.

10

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ says Neve five minutes later. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to swear. Sorry.’

She picks up the glass of water she was offered on arrival into the office and puts it down again, sloshing a little onto her trousers as she does so.

Laura Meade regards her with an expression she can’t quite read.

‘I assure you, I’m not,’ she says. ‘Look, I appreciate this is a shock. It is why I wanted you to be here in person. I thought this had to be a face-to-face conversation, rather than being discussed by letter or over the phone.’

‘But how?’ Neve blurts out, her voice too loud. ‘I mean, how can she have given me a fucking cottage? Sorry. But how? She didn’t even know me.’

Laura nods patiently.

‘It’s a special type of bequest,’ she says, ‘that can be made separately from a will. It applies when someone dies intestate, like Isabelle did, and is known as donatio mortis causa.’ She pauses. ‘Basically, it’s a deathbed gift.’

Their eyes meet and both look away at this uncomfortable term then Laura continues crisply. ‘There are a few basic requirements for this to be legally binding,’ she says, ‘and they have all been met, however unusual the circumstances may be.’

‘But why me?’ says Neve after a moment.

Laura sighs. ‘We can only guess that she wanted to make this bequest to the last person she saw before she took her life.’

Neve thought of the envelope, clutched in Isabelle’s thin, white hand.

She never even saw it fall to the ground when she’d dropped it a couple of minutes later. The shock of the other woman climbing up and throwing herself into the cold, dark water had thrown it violently from her mind. ‘What exactly was in the envelope?’ she says.

Laura lifts a coffee cup to her lips and takes a sip before placing it carefully back on its coaster.

‘It contained the deeds to the cottage, plus a written note. You may remember she also recorded a message into her phone, confirming your name, just before …’ she clears her throat ‘… just before she did it.’

‘God,’ says Neve quietly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’ After a moment, she adds, ‘Did you know her?’

Laura seems to lose her professional veneer for a moment and makes an anguished face.

‘We were at school together, years ago, but we weren’t really good friends. She was …’ she pauses. ‘She ran with a bit of a different crowd. I hadn’t heard from her in years. Then … well, then we received this.’

Neve chews her lip.

‘I can’t take it, anyway,’ she says.

‘Why not?’ Laura slightly tips her head to the side.

‘Because!’ Neve lets out a humourless, stressed laugh. ‘Because it’s not right. And what do her family say? Don’t they mind?’

Laura looks down at her skirt and brushes something off before looking up at Neve again. The shutters are back down now.

‘She only has a brother,’ she says. ‘And …’ she pauses. ‘I have no idea whether he wanted it or not.’

Neve shakes her head in wonder.

‘I just can’t understand why someone would do this though, with a complete stranger. I mean, why not leave it to, I don’t know, Barnardo’s, or Battersea Dogs Home or something? Why a random person on a bridge?’

Laura sits back in her seat with a sigh.

‘We can’t possibly know what was going through her head now,’ she says, wearily. ‘But she clearly had a desire not to be alone when she killed herself. Maybe she just wanted to say thank you, retrospectively.’

‘Well, it’s the saddest bloody thing I’ve ever heard.’ Neve’s eyes fill with hot tears and she swipes them away, furiously. ‘I wasn’t even that nice to her,’ she says. ‘I was impatient to get home. All I did was say I’d stand her a night bus and ask where her coat was.’

‘Well,’ says Laura, her gaze fixed on Neve’s face. ‘All we can assume is that this is more kindness than she would have had otherwise. Maybe it was enough.’

There’s a pause. Neve swallows and finds a tissue in her handbag, which she uses to blow her nose, more loudly than she intended.

Laura pushes an A4 padded envelope across the table towards her.

‘This really is happening quite legally, Neve,’ she says in a gentle voice. ‘You own Petty Whin Cottage and everything in it. It’s all yours now.’

11

Neve walks robotically back to the station afterwards, all thoughts of having a wander around Salisbury and finding somewhere cheap for lunch forgotten. She has a strong desire to get straight on a train and try and make sense of what has just happened.

She’s lucky with trains and is able to run for the Waterloo-bound one that is just leaving.

Finding a table to herself, she begins to investigate the contents of the envelope. There’s a bundle of papers, including the details of a lease. At the bottom of the envelope there is a small keyring in the shape of a dog, with a grubby suede covering that is worn away in patches, revealing carved wood underneath. It looks ancient, thinks Neve, spreading out the lease document and studying the address.

Petty Whin Cottage

Briarfield

Stubbington Lane

Cador

Near St Piron

Cornwall

Neve reaches for her phone and taps the Google app, before typing the name of the cottage into the search box. There are no entries for the property, but she learns that the odd name comes from a yellow flowering plant native to the area.

Cornwall.

She’s never been there. She’d wanted to ask Laura Meade if the cottage was by the sea, but it didn’t seem right. It might have sounded as though she actually wanted it. But the very word makes her picture blue skies, roses climbing up the front of a whitewashed cottage. Healthy sea air. Her heart rises a little, despite herself.

There isn’t anything much online for Cador, except, worryingly, a headline from the Cornish Times about a drugs bust. Neve assumes it is too tiny for mention, but St Piron seems to be a small town that’s a few miles from Truro.

Next she Googles the name ‘Isabelle Shawcross’ and after a couple of unhelpful entries about an American law professor she sees a news story from a site called West Cornish Life.

Christmas Suicide of Local Woman

A woman has died after apparently jumping into the Thames on 21st December. Isabelle Shawcross, who grew up in the St Piron area of the county, was 34 years old and left no husband or children. It is believed she had been living in Australia for some time before returning to the UK. The police say they are not treating the death as suspicious, but the coroner has yet to fix a date for the inquest. Her brother, local landowner Richard Shawcross, was unavailable for comment.

Searching further, she finds only a black American woman called Isabel Shawcross on Facebook and nothing else.

Bizarre. Isabelle seems to have been someone with almost no internet presence.

Neve finds herself tapping the words ‘cottages for sale, Cornwall’ into Google.

On the Rightmove site a list appears and she begins to scroll through it, quickly finding an astonishing difference in the range of house prices here, from a run-down two-bedroom cottage at £75,000 right up to places going for several million.

But right now, £75,000 sounds like a miraculous, almost magical amount of money. All of a sudden, Isabelle’s last words appear in her head … ‘And keep it, if you can bear to,’ and the back of her neck prickles.

When the train pulls into Waterloo station, Neve drains the last of the warm gin and tonic, her second on the train, and begins to gather her things.

Over the course of the journey, she has made a series of plans:

1. Sell the cottage immediately. Pay off debts. Get own flat.

2. Say NO to cottage. How can I possibly accept???Find a way of contacting Isabelle’s surviving relative. Hand over cottage.

3. Sell it. Sell. SELL.

Walking across the concourse at Waterloo towards the tube station, at first Neve ignores the man pointedly staring at her, taking him to be a creep. But when she hears her name she looks at him properly and feels her stomach plummet.

It’s Fraser from work, gazing at her with a triumphant expression.

‘Well,’ he says, as commuters stream past them in both directions. ‘Looks like you have made a full recovery.’

‘Does, doesn’t it?’ says Neve. She has to stifle a yawn that rises from nowhere. She’s suddenly very, very tired.

‘I think we’d better have a word tomorrow, don’t you? A little chat about responsibility?’

He’s so pleased with himself that his face has turned the colour of ham. Neve sighs.

‘Bugger off, Fraser,’ she says, just as another man comes to stand right next to him, his expression one of injured puzzlement.

Without waiting to hear a reply, Neve turns away and hurries to the tube.

She can’t face going home.

Everything is buzzing inside her now. The tiredness has turned into a wired energy. She needs to go out, to do something. To find a way to make sense of the mad day she has had.

On the Northern Line, she makes the snap decision to get off at Camden station. She’ll go to the pub where she and Daniel used to hang out. There’s bound to be someone there who wants to have some fun. There might be a live band. Maybe Daniel will even come along. She can pretend it’s just like old times.

It turns out that most of her old crowd are there. By ten o’clock she’s standing outside, smoking a joint with her back against the wall and laughing so hard she almost starts to pee.

She’s with a drummer called Bick, a friend of a couple of years. No one knows where Bick comes from, exactly. He has a strange accent that is part American and part Scandinavian. He is six foot five and his shaved head gleams like polished ebony. Tribal scars nubble his cheekbones and rows of earrings stud his upper lobes. His sexuality is what he refers to as ‘fluid’. He’s the most beautiful man Neve knows.

She has told everyone about the cottage over the course of the evening.

Most agree that she must sell up straight away. A tiny, birdlike girl called Darcy, an ardent clubber, is of the opinion that Neve should go and live there. There was some talk of jam-making and a mass visit from them all at a date in the summer. Also possibly a music festival in the ‘grounds’. Everyone, including Neve, is hazy on the specifics but it sounds like the best idea for a while.

Bick is talking now and Neve smiles soppily up at him.

‘I think I love you, Bick,’ she slurs and puts her hands on his chest, raising her mouth to kiss him. But Bick steps back, laughing.

‘Neve, honey, I absolutely would, don’t get me wrong. But you’ve had a very weird day and I think you need to go home.’

Deflated, Neve stands back and almost falls off the kerb.

‘I’vegotafuckingcottage,’ she says as one word.

‘I know you have, darling. I know you have.’

A few minutes later he folds her into a taxi with assurances to the sceptical driver that she isn’t going to be sick. Neve manages to pass on Lou and Steve’s address. But when they reach the junction of Camden Road and Kentish Town Road, Neve leans over and gives new instructions, filled with a sudden second wind.

The driver eyes her warily, then changes direction.

A few minutes later, the car pulls up outside Daniel’s flat. The flat that was once hers and Daniel’s.

She pays the driver with the money Bick had insisted she take and stands on the pavement, staring woozily up at the top floor. A fox appears from the alleyway next to the house and regards her brazenly before slinking away. There’s a car alarm going off on the next road along.

Swaying slightly on her feet, she wishes fervently now that she hadn’t thrown the keys back at him during a fight. All she wants is to creep in and go to bed. She wouldn’t even bother him; she’d only sleep on the sofa. It seems so reasonable that she could do this. Who could possibly object to her sleeping on their sofa?

But there is no option other than to wake him up, now she’s here.

She wobbles up the steps and peers at the row of buzzers. Funny how unfamiliar it looks in such a short time. Focusing hard on not missing the target, she presses her finger squarely onto the buzzer and keeps it there. Then she removes it and does it again.

‘Hello?’ Daniel’s sleepy voice crackles from the intercom. She feels a happy rush that he is so near and she will see him within mere moments.

‘S’me!’ she says.

‘Who?’

Neve pauses, frowning.

‘S’Neve,’ she says a bit less cheerfully.

There’s a silence.

‘What do you want?’

Neve sways and tries to concentrate on what’s happening. This isn’t working out as she had expected.

‘To go to sleep,’ she says honestly and pushes the door, confident that it will have been released.

Nothing happens so she buzzes again and, a few seconds later, it opens and reveals a stony-faced Daniel.

He’s wearing an old T-shirt she has always loved, which says Revolution is Just a T-Shirt Away in white letters on black, faded to soft grey now, and pyjama bottoms. His hair is tousled and hangs over his eyes and he’s grown a small beard since she saw him last. He’s never looked more attractive and desire floods her entire body, hot and quick.

‘Neve? What the fuck?’ he says as she moves quickly and snakes her arms around his back. She breathes in the familiar smell of him and feels her groin squeeze in anticipation.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she says and starts to nibble and kiss his neck. ‘Let’s just forget about all of it. I have a cottage now.’