‘Watch those quiche cases,’ Bram instructed, heading across the kitchen to the door to the Room with a View, as David called it. He’d better check that everything was okay in there. David was bound to head straight for it.
He had to admit that David had been right to insist on an expanse of glass for the long end wall, the middle sections of which were sliding doors giving onto a terrace. Every room in the house had a lovely view – how could it not, in such an idyllic location? – but this was spectacular. Immediately behind the house was the paddock, where they hoped to keep goats, and beyond that another small field and, off to the left, the wood of pine and birch and beech trees that actually belonged to them – how amazing was it to actually own a wood? Was it deeply un-PC of him to be gloating about this? And just in front of the wood there was a stream, with a cute little footbridge carrying a Hansel and Gretel path across it, perfect for Phoebe’s interminable games of Pooh sticks.
So much for his egalitarian principles. Dangle fourteen areas of idyllic Scottish countryside in front of Bram Hendriksen and it seemed his inner Tory would bite your hand off.
The ground beyond the field dipped down and then slowly rose, providing a panorama of forests and fields and farmhouses and, as a backdrop to it all, the hazy bulks of the Grampian Mountains. On this perfect midsummer day, it was a glorious, impossibly lush patchwork of greens and purples and blues.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They’d done the right thing.
He missed his London friends like crazy, but this was a little piece of Scottish heaven. It was going to be amazing, living here with nature all around them – none of which, barring the very slim possibility of adders, had the potential to be fatal.
He straightened a picture, picked up some loose thread from the carpet and rearranged the fossils on the big fire surround made from old ship’s timbers. He defied even David to find fault with this room. Their honey-coloured linen sofas, which had looked oversized in the Islington flat, were perfect here, and Bram had found vintage fabric online with which he’d made fresh covers for their collection of cushions. Which were looking a bit squashed from the four of them collapsing on the sofas last night at the end of the hectic moving-in day.
He picked up an orange and white cushion and plumped it, and set it back on the sofa in its proper place. But as he reached for a green and blue one, he stopped.
What was he doing?
Why was he pandering to the man? This was their home, not a show house, and if the cushions were flat, David would just have to suck it up. In a childish act of defiance, Bram grabbed the orange and white cushion and chucked it down on the sofa and sat on it, bouncing a couple of times to make sure it was completely de-plumped.
Starting as he meant to go on.
He stood without looking at the cushions again – because he wanted to plump those bloody cushions! – and opened the sliding doors. On the terrace, he took his phone from his pocket to capture the view. He’d do a blog post tonight about their first day in the new house, in Woodside, as they had called it.
The air was so clean, scented with pine resin, and as he walked round the side of the house and past the shed, he breathed it into his lungs. Thanks, Bram, his lungs were probably saying. You’ve almost forty years of London pollution to make up for, but it’s a start. He chuckled, imagining what David would say if he knew Bram’s lungs were talking to him.
His smile widened as he spotted Henrietta, the carved wooden goose from his childhood, positioned by Phoebe in a little drift of wildflowers – were they some kind of buttercup? He took a photo for the blog. He’d get a shot of the veg patch too. Or maybe a video of his hand picking the first onion? He switched to video function, angling the phone to get a long-range shot of the veg patch, and started walking again.
‘So,’ he narrated. ‘First day in Woodside and it’s time to pick some onions! Yep, Bram’s much-derided self-sufficiency drive is finally paying off. Let’s harvest those suckers! Let’s–’
He stopped, looking from the screen of the phone to the actual ground.
‘Oh, no! No no no!’
Where the veg patch should be there was just a rectangle of earth covered in shrivelled, dry, yellowing stalks and flopped-over leaves. Stupidly, he looked around for a moment, as if the real veg patch might be somewhere else, before dropping to his knees and examining the nearest plants, a row of Salad Bowl lettuces. They had been succulent lime green and deep purple last time he’d been here but were now a uniform gungy brown, the lower leaves stuck gummily to the soil, already half-decomposed.
Bloody Nora, as Kirsty’s mum would say.
Everything was dead.
Okay so he’d not checked the veg for a few days – he’d been too distracted with the move – and they’d had a very sunny, dry spell. But this was Scotland. Surely it hadn’t been hot enough to kill them? He touched the soil. The top layer was crumbly, powdery between his thumb and forefinger, but when he poked his finger down a few centimetres he hit dampish earth.
He stepped across the row of ex-lettuces to examine the other vegetables. The carrot shaws were withered and papery, but when he pulled up a carrot – a puny specimen at this time of year – it looked more or less okay. But if they’d been hit by some kind of blight, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to eat any of it.
The onions were just starting to fill out, too, the bulbs that were peeping up from the soil fattening nicely. It would have been satisfying to have a few home-grown onions, no matter how small, for their first lunch in the new house.