And really, the scale of Applecote is perfect. They wouldn’t be lost in it. Huge compared to their London semi-detached, it’s still a doll’s house compared to the real old piles in the area—the name manor is definitely pushing it. Only two rooms deep, the square footage is in the width, and it’s rustic rather than grand, with gnarled woodwormed beams, walls that bulge as if breathing, no straight edges. A pelt of ivy covers the stone exterior, the house not immediately visible from the road. Jessie likes this, the unshowiness, the way Applecote doesn’t dominate the surrounding countryside but settles into it, like an elegant elderly lady dozing in long grass. Jessie can see Bella finally finding some peace here, and her daughter, Romy, freed from rubber-matted city playgrounds, climbing trees, those strawberry blond curls catkin-fuzzed.
Romy already seems perfectly at home, prodding at the kiss of a snail’s fleshy sucker on the other side of the glass with chubby toddler fingers. Jessie is sure her little girl will love the freedom of the countryside, just as she did as a kid, all those secret nooks of childhood, tiny worlds invisible to grown-up eyes. When the snail foams forward, Romy giggles and looks up: Jessie sees her own pixie-pretty features miniaturized, her family’s Irish teal-blue, copper-lashed eyes, Will’s full mouth. She grins back, Romy’s delight her own. Their relationship is still porous, umbilical, the opposite of Jessie’s with Bella, which seems to be fortressed by a wall just as thick as Applecote’s. Occasionally she can peer over it, if she pulls herself up, dangling precariously. Not often. Certainly not today.
It’s been three years since Jessie crossed the city with her five-months-pregnant belly, the world’s happiest accident bulking under her coat like a hidden present, and moved into Will’s house—two years after Mandy died. Not wanting to intrude upon his life or his daughter’s, she had hung on to her independence and Dalston flat-share as long as possible, resisting the man she’d fallen madly in love with—“I don’t want to waste another minute of my life apart from you, I need you, we need you, Jessie”—until it became ridiculous and impractical. They didn’t want to unsettle Bella further by moving then, not with a new baby on the way. And Jessie naively believed that a big heart, an eagerness to love Bella as her own, would eventually win over the fawn-like girl with the haunted eyes who clung to her father’s hand as if he were the last human left on earth. She had no idea that trying to love Bella, let alone parent her as she grew into an angry teen, would be like trying to hug an animal that wanted to sink its teeth into her neck. That she might never be forgiven for invading Bella’s private world with her father and bringing forth the joy, noise, and disruption that was Romy, a rival for her father’s affections and embarrassing proof of his new sex life. And who could blame poor Bella?
Time, everyone says. But time seems to be making things worse for Bella in London, not better, like something fragile left outside in the polluted city air, accruing damage. These last few months have been particularly bad, hormonally explosive with an unsettling crescendo that’s forced their hand. Both Jessie and Will are agreed that Bella, whether she wants it or not—not, obviously—needs a fresh start. She must be removed from the skunky parties and the toxic cliques, taken far away from what she did to that girl, everything that happened. There’s no point in just moving to another London borough. If they’re going to do it, they need to be radical, reframe their lives. They will leave the city for somewhere much more innocent and benign. And what could be more innocent than Applecote Manor?
And yet.
The windowpane bisecting the family’s reflection seems uncannily symbolic, reminding Jessie that there are other, murkier reasons Applecote draws them: Will trying to escape the mental imprint of a truck turning left, the broken body of his beautiful wife churned along a concrete road; Jessie’s insecurities, the ones that flare secretly, pettily in her brain. How could she tell Will that she’s never felt comfortable in his dead wife’s smart house, a domestic life that was never hers? That she has to fight terrible childish urges to paint over the chic gray walls with a riot of color. That this is his second marriage, yes, but it is her first, her only, and she wants it to have its own unique character. And that Mandy, magnificent Mandy Tucker, a subject so huge and heartbreaking that Jessie daren’t mention her at all, is inescapable in the London house? Only last week Jessie pulled out one of Mandy’s scarves from behind the radiator in the hallway. Sitting down on the stairs, the gray walls pressing in, the scarlet silk limp in her hand secreting another woman’s expensive scent, she wondered what to do with it. In the end, at a loss, she dropped it back behind the radiator and felt terrible. But Jessie knew that bits of Mandy would always be in that house, her marriage, hiding in crannies, waiting, watching.
They wouldn’t be at Applecote Manor. No ghosts here.
“I can tell you’ve already moved in,” says Will, making her start, guiltily pushing away thoughts of Mandy.
She can see her own smile spread in his tawny brown eyes. “And I can tell you’re still on the motorway. Outside London.”
A laugh rumbles up from his thick coat. “I might turn off.”
So he’s losing his nerve. “Might?”
“We can’t afford it, Jessie. Not if you factor in all the work that needs doing. Unless you want to live like a squatter.”
Even this has a romantic appeal. Jessie imagines them all huddled around a roaring fire for warmth, drinking cocoa from tin mugs, telling one another stories.
“The commute to the London office will be like some sort of daily triathlon,” says Will. “We don’t know a soul here. In fact, there isn’t a soul here. We may as well move to Mars.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jessie sees Bella nodding fervently in agreement.
She thinks of the journey out of the city earlier in the day through sleepy suburbs, the anonymous banker satellite towns, chocolate-box villages, the cold skies clearing, blueing, until they passed the point at which a daily commute into London was, Will joked blackly, “completely unfeasible without a midlife crisis,” on and on, a series of country roads, smeared with the bloating carcasses of foxes and pheasants, then a narrow lane, squeezed between hedgerows, a deserted old house, waiting. In a way she doesn’t quite understand, it felt like a route deep inside herself. She can’t turn back.
“Total madness.” Will’s mouth starts to twitch with a smile. “But . . .” He is the only man she’s ever met who can seduce with only his eyes. “. . . it is wild and beautiful, just like you.”
Bella groans. “Oh God.”
“And you’ve got a slightly mad, determined look going on that’s making me think you might just move here anyway, whether I come or not.” He grins at her from beneath the mop of floppy dark hair that he likes to wear a little too long, a little rock and roll, a small rebellion against being forty-four—nine years older than Jessie—and the demands of the growing logistics company he set up fifteen years ago with an old college friend, Jackson. A large, loud bachelor, Jackson was the best man at Will’s first wedding (huge, white) and absent from his second (a family-only affair in a registry office, Jessie in a green dress, scarlet lipstick, a baby on her hip).
“So, yes, there’s a chance you might be able to persuade me. A very small chance.” He pulls her toward him, lightly pressing his hand against the curves of her bottom.