Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(6)
The girl who once got around by cycling all over London and stayed up all night inspired to finish an article now got overwhelmed by the idea of leaving the house, and had to take a nap every few hours just so that she could form coherent sentences.
The girl who’d bought most of her clothes at trendy vintage shops (beige slacks that Pete had bought her notwithstanding) now wore pyjamas like a uniform.
Nothing felt right. Her scrambled senses could muddle the touch of water with the prick of needles, or the sound of Elvis’s crooning with chainsaws. She had to rely on Evie for everything. Her hazy vision meant that even opening up the right pill bottle or making herself a cup of tea was a challenge because she couldn’t rely on her other senses to help guide her.
The smallest thing could feel like a battle, like early the next morning when she tried to put on socks and it felt like she had applied a heat rod to her soles. Evie found her sobbing on the edge of the bed.
‘That’s the worst of it,’ she said, as Evie stroked her back, tried to calm her wails. ‘I feel so overwhelmed all the time. I just want my old life back! I just want things to make sense – literally.’
‘It will, love, just give it time.’
Time was all she had now, great bucketloads of it. Her world had turned small, constricted to the alcove around her bed and the wider surrounds of the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom.
She couldn’t escape into a novel as the letters scrambled across the page like moving ants, and even if she could watch television, Evie had never owned one, though she suspected that the moving images and sounds would have simply worn her out anyway. The same was to be said of social media; it was all just too hazy and there was a real danger of her typing something that didn’t make sense at all.
‘You’re home now love, you’ll see, things will get better soon,’ said Evie, getting up to put the copper kettle on the range for tea.
Home. One of the things that she did look forward to about being back – one of the only things really – was seeing her oldest friends, Maggie and Jenny, who, along with Gretchen (who, sadly, lived in Scotland now) had been a constant in her life since her first year at school. Who needed social media when you could have the real thing, she thought with a grin.
Emma lay back against the cushions and thought: home. When she pictured it, it was this. The large, whitewashed kitchen with its navy blue range, the same behemoth that generations of Halloway women had used since Grace Halloway swept into the village of Whistling some two hundred years before, with dust lining her coffers and only her family recipes to her name. The flagstone floors and pale weathered beams were the same too. Cats asleep in shadowy corners – though always just outside the kitchen, which was, as ever, Pennywort’s domain. Dust-mote rainbows in the lemon-coloured sunshine. Herbs drying on the windowsills. Pennywort himself, seated on a chair, his old head resting on the large scrubbed kitchen table, keeping an eye on what they made. Miraculously still going strong after all these years (the aunts insisted that it was due to one of their recipes for longevity; Emma thought they’d just got lucky). Evie.
But it was also this: the sound of anxious knocking on the door. The reason why, in many ways, she’d been happy to see the back of Hope Cottage.
Shooting Emma an apprehensive glance, Evie opened the door to find Mary Galway standing in wait. Her pale eyes darted nervously around the room, widening in alarm when they took in Emma lying in bed in her fluffy pink pyjamas. Emma cursed herself for having moved the blue silk screen that blocked the alcove from the rest of the kitchen, en route to the bathroom the night before. She fought the urge to hide beneath the covers.
Mary dithered, with one foot on the threshold like a startled rabbit, ready to flee at the slightest provocation. Her mousy hair hung in lank strings down her face and she had that deflated look of someone who had become recently thin, like a soufflé that had popped in the oven.
‘Cup of tea?’ Evie asked.
Mary nodded, and Evie asked, ‘For you as well, love?’
Emma stifled a groan. What she really wanted was for Evie to put the silk screen back in place, so that she could pretend for just a second that she hadn’t re-entered the twilight zone.
‘No thanks,’ she said instead.
Evie shrugged, beckoning Mary inside where she took a tentative seat next to Pennywort, who eyed her solemnly for a moment then jumped down as if he would offer the two some privacy.
‘What seems to be the problem, Mary?’ asked Evie.
Some things never changed. No one came to Hope Cottage at dawn, not unless they had a problem they couldn’t solve any other way, because what the Halloways offered always came with a price, a sacrifice.
It was the tradition, as old as the cottage itself. If you needed the Halloways you came at sunup. Being a Halloway and having a lie-in were not things that often went together.
Mary swallowed and darted Emma a nervous look, hesitant to say what it was in front of her, no doubt. Emma hid a grin. She half suspected that that was Evie’s plan, why she’d put her bed in the kitchen and not the living room – so that she could be drawn back in to the life of the cottage.
Not today, thought Emma, getting up with some difficulty. She shrugged into her fluffy pink robe, which clashed rather magnificently with her badly-in-need-of-a-brush red hair, and hobbled away with her crutch. ‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ she said pointedly, Pennywort following at her heels.