Lucy was as cautious with her emotions as she was with everything else.
She was afraid to fall in love, one of her boyfriends had once accused her. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps the loss of her parents, coming when it had, had somehow instilled in her an inability to take the kind of emotional risks that went with loving someone. Or perhaps it was her own nature she feared; the knowledge that beneath her calm surface ran very deep and intense emotions and passions.
As she walked towards the door she gave a small shrug. She was twenty-six years old and she enjoyed being single; what was wrong with that? She wasn’t the kind of woman who needed to have a sexual relationship in her life; she preferred men’s friendship to their sexual advances, and was always very firm about making that quite plain.
She had had one or two problems at first in France in that regard, but a cool smile and the information that she never, ever mixed business with pleasure had soon solved them.
Her car was parked next to Verity’s Mercedes coupe´.
‘What on earth made you choose a car that colour?’ Verity demanded as she came out to see her off and frowned over the plain grey body of Lucy’s small Ford.
‘I liked it,’ Lucy told her. ‘It’s discreet and practical.’
She smiled as she spoke, knowing that Verity would not understand. Verity was a creature of colour, an extrovert who demanded to be noticed. Lucy was not like that.
She liked to blend into her background, not stand out from it. She smiled a little over the difference in their appearances. Verity was wearing a scarlet suit, and her make-up was equally vivid. She, Lucy, was wearing a cream silk shirt worn outside a camel-coloured straight skirt. Her toffee-brown hair was cut neatly to her shoulders, its straightness enhancing its healthy shine. Her make-up was minimal and discreet; her pale matt skin needed no foundation, just a hint of blusher along her cheekbones to bring them warmth, a touch of grey shadow around her eyes to emphasise the elegance of their almond shape. That they were a particularly vivid shade of turquoise blue was something that had always made Lucy feel slightly uncomfortable; hazel or, better still, grey eyes would have been far more in keeping with the image she chose to project. Turquoise was somehow far too theatrical, far too noticeable.
Her lipstick was a discreet peachy pink. She wore the minimum she could get away with because her mouth was, in her eyes, a little too large, her lips rather too full.
‘Why is it that you always manage to look sexy without even trying?’ one of her friends had once complained.
Lucy had been horrified by her question and still sometimes rather anxiously searched her reflection in the mirror, looking uncomfortably for this supposed sexiness, which thankfully was not apparent to her.
She got into her car and started the engine, a serene-looking woman who rarely allowed others close enough to her to guess what that outward serenity sometimes cost her.
Her flat was on the opposite side of their small local town to where Don and Verity lived, but, instead of taking the more direct route through the town itself, Lucy turned the car towards the open countryside.
The cottage she had inherited from her cousin was well outside the town, all that was left of the several good-sized farms and their lands that had once been owned by her family. The big house, the house built by her great-great-grandfather, had been demolished shortly after the war, but, from what she had seen of it from photographs, there was no reason to regret its destruction. It had been a rather ugly and over-large building which her father remembered as being extremely cold and uncomfortable.
The cottage must have originally been a part of one of the farms and had probably been built to house a farm labourer and his family.
It had a good-sized garden, now completely overgrown and something of an eyesore.
That had been another of Eric Barnes’s complaints. Her cousin, as his landlord, should have done something about the garden, he had told her when Lucy had visited him in an attempt to try and explain to him her situation.
It had not been a pleasant meeting. Eric Barnes was, in Lucy’s opinion, a misogynist. He had been aggressive and unpleasant towards her, making all sorts of impossible financial demands, but against her immediate dislike of him was the fact that the cottage was in a disgraceful condition.
The roof leaked, and one bedroom was virtually uninhabitable because of this. The house had no proper heating; just an ancient stove in the kitchen and open fires in the other rooms. The bathroom had horrified Lucy as she had surveyed the fungus-and mould-tainted walls and the cracked, grimy tiles. And as for the kitchen…She suspected it was probably a health hazard, but this was as much Eric Barnes’s fault as the cottage’s.
He had seen the swift look of distaste she had not quite been quick enough to hide when she had seen the greasy grey water in the washing-up bowl, the remains of food on a table which had looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, and he had immediately jeered at her, taunting her, making totally invalid comments about her supposed wealth and her family’s position, even threatening to reveal her negligence to the local Press.
Lucy had been taken aback by his vindictiveness. She had come fully prepared to apologise for the state of the cottage and to explain to him her own position, but his attitude had made this impossible.
Since then she had learned that he had the reputation of being a very difficult old man, who apparently conducted a series of running battles with all the local care agencies, alternately demanding their services and then rejecting them with a barrage of unfair complaints.
‘He just likes causing trouble; he’s that kind of man,’ someone had feelingly told Lucy, but none of that altered the fact that the cottage was not really fit to live in, nor that it was her responsibility.
Her solicitor had gently pointed out to her her obligations as a landlord, adding that, because of her cousin’s mental health, it would have been impossible for any real case to have been brought against her, but that Lucy was not similarly protected.
‘But what can I do?’ she had asked helplessly.
Her solicitor had shaken his head. They both knew there was nothing she could do. Not unless she sold her own home.
Lucy slowed down as she approached the cottage. It was set back from the main road in its tangled, untidy garden, surrounded by green fields. It should have looked a pleasant spot, but instead…
Lucy sighed as she surveyed it. Upstairs a window yawned emptily where apparently the distorted frame had fallen out in the winter storms. The black polythene which had been used to cover it did not present an attractive sight. The remainder of the window-frames were warped, what paint there was left on them blistered and flaking off. Grimy net curtains covered the downstairs windows. There was an ominous bulge in the wall at the side of the cottage where apparently there were some serious structural defects, and on the other side a lean-to of sorts had been constructed with a corrugated-iron roof, which was now rusting and even holed in places.
It was in there that Eric Barnes stored the coal for his fires, and he had complained to Lucy that the holes in the roof were making the coal almost too damp to use.
In the garden, overgrown shrubs and brambles almost but not quite concealed several rusting piles of rubbish, items which Eric Barnes claimed had been in the house when he had taken up occupation. The wooden gate fronting the lane was hanging off its hinges and rotting.
Her heart heavy, Lucy drove on. Even without its unpleasant tenant it would have been difficult to sell the cottage. Sell it! It would have been difficult to give it away in its present state, she admitted.
Her hands clenched on the steering-wheel. She tried to force herself to relax. She was fine-boned and slim, but recently friends had begun to comment that she was looking a little too drawn, a little too fragile.
That was the cost of her outward serenity, the fact that