The Country Escape

Jane Lovering

Description

'A funny, warm-hearted read, filled with characters you'll love.' Matt Dunn

Welcome to the idyllic country retreat of Christmas Steepleton, and let Jane Lovering whisk you away with the most heart-warming, romantic and comforting read of the year.

Leaving London and her ex-husband Luc behind, Katie and her 14-year-old daughter Poppy move into their very own, very ramshackle cottage near the village of Christmas Steepleton on the Dorset coast.

Harvest Cottage has been unloved for many years, so the job of bringing it back to life is a slow and expensive one. So, with funds running low, Katie jumps at the chance when a film company asks to use the cottage as a location. But even as things are looking up, as harvest time passes and autumn chill starts to bite, the prospect of a cold winter in the country is daunting.

Some light relief comes from new friend Gabriel, so different from Katie’s exuberant but arrogant ex Luc. Will their friendship blossom into something more romantic, or will the reality of a tough country winter send her and Poppy scurrying back to the comforts of town?

Let Jane Lovering spirit you away to the perfect country escape, far away from the bustle of the city. Just right for fans of Emma Burstall, Fern Britton and Kate Forster.

What readers are saying about Jane Lovering:

‘Jane Lovering has that ability to choose exactly the right words and images to make you laugh, with a wonderful touch of the ridiculous, then moving seamlessly to a scene of such poignancy that it catches your breath.’

‘It is very difficult to explain just how wonderful this book is. The power of her words and her descriptive prowess to put it bluntly is amazing… the emotional impact it has had on me will be long lasting.’

‘Fall in love with reading all over again with this cracking tale from Jane Lovering. An excellent reminder, if one is needed, of the absolute pleasure of losing yourself in a good book.'

Sujets

• Romance contemporaine
• Fiction
• Romance
• Family Life
• Contemporary
• Holiday
• General
• Animals
• The Women
• Woman
• General officer
• Sibling
• Romantic Comedy
• Contemporary history
• Friendship
• Coming of Age
• Women
• Humorous
• Siblings
• Holidays
• Mashups

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781800482234
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Country Escape


Jane Lovering
Contents



Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19


Acknowledgments

More from Jane Lovering

About the Author

About Boldwood Books
This book is dedicated to those who have suffered a stroke; to those who have kept a pony in a small orchard, those who live in tiny spaces, anyone who shares their home with more woodlice than they'd like and/or has the garden growing through into the house. And also to my offspring – Tom, Vienna, Fern, Will and Addie, for listening to my endless wittering on about imaginary people and places. Love you all.
1

‘You’ve bought me a pony!’
As I sailed upwards from the warm comfort of sleep to the sharp-edged day, the words became part of my dream, and I was eleven, the air smelled of horse and the potential excitement that only an eleven-year-old can feel at the thought of mucking-out and cleaning tack into infinity. Then the excitement faded beneath an oncoming darkness, and I was awake, with my fourteen-year-old daughter bouncing on my feet.
‘Wha’?’ I said, less than elegant at this time on a September morning. Not that I’m all that elegant even in June, but there’s something about the chill of a late summer morning that makes me think my mother’s cardigan habit wasn’t entirely for show. There was an extra duvet on the bed and I was wearing fleecy pyjamas.
‘A pony!’ Poppy bounced on my feet again, reduced by the prospect of a potential equine from the cynical, world-weary teenager to an overexcited nine-year-old. ‘There’s a pony in the orchard!’
As my dreams had also taken me back to our old life in the London flat, with Luc, even the word ‘orchard’ wasn’t computing. ‘Wha’?’ I said again, struggling upright under the bouncing. The cold air hit me as I exited the duvet and with it came the whole of past life, hitting me around the head. ‘Oh.’
Whump went the sand-filled sock of memory as I stared at the bare walls of my bedroom, the tiny low window, which managed to let in as much cold air closed as open, and the dusty light of the old sun filtering through cobwebs I hadn’t yet had the heart to disperse. Dorset, not London. Small house, not flat. And, apparently, an orchard, which I now remembered was what Poppy had decided to call the overgrown patch of land that adjoined the house. Too big and uncultivated to be a garden and too small to be a field, the borrowed dignity of a couple of mossy old apple trees had designated it its orchard status.
‘Well?’ Poppy had her hands on her hips. ‘ Did you buy me a pony?’
With the habit of motherhood I noticed that she was still wearing her pyjamas, despite it being a school morning, and went straight to the practicalities. ‘Go and get ready for school or you’ll miss the bus.’
‘Aren’t you even going to look ?’ A humphy sigh, of the kind I’d got used to. ‘Because if you didn’t, and Dad didn’t, then someone has parked a pony outside, and I’m pretty sure that’s, like, a criminal offence?’ She slithered the long body that she still despised, although it could only be a year or so away from being her best asset, off the bed and stomped across the creaky boards. ‘And I’m going down to see him.’
‘Get dressed first!’ I called after her, pointlessly. It had been one of the many shocks of motherhood that the daughter who’d idolised me for the first five years of her life could come so quickly to the realisation that, basically, I was there to provide for her and keep her from harm, despite her increasing ability to outdo my ability to perform either of these tasks. She knew that I knew I couldn’t make her do anything. There was a lot of reverse psychology going on, that’s all I’ll say.
In the spirit of ‘don’t do as I do’, I dashed down the creaky, narrow-boarded stairs, trailing in the wake of Poppy, out across the stone-flagged kitchen into the orchard. The sun was up now, its low-level slant flinging the shadows of the trees back towards the house. There was a smell of incipient cider from a few windfalls, and the threatening hum of wasps starting the day’s motor.
By the time I caught up, Poppy was at the far side of the field, where the narrow hawthorn hedge bordered the lane. And she was stroking the nose of something that could only be called a pony because the phrase ‘badly put-together cow’ was already taken. I called a token, ‘Be careful,’ across the grass but she didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken.
‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ she breathed. ‘Where do you think he came from, Mum? Dad wouldn’t give me a pony. Would he?’ she finished on a note that was part acceptance of her father’s fickle and profligate nature, and part a deep hope.
I looked over the slightly sway back of the piebald pony, to the gateway that led into the orchard. ‘I’d say, just at a rough guess…’ I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my words, but I knew she’d reinsert it anyway ‘… he’s from that.’
Parked in the pull-in, where the lane became briefly wide enough between its tree-laden edges to allow a passing place, stood a caravan. One of the old-fashioned gypsy caravans, with a glorious bow top and painted front, a gilded split door surmounted by a little window and covered in gold-painted designs. The shafts were propped against the gate.
‘Oh,’ Poppy breathed, ‘it’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. Do we get to keep him? If he’s on our land, I mean?’
‘No.’ My voice was tight. I could smell the pony now, that mix of hay and newly mown grass and sweat and hooves and mud. ‘Of course we can’t. I’d better go and wake up the inhabitant and ask them to move.’
Poppy gave me a look. ‘You better get dressed first, Mum. You don’t want to look like a skank if you’re knocking on someone’s door at this time in the morning.’
In the spirit of not caving in to what my daughter thought of me, I climbed over the gate and cautiously approached the caravan door. I could feel the weight of Poppy’s stare between my shoulder blades, and the horse wasn’t helping either.
‘Excuse me?’ I tapped on the door. ‘Hello?’
The door swung towards me, unlatched, on a waft of fried-food smells.
‘Er, I live in the house…’ I poked my head through. ‘Your horse…’
The inside of the van was scrupulously tidy, beautifully ornate, and completely devoid of occupancy.
2

I have no idea how I managed to get Poppy to leave off cuddling the horse and go to school. She probably decided it was better to go and be able to boast about the pony that turned up in her field, than to stay at home with her mother being heavily disapproving at her. Either way, she dragged her uniform on and went to stand in the lane, where the minibus picked her up, together with a bunch of others from local farms, and dropped them all down in the village of Christmas Steepleton, from where they were all collected by the larger school bus. It was, as Poppy repeatedly told me, ‘a drag’, and if I’d been any kind of mother I wouldn’t have removed her from her natural London habitat. Where her Starbucks addiction and her desire to try on every outfit in Oxford Street had been close to bankrupting me, but I hadn’t mentioned that. I’d just told her that her dad and I finalising the divorce meant that the flat had to be sold, and the amount of money it gave me had just about been enough to buy Harvest Cottage and move to the Dorset coast.
Guilt, I told myself. Not just the thing making the outside of that inexplicable deserted caravan shiny. I looked out of the kitchen window, where the sun was busy highlighting the fact that nobody had dusted or cleaned for what looked like a decade, across into the orchard. The pony was grazing as though he hadn’t seen grass for weeks, although the width of him indicated he’d been extremely well fed up to this point. His black ears stuck up from the overlong grass that hid the rest of his face, looking like two skinny crows having a conversation, and the rest of his black-and-white-patched body seemed relaxed. I had a brief thought about laminitis, reasoned it was too late in the year for him to be affected, and went back to cleaning. He wasn’t doing any harm, and it was possible that the caravan’s occupant had just popped down to Steepleton to get some shopping. My lane was on the way, sort of, if you didn’t mind squeezing between the overhanging oaks that lined it, before it climbed up and over the hill to join the main road and begin a final – and, in a horse-drawn caravan, probably fatal – drop down into the village. In the other direction lay another steep descent, a narrow ford and then miles of meandering grey tarmac, broken by weeds and salted with farm trackways, before it met the Bridport road.
Yes, that would be it. Someone had gone shopping and hadn’t realised that Harvest Cottage was now occupied. After all, it had been empty for nearly five years, apparently, following a disputed bequest. Nobody had technically owned it, so nobody could sell it, and it had sat here in its damp fold in the Dorset hills with dereliction becoming an increasing likelihood. Once the whole ‘who inherited the cottage’ had been sorted out, it had hit the market just at the point that Luc and I had sold the flat. I’d been left with my half of the proceeds, enough to outright buy the little place. Luc had… actually, I wasn’t entirely sure what Luc had done with his half. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need to know. We were divorced. We only needed contact to talk about Poppy.
I suddenly realised that I’d been scrubbing so hard that I’d washed a layer of paint off the kitchen wall to reveal that a previous owner had thought that pale green was a suitable colour scheme for a room that already let in bilious levels of light. It would have been like cooking inside someone’s hangover. I tipped the bucket of filthy water down the sink