Cold to the Touch by Frances Fyfield

examination of every other visible house within her size range and already knew that she would swap her cottage for one of those in the two rows right down by the beach, set apart from the rest and looking out directly to the sea, but this was good for starters. A sweet, sad house in need of rescue, thus catering to her own speciality, also with certain vital ingredients, such as a porch at the front with the promise of honeysuckle growing over it in summer, and a small south-facing yard of a garden at the back, almost empty apart from dead things in pots and a tiny border. It was the stuff of dreams all the same, the life-lottery win, the almost perfect existence promised by a six-month lease on a cottage with honeysuckle round the door and the sea at the bottom of the road, with room to nurture cabbages and flowers.
    The realist in Sarah had always known that such a dream was only a kind of analogy for something else, such as being reconciled to disappointments, free of duties, responsibilities and obligations, not having to go to work and being able to pay the bills with ease. A state of not wanting anybody or anything other than what there was, like living on one side of a river without constantly craving a better place on the opposite shore. All summed up in a vision of a cottage in a village with a large expanse of water attached, about as far distant from central London traffic and a pressurised careeras it could be without emigrating. Being in a place where the land ran out; the delightful end of the road. Not that she had ever been deluded by the notion of a perfect way of life; ambition and discontent and even a little bit of fear were so vital to achievement and survival, after all, but she knew the importance of dreaming. Of getting a dream, kicking it about, trying it on for size like a new skirt and then, if necessary, chucking it away and trying on something else. The cottage with roses round the door could mean a state of
not needing,
but a state of complete self-sufficiency would have to involve a complete frontal lobotomy. It was not natural. She might regard herself as profoundly irresponsible, wanted to be
divinely
irresponsible, a merely optional extra in other lives, but that was not quite possible, either. She was far too interested in humankind to remain aloof; could not quite disengage however hard she tried; responsibility followed affection and that was that.
    It would be nice if you got to know my mother,
Jessica had said.
But you don’t have to. Just be happy. I’m not going to bugger things up for you with introductions. You don’t need them.
    You’ll go crazy here,
Mike had said when he’d delivered her to the door in an uninsured, mysteriously obtained white van,
without something to do.
He was a case in point. He loved her, but he would do perfectly well without her and that was all she had ever wanted for him and he was right about her needing something physical to do and she had embarked on that immediately. She had redecorated every place she had ever occupied, whether she owned it or not (ownership was all in the mind, after all) and most of the bubbled walls in her cottage were already liberally covered in ‘orchid white’. Paint always lived up to its promise, neverdisappointed, and she took immense satisfaction in the very names they gave to the stuff. Sarah had breathed on the honeysuckle branches to make it grow and the backyard was littered with trays of seeds and bulbs. She was going to stay here long enough to grow cornflowers and sweet peas at least and learn not to uproot them just to see how they were doing. That was what people did with relationships. Not a good idea to question things about their right to grow or not.
    The walls were incompletely fresh; there were the few things she had brought with her standing alongside the utilitarian pine furniture left either by her landlady Mrs Celia Hurly or by J. Dunn. For the first two weeks she had been here it had rained