Welcome to Oakhaven , livre ebook

Title Page
WELCOME TO OAKHAVEN
by
Sullatober Dalton



Publisher Information
Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Sullatober Dalton to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 Sullatober Dalton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wife, without whose patience and understanding it would never have been started.



Chapter 1
In jeans and a warm shirt and jumper, Elaine Jackson stood gazing down the lane that ran along the front of Jasmine Cottage. Up until now, she’d been sure she’d made the right decision. You’ve always made friends easily, she’d told herself, but the nagging worry of what her friends and her daughter had said about burying herself in the country kept unravelling the edges of her confidence. George had always said that the third anniversary was the worst, the third hour, the third day, the third month and now the end of the third year since George had drowned trying to save that girl.
She forced herself to think of the present and shake off the depression that threatened to choke her; if the furniture van would only appear and give her something to do, she’d be all right.
She walked back inside the cottage and looked round. Despite the slight mustiness caused by the year it had been shut up, it was ideal for her. Inside the front door was a square hall with a door into the kitchen on one side and on the other side of the hall, not opposite, thankfully, a door led into a bathroom with a shower.
In front, another door led into a central living and dining area. Two bedrooms led off on opposite sides of that, their ceilings cut off and sloped at the end by the low roof, adding cottagey character and cosiness, making them reminiscent of gingerbread and fairy tales. Her own bedroom had an en suite bathroom and a small dressing area.
From the dining area a door gave access to the kitchen, which was small but walled with cupboards and had a wide window that looked out over a small piece of lawn to the lane that led from the village by a winding route.
To the back, away from the lane, the living room had French windows that looked out over a wide garden. Immediately in front, the lawn had gone mad and long- haired. Around the lawn, what had once been a surrounding border was a growth of waist high weeds, which, in her mind, waited to be filled with gardenias and hollyhocks and splashes of pansies and petunias. The wilderness to the left and behind the garage, tacked on to the end of the house, she would screen off with a trellis of sweet pea and create a herb garden. The herb garden would only occupy a quarter of the area and she’d like vegetables but doubted she could dig even the warm, crumbly, dark brown soil.
The removers had packed her old house late last night, Tuesday, and the driver had promised he would be here by nine. It was now almost twelve and, despite herself, Mrs Jackson walked out to the gate and looked down the lane again.
It was still empty.
The spring sun might be shining at its gayest, drawing the myriad perfumes of spring from a thousand places, the flowers of the woodland might be bursting forth in rainbow colours, encouraging drowsy bees to suck their honeyed sweetness, but what the lane lacked was any sign of a furniture van.
As her thoughts returned to her nagging concerns over this move, she reminded herself of her reasons for making it. Friends, who had been supportive and protective in the early days after George’s death, had changed; had become too keen to find a suitable partner for her, a fifty four year old widow.
Clearing away one evening after one of her own dinner parties, she had overheard Mary Duncan, the wife of Richard Duncan, who had been George’s best friend, say, ‘I don’t know what to do any more, I’ve introduced her to everyone I can think of, invited her to things, but
she just has no interest in getting on with her life. I mean, she’s still attractive. She’s hardly put on anything at all, she still has a very trim figure and you hardly see any grey in that dark hair of hers and those hazel green eyes still melt the men, some of them anyway. Fortunately, not your Ken or my Richard.’
Above the rattling of collecting plates, she’d heard her other friend confide, ‘I hated her at school, she just flashed those eyes and the boys collapsed. The rest of us had to show a bit of cleavage.’
I hadn’t enough cleavage to show until I had Tracy, Elaine had thought.
She smiled now in recollection of the partners those friends had arranged for her, partners who sometimes towered over her, others who had to look up at her if she wore high heels, partners she’d had to smile at and pretend to be interested in the intricacies of the insurance industry, or the workings of a model steam engine.
She pushed away the other recollection. The easy growing friendliness of her own best friend, Jean’s, husband. A handsome man, used to women’s adoration; her own reliance on his help in the beginning, thinking it no more than like Richard Duncan’s concern; the later realisation that he thought there was more to it. How resolute she’d had to be to discourage him; the confrontation with Jean; the unreasonable feelings of guilt, even though she’d done nothing wrong.
Memories of that shocked confrontation with Jean, of being unfairly accused, of feeling real loneliness, stung and choked and threatened to overpower her again. She forced the feelings back - if that damn furniture van would just appear!
Here, in Oakhaven, no one knew her, she told herself firmly, would feel obliged to invite her for dinner, could feel she was breaking up their home.
Her friends had been right. It had been time to let go. Their old house, with all its memories, had been a comfort in a way, but after that first grieving, the big garden and the four bedrooms had become more and more of a trial.
Her visit to Oakhaven had been accidental. She’d been returning from her daughter’s and had taken a wrong turn on the shortcut her son-in-law had recommended, had stopped to ask the way outside the estate agents and had seen Jasmine Cottage with its sheltering trees advertised in the window. Why she’d asked about it, she still wasn’t sure, but once inside the cottage, she’d fallen in love with its low ceilings and small leaded windowpanes.
The rooms were small; pokey, Tracy, her daughter, had corrected. Her son, Simon, in South Africa, had only asked if she’d be happy. More to please him than from certainty about the future, she’d said, ‘Yes.’
Her suburban friends had been not only surprised but shocked when she’d told them where she was moving to.
‘Why do you want to bury yourself away in a village in the middle of nowhere?’ they’d asked. ‘It’s not as if you have anything to hide, Elaine.’
Well, she hadn’t, and she’d even left that name behind. The estate agent and, after his introduction, the man in the post office, and at the baker’s, had referred to her as Mrs Jackson.
‘You’ll never meet anyone eligible there,’ Tracy had warned. ‘Fifty four might not be old, Mother, but you’re not getting any younger.’
‘I have enough memories of your dad to keep me warm,’ Elaine had laughed.
Preparing for moving, clearing and discarding things George and she had collected together, had broken her heart. A set of side tables from Scarborough, bought with money they didn’t really have at the time; three pictures from Cornwall, bought the year Tracy was born; a bedside cabinet they’d seen in a shop window in Venice on a second honeymoon; all the children’s toys, with their memories of birthdays and Christmases she’d never had the will to put away before.
As she stood now, remembering those moments and hesitating about walking to the village to look for a telephone to enquire about the van, an old car turned slowly into the lane and came nervously towards to cottage.
Mrs Jackson stepped back to give it room to pass as it drew close. The car suddenly jumped forward and slammed to a halt.
The driver’s door, on the other side of the car from Mrs Jackson, opened and someone got out. A head, on top of a clerical collar, appeared above the car roof and shook a mop of dark hair and grinned at Mrs Jackson, leaving her unsure if it was a man or a woman, ducked back into the car before reappearing round the bonnet. At that point Mrs Jackson saw the head was carried on top of a robust figure with a bust.
‘I’m the vicar,’ the figure announced, holding out a large flask and what looked like a smaller one in a sock. ‘Brought some coffee and a biscuit, thought you might be glad to see a human face.’
‘I’m sorry, my furniture hasn’t arrived and I’ve nowhere to invite you in to sit,’ Mrs Jackson told her.
The vicar looked round and moved to a garden bench, green with neglect, and plumped down, giggling at the benches creaking protest.
‘Lovely spot,’ she commented, grinning again.
She opened the flask and the smell of coffee startled Mrs Jackson’s taste buds.
The vicar poured coffee into the flask-top cup and held it out.
Mrs Jackson took it in both hands