Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [1]
Her cottage originally had two bedrooms, but she had decided to have the second refitted as a bathroom. She kept the first floor heated throughout the night – it was one of her luxuries in life, allowing her to pad around with bare legs and feet. Pulling on her jeans and thick socks was always the last thing she did before going down to the cold downstairs.
She made up the bed, drew open the curtains, then crossed the small landing between the bedroom and bathroom. She called downstairs to her Border collie, ‘Bridy, walk in five minutes.’ She turned a blind eye to her dog spending nights on the settee.
In the sitting room, Bridy uncurled herself and slid on to the stone floor. She dutifully took her place at the bottom of the stairs and waited for her mistress.
Jackie’s clean underwear was drying in an orderly left-to-right queue on top of the radiator. They had come from the same home-shopping catalogue as her nightshirt. It was only the second time she had worn them, and already she could see that the quality wasn’t great.
She ran the basin’s hot tap until the water steamed, then dropped the polished plug into place and left the basin to fill. She pulled off her nightshirt, folding it as she made her way, naked, back to the bedroom to leave it under her pillow. Jackie glanced at herself in the dressing-table mirror; she had no objections to her figure. She had long since accepted that it was her lot to be boy-like rather than womanly. Perhaps she would have paused longer if there had been anyone to see her naked. There wasn’t.
Dressed in her ski jacket and jeans, Jackie opened the cottage’s side door on to the Fen Ditton morning and checked the weather for the first time. Not that it mattered: barring a change of boots for floods or unexpected snowfall, there was no British weather that would prevent her from taking Bridy on her morning walk.
A damp chill hung in the air. She put Bridy on the lead, and the dog trailed at her heels, grey muzzle close to her left hand.
This was the village at its best; fresh with a new morning and blissfully few people. Not that she disliked people, but they were likely to be a distraction, and she needed space to think.
Bridy paused to snuffle in the verge. Jackie rattled the choke chain and made a clicking noise with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Not yet, Bridy.’
Bridy responded with a sneeze, then continued to trot alongside her.
Jackie cast a concerned eye over the war memorial. A delinquent had defaced the ‘Lest We Forget’ by changing the ‘L’ to a ‘B’. The press had inevitably jumped to the defence of the youth. The Cambridge News had done a survey of local schools and reported a ‘commendable knowledge of the two World Wars amongst local teenagers’.
Words are cheap.
Mr Mills at the post office had actually done something about it. He had campaigned for a custodial sentence, which had apparently scared the lad witless in the process.
She walked past the post office, its windows polished and paintwork immaculate; she had a great deal of respect for Mr Mills and his determination to care for the village. The idea of standing up in public like that was impossibly daunting and she’d been glad when the press’s brief interest had died.
She checked herself. Wasn’t she suddenly sounding middle-aged? The point of her whole routine had been to make her daily life more efficient, but she could now see it had merely caused her to become set in her ways. She was touring the village complaining about other people, when perhaps she should look at her own life with the same critical eye.
Jackie wasn’t about to dwell on all the things she’d once thought she would be able to accomplish by the age of thirty. She didn’t need to list them to know that she’d ticked none of the boxes, and with only one month to go they were most likely to remain unrealized. But was this it, then?