500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(19)
It wasn’t flashy, or incredible, or like something you’d see in an interior-decorating magazine, nothing like that. It was a cottage, roughly whitewashed in the same style as the bigger house with the GP surgery. It had a roof that had obviously once been thatch but was now slate, with two dormer windows in it; a red wooden front door with a protruding porch that had a shoe rack, presumably for Wellingtons, and an umbrella box with two walking sticks leaning out of it in a friendly way. There were two windows at the sides of the door, giving it the friendly visage of a house a child might draw, and a stone step straight onto the pavement.
Behind it was a small, tidy garden with a vegetable patch planted neatly. Imagine, thought Lissa, having time to tend a vegetable patch. She had never met anyone in her life with the time: not her family, always busy; not her fellow nurses, some of whom worked two jobs to get through nursing college and the university courses that were required these days; not her school friends. She barely knew anyone with a garden, not to mention a vegetable patch. She had assumed this nurse guy was . . . well, she hadn’t really thought about him at all after they’d failed to find much on Facebook. This was something that was happening to her, after all. She really, really hoped he didn’t expect her to keep his vegetable patch alive. Because she really didn’t have a clue how.
She added it to her worry stack, went back around the front, and turned the rusty key in the old lock, both nervous and rather excited.
The door creaked open straight onto a cozy sitting room—no hallway or corridor at all.
A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the side wall, with an old fireplace surround; a leather sofa and a floral sofa bunched companionably around it. On the other side was a dinner table that looked underutilized, and through the back was a small, functional kitchen on a wobbly-built extension with several glass windows overlooking the back garden. Behind the house was the stream, cutting through the bottom of the garden, and then . . . nothing.
Beyond the wooden fence were fields leading to woods straight ahead, and the mountains loomed behind them. If there hadn’t been an electricity tower in the distance, she could have been in any time from the past three centuries. It was really rather extraordinary.
She turned back to go upstairs. She was slightly worried about entering a strange man’s bedroom as she mounted the small staircase. She needn’t have worried. There were two tiny rooms underneath the eaves, a tongue-and-groove bathroom in between them, and she was obviously expected to sleep in the spare, which suited her fine. The whole place was spotlessly clean. She wondered about him again. Gay? Some male nurses were, but that didn’t mean anything. A pickup artist? She couldn’t imagine many players would choose to live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, though.
Lissa hauled her bag up the narrow stairs and considered unpacking. The house was freezing and she couldn’t figure out where the central heating was. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might not have heating. Hang on. How was that going to work?
Back downstairs she found a folder full of instructions for anything and everything—the hot water heater, the fact that she had to light the log burner and that would heat everything else. There were no instructions on how to light the log burner. This was obviously something he assumed everybody knew how to do. She opened the back door and glanced outside, and sure enough, just next to the kitchen extension was a huge pile of chopped-up logs that gave off a warm, aromatic smell. In the kitchen were a small packet of fire starters and a box of matches. She stared at them for a long time, feeling as if civilization had ended and she was going to have to get on with life as the last person on earth. She felt the now-familiar feeling of panic creep up on her.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Chapter 23
Cormac figured he should probably go out and look at a bit of London. He took the tube up to Leicester Square, walked into the M&M’s shop while wondering what on earth the point of that was, considered going to see a film until he saw the cost of a ticket, and ended up having a very poor meal in the window of a steak house, exactly as he had the last time. He didn’t feel it was going very well.
How’s it going? Jake had texted him. Met any supermodels yet?
Cormac rolled his eyes. I think I managed to insult someone already, he said. I’m not sure how I’m going to get on here.
Aye, well, everyone in London’s a weirdo, typed Jake, man of the world. Was it a woman?
Think so, typed Cormac tentatively.
Did you apologize?
No.
Well, do that then!
I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.
That NEVER MATTERS with women.
So Cormac set out to find the local supermarket next to his digs, quite pleased to have an errand.
He found it extremely confusing—there was no square sausage or Irn-Bru, the crisps were different—and in general it was not entirely unlike the time he’d been to Spain and wasn’t sure what to ask for whenever he was hungry, and once he’d ordered some toast with butter and everyone had laughed at him because he’d asked for toast with a donkey on it.
Anyway. He had made a mistake on his very first day and thought he’d take Kim-Ange a small gift. The shop didn’t sell tablet candies or Tunnock’s tea cakes or Edinburgh Rock or soor plooms or Oddfellows, so he was slightly puzzled as to what she might like but eventually went for a box of Dairy Milk and knocked on her door.