When Nadine arrived at her new home, toting three suitcases and a cat basket with no cat in it, its yellow paint gleamed like butter in the summer sun. But after three days of rain, a survey revealed streaks of lime green, scuffs of brown, and a skirting board of ankle-revealing bareness to which moss and dandelions had attached themselves in merry spite.
Her leasehold agreement said the house must be kept tidy and painted at regular intervals. There were three tins with rusted lids in the cupboard by the back door, but she bent two nails trying to hammer her way in, and put them aside for the tip.
A phone call followed. Where was the cheapest place to buy paint? She also asked the lady behind the counter at the post office, over the cardboard displays of lollies and chocolate, and faded postcards last re-printed in 1985.
“Oh, you’ll have to go into town,” she was told.
It seemed a bit much, if Nadine was honest—and she was very honest to her aunt on the phone—when every house sprung beeswax-like from the hillside.
Surely the paint should be provided.
She tried the neighbors. A couple in wax jackets were just on their way out of their gate, with two straw-hatted girls in summer dresses and jelly sandals. Two sheepdogs and a floppy Labrador who imagined her fingers were an ice cream.
Their house had once been a farm but they’d converted the outbuildings to self-catering cottages. It was summer. There was a small gravel yard of 4x4s over the wall.
“Oh, we usually always have some in,” smiled the woman. “I can check the loft later for you.”
“I’ve got the number of a good painter, if you don’t fancy doing it yourself,” said the man. The smile he gave her suggested he didn’t fancy her chances.
“No, that’s fine,” said Nadine. She would go into town.
“You can take the train,” said the woman. “Here’s a timetable.”
The station stood half a mile outside the village, down a lane wide enough for a cart and any car manufactured pre-1990. The hedgerow stood so high, Nadine could only hear the cows in the fields to either side.
Halfway there, she met a man coming the other way. He carried a bike wheel over one shoulder, arm through the spokes, and a basket covered by a checkered tea towel. His limp brown hat had an ear of straw sticking out of the band and he wore a burgundy waistcoat. It had no buttons.
He was cosplaying as a scarecrow, Nadine decided.
A jackdaw watched them from the lowest branch of an oak tree, unconvinced.
“You must be the lass as moved into the house by the cherry tree,” he said.
“Yes, Nadine. I’m just going to catch the train into town to buy some paint.” She said it in a way that she hoped conveyed how annoyed about this she was without coming off as impolite. His smile didn’t shift. His eyes shone like sapphires.
“I was going into town, with my bread, but my bicycle’s broken. You got a pass?”
“A pass?”
“Aye. To go into town.”
“I need a pass?”
“Aye. A pass to go into town.”
“A pass? To go into town?”
“Aye. You’ll need one.”
So that was that.
The Estate Office stood in the village, between the vicarage and the old courthouse, collar to toe yellow, with a black slate roof and a gleaming brass plaque.
Behind the low wall and railing stumps in front, stood a woman in jeans, a hoodie, and a brown beanie hat. She had the air of a wound-up ferret.
“Sign the petition.”
“What petition?”
The woman rolled her eyes and brandished a pen. Nadine covered her nose in case the woman tried to ram the pen up it like her wide eyes suggested she might.
“The petition. Obviously.”
Nadine took a step back. “What’s it for.”
The air thickened like custard, bordering on boiling over. Nadine could have sworn she smelt car tires on fire but it wasn’t that kind of place.
The woman harrumphed and waved a leaflet. “To reduce the speed limit through the village to twenty miles per hour. Not just at pick-up time.”
“Right.”
The doorbell boomed inside the building.
“Well?”
“I don’t think…I’ve barely been here five minutes…”
The door opened onto an escape and Nadine dodged under the woman’s outstretched arm. The step was higher than the average step. It caught her toe and over she went, tumbling onto the scouring-pad brown matting.
She righted herself quickly so as not to make too bad an impression.
“Good afternoon,” she said to the young man pressed against the wall. “I’m here to get a travel pass.”
He nodded and pointed to the coat hooks, and the elephant-foot umbrella stand.
“It’s sunny. Not a bit of rain. Not even drizzle,” she assured him.
He frowned. “Sorry, I just make the teas and coffees.” And drifted back off towards a door beneath the stairs.
Nadine wondered if she should follow him but was saved from her faux pas by a woman opening a side door, sticking her head out and shouting. “Come in then if you’re coming. Oh. Bother. I told him to make sure he shuts the door. Get out Olga.”
The protesting woman was halfway inside when the office woman applied her palm firmly to her chest and pushed her back out into the garden. The door slammed shut, taking the daylight with it.
The woman returned to her office, which was labelled “Rowena Hilton,” and Nadine followed. She wasn’t hopeful. Rowena had a desk of mahogany, an unlit oil lamp, and a fire in the grate that barely deserved the name. A typewriter balanced on top of a stack of papers. A painting of an angry badger watched them from the chimney breast.
On the opposite wall hung a map of the estate with the village in red ink in the middle. All the labels were written in black letter Latin and underlined in green.
“I would like a travel pass, please.”
Nadine had no time for pleasantries. She used to live in London Town. And she was already late for a meeting.
Rowena Hilton didn’t look up from her ledger. She was frowning at three columns of numbers and a handful of plastic five-pound notes.
“What have you brought in exchange?”
“Exchange?”
“Yes. For your travel pass. What have you brought to pay for it?”
A chaffinch tapped on the window, turned its head to one side, confused.
“I have to pay for a travel pass?” Nadine leant forward. “Are you saying I have to pay to leave the valley? That’s ridiculous.”
“How were you planning on travelling?”
“By train, I…”
“Well, I assume you were going to pay for that.”
Rowena Hilton looked at her like she’d asked for a gold carriage to drive in, with four dappled horses and a chauffeur in chiffon.
With a sigh, Nadine pulled out her purse. “How much?” The house needed painting and she needed to be on Zoom half an hour ago, arguing with Ryan from Acquisitions about the color of an embossed font.
Rowena smiled, opened a drawer and dropped the fivers out of view. “A brace will do.”
“What? Like, for your teeth.”
“A brace. Rabbit, pheasant, grouse, whatever. Salmon if you can get it but…” She ended the sentence with the kind of up-and-down look Nadine had once given a woman in a clothes shop on Boxing Day.
She was right. Nadine wasn’t donning waders and going after salmon. Not in this weather. She’d be red as beetroot and no further forward.
Outside the office, Olga had left her placard behind the wheelie bin and changed into a long brown dress and jacket. She’d found herself a bonnet to match and glared at Nadine from under the frills.
“Stop the railway,” she said. “Stop the march of iron tearing up our land.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“We don’t need or want a railway here.”
Nadine very much wanted a railway. She wanted to be on it already and two miles off the central station.
“Is this another railway? A high-speed railway?” There hadn’t been anything about that on the estate agent’s listing. Or her cursory internet search while she watched a presentation on sales rank. She’d wanted out, right there, right then. She was desperate.
The protesting woman fastened the padlock on a chain that wound around the building’s railings. “The Lord’s new railway. It’ll just bring smoke and soot and factories and…”
“What’s wrong with the railway that’s already here?”
“There is no railway here.”
“But there is. I’ve seen the smoke from the train. I’ve heard it.”
The woman sat down in a flump on the pavement. “Are you sure?”
Nadine walked away, not sure enough to argue. Perhaps the woman was right. Perhaps she’d imagined the train after all and that was the problem.
The next day, when her meetings were over, Nadine packed her rucksack with a flask of tea, four ham sandwiches, two cheese and pickle, a mini scotch egg and a packet of mint cake. At the garden gate, she turned back and added a torch.
She walked into town.
She heard the train six times in all but never saw it. Perhaps it didn’t exist. If it did, surely no one got on it. She’d seen no-one out shooting pheasants in the six days since she’d moved in.
In a shop with a flat roof and a car park full of cranky shopping trollies, Nadine bought herself eight pots of lilac paint. She threw them in the back of a taxi, which dropped her in the village, and shuttled them, two-at-a-time, from there.
Two days of wearying meetings later, she dragged a wooden ladder from the shed and set about painting the walls. For good measure, and because she was feeling daring in the busy-bee sunshine, she used two pots of deep blue paint from the attic to repaint the doors and window frames.
The house charmed. Nadine stood with her back to the fence, full of pride like ice cream. She stirred her lemonade with a straw. It might not be yellow, but it was neat and tidy. It would do very well.
The man with the burgundy waistcoat came around the corner. He was singing something about mermaids and swinging his basket, which he rested on the fence when he reached her.
He was younger than she’d thought on the path to the station. Not much older than her in fact.
“Brought you a couple of loaves,” he said. He held out his hand. “Arthur Knott. I live on the edge of Bluebell Wood, in the cottage with the swordfish weathervane. I’ve got some chickens, if you’re after eggs, and tomatoes. Lots of them right now.”
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”
He cocked his head to the side and regarded her newly purple house. “They’re not going to like that, mind.”
“Who? The estate?” Nadine pushed off and swirled the straw in her empty glass. “If they’d wanted yellow, they should’ve made it easier for me to get some.”
She coasted on the high of packing her bags and bidding farewell to the rainy city. To the burned rubber smell buses, with their tattered seats in blue and orange. To the blocked drains, blocked roads, blocked minds. To the breeze blocks and sweltering glass. To her airy flat with a view of the park and a row of poplar trees. To her friends who’d stared and laughed like she was joking.
So, her house wasn’t yellow. So what? From a distance of a mile or so, who could even tell?
Things started to go wrong almost immediately.
The church clock chimed the wrong hour. Starting with three at one o’clock. The tune it played on the quarter hour stuttered. Westminster quarters all out of whack, until by five o’clock it had morphed through Frère Jacques, and settled on Oranges and Lemons. A tune that made Nadine feel six again, imprisoned in a circle of her best friends’ arms, ready for beheading.
That night, as she sat in the kitchen with a plate full of spring rolls, between floorboard creaks, she heard the sound of someone crying. An owl trilled, a car zoomed along the valley, and tears fell in the lane.
She took the bread knife, just in case, and climbed out of a window. She imagined that anyone planning on jumping her would hide outside the door.
On a bench under a whispering ash tree, a woman in a long linen coat blew her nose into a handkerchief. She glanced up when Nadine’s slippers crunched gravel.
“We buried her in spring,” the woman said. “I remember the leaf buds on the trees and the birdsong.”
“Who?”
A spider crawled over Nadine’s ankle.
“My sister. This is her bench.” The woman touched the brass memorial but in the dark, Nadine couldn’t read it. “I didn’t remember.” She surfaced from the tears long enough to glance past Nadine’s shoulder. The security light dazzled.
“What did you do to your house?” Standing now, the woman glared.
“I…”
“It isn’t yellow. What did you do?”
Nadine slept like a storm-tossed buoy for the rest of the night. She rose for her morning meetings and dragged herself about. The coffee gritted her throat. She stumbled over her answers and resigned herself to being on mute.
Nothing to add.
Thank you for coming.
She went to drag the bin in. She walked down her path in sunshine, to find the green wheelie sitting in a flood on the road. The two little girls in jelly sandals sailed wind-up boats across the new lagoon.
“Did you hear?” said the eldest, wide-eyed, conspiratorial.
Nadine wasn’t sure that she wanted to know but the youngest was impatient, with no stomach for the games her sister played.
“The church tower fell down,” she announced. “Halfway through nine o’clock.”
By noon, the steam train smoke was coming up purple and a man knocked on the door to sell her a wheel of ginger cheese.
“The bench wasn’t there when I got here,” she told her aunt. “I would’ve seen it.”
“Well, it must have been, dear. That’s just like you. You walk about with your head on the moon half the time.”
Thanks very much. Nadine rolled her eyes at the pile of washing-up and peeled the red rind off her mini cheese.
“When are you coming home? The boys missed you at dinner last Sunday.”
“I’m not coming home.”
She’d jumped the plank. Given up the kind of flat that second-home buyers and investors drooled over. There was no going back to the city even if she wanted to.
The sound of metal on brick.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
Nadine took her cup of tea to the door, digestive biscuit tucked into the pocket of her baggy trousers. Fear of intruders evaporated in daylight. Maybe they were coming to put in another bench.
Two ladders leant against the house, sprouting from a gathering of flat-capped and bonneted people. The two girls from next door, spinning skirts and jelly sandals slapping, sucked on made-at-home ice lollies. A carnival day in her garden. Gossip among the wilting roses. The acerbic smell of paint as cans popped at the urge of screwdrivers.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The man from next-door stood with his hands on his hips and his feet apart, looking up at her house from under a jockeys cap.
“Found you some paint.”
“I got paint. I painted it.”
Two women in ankle boots and floral blouses shook their heads. “Can’t leave it like that.”
Nadine went back inside. She was vastly outnumbered and had a report to file. When she glanced between the slats of her blinds an hour later, she saw the woman, Olga, from outside the estate office standing by her gate.
She had another placard and was dressed in a long raincoat and wellingtons, and she turned to glare at the window as if she knew Nadine was there.
When Nadine ventured out later, sneaking past the men on ladders with paintbrushes, she was accosted at the gate. Olga had been joined by the weeping woman from the night before. They both had placards now.
They wanted her to leave.
They had chants to that effect and leaflets. They’d run them through the photocopier in the vestry. Which, when Nadine thought about it, was under the tower. Wasn’t it squashed to a pulp beneath the remains of steeple?
The bench left under its own steam during the night. Nadine slept fitfully through the paint vapors and a Monday morning tube carriage dream of stale coffee. She awoke five minutes before the seven o’clock chime, which was as Westminster as it had been the day she’d moved in.
As she tied her dressing gown belt and stumbled over her slippers, the doorbell rang. She had found an ugly cast-iron lion knocker when she arrived, and since replaced it with a manual pull bell. It reminded her of the bell above the door in the bookshop of her teenage years. It conjured worn carpet, twisting stairs and the scent of old paper.
Rowena Hilton from the estate office stood on the doorstep in a top hat and knee-length bottle-green tailcoat. She held a clipboard and a quill pen.
“Good morning,” she said brightly. “I’ve just come to check that everything’s all right. Settled in? Everything working?”
Her neighbors had repainted her house and protested her presence.
“Yes, yes, everything’s just great, thank you.”
It was too early for tea and cake.
“Good, good. Just a couple of things then. Here’s your travel pass.” Rowena handed over a wooden keyring in the shape of a locomotive. “You’ll need it for the train, or the bus. As an estate resident you can travel for free as far as the border. For long-distance journeys, we advise that you pay for your ticket in advance. There’s a link on the residents’ section of the website.”
“I… thank you.”
Just take the pass, she heard her aunt telling her. Questions were for the fully caffeinated.
“One more thing. It does say in the contract that the house must be painted yellow. That is very important. This is your house, of course, and you’re free to change it in whatever way you want. But remember, it must always be painted yellow. We like yellow houses here.”
“I… How’s the church?”
Rowena smiled. A honey smile, full of the warmth of summer. “We sorted it. Don’t worry. These things happen.”
She turned to walk away then reconsidered and returned to the step. It was a high step. Nadine towered over her like a statue in the park.
“I think you’ll fit in here, you know,” Rowena said. “I like you.”
It wasn’t something Nadine had ever heard before, so bluntly put like that. So certain. So quick. She’d moved in two weeks ago and done nothing but paint her house lavender and demolish a steeple.
Still, it was nice to be wanted for something other than trifle on a Sunday and walking the dogs when her aunt couldn’t be arsed.
“Okay,” she said.
“Oh, and I brought you these.” Rowena opened her leather shoulder bag and extracted something shrink-wrapped. “Pheasant. A brace. Mind out for shot.”
“I…”
“I can recommend a pie. Mrs. Almond—she’s at the Grove—has a fantastic recipe if you’re not sure.”
Swallowing her annoyance at the assumption that she had no idea how to cook pheasant, Nadine took the offer and laid it on top of the parish newsletter on the side table beside the door. It was made more annoying because it was true. Her aunt disliked the taste of game, and red meat, and fish that tasted too much of fish, and…
“Oh, and if you want anything else, don’t hesitate to call on me. Any time.” Rowena noted something on her clipboard. The feather was so big it nearly stuck up her nose. “Don’t forget those.”
Someone had left a box of eggs and a loaf wrapped in brown paper on the step.
Nadine watched Rowena leave. She had meetings until three o’clock and a deadline at the end of the week. Then, tomorrow, she had boxes to unpack. She might even order a bench for the garden.
Someone was playing bagpipes by the chestnut tree on the green and two girls in jelly sandals ran past down the lane, waving hammers and a plan to build a launchpad. The train passed, spewing rainbow shades and a piercing whistle. A woman walked past waving a placard and shouting about parking charges.
When Nadine closed the bathroom window, she couldn’t hear any of it.
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Louise Hughes is a speculative fiction writer and time traveler from the north of England, with stories in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and more. She can be found wandering the dales and fells with a flask of tea, or on Bluesky @trailofleaves.bsky.social. |
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