Page 12 of The Cornish Cream Tea Bookshop
‘I bet that looks lovely,’ Ollie said, sinking onto her haunches. ‘Let me know if you change your mind, though.’
‘I’d best be off,’ Marion said. ‘Thank you for showing me your … sparkles.’ She waggled her fingers, then walked out of the room.
Ollie stared at her box of indulgent goodies, the colours and textures, the way that everything shimmered and shone in an unashamedly festive way. She realised, after she’d heard the front door slam, that she hadn’t told Marion about the book club meeting on Friday night.
The air was icy against Ollie’s bare cheeks, though the rest of her was wrapped up in her long coat, boots, thick scarf and berry-coloured woolly hat. Henry was overjoyed at the path they had taken, round the back of the farmhouse and deeper into the countryside. It was hilly here, the ground soft after recent rainfall, the trees in compact clusters rather than never-ending stretches of woodland, so they were sometimes beneath a canopy of oranges and reds, sometimes out in the sunshine.
The inclines stretched Ollie’s calves, the descents tested her knees, and she caught glimpses of the sea in the distance, the gunmetal grey sparkling whenever the sun peeked out from behind a cloud.
Everything smelled rich and musty, thick with vegetation, and birds sang in the trees. Getting out in nature, all the articles and podcasts had told her, was one of the best things you could do for your well-being, and with Henry, Ollie had a ready-made reason to.
A walk through London streets was always interesting, full of tableaux of other people’s lives, and it was rich with green spaces. But if your workdays were long, and you didn’t have one of those green spaces on your doorstep – only a flat with a few houseplants – you could go far too long without hearing the trill of a blackbird. Being in Cornwall, Ollie felt like she’d been picked up and put down in adifferent world. But it wasn’t just her surroundings that had changed.
Everything she’d given value to in London had gone. Her job, which she had blithely thought she would continue to excel at; her relationship with Guy; living with Melissa. They had all, in the end, proved to be impermanent, and without them, her life had become paper thin, meaningless. Moving here had seemed like the perfect solution to her problems, even though she was having to start from scratch. It was exciting and disconcerting all at once.
She increased her pace as a hill rose in front of them, the leaf-strewn pathway weaving between spindly trees. She hurried to the top, still several paces behind her dog, and saw the Cornish countryside stretched out before her: the soft ripple of hills meandering into the distance, pockets of autumn-burnished foliage, the blue-grey line of the sea. There was a lemon-yellow cottage to her right, nestled in a steep valley.
Ollie stood with her hands on her hips and breathed in, letting the emotions rush over her. She was just starting out, so it was bound to feel strange. And so what if she’d bought expensive decorations that only a handful of people would see? Marion’s words had been playing on her mind, reminding her that, despite the twinkly garlands, her festive calendar was empty. She tried to ignore the twinge of sadness, and was about to make her way down the hill when Henry started barking. He was scrabbling in a pile of leaves, his movements more frantic than Ollie was used to.
‘What have you got there?’ He looked up at her, panting, as she joined him, and she directed her gaze to where he was digging. ‘What’s this?’
It was a large stone, more of a boulder, nestled at the bottom of the hill she had just come down. There were several smaller stones around it, and fallen leaves had gathered in the hollow of earth in front of it.
Henry had clearly found something interesting in the pile of leaves, but Ollie was distracted by the exposed, smooth side of the boulder. On it, imprinted in it, but surely impossible because it was a natural rock, not a piece of concrete, was what looked like a handprint, the fingers splayed.
Ollie crouched and put her hand out, her gloves cracking as she stretched her fingers. It fitted into the ghost handprint almost perfectly, the stone cold even through the leather. Henry stopped scrabbling, and his gaze fixed on Ollie’s hand.
‘It’s probably a fossil,’ she said. ‘One that looks like a handprint. Don’t you think, Henry?’
Her dog whimpered.
‘What were you scrabbling at, anyway?’ She tried not to be too alarmed that her dog had stopped what had, moments before, seemed like the most important dig of his life, and was now sitting calmly, watching her.
She pulled her hand back and stood up quickly, her knees protesting.
‘I,’ she said to him, ‘have been spending too much time on New Age websites.’
Henry barked up at her, then turned away from the rock and his beloved pile of leaves, bounding on ahead as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened. Ollie shook her head. The sooner she got these bookshop events going, the sooner she got to know more people in the town, the better thingswould be. Otherwise, regardless of how many avocado smoothies she drank – and that smoothie had been truly disgusting – she wouldn’t sort her life out, but instead would send herself into isolation-based madness.
Sparing only the briefest glance at the strange stone, Ollie followed her dog, who seemed entirely carefree as he cavorted in the mud, delighting in the acres of land stretched out ahead of him, and they made their way towards the silvery shimmer of sea in the distance.
Chapter Seven
By the time she was getting her washing in from the line in the garden behind the barn, Ollie’s confusion had faded. The handprint must have been a natural anomaly, and she’d imagined Henry’s strange behaviour.
‘Hello there,’ called a familiar voice over the redbrick wall.
Ollie dropped her pyjama shorts into the basket and turned to see Liam resting his forearms on the wall. ‘Hi Liam, how are you?’
‘Grand, love. What about you?’
‘I’m good! I had Marion’s help with a delivery this morning.’
‘I heard.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Marion is quite strong on tradition. You’re certainly giving her some things to think about.’
‘And talk about?’ She grinned. ‘I think having your ideas challenged is a good thing.’
‘So do I, and speaking of ideas, when shall we get going on my book? I appreciate that you’ve just startedyour new job, but two weeks is surely enough time to settle in?’
