Page 64 of The Friend Request

The cottage is cold. The fire went out in the night, and the kitchen smells of dead ash and the damp that creeps in through the stone walls when the heating hasn’t been on. I stand at the window and look out at the hills, and they’re beautiful – green and grey and streaked with low cloud – but I don’t care. I don’t care about the view, or the fresh air, or the walking paths, or any of the things that are supposed to make isolation feel like a retreat instead of a punishment. I’ve been here five days and I’ve spoken to one person. Last night I sat in this kitchen and had a full conversation with a teapot because the silence had me wanting to climb out of my skin.

I need a human being. An actual, living, breathing person who isn’t me.

So I pull on my boots and my coat, lock the cottage, and walk.

The path over the hill is familiar now – I’ve done it enough times that my feet know where the ground dips, where the mud collects, and which stones are loose on the steep bit near the top. The sky is overcast but dry, and the wind has dropped since last night. The sheep scatter as I come over the ridge, bleating and offended, as if I’ve interrupted something private. On the other side, the valley opens up, and Jeff’s farmhouse sits in its fold of hill, grey stone, slate roof, and the thin line of chimney smoke I’ve come to think of as a signal – someone’s home, someone’s warm, someone exists.

I knock on the front door. There’s a pause, then the sound of a chair scraping and a dog barking – a single short bark, more announcement than threat – then the door opens and Jeff is standing there in a checked shirt, corduroy trousers, and slippers, with a tea towel over one shoulder and a look of mild, pleasant surprise on his weathered face.

‘Kim,’ he says, as if we’ve known each other for years. ‘Come in, come in. I’ve just put the kettle on.’

The kitchen is the warmest room I’ve been in since Alex left. There’s an Aga against the far wall, dark green and radiating a steady, bone-deep heat that hits me as soon as I step through the door. A wooden table takes up most of the space, scarred and scrubbed and covered at one end with a newspaper, a pair of reading glasses, and a half-finished crossword. The dog – a border collie, old and grey around the muzzle – lifts its head from a bed by the Aga, decides I’m not interesting, and puts it down again.

‘Sit yourself down,’ Jeff says, already reaching for mugs. ‘Milk and sugar?’

‘Just milk, thank you.’

I sit at the table and let the warmth settle over me like a blanket. The kitchen smells of toast and woodsmoke and something sweet – fruit cake, I think, or scones – and there are photographs on the windowsill, small, framed snapshots of a woman with dark curly hair and a wide smile, standing in front of this house, holding a lamb, sitting on a gate with the hills behind her. In every picture, she looks like she’s about to laugh.

Jeff follows my gaze as he sets the mug down in front of me.

‘That’s Margaret,’ he says. ‘My wife.’

‘She looks lovely.’

‘She was.’ He sits down opposite me and wraps both hands around his mug – big hands, rough and brown, the knuckles swollen the way hands get when they’ve spent decades working in cold weather. ‘Forty-one years we had. Not bad going, is it?’

‘Not bad at all.’

He talks about her easily, without the stiffness people sometimes get when they mention someone they’ve lost, as if the grief has been worn smooth by time and handling and has settled into something he can carry without it cutting him. Margaret loved the garden. Margaret sang in the church choir even though she couldn’t hold a note, and the vicar was too polite to tell her. Margaret made the best bara brith in the valley, and he’s been trying to replicate it for three years and hasn’t got close. He’s starting to think she left a secret ingredient out of the recipe on purpose so he’d always miss her cooking.

‘She’d have liked you,’ he says, pushing a plate of cake towards me. ‘She always said the cottage brought interesting people. We had a painter one summer – watercolours, out on the hill every morning in all weathers. Margaret used to take him flasks of tea. And a couple from London who thought they wanted the quiet life and lasted about four days before they drove to Brecon for a pub lunch and didn’t come back until nightfall.’

I smile. ‘I can understand that.’

‘Can you? Getting a bit much on your own up there?’

The directness of it catches me off guard. I take a sip of tea to buy myself a second, and when I put the mug down I find him watching me with those pale blue eyes – not prying, just attentive how people who live alone learn to be, because when you only get one visitor a week, you pay attention to them.

‘A bit,’ I say. ‘It’s very quiet.’

‘It is that. Takes some getting used to. Margaret struggled with it when we first moved here – she’d grown up in Swansea, you see, streets and buses and neighbours you could hear through the walls. Took her a good six months before the silence stopped bothering her. Said it was like learning to swim – you have to stop fighting it before it holds you up.’

‘That’s a nice way of putting it.’

‘That was Margaret. I just stood in fields and grunted.’

I let out a laugh that comes from somewhere real rather than somewhere polite, and it surprises me. Jeff grins and cuts me another slice of cake without asking, and I eat it because it’s good – dense and sweet and studded with raisins – and because saying no would feel like turning down more than cake.

We sit for a while. He tells me about the sheep, which are due to be moved to the lower field next week. He tells me the stream floods if the rain keeps up, but not badly, and not as far as the cottage. He tells me there’s a footpath along the top of the ridge that leads to a Bronze Age cairn, if I fancy a longer walk, and that the view from up there on a clear day stretches as far as the Beacons.

It’s so normal. So beautifully, boringly, blessedly normal that I want to sit at this table for the rest of the afternoon and let this kind old man talk to me about sheep and footpaths and his wife’s bara brith until the world outside stops being frightening. But the question has been waiting since I knocked on the door, and eventually, I can’t hold it any longer.

‘Jeff,’ I say. ‘Were you up on the hill last night? Near the ridge, above the cottage?’

He frowns. ‘Last night? No, love. I was in bed by nine. The dog gets me up at five, so I’m no use after dark. Why do you ask?’

‘I thought I saw someone. Up on the ridge, looking down towards the cottage. A figure, standing there.’