The Keeper

Dean's New Start

Dean sat in traffic on the dual carriageway. The cars were filled with people fleeing from city life, desperate for West Country calm. It was a chance to think over his life before and his life to come. He didn't have a plan, didn't know what he was going to do exactly, but he knew what he didn't want to do. He didn't want a normal life, or a normal job, or to live in a two-up, two-down perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice estate in a perfectly nice town. It was clear to him now that he had wasted the last decade doing the right thing wrongly, letting his wife decide how he should live, as a penance for the mistake he had made so many years before. Now he was free to make his own decisions and live a life he'd chosen, though that freedom came at a cost. He had to fill his new life so that the thought of what had happened with Martha didn't consume him. But it was hard. He blinked back the sadness as the traffic picked up speed, and nearly missed the exit he needed to take. Robert's scribbled directions were now more detailed. Roads became windier and narrower until hedges scraped the car on both sides and a line of grass ran down the middle. He shot past a couple of turnings and got himself back on track with his road atlas and the help of fingerpost signs. Just as he thought he was lost again, he saw the marker of his destination – a large granite boulder and an ash tree at the entrance to a rutted dirt track.

This was where the Land Rover felt at home, bumping along the track at ten miles an hour. It was overgrown, and he had to get out of the Landy to bend back branches that tussled with his wing mirrors. Disturbed pigeons whoop-whooped away as he drove into the clearing in front of the house and barn. He parked up and found the keys to the cottage under the old milk churn by the door. A random selection of lights came on when he turned on the power. Dean went around the cottage, checked everything looked undisturbed, switched off the lights and found the kitchen to put on the kettle after he'd scraped hardened instant coffee into a mug. There were unopened bags of real beans, but he couldn't be bothered with that. The refrigerator door was ajar, and he opened it, knowing it would be empty. It would be easier to begin to have his coffee black. His spirits lifted when he found an unopened packet of digestive biscuits in the pantry. They would keep him going for the time being.

The sun shone through the trees and lit up the long grasses and umbelliferous flowers. Insects flitted from one to another and he watched a sparrow deftly dart in to snag a fluttering whitefly. Dean sat on a wobbly wooden bench, drank the coffee and ate half the packet of biscuits as he observed the wayward garden returning to its normal activity. A chatter of starlings and sparrows peppered the shrubs, and green and gold finches cracked open seed heads. Blackbirds and a robin were rifling through the leaves strewn about vegetable beds gone to seed. He could hear the churring of blue tits and the knocking of a woodpecker in the forest beyond. It was good to be a bystander in a world others liked to conquer. Part of the deal of living at the barn was to tidy up the garden, but he would make sure he left the edges for wildlife.

When he finished his coffee, Dean investigated the barn. The heavy door hung badly on its hinges, opening reluctantly as he pushed and lifted it. Sunlight forced its way through the grimy windows, illuminating dust that danced in its warmth. There were crates, rusted old tools and hessian bags everywhere. But the wooden floor looked sound and he couldn't see daylight through the tiled roof. Dean propped open the door with a seized-up push mower and tidied up a corner, stacking tools into crates, and sweeping out dirt and windblown chaff. He unloaded the Landy and unpacked his camping roll and sleeping bag. The proper work could wait until the morning. He went to bed with Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and was asleep before Tess made her appearance.