Was it just the charm of an old house that drew Alice back to her roots?
She couldn’t really say what had brought her back to this little Norfolk village. The urge had come upon Alice as she sat at her computer in her studio flat in Camden. She hadn’t even booked ahead for accommodation, had just thrown some things in a bag and jumped into the car.
The place was just as she remembered it from her childhood – the village green peppered with crows, the pub with its rickety tables overlooking the cricket pitch, the antique barn full of old bird-baths and stone cider flagons.
Alice stood for a while at the edge of the green, listening to the fruity song of the blackbirds, before taking the mud track marked ‘Circular walk’. She remembered taking this same route all those years ago.
The day was mild for the time of year and, as she walked, Alice tried to push away any negative thoughts – the loss of some of her private students, her non-existent love-life, London’s extortionate property prices, and her acceptance that she might be destined evermore to live in a 12ft-square room.
‘Live in the moment,’ Alice murmured, repeating the mantra of her recent mindfulness download. ‘You are a mountain. There is no problem you cannot surmount.’
She smiled to herself. She would certainly be one lonely mountain here. The Norfolk fields, flat as flounders, stretched endlessly before her, sugar-frosted in the winter sun. A vast sky arched above her, and unwinding just beyond a line of beech trees was the jade-green ribbon of the River Bure.
Alice soon found herself relaxing without even having to try. Wrens flicked through the hedgerows and plump thrushes gobbled down winter berries. The white rear of a muntjac deer skipped ahead of her on the path, and the air was alive with the honks of dark-bellied and pink-footed geese.
The house took Alice by surprise. She had no memory of it from her childhood. Spiky drifts of winter heather and hellebore, marram grass and thistles sprung out of a hillock, almost obscuring the old stone structure that hunkered down on the other side.
Something about the house made her curious and she inched around the bank to get a better view. The building had been neglected over the years. The windows in their rusty frames were mottled like antique mirrors, and Alice squinted through one attempting to see inside. She had assumed the place was empty, hence her surprise when her eyes met those of an elderly man who was working at a table bes
