Over the last five years Antonia had visualized doing quite a lot of things out in the world–some of them had been quite possible and sensible, and some of them had been so bizarre as to be wild daydream stuff–but none of them had included renting a former almshouse tucked into a remote sliver of the Cheshire countryside. As she drove away from the little pub the sky was overcast, and there was a feeling that even at three o’clock in the afternoon night was poised to sweep in. She managed to find her way back to the motorway and, although she kept glancing in the driving mirror, there was no sign of any dark blue hatchback tailing her.
Amberwood, when she finally reached it, was much nicer than she had expected. It was a small market town that looked as if it had not progressed much beyond the early years of the twentieth century. It did not appear to have reached the twenty-first century at all. Antonia found this rather endearing.
Driving along, the agent’s sketch map propped up on the dashboard, she passed what looked like an old watermill. It was low roofed and ancient-looking, and Antonia slowed down to take a better look. Yes, it was an old mill, built up against a reservoir. It was clearly disused but by no means derelict, and there was what appeared to be some kind of memorial clock set into one of the gable-end walls.
She pulled on the handbrake and sat in the car for a moment considering the mill, wondering if it was a remnant of Victorian paternalism, or whether it might have been one of the dark satanic mills of Milton and Blake’s visions. No, it was too small for that, and probably in the wrong county as well. This was clearly a local affair, used to grind corn for the farmers and, despite its look of extreme age, it might only be eighty or so years since it had stopped working.
How must it have been to live in those days? Never travelling far but belonging to a close-knit group of people who knew one another’s histories and who stuck loyally by each other and shared the good and the bad equally: celebrations of births and weddings; mingled tears when there was death or sickness or hardship. It sounded very attractive. Oh sure, thought Antonia cynically, and I suppose the child-mortality rate sounds attractive as well, does it, and being carted off to the workhouse if you couldn’t pay your way, or the barbarism of surgery without anaesthetic…?
She drove on. The main street was pleasing: shops and tiny coffee places, and a small hotel at one end. There was a square with a war memorial–Amberwood had sent its share of young men to both world wars it seemed–and a number of the buildings had the unmistakably wavy look of extreme age and the straight chimneys beloved by the Tudors. Either the place came under the aegis of town planners with an unusual vein of municipal aestheticism, or the residents of Amberwood were militant about preserving their history, because there were no converted plate-glass-fronted monstrosities blurring Elizabethan or Queen Anne fa?ades, and everywhere was immaculate. There was certainly a small supermarket, but it was tucked discreetly away in a side street, politely self-effacing amidst a couple of picture galleries, and craft shops of the dried-flowers and raffia-mat type.
I’ll still hate being here, thought Antonia but I can’t really hate any of this. I’ll come into the high street for shopping, and look at the paintings, (I’ll manage to stay out for long enough to collect shopping and have a cup of coffee, surely to goodness!), and it’ll all become familiar and ordinary.