Lost in the Green Grass , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Henry Sands

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79 pages

English

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Lucinda was the girl who had it all in her twenties; great job, an adoring and glamorous husband, and a beautiful mews house in Notting Hill. Then, with one wrong step, her world was turned upside down. Thirty years later she is stuck in a loveless marriage and feeling trapped in sleepy rural Norfolk, wondering how her life has ended up like this. She decides to leave her husband to start a new life abroad, but her well thought out plans to escape, after a final family Christmas together, are turned upside down by an unexpected present from her student son, Jack. Having won a competition for a week's holiday at one of the coolest spiritual retreats in Tulum, Camp Mayo, he gives this to his mother for her Christmas present, having failed to remember to get her anything else.The trip brings unexpected consequences, not just for Lucinda, but for all members of her family as relationships are tested to the limit and years of pent-up emotions are forcibly released. This will lead to everyone questioning everything they thought they knew and, more importantly, who they are.

Sujets

Contemporary romance

Norfolk

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838597382
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Henry Sands

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To my three lovable menaces:
Mr Digby, Django-Bear and Tilly.
- Contents -
- Chapter One -
- Chapter Two -
- Chapter Three -
- Chapter Four -
- Chapter Five -
- Chapter Six -
- Chapter Seven -
- Chapter Eight -
- Chapter Nine -
- Chapter Ten -
- Chapter Eleven -
- Chapter Twelve -
- Chapter Thirteen -
- Chapter Fourteen -
- Chapter One -
Norfolk, England
I t was at that moment that Lucinda, looking over the breakfast counter cluttered with newspapers and some cold, uneaten toast, knew that she was going to leave her husband, Anthony Palmer.
Anthony was sitting in his battered wooden chair, next to the back door of their 18th century Norfolk farmhouse, on the far side of the kitchen with his head buried in the weekend business supplement of The Times , oblivious to Lucinda’s watchful gaze from the other side of the room.
After twenty-two years of marriage, this is what it had come to, Lucinda thought. Nothing. In the space where husband and wife were meant to have love and companionship, she felt only hollowness.
But for the first time for as long as she could remember, she felt excitement again. She drew this from the idea that there could be a way for this benign, lonely existence to finally come to an end.
It wasn’t that she hated Anthony, or had become scornful towards him in the way some wives grew to despise their husbands. She thought him a decent man and often admired his perfect contentment in life. For Anthony was undeniably both decent and content. She just could not accept that this was it.
What a waste it seemed that her twilight years were to be spent watching her husband read the weekend magazine supplement in the kitchen, before raising his head now and again to make some innocuous comment that couldn’t possibly interest either of them. For twenty-two years, she had politely nodded along to his murmurs with a, ‘What’s that, darling?’ or sometimes, ‘Yes, dear,’ regardless of whatever the point being made was this time.
She had to remind herself she was fifty-eight, not eighty-five, increasingly frequently. Surely, there was still some excitement in life for her out there. She would regularly scour the internet reading blogs by middle-aged women who for one reason or another had packed in their lives and gone travelling. She had read Eat, Pray, Love multiple times, regularly envisaging herself as the protagonist, Liz Gilbert. A summer spent learning to paint in Tuscany or visiting archaeological ruins, before rolling around in the sand and having a one-night stand with a mysterious and handsome young man didn’t sound too bad at all.
It wasn’t even the idea of romance that she wanted; she hadn’t been sexual with Anthony for many years. Christ, she thought, she wasn’t even sure her body would know what to do anymore. But she longed for something unexpected and spontaneous.
Lucinda and Anthony used to be quite a social couple. Norfolk, she felt, was good for that, with plenty of dinner parties taking place every night of the week. She had always put the convivial nature of the county down to its location; it being far enough away from London meant that daily commuting to the city wasn’t really an option, and therefore everyone lived as if they were expatriates .
But the drinks parties and dinners that had once filled their diaries had gradually declined over the years. At first, Lucinda put it down to people getting a bit older and so entertaining less, but after a girls’ lunch a few years ago that had flowed with a touch too much white Burgundy, a close friend had revealed something that Lucinda had already suspected, deep down. Her friends’ husbands had grown rather, well, just a bit bored of Anthony and his seeming unwillingness to make an effort to strike interesting conversation.
Not that Anthony himself would have minded at all about being branded antisocial, really. He was happy enough just pottering around making himself busy at home. An ideal morning for him would have been attentively following an instruction manual line by line, preferably one he had ordered in especially, having lost the original, and using it to fix a broken washing machine. Bleeding all the radiators in the house for the umpteenth time that month was another good option. ‘Always good to be sure,’ he would mutter.
For many years, Anthony had been a partner in a small accountancy firm, ADR Advisors, based in London and which specialised in looking after the accounts for small and medium-sized companies, as well as individuals’ tax returns. Anthony had been the fourth partner there, but the three founders decided not to extend the name to ADRP, with the view their own three initials were quite enough. True to form, the Palmer contingent hadn’t put up much resistance and seemed perfectly happy maintaining the status quo.
Several years later, ADR Advisors was bought by a bigger firm and, in order for Anthony to secure a reasonable payment as part of the sale, he was to continue to act as a senior adviser to the new firm, Chapman Parker.
The new set-up had only required him to be in the office for three days a week, and the general expectation was that he would gradually scale back his workload further over time. Having cut down to just one day a week, though, he realised how much he missed the routine and the backbone that the working structure had instilled in his life, and so, to the bafflement of the more junior members of staff, he quickly upped his voluntary attendance to three days a week.
On Tuesday mornings, Lucinda would drop him at Downham Market station, in time for the 07.21 train. This would normally get him into the Chapman Parker office in Chancery Lane by 09.30. He had a small flat that had once belonged to his mother in Victoria, off Vincent Square, where he stayed on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, before taking the train back to Norfolk at 16.48 from Kings Cross on a Thursday.
His three-day week in the office had earned him a rather ambiguous nickname amongst the same group of junior employees: TWAT. Rarely for Anthony, he looked almost angry on being addressed in such a manner by this year’s summer intern, before the second-year university student quickly pointed out that the term reflected his attendance in the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays And Thursdays. If truth be told, the title took some getting used to, but although perhaps lacking in overt warmth, the perceived office camaraderie that Anthony felt was generated as a result was sufficient enough to enable him to decline regular office drinks and other social events, and so was worth putting up with.
Lucinda often wondered how it was that she was more bored and lonely when Anthony was back at the house in Norfolk than when he was away in London, but it was undeniably the case. At least when it was just her at Ferryman’s Cottage, she felt she had space. She had her own privacy. But when Anthony was at home, it was his constant shadow of apathy that depressed her so. And that’s how she self-diagnosed her state of mind: depression.
Of course, she had thought about leaving Anthony before. In her imagination, her new life was full of unexpected twists, turns and impromptu excitement. The truth, though, was that she knew she didn’t really have anywhere to go, nor many savings left to fund her escape. The money she had was largely tied up in their house and the grazing land their house backed onto, which they had since purchased separately. Though, technically, that was Anthony’s money.
In the past, when she’d had these visions of her new life, the initial excitement hadn’t taken long to dissipate as she inevitably came back to the conclusion that she was just being silly, and there was no way it was a viable plan. Instead, it made much more sense for her to just continue ploughing on as they were, attempting to make the life they had a little more fulfilling. These attempts were initiated with gusto for several days, sometimes weeks, before she felt unable to carry the weight of Anthony’s detachment, and the whole cycle started once again.
But this Saturday morning, it was different. She knew as she watched her husband of the last two decades that things were going to change. This time, it was for real, and she was going to leave him, once and for all. Her fantasies had been going on long enough now, and it was time to make them a reality. From somewhere inside herself, where previously the conviction to go through with it had been found wanting, she now fo