No Place Like Home

that David wouldn’t be popping in all the time, but here they were, on their first day in residence, and David, Linda and Kirsty’s brother, Fraser, were somehow coming to lunch.
How had that happened?
He ran a hand along the wooden worktop. David was an old-school builder who considered eco-friendly materials the work of the devil and had been appalled at the idea of using reclaimed wood in the kitchen, but had had to admit that the worktops looked great. ‘You’d never know it was reclaimed crap, eh, Bram?’ he’d said after his team had installed them.
‘Is our house the best house in the world, Max, or what?’ Phoebe demanded, whirling round on the spot. Phoebe had shown her brother around yesterday like an estate agent trying to sell the place to a potential purchaser. ‘I’m never going to live anywhere else but here!’
Bram and Max exchanged indulgent looks. Phoebe, like Bram, was a real homebody, and had been desperate to move into our house, even though living at Grannie and Grandad’s meant she could play with Lily, Rhona and Katie Miller whenever she liked. The Miller sisters, Phoebe’s best friends, lived across the street from Linda and David, and Phoebe had got to know them well during all the holidays they’d spent up here. Back in London, Phoebe had somehow got off on the wrong foot with the girls in her class – Bram had never got to the bottom of the reason for this – and had had to deal with a certain amount of nastiness and bullying. When the decision to move up here had been made, Phoebe had immediately exclaimed: ‘I can be in Rhona’s class!’ and burst into happy tears.
‘Watch those quiche cases,’ Bram instructed, heading across the kitchen to the door to the Room with a View, as David called it. He’d better check that everything was okay in there. David was bound to head straight for it.
He had to admit that David had been right to insist on an expanse of glass for the long end wall, the middle sections of which were sliding doors giving onto a terrace. Every room in the house had a lovely view – how could it not, in such an idyllic location? – but this was spectacular. Immediately behind the house was the paddock, where they hoped to keep goats, and beyond that another small field and, off to the left, the wood of pine and birch and beech trees that actually belonged to them – how amazing was it to actually own a wood? Was it deeply un-PC of him to be gloating about this? And just in front of the wood there was a stream, with a cute little footbridge carrying a Hansel and Gretel path across it, perfect for Phoebe’s interminable games of Pooh sticks.
So much for his egalitarian principles. Dangle fourteen areas of idyllic Scottish countryside in front of Bram Hendriksen and it seemed his inner Tory would bite your hand off.
The ground beyond the field dipped down and then slowly rose, providing a panorama of forests and fields and farmhouses and, as a backdrop to it all, the hazy bulks of the Grampian Mountains. On this perfect midsummer day, it was a glorious, impossibly lush patchwork of greens and purples and blues.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They’d done the right thing.
He missed his London friends like crazy, but this was a little piece of Scottish heaven. It was going to be amazing, living here with nature all around them – none of which, barring the very slim possibility of adders, had the potential to be fatal.
He straightened a picture, picked up some loose thread from the carpet and rearranged the fossils on the big fire surround made from old ship’s timbers. He defied even David to find fault with this room. Their honey-coloured linen sofas, which had looked oversized in the Islington flat, were perfect here, and Bram had found vintage fabric online with which he’d made fresh covers for their collection of cushions. Which were looking a bit squashed from the four of them collapsing on the sofas last night at the end of the hectic moving-in day.
He picked up an orange and white cushion and plumped it, and set it back on the sofa in its proper place. But as he reached for a green and blue one, he stopped.
What was he doing?
Why was he pandering to the man? This was their home, not a show house, and if the cushions were flat, David would just have to suck it up. In a childish act of defiance, Bram grabbed the orange and white cushion and chucked it down on the sofa and sat on it, bouncing a couple of times to make sure it was completely de-plumped.
Starting as he meant to go on.
He stood without looking at the cushions again – because he wanted to plump those bloody cushions! – and opened the sliding doors. On the terrace, he took his phone from his pocket to capture the view. He’d do a blog post tonight about their first day in the new house, in Woodside, as they had called it.
The air was so clean, scented with pine resin, and as he walked round the side of the house and past the shed, he breathed it into his lungs. Thanks, Bram, his lungs were probably saying. You’ve almost forty years of London pollution to make up for, but it’s a start. He chuckled, imagining what David would say if he knew Bram’s lungs were talking to him.
His smile widened as he spotted Henrietta, the carved wooden goose from his childhood, positioned by Phoebe in a little drift of wildflowers – were they some kind of buttercup? He took a photo for the blog. He’d get a shot of the veg patch too. Or maybe a video of his hand picking the first onion? He switched to video function, angling the phone to get a long-range shot of the veg patch, and started walking again.
‘So,’ he narrated.