Soul Sanctuary Hub

Part One: Arriving

The removal van had gone by the time Helen pulled up to the cottage.

She sat in the car for several minutes without getting out. The cottage waited at the end of a short gravel path, flanked by overgrown lavender that had seeded itself into the cracks and spread in that determined way that plants have when nobody has been paying attention. The windows were small and darkened. A wisteria, unchecked for years, had grown up over the front porch and begun to make claims on the chimney.

It was not what she had pictured. But then, she had not pictured very much. Picturing things required a particular quality of hope that had been absent from Helen’s life for the past fourteen months, ever since David had died and she had found herself inhabiting a world that was the same in every external particular and utterly, fundamentally changed.

She got out of the car. The gravel crunched. A wood pigeon was making its low, repetitive announcement somewhere in the oak to the left of the path. The air smelled of something she couldn’t immediately name, green and old and faintly sweet, the smell of a place that had been waiting quietly for someone to arrive.

The solicitor had described the cottage as ‘in need of some attention’ which she had understood was estate-agent shorthand for considerable disrepair. It had belonged to a great-aunt she had barely known. A woman her mother had spoken of occasionally, always with a particular tone that suggested both admiration and mild bewilderment. She had lived here for sixty years, apparently. Alone, for most of them. And had left it to Helen in a will that had arrived, via a solicitor’s letter, two months after the funeral, when Helen was still opening the post as though performing an act she had not yet fully understood the purpose of.

She turned the key in the old lock. The door swung inward with a sound that was less a creak than a sigh. A long, patient exhalation, as though the house had been holding its breath.

The entrance hall was narrow and dark, floored in worn flagstone, the walls hung with a faded paper the colour of old tea. A coat rack held the ghost of three or four coats, the shapes of them pressed into the wood, the hooks empty now. A barometer on the wall read ‘change.’ Helen stood in the doorway and looked at all of this and felt, for the first time in fourteen months, something other than grief.

She was not sure what it was, exactly. She stepped inside and let the door close behind her.