It had seemed appropriate at the time.
“Romance is dead,” Charlotte admitted. “Mark emptied the recycle bin, clicked 'yes' and now Romance is gone forever, lost to the void.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” her mother said. “Honestly, I just want to knock your heads together.”
“That would require us being in the same room,” Charlotte said, “and that's not going to happen for a long time.”
“But to run away from a relationship just because you're bored ...” her mother began.
“I didn't run away,” Charlotte said. “And it wasn't just because I was bored. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be in love. So does Mark.”
Her mother sighed.
“It's a bad line,” Charlotte said, covered the receiver with her hand and made a hissing noise. “I've ... to … go!” she yelled. “Speak soon. Bye!”
After that rousing display of moral support, she didn't have the energy to call Mark after all. Instead, she waited until that evening and left two messages on his answering machine, letting him know that she was okay.
Chapter 2
Having arrived on Friday night, Charlotte spent two full days at the cottage without seeing a soul. She had finished the gratuitous bottle of wine by Saturday afternoon and it took her until Sunday evening to get through the meagre contents of the fridge. She made a cheese sandwich – delicious – and ate it while watching the sun set behind the forest to the right of the cottage.
She listened to the sound of someone chopping wood in the distance and later she heard animated French voices, presumably all coming from the house at the end of the drive. Until then, she supposed, she could have been in the countryside in any number of European countries, but that jovial, distant interaction fixed her in rural France.
It was frightening, but exciting to be so far from everything she knew. Now that she had eaten almost the entire contents of the fridge, she'd have to explore the village. Tomorrow. She was no longer hungry and it was late Sunday afternoon, so she reasoned that everything would be shut by now anyway.
It remained dark inside the cottage, even with the lights on. Every fitting sported an energy-saving bulb that took an interminably long time to reach full brightness, which meant that the shadows retreated slowly and then only into the corners. She perched on the bed in the master bedroom, waiting for the light, passing her fingers over the books on the shelf, wishing she had packed a DVD player.
By Monday, she was keen to get off the grounds and visit the neighbourhood. To her surprise, she'd discovered that she'd had more than enough time by herself for now.
She left the cottage armed with a small bottle of tap water, a French-English dictionary, her near-useless mobile phone, a neatly-handwritten list of things to do and the last remaining cube of cheese. The most important items on her agenda were getting a better mobile signal and finding an internet café where she could finally check her email message from Mark. She'd played it cool long enough and was now desperate to know what he had to say.
As she passed the house at the end of the drive, she looked through the trees. It was a beautiful house, not nearly as old as the cottage she was staying in, but with character nonetheless. It had big windows to let in the light and a chimney with a weather-vane with a cockerel on top. In the garden was an array of gardening tools as well as items that seemed somewhat more heavy duty than might be found in the average