The Ullswater Undertaking by Rebecca Tope (read dune .TXT) 📕

‘Well, I don’t know exactly. But I’m sure it’ll get better. It’s only been a few weeks after all. You’re still getting to know each other.’

‘The more I know, the worse it gets,’ said Bonnie darkly. ‘I actually liked her at first. But luckily there are plenty of orders, so she’s out half the time.’

‘Well, hang in there. If business keeps up, you might even get a rise.’

‘And if Ben doesn’t go back to uni this term, I’ll have him as compensation,’ said the girl cheerfully.

Simmy said nothing about the morning she was about to spend with Bonnie’s beloved. She didn’t have time to describe the events of the previous evening, and she was diverted by the thought of Ben losing an entire term of study. That felt ominously risky, despite his youthful confidence that it would all work out somehow. The prospect of starting again in the autumn, with three more undergraduate years ahead of him, did not appear to worry him.

‘I’ll call you again this evening, maybe,’ she said. ‘You’ll want to catch up with everything. I can’t stop now.’

‘Nor can I. There’s a customer,’ said Bonnie.

On the road down to Troutbeck she was quickly aware that the tourist season was really getting into its stride. Not just cars and caravans, but cyclists and even a coach full of pensioners all competed for space on the small winding highway. Kirkstone Pass, as always, gave Simmy a little shiver. She had seen it in all seasons now, and still could not bring herself to like it. The bare, windswept fells on every side made her feel small and vulnerable. There was a weight of history pressing down on the place, with tales of frozen bodies missing for weeks until the snows thawed. Mostly sheep, admittedly, but enough humans to cast a blight. There was no rest for the eye, no hopeful point to aim for, where warmth and food might be available. Except for the pub, of course, which called itself an inn and which had a handy car park. It attracted tourists effortlessly, but Simmy had never been inside.

She would have to come this away again to get to the clinic at Ambleside, but instead of carrying on down the relatively civilised A592 to Troutbeck, she would turn right and plunge down the steep road known as ‘The Struggle’. Going down was worse than coming up, she had decided. There was no reason to doubt the efficacy of her brakes, but you could never be sure of other vehicles. Big old vans or trucks losing control and crashing into her from behind was one of her persistent imaginings. The road was not especially narrow, but it had sturdy stone walls on either side, and there would be no escape. With a helpless baby on the back seat, the whole thing readily became nightmarish.

The landscape was not as nature intended. There was a big slate quarry, for one thing. And there was a growing conviction that there ought to be trees covering the fells right to the top. Once this idea took hold, the very bareness of the slopes looked wrong. Simmy was mildly inclined to support calls to remove all sheep from at least some areas, and then stand back to see what happened.

It was only a few miles to her rendezvous with Ben. When she found him, he said he would leave his bike at the Mortal Man and walk back from Hartsop for it later. They had both realised it would not fit in the car as well as Robin’s buggy. ‘I’m coming back this way anyway, later on,’ Simmy told him. ‘So you don’t need to do such a long walk. At least I can drop you at the turnoff to Ambleside, if you want the exercise. It’s not far from there.’

‘We’re going up to Ullswater now, are we?’ he asked.

‘Might as well.’ She inspected her baby. ‘He seems okay for a bit.’

Ben gave the infant a cursory examination. ‘He looks bigger,’ he said.

‘No, he doesn’t. He looks exactly the same as he did yesterday. You just think that’s something I want to hear. People keep doing that.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Ben easily.

He, unlike Simmy, remembered the precise location of Aunt Hilda’s house, and directed her to its door. It was at least a mile further north than she had visualised, on the left-hand side of the A592, overlooking the placid expanse of Ullswater, with a patch of woodland rising behind it. ‘Gosh, we’re almost at the Dockray road,’ said Simmy. ‘Lucky I didn’t try to walk here. I’d never have made it from Hartsop.’

‘It is quite a way,’ Ben agreed. ‘You can park here, at a squeeze.’

Parking was such a perpetual challenge, an issue that never went away and was never fully resolved, that Simmy did not demur at the proposal that she drive onto a patch of ground that was obviously private. ‘Does it belong to Hilda’s house, do you think?’ she asked hopefully.

‘The next one, I guess. The one we want has its gate round the side, look.’ He pointed out a small track with a gate opening onto it. The gateway was just wide enough to admit a car. ‘Where did she park, I wonder? What if she had visitors?’

‘Maybe somewhere further along the track,’ Simmy suggested. ‘But this will have to do for now.’

It was mid morning on a Friday in springtime. Visitors were thronging the whole area, wedging their cars into any available cranny and getting told off as a result. But it was mild with a hazy sunshine and for the moment nobody wanted to stop to admire this particular stretch of lake. The famous Aira Force was half a mile further along the same road, with its own expensive car park and a spectacular waterfall. Wordsworth’s daffodils were there too. ‘We’ll be fine here,’ said Ben, getting out of the car.

The house was large and handsome but not unduly special. Made of the usual dark grey stone,