Page 10 of The Inn on Bluebell Lane
Sarah had been giving them a tour of Llandrigg for the last hour, talking the whole time, while the children had followed on, looking depressingly disinterested. Ava had held Ellie’s hand at the start, skipping along, but she had little legs and was tired from their travel, and after a while Ellie had had to hoist her on the hip, which Sarah had noticed and clearly disapproved of.
The truth was, she was more than a little intimidated by Sarah—she was tall and poised, with her dark auburn hair, the same color as Matthew’s, pulled back into a neat ponytail, dressed in immaculate Hunter boots, a waxed jacket and skinny jeans, looking like she belonged on the cover of Country Life. Everything about her radiated calm confidence, slight superiority… or maybe Ellie just felt inferior, since Sarah seemed to know so much and Ellie so little.
Her sister-in-law hadn’t faltered once in her recitation of all Ellie needed to know about life in Llandrigg—so far, she had heard about organic veg boxes, after school cricket club, how the Rainbows had lost a leader and just wasn’t the same, and the dangers of the new skate park by the river, which included broken glass and teenagers who vaped.
Her mind was seething with information, as well as worry and frustration about all that lay ahead. Not one of her children, save Ava, who had asked if Llandrigg had a toy store, had said a single word during this whole interminable tour. If Ellie had nurtured hopes they’d bond with their cousins—and to be honest, she hadn’t, not really—those had not materialized in the least. Four preteens and teens mooched behind her and Sarah, doleful in the extreme. Sarah, however, who was busy telling Ellie all she needed to know, hadn’t seemed to notice.
Maybe, Ellie reflected wearily, she should have given them all a day simply to be before she’d launched them into their new lives, but mooching around the B&B, with Gwen always skulking in the shadows, hadn’t felt like the best use of their time, either.
And so, she’d followed Sarah, the children trooping behind, from post office shop to church to primary school and now to the green, listening to her sister-in-law inform them on every aspect of village life, too tired to keep hold of any of the information that Sarah seemed to deem so important.
They reached the village green—a swathe of lush, if rather overgrown, grass with a tiny, dilapidated play park at one end. Ellie thought of the state-of-the-art playground back in Connecticut; it took up half an acre, with slides, swings, tunnels, trampolines, and sprinklers for summer. It was a far cry from this—a couple of swings, a rusty, old roundabout, and a broken seesaw.
Sarah surveyed the offerings with a beady look before she prodded Owen between his shoulders. “Go on, then, Owen. Show your cousins the play park.”
With a decidedly unwilling glance for said cousins, Owen walked off, followed by Mairi, and after an awful second’s hesitation, Ellie’s children trailed morosely behind, Ava letting go of Ellie’s hand to follow her siblings toward the playground.
“There,” Sarah said with satisfaction as they retreated to a bench on the side of the park, Owen kicking the tufty grass and Mairi scowling into the distance, clearly too cool for Jess, who was a year younger. Ellie’s own children were wandering around, seeming disconsolate. “They’ll get along eventually. Children always do, don’t they?”
With “eventually,” Ellie thought, being the operative word. Still, she knew a friendship could not be forced. The cousins would have to sort it out for themselves.
“It really is a cute village,” she offered as she glanced around the village green, surrounded on two sides by quaint little cottages, and on the third and fourth sides by the Norman church and a pub. The pub’s colorful sign, indicating the three crowns of its name, swung in the summery breeze.
“Cute,” Sarah repeated, with that little nose wrinkle Ellie was beginning to recognize—and dislike.
“Quaint, I mean,” she corrected. Did Brits view cute as an insult? Well, Sarah couldn’t argue with quaint. Everything about Llandrigg was impossibly quaint and so different from suburban life in Connecticut, with its giant parking lots and box stores and general lack of charm, outside of a small designated historic area that had swanky boutiques and independent stores. But their slice of suburban Connecticut also had multiplexes and playgrounds ten times the size of this one, three outdoor pools, tennis courts and ice-skating rinks, not to mention restaurants of every cuisine imaginable, as well as drive-through banks, pharmacies, and the ever-essential Starbucks, all within a five-minute drive of their house, and no need to leave the air-conditioned sanctuary of their car if they’d rather not.
Ellie had never thought of herself as being particularly materialistic, but right now she felt a sweep of homesickness for the convenience of her former life, the utter ease of it. The nearest shopping center, Sarah had informed her, was forty minutes away. Not that Ellie even wanted to go shopping, but still. She wanted just one thing to be familiar and easy. Sitting here on this bench, looking at the church and the pub, she felt as if she might as well have been dropped down on Mars. She imagined her children, especially Jess, would feel the same, only more so. Still, she told herself, they’d get used to it. Eventually.
“What about a pediatrician?” Ellie asked Sarah now. Since her sister-in-law seemed determined to be the font of all parental wisdom, Ellie decided she might as well drink from her ever-flowing waters. “Is there one in the village?”
“A pediatrician?” Again, Sarah wrinkled her nose. “How very American of you! Children just go to the regular GP in the UK, Ellie. They don’t have special doctors unless there’s something wrong. There’s a GP in Abergavenny, but there might be a waiting list.”
Ellie didn’t think Sarah meant to sound patronizing, but she did. “How far is Abergavenny from here?” she asked, knowing Matthew had told her, but she’d forgotten.
“About thirty minutes, give or take a few.”
Half an hour to the nearest doctor…! Okay, fine. Ellie managed a quick smile and then drew a steadying breath, casting an eye to her beloved brood. Ben was pushing Josh on the roundabout, which normally would have warmed her heart, but she was experienced enough to know he’d probably push him too fast and Josh would start to cry. Jess was standing by herself, arms folded, looking furious because she’d been forbidden from bringing her phone. Owen and Mairi had taken over both swings and were flying high, legs pumping, while Ava looked longingly on. Eventually, she reminded herself. It felt like a prayer.
“And what about a dentist?” she asked Sarah, deciding to get it all over with at once.
“Abergavenny.” Sarah sounded amused, as if this should have been glaringly obvious, and considering the size of Llandrigg, perhaps it should have been. The takeaway from all this, Ellie thought, was that everything convenient was at least thirty minutes away, which made it decidedly inconvenient. “But you’ll most certainly have to go on a waiting list for that, I’m afraid,” Sarah continued. “Dentists are difficult to come by on the NHS in this area. You could always go private if you wanted, but, of course, that’s expensive.”
Ellie drew another breath. Fine. It was all going to be fine. She knew it was. She’d make the phone calls; she’d get on the waiting lists. It wasn’t that different from America, where finding a doctor or dentist who took your health insurance could be a challenging feat, indeed.
It was just this all felt so foreign, from the names of the villages and towns as well as the television shows to whole swathes of life she didn’t understand. Matthew really had lost his Britishness when moving to the States; he’d never talked about any of this stuff… and Ellie realized she had never asked. She’d never needed to know, or even considered that she might need to know. Now he seemed to have rediscovered his roots, while she was… flailing.
She stared blindly ahead as Sarah started talking about boots, and it took Ellie several minutes to realize she meant a shop called Boots, not footwear. And when she’d laughingly explained her confusion, hoping for at least a small bonding moment, Sarah had wrinkled her nose—again—looking politely confused, as if she didn’t understand why Ellie might have misunderstood such a thing, because they were obviously two totally separate concepts. And yes, Ellie actually had heard of Boots, so maybe she was just being a little slow. There’d been one in the airport. She’d bought some travel sickness pills there, for Ava.
“Anyway,” Sarah continued, cutting across Ellie’s vain attempt at finding the humor in the situation, “you can get some minor treatments at Boots, if you don’t want to go to the GP.” She gave a little sniff, while Ellie tried not to sigh.
Ellie honestly thought Sarah meant well, just as Gwen did, in giving her all this information—she knew they did—it was just they all kept missing each other somehow. Perhaps it was a cultural difference; Ellie hadn’t realized how much of a difference there was between the UK and the US until she’d married Matthew and, even then, it had seemed negligible, because by the time she’d met him he’d been living in New York for a while and had become used to American ways, seemed to enjoy them. How many times had he extolled the virtues of drive-through convenience, or the enormous portion sizes at the local Applebees?
It had only been when she’d met her mother and sister-in-law, and so infrequently, that she’d had to acknowledge, with a funny little jolt, how different they were, how different she seemed to them. Every time she’d visited—or when Gwen had visited them in America—Ellie had come up a little short, startled by the way they seemed unable to get along, without anyone raising their voice or even an eyebrow. It was all so very civilized, and yet it left Ellie feeling unsure and out of sorts. When they’d lived in Connecticut, she’d been able to shake it off and move on. But now that she was actually in Llandrigg? The cultural difference was smacking her right in the face. Repeatedly, and she couldn’t even get out of the way.
“Well, I’m sure I’ll learn the ropes in time,” Ellie said with a little laugh, still determined to be optimistic, and Sarah smiled at her.
“Oh yes,” Sarah assured her. “I’ll help you.”