Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  Gabby felt like whispering, I’ll do it for nothing, just let me have the chance, but she knew it wasn’t professional and Nell and Charlie would explode.

  Rowe opened his mouth to argue and the Canadian said evenly, ‘I suggest that having got the figurehead safely home to Cornwall, not without some difficulty, it would be foolish to move her again. She is damaged and had I thought she would not be restored locally, I would have left her in London.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Rowe was an unpopular councillor but he was good at obtaining money from various sources. The Canadian winked at Gabrielle then watched the councillor with veiled amusement.

  ‘I think,’ the vicar said, ‘we should all repair to the pub and discuss this over lunch.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Peter Fletcher said.

  ‘Indeed,’ Rowe said. ‘I can then go on to talk to the Heritage people. Well, Mrs Ellis, thank you for coming, we will inform you of our decision.’

  ‘I meant,’ the vicar said coldly, ‘for Gabrielle to accompany us and be part of the discussion.’

  Peter took Gabrielle’s arm as they walked out of the church. He was a polite bachelor and he deplored Rowe’s crassness. ‘Let’s go and see if we can find a table.’

  Gabrielle smiled at him. ‘Peter, really, it’s fine. I should be getting back anyway.’

  They all emerged into the harsh sunlight. Gabby put on her sunglasses with relief.

  Peter said, ‘I think it’s important that you stay, Gabby. We are keen that you do this restoration, that’s why we rang you, and I’d like to talk this through with you.’

  ‘I agree,’ the Canadian said, falling into step the other side of her. ‘It would be good to talk with you, if you have the time. That figurehead has been my baby for quite a while.’

  ‘Settled,’ the vicar said. ‘Come on, Gabrielle, off we go.’

  Peter moved away to talk to him and Gabby was left with the Canadian. She felt suddenly, infuriatingly tongue-tied. From the moment she entered the church she had been aware of his eyes constantly on her face.

  He was a tall and lean man, and in the sunlight she saw he was older than she had first thought. His eyes crinkled with amusement as he bent to her.

  ‘Now what the hell could you have possibly done to upset that asshole?’

  Startled, Gabby snorted with laughter. ‘Not me! Nell, my mother-in-law. She upset his brother, an untrained restorer, who ruined a valuable painting belonging to an old friend of hers and then charged her the earth. Nell wrote an article in the local paper. She didn’t name him but everyone knew exactly who she was talking about. It was the end of his career. Councillor Rowe has never forgiven her.’

  They sat inside in the cool and Rowe pointedly ordered himself a pasty and orange juice and left. As the door closed behind him everyone relaxed. The young reporter started to quiz Mark on the details of shipping the Lady Isabella back to England while John Bradbury ordered sandwiches.

  ‘How’s Nell?’ Peter asked Gabby. ‘Still working, I hope.’

  ‘Oh yes. Nell will never really give up. She’s working on a huge painting at the moment.’

  ‘I met a guy in London who knew your mother-in-law,’ Mark said suddenly. ‘She’s still very highly thought of. I understand she worked for the National Portrait Gallery and then gave it all up to become a farmer’s wife.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s ever really stopped restoring. She just took on work locally instead of from London, when Charlie was old enough to help around the farm.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you Cornish?’

  ‘No. Charlie is.’

  Now, why did she not want to talk about Charlie, as if it might make her less interesting to the Canadian?

  ‘They have the most beautiful farm,’ Peter said, ‘miles from anywhere and hell to find.’

  The Canadian – Mark, for heaven’s sake, he has a name – was still firmly concentrating on her rather than the reporter. Gabby, who hated the focus of attention being on her, turned the conversation back to the figurehead to the relief of the earnest young man.

  Back in the church car park they said their goodbyes. The two men thanked her for coming. The young reporter got on his motorbike and roared off. John Bradbury walked home to his vicarage. Peter sent his love to Nell and went to unlock his car and open all the windows.

  The Canadian took Gabby’s hand and looked down on her in the amused way he had, as if laughter was never far away. She wondered if he found them all very quaint and British and tried to draw her hand away, feeling suddenly cross with him for staring, for making her tongue-tied, when she would think later of all the questions she wanted to ask him. He hung on to her hand, still smiling down at her.

  ‘Please could I have my hand back?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course you can,’ he said. ‘I’m only borrowing it – for now. It’s a very nice hand indeed.’

  He let it go. ‘It’s been great meeting you, Gabriella. I’m so happy Lady Isabella is going to be in your hands. She will be, you know.’

  ‘I would really love to restore her,’ Gabby said, hot all over. ‘Goodbye.’

  She climbed into her car and banged the door shut, deeply grateful to her sunglasses that she hoped were hiding her face.

  ‘Goodbye, Gabriella, take care,’ Mark said through the window and turned and walked back to Peter, who waved at her as she drove quickly past, eager to get round the corner and back onto the road home.

  The sun was beginning to fade and the shadows over the fields lengthen. Cows were making their way down a field to be milked. She wondered how long Charlie could keep his herd and how diminished the farm would be without the sight of them in the yard every morning and evening. Wistfulness for everything to stay exactly as it was overtook her so suddenly that tears sprang to her eyes. She made the little car go faster, as if the farm might have disappeared altogether in the time it took her to drive home.

  Chapter 4

  Nell watched as the girl and the small boy crossed the edge of the daffodil field down towards the coastal path. The morning was still, the wind from the south-west soft and teasing. The sky and sea merged in the distance, blue on blue.

  The day was held, breathless and hovering, like the kestrel poised, wings fluttering, over the hedge of the field where the girl walked.

  It was one of those days that was too still, the lack of wind unnerving, making the morning seem as if it had drawn in on itself, gathering and collecting in a silence that should be listened to.

  Nell stood, shading her eyes, holding the bowl full of corn, staring out towards the small figure of the girl in the distance. There was no hint of cloud, just the endless shimmering ocean meeting the lush green of the fields dotted with buds of emerging daffodils.

  She could hear the tractor now, moving along the farm track. As it came into sight above the hedge the girl stopped and lifted the child, and he called out, waved vigorously with his small, fat hands. The driver stopped and jumped out and walked to the field gate that lay between them. The child let go of his mother and ran along the stony edge of yellow daffodils so fast he fell, and the man leapt over the gate and scooped him up, threw him up over his head. Nell could hear the child’s laughter blowing over to her like dandelion fluff on the fragile stillness of the day.

  Maybe it was going to work, Nell thought, against all the odds. Watching from a distance they looked like a little textbook family; content, happy in their skins. Charlie had a son. He had never doubted for a moment that his firstborn would be a son. That had made everything easier.

  The man ruffled the girl’s dark hair lightly and they stood talking for a moment before he lifted the child up onto his shoulders, walked away and climbed over the gate and placed the child in front of him on the tractor. The engine started up again and they continued down the lane, towards where Nell stood in the yard holding the bowl of corn for the hens, watching.

  Silently the kestrel dived, steep
and sharp. Nell could hear the sudden squeal of the baby rabbit as it was caught and pulled out of the hedge. The girl turned, startled, and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.

  ‘No. No. No,’ Nell heard faintly on the wind. Then the girl made little runs up and down, crying and shouting in impotent anger at the kestrel, which lifted its prey swiftly upwards over the hedge and away in low flight.

  The girl was left small and alone in the vast rolling greenness of the field. Some nebulous, disturbing feeling caught at Nell as the girl, shading her eyes, watched the kestrel until it was a pinprick in the sky.

  Nell had rarely seen any show of emotion in this girl. Placid, cheerful, so careful to fit into country life, to be accommodating, to be loved. Nell realized in that brief moment that her daughter-in-law had been smothering any spontaneous expression of anger, joy or misery. She suddenly perceived Gabby as a sleepwalker in her own life. It was safer to sleep sometimes than to question how or why we came to be in a particular place at a particular time with a particular person. Nell knew this protective passivity only too well.

  She turned away from the figure making its way back towards her, a small, clear silhouette against the horizon of sea and sky. She clucked at the hens and scattered the corn in a wide arc as she identified this intangible feeling of unrest. What happened when Gabrielle woke up? No one could sleep for an entire lifetime.

  Nell turned Josh’s postcard over and looked at the soldier on horseback. How quickly the years had slid away. Hard to think of that little curly-haired boy in uniform. Hard to watch the green field he loved so much with its annual rash of mushrooms, disappearing into piles of earth, forming trenches for foundations that would house another generation on land she knew like the back of her hand.

  Who would have thought Josh would become a soldier, not a farmer? Who could have guessed he could permanently leave the farm he loved, the friends he had grown up with? She slipped the postcard into her pocket. She loved Josh with a fierce love and pride and was suddenly shocked at her own duplicity.

  She understood exactly why Josh had turned his back on the farm. How could she, of all people, not feel honest and grateful that he had needed more than a lifetime embedded in the harsh Cornish landscape? That he had chosen not to be smothered by the seasons, the weather, disease, and animal husbandry.

  She would have been bitterly disappointed if he had grown up incurious about anything outside the parochial world in which he had spent his childhood. There would be no more grandchildren, she had had only one chance to instil in him a need for something outside the farm and county, a craving to learn; for him to soak up like a sponge all that a country childhood had made him, by distance, ignorant of.

  She had taught him about paintings, about art, about conserving the past, the environment; all that she herself felt passionate about. Gabby had given him a ferocious love of books and Charlie an abiding pride in the land they owned. This was why Charlie had difficulty in understanding how Josh could turn his back on the physical thrill of working land that had belonged to four generations of his family.

  Yet, Josh, the scholarship boy, had come away from university with a first and gone straight to Sandhurst. Nell found it mystifying. It was also humbling. What right had she to try to mould Josh, from a baby, to compromise? Here she was, believing she had widened his horizons when he would have certainly done so without her help. Josh had always seemed to know what he wanted from life. Possibly, it was away from the two women who loved him, in a way, Nell had begun to realize since he had left, that might well have been suffocating.

  She and Gabby had each other, their restoration work, and Charlie. Josh must forge his own life. Nell smiled. The lorries had gone, the cows were coming up the lane for milking. Soon Gabby would be home to tell of her day.

  She took Josh’s postcard out of her pocket and placed it in the centre of the mantelpiece. Thank God for Gabby.

  Chapter 5

  Extraordinary. Mark did not know who he was expecting. A middle-aged spinster? An earnest academic? A hugger of trees in ethnic sweater and bright sandals? Whoever it was, it certainly was not this small, dark girl hovering on the other side of the museum gate.

  She stood peering at them in an enormous pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. With her hand on the gate she seemed poised for flight and ready to bolt. The kindly priest next to him turned and saw her, called out her name, and it was only then that she lifted the latch and walked towards them.

  The little pompous guy was telling Peter that he considered Gabrielle Ellis to be too inexperienced. He was cut off by the priest who moved away to greet the girl. Introductions were made and Mark saw, closer, that Gabrielle Ellis was not a girl, but a small, very pretty woman.

  They had unpacked the figurehead on the ground floor in a corner near the window at the back of the museum where there was the most light for Gabrielle to look at her. He watched Gabrielle’s face as she caught sight of the Lady Isabella. A little involuntary sigh escaped her. She moved forward to peer at the wooden face he had grown to love, tentatively, as if the impassive face of Lady Isabella was alive and carried secrets from the ocean she would love to know.

  Gabrielle Ellis had dark hair to her shoulders and she tended to flip it forward to hide her face. As she listened to everyone her face was concentrated and rapt. She kept glancing back at the figurehead, bending to look at her face and neck, her fingers hovering and framing Isabella’s face as if she longed to touch or was offering comfort to a patient.

  As she leant forward to examine the many small craquelures and fissures, her hair fell forward to reveal, against her suntanned shoulders, a tiny triangle of startling white neck, as soft and tender as a baby’s. Mark had this sudden overpowering urge to place his lips upon that tiny place of whiteness.

  He brought himself back abruptly to the conversation. The councillor seemed determined that Gabrielle Ellis was not going to get the job of restoring the figurehead. This project, he thought, has been my overriding passion for too long. If a local restorer can do the job, I’m damned if I’m going to let this sententious little man, with some agenda, ship her back to London.

  Mark said his piece and a sticky silence followed. He wondered if Gabrielle was feeling undermined by the attitude of the councillor, but he watched her face and it did not appear so. John Bradbury was beginning to get mad, though, he could see a small tic starting up in his cheek, and Mark grinned to himself.

  As they walked over to the pub he made Gabrielle laugh, but she seemed shy and talked little over lunch. She scribbled a quick estimate on a pad and it was obvious that both John and Peter Fletcher wanted to give her the job. Cock Robin disappeared in high dudgeon and he wondered who had the deciding vote; the council, the Heritage people or the museum.

  He studied Gabrielle while he ate his sandwich. Without the sunglasses, and out of the dim church, her face was small and elfinlike. She had extraordinary blue eyes with flecks of grey and brown in them. Her hands were small, like a child’s, with dimples in the wrists. Dear little hands.

  It was her stillness that struck him most. Her movements were slow and tranquil, but somehow detached, as if a piece of her was somewhere else. He knew he was making her self-conscious by looking at her for too long, too intensely, but he found it almost impossible to turn his gaze anywhere else. As soon as he tried to concentrate on the Tristan guy, who was earnestly trying to elicit information for his local rag, his eyes would return to her face as if pulled by a magnet.

  They all walked back to the car park to go their separate ways. Peter was driving him back to his Truro hotel. The afternoon was still hot but the colours were changing as the sun got lower in the sky. The sea beyond the languid fields was aquamarine. Loneliness seized him; he did not want to return to his impersonal hotel room, he wanted to watch the sunset on a cliff top with this woman.

  He took her hand, held on to it, said goodbye, smiled down at her with the pure exultation of a discovery. She asked, rather severely
, for her hand back, got into her quaint little English car, still hidden by those ridiculous sunglasses, and sped off.

  He felt, as he held that small hand, such a surge of desire that her hand in his had trembled. He knew, as he felt the heat emanating from her small body and down into her hand like a tangible thing, that she was as acutely aware of him as he was of her.

  He turned and walked away to Peter’s car. The curator was watching him with an expression Mark found impossible to read, and he thought suddenly, I am a married man, at least twenty years older than Gabrielle Ellis. I have a wife I love and five grown-up daughters.

  The car turned out into the road and they both reached out to pull the visors against the sun moving down the sky in front of them. They had to stop while a herd of cows idled along the road in front of them, flicking their tails. Huge great beasts with sweet, grass-smelling breath, shoving against each other and mooing noisily as they turned into a muddy farmyard to be milked.

  ‘I’d like to take you out to supper,’ Peter said.

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Can I pick you up about eight?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll be ready. I’m not taking up too much of your time?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll bring someone I think you’ll enjoy talking to, an archaeologist friend of mine. You have confidence in Gabrielle Ellis to do a good restoration? It must be hard to hand Lady Isabella over.’

  ‘It is hard, but I’m sure you’re right in wanting Gabrielle to restore her. How much pull does that councillor fellow have?’

  Peter laughed. ‘We don’t have to take the help of council funding or the conditions the council might impose for that funding, but, as you know, to gather private donations, even with National Heritage help, is difficult and time-consuming. We do have ways of persuading Councillor Rowe to our way of thinking. He is a very vain little man. Give him the limelight, lots of press coverage, photos … The Heritage people find him as much of a bore as we do.’