Mark and Gabby both slept facing towards each other. The sun dipping slowly lower over the sea cast a shadow for their faces out of the jutting rock. Their fingers relaxed, but remained touching. Both perfectly at ease, felt, in their sleep, intense happiness.
Gabby woke first and watched Mark’s face as he slept. It was a surprise to find how familiar his face seemed. Like a map she already knew her way around. It was a shock to realize that at the end of this day she would never see his face or experience this stab of recognition again.
He suddenly opened his eyes as if her gaze had woken him. They looked at one another in silence. His eyes were serious, she could find no hint of laughter in them. He closed his fingers around hers for a moment and then sat up yawning.
‘I suppose it’s time we went.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just time for one more look at the figureheads?’
‘Yes, we’ve got time.’ Gabby gathered the beakers and the empty wine bottle and Mark put them back in his haversack. A small wind got up and Gabby pulled on her sweater. Mark, smiling, reached out to pull the collar of her tee-shirt free at the neck. While his hand was there he could not resist taking a wisp of dark hair from her cheek and tucking it behind her ear.
Gabby experienced such a violent lurch of desire that she wobbled about, her feet sinking into the sand. Mark steadied her, and taking her hand in his they walked back towards the gardens. Standing in front of Valhalla, Mark got out his camera and took some more photos of the figureheads.
‘Now, one of you, Gabriella … standing right there … that’s it.’
‘OK,’ Gabby said. ‘Now I’ll take one of you, for your book and for your family.’
Around them birds scuttled and squawked in the undergrowth as the sun started to slip into the sea. Gabby bent and took out a piece of roll she had kept. Sparrows hopped around her for a second or two, then suddenly a brave one landed on her hand and grabbed a crumb, then another and another until it seemed as if birds were springing from her fingertips. Gabby threw back her head and laughed silently for the sheer joy of the moment.
Mark snapped her again and again with his camera. He did not know why, but something deep inside him felt as if it was fragmenting, as if he had witnessed and captured a moment he might never have again.
Voices faded, the garden grew full of shadows and the scent of spring flowers more intense as they retraced their steps out of the garden. Above them the helicopter hovered noisily, and landed.
Mark stood beside his hire car jangling his keys. Gabby’s car was next to his and she opened the door and all the windows because the windows had misted up in the damp old car. She said awkwardly, ‘Goodbye. Have a good journey to London and good luck with your research … It was a wonderful thing you did, returning the figurehead …’ She petered out.
Mark took her hand. ‘Thank you for coming with me today.’ He seemed to be laughing and he showed no sign of letting her hand go. It appeared to be a habit of his. He brought her fingers to his lips again, then in a small quick movement drew her towards him and said softly, ‘Gabriella, do you really believe that we will never see each other again? That I can say goodbye and just walk away?’
Gabby could not speak. He shook her hand gently so that she looked him in the eyes. ‘Do you?’
‘You live in Canada. I live in Cornwall. When this trip is over you will go home.’
‘Yes. But I have an English publisher and I will be coming over regularly.’
Gabby stared at him, her eyes giving her away. Joy soared and she did not care.
‘Have you got a mobile phone?’ he asked.
‘Not yet, but I am getting one. Josh is always complaining about not getting hold of me.’
Mark let her hand go and dug into his pocket for a piece of paper.
‘Right, this is my mobile number. Do you know how to text?’
‘I think so.’ She laughed nervously, a part of her not believing she was having this conversation.
‘When you get your phone, text me your number. I know you won’t ring me, because you will have decided by the time you get home that we did not have this conversation. I’m in Devon for one night, then in London for two more before I fly back home.’
He picked up her hand again. ‘I will be in hotel rooms, which I hate. It would be great to talk to you.’
Gabby heard the first note of anxiousness in his voice.
‘I’ll ring you, even if I don’t have a mobile phone.’
He bent and held her face between his hands, kissed her mouth quickly, then turned away to his car.
‘Au revoir, Gabriella. Drive carefully home.’
He sat behind the wheel until Gabby had finished demisting the windows of her car. She waved, then turned out into the road and was gone.
Mark started his engine. The wind had got up, whipping the sea into white. He did not like the thought of her driving into the wilds of nowhere in the dark, in what looked like an unreliable car. It was a long time since he had had the chance to feel protective about anyone.
He thought about the lights of a farmhouse with people he did not know waiting for her and felt a pang of jealousy. He could not ring her, and there was a chance she would not find the courage to ring him. He knew this. A day can fade so easily, changing shape, becoming an amorphous thing, a trick of the imagination.
Back in his hotel room, he undid the two small paintings and sat on the bed staring at them.
Cottage before a Storm. There, in front of him, the inherent, inescapable dark night of the soul. Spirituality glimpsed. A loneliness so stark it had to be skilfully transformed into colour and paint; the dark shape of pain captured forever in violent colour. Too recognizable for comfort.
Something lost. This small house dwarfed by the fierce landscape and angry sky, rendering all to a speck, as nothing, impotent to change one aspect of the hidden power of the elements or the isolation of the human spirit.
To understand what it is you have lost. To recognize so suddenly an area of your life you have hidden from yourself; an unease, a pointlessness that has been threatening for some time, is unnerving. Mark, his imagination coloured by whisky, almost believed he had been led to this painting, convinced himself this picture had been painted just for him. An omen. Facing the demon within. He determined to write to this Elan Premore, to explain the impact this small painting had on him.
The sunrise was for another day. The sunrise was full of hope. These two pictures were painted before and after some personal crisis. They belonged together, Mark was sure of this.
Chapter 12
Charlie, washing his hands at the sink, turned his wrist to look at his watch.
‘Shouldn’t Gabby be home by now?’ he asked Nell.
‘Any moment, I should think.’ Nell was getting a casserole out of the Aga and peering at it. ‘The last helicopter is about seven or seven-thirty. Is Matt doing the milking?’
‘No; Darren. Matt’s been out at Mendely with me all day today, he’s whacked, I’ve sent him home to Dora.’
‘Oh dear,’ Nell said, ‘I’m sure to bump into Dora in the village.’
‘He’s not as young as he used to be …’ Nell and Charlie intoned together. ‘I hope your Charlie isn’t taking advantage.’ They grinned at each other.
‘I’m dreading him retiring,’ Charlie said, reaching for a towel. ‘The younger lads just don’t have the interest or staying power.’
Nell finished stirring the casserole and put it back in the oven. ‘You can’t blame them, Charlie; low wages, long days in all weathers.’
‘I don’t,’ Charlie said. ‘I just can’t afford to pay more. You’d think the incentive of a tied cottage would be attractive, but not in the middle of nowhere, it seems. I look after those cottages, too. You should see the state of the accommodation John Tresider offers his workers. His houses have to be seen to be believed. It gives all farmers a bad name.’
‘Then it’s a disgrace,’ Nell said crossly. ‘There’s no excuse, they got a
huge grant last year. His father was as bad. He couldn’t keep his workers either. I’m surprised the environmental health people haven’t been round to condemn them.’
‘It’s only a matter of time.’
This was a conversation Nell and Charlie often had in different guises, and both fell into comfortably.
The wind hit the window in a sudden squall.
‘I wonder where Gabby’s got to. It’s getting late and there’s a gale coming in. I’m just going out to check on Darren.’
‘Charlie?’ Nell knew Charlie liked everyone safely in before dusk and as Gabby did not like driving in the dark. She was not often late. ‘I do think it’s about time Gabby had a new car. She’s starting to go further afield now and that old Peugeot is not reliable. She really needs something with a large boot to hold paintings.’
Charlie was irritated because he knew Nell was right.
‘Nell, I can’t afford to buy a new car at the moment.’
‘Look, Charlie, Gabby puts everything she earns into the farm. If she didn’t, she could afford a new car for herself. Doesn’t that strike you as rather unfair?’
‘No, Nell. It’s how we survive. We have to pull together like you and Dad did. Gabby only has to ask, you know that, she doesn’t go without.’
Nell stared at him. Sometimes it was hard to swallow her frustration or stifle a sharp retort. It did no good. It had alienated Ted and it alienated Charlie. Once entrenched, neither would budge an inch, and she was never sure whether it was obstinacy or misplaced pride.
In her marriage to Ted she had perfected a duplicity which she guiltily maintained over the years of her marriage. Like Gabby, she had pooled her income back into the farm willingly, but she had withheld a small amount each month for her own needs. She had bitterly resented having to ask Ted for things from money she herself had earnt.
When she had first married she had been nineteen and in those days she was unable to open a bank account until she was twenty-one. For her twentieth birthday she had desperately wanted a portable radio. Her parents had sent her a large cheque so that she could choose her own. Ted had cashed the cheque, but when she found the radio she wanted he refused to let her have the money. He told her it was a sheer waste to spend that much on a radio. He bought her a cheap plastic one and the rest went towards a new bailer.
Nell never forgot or forgave him. The meanness froze her heart. Her mother coming to stay and seeing the cheap radio had been quietly livid. Her generous and liberal parents never made the same mistake again. They had, all their lives, schooled Nell for a career and independence. Even as a child Nell had always had a small allowance and it taught her to budget. From the age of sixteen she had never had to ask anyone for anything. The marriage her parents had thoroughly disapproved of had been a shock.
Nell, on the rebound, had married young, full of hope, captured by a good-looking face; seduced by a long hot Cornish summer and Ted’s single-minded intent which she had mistaken for devotion.
When she became twenty-one she had persuaded Ted it would be a good idea to have a joint account so that she could write cheques on behalf of the farm. Eventually, as she was doing the farm accounts, he had reluctantly agreed, but had made their joint account a business account, while keeping the personal account in his own name, thus keeping control of all domestic transactions. Even then he had perused each statement for evidence of female waste or frippery, but when he saw none he had relaxed.
What he did not know was that Nell often asked to be paid in cash for her restoring, and this money she placed in her own secret account.
‘Good girl,’ her friend Olive had said. ‘Every woman should have a running-away account.’
From then onwards it was Nell’s R.A. account. When Ted died and she saw the amount in his personal bank accounts, she stopped feeling guilty. She just felt sad at a lifetime of endemic meanness. They had had to work so hard all their marriage, then when they could both have slowed down and relaxed, enjoyed what they had, he had let her go on believing they owed the bank money.
He had not even been able to enjoy the money himself, just given himself an early heart attack. She realized she had never really ‘done the accounts’ for Ted, just faithfully added up the milk quota and feed bills Ted put in front of her.
Later, when sadness turned to anger, she had been glad of Ted’s thrift. It had enabled her to help Charlie and Gabby and put a lump away for her beloved Josh.
She said now to Charlie, knowing it would annoy him further but needing to say it, ‘How on earth would you know if Gabby goes without? She would never say. You would never even notice.’
‘What’s got into you, Nell? Gabby often tells me what she’s bought. Things for Josh, usually. We have a joint account, for goodness’ sake.’
‘I know you do, but has Gabby ever bought anything biggish, or personal – clothes, for instance – without asking you first?’
‘Of course not. We have to budget, we both need to know what we can afford and what we are spending each month.’
‘So you talk it over with Gabby before you buy anything major, like a new tractor, do you?’
Charlie clicked up the latch of the back door. He knew it was pointless trying to talk to Nell when she was having what his father used to call ‘a feminist moment’. Or, and this had on one occasion caused Nell to throw one of his grandmother’s vases at Ted’s head, ‘the wrong time of the month’.
‘You know perfectly well that Gabby and I have a joint domestic account and I run a farm account with Alan that has absolutely nothing to do with Gabby. It’s business.’
‘Yes. But you hold the strings for both accounts. If Gabby contributes largely to the domestic account, why can’t a new car for Gabby, who is also running a business, come out of the business account she indirectly contributes to? That would be fair, don’t you think?’
Charlie stared at her in much the same way Ted used to; as if she had flown from another planet and was talking a foreign language impossible to decipher.
‘Nell, I don’t understand where you are suddenly coming from. When I can, I will buy Gabby another car, perhaps at the end of the summer. I can’t afford one before that. Gabby hasn’t mentioned anything about her car. You seem to be the one with the problem.’
He shut the door carefully behind him.
Nell stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the closed door. She had been dismissed so often in the years of her marriage, she should be used to it. But the small personal trigger spread like a stain across her heart. Like an interior bleed spreading into something beyond tears. An isolation that might have turned into a wail of anguish, if she had ever let it.
This moment in the flagstoned kitchen, full of the things I touch every day, is the life I led with two strangers. Until Gabby.
Charlie was right, in a way. It was her problem, this terror of meanness; because meanness slid slyly into all areas of life. Emotion, time, love and sex. But she knew her attitude to Charlie was coloured by Ted, and this was not fair. How could Charlie possibly understand why she randomly pounced?
People blamed mothers for selfish or thoughtless men. Nell did not. She believed it an entirely genetic thing that might be mitigated by example, but that was all. Despite Ted’s rampant chauvinism Nell had always insisted that Charlie helped with certain chores and cleared up after himself. As a child he had complied, but as soon as he married Gabby he appeared to take it for granted that all domestic chores were now her role.
Gabby, young and eager to please, had been complicit in this assumption. Once started, how difficult habit and conditioning were to break. There was nothing offensive, not even self-conscious selfishness on Charlie’s part, but his and Gabby’s roles were clearly delineated.
Charlie, like Ted, had never bothered to find out how painstaking and scientific restoring could be. How tiring. Hours of matching and patching, testing, waxing – all with someone else’s precious property.
It pained Nell to watch Gab
by clearing up after her son. Mud under the table where he had not bothered to take his work boots off. Never replacing the lid of the marmalade. The paper would be left scrumpled in a heap as if a cat had had a field day with it. It never occurred to him to carry his plate or mug the short distance to the sink. Small, thoughtless things, not important in themselves, yet indicative of his general attitude to who it was who cleared up after him.
Out of the kitchen window the day was dying, the sky crimson, covered with dark cigar-shaped clouds. In the fields a cow mooed repeatedly for her calf. Nell thought of Elan, standing with his whisky watching the same sky from his cottage. No children, no lover. Just the fading embers of another day with canvases full of the thing that lay unspoken in his heart.
She stood listening for the sound of Gabby’s car. Elan had said once, watching a childish, pregnant Gabby, ‘The girl wraps herself so close, Nell. She is too contained, too careful to oblige. This Gabby is easy to love, yet I have a sense of someone else, infinitely more complex, carefully hidden, but I don’t think we are ever going to be allowed to glimpse that little person.’
Out of the growing darkness Nell heard the sound of Gabby’s car coming up the lane. She relaxed, smiled, moved quickly flicking lights on, busy creating order and warmth at the end of the day. As she had always done for Gabby, so that she should never come home to darkness and an empty house.
Chapter 13
‘I’m going into town, I need some materials for work,’ Gabby said to Charlie over breakfast. ‘Do you need anything?’
Charlie looked up. ‘You could go to Industrial Farmers for me. I ordered a new hay feeder.’
‘Will it go into my boot?’
‘Just, I think, but it’ll go on your back seat if you slant it towards the back window.’
Nell came into the kitchen and Gabby turned to pour her coffee. She said quickly the thing she had been rehearsing in her head and which was now easier because Charlie wanted a favour.
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