‘How are your parents?’
Zoë blew her nose. ‘Bloody awful. They seem worse since Andrew and I left home. Every time we go back they argue and contradict each other and vie for our attention. They are far worse than any of my infants. Andy and I don’t know why they don’t just separate. Now that we’ve left home they have absolutely nothing in common.’
Josh grinned. ‘Except arguing. Perhaps that’s what keeps them going.’
‘Andy reckons he was on the way and they had to get married. Awful, really, the way people mess up their …’ She stopped and flushed red. ‘God! Listen to me … One drink too many and it can happen to anyone …’
Josh took a deep breath. Get it over with.
‘Zo, what I most regret about that is we are not mates any more.’
Zoë looked startled. ‘Of course we are! Whatever makes you think that? We still ring each other. I tell you nearly everything.’
‘It feels different. As if you want more. I love you, Zoë, but not in that way.’
Zoë was silent, then decided on truth. ‘I suppose it is different. It’s like it never happened, or was so unimportant to you that it wasn’t worth mentioning, let alone repeating. If it had been with anyone else I would have felt much worse. At the time, I suppose I thought I’ve got to lose it sometime and I would rather it was with someone I knew.
‘The evening wasn’t … like calculated, it just sort of happened. It’s not like the earth moved for me, Josh. I just wanted you to acknowledge that it had happened. It’s as if I have to make something of it or file it under humiliation.’
Josh turned the car abruptly into a lay-by and stopped. He didn’t look at Zoë for a moment. He felt ashamed and embarrassed. She asked abruptly, ‘Do Gabby and Charlie ever argue or interrupt each other? Only, I’ve never heard them.’
Thrown, Josh looked at her puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not in front of me, anyway. Charlie and Nell argue a lot. What an odd question to suddenly ask.’
Zoë smiled. ‘You should know my magpie mind by now. I just thought, Gabby is quite young and I wondered if she got caught, like my mum; but your parents always seem happy.’
Josh turned in his seat. ‘We are talking about you, Zoë. I’m an insensitive bastard. I’m sorry. I guess I was ashamed … of myself,’ he added hastily and picked up her hand. ‘I’m sorry I’ve hurt you. It just felt wrong, Zo, like … incest … I know you so well’
‘I suppose that was my … point. I’m sorry, too, let’s forget it.’ She bent and kissed his cheek. ‘The stupid incident will fade anyway … in time.’ Like a bruise, she thought.
Josh said, because he must, ‘Despite what I’ve just said, never think it wasn’t a lovely experience for me. It was. I’m glad you chose me.’
He pulled her to him and hugged her so she could not see his face, and felt her relax against him. He did not like himself, or lying, and the dichotomy of his words did not stand up to scrutiny.
‘Tell you what,’ he said carefully, letting her go. ‘I’ll ask you up to the next party and introduce you to some good-looking soldiers.’
‘OK,’ she replied, matching his tone. ‘You’re on.’
After he had dropped Zoë off in Bristol and had criss-crossed onto the right motorway, Josh suddenly remembered what she had said.
Do Gabby and Charlie ever argue or interrupt each other? Only, I’ve never heard them.
Josh tried to think of an instance of his parents having a long conversation, about any issue other than the farm. He couldn’t. He tried to remember them arguing or having a heated debate or throwing things or raising their voices at each other, and failed. Nell and Charlie argued all the time, and Gabby and Nell talked to each other in the shorthand of familiar conversations. But he could not make a picture come of Gabby and Charlie engaging together in any fiery exchange, affectionate or otherwise. For some reason this unsettled rather than reassured him.
At the gates to Sandhurst, as he showed his pass to the soldier on the gate, he suddenly spotted a tall girl with blonde hair and sunglasses waiting to drive out the other way. He whistled under his breath and the soldier laughed.
‘Out of your league, sir. She is the Commandant’s daughter.’
Josh smiled at the girl. She was a stunner. He got back into his car and drove up the wide road to his barracks. It was dusk and the huge trees made shadows across the road. He realized with relief that he was actually glad to be back. He had put last week out of his mind. It had been good to go home, but Zoë had reminded him of one of the reasons he had needed to leave Cornwall. In a small village it was just too easy to get trapped in the wrong life.
Chapter 17
The room on top of the museum was warm when Gabby arrived. John Bradbury had been over and switched on a heater and left her a kettle, a jar of coffee, tea and a packet of biscuits. The sun streamed in at the large window over the graveyard and glistened on the sea in the distance; sea that met the sky so seamlessly it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Lady Isabella still lay on her back, cushioned by foam. Before Gabby began to treat the flaking paint with consolidant she walked round the figurehead, carefully looking for anything she had missed. Then she photographed Isabella from all angles for her record of work in progress.
She had to stand on a stool to take the photos, and as the camera clicked it seemed to Gabby a flicker of expression passed over Isabella’s face. Gabby knew it was a trick of the light, the lift of her arm causing a shadow, the sunlight full of dust motes making her blink; but all the same her heart leapt and she experienced a strange and sudden physical reaction as she looked down on that impassive and beautiful face.
Shakily, she moved away and got her magnifying glasses, a plastic pocket and tweezers. This won’t hurt, this will make you see again. I need to discover the colour of your eyes. With the tweezers she lifted a speck of paint from beneath one eyelid and dropped it into the pocket. The blind eyes stared upwards, unblinking.
Gabby then laid Japanese tissue gently over the damaged eyes and held it in place with a weak solution of gelatine. The wood under her fingers seemed to grow warmer. Gabby closed her own eyes for a moment. The sun streamed into the room and outside the birds sang among the gravestones. Gabby, with her fingertips pressed to Isabella’s bandaged eyelids, felt the silence swell and grow inside the room, as if time had stopped or was holding its breath. As if this single touch of her fingers on the damaged face could, like a surgeon, reactivate a life unfulfilled.
The sensation was so real, so profound, that tears came to Gabby’s eyes. She felt overwhelmed by an intense and incomplete emotion she could not place, and the sudden powerful need to know who Isabella had been.
Isabella noticed that the snowdrops were out under the trees and the daffodil buds were unfurling to show cracks of yellow and green. Below the lawn, where she stood beneath the branches of the macrocarpa, lay the creek on a full tide. The branches of the great fir were reflected in the water, rippling and moving, changing shape dizzily as she watched.
Everything in the garden was about to burst forth in a riot of colour. Isabella could feel the excitement tingling in the tips of her fingers. The birds felt this, too, she was sure of it. They swooped and flew low, beginning to gather twigs and moss for their nests. Spring was poised, waiting, it seemed to Isabella, for the sun to breathe warmth upon the tight buds; and like magic the garden would be transformed and radiant.
Isabella looked upwards. The sky was Prussian blue with small floating scraps of cloud. Far away down on the creek curlews called out, small lonely echoes like a madrigal. She closed her eyes, her face upturned to a sun not yet warm, and she experienced a moment of pure exhilaration in being alive, in being there in the garden; in being Isabella.
So acute was this sensation of herself, it felt like pain. It caught in her throat, made her shiver with some primitive instinct that she should not acknowledge this happiness, but recognize the transitory power of joy. Y
et, this knowledge of herself was set so perfectly in this fleeting moment of her own life that she did not yet have the wisdom to pay homage to fate. She gathered the folds of her long skirt, lifted the heavy material above her ankles and set off in a run across the grass. Her footsteps made small indentations on the wet lawn and her laughter carried in little pockets of sound across the still garden.
Isabella was fourteen years old, and her body, like the garden, was beginning to stir. She felt acutely alive, but in waiting. Confused and excited as if she was poised on the edge, the very beginning of her adult life. As she ran across the garden she laughed without knowing why. Perhaps it was a last goodbye to childhood or just the sensation of being part of the earth, part of this cycle of nature; hidden, but stirring with new life and about to burst forth upon a waiting world.
Her dark hair flew out behind her, blue-black in the sunlight, blue-black against the whiteness of her pin-tucked blouse. Her black riding habit held high above her ankles, revealed slim black-clad legs and small riding boots.
Her mother, Helena, dressed also in a riding habit, watched her from the window of her bedroom and smiled. Isabella was still free. Free to be anything she chose, God willing. She watched the girl run and duck under the lower branches of the fir, circle the small fountain and head for the path to the lake.
Helena suddenly saw from a distance what she had been avoiding facing. Isabella was no longer an angular child, but fast becoming a rounded young woman. A child may charge around the garden like a highly strung horse, but it would be considered unseemly in a woman.
Helena had tried and failed to get Daniel to educate his daughter as he would have educated his son, if he had had one. Helena was sure that his disappointment in not having an heir was not the reason. Each time she asked, he smiled indulgently.
‘What is the point, my love? My daughter is going to be a beauty like her mother. She will marry and have children and have no need of an education.’
‘But, Daniel, education is a means of broadening Isabella’s mind and will help her converse on a range of subjects. I know you think my music and my education is wasted, but it is not. I may not often play for anyone else, but I play for myself …’
And while she was saying these words to her husband, the waste of her own talent would often consume Helena, for she knew her words were as dandelion fluff blowing across the fields. Daniel had closed his mind to her arguments.
Helena knew that in questioning Isabella’s narrow education she was also questioning her own life. This yearning she had for something … something more than this comfortable, undemanding existence.
She moved away from the window and walked into her sitting room. She stood for a moment looking at her beautiful piano, then she lifted the lid and sat down letting her fingers rest lightly on the keys. Music was an extension of herself, part of the nature of who she was. The only way she had to express herself.
Her father had considered ambition in a woman unseemly and had been afraid her music would prevent her finding a husband. Despite assurances from Helena’s professor of music in Rome that she had a rare talent, he had resolutely insisted that to even consider playing at concert level was out of the question. Helena’s fingers played a sombre little tune. She could have travelled to Vienna, Paris, London … She closed the lid gently. She had been separated from her music professor and sent to study English in London, with the Vyvyans. If her marriage to Daniel Vyvyan had not been exactly arranged, it had been hoped for. Both her father’s family and the Vyvyans had known each other for generations.
Daniel had generously bought her the piano as a wedding present. He played himself, jolly little popular tunes, and he had thought it would be nice for them to play together when they had guests. However, Helena’s playing, even if she tried to match her playing to his, so outshone his own ability, so impressed and astonished their friends, that Daniel felt inadequate.
Daniel Vyvyan did feel threatened by Helena’s intelligence, by her musical talent and her undoubted beauty. He wished her sometimes more … ordinary in all aspects of her character. He was twenty years older than his wife and he was intensely jealous of the young men who gathered around her like bees attending their queen. It was not just young men either, he was much envied by his friends.
On occasions, riding over his land, he would kick his horse to a gallop, furious that Helena should have turned out not to be as compliant as he would wish. The point of marrying a much younger woman was that she should be malleable, not have an intellect that made him feel exposed.
Politics and philosophical debate should be kept for the club and had no place in the drawing room. In his view, women should exchange gossip, run the household, and look pretty.
Helena, seeing the time, ran down the wide staircase to the hall. She picked up her own and Isabella’s riding crops from the rack by the front door, which stood open to the morning. Benson had brought the horses round and they stood in the spring sunshine, shaking their heads, restless to be away.
Isabella rounded the corner of the house, her face flushed with running. Her eyes lit up when she saw Helena and the horses.
‘Mama, I thought you were never coming, it is the most wonderful day to ride.’
‘Indeed,’ Helena said, smiling at her daughter when she should have scolded her dishevelled appearance.
‘Isabella, you will need your jacket, it is not yet warm enough to ride without one. Go quickly and pin back your hair securely or it will catch in the trees and unseat you.’
Once mounted, Helena and Isabella turned their horses away from the house and down the long drive. Isabella glanced back at the huge ungainly house. The many windows of her home always seemed like eyes watching. So many of the rooms lay empty and unused.
‘I thought we would ride to the old stables, Isabella, to see how Mr Welland is getting on with your chest of drawers.’
‘Could we ride down to the cove, Mama, and then up the cliff path to the village? The horses love the sea.’
‘I think it better we return that way. It is near noon and we must not disturb the men’s luncheon.’
They rode in companionable silence, skirting around the top acre field on the edge of the wood towards the village, which lay in the valley below them. The mist still lay over the houses and only the spire of the church protruded above it.
A small three-masted schooner with all her sails unfurled to catch the wind was heading out to sea as graceful as a butterfly on the surface of the water. Isabella, watching her, asked, ‘Papa says he might buy a small trading ship, Mama.’
‘I believe he is seriously thinking about it, Isabella. Trade is so good these days, and he and Sir Richard Magor are talking of sharing the cost.’
The horses shook their heads and snorted, and Helena and Isabella set off down the hill, only loosening the reins and giving them their heads when they reached the flat. Isabella rode ahead and her laughter came to Helena like small birds’ cries on the wind. She smiled, wanting to laugh out loud, too, for the sunshine warm on her face, for the changing colour and beauty of the fields, for the sea below them and for the intense pleasure and wonder she had in her daughter who was so much a part of her and Daniel, and yet so uniquely herself. Helena lifted her face to the sky. She had much, much to be grateful for.
Isabella sniffed in the scent of wood shavings and glue as they entered the boatyard, which was housed in the old stables belonging to the Vyvyans. There were three men working on the hull of a boat, sanding and planing planks of wood. It was evidently hot work in the sheltered yard for one of them had removed his shirt. He had his back to them and seemed engrossed in what he was doing. His fair hair flopped forward, striking against the darkness of his skin. His back was long and smooth and brown, and the muscles in his arms moved and swelled as he planed a piece of wood, back and forth, back and forth.
Isabella could not move. She was transfixed by the sight of the half-naked boy. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her mouth felt dr
y and her body strange and hot as if she had a fever. She could not turn her eyes away.
Ben Welland lifted Helena down from her horse and came round to help Isabella dismount. He followed her eyes and issued a sharp command to his son.
‘Thomas – get thy shirt on, we have company.’
The boy looked up startled and noticed the women for the first time. He stared straight at Isabella with vivid blue eyes, so deep they were almost purple. With an easy and laconic grace he unhooked his shirt from a piece of wood and pulled it over his head, then with a curt nod turned back to his work.
Ben Welland led Helena and Isabella to the edge of the yard and opened one of the stable doors into a workshop. Isabella hardly listened to the conversation between her mother and the carpenter. She was feeling very odd indeed.
Isabella’s chest of drawers lay in a corner covered with a sheet.
‘I hope this pleases thee, Ma’am.’
Ben pulled the sheet away and Helena and Isabella gasped. A small, exquisitely carved piece of furniture was revealed. Helena had ordered a chest of drawers for Isabella’s room and this far exceeded her expectations.
The wood was plain and light with capacious drawers, polished smooth as an apple; but it was the work on the front of the drawers and all around the edges of the top of the piece that was so skilfully done. Instead of brass handles there were round knobs carved in the shapes of leaves and flowers.
With a cry Isabella moved forward to touch and look closer. There were slender trees and birds nestling among the flowers. Squirrels and tiny dormice, all carved to fit the piece and make it seem as one piece of wood.
‘Mr Welland,’ Helena exclaimed, ‘this is an exquisite piece. I have never seen a piece of furniture like it. I know your work and expected it to be beautiful, but this … Isabella?’
‘It is perfect, Mr Welland. It is … wonderful. I thank you so much for it. Mama has had my room newly decorated, and this … I love it! I truly love it.’
Another Life Page 11