Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  Two fields away towards the coast he could just see Jason ploughing, oblivious to all but his music playing full blast on his earphones. He’ll be deaf before he’s thirty, Charlie thought, watching the furrows the boy was ploughing critically.

  The morning was unusually still, what his father used to call a ‘given day’. He paused, whistling to Shadow and Outside Dog to wait. Leaning on the gate he gazed into the shimmering horizon. From this gate he could look across his land in every direction. It was the highest point between the sea and the farm.

  There was no sound except the birds and the distant tractor. He squinted upwards at a bird of prey above the hedge of the next field. It hovered, waiting to swoop, deadly as an arrow … there it went sure and true to its prey, too small for Charlie to see.

  He thought suddenly of Josh. What a difference it would make if he could have gazed across this land knowing he was going to hand it over to his son. He still hoped, he could not help himself. Something deep inside him refused to believe he would be the last Ellis to farm this land. There was a remote chance that if Josh had a son … but Josh would not be able to turn his back forever, Charlie was convinced of that.

  It was odd. When Josh was small, and all the time he was growing up, it had never occurred to Charlie that Josh would not want to farm. University, yes; Josh was a bright lad. Gap year, travelling a bit, that he could have understood; it was a rite of passage for the young. But the army! Charlie turned away from the gate abruptly and continued walking the edge of the daffodil field. The shock when Josh told him. He had laughed at first; had been about to say, Good one, Josh. Then he had seen Josh’s face, miserable and anxious.

  ‘Why the army, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Dad, it’s something I’ve been thinking of for a long time. It was just hard to tell you.’

  ‘The army is a bit different from being a cadet at school, Josh. I know you enjoyed all that, it’s a part of growing up.’

  ‘More than enjoyed, Dad, I loved it.’

  ‘So is this the result of the recruitment officer bending your ear?’

  ‘He didn’t have to. There are so many opportunities in the army … Dad, I want to fly. I want to fly helicopters.’

  ‘There are the same opportunities outside the army. You are deliberately going to waste a good degree.’

  ‘Rubbish, Dad, it’s because I’ve got a good degree that the chances of promotion are higher. Everything is computerized and highly technical now. It’s not Dad’s Army.’

  ‘I can’t see why you have to join up. If you don’t want to farm you could just as easily be a civilian pilot.’

  ‘I’m joining up because I like the whole ethos: the challenge, the fitness, the competition, the camaraderie, the whole life, Dad. Moving on, new postings; it’s what I want to do with my life. I’m sorry.’

  Charlie had stared at him, then said bitterly, ‘Can you so easily turn your back on all this? The Ellises have farmed here for generations.’

  Josh had stared back, unflinching. ‘I know. And each year it gets harder to make a living. It’s not a job, Dad, it’s a way of life. It’s like a yoke round your neck. I love this farm, it’s my home, but I don’t want it. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I knew you would take it badly.’

  Josh had turned away, upset at Charlie’s white face.

  ‘How the hell do you expect me to take it?’ Charlie had bellowed. It felt like a precious gift had been thrown back in his face, somehow devaluing it. It was like being slapped by the most important person in your life. Charlie was reeling. He had gone off for the whole day, in turns furious with Josh and then deeply hurt.

  Farming was all he knew and had ever wanted and he could not understand how Josh could give up this inheritance. He had thought the day Josh told him, and he thought it now, If only I had two sons, or even a daughter.

  His deeply buried secret resentment surfaced. He blamed Gabby. It wasn’t much to ask, after all he had … Here he stopped, guiltily admitting unfairness, but if someone could get pregnant by mistake, surely they could get pregnant one more time. Surely one more pregnancy wasn’t too much to ask?

  Secretly he also blamed Gabby for Josh’s choice of career. Nell and Gabby had mollycoddled him, encouraged him to travel, to enjoy things outside the farm; put ideas into his head.

  Nell had said to Charlie, ‘It’s not personal, Charlie. Josh is not sticking two fingers up at our way of life, just choosing another life.’

  ‘How can I take it, but personally? How the hell do you expect me to feel?’

  ‘I mean that Josh choosing the army isn’t a slight. It’s not done to hurt you, although it must have done and that has made him thoroughly miserable. It was hard for him to come and tell you, Charlie, probably the hardest thing he has ever had to do.’

  Charlie was not listening. He went to the pub that night and drank morosely until closing time, whereupon the publican drove him home.

  The field still carried the strong scent of daffodils. He used to walk here with Ted as a small boy, and the smell could take him straight back to total recall of his father’s face and his old tweed jacket and cords, pipe in his mouth, flat cap on his head.

  He made his way slowly to his Land Rover parked on the far side of the field. How could Gabby bear to be in London in summer? Odd she did not seem to mind the days spent inside working in a city. At home she could never bear to be inside for long, and the doors and windows would stay open from dawn to dusk.

  He had never imagined she would have a real career, just dabble at her picture restoring. She was such a hermit and had from the day he married her hated being away from the farm for long. Then, suddenly, when Josh left she seemed to grow more confident of her skills or perhaps it was the figurehead that had been the start of the change.

  Gabby had been going up and down to London three days a week now for three months, and she did not seem to be getting tired of it. With her work in Cornwall she was, for the first time, making real money. Charlie admitted this helped to compensate for the fact he had to make his own breakfast when she was away; fend for himself; do all those irritating little jobs he’d never had to do before; or Nell had done for him and seemed to think he could manage for himself now.

  He opened the back of the Land Rover and the dogs leapt in. There had been a little write-up in the local papers about the figurehead.

  ‘You must be proud of Gabby. Isn’t she doing well?’ people said to him in the village.

  ‘Got to pull your own weight now, boy,’ the old boys joked in the pub. Gabby had been the only wife who took his lunch to the fields in the old days when they were first married. Lunch and tea at harvest. He smiled. Gabby had always been good like that.

  These days she came back from London all excited and hyperactive. She rushed around trying to make up for her absences, cooked meals to save Nell the trouble and put them in the freezer. Ran about cleaning the house as if she could not stop still; and she was definitely losing weight. She and Nell talked endlessly about paintings. It seemed to Charlie that restoring was becoming a bit of an obsession.

  People also said, ‘You must miss her?’ He did, but he missed the slow-moving, hesitant, dreamlike Gabby; that was the person he missed. He was used to that person. He was not sure about the new confident Gabby, it made him uneasy.

  For the first time ever Gabby was not going to be home for the weekend. It was Elan’s preview on Friday evening and she was staying up in London to support him.

  He stopped in the lane and looked at his calves. They were coming on beautifully. Charlie began to whistle contentedly. Darts match tonight and he was playing cricket on Sunday. It had been a good summer so far; he was even paying off the bank. Not a bad life. Not bad at all. He wouldn’t change it. One day when Josh was his age he would regret his decision. Charlie had no doubt of that.

  Chapter 26

  Josh, coming down the stairs of the Hershon Gallery where Elan was exhibiting, caught sight of the back of a woman who seemed fami
liar to him. She was half turned away from him as she stood inspecting one of Elan’s paintings. She was wearing a stunning, very expensive-looking little black number and strappy little shoes. Her dark hair was shiny and cut to just under her chin. David, beside him, was staring at her, too. Her arms were tanned and something about her was exotic, relaxed, sexy.

  At that moment she turned smiling to the tall, dark man beside her, and Josh saw with a sick shock that it was Gabby. Rooted, he could not tear his eyes away from her. He felt a strange falling away, a glimpse of a person he did not know, a snapshot of someone other than his mother. He wanted to turn and run out of the gallery, but he could not move.

  ‘Do you know her?’ David asked, seeing Josh’s expression.

  ‘Yes, I know her,’ Josh said under his breath.

  ‘Well, come on, introduce me. Wow! I want to be her toy boy.’

  Josh was so angry he wanted to slam his fist into David’s jaw. He was going to leave now, quickly, before Gabby saw him; but at that moment his mother turned his way. A strange thought flashed through Josh’s mind as Gabby saw him. For one second, he wondered, Is it really her? Is it her double? Gabby had had her hair cut and she never wore clothes like that. Is her face going to fall with shock at the sight of me?

  Gabby gave a start, her eyes widened in shocked surprise, then she gave a small instinctive squeak of pleasure and rushed towards him holding her arms out. She was hugging him, smiling at David, turning to introduce the man she was with.

  ‘Josh, this is Mark Hannah. He brought the figurehead I’ve been working on back from Canada. Do you remember? I told you about it.’

  Josh breathed out suddenly. God, I’m stupid.

  ‘This is my son, Josh,’ Gabby said proudly. ‘Darling, what are you doing here? I thought you couldn’t come tonight?’

  Josh grinned and relaxed. ‘You’ve had your hair cut! I didn’t recognize you!’ It was all right. It was bloody all right. For a second he had thought … but it was only Gabby in work mode. How extraordinary to see it for the first time. As if she was someone quite else.

  ‘This is David Matthews,’ he said. ‘We’re on the same course. I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it, but our last-minute rehearsal was changed to Sunday, so change of plan.’

  Gabby shook David’s hand. ‘We’ve been here quite a while, we were just leaving. Elan’s done some wonderful work.’

  ‘Is he here? I was hoping to catch him. I bet he’s done a bunk as usual?’

  ‘I think he might have. He didn’t think you were coming. I tried to persuade him to have supper with us but he was sloping away somewhere.’

  ‘Trolloping off, was he?’ Josh grinned, turned to David. ‘Elan hates his own previews. I’ll just go and see if I can find him, he might have got waylaid.’

  ‘We were just off to eat round the corner, in that little Italian place. Can you join us when you’re done here?’ the man called Mark asked. He had an American accent.

  ‘I can’t, I’m afraid,’ David said. ‘I’m meeting my sister and some friends at Marble Arch – it’s her birthday – but you stay, Josh, we’ll meet up later.’

  Josh said quickly, ‘No, let’s stick to our plans. Why don’t we have a quick drink with you, Gabby, when we’ve finished here?’

  Suddenly and unaccountably Josh did not want to eat with his mother and a stranger, and the tension was there in the back of his neck again.

  ‘Fine,’ Gabby smiled at them. ‘See you both later. Elan’s done terribly well; lots of red dots already.’

  Later, much later, Josh, David, David’s sister and a group of her friends, erupted from a club and drunkenly got a taxi to David’s sister’s flat to crash. When Josh woke sober and with a dry mouth early the next morning, he lay thinking about that strange meeting with Gabby and the Canadian.

  The man had been charming, neither too friendly nor too interested. He was much older than Gabby, older than Charlie, too. Josh had watched him with Gabby. He had no reason to think they were anything but two people who worked together. But something niggled at him. Why wasn’t Gabby going home tomorrow? It was the weekend. Why, apropos of absolutely nothing, did the man, Mark, carefully introduce the topic of his family as if he was afraid of what Josh might be thinking? And, if he had thought Josh might be suspicious, did it make it true?

  Josh felt a strange, sharp pain at the memory of his mother looking young and … really great. So great that David had gone on about it.

  Your mother was your mother and she had no right to look … attractive to people of your own age.

  He was used to having a young mother. He had been proud of it at school, but his eyes had been sharply opened by the fact that Gabby had a life he knew nothing about away from the farm, away from Nell and Charlie; away from him. An entirely separate life.

  He knew it was incredibly childish, when he’d left home, had his own life. What did he want? Would he like Gabby to be patiently waiting in familiar surroundings, doing what she had always done, keeping to a routine he knew like the back of his hand? The gentle rhythm of his childhood remaining the same each time he went back home, to be sure somehow that Gabby’s life revolved around his?

  The answer was yes, yes he did, and Josh was appalled at himself.

  Chapter 27

  There were times when Isabella felt like a spoilt child with too many toys. She had more clothes than places to go. She had two horses. She had a gardener who had been told to humour her every whim, which did not endear her to him, for she knew nothing about flowers although she was trying to learn.

  Some days she thought she would turn into her own grandmama before she reached twenty years. Time passed slowly like a meandering, infinite summer. Isabella felt suspended, like a dragonfly hovering in one place over the river. There was nothing to complain of save that her life seemed to have little purpose.

  Botallick House, Richard’s family home, lay above the mouth of a small creek near Falmouth. The windows at the front of the house faced down to the small quay and natural harbour, where sailing boats and small trading schooners were moored. When Isabella was in the garden she could hear the boats swinging about on their anchor chains, moving and turning on the tide, their rigging clinking and whistling in the wind. It was a comfortable, lazy sound, somehow reassuring for she found sailing folk to be jolly and friendly.

  Richard kept his own small sailing boat down there and occasionally Isabella would go out with him if the weather was calm. But she was not a natural sailor; she mistrusted the sea having grown up on the north coast and seen what a calm sea could so quickly turn into.

  Her husband, however, was in his element. He respected the sea but appeared to have no fear of the sudden unexpected savageness of tide and wind despite his adventures as a naval captain, which he was fond of recounting to Isabella at length, usually at meal-times.

  Unlike her father, who rarely conversed at any length with her mama, Richard would talk animatedly of his plans to Isabella.

  ‘My love,’ he would burst into the room, disturbing her daydreams, her book-reading or gardening. ‘My love, what did you think of Sir Penrose? I saw that you talked to him at length last night. Women are so good at defining character. Is he trustworthy? Does he have a steady heart, do you think, for the business of investing in trading vessels? Is he a fair and honest man?’

  Isabella would consider slowly and seriously for she knew that her husband had already made up his mind and hoped only that she would verify his own opinion. She also suspected that if she had talked too long with any one gentleman at dinner, Richard needed to know what she thought of him. She had learnt to be measured in any approbation and careful over any reservations she might have. Generally, though, she gave her honest opinion, especially if she thought her generous husband was being exploited or that his assessment of character was awry.

  Isabella did not believe there was any schooner or brigantine that Richard did not know and revere. He was interested in all manner of shipping and in bu
siness he was very astute, this she had learnt before her marriage from her father. Daniel Vyvyan had been so impressed by Richard’s success with trading schooners that he had taken up a partnership in one.

  Her husband owned four two-masted schooners of his own which traded around the British Isles, South Wales, the Scottish coast and Ireland. He traded in all manner of diverse goods: coal, tea, slate, furniture, farm implements, drink and foodstuffs.

  Richard was Devonshire-born, but as well as inheriting Botallick House he still owned a small family summer house in St Piran where many of his ships were built or refitted. His larger vessels, the three-masted schooners, were jointly owned by three or four families who held shares in the ships. Indeed, Richard had taken out shares in Isabella’s name and taken the time to explain exactly what this meant.

  This year he was having a ship built in Prince Edward Island in Canada, for the wood and labour were cheaper. He planned to take emigrants out to the colonies in this new schooner and to bring lumber and exports back in the empty vessels.

  The trading ships disgorged such a strange assortment of cargo upon the beaches and harbours. Lisette and Isabella set off sometimes to Falmouth to watch the vessels unload. It was a veritable treasure-trove, a meeting place of diverse utilities and personal items. Candles, salt, bags of nails, soap, a piano, a toy horse, a puncheon of rum.

  Smuggling was rife everywhere, but Isabella could not blame these men, for the mines had been closing for years as the tin had dried up. She had heard that the farmers were resorting to violence at the wilful export of foodstuffs needed here at home after poor harvests. Drink, of course, was the most smuggled item. The coastguard had recently found ninety kegs of rum as well as tobacco and wine in a cave just below Botallick House.

  All these little things diverted Isabella’s days. They also helped her to view an outside world she had never been a part of, only viewed from a distance, only glimpsed from a vantage point of a large house.