Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  Chapter 34

  At last Isabella was in bed and alone. She asked Lisette to leave the curtains open so she could see the sky. She asked her to please make sure she was not disturbed. Lisette brought her herb tea on a tray. It tasted unpleasant, but it always eased her head.

  It seemed so long ago since this morning when she woke that she felt as if she was in another day.

  ‘You are hot, Miss Isabella, you should not have been out riding so long in the rain. I hope you are not coming down with a fever.’

  Lisette fussed and tucked and fiddled and folded until Isabella thought she would scream. At last she said goodnight and left the room. Isabella knew that she would go straight downstairs to Sir Richard and complain that he had kept her out too long, that she was overtired and now must be left to sleep. Isabella smiled. Richard was a little afraid of her Lisette.

  She watched the clouds scud across a navy sky studded with stars, and little by little she let her mind go over the moment she turned and saw Tom Welland again. When she had suddenly recognized who it was her heart beat so loudly she thought Richard must hear it. She remembered that earlier time in the boatyard with the smell of sawdust and a boy with his shirt off, bent to his work.

  Mama had been watching her and she had ridden ahead of her out of the boatyard so that she might not read her face. She needed to keep to herself, to hide this strange excitement. Then, suddenly, like a punishment, Mama was snatched from her. Isabella could never look upon her beautiful face or talk to her again. She was gone in the moment it took her to reach the sea.

  On the quay, standing next to her husband, the same feeling flooded through Isabella with such force as she looked at Tom Welland once more that she thought her knees would give way, that she would fall onto the wooden boards of the quay in front of all those people.

  Isabella had felt sick to her heart, angry with herself, that until the day she died, Tom Welland would be inextricably linked to the memory of Mama’s death and her neglect of her. Yet, clear to her, clearer even than the memory of her voice, was the treacherous way she had reacted at the sight of him. Faint, like a schoolgirl. Breathless when he looked upon her.

  Isabella sits in the shade of an apple tree, watching me. Lisette has sent the gardener’s boy out with a garden chair and a rug although the day is warm. Isabella looks stiff and self-conscious and cannot relax. There is tightness in her shoulders and mouth and still I have not picked up my pencil to sketch her.

  Finally, in exasperation, I ask, ‘Are you comfortable, Miss … Lady Isabella?’

  ‘Quite comfortable, thank you,’ she says coolly, though it is obvious that she is not.

  I pick up my drawing pad and do a quick little drawing which I show to her.

  ‘Who on earth is that?’ Isabella cries crossly.

  ‘Why, it is yourself, your ladyship.’

  She looks up sharply. ‘Please do not call me that! That drawing looks like a cross old spinster lady.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I peer at it. ‘So it does. I only draw what I see. So what shall we do about this? Shall Sir Richard have the only cross figurehead in the world? It may, of course, start a fashion. Captains of the fleet may compete to have their wives carved upon the prows of their ships in order to see their scowling little faces plunged through the waves …’

  Isabella giggles. ‘I think it is the chair. I would rather sit upon the ground. I cannot relax in the chair.’

  I take the rug and place it under the tree, and Isabella sits leaning against the apple tree. I sigh; at last a face I can draw.

  ‘Will you close your eyes for a moment and talk to me of something that gives you pleasure?’

  Isabella closes her eyes. She is silent for a while then she says softly, ‘I like the early morning and the sound of the sea which breaks into my sleep. It is wonderfully soothing, the rush and slap of the waves … I like the moment before I open my eyes when there are infinite possibilities before me … I like my new rose garden and the scent of the roses that floats over to me as I lie reading …’

  The voice stops and I see she is watching my fingers moving across the page as I sketch her likeness. Her eyes are dark and fathomless and my fingers holding the pencil grow slippery under her gaze. Even with her eyes closed, those intense eyes seem to scorch my skin. Hot, I shake my head to free my hair from my eyes, breathe slow to steady my hand upon the page.

  There are bees in the apple blossom above where Isabella sits and the orchard is full of their gentle noise. My fingers move fast and true over the page and I catch that faint, secret smile upon her lips. Now her features are relaxed I can capture the beauty of her cheekbones. Her hands in her lap are upturned as in sleep. Small, white hands.

  I ask her to open her eyes and when she does they are somewhere far away. Although she does not know it, those eyes which look so directly at me sear me with their sense of innocence and loss.

  Over the white page my fingers fly as if possessed, for I must capture these first moments of her face unguarded; capture this heavy-lidded, sleepy expression that makes my hand tremble. I must carve a face from wood that will last long, long after we both are dead.

  Chapter 35

  For the first time on the train back to Cornwall Gabby felt a sense of dread. The sky was a cold, closed battleship-grey. A November sky. The train half-emptied at Reading and a sort of titanic hush descended on the remaining passengers in the carriage, all the way back to Penzance.

  Gabby drank relentless cups of bitter coffee that made her feel squeamish, and the heavy emptiness in her stomach refused to budge. She would have two, maybe three months without Mark, who had flown home to see his family ahead of Christmas. His foster mother was still alive and being cared for by his half-sister. He had friends and colleagues he wanted to catch up with. He had a house that needed attention. He had a wife and five daughters.

  There lay the rub. There lay the chill of the human spirit. Gabby, watching the bare wintry trees and small Lowry figures muffled up and bent into the wind on a sea wall landscaped by a vicious cold sea, hurt. Was stilled and dumb with misery. She sat huddled into her seat, bent towards the window, bent away from contact with other passengers.

  She had travelled up and down on this train through a spring and a summer. Up and down, using the journey to settle back into the life waiting at the end of it. On that first trip to London the hawthorn blossom had been out, great mouthfuls of it flaming along the track. Gabby had watched people cycling along canal paths, running with dogs across fields, all getting in the mood for a summer that was hovering, just around the corner.

  That first glimpse of London, breath held for she was meeting Mark again, was stamped indelibly on her memory. Magnolia buds like upheld mouths were beginning to open in small town gardens. Cherry trees were already out on the pavements. Delicatessens and coffee houses had wiped down chairs and tables placed outside in the spring sunshine. People had cautiously left their coats at home and sat at the tables pretending they were in Paris.

  Great trays of plants and flowers had flowed across the pavements next to antique and newspaper shops, bicycle and betting shops. The sun, Gabby thought, changes everything. She longed to travel back in time, to have that spring and summer all over again.

  She had trailed down the wide roads observing the routine and ordinary lives lived in a city, watching mothers wheeling children and walking dogs to the shops, and she had thought suddenly, as she gazed into the windows of houses where all these millions of lives were being lived out, Why, I could live here. I could melt into another person. I could metamorphose into someone who has a town life. As long as I could see from my window a green tree, have great pots of colour in a yard; as long as I could walk in a park. How is this? I never believed I could live anywhere but by the sea.

  I could have been one of these women who wheeled her child along these pavements. I could have been a city girl who jumped off and on tubes without blinking an eye. I would have taken my child to galleries and museums.
To the V&A. To the Tate and to the river to watch the boats.

  As the train travelled along the coast a watery sun appeared, glazed behind hazy cloud. The moon was already out over the sea. The tide was high and Gabby felt she could almost stretch out to reach the water from her carriage. It was as if the train was travelling through it.

  As evening came into the near-empty train, Vs of birds flew south. Seagulls followed a fishing boat like a swarm of butterflies.

  At Teignmouth the sky above the sea wall as the sun set looked like some tinged and misty Jerusalem. Love for this familiar landscape welled up in Gabby like a small wave. I am schizophrenic, split into two, she thought, as puffs of smoke rose from houses and a moorhen scooted across the calm surface of the water. Gabby felt choked with the certainty of belonging, but to whom? To what?

  It was as if the merging of day and night mirrored her confusion and identity. The silent transference from golden dusk to darkness, of lights snapping on in houses. Of the last rays of the sun staining the sky like a mirage then fading in the blink of an eye behind a fall of land, only to appear again ahead of the train. It was like following a flame into darkness.

  Then the light was truly gone and the day had died. The train travelled over the Tamar in blackness with street-lights and the lights of ships below them. Over the bridge it slid into Cornwall. Home at the end of the world.

  As the long-empty train pulled in to Bodmin, Gabby was in the end carriage beyond the platform and lights, beyond the opening and banging of train doors. She was in a little pool of darkness, in the middle of nowhere. This was just a long journey home and yet Gabby felt suspended. She had left herself behind somewhere and was travelling forward in limbo. Fear rose. If she had lost herself, who was she now? What might she become?

  As the train got closer and closer to Penzance she felt as if all her nerve-endings were on the surface of her skin. Throughout the whole journey she had felt acutely aware of insignificant things. Small observations barely noteworthy were heightened and seemed important; like a dream sequence singled out to seem profound. Yet, as in a dream, there was this abiding sense of loss that made the familiar strange, a known landscape foreign. There had been a surreal quality to this train journey that deeply disturbed her with its uncertainty and sense of threat.

  Gabby stared at the perfect half-moon as they drew into Penzance. Thought of the relentless tug of time and tide, of the ephemeral fleetingness of human lives. She thought of that same moon shining down on Mark’s house, a house which contained his wife and daughters. Loneliness, like a shocking icy wave, swamped her.

  Nell was waiting on the platform. She had Shadow on a lead. The dog barked with joy as she spied Gabby and strained at the lead and Nell let her go. She raced towards Gabby with little yelps of pleasure.

  Gabby dropped her bags and bent to her thick fur, buried her head into the dog’s neck, hugged her fiercely, fought the relentless urge to burst into tears and howl on the deserted windy platform.

  By the time Nell reached her, she was able, just, to leap up, willing herself jolly.

  ‘Hi Nell!’ she said, hugging her.

  ‘Hello lovie …’

  She held Gabby away and examined her face. ‘Gabby, how thin you are. It’s a damn good thing you have a long break for Christmas. You are getting to look like a pale city girl.’

  As Gabby climbed into Nell’s truck she vowed to leave the city girl behind her, to practise happiness. Shadow, in the back, draped her long pointed nose and head over Gabby’s shoulder like a fox fur, breathing doggy breath down Gabby’s neck.

  Gabby sighed, closed her eyes, leant back into the seat and caught the whiff of Nell’s familiar scent. She would think no further than this moment. This small intimate homecoming in the darkness with Nell and her dog.

  Chapter 36

  Mark stood in a glade surrounded by Norwegian spruce, holding the small mittened hands of two of his grandchildren. Elle and Naimah were marching indecisively through rows of firs looking for the one perfect Christmas tree among thousands. Apparently their Christmas depended on the exact height and width, the exact space and shape and form of branches, of a tree he would have to strap to the roof of his truck.

  Daisy and Violette, holding his hands, were cold. Mark was cold. He swallowed the desire to bellow down into the small green forest, Oh, for God’s sake, girls, what does it matter? Just pick a tree and let’s go home.

  Instead, he hitched a child under each arm and walked towards his daughters. Daisy took off a mitt and placed a freezing little starfish hand to his cheek and left it there as if to warm it. When she removed it the place where it had lain burnt like a small brand. Traitor.

  ‘Look,’ he called, keeping the impatience out of his voice. ‘Here is a great little tree and just the right size.’

  The two girls moved quickly back towards him. ‘Mmm, that’s one of the ones I liked too …’ Naimah said.

  ‘Yeah, it is quite a pretty tree …’ Elle agreed.

  ‘Come on you two, make up your minds and go tell the man, these kids are cold and hungry.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’ They flashed him smiles that took him back to their childhood and disappeared to find a man to dig out the shallow-rooted fir grown just for Christmas. Veronique insisted on a tree with roots every year, which was commendable, but every year another tree died in one or other of his daughters’ gardens.

  At that moment Veronique would be cooking and bottling, icing and storing, shopping and hiding so frenetically, that by Christmas day, the whole point of all this yearly palaver, she would be exhausted yet triumphant. Nothing had changed in this Christmas ritual since his first daughter, Inez, was born.

  It was as if the entire happiness of their Christmas depended on these small, everlasting rituals, not the fact that they were all together sharing a Christian festival. Something at odds with my wife’s Catholicism, Mark thought. You would think that religion would predominate on this feast day, but it does not. Going to Mass interfered with the perfection of the turkey.

  Love makes us cruel to those we have stopped loving.

  Standing holding these babies, flesh of his flesh, Mark felt as detached and dislocated as if he had suddenly awoken and realized he was someone else. This year he could conjure no interest, no joy in this regular, vast family Christmas in which he was about to be swallowed.

  He set the children on their feet and indicated to his daughters, who had now found a man with a spade, that he was going inside the café to buy these cold children a hot chocolate. Ten minutes later they joined him, took charge of their infants, found small plastic beakers with non-spill lids in which to pour their drinks.

  He caught Elle sliding a quick, knowing look at Naimah. She said, ‘Dad, would you mind if we had lunch here? I know it’s a bit grim, but we’re here and everywhere else is going to be so crowded …’

  ‘Do they serve beer?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Sure they do,’ Naimah said. ‘I’ll go get a menu.’

  They ordered scrambled eggs for the children and they ate cardboard sandwiches, but the beer hit the spot and Mark cheered fractionally and joked, ‘Are you sure your mother isn’t back home cooking a four-course lunch for us?’

  Again his daughters exchanged glances.

  ‘Come on, spit it out!’ he demanded fondly. ‘Less of those loaded glances I know so well. What are you hatching?’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’

  Mark had always been able to read his daughters and it annoyed them greatly. It was what he loved most about them, their openness, and for this he had Veronique to thank.

  They avoided his eyes for a minute or two, popping mouthfuls of egg into small open mouths like mother birds. Then it came.

  ‘Dad, while you’ve been away we’ve been wondering about what we could do … how we could …’ Naimah eyed Mark miserably.

  Elle said quickly, ‘We thought of ringing you for advice, but we all decided you deserved this sabbatical in peace, away from us all …’


  ‘You have been such a brilliant dad …’

  Mark was worried now. ‘What’s happened? For heaven’s sake …’

  ‘Dad, Dad, nothing has happened, it’s just …’

  ‘We don’t want to hurt Maman, she’s so great …’

  ‘She’s a wonderful mom …’

  ‘We love her to bits … You too, Dad …’

  Mark banged his beer glass down. ‘If you two don’t come to the point I am going to get off this chair and knock your heads together!’

  Silence. Then they dropped the bombshell.

  ‘Maman’s got to let us go, Dad. Let us have our own lives. It’s affecting our marriages …’

  ‘We’re grown up now. Sunday meals and weekday suppers are lovely every now and then, but not every Sunday, not every week …’

  ‘We’ll always be in and out of the house, it’s our home and we love you guys, but Maman has got so she expects us all to be there when she wants … I know she picks up the children and feeds them and has a meal ready for us, and it’s sweet of her …’

  ‘… But we need to get back to our husbands, our chores, our studying, our lives, Dad. The men are getting pissed off.’

  Mark had no idea they felt like this. How selfish of me. How blind and insensitive. He closed his eyes, jerked out of his shocking, convenient, complacency. He had always thought, If I ever leave, Veronique has the kids.

  ‘I had absolutely no idea you all felt like this. You should have spoken to me sooner …’

  ‘Dad, please don’t look so shocked … it’s no big deal …’

  Oh, it is. It is.

  ‘We’ve been racking our brains over how to say something without hurting Maman.’ Naimah touched his arm anxiously and Mark picked up her hand.