Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  The cold sea against her ankles was intoxicating and she ran and ran, wishing for the first time she was just a girl from the village who could do this every day if she felt like it. She skirted out of the sea but kept running on the wet sand along the edge of the waves.

  Tom had come out of the water and picked up the basket and their shoes, and was walking in the shallows towards her. Isabella could see when she turned that he was laughing at her. She waited for him to catch up and they stood smiling at each other, then he said in that particular voice that made her stomach turn over, for it seemed to be saying something quite different, ‘I must get you home, Lady Isabella.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Indeed, indeed!’

  Isabella giggled. They moved onto the dry sand and Tom handed her the basket with her shoes and stockings. He took his shirt off and bent to dry her feet. He carefully brushed away the wet, clinging grains of sand from her toes, and when he had dried both feet as well as he could, he placed them on his rough blue shirt and stared at them a moment. He could still see the faint marks of her ankle boots on her skin.

  He touches me. He touches my feet. His fingers brush the glistening, scratching grains of sand. Those fingers which carve my likeness now touch my skin.

  Tom got up abruptly and walked towards the far rocks where he turned his back to put his own boots on. Isabella stood on his shirt and quickly pulled her stockings back on, then sat on the sand to do up her boots.

  When she was done she lifted Tom’s shirt and shook it free of sand, but there on the front was the clear imprint of her feet. She lifted the shirt to her face and breathed it in, breathed in the smell of Tom.

  Tom turned and saw Isabella’s face bent into his shirt. Desire shot through him like buckshot. He turned quickly away to the sea before she looked up. The water was bright with sparks, the sun was sinking lower at the end of the day, and Tom fought with himself, confronted the enormity of his feelings. No fantasy, this, no flight of his imagination. This thing between them was a factor he could no longer control.

  Isabella reached him and held out his shirt.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to his brown naked back.

  Tom turned to take the shirt. Isabella stared at the fair hairs running over his chest. Everything about this man was beautiful. before she could stop herself she had reached out and touched the warmth of his skin, startling herself as much as him. They stared at one another, fascinated and afraid. Tom battled with himself, breathing hard. Isabella was willing him; touch me, touch me. Oh God, touch me.

  Tom broke eye contact, quickly took his shirt and pulled it over his head, bent to take the basket, and they walked in complete silence across the sand and up the path to regain the fields. Tom helped her over the stiles without meeting her eyes. He could find no words to say that would sound right, although he rehearsed them in his head. He felt her embarrassment and wanted to break the silence, but he could not trust himself to say what he should.

  They came out on the road, just below the small house.

  ‘Will Lisette be home?’ he asked finally before he left her at the gate.

  ‘I do not think so.’ Isabella took the basket. ‘Thank you for walking me home. I hope that you will not have missed your meal.’

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow? It will not be long now before I finish. I will try not to keep you too long.’

  Isabella nodded. ‘I will be there if you need me. Goodnight, Tom.’

  Her voice was small and tight and miserable. She looked as wretched as he felt.

  ‘Goodnight, Isabella,’ he said.

  Isabella looked at him then, caught something in his voice, then she turned and went inside the house and shut the door.

  That night I toss and turn. Sleep evades me. I am angry with myself. I burn and the bedcover suffocates me. I kick it off. Isabella’s face keeps passing before my eyes. She had gazed at me like a small flower opening. She reached out and touched me and I turned away. I wounded her for I did not have the wit to play light of it, to pass it off as play, to talk of other things, to distract her as I should have done.

  Isabella is without guile. Her feelings play across her face openly. She is like a child who has been too long restricted by adults who would like to keep her safe in the nursery, and I feel a sudden, unjustified anger towards Sir Richard.

  I see her face pressed into the blue of my shirt. Her hair is dark against it. I see her small childlike hands and those narrow, confined little feet trapped in boots …

  I throw the cover off, leap out of bed and climb down the ladder and out into the still night. Not a breath, only the infinite distant roar of the ocean. I begin to walk and find myself climbing the hill towards the house where Isabella will be lying asleep.

  I know Lisette will not be there tonight, my mother told me Morwenna Penrose is dying. Isabella is in the care of the cook and one housemaid.

  The house is in darkness and I have no idea why I have come or what I will do. Neither do I know which room Isabella sleeps in. Isabella has told me she can hear and see the sea from her window. So she must sleep at the front of the house. I stand looking up at the windows. The middle window must be a landing so it must be one of the rooms to the right or left of the front door.

  The left room has light cotton curtains and I decide this must be where Isabella sleeps, and I stand in the dark looking upwards.

  Isabella could not sleep. How could she, a married woman, have touched him, again?

  I did not mean to, she kept whispering over and over, it just happened. I reached out like a sleepwalker and now I have to endure the torment of having embarrassed Tom and myself. Oh, if only I could have the afternoon back and begin again …

  Isabella threw herself on her back in agony as she remembered. She had thought … What had she thought? That he … She thought back to how he had looked at her in the water … It was unmistakable, that look.

  Admiring you does not mean he will … will … What had she wanted him to do? She closed her eyes … She did not know. She was not thinking, just feeling …

  She thumped the pillow. She would never sleep now, and she would look pale and drawn tomorrow and would wake ugly and he would not be able to carve her likeness … She jumped out of bed and walked round the little room. Thank God Lisette was not there … How selfish I am, I have not thought about poor Lisette and her mother once.

  Isabella went to the window. There was a half-moon and clouds were racing past it. Then, under the tree by the gate, she made out a figure. She drew back a little, her heart thumping, gazing downwards, and the figure moved forward towards the window and stood on the lawn looking up. It was Tom Welland.

  Startled, she opened her window and whispered down,

  ‘What are you doing here? Is it Lisette? Is she all right?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘She is still with Morwenna. I have something I must say to you, Isabella. Will you come down for a moment?’

  Isabella stood gazing down at him, then shut the window and pulled a wrap round her and tiptoed down the stairs. At the bottom she put on a pair of slippers and opened the front door, undid the bolt slowly, holding her breath. Then she turned the heavy key and she was standing outside, facing Tom.

  He smiled. She was all in white like a snowflake.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘Isabella … this afternoon … I am sorry … Please look at me.’

  Isabella reluctantly met his eyes.

  ‘Isabella,’ he whispered. ‘You did not mistake my feelings. They have been there ever since I met you again.’

  They stood in the dark, facing each other in silence, and the night rustled around them moving inexorably towards daylight. Then they both moved together and Tom was pulling her to him, bending his mouth to hers, holding her face to his, kissing her again and again, and Isabella leant against him feeling his body move against hers; young, firm, exciting and unknown.

  Then he drew back, pressed her head into
his shoulder for a moment.

  ‘Isabella,’ he whispered. ‘Go and sleep now. I will see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  She was gone through the door. He heard the bolt and the key. Isabella raced upstairs to the window and he held a hand up to her and melted into darkness.

  The sea sounded louder in the dark, but Isabella could hear her heart thumping in the silent room. After a while the birds started, slowly at first, then the whole world was full of the sound. Something stirred in Isabella. She felt the sudden smallness of herself in the world. It was a chilling, isolating sensation and, shivering, she moved down under the bedcovers.

  She could not know that she and Tom had taken a step that was irrevocable. That one day she would pay a terrible price. She could not know of the hurt she would cause, or the lives she and Tom would damage, but she had a second’s fleeting intimation in the dawn of a new day.

  Chapter 45

  Nell was thinking of going on a spring cruise to celebrate finishing the monster picture. She had taken so long its owners seemed to have forgotten about it. She missed Elan and knew there was a chance he might not come back, or at least not live there permanently.

  She was cleaning his cottage to combat the January blues. She did not want him to come back to the cottage just as he had left it, with all the paraphernalia of a dying man still in the house. It had rained solidly for days and she had watched Gabby itching to get back to London to work. Nell didn’t blame her. She had never grown sanguine about Cornish winters either.

  Lucinda seemed to be finding Gabby plenty of work with the gallery and with private collectors. She had stopped taking on local work, apart from small paintings for loyal clients. It was a shame, Nell thought, that Gabby couldn’t strike a balance, somehow. She knew the money Gabby earned in London had been a godsend for both Gabby and Charlie, but she looked thin, tired and permanently preoccupied.

  Nell looked down at the pile of things Patrick had needed that must go back to social services. She thought of Gabby’s exhausted outburst before Christmas. It had been startling and disturbing.

  Gabby was changing, Nell realized. She was suddenly seeing what Nell had tried to warn her about from the start of her marriage. Charlie’s casual selfishness. It had taken far longer for Gabby to build up a healthy resentment to her marriage than it had taken Nell with Ted.

  She threw open the kitchen window, which stuck. She saw the ledge was rotting and took in the air of neglect, the smell of damp that granite cottages so quickly assumed when unlived in.

  Come home, Elan, I miss you.

  Oh, how she missed his sometimes bitchy humour and the knowledge he was here in his cottage painting, always glad to see her. They went back such a long way and there was a shorthand old friends used which could never be replicated. A moving through life together, watching a familiar face grow older and yet seem exactly the same as ever.

  Life moved on. Patrick, the dedicated and tireless GP, was dead. Elan was floating, looking for a place to land, and that might mean anywhere and everywhere. Gabby, the biddable and pliant housewife, had moved on, too; Nell was unsure where she was roosting or how this commuting back and forth was going to work out in the long-term.

  She was amazed that Gabby could settle happily in one room in London, especially in spring and summer. Gabby had always come alive when the weather changed. She lived outside, revelled in the sun and colour of the sea, had never ceased to be enchanted.

  Nell knew this Lucinda existed because she had spoken to her on the phone. Gabby insisted her room was lovely and the two of them had obviously become friends. It was surprising, for she would not have said Gabby was ambitious, but she obviously was.

  The figurehead seemed to have given her confidence and kudos. In all the years she had been on the farm Nell had never known Gabby make a close friend of her own age. Of course, young mothers came in for tea with their children when Josh was small, but Gabby never had a mate, never telephoned or gossiped.

  When Nell had pressed the young and self-contained Gabby, she had said, ‘Nell, I have you and Josh, the farm and Charlie. I don’t need anything or anyone else.’

  Nell, standing in Elan’s tiny sitting room, realized with horror she was yearning for the days when Gabby needed her; when the work of the farm threw them together, day in and day out.

  Dear God, I’m lonely, Nell thought. Which means I haven’t moved on and I damn well should have.

  Gabby drove over to St Piran to look at Lady Isabella. Peter had rung and told her that donations to the museum had been surprisingly good. They had started a ‘Friends of St Piran Museum Fund’ and many locals had contributed. It had been a good summer opening. Lady Isabella could draw in the crowds.

  Gabby walked over to the vicarage for the key. John was taking an adult confirmation class and mouthed, ‘Come back after you’ve checked Isabella, we’ll open a bottle.’

  Gabby grinned at his expression; it was obviously going to be a long afternoon.

  Isabella stood in her corner, as majestic and beguiling as ever. She had not deteriorated any further in the even temperature of the museum. Gabby checked her base where the rot had begun to set in and which she had treated. It was stable and had not spread, but would definitely have to be treated again at some point.

  Isabella’s right hand possibly once held a flower and both hands must have been beautifully carved.

  ‘Your arm, I think, is a priority, Isabella, and an insult to your original carver. I will come and fix that soon, I promise.’

  She stood looking at the beautiful face in the faded light of the museum. Isabella gazed steadily back. The more Gabby stared at her face, the more warmth and feeling seemed to enter the wood and give Isabella’s face fleeting expression, like the shadows from the branches of a tree playing across a window.

  Gabby shivered but could not move away. The wooden eyes were dark, dark brown, and held her, mesmerizing her with their intent. It was as if Isabella was trying to tell Gabby something. The hairs moved on Gabby’s arms. The figurehead seemed suddenly large in this confined space and the winter light was dying. Gabby felt too spooked to move away, then, out of nowhere, she had a clear image of a grave; overgrown, hidden and covered in lichen. Then it was gone and Isabella was just a figurehead once more, standing in a dusty little corner of a museum, quite still and inanimate.

  Gabby shivered again and went out of the door, locked it, and then found herself walking not down to the gate but through the narrow paths of the old, overgrown graveyard. The rain had stopped and the earth smelt damp and lifeless, but in spring it was a beautiful place full of colour and life and wildflowers.

  She was drawn to a far corner of the graveyard where the headstones were ancient and ornate. Two faced the sea. They were hidden with dead grass and brambles. Gabby bent and pulled at the nearest until she could read the name inscribed on it. The words on the grave were worn and disappearing:

  Morley Penro e 1802–1840

  A mariner n th arm of t sea he loved.

  Bu band of Mo men a Penrose

  Fat er of Lisette

  Then, added at a later date:

  M rwe na Penrose 1810–1866

  Beloned Mot er of Lisette

  The names meant nothing to Gabrielle. She pulled the dead winter grass from the second grave. The brambles were huge and tore her gloves as she moved them up and behind the grave to read the inscription. She crouched in the wet grass peering down at the grave. She could feel her heart racing with excitement but she did not know why.

  Lisette Penrose 1827–1890

  Saithful servant and friend

  To Thomas from 1867–1890

  And to Isabella, his mother, before him

  Isabella … his mother! No surname for Thomas or Isabella.

  Gabby straightened up. She was trembling with cold and something she was struggling to remember. She felt strange and light-headed.

  She made her way slowly to the vicarage. John Bradbury open
ed the door and exclaimed over her ashen face, wet, muddy jeans and scratched hands. As he took her waterproof jacket, Gabby saw her face in his old spotted mirror in the hall. Her face was wild. For a second she thought she saw a reflection of another dark young woman behind her, then it was gone and she was left staring at herself and at the vicar’s startled expression behind her.

  She turned to John Bradbury. ‘I’ve found Isabella’s name on a grave.’

  Chapter 46

  It was late April and Elan was crossing Paddington Station to pick up the ‘Cornish Riviera’ train to Penzance, when he spotted a small familiar figure in the flood of people flowing off the incoming train. She was wearing jeans with a snazzy little suede jacket he had not seen before. A pale mauve scarf was knotted fashionably at her neck and she looked for all the world like a seasoned city girl. She was scanning the barrier ahead and Elan was just about to wave and call out, ‘Cooee, darling – what a surprise!’ when he saw her face light up. She was laughing with pleasure, throwing back her head in sudden joy.

  Elan turned and looked to his right through the crowds. A tall figure stood watching Gabby hurrying towards him. It was the Canadian Elan had briefly met at his exhibition before he had made his escape.

  As Gabby reached him, Mark Hannah held out his arms and Gabby walked straight into them, and they stood there to one side of the barrier just holding each other. What a risk they are taking standing there for all to see near the platform for trains to Cornwall. What a risk.

  Elan watched with a sinking heart. Still they stood there holding each other and rocking slowly amid the crowds, and Elan saw it was a homecoming, a coming to rest, a serious thing. Not an affair, a fling, a light-hearted tryst.