Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘Yes!’ Isabella says. ‘We will be strong and we will never break trust with one another or have doubts …’

  ‘Never. We know our hearts and we understand one another.’

  And the night passes and dawn comes swiftly and we rise early to meet my father. Now we must part and it must be quickly done.

  I hold Isabella one last time and whisper, ‘Do not let your husband hurt you or make you ashamed. Pretend to forget me. We are as one, Isabella, and neither distance nor words can part us. We will live together one day soon and we will die old together. Isabella, I love you with all my heart. Remember it when you are sad.’

  I take my poor father’s hand and he closes both about mine. I look into his eyes and see loss there, too. I turn quickly and walk down to the harbour. I do not look back but I know they both stand watching me. I dare not look back.

  Isabella could remember little of the long, weary journey home with Ben Welland. It felt as if a mist had come down and she was enveloped within it. Ben too looked dispirited and they had few words to say to one another.

  Ben, beside her, twisted his cap nervously between his fingers.

  ‘Ben?’ Isabella asked suddenly. ‘You are afraid that even my return may not reopen the shipyard?’

  ‘I am, my Lady. Every job is dependent on another, lass. Close one thing down and it affects a whole community. In one week the effect has not bitten home, but it will. Sir Richard means business. This is what he is showing thee.’

  Isabella turned to him. ‘I understand this, Ben. I will do my best, I promise.’

  ‘I know thou will, lass. God go with thee.’

  He got out of the trap and Trathan turned and urged the horses back up the hill to the Summer House where Richard waited for her.

  ‘I bought the carver and his family off far more easily than I might have imagined. I suppose I should not have been surprised. For a sum, Welland was only too anxious to sail quickly away from his responsibilities.’

  Isabella looked on Richard’s face and saw a quite different man to the one she had held as they wept together a week ago.

  Eventually, because she did not speak, Richard looked up at her.

  ‘What have you to say?’

  ‘Richard, I am sorry I have hurt you …’

  ‘Hurt! You are an adulterer.’

  ‘I have given you the right to say that. I have wronged you. But no one else is responsible. No one in this village has ever done you harm or been disloyal to you. Please do not make innocent people suffer for a wrong I have done you.’

  Richard stared at her. ‘I believe people in this community have aided you in your affair with the carver. Why should I reopen the shipyard? Why should I give work to people who have deceived me? I can never be sure of their loyalty or that they will not aid and abet you again.’

  ‘The village knows nothing. You know that they do not, Richard, for I understand the reason you have given for stopping all work in the yard is a disagreement with my father. Do you think anyone in the village would aid me at the risk of their livelihood? Only Ben knows the truth. What can they aid me with? You tell me that you have paid Tom off, that he was anxious to be away.’

  Richard stood up and looked at Isabella with such loathing in his eyes that she quailed.

  ‘Do not get clever with me, Isabella, or you will be sorry.’

  ‘Richard, you have every right to hate me, therefore it is better that I go from this house and out of your sight …’

  ‘What you will do is return with me to Botallick House, Isabella. Nothing more will be said of this incident. In public we remain man and wife. The child you carry is mine and a cause for celebration …’ Richard spat this out.

  Isabella was shocked. ‘You would keep me and my child, hating us both, just to save face, Richard?’

  ‘I will not be made a fool of by one of the lower orders.’

  ‘Then I am a sort of prisoner?’

  ‘If you like. You are my wife. I am your husband.’

  ‘And if I refuse to stay with you?’

  ‘St Piran will remain closed down. You will put St Piran out of work.’ Richard smiled. ‘The out come of this shoddy little episode, Isabella, was never in doubt. You should have expected this. Whatever your carver whispered to you, I assure you he could not get away from you fast enough. If you play the slut, Isabella, you get treated as one.’

  Isabella sat suddenly on the chair. She deserved these words, but she would never have believed Richard could utter them to her and in such a way. She had never even heard him raise his voice before. Is this what she had done to him? She longed to run from the room and his insidious and poisonous words.

  ‘So?’ Richard said, turning his gaze away, for the sight of Isabella frail and with child threatened to undo him. ‘Do we understand each other? I am saving your reputation as well as mine.’

  ‘I have no choice but to agree, Richard.’

  She did not say, If you had asked me the night you held me and wept. If you had stayed so that we might have talked as friends, my answer might have been so different.

  But he had threatened and lied and bullied and that could not be undone either.

  She said, without hope, ‘I will act as your wife. I will do all that you ask, but I must have a place I can go. I must have a place of my own to live in peace until my baby comes.’

  Isabella was not acting now. ‘I ask this because I have done you a great wrong. Our marriage is not as it was and I cannot live all year with your hate. I cannot socialize at present, I am unwell, and you can explain my absence by my condition. I cannot pretend that nothing has happened and go on as before, whatever you threaten, I cannot do this …’

  ‘Isabella, you are in no position to ask for any favours.’

  Richard watched her, then he asked before he could stop himself, ‘Would you have preferred banishment, Isabella?’

  Isabella looked him in the eyes. ‘Yes, Richard, I care little for what people think. It would have been more honest than the life you suggest.

  ‘I would like to live here in the Summer House. I grew up in St Piran. Although we have been estranged I am near my father. You need have no fear of Tom Welland because he is gone and that part of my life is over. This is the nearest to going home I can get …’ Isabella’s voice broke.

  Richard thought, If she stays here it will kill all gossip about my reasons for closing the yard … and I can close the rift with Vyvyan which will ultimately harm my business.

  ‘Very well. I have no particular love of this place, for obvious reasons. For the period of your confinement I am willing to let you stay here. After that, you return as my wife.’

  Isabella got up. ‘Thank you, Richard. I would like to go and rest if I may.’ She walked slowly to the door, closing it softly behind her.

  As she left the room, Richard felt vanquished rather than victorious.

  How terrible was a love that refused to die.

  Chapter 69

  Charlie was fuelled for the first few days by a sense of shock, fury and astonishment. Gabby! Of all the people to go off and have an affair! Charlie had trouble accepting or believing it. Anger catapulted him out of bed in the morning and lured him to the whisky bottle in the evening. His workers learnt to keep out of his way.

  There was talk in the village and once when Charlie walked into the pub there was a sudden embarrassed silence and he knew they had been talking about him, for it was followed by hearty offers of a drink and cries of, ‘Good to see you, boy.’

  After that, Charlie took to drinking alone in his kitchen, growing more morose and maudlin. OK, so she had changed since she started work in London; she’d bought different, smarter clothes, had her hair cut. But she had seemed happy enough to come home … and all the time she was planning to leave him. The bitch.

  He thought of all the times his mates in the pub had joked, ‘Your Gabby off to London, then? You’d better watch it, you’ll lose ’er, boy.’

  And if he’d t
hought about it at all, it had been, ‘What, Gabby!’ Gabby was Gabby, always had been. Part of the furniture. As familiar and comfortable as an old shoe. He shook Nell’s voice out of his head.

  He went over the terrible week when Josh was captured. Remembered how Gabby had turned to him and his heart had wrenched at her smallness, at her fear and her grief. He had thought, with a jerk of fear, that if anything happened to Josh it would be the end of Gabby. He had felt … protective, near to love, nearer to it than he had ever felt.

  Then the strange week of the eclipse and the … thing that had happened on the beach together. They had both seemed like other people. Not themselves. It had felt as if he was watching himself trying to stop the terrible racking sobbing that seemed to be more, somehow, than fear for Josh, but something extreme that had been waiting inside her to erupt at a certain trigger. He hadn’t thought about it straight afterwards, only in the weeks after she had gone back to London. Sometimes he would take the memory out, unsure if it had really happened, that raw, rough sex on the beach. It had been like doing it with someone else; Gabby had never been that keen on sex.

  The bit that was painful then, and stabbed at him now, were the moments afterwards. Something in her had wanted or needed something he did not want to give. He didn’t want anything to change. He was as embarrassed by that sudden passionate coupling in the open as if he had shagged a stranger. He had no idea why he felt that instinctive need to draw away and distance her, to turn abruptly from something he saw in her eyes that scared him to death with its emotional pull. Charlie watched that small lightness of spirit die in her eyes almost before it began. He knew, in the small hours of the morning when truth rushed in whether you wanted it or not, he had rejected an opening, an offer, a chance to move on.

  Something in him hated to get too close. Couldn’t bear it … Couldn’t do it. Women sucked you dry with their words and their analysing.

  He had thought that the marriage he and Gabby had worked. She wasn’t the emotional sort. She didn’t lose her temper or throw things. She didn’t argue like Nell and she did her share in the house and round the farm. She was just beginning to bring in good money too. She had everything. Why had she done this? Coldly, planning to leave him, Nell and Cornwall? All for what? Some old lecherous American. Josh would be devastated. It would be like a bolt out of the blue for him too.

  At this his self-righteous fury would start up all over again. He felt duped, tricked, a mug.

  Nell came into the kitchen and said severely one evening, ‘Charlie, this drinking binge has got to stop. You can’t drink spirits like you’re doing and get up at dawn. You’ve got to get a grip. I know it’s a shock, but have some pride. It’s not fair on any of the workers. You’ll lose their respect.’

  ‘She had everything, Nell. Why did she throw it away?’

  ‘Because, Charlie, someone fell in love with her and she with them.’

  ‘Blah!’ said Charlie. ‘Love!’ He tried to click his fingers and failed. ‘I give you that for love.’

  ‘I know you do, perhaps that was the problem.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Charlie, have you ever been in love, really loved any woman? Think about it.’

  ‘I had a wife, didn’t I? Much good it’s done me.’

  ‘She was a wonderful little wife. You just forgot to notice. Come on, let’s get you to bed. I mean it. I’ll leave too, if you don’t stop drinking.’

  ‘Bloody ol’ sinking ship,’ Charlie said blearily, staggering to his feet.

  Having got him upstairs to bed, with difficulty, and taken his shoes off, Nell said suddenly, ‘Charlie, did you ever love Gabby?’

  ‘I married her, didn’t I?’

  ‘It’s not what I asked.’

  Charlie closed his eyes to stop the room going round. Then he said quietly, ‘I don’t know. She’s my wife and Josh’s mother. We were all right.’ He tried to grin at Nell. ‘I’m like my father. I don’t go in for grand passion.’

  Nell sat on the bed. ‘Charlie, you never wavered when Gabby got pregnant, not one minute’s hesitation, so you must have felt something. You seemed fond of one another, especially when Josh was small, and you were a wonderful father. And yes, I think your marriage did work. But to think of you going through life without ever truly loving a woman makes me sad. Maybe, although it can’t possibly seem like that now, it will turn out to be the right thing for both of you.’

  ‘Like fuck it is,’ Charlie said. ‘I wish her in …’

  ‘Goodnight Charlie,’ Nell said. ‘This drinking is doing you no good at all. You and Gabby are going to have to talk before Josh gets home.’

  She heard Charlie snoring before she reached the bottom of the stairs.

  When Gabby reached the back door she suddenly, bizarrely wondered whether she should knock. Then she took a deep breath and the heavy latch clicked under her fingers.

  Charlie was leaning against the Aga reading the paper. He did not look up.

  ‘Charlie?’ Gabby said, standing awkwardly.

  Charlie folded his paper and looked at her, avoiding her eyes. He had not expected her to look so … bloody awful.

  ‘Pleased with yourself, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not.’

  He skimmed the paper across the room and it landed on the table.

  ‘You’ve broken up this family. For what? For bloody what?’

  Gabby did not answer.

  ‘I suppose you are going to come out with all the trite, fucking rubbish about not being able to help yourself, and that it just happened.’

  He was working himself up into righteous anger and Gabby knew it had to run its course.

  ‘Well? Are you just going to stand there saying bugger all?’

  ‘What can I say except I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, Charlie?’

  ‘What do you mean, if you’ve hurt me? My bloody wife shacks up with a bloody American for months and then says “sorry if I’ve hurt you”.’

  Charlie mimicked a silly girlie voice and this triggered something in Gabby.

  ‘I’m unsure how exactly I was meant to know you cared a fig whose bed I was in.’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means, Charlie, I’ve never known how you felt about me.’

  ‘Balls! Any second you are going to say it was my fault.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Gabby turned and switched the kettle on. Her mouth was dry. ‘I’m not going to make any excuses, there are none. I fell in love with someone. Of course I felt guilty, of course I didn’t want to hurt you or Nell or Josh. What I’m saying is I honestly don’t think it is your heart that is wounded but your pride. Charlie, be honest with yourself and with me. I believe you were fond of me, but you have never loved me, been in love with me. You did the honourable thing. If it had not been for Josh we would never have got married. You know this and I know it.’

  ‘We’ve been together for twenty-four years, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘So what are you saying, Gabby? That for all those years you’ve been unhappy?’

  ‘Of course I’m not. You know I’m not. I’ve never been unhappy with you. I’ve had a good and happy life with …’

  ‘So why chuck it away?’

  Gabby closed her eyes and swallowed the loss of it all. She said quietly, ‘I met someone who loved me, who was interested in me and my work …’ Her voice trembled, ‘Who thought I was clever and fun and beautiful and I realized what it felt like, to be really loved.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at Charlie. ‘Fondness is enough, I think, until you know the difference.’

  Charlie met her eyes and Gabby held them. ‘That day, after Josh was rescued, I … thought … for a minute it might be OK for us. There might be a way forward. We got close to love, I think, when he was threatened. But it’s hard, Charlie, and you couldn’t make the leap … and I understood, truly … that the moment had passed for us.’

&nb
sp; Gabby was looking at him and the tears were trickling down her cheeks. Charlie felt the tears suddenly behind his eyes, in the back of his throat, and was appalled. He had let the moment pass and he knew it, had known it at the time, but had been unable to summon the emotional wherewithal to cope with what it meant.

  He dropped his eyes, dug deep for resentment. ‘You have no right to break up this family. We were all right. You’ve broken up this family for bloody nothing. What do you think Josh is going to feel? You know he’s due home in a week or ten days?’

  Gabby turned and poured water over a teabag. ‘Yes, I know he is.’

  Elan had had an e-mail. She knew there would be an e-mail on her computer too.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘No.’ Charlie dived for the fridge. ‘I’ll have a beer.’

  ‘Josh is going to be upset. But he is an adult with his own life now, Charlie.’

  ‘Adult or not, who would like to find out their mother has been living a double life, shacked up with another man?’

  Gabby hugged the mug of tea between her hands. She looked at him. Dark, slightly heavy, good looks. Hair that needed a cut and flopped over one eye. At that moment, sulky mouth and eyes full of resentment.

  ‘Forget Josh, just for a moment. What about you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How exactly do you feel?’

  ‘What a fucking stupid question.’

  ‘Is it? In what ways do you miss me?’

  ‘You’re my bloody wife.’

  Gabby waited and Charlie banged his beer down. ‘I’m not going to stand here and play silly buggers with you.’

  ‘You can’t answer me, Charlie.’

  Charlie suddenly with violence threw the beer bottle across the room where it shattered in a corner. Gabby jumped.

  ‘OK. OK. You want the truth, do you? How fucking dare you decide to break up our marriage when I married you, married you because you were pregnant. You had nothing. You were nothing and I gave you everything. You were a pathetic little runaway. You’ve had a home and a family and financial security. I’ve been bloody good to you … so has Nell …’