The Healing Stream

by Connie Monk

  On that morning as they approached the farm Richard was in the yard and realized this must be ‘the hybrid’, as Tessa called the vehicle she drove. By the time they reached the gate he had it wide open for them to drive straight in.

  ‘Hello, girls,’ he greeted them as, the gate safely latched, he came to join them in the fortunately dry yard. ‘So you must be Deirdre. Tessa has kept us waiting all these weeks to meet you. Naomi!’ he called, ‘come and see who’s here.’ While he talked he had brought the chair down the slope, leaving the ramp out ready for reloading. Then Naomi came from the dairy, her thin face beaming a welcome that even Deirdre couldn’t ignore.

  ‘Come in the dairy and see where the work’s done,’ Naomi said as the commotion of their unexpected arrival died down. Did she imagine it (wishful thinking, perhaps) or was there a slight lift in Deirdre’s expression? ‘I expect Tessa has told you something about it, has she?’

  ‘Might have done. Can’t remember.’ Oh dear, oh dear, does Tessa have this sort of behaviour to contend with every day?

  ‘Well, once you’ve seen for yourself you won’t forget too easily. I guess lots of people would say the days are monotonous, the same routine almost to the minute. Maybe I’m a sucker, but you know I never find it boring; each day there is such a sense of achievement when the butter gets packaged, the cream put in its tubs, everything ready for delivery to the village shop.’ Once inside the dairy she returned to turning the handle of the butter-maker as she talked. ‘This and the ducks and chickens – and the mushroom shed – are my responsibility. The real bread and butter of the place is Richard’s side of it with the animals he rears. I keep out of that.’ Then, with a grin that etched deep lines into her thin face, ‘That’s man’s work. Oh, talk of the devil . . .’ as Richard put his head round the door of the dairy.

  ‘Tessa, can you give me a hand for a couple of minutes? I don’t want to hinder Naomi; she likes to get the delivery to the village in good time.’ Then as a rider, ‘As if you don’t know! Shan’t keep her long, Deirdre.’

  Not until they were away from the dairy did he turn to Tessa with a conspiratorial wink. ‘I thought it might be a good idea to leave her with Naomi for a bit. I don’t really need a hand, I’m only tinkering with the electric fence in the high field.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll walk up there with you. It’s a good idea leaving them together. What is there about being with Aunt Naomi that makes it so hard to be miserable? Bet you that when we get back we shall find a very different Deirdre.’

  But even they weren’t prepared for what they found: Deirdre had her chair pulled close to a side table where the morning’s egg collection had been waiting in a large basket. Absorbed in what she was doing, she was packing them into cardboard egg-trays, two dozen in each, then stacking them one on another.

  ‘What a woman!’ Richard laughed. ‘She didn’t waste much time getting you working, Deirdre.’

  ‘I’ll be ready to go to the village in no time at this rate,’ Naomi said. ‘You girls must look in more often.’

  ‘May we?’ Deirdre asked hopefully. ‘You know what? This is the best morning I’ve had for ages, even better than when we went to Deremouth to choose my new make-up, Tessa. You never told me there were things like this to do. When you said it was a farm, I expected fields of corn or whatever it is farmers grow – and animals, of course.’

  ‘If you want to see the rest Tessa can take the car as far as the high field. We only have animals, cattle, Cotswold sheep, pigs, poultry – but clearly you know we have poultry.’

  ‘Horses?’ Deirdre wanted to know. ‘I loved riding. I had my first pony when I was four. I had Jasper for my sixteenth birthday. The accident happened when we were jumping a hedge and he landed with one foreleg in a hole in the ground. I suppose it was a rabbit hole. Anyway, that’s how I got thrown. Poor Jasper broke his leg and fell on me. Daddy had him put down, he said he had done internal damage as well as his leg. I thought he was jolly lucky being got rid of like that.’ Until those last few words she had been chattering in a friendly, relaxed way, as if she had known them all for ages. Instantly her manner changed.

  ‘I bet you did, too,’ Naomi answered, just as if she hadn’t noticed the girl’s change of mood. ‘So would any of us if we were faced with a shock like you had to face. But life has its own way of turning things around. Your life will never be the same as it was before, but you know what they say: “When the Lord shuts the door, he opens a window.” I remember thinking the same sort of thing during the war – not this last one – the one before. Oh, not about myself. I was safe at home. But I had two brothers; both of them were killed. And I remember thinking they were lucky compared with my cousin Bertie. He was in the Flying Corps. His plane was shot at and caught fire when it crashed. He was most dreadfully burned, it was awful to look at him. For ages after he came home he wouldn’t meet anyone or even go out. Then he started to paint. He didn’t paint models, or copy photographs; he painted what he saw in his mind. Dreadful things. But it was as if in putting the images on to canvas he was freeing his spirit. Gosh! Hark at me. Why doesn’t somebody shut me up?’

  ‘Go on, Mrs Pilbeam. What happened to your cousin?’ Deirdre encouraged.

  ‘He found a sort of peace. You could see the difference in his pictures. Then he met a girl, a sweet girl, shy, talked with a stammer. But not with him. That was what was so . . . so . . . miraculous. When she was with Bertie she could talk the same as you or me.’ Then, with another smile at her young visitor who sat holding an egg in her hand as she listened, ‘And like in all good romances, they married. He made a modest living from his paintings, she made delicious cakes and opened a tea room in their cottage. Not much money coming in, but I bet there was no happier couple.’

  ‘Bar one,’ Richard put in. ‘Now then, lady, I’ll start stacking the van, shall I? Butter and eggs, that’s the lot for a Monday.’ Then, to Deirdre, ‘No one wants cream and mushrooms after the weekend, just bare essentials.’

  Deirdre was at a loss to understand why Monday’s shopping requirements should be different from any other, but instinct made her just nod in agreement with his remarks. It was suddenly important to her that this kindly, middle-aged couple liked her.

  That was the first visit of many to Chagleigh. Soon she found herself working as hard as Naomi and Tessa. Skimming off the scalded cream to fill the cartons or transferring eggs from the wicker basket to the trays, first making sure none were cracked, she worked as fast as the others – and found satisfaction even greater than theirs in what she did.

  At other times the two girls ‘attacked the shops’, something most of their contemporaries might take for granted. Of course there was no quick cure for Deirdre’s moods of self-pity and depression, but her scowl appeared less frequently and usually she accepted the wheelchair as nothing more than an inconvenience when shop doorways were too narrow. She learnt to laugh – or perhaps more truthfully she forgot her misery and the smile she had given the world before her accident surfaced from where it had been buried deep in her resentment.

  Except at lunchtime Tessa saw nothing of Julian Masters. His manner was always courteous but distant. Lunchtimes were very different at Fiddlers’ Green from the chatty half hours spent around the table in Chagleigh Farm’s kitchen. Although in the evening Deirdre and her father dined alone, Miss Sherwin – and now Tessa, too – joined them for their midday meal and lively conversation was never on the menu.

  ‘I was in Deremouth this morning,’ he said as the maid disappeared, leaving Miss Sherwin to ladle the soup from the tureen, ‘in Houghton and Parkes. You know the shop I expect, Tessa?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But I’ve not lived here very much longer than you have, and until Deirdre and I started exploring I hadn’t really known the town. It’s a long way to cycle unless there’s some special reason.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It seemed to me a very good shop. An outfitting department for ladies on the first floor and a good-sized lift. Deirdre, my dear, it’s q
uite time you took over the choosing of your own clothes. Let Tessa be your guide and find yourself some pretty things to wear, humph?’

  If he’d made such a suggestion a month or so previously, it would have been met with a sulky glare and shrug of her shoulders. Now, though, Deirdre turned to him, her eyes shining with pleasure.

  ‘Gosh, Daddy, thank you! How much am I allowed to spend?’

  ‘Just find things you like and spend whatever is necessary. I have opened an account and arranged that you may use it. So you have a free hand.’

  ‘Gosh! Let’s go this afternoon Tessa. Gosh!’

  That afternoon proved a milestone. With various items to try, Tessa wheeled the chair into a cubicle and even though Deirdre had to be content with fitting what she could while she was sitting, they had a lot of fun. By the time she wheeled the chair up the ramp and secured it, the passenger front seat was piled with parcels.

  It was when they returned to Fiddlers’ Green that Tessa saw a car following them up the drive. ‘It seems you have a visitor,’ Tessa said, looking in the driving mirror. ‘A green sports car.’

  ‘That’ll be Giles. He must be back from London. Giles Lampton – he writes books.’

  ‘The Giles Lampton?’ If Deirdre had said the visitor was St Peter himself Tessa wouldn’t have been more impressed. ‘Have you read his books? You know what? I got one out of the library when I came home from school – came home for good, I mean, when I left school. It wasn’t a just-published book; it was the first of the series about Burghton village and the people there. I felt as if I knew each one of them. After that I bought all nine of the series. Have you read them?’

  ‘I don’t read much. Daddy was always going on at me that I ought to spend my time reading. I suppose he meant because I couldn’t do proper things like other people. That’s what put me off.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I love to lose myself in a book, even if the only time there is has to be in bed at night. Is he a friend of your father’s?’

  By this time they had parked the car and Tessa was getting out ready to fix the ramp.

  ‘I suppose he must be. He sort of comes casually as if he belongs to the family; he always has. Shh! He’s coming over. Don’t let’s be talking about him.’

  Living with her grandmother, Tessa’s had never considered her life to be different from other girls’ of her age. For many of them, trips to the cinema were responsible for the first stirrings of adolescent dreams; pictures carefully cut from movie magazines were pinned to bedroom walls. But not for Tessa. Working in the hotel meant she wasn’t free in the evenings so what more natural than she should look for friendship in books? And of all the books she had read, none had become part of her life as those about the people of Burghton. And now she was about to meet their creator!

  ‘Let me do that for you.’ She heard his voice as she was opening the back doors of the hybrid, a beautiful voice just as she’d known it would be. She was almost frightened to look at him for fear that the picture she had built in her mind would be shattered. ‘I’m quite adept at it, aren’t I, Deirdre? I’ll get you out and then you can introduce me to your friend.’

  ‘She’s Tessa.’

  ‘Ah.’ With the chair wheeled down the ramp to the ground, he turned and held out his hand. ‘How do you do, Tessa. I’m Giles.’

  ‘Yes, I know. You’re Giles Lampton.’ She found herself gazing at him in awe. ‘Deirdre told me. You’re like I expected.’ And she believed she spoke the truth as she gazed at the creator of Burghton, the place she knew so well. He was tallish, slim and yet he gave the impression of strength, his brown hair was neither straight nor curly. But it was his eyes that seemed to hypnotize her, light blue and fringed with dark lashes, she felt they saw right through her.

  Giles laughed. ‘What did she tell you then?’

  ‘I mean, I didn’t know what you would look like. I’d never thought about it. But because I know the characters in your books: Chilvers from the bakery, Reverend Maidment and the family at the rectory, Percy the milkman and his wife Margot, all of them, because I know them as if they’re family really, it’s as if I know you, too.’

  All the time she’d been speaking he had still held on to her hand.

  ‘That’s the nicest thing you can say to any writer.’ What a delightful creature she was, he thought, aware that he was the object of her adolescent hero worship and enjoying the situation. He came in for plenty of flattery from the opposite sex and accepted it for what it was worth. But this girl was different. Despite her confident manner, she still had the innocence of childhood about her. And those luminous dark eyes refused to keep the secret of her innermost thoughts.

  ‘Daddy is at the dentist’s,’ Deirdre was saying. ‘But you can come in and have tea with Tessa and me if you like.’

  And ‘like’ he most certainly did, meaning to milk Tessa for all the adulation she was willing to shower on him.

  Much later, driving back to his cottage on the edge of Downing Wood he felt less certain. Yes, the adulation had been there, there was no doubt of that; what he hadn’t been prepared for was a strange and unfamiliar feeling. Tenderness? Yes, but not the sort of tolerant tenderness, probably tinged with humour at the situation, that might be felt for a hero-worshipping youngster. And that’s what she is, he reminded himself. I’m old enough to be her father. Remember the natural way she walked on those ridiculously high heels: straight-backed, seemingly unaware that she’d been bestowed with such natural grace. Smartly dressed in a suit with a tight-fitting straight skirt that had made him conscious of the slight movement of her bottom with each step. Fortunately for Giles there was almost no traffic on the country road, for his thoughts refused to be kept in check. Slender legs, legs right up to that provocatively moving bottom. His journey nearly over, he crossed the main Exeter-to-Torquay road and took the lane on the western side of the Dere estuary leading to Otterton St Giles, but before he reached the village he turned up a track to the right and there on the edge of Downing Wood was Hideaway Cottage, his isolated retreat.

  Next morning he went back to Fiddlers’ Green.

  ‘Have you two any plans for this promising-looking day? I thought I might take you to a pub I know on Dartmoor. Is your father in? Do I need his permission to run off with you both for the day?’

  ‘He went early this morning to the works and won’t be back until the end of the week; I’ll just have to tell Miss Sherwin. Sounds nice, Giles. I’ll go and tell her now.’ As Deirdre spoke she was turning her chair to propel herself back indoors.

  Face-to-face with Tessa, Giles lost some of his usual confidence; the memory of the way she had haunted his evening seemed to hang between them.

  ‘You said you wanted to take us. But Mr Lampton—’

  ‘We established yesterday that my name is Giles. I realize what you’re going to say: her chair won’t go in my car. And you’re right. It means the converted job that you drive.’ Then with a teasing smile, ‘I’m not used to being driven. You’ll take care of me, wont you?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll do my best. You could drive except that I don’t think the insurance would cover us if you did. It used to be just for Mr Masters until I came and then he added me as a named driver. That’s really why he engaged me, because he found he wanted Deirdre to go out more often. In the advert he said he wanted a carer-oblique-friend. Funny sort of job description, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind for the time I’m tired of my own company.’

  ‘But you never need to have just your own company. You have friends galore in Burghton.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a secret. They seemed all to shut their doors on me last evening. I went home intending to work, but it was your fault I couldn’t. I kept hearing your voice telling me you knew each one of them as if they were part of your family. Does it sound crazy when I say I felt it was I who was the outsider?’

  ‘Oh but that’s silly. If it weren’t for you they wouldn’t be there at all. You make the
m live and breathe. They are you. That’s really what I meant yesterday when I said I felt I knew you already.’

  ‘Believe me, Tessa, the life I live is a far cry from the good folk of Burghton. Ah, here comes Deirdre all ready for our day of adventure.’

  For some reason Tessa hadn’t tried to fathom, she hadn’t told Richard and Naomi about her meeting with Giles Lampton the previous day. She had wanted to hug it to herself, to relive each second. By the next evening, after their trip to Dartmoor she made herself talk about the outing, explaining that Giles was a family friend and it had been through him that Mr Masters had heard about Fiddlers’ Green.

  So without her actually saying so, the impression was given that Julian Masters and Giles were friends and contemporaries. That ought to steer them away from guessing her innermost thoughts.

  The Deirdre of earlier days might have given more thought to the frequent visits of Giles Lampton to Fiddlers’ Green. Not that she was particularly interested in him; she had known him all her life. Why he was a family friend she had no idea, for certainly he and her father didn’t appear to have much in common. Perhaps it had been her mother who had brought him to the house in the first place; and at the thought Deirdre’s expression showed her contempt. For, keen to shake off the ties of marriage and motherhood, Julian’s wife had deserted him for a younger and wealthier man leaving him with a toddler. Deirdre had never been interested enough to wonder where Giles fitted into the picture any more than she wondered why, as winter took hold, his car was so often parked in the drive.

  Then, towards the end of the January, she glanced out of her bedroom window and there he and Tessa stood talking. What was so strange about that? If she and Tessa were around when he visited, he always came to talk to them. Watching them now, she turned the wheels of her chair so that she was close enough to the casement window to open it and then move out of their vision in case they turned her way. So from where she was shielded by the curtain she strained her ears to hear what was being said.