The River Home : A Novel (2020)

by Richell, Hannah

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Eve, narrowing her eyes. Across the tree trunk were now scored five white letters, hacked into the bark with Lucy’s knife. K. T. E. L. M.

  ‘For posterity.’

  Eve frowned. ‘Why?’

  Lucy smiled. ‘Because you’re leaving, and because no matter where you go, or when you’re next home, this tree will be evidence that you belong here. We all belong here.’

  ‘You’re such a dork.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘Yep.’

  Margot, noticing the apples hanging in the branches of the old tree, reached up and wrestled three from their stems, awkward with her bandaged hand.

  ‘It’s too soon,’ said Eve. ‘They won’t be ripe yet.’

  ‘Who cares?’ laughed Margot.

  Eve took her apple and bit into it. She was right. It was sour – too acidic. She spat out the flesh and threw the whole apple into the hedgerow, the bitter taste lingering on her tongue. Her eyes drifted back to those five letters carved on the tree trunk. You belong here. Perhaps Lucy was right, but Eve couldn’t wait to find out what else awaited her, away from the confines of Windfalls.

  Ted stomped down the gravel path and out onto the lane. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he couldn’t bear another minute in the house. He couldn’t bear another moment of being undermined by Kit.

  When they had first got together she had listened to him. Oh, how she had listened. He knew it was poor form to admit it, but her adoration had made him feel good – it had made him feel manly – to feel so supported, so revered by a spirited woman like Kit.

  Only somehow, over the past few years, the respect and admiration she had felt for him seemed to have crumbled. There had been a clear but seismic shift in the balance of their relationship.

  It’s been years, Ted, years that you’ve been putting yourself under this pressure to write. Haven’t you ever wondered if you might be happier if you found something else to do?

  Her words had cut like a blade, all the more painful as they’d only echoed his own private fears. It had been years. So many years since he had enjoyed that first sweet taste of success, when he had been heralded as one of the country’s finest young playwrights. Look at him now: a washed-up, middle-aged, unemployed man living off his wife’s royalties. He was an embarrassment. A nobody. And she … she was the world famous K. T. Weaver.

  Chief enabler. He’d meant what he’d said. He had put his ambition on hold to run Windfalls as best he could, and to parent their three daughters. It wasn’t a conversation they’d ever explicitly had about how they might share the division of duties, but as Kit’s writing career had escalated and the pressure to hit her deadlines had increased, Ted had fallen into the primary parenting role. Small hands clasped in his on the walk to the village primary school. Plasters on grazed knees. Pushing swings and helping little legs to scramble up tree trunks. Swimming lessons in the river and reading books at bedtime. He’d been there for all the cherished moments of his daughters’ childhoods. He’d felt lucky, in many ways, to be surrounded by such spirited souls, to be his daughters’ guide and their protector. But he was traditional too. He had values and expectations embedded in him from his own more formal upbringing. He couldn’t help feeling that he was lacking, as a man. That he was failing them in his duty to be not just their protector, but also their provider.

  ‘You’re not like a normal dad, are you?’ Lucy had commented one day on a walk home from school.

  ‘What do you mean, Luce?’

  ‘Well, you don’t work. You don’t wear a suit or tie. You don’t drive one of those big, fancy cars.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ He’d looked down at her heart-shaped face. ‘Do you mind?’

  Lucy had shaken her head. ‘No. I like you just the way you are.’

  Ted had smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘And I like you, Lucy. Just the way you are.’

  Such simple acceptance. Yet Ted knew he’d be lying if he hadn’t admitted a degree of resentment. How swiftly, how easily Kit had assumed that Ted would take the brunt of it. When the school phoned to say one of the girls was sick, it went without saying that Ted would be the one to collect them, bring them home and tuck them into bed. When the holidays rolled around, it was Ted who planned their days and managed their care. Increasingly, he had slid into a space once shared between them. He could never regret the closeness he had built with his daughters, but such closeness only seemed to increase the growing rift between him and Kit. He couldn’t help but feel resentful at the many assumptions she had made. Without any debate, their roles had been set and defined.

  Even Max, his agent, had relegated him to the list of has-beens. ‘Ted, old boy,’ he’d greeted him on the phone last week. ‘Great to hear your voice.’ Somewhere from down the phone line Ted had heard the distant siren of an emergency vehicle moving through the streets of London. The sound had conjured such a yearning in him, to be back walking those gritty pavements, surrounded by a throng of humanity. To be back as the man he once was.

  ‘If you’re calling about the script …’ he had started, about to launch into a pleading defence, when Max had interrupted.

  ‘No, Ted. It’s Kit I want. I need a quick word with her about the Japanese contracts. A small sticking point. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ted had replied through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll fetch her for you.’ And off he had trundled, the obedient lackey.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t rate Kit’s work. He had read her first two novels with his heart in his mouth. He had been transported – gripped. She wrote a rattling page-turner and he had felt both surprised and proud of her – perhaps even a little in awe too. God knows, he knew better than most what it took to sit down at that desk every day and face the blank page. No, it wasn’t that he didn’t rate her work. Ted’s problem was that he no longer rated himself.

  He had written Lost Words, his first play, in a storm of grief. It had felt like an urgent process, a necessary act of survival to pen the script, to make sense of the years he had spent as a teenager watching his elderly father suffer dementia, caring for a man who was essentially slipping away, watching the slow erasure of a parent he had loved the only way a boy could love a certain type of kind but emotionally distant man from the silent generation. Without the buffer of his mother between them, the two of them had been all at sea. After his father’s death, the words had poured from him, sprung from his grief. The work had meant something – everything – to him.

  Perhaps that was the difference between them. Kit’s work involved daydreaming and fantasy, a wild flight of fancy into a make-believe world. Ted, on the other hand, seemed to need his work to be grounded in reality. He wanted to use his words to interpret the baffling realities of the life he lived. He wanted to say something real, something meaningful. Yet the problem he faced, day after day seated at his desk, was that he seemed to have nothing to say.

  He’d spent years now, distracted by the girls, feeling stalled and frustrated, unable to finish a single damn play, that haunting voice of self-doubt perched on one shoulder, the fear of failure on the other. He’d been paralysed, and the greater a success Kit became, the smaller he shrank by comparison. He was supposed to be a man of words, and yet he had no words. He was a voiceless man, silenced by the success of his partner, quietly unravelled by jealousy. That was the ugliness inside of him – the ugliness he couldn’t tell her. It’s been years, Ted. She could never know how her words stung. He felt like Samson, living with his very own Delilah. It was as if she had taken up scissors and shorn him of his strength. Lost Words. The irony of the title of his first play had not escaped him.

  He walked for a while, head down, his gaze fixed on the tarmac as his shoes stamped heavily down the lane, past the church, taking the bridge over the river. Midway across he stopped and gazed down at the churn of water moving below him. The river level was higher than usual after a night of heavy rain. Reeds billowed under the surface, and he could see the roc
ks and pebbles shifting visibly under the sheer force of the flow. He thought of those river stones, bouncing along, knocking against each other, being worn smooth by the movement of the water. It seemed somehow apt, those particles of rock being slowly removed, the edges rounded and worn away. Evidence of another slow process of erasure, like his relationship with Kit, like his career, like his sense of self. Attrition, that was the word for it. He was atrophying here at Windfalls. What was it Kit had thrown at him? Perhaps it’s time to think about the life you want to lead? Was there truth in that?

  Halfway up the far hillside, he lifted his head and looked around. He had left the river and was surrounded now by farmland and fields. A short distance away, if he were to carry on over the crest of the hill and through the wooded copse beyond, he knew he would come to a small, stone cottage nestled at the edge of a cornfield. He sucked in a breath and lifted his head a little higher then turned his face to the sun and kept walking.

  It was only as he arrived at the cottage that he wondered what he was doing. He almost turned back, but as he stood deliberating, one hand hovering at the gate latch, the woman had emerged from one of the nearby outbuildings wiping her hands on a cloth as she squinted at him in the sunlight. ‘Hello,’ she said. She was wearing a green dress, the colour of moss, and her long red hair was pulled off her face with a comb, loose strands falling about her face, glinting copper in the sunlight. ‘Have you come to buy one of my pots?’

  ‘Er … I didn’t …’ He patted his pockets, realising he hadn’t thought to bring his wallet, and it was only when he saw the smile creeping across her face that he realised she was teasing him.

  ‘How is your daughter?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s fine. You were right. A few stitches and an injection but they sent us home within the hour. She was lucky. Any deeper and they said she would have damaged the tendons.’

  She winced. ‘Well, that is fortunate.’ She threw the cloth back in through the open door behind her. ‘I was about to put the kettle on. Fancy a cup of tea? I have biscuits,’ she added, in that teasing voice again. ‘Chocolate ones.’

  Ted considered the return walk to Windfalls, the dry taste in his mouth and the frosty atmosphere waiting for him back at the house. ‘Why not?’ he said, relenting. ‘Thank you.’

  In the kitchen, she washed her hands at the sink then fetched mugs and a glass jar of tea leaves while the kettle boiled. ‘Sit,’ she urged, seeing him hovering awkwardly at the table, so he pulled up a chair and watched her for a moment. He noticed how she moved with an easy grace, performing the tea-making ritual with a lack of self-consciousness that belied the fact she had a perfect stranger sitting at her kitchen table watching her every move. He saw traces of dry clay in her hair, a red powdery smudge up one arm. The sight of it somehow brought the memory of Margot’s accident spinning back. He recalled the way she had unwrapped her own scarf and swathed Margot’s hand so tenderly, and caught there in the memory was the sight of her slender fingers and the whiteness of her wrist in the bright sunlight.

  With the tea brewing in the pot, she settled into the chair in front of him, exhaled a long breath and turned her attention to him. He felt a certain kind of stillness settle over him as his eyes met hers. It was a calm, open sense of being studied, observed. No judgement. She smiled and he noticed the fine lines creasing at the corners of her eyes. The small heart-shaped mole on her left cheek. She poured two mugs and pushed one towards him. He took a sip of his tea, scalding his mouth, swallowing it too quickly and feeling it burn the back of his throat.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she warned, still with that slight teasing tone in her voice.

  He wasn’t sure what had come over him. Perhaps it was the walk in the sunshine. Or perhaps it was the stillness of the day, the intimate air in the kitchen. He glanced about again, suddenly unable to meet her eye. Pots and pans, hanging over the hearth, caught the light from the lead-pane window. A wooden armchair with a patchwork cushion on the seat stood nearby. He saw a bowl of pine cones on a dresser. It all looked surprisingly inviting. He turned back to find her still watching him. They smiled, a flicker of recognition at the strangeness of the shared moment, and Ted relaxed. He was being ridiculous. He stretched out his hand. ‘I’m Ted. It’s nice to meet you, properly.’

  ‘Sibella.’ As she took his hand in her warm one, he felt a small pulse of electricity travel up his arm.

  ‘I owe you a thank you,’ he said. ‘For your help, for being so calm and kind, and … well … for sacrificing your lovely scarf.’

  Sibella smiled. ‘It was nothing. The main thing is that your daughter is OK.’

  The sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the kitchen filled the silence. Sibella eyed him over her mug. ‘Are you OK? You looked a little shaken by the accident. These things can be a bit of a shock, a reminder of our fallibility. I imagine it is hard to see your child in pain.’

  Ted was surprised to be asked how he felt and even more surprised to feel a lump forming at the back of his throat. ‘Yes. I’m OK. Of course.’

  He took another sip of his tea. Her skin was the colour of milk, he decided. Her eyes the same moss green of her dress. She’d be in her late thirties, he supposed. ‘You’re a potter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Too young to be stuck out there on her own with nothing but her clay pots and her kiln for company. He wondered how she bore it. ‘I heard you lost your husband,’ he blurted out, unsure why he felt the need to mention it, but feeling somehow as if it were the right thing to do. ‘I’m sorry.’

  When she looked up, he found himself falling into her green-eyed gaze. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He fought the urge to reach out and touch her arm, to try and comfort or reassure.

  ‘It’ll be seven years this month since my husband died,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Patrick.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask how he died?’

  ‘No. We ran a dairy farm in Staffordshire. He was out in the fields on the tractor and hopped off to shut a gate. A safety switch on the vehicle failed. The machine rolled back onto him. It was a terrible, freak accident. That’s what the coroner called it.’

  Ted looked down into his tea. ‘I’m so sorry. How long had you been married?’

  ‘Two years.’

  Ted didn’t interrupt, sensing she had more to say.

  ‘I was nine weeks pregnant at the time. I lost the baby two days after his funeral. I had to sell most of our land to pay off the debts we’d accrued after a couple of poor years on the farm. Overnight, the life I knew – the future I had imagined – vanished. It was loss heaped upon loss. In the end, I decided it was best to move away from the place of so much pain. Though, of course,’ she admitted with a sad smile, ‘you can’t outrun it. You carry it with you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Ted reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing her warm fingers in his own. Sitting there, Ted thought for a moment how strange life was, to find himself holding a virtual stranger’s hand, and for it to feel like the most natural thing in the world. How odd it should be, the feeling he had to comfort her, the feeling that he didn’t want to let go.

  It was Sibella who pulled away first, reaching up to brush a tear that had trickled down her cheek. ‘I’m sorry. Seven years later and it can still rush up on me.’

  ‘It’s not fair, that you should lose him like that. And the baby.’ He shook his head.

  Sibella shrugged. ‘No. It’s not.’

  ‘It’s not the same, but I lost my parents a few years back. My mother when I was young, then my father, to dementia, when I was a teenager. I was his carer in the final years. We weren’t close but I still found the loss hard to bear. I can’t imagine how you have coped. Grief is confounding, wild and unpredictable.’

  She nodded. ‘It is.’

  ‘You never remarried?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you get lonely out here all by yourself?’

 
She shrugged again. ‘Sometimes. But it’s peaceful.’ She let out a sigh and threw him a small smile. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I told you all this. I don’t usually bombard strangers with my tragic past over a cup of tea. It’s hardly the sort of small talk exchanged between new friends, is it?’

  ‘No. But at least it’s real.’ Ted thought it might be the most real conversation he’d had in months. They held each other’s eye and Ted felt it again, a strange energy passing between them. Understanding. Connection. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he felt rattled by it. He looked down at his teacup and noticed it was empty. ‘I should get going.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  As he stepped out into her courtyard, he saw a shard of light breaking through the clouds, falling like a spotlight onto the valley below. High above, a buzzard wheeled in tight spirals across the sky, its cry echoing over the valley. The scene was breathtakingly beautiful. He turned to her and smiled. ‘Thank you, for the tea, and the conversation.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  For some inexplicable reason, he found it took all his willpower to turn and walk away. At the gate he stopped and looked back. She was still there, watching him.

  ‘I’ll come back next week,’ he shouted. ‘With my wallet. I’ll buy one of your pots!’

  She raised her hand in acknowledgement and he felt her smile lift him like nothing else had in a long time.

  THURSDAY

  16

  Kit wakes early, pulled from sleep by a disturbing dream in which she has stood by, watching helplessly as Windfalls and everyone she loves is razed to the ground in a terrible inferno. It’s a nightmare she hasn’t had for a while, but last night it revisited her in full Technicolor. Pushing herself wearily from the bed, it’s almost as if she can still smell the acrid smoke, can still hear the echo of her cries: What have you done? What on earth have you done?