She has been up for three and a half hours by the time he emerges the next morning. The cows have been milked, and she is giving Field Cottage a quick check over before the new guests arrive later that day.
She catches a glimpse of Alice, shaking breadcrumbs out for the birds in the garden, but the old woman scuttles into her kitchen when she sees Lucy glancing across. She looks nervous, and she is not surprised, for her grandmother can be formidable when angry. She pauses on Yard Cottage’s doorstep. She doesn’t blame Maggie for refusing to listen to all she had to say, and yet it seems a wasted opportunity. Alice might have been able to tell her more about her search for Jeremiah, she is sure of it. If only she was willing to hear.
‘I thought we could go for a walk on the beach?’ Matt’s voice cuts through her thoughts. He looks different. On his feet are pristine navy blue Hunter wellingtons with not one speck of mud on them.
‘You bought some.’ She gestures, suppressing the desire to smile, for he is making an effort. ‘They suit you.’
‘Do you think so? I’m not sure they’re really me.’
‘They’re very you.’ In his glossy wellies, skinny jeans, neat T-shirt and slim-fitting tweed jacket, he looks exactly what he is: an advertising creative playing at being a country gent. Topped with his heavy-rimmed glasses and two-day-old stubble, he looks as if he should be staying in a boutique B&B while attending a festival. He is, as Tom might say, a right townie.
‘So – the beach?’
‘Great!’ She feels a sudden rush of warmth. Perhaps this will be OK. ‘I need to be back for midday to bake some scones, but I’m all yours before then.’
‘Two and a half hours?’ He glances at his watch, peeved.
‘Well, we’d better make the most of it, then.’
Try to make an effort, she reminds herself, as they march on down to the beach, and she hears herself chattering away to him in that relentlessly chirpy tone she never uses for anyone else. She reaches for his hand and swings it, but they have never been a hand-holding couple, and she quickly drops it again.
He pulls her to him for a quick hug, but that doesn’t work either and, self-conscious, they break away. Soon, they find their rhythm: him walking in front, once the track narrows towards the sand dunes, her a couple of paces behind him. We have always been better like this, she thinks. Each in our own space.
Matt walks quickly, and as he strides on, legs out of kilter with hers, she compares theirs to her parents’ marriage. Despite Fred’s occasional dark moods, it was a good one: both trying to support one another and ease each other’s workload as they brought up their young family and ran the farm.
They were easy in each other’s company, too, and there was a definite spark. A memory of Fred taking out his silver trumpet and serenading Judith with some Miles Davis flits through her mind. ‘Fred the Lips’ he’d been called, when he’d played in the local silver band, and Judith had teased him: ‘You’ve still got it, Fred the Lips.’ ‘I’ll give you Fred the Lips,’ he had roared, and chased her from the room, pouting grotesquely, before giving her a smacking kiss.
The teenage Lucy had rolled her eyes at Tom. It was clear theirs was a passionate marriage and, though the thought of them doing that made her cringe with embarrassment, as she grew older she sensed that this was something to replicate.
But perhaps they were too hard an act to follow. She cannot fabricate that unquestioning love and trust with Matt. Not any more. Not since Suzi, who blew the artifice of their marriage apart. Perhaps it’s for the best he had said, as he’d left; and his comment keeps coming back at her, popping up whenever she finds herself almost believing it is possible. For it was the catalyst that has made her reappraise just what she wants in life.
They have reached the beach now. The tide is half out so that the sand dimples with silver and a windsurfer criss-crosses the fine strip of blue between the opposite bay and the sandbank with breathtaking ease. On the opposite cliff, a tractor prowls: a neighbouring farm baling his corn in an elaborate quadrille. In the field behind, cows amble through the grass, tails flicking away bluebottles, heads dipping as they replenish themselves before the four o’clock milking.
‘It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?’
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘If only it would stay this way.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I almost love it more on crisp days in the winter when the beach is empty and the sea rough, or whenever there’s a gale blowing. Anyway, are you coming for a paddle?’ She scrunches her toes into the soft sand, enjoying the warmth and, as she sinks deeper, the silvery cool and then wet.
He looks down at his wellingtons.
‘I’ll paddle in these, I think. Can’t bear the faff of sand between the toes – and the palaver of getting these back on again.’
She laughs, but of course he’s not joking, and as they stride out, she is corroded by sadness: sand between the toes is what life should be about, isn’t it? Her throat catches, and she realises that if she tries to talk, she will cry. It hits her, with utter certainty, that if she wants to be with Matt it will mean relinquishing all of this: the rhythm of this life. Its harshness, but also its sheer physical beauty.
The tide laps around her toes and she breathes in the sweet, salty air, fresh off the Atlantic, and imagines it plunging deep inside her body, filling her lungs, giving her strength. She could never capture this smell in London: the fug of exhausts, fried food, strong coffee and other bodies consuming her instead. She wants to bottle it, this potent cocktail of discrete flavours – for there is seagrass and gorse there too, and further up the beach, just a tang of silage – that sum up this place.
‘Happy?’ Matt calls to her – and, yes she is. Standing here, drawing on this loveliness. But it has absolutely nothing to do with him.
Later, much later, they finally make it out into Padstow. Matt has booked a table at the upmarket fish restaurant where Flo works, and where the prices make Lucy wince with anxiety; and she suggests a drink at the Wrecker’s on the way. A bit of Dutch courage, she thinks, for she knows that they will have to talk about their marriage properly – not just skirt around the issue as they did this morning, when she filled him in on her father’s suicide, and her grandmother’s secret. Besides, alcohol always helps her behave more amorously.
It is a glorious evening. The sun bathes the clouds in gold: the periwinkle sky has long since faded. The fishing boats bob in the harbour: all is safely gathered in. The debris of the day – the fish and chip wrappings, the melted ice creams, the broken crab lines – have been cleaned up so that what is on show is a sanitised Padstow, like the town her grandmother knew as a girl. Even the travellers who sell hair braids and loom bands around the harbour, to the consternation of the town council, have quietly ebbed away.
The tables outside the Wreckers are filled with holidaymakers enjoying a warm evening. Everywhere there are golden retrievers, and families who are smiling out of sheer relief at having fought their way down the M4, M5 and A30, and finally got to Cornwall for the bank holiday weekend. Matt watches them, as he sips his pint, and she knows that he is wondering how to bottle this goodwill and to express it in an advert. There is a look of detached amusement on his face.
He is not unattractive, this man who is her husband. In fact, she has always thought of him as good-looking in a neat, urban, almost feminine way. Of course, he is very different to the men she was brought up with. And that was part of his attraction. A boyfriend who wore modish glasses and mustard cardigans, whose skin remained alabaster, because he preferred to spend his days in bars and galleries, shops and cinemas, fitted in with her vision of what an urban boyfriend should be.
If she’d wanted a farm boy or a surf dude, she might as well have stayed in Cornwall, she told herself. He was a type: the type that belonged to the world of PR, advertising and magazines. And being with him was an education: he might not want to explore the UK outside the M25, but he introduced her to the hip cities of Europe. She took more easyJet
flights than First Great Western trains.
And all this was wonderful, of course it was, until Fred died, when it suddenly all felt rather irrelevant. But then Matt got her through those first weeks after his death. And when he proposed, six months later, she threw herself into planning the wedding with a certainty she hadn’t experienced since that terrible phone call from her mother. Here was a future: something positive and hopeful, the perfect distraction from her distress.
It was an impulsive decision, she knows that now. A panicked one born out of a sorrow she had never before experienced; and a desire not to obsess about her dad’s gashed and bloated body, offered up by the sea five days after his death. There had been a moment, a week before the wedding, when Tom had rung and asked if she was sure this was what she wanted. And she had been so scared of being derailed – of having to think about what she really wanted – that she had put the phone down on him.
She looks up and catches Matt’s eye. He raises a quizzical eyebrow.
‘So …’ she begins but she doesn’t get any further. Ben Jose is ambling out of The Wreckers, a beer bottle in one hand, talking to a man who she recognises as his younger brother. She spots him out of the corner of her eye and refuses to look at him, but her train of thought is gone. A hot flush creeps up her neck.
‘Hey, Lucy!’
Bugger. She glances at Matt and winces in apology, then half-smiles at Ben.
‘Are you all right?’ He stands there, glancing from her to Matt. His long, tanned fingers, lightly holding the beer bottle, are inches from her lips.
‘Ben, this is my husband, Matt. Matt, this is Ben – you know, who I told you about? Who’s going to buy our ice cream?’
The two men nod to one another, checking each other out. She wonders what Ben makes of her husband and realises that, to her acute shame, she’d rather not know.
‘So have you done any more swimming recently?’ Ben breaks the heavy silence.
‘No,’ she says, painfully aware of Matt watching. ‘I haven’t had time. Besides, the tide’s wrong, at the moment, for a cove swim.’
‘I got into trouble swimming,’ she finds herself explaining to her husband. ‘And Ben kindly helped me out.’
‘Ah. It was nothing. I’m sure you’d have been fine.’
‘How serious was it?’ Matt is bemused.
‘Oh, not very … It wasn’t worth worrying you,’ she backtracks, feeling as if she has kept a secret from him.
‘Right. Well – take care of yourself.’ Ben stretches out his spare hand as if to touch her shoulder, then drops it without making contact. He smiles at Matt as if to compensate. ‘Nice to meet you. Perhaps we’ll be seeing more of you down here?’
There is another pause, painful in the extreme.
Matt gives a grunt that could be interpreted as a yes or a no and a non-committal nod.
‘So. Who was he?’ Matt comes straight to the point as they walk from The Wrecker’s towards The Fish Shed, the restaurant Matt has chosen. The sun has set now, and the temperature has dropped. There is a crisp nip in the air.
She reaches for his hand and he gives it a quick squeeze, then releases it and hooks his thumbs in his pockets. The distance between them feels impassable, though in reality it is no more than two feet.
‘I told you. Tom’s old school friend, who farms at Tredinnick. The one who’s introduced us to Alex, who wants to sell our ice cream.’ Her voice, high-pitched, strains to convince.
‘Well, he certainly seems interested in you.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘And I think you know it.’ His tone is amused, but it masks an edge.
‘Matt …’ They have reached the restaurant now, and she stops walking. ‘He’s an acquaintance: a business contact. There’s nothing going on with him. Besides which, you’re hardly in a position to judge.’ The pain spills out, despite her best attempts to control it. ‘I’m not the one who shagged a colleague!’
‘We’re never going to get beyond that, are we?’
He looks at her – all pretence that they will remain entirely civilised blown away.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, and her voice is thick with tears. ‘I just don’t know any more. I don’t know about anything. But at the moment, I doubt it.’
The meal, of course, feels strained and dissonant: like a piece of music in which one instrument – a second violin, perhaps – persists in a different key.
‘Well, this is nice,’ she tries, as she searches for the least expensive item on a menu boasting pan-fried sea bass on a celeriac purée; roasted hake with potato fondant; pan-seared scallops with pancetta; langoustines with a Bloody Mary espuma and celery sorbet.
She finds a mushroom risotto drizzled with truffle oil.
‘This is a fish restaurant. You’re supposed to have seafood,’ says Matt. His eyes skim the list and he chooses quickly, as he always does: no room for indecision. ‘I’m having the turbot and, to start, the bouillabaisse.’
‘Well, OK, then,’ she says, scanning the price list. ‘I’ll have the salmon.’
‘And for a starter?’
‘Oh – shall we just skip them?’ She wants to cut this meal short; be anywhere but here.
His face falls. ‘I was looking forward to the bouillabaisse.’
‘OK – a tomato salad, then, with a basil jus.’ She shuts her menu and looks around for a waiter, eager to hurry the meal along or, at least, to change the subject.
Flo, apron tied tightly round her neat waist, her hair in a high ponytail, comes over to them. Lucy’s embarrassment escalates further. The white damask tablecloths, the gleaming wine glasses, the polished cutlery, the bill that will top a hundred pounds easily: these are all at odds with the farm’s financial difficulties; at odds with the world she inhabits – and where she feels at home.
Given the right company, she would be far happier perched on the top of a sand dune, the tide rolling towards her, with a bag of fish and chips and a takeaway cup of tea. In fact, she realises, and the shock makes her look down into her lap so that Matt won’t see her expression, she would be far happier doing that on her own.
‘Hello, Matt. Wondered how long you would stay away,’ Flo says, her smile light and seemingly innocent. ‘Lovely to have you down.’
‘Thank you,’ Matt says, and Lucy can see him wondering whether he is really welcome at all.
He spends the starter and main course detailing his excuses for his affair. He felt lonely when Lucy did night shifts, shut out when she was so evidently preoccupied with her patients. Of course it wasn’t right, but he missed the old Lucy – the one who didn’t bring her work home with her; who put him first for a change. Perhaps they both need to make more of an effort with each other, he said. Realise that they have something worth keeping and try to find a way forwards from here.
She nods, smiles, bites backs the retorts that keep rising, unbidden – But of course I was preoccupied when there were babies dying. Notices that he doesn’t mention love or even acknowledge her pain. As she eats her salmon without tasting it, she plays along with the idea that in a fortnight she would be back at the hospital, caring for the babies she is terrified of hurting. That life could continue with her back in London. That she could pick up from where she left off: back in his life, back in his bed.
Just the once she mentions her fear of returning to nursing.
‘Oh don’t be ridiculous.’ He is dismissive, barely seems to hear her. ‘Nothing happened to the baby in the end, did it? You probably needn’t even have mentioned it: just you being ultraconscientious again.’
She swallows, pushing the memory of the wrong infusion from her mind. Agrees that, when she returns, perhaps they should reinstate date nights.
Yet even as she plays along with this, she knows she is spinning a yarn. She sees herself running to the Tube, incubating babies, administering infusions – and it is as if she is watching a character in a film. Fiddling with the cutlery, she looks at her hands, bronzed against th
e white damask, and sees that they are no longer the hands of someone who works in a sterile environment: who inserts cannulas into minute veins; who lifts limbs so slight she fears they will break at the touch. Her nails are clean, but a trace of earth is caught in the nick of a cuticle.
She sustains the fiction throughout the meal as they quaff a Chablis and share a raspberry semifreddo that is not a patch on Tom’s. She orders a double espresso – the need to be responsive and not to plead tiredness suddenly important if she is make one last attempt to convince herself that they can stay married.
When they make love – at her initiation – it is as if she is watching that character in a film, once again. The real Lucy sees her body-double make the right moves, utter the right noises, lick and bite and suck and kiss. As her mouth snakes down his stomach, she wonders at him being so easily fooled, and then she looks up and catches his eyes, pools of tender darkness widening as she inches down. Sadness and guilt well, and she closes her eyes so as not to see him. In trying to make things better, she has only deceived him more.
‘All good for you?’ he asks afterwards as he spoons around her body. They have always fitted better together when lying down, though his neatness has always made her feel too ample: as if he needs a more androgynous wife.
‘Lovely,’ she says. And she turns her head into the pillow so that he won’t see her silent tears.
Forty-one
She sleeps fitfully and, at a quarter to six, when she hears Tom’s heavy tread along the landing, she slips quietly from her bed.
The milking parlour is cold at this time of the morning, the lights brutal after the gentle dawn of the farmyard. But she feels almost wired as she sidles up to her brother and accepts a mug of strong tea.
The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016) Page 28