Another Life: Escape to Cornwall with this gripping, emotional, page-turning read. Sara MacDonald

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       Chapter 4

       Nell watched as the girl and the small boy crossed the edge of the daffodil field down towards the coastal path. The morning was still, the wind from the south-west soft and teasing. The sky and sea merged in the distance, blue on blue.

       The day was held, breathless and hovering, like the kestrel poised, wings fluttering, over the hedge of the field where the girl walked.

       It was one of those days that was too still, the lack of wind unnerving, making the morning seem as if it had drawn in on itself, gathering and collecting in a silence that should be listened to.

       Nell stood, shading her eyes, holding the bowl full of corn, staring out towards the small figure of the girl in the distance. There was no hint of cloud, just the endless shimmering ocean meeting the lush green of the fields dotted with buds of emerging daffodils.

       She could hear the tractor now, moving along the farm track. As it came into sight above the hedge the girl stopped and lifted the child, and he called out, waved vigorously with his small, fat hands. The driver stopped and jumped out and walked to the field gate that lay between them. The child let go of his mother and ran along the stony edge of yellow daffodils so fast he fell, and the man leapt over the gate and scooped him up, threw him up over his head. Nell could hear the child’s laughter blowing over to her like dandelion fluff on the fragile stillness of the day.

       Maybe it was going to work, Nell thought, against all the odds. Watching from a distance they looked like a little textbook family; content, happy in their skins. Charlie had a son. He had never doubted for a moment that his firstborn would be a son. That had made everything easier.

       The man ruffled the girl’s dark hair lightly and they stood talking for a moment before he lifted the child up onto his shoulders, walked away and climbed over the gate and placed the child in front of him on the tractor. The engine started up again and they continued down the lane, towards where Nell stood in the yard holding the bowl of corn for the hens, watching.

       Silently the kestrel dived, steep and sharp. Nell could hear the sudden squeal of the baby rabbit as it was caught and pulled out of the hedge. The girl turned, startled, and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.

       ‘No. No. No,’ Nell heard faintly on the wind. Then the girl made little runs up and down, crying and shouting in impotent anger at the kestrel, which lifted its prey swiftly upwards over the hedge and away in low flight.

       The girl was left small and alone in the vast rolling greenness of the field. Some nebulous, disturbing feeling caught at Nell as the girl, shading her eyes, watched the kestrel until it was a pinprick in the sky.

       Nell had rarely seen any show of emotion in this girl. Placid, cheerful, so careful to fit into country life, to be accommodating, to be loved. Nell realized in that brief moment that her daughter-in-law had been smothering any spontaneous expression of anger, joy or misery. She suddenly perceived Gabby as a sleepwalker in her own life. It was safer to sleep sometimes than to question how or why we came to be in a particular place at a particular time with a particular person. Nell knew this protective passivity only too well.

       She turned away from the figure making its way back towards her, a small, clear silhouette against the horizon of sea and sky. She clucked at the hens and scattered the corn in a wide arc as she identified this intangible feeling of unrest. What happened when Gabrielle woke up? No one could sleep for an entire lifetime.

      Nell turned Josh’s postcard over and looked at the soldier on horseback. How quickly the years had slid away. Hard to think of that little curly-haired boy in uniform. Hard to watch the green field he loved so much with its annual rash of mushrooms, disappearing into piles of earth, forming trenches for foundations that would house another generation on land she knew like the back of her hand.

      Who would have thought Josh would become a soldier, not a farmer? Who could have guessed he could permanently leave the farm he loved, the friends he had grown up with? She slipped the postcard into her pocket. She loved Josh with a fierce love and pride and was suddenly shocked at her own duplicity.

      She understood exactly why Josh had turned his back on the farm. How could she, of all people, not feel honest and grateful that he had needed more than a lifetime embedded in the harsh Cornish landscape? That he had chosen not to be smothered by the seasons, the weather, disease, and animal husbandry.

      She would have been bitterly disappointed if he had grown up incurious about anything outside the parochial world in which he had spent his childhood. There would be no more grandchildren, she had had only one chance to instil in him a need for something outside the farm and county, a craving to learn; for him to soak up like a sponge all that a country childhood had made him, by distance, ignorant of.

      She had taught him about paintings, about art, about conserving the past, the environment; all that she herself felt passionate about. Gabby had given him a ferocious love of books and Charlie an abiding pride in the land they owned. This was why Charlie had difficulty in understanding how Josh could turn his back on the physical thrill of working land that had belonged to four generations of his family.

      Yet, Josh, the scholarship boy, had come away from university with a first and gone straight to Sandhurst. Nell found it mystifying. It was also humbling. What right had she to try to mould Josh, from a baby, to compromise? Here she was, believing she had widened his horizons when he would have certainly done so without her help. Josh had always seemed to know what he wanted from life. Possibly, it was away from the two women who loved him, in a way, Nell had begun to realize since he had left, that might well have been suffocating.

      She СКАЧАТЬ