Authors: Raffaella Barker
‘Okay, I’ll collect her and then we’ll get Mae and have tea. Tell me, Dora, does she know?’
‘Know what? About this guy? ’Course not! I never introduce them to Maddie. Except for Aaron.’
Luisa sighed. Aaron. Never far from her thoughts still five years on. He was kind to Dora, and he could play the spoons on his knee and sing whatever anyone asked him to, while looking like he’d stepped out of a Kodachrome snap of the seventies with his burst of fair hair and his beard.
Luisa heard the tiny wobble in Dora’s voice, At the time, Tom had said, ‘She will never stop loving him, Aaron was the one for her.’ That still held true. Silence crackled between them down the phone line, until Luisa spoke.
‘Mae and I would love it, you know we would. Maddie is family. Did you tell her it would be me?’
‘I said it might be – help! Look at the time. Thanks so much Lou, I owe you. See you later. God, my hair isn’t even dry. Oh well, take me as you find me is my motto, or don’t take me at all. Bye!’
Dating vicariously though Dora was hair-raising, thought Luisa, returning the phone to its place on the table among a chaos of her notebook, three pairs of glasses, two of which belonged to Tom, so he didn’t have any with him to teach today, and a rubber sunflower that came as a marketing ploy for God Knows What, when the farm suppliers dropped off a roll of fencing wire. What would it be like to be out there meeting men herself? Thank God for Tom. No matter how staid and invisible-making marriage could be, and sometimes it certainly was, at least it removed the stress of first dates. Anticipation was one thing, but what about not getting on? Being bored by someone. Dora was always bored by the men she met.
The drilling command of the oven timer shrilled at her. Why? Everything was cooked. Oh yes, the violets. She’d noticed them by the beech tree this morning, and an experiment was hatching. She would steep them in scalded milk. She was borrowing ideas from an eighteenth-century text she’d looked at in the antiquarian books shop in town. The book was vast, the pages frayed and yellowing, and its price ran into hundreds of pounds. Luisa had seen it in the window display and decided to have a go at the recipes. She began with the page it was open on, and the blackcurrant leaf sorbet had been so delicately fragrant she now couldn’t wait to see what would happen with violet ice cream.
A car dashed into her reverie, screeching to a halt outside the kitchen, gravel flying. Grayson raised his head, sighed, and lay back down. It was Tom. He wasn’t meant to be back. For better or worse, but never for lunch, that was the golden rule for marriage. Luisa felt a rush of irritation as her husband opened the door, then found that she was actually quite pleased to see him. Another person who could eat pudding. She decided to kiss him. ‘Darling, how come you’re back?’
Tom threw a bag of books on to the table with the air of a man who was being pushed to breaking point. ‘You know your phone’s off? I couldn’t get through.’ He swung the fridge door open, stared accusingly at the contents and shut it again. ‘I’m starving,’ he said weakly.
Luisa took no notice, it was the same with every family member who opened the fridge. She fished her phone out of her bag, and turned it on. A cascade of chimes announced many missed calls. ‘It’s always off,’ she said, ‘I do it so I can’t mind when Ellie doesn’t call. You could have tried the land line, you know.’
‘I did. Engaged.’ Tom circled round the blue Baked Alaska, eyeing it with suspicion: ‘What’s this? It looks like toothpaste.’
‘Oh yes, Dora.’ Luisa was distracted, listening to her messages. ‘D’you want to taste it? I’d love to know what you think.’
Tom digged a spoon in, and nodded. ‘Bloody good. Why’s it blue though?’
‘I thought it looked like a swimming pool so—’
‘A swimming pool? Really?’ he scooped another mouthful. ‘Mmmm,’ grinning at her, ‘Looks more like a car-cleaning sponge to me.’
The Land Rover outside the window wore a patina of dust, sea salt and flecks of cut grass.
Luisa looked from it to her husband. ‘Have you ever seen a car-cleaning sponge?’ she asked innocently.
He pointed at the pudding. ‘I have now!’
She laughed. ‘Go away. Why are you here anyway? You still haven’t told me.’
‘Those sheep.’
‘They’re out? Again?’ Luisa scanned her memory. She’d been in charge of catching them a couple of days ago. Did she leave the gate open? No, surely not. If she had they’d have been out even sooner. ‘They’re such a menace, this is the third time.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Had a call from the Whites at Mill Farm. Some day-tripper in a rush found a bunch of them heading up Sleet Hill and almost ran one over. Thought they were from their yard so he went and kicked up a stink.’
‘Oh God, it’s the garage,’ muttered Luisa, still half-listening to her phone messages. She put it on to speakerphone. ‘Listen, Tom, it’s about the ice-cream van.’
Jed the mechanic was intoning, ‘Welding on the front axle, some of the receptors and brake pads and could need a new front wheel arch panel, so it’s good news and bad,’ he announced with relish.
What was the good bit? wondered Luisa.
Tom shook his head, ‘Dunno, sounds long term to me. You’ll have to share my car, Tod.’
‘What are you doing?’
Tom had taken his shirt off, throwing it in the direction of the utility room, but it landed nowhere near the door, let alone the washing machine itself.
‘That’s why I came home on the way,’ Tom reached into the explosion of clean laundry on a chair in the corner and pulled out a green shirt. ‘Managed to spill coffee all over my shirt when I got the sheep call. It was right in the middle of a time-tabling meeting with the Head. Some angry bloke from Newcastle or somewhere was giving the Whites a load of grief. I could hear him in the background. I’m sure the Head could too.’
Tom pulled the shirt on over his head, Luisa noticed how his back muscles moved, working from his spine. He was tucking the shirt into his belt. He tightened the buckle and looped the leather end back through. Luisa put her finger on the belt. ‘You always loop it like this,’ she said. Tom patted her hand and moved to the other side of the table. He had moved on in his thoughts and was now talking about the mechanic. He was irritated that the work was going ahead on the ancient, rusting ice-cream van she had bought, against his advice, on eBay. Tom didn’t have time right now, to deal with it.
‘You can’t just write a blank cheque for a pile of rotting junk,’ he said. ‘It needs a fortune spent on it I should think.’
‘It’s for my business,’ she protested. ‘I need your help.’ In a way, it was a talisman, a memento of how they met, a link to the time when they were passionately in love. ‘We can sort it out together,’ she suggested.
Tom’s mind had returned to the sheep and that phone call. ‘The guy was ranting away about whether I had insurance for this sort of incident. I had to hold the phone away from my head, and I reckon the whole meeting could hear him.’
Tom switched on the kettle, and waited, drumming his fingers.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to come and look at the van. But don’t make any decisions until I do. I’ll get down there this week.’ He sighed. ‘Life’s too busy,’ he muttered under his breath, and began flicking through his phone messages.
He wrote down a number and shoved his phone back in his pocket. ‘What’s the point of letting the farmland if the people who rent it just bugger off all the time? It’s a pain in the neck. Jason’s sheep are in the middle of the road, and of course sodding Jason’s on holiday in Portugal, isn’t he? Why the hell couldn’t he take his sheep with him? That’s what I want to know.’
‘Mmm,’ agreed Luisa. Luckily, he seemed to have completely forgotten that she was the one who should have dealt with the sheep emergency call. Tom picked up his keys and his cap. ‘Come on, Grayson, time you pulled your weight a bit with some sheep herding. See you later, Tod.’ He blew her a kiss.
‘Tom?’
He opened the door again and leaned in, ‘Ye-es?’
She shot him a devastating smile. He glanced at his watch.
‘Nothing, it can wait,’ she said.
The lane in front and behind Kit’s car was a tunnel of shifting green as he hurtled east. The hedgerows on either side of him tumbled with wild honeysuckle, couch grass in a knot, cow parsley nodding. Plant life rattled against the door panels, stones swooshed luxuriously beneath the wide tyres. Kit narrowed his eyes and lowered the sun visor. He’d begun travelling before dawn, and was almost there. Rolling his shoulders, he yawned. He ached, his eyes were tight with the strain of watching the road and he couldn’t think about his legs or his back, they screamed, muscles impatient to get out, to move. He would be glad to stop. The car had been going like a dream, but eight hours was a big ask for a thirty-year-old engine. Come to think of it, it was a big ask for the driver too. And he was on the final leg now, the home straight.
Kit found himself immersed in nature, not something he usually took much notice of. The scent of wild honeysuckle blew in through the window, enveloping him, catching in his throat, insisitent and beguiling as a lover. He snorted. He hadn’t considered so much as the possibility of a lover in a while. There had been no room, no time. Grief consumes all, Kit had discovered. It might have been different, he supposed, if he had siblings with whom to share the loss.
He braked abruptly as an unmarked junction appeared ahead of him. Leaning over the steering wheel to see if any traffic was approaching, a flash of yellow in the hedge caught his eye. A sprig of gorse had been dropped into the woven bowl of a bird’s nest, and it trembled there as the occupant darted away. The bright cadmium jumped at Kit. Gorse. It felt like a sign. He had never thought himself superstitious, but after his mother died he’d begun to notice things. An old yellow mini van, identical to the one she’d driven him to school in, appeared at the garage where he had his car serviced. Radio 3 ran a series on Thomas Tallis, and for three weeks Kit listened to his mother’s favourite music and wished he’d made the effort when she was alive. It was absurd, he knew, but he fancied it was her communicating with him again. Gorse was another connection. It was eighteen months after her death that Kit launched the first new fabric in the Felicity Delaware Archive collection, and the yellow gorse flower was the motif he’d picked from his mother’s numerous notebooks. The design was selling well. Indeed, an email he’d scanned quickly when he’d stopped for petrol was full of it.
‘
“Gorse” is on track for a record first month,’ wrote Matthew, head of sales at Lighthouse Fabric. ‘Have asked for a few more archive yellows to scan through. Any favourites?’
A thrush darted past the car and dipped herself into the nest, jabbing her beak at the gorse petals. Kit held his breath and fumbled in the glove box for his binoculars. He’d never been this near to a bird. She eyeballed him. Or maybe she didn’t, but through the lens, her eyes shone like jet. She opened her beak and a torrent of sound poured out, ceasing as if a plug had been pulled when, without warning, she flew off again. Kit peered at the nest. At the bottom of the mud-lined cup, two bright blue eggs lay like sugar lumps. ‘An heir and a spare,’ thought Kit, irrelevantly. The gorse sprig had vanished.
Kit drove on, hoping he was still heading in the right direction. Signposts were not part of the Norfolk experience. Norfolk was confusing enough to Kit without getting lost. For his mother to have owned property here and never told him had been impossible to deal with while Kit came to terms with being alone in the world. Never mind that he was a grown man, and had been for decades, grief took its own time. A lighthouse in Norfolk, tenanted and taken care of by a lawyer in a small East Anglian town was best ignored. The thought of investigating it had overwhelmed Kit. Until now. Now he was coming to take possession of this lighthouse. Perhaps it wasn’t that odd anyway, his mother always loved seaside icons. Why shouldn’t she have bought one? There was probably a very reasonable explanation. Perhaps he could integrate its image into the Felicity Delaware Collection. Jesus Christ, what was that?
Something large had plummeted off the grassy slope above him in the direction of the windscreen. Kit ducked instinctively, slamming his foot on the brake so tyres and brake cables screeched in unhappy alliance. The car cavorted to one side of the road, burying its front bumper into the bank with a judder that caused a map, the binoculars and Kit’s phone to slither off the front seat. Kit was rammed uncomfortably against the steering wheel as the car attempted to lurch once more and stalled. The ensuing calm was a balmy relief. No one around. Thank God. He wouldn’t have wanted to be seen making such a hash of an emergency stop. Alf, his godson, who had only been learning to drive for a month, could have done better. Kit opened the door cautiously. He didn’t think he was hurt, but his body was crunched and weary, and moving was an effort. Stretching, he grinned to himself. The first time in his whole life he’d seen the point of wearing a seatbelt.
Well, you live and learn, he thought. He leaned on the car, snatching a breath. A few rain drops fell half-heartedly. Whatever it was had disappeared. He rubbed his eyes. Could he have imagined it? All he’d seen was a blur of rushing legs, a black shape hurtling towards him. Fuzzy, and moving fast. A wig? An optical illusion? No. Unless his ears were misleading him, it was nothing so interesting. His car bumper was embedded in the bank for the sake of a bloody sheep. And here came its friends. Bleating assailed him as a woolly ewe appeared out of the scrub on top of the bank, and stood for a moment, chewing, her yellow eyes darting everywhere like a hooligan intent on trouble. That sheep will not be alone, Kit thought wryly. Sure enough, the gap in the hedge broadened to allow through a gang of about ten of them, some black, some white, if anyone could call the greasy grey of their fleece white, but all sharing the devilish gaze and loud complaints of the first.