What do you do when the moment has gone? Exist, I suppose; if that’s what you call inhabiting in a pain-filled vacuum with no hopes or dreams…except to die. For without him, there was no longer any point to life. He was my life.
Bill had been to fetch Aunt V to Homewood, and she sat upright in the chair at the head of the large pine kitchen table. Her face was white and pinched, but her eyes revealed nothing except tenderness for me, and that very tenderness only magnified the pain that I wanted to feel, needed to feel. She said nothing, just sat stalwart, a rock to lean on in my time of trouble.
Mr. and Mrs. Brown had gone to the hospital, and we waited motionlessly, hardly daring to allow ourselves even a shred of hope. But still the hope was there. Somewhere deep down in my tortured mind, I clung to the hope that the accident had been a horrible mistake and the man on the phone had not really mentioned the word fatal.
The clock ticked loudly in the echoing silence as I nursed the unbearable ache that racked my whole body. It made me want to shriek and cry and all the time my ears were finely tuned for the shrill of the phone, or the approaching hum of the Land Rover engine.
When at last the car came rattling down the lane, I leaped from my chair and raced outside to meet them. How could Daniel be gone when the sun was shining so brightly? It was a mistake, had to be a mistake, and in a moment Edna Brown would look at me and smile and tell me that everything was going to be all right.
As she stepped from the cumbersome vehicle, leaning heavily on her husband’s arm, her tall, proud figure appeared to have shrunk. She glanced at me and her face crumpled, distorted by the same unbearable pain that filled my heart and soul and mind. For a moment we just stared at each other, then Mr. Brown ushered her into the house and up the stairs, while Aunt V stepped forward and placed her arm around my shoulders. I turned my face into the warm roughness of her sweater.
“Please tell me it’s not true,” I begged her. “Please…please…please…not Daniel…not my Daniel.”
“Oh, Lucy,” she groaned. “Poor dear Lucy.”
After what seemed an age, Mr. Brown reappeared. His eyes were wet with tears, his jaw was set in a tight white line beneath his skin and he spoke to us in a stilted tone.
“Nothing could be done…builder’s van…didn’t see his bike…turned right across in front of him.” His voice cracked on the words and he shifted away, covering his face with his hands as his shoulders shook uncontrollably.
“Did you see him?”
Suddenly it was so important that I see him.
Mr. Brown shook his head. “They wouldn’t let us.”
“It might not have been him.”
Hope gushed into me.
But he shook his head again, hopelessly.
“They gave us some of his things.”
He motioned toward the Land Rover, and unheeding of Aunt V’s restraining hand, I ran across and rummaged through the bag on the passenger seat.
I pulled out his wallet with shaking fingers, the wallet I’d given him just last Christmas. I opened it, and my own face stared back at me, happy and smiling. Another face in another time on another person. That person was dead now…along with Daniel.
“Come on, lass,” urged Mr. Brown. “The doctor is on his way. He’ll have something to dull the pain a little.”
“I don’t want to dull it,” I screamed at him, my arms flailing wildly. “I don’t want to shut it out. I want Daniel…please…please…please, God, tell me it’s not true.”
Mr. Brown grabbed hold of my forearms and pushed them down against my sides, then he held me very, very tightly until the doctor arrived. I didn’t feel the needle that brought me a blessed relief from the hysteria that had taken me firmly in its grip, but when I awoke again, I was in my own bed. I had one fleeting moment of happiness before the memories flooded back.
I grew to love that waking moment, when, just for the tiniest instant, I thought that everything was all right again, before the agony rushed back to drown me as I reentered the hell my life had so suddenly become.
They brought Daniel home just before the funeral, and I waited all morning until the long black car drove up, needing to see him so much, needing to try to make sense of the mockery my life had become. They carried his gleaming oak coffin into the dining room and the pain inside me twisted my guts as I followed in his wake.
“Are you sure?” asked Aunt V when it was my time to go in to the empty silence of the darkened room. I nodded, desperate to touch the contours of his face, desperate to speak to him, to ask him why he hadn’t kept his promise.
His head rested back against the pillow, familiar features reposed as if in sleep. Yet, despite the familiarity, it wasn’t Daniel’s face at all, merely a waxen effigy of the man I loved, a caricature. I reached out to touch his skin; it felt cold and clammy beneath my fingers. I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his forehead, shutting my eyes tightly, trying to imagine his arms closing around me.
“Oh, Daniel.”
The cries welled inside me, overflowed in a torrent of salty tears that streamed down my cheeks, falling onto his silent, motionless face.
“Where are you, Daniel?”
That may have been Daniel’s body, but it wasn’t Daniel. He was somewhere else. I knew it with no shadow of a doubt. He had left this husk behind and moved on to another place.
At my desperate cries, soft voices sounded in the silent room. Caring hands drew me away from the heavy atmosphere, out into the sweet fresh air, but all I wanted was Daniel, and seeing the form that once belonged to him had only filled my heart with confusion.
That night, when the funeral was over, I walked out under the stars in the garden at Homewood, where we had spent so many happy hours. I stared up into the clear night sky and begged him to come to me, pleading with him to show himself. I sat on the wall and closed my eyes, willing him to speak to me; for he was there—I know he was. Somewhere out there he was waiting for me. I just had to find him.
I waited and waited, but still he didn’t come. The cows bellowed in the field beyond the house, and somewhere a dog let out a desolate howl, but Daniel didn’t speak to me that night. He didn’t keep his promise.
Mr. Brown found me there much later, shivering in the moonlight, long after everyone had gone home. He placed his arm around me and gently helped me into the Land Rover to drive me back to the cottage where Aunt V, waiting helplessly, hopelessly, fed me pills left by the doctor and tucked me up in bed.
“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “What are we to do with you? First your mom and now you.”
It was those words that snapped me out of my despair and made me fight my way back to life again, and I remembered the promise I had made to myself when I was just a little girl and my mother had first turned inside herself.
I would never end up like my poor sad mom. That was my promise to myself. I would never allow myself to give up and give in when things went wrong, as she did.
And now it seemed she had completely given up. Daniel’s death and the finish of our wedding plans had sent her into one of the worst depressions I could recall. Now she was like an empty shell. Despite my promise to myself, part of me still wondered, Is that how I would be? Is that how I would survive the agony life threw at me? Was I really just like her?
The morning after the funeral I awoke and lay in my bed, remembering all my happy memories for the very last time, because I knew that to cope I had to forget them. I would make a new life for myself, a fresh start, be someone else. It was the only way.
If Aunt V was disappointed in my decision, she never made a criticism, and yet in retrospect, I realize how much she must have missed me.
“You do whatever you have to do, Lucy,” she told me when I scoured the Help Wanted columns for jobs in the city. “But London is such a long way off. Are you sure that it’s the right thing?”
She eyed me soul-searchingly and I answered from my head.
“It’s the only way I can go on,” I told her simply.
“Well then, dear little Lucy,” she said, nodding sadly, “that is what you have to do. But remember, we’re all still here when you’re ready. Me and your mother and the Browns; don’t forget the Browns. They need you, too. They need to remember him with you, to talk it through.”
Had I forgotten the Browns in my own selfish agony, or was it just that I couldn’t bear to remember them?
I drove to the city for my first job interview, and that in itself was a kick-start to my new life, for I had never driven farther than the market town of Appleton before. When I stalled in a street near the car park, it felt as though a hundred angry horns were directed at me. A man in a BMW raised his fist and yelled, and I felt the prick of tears as I struggled with the stubborn ignition. Then at last it burst into life again and I was moving forward, through the entrance to the car park. I nosed into a narrow space, switched off the engine and leaned over the steering wheel as it shuddered into silence. I had made it. All I had to do now was find the office of Fawcett and Medley and do the best I could.
“Don’t you worry,” Aunt V had instructed me before I’d left. “Just be yourself and answer their questions as honestly as you can, and if they don’t want you, then their loss is our gain.”
Why hadn’t I seen the pain in her eyes when she’d looked at me? How could I have been so blind?
The office was starkly white, with heavy mahogany doors and quiet corridors. A tiny woman peered at me from over her spectacles and gave me a tight, expressionless smile.
“And you are…?”
“Lucy McTavish. I’ve come about the job.”
My voice sounded flat and broad, countrified. I twisted my fingers together, uncomfortable in my tight, gray pin-striped skirt.
“Take a seat. Mr. Lawson will be with you presently.”
She gestured at a row of hard-backed chairs upholstered in antique leather. I perched gingerly on the edge of the nearest one, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow me.
Mr. Lawson, surprisingly, proved quite pleasant. He ushered me into his office, showed me to a chair and riffled through a pile of papers for my job application.
“Bit of a change of career for you, isn’t it?” he inquired, smiling broadly. My mouth was too dry to speak, so I nodded, instead.
“Any particular reason?”
I wanted to say, Because the love of my life is dead and I can’t cope with the memories, but I simply smiled into his kindly eyes and found my voice.
“I just wanted to try city life.”
He asked me searching questions about my interests and experience, and I tried to answer them honestly. I had done word processing at an evening class while I was working at the kennel, and I was fairly familiar with most aspects of a computer. If all they required was someone to type and to be a general dogsbody, then I felt fairly confident that I could do the job.
“I make a good cup of tea,” I told him.
He laughed loudly.
“Well, that decides it, then. We’ll give you a start here at Fawcett and Medley and see how you get on. Just a trial, mind. You can talk to Rosie about the details—you know, rates of pay and such.”
I stared at him in a kind of stupor. What had I done?
“Rosie…She’s the girl you spoke to when you walked in….”
I forced a smile onto my face, nodding stupidly. This wasn’t what I had expected at all. In my imagination, I had seen myself traveling to the city time after time for job interviews, easing myself into my fresh start, not jumping in immediately, feet first. I hadn’t even told Jenny yet. My heart sank as I thought about telling the Whitfields that I was leaving. And what about all my charges? The little dog, Flint, whose hip had just been pinned after a nasty break and the new litter of puppies that were due any day—they needed me.
My heart hardened, as if a switch inside me flicked off. I had needs, too. I had to get away from all things familiar in order to survive.
Telling Mrs. Brown—I could never get used to calling her Edna—was worst. She looked at me with empty eyes and shook her head slowly.
“Oh, Lucy,” she groaned. “What has become of us all?”
I kissed her cheek, recalling the intoxicating scent of violets that had always seemed to me the essence of the Mrs. Brown I had admired and respected for so many years. Now she just smelled of soap, and her hair, once swept up neatly on top of her head, hung in limp strands that showed a lack of care.
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “But I have to get away…or go crazy.”
I held her gaze, willing her to understand, but I couldn’t make out her expression, for my eyes were blurred with the tears I fought to contain. I owed her more than this, and deep inside, I realized.
For a moment, she clung to my arm.
“But running away isn’t the answer, Lucy.”
“I’m not running away,” I insisted. “I’m…I’m just trying to get on with my life.”
She kissed my cheek then and sighed, a heavy, heartrending sigh.
“Don’t forget us, Lucy,” she pleaded. I wrapped my arms around her, fighting the emotions that told me to stay.
“How could I ever forget you?” I cried.
I managed to rent a tiny apartment just across the park from the offices of Fawcett and Medley, and threw myself into my new life. Forgetting my old life was easy when everything was so new, and late at night, when the memories haunted my dreams, I would take a couple of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed and wake late for work with a thick head and a dull empty ache in the place where my heart used to be.
The girls at the office were kind and friendly, but I kept my distance, not wanting to share myself with anyone. I was always the one who offered to work late, and often after work, I would walk along the busy street to the swimming pool in the city center, to swim and swim and swim until I felt so tired that all I wanted was my bed.
And so I survived. For the next six months, I existed in a world with no emotion, not allowing myself the acute and necessary experience of pain.
Mrs. Brown wrote to me every week. In a neat and tidy hand, she told me, with almost clinical detail, of everything that was happening on the farm, but she never mentioned Daniel, never mentioned the love of both our lives. I could cope with those impersonal letters, and even looked forward to the link with a past I dared not face, until one day her letter was different, filled with a kind of intensity that was too closely linked to pain. She talked of the horses and how much they had meant to him, and she told me that they were going to keep them both for me to ride when I was ready to come home. Didn’t she understand that I would never come home?
After that I kept her letters tied up with a blue ribbon in a little wooden box, but I never opened them, for I was too afraid. Instead, I wrote to her. Every week without fail, I wrote of the typing I had done today and how many lengths I had managed to swim and what was on TV the night before; shallow, empty letters that could have been penned by a stranger.
Aunt V drove her elderly car to the city every other weekend just to see me. I would wake up on the Sundays she was due, tidy my tiny apartment and then sit in the tall narrow window overlooking the street, watching and waiting until her car chugged around the corner. A warm comfortable feeling would fill me when I spotted her short upright figure march across the pavement, and I would run down the three flights of stairs and fling my arms around her whether she liked it or not. Aunt V was never one for displays of emotion.
After I had made her a cup of tea and she had appraised my one roomed apartment, we would walk into the city to window-shop, before stopping somewhere for a leisurely lunch. I loved those Sundays, especially on the rare occasions when she brought my mother with her. The three of us would stroll through the park, wrapped up warm against the winter’s chill, and chat of nothing in particular. It suited me, “nothing in particular.”
All in all, I suppose I allowed my life to slip into a sort of comfortable vacuum, living from day to day, with no dreams for the future and no thoughts of the past. But I found out before too long that escape is not always such an easy route to take and life does have a habit of throwing you back into the fray, just when you least expect it.
Aunt V had come to see me and for once I thought she seemed a bit preoccupied. Before she left, I took hold of her hands and made her look at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head and tried to pull away, but I held her fast.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
Her shoulders slumped uncharacteristically. “I’m worried about your mother.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean…what way? Has she had another of her funny do’s?”
Aunt V shook her head again.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. I just don’t think she’s very well.”
Suddenly she leaned toward me, a fierceness in her eyes.
“I think it’s time you returned for a visit,” she said.
It was the first instance that she had put me under any pressure since I’d told her all those months ago that I was moving to the city to start a new life. Now it seemed that my poor mother needed me after all, and duty was about to draw me back to the place I was so afraid of.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Has she seen the doctor?”
Aunt V shrugged. “You know your mom. She isn’t easy to talk to at the best of times. It’s just a feeling I have, a feeling that something’s not right. Come home, Lucy. Please. Just for a short visit. You owe us that at least.”
How could I refuse? How could I harden my heart against such a plea? She was my mother, after all, and if not for Aunt V, I would have had to take full responsibility for her.
“I’ll be home on Saturday,” I promised. “And I’ll stay overnight.”
The expression on her face said it all.
The week passed slowly. As usual, I kept myself to myself, but it had become more difficult lately, since the arrival of Mr. Medley’s new personal assistant, Nicola Birch. She was just so alive and full of fun. The whole office buzzed when she’d walk in on a Monday morning, eager to share her exploits from the weekend. For some reason, she had embarked on a quest to improve my “quality of life,” and was constantly attempting to persuade me to go out clubbing with her. So far I had managed to resist her invitations, but my excuses were wearing thin, so I was glad for once to have a genuine reason to say no to Saturday night.
She waved at me as she jumped into a taxi outside the office after work that Friday.
“Next week, then, Lucy,” she insisted. “No excuses. I’m going to make sure that you have some fun whether you like it or not.”
I smiled halfheartedly, cringing inside.
As soon as I saw my mom, I knew that Aunt V was right to be worried. Her face was ashen, and she was constantly short of breath.
“You’ll have to go to the doctor on Monday,” I told her.
“You see, Mary? Lucy agrees with me,” said Aunt V. “I’m making you an appointment, no ifs or buts.”
“I’ve seen enough doctors to last me a lifetime,” grumbled my mother.
“But they were for your nerves.” I butted in. “This is different. You aren’t well.”
She muttered something, rambling in her usual way, then she took herself off to bed early. When Aunt V brought her a cup of tea next morning, her limp body was already turning cold.
Two deaths within one year. It seemed impossible, and yet life is adept at the seemingly impossible. The first death, Daniel’s, drove me into an apathetic vacuum. My mother’s, in a way, rekindled my desire to live, but by throwing caution to the wind and caring for no one.
I was fine until the funeral. Fawcett and Medley were only too happy for me to take a well-deserved leave, and I flung myself into helping Aunt V with the funeral arrangements. I had missed all that with Daniel. Left it for others to deal with. Hidden from my responsibilities, I suppose. This was different; I felt much stronger now and took a great satisfaction in being there for my aunt, who would miss my poor mother far more than I ever could.
Edna Brown was our rock. She arrived unannounced, offering sympathy and support in just the right doses, making things so much easier for Aunt V and me, despite the fact that my mother’s death must have been painful for her, too. She walked tall again, but with a new serenity, and the scent of violets followed in her wake once more. I wanted so much to ask her how she had managed to move on with her life. However, the right moment just never seemed to come.
The day of the funeral dawned bright and clear. A spring day filled with life and promise. I think it was that that nourished the canker that beginning to fester inside me. I remember walking into the village church behind the coffin and seeing the yellow and purple spring flowers scattered across the emerald-green of the grass. It seemed so wrong that my mother should be dead, so unfair that her life had been snuffed out so when the whole world was bursting with energy and beauty. But was it for my mother that my heart grieved so badly? Or was it for Daniel, whose loss I had never really learned to live with…whose loss was eating at my soul?
I couldn’t bear to make small talk with the kindly villagers who had crammed into our tiny cottage after the service, so I quietly let myself out the back door and walked in a kind of daze along the lane, feeling like the little girl again who had walked that road a thousand times. Every tree was familiar, every scent, every sound. Nostalgia engulfed me. I thought about the red shoes that seemed to me to have been at the very start of the changes in my young life. And I thought about my handsome charming, selfish father, who had destroyed my poor dead mother. Or had she destroyed herself?
Just ahead of me now, I could see Homewood Farm, the place that was once to be my home, nestling beneath the mighty fells that loomed in the clear spring sky. Memories devoured me, eating at the core of me, twisting the knife in my heart. Daniel and I had spent so many happy hours riding way up those mighty slopes and together at Homewood, the place of my dreams. Hours that I had then believed would last a lifetime. But life is a fickle, treacherous beast that lies in wait to drag you down.
I sat on a rock at the base of a fell, hopelessly trying to find inside myself the apathy that I achieved in the city. The words of a poem by T J Darling sprang, unbidden, to my mind, a poem that I used to recite to Daniel. “Like the backs of colossal elephants, motionless against the sky, here doth winter flourish, here stay I…”
They were like the backs of colossal elephants, those mighty hills I used to love. All of a sudden something snapped inside me. Emotion flooded me taking my breath and drowning my senses. I had to get away, had to get back to that safe place where nothing could touch me. I stood sharply and started to run, my breath coming in great heaving gasps, and as my feet pounded along the lane, the familiar poem sprang painfully into my head again. “I walk these bleak and mighty slopes where the fell sheep roam and my heart is filled with joy. For this is my home.”
But it wasn’t my home anymore, was it? It could never be my home again.
I knew that I shouldn’t be leaving Aunt V. In the few days since the funeral she had changed so much. Throughout everything—the shock of my mother’s death, the agony of the post mortem and then, finally, the funeral—she had remained stalwart, carrying me along with her powerful personality as always. Now, suddenly, she seemed to have shrunk and fresh lines marked her pale cheeks. Yes, I shouldn’t leave her, but I just had to go, back to the safe anonymity of the city.
I had avoided close contact with Edna, but she singled me out before I left, touching my cheek with a gentle finger. I saw the sadness that still lingered in her eyes and I looked away.
“Don’t run from the memories, Lucy,” she told me. “You have to learn to live with them to find peace again.”
My whole body shuddered. “But what if I can’t? What if I can’t face the memories?”
“You will,” she said firmly. “One day you will face them, and then you can come home.”
I smiled at her with tear-filled eyes and hardened my heart, for I knew that I could never come home.
“Look after Aunt V for me,” I whispered.
Before I left, the coroner told us that my mother’s poor tired heart had just stopped beating while she slept. And who could ask for a better end? All I could think of was the needless violence of Daniel’s death. He had been returning home especially to meet me and his life had been snuffed out by the act of a careless driver. So his death was really all my fault, then, wasn’t it? Yes, I had to get away from this place, had to get back to my other life before the grief drove me crazy, too. But my other life was no longer there; my comfortable vacuum was gone for good. Oh, why hadn’t Daniel kept his promise?