Elan drove Gabby back to his cottage two days later. She was in no state to go home and in no state to be left in London. He phoned Nell before they left.
‘Thank goodness you rang. Elan, we can’t get hold of Gabby. Normally she phones me every two or three days. I wouldn’t have been worried, but the Lucinda girl from the gallery rang, she hasn’t been in to work …’
‘It’s OK, Nell, she’s with me.’
‘What on earth’s happened? Is she all right?’
‘Yes, Nell, she is all right in the sense you mean. I can’t explain over the phone. I will come and see you tomorrow.’
‘Are you bringing her home?’
Elan hesitated. ‘Nell, she is going to stay with me for a few days. Is it possible for you not to say anything to Charlie until we’ve talked?’
Oh God, Gabby wants to leave Charlie.
‘All right, Elan, I’ll see you tomorrow. Drive carefully.’
‘I will, Nell. Take care.’
Charlie was out and Nell sat down heavily on a chair in her kitchen. Oh, why have I not seen this coming? Gabby taking on more and more London work … The last time I put her on the train … I love you Nell, she had said. Gabby had been leaving.
Nell picked up her newspaper from the table and distractedly started to thumb through it, while she thought about what to say to Charlie. Just as she was closing the paper her eyes fell on the obituary page:
Professor Mark Hannah was one of the passengers killed on a Canadian Airline internal flight to Montreal on Tuesday. Currently on sabbatical in London, he was responsible for returning a ship’s figurehead to the small Cornish port of St Piran. He was a popular writer of marine history and well-known on the lecture circuit for his innovative and slightly eccentric slant on history. He aimed to make the past accessible and alive and he succeeded. His passion was figureheads from the small trade schooners of the nineteenth century. He was completing a book on this underrated art form when he died. He leaves a wife and five daughters.
There was a fuzzy and much younger photo of a very beautiful man.
Nell closed the paper and folded it slowly and neatly into fours, stepped over her cats and went outside. Charlie was sitting in his Land Rover chatting to Sarah Caradon, who was facing the opposite way in her truck. They were obviously talking fruit and flirting. When Charlie saw Nell, he called, ‘I’m going to the pub to pick Sarah’s brains, see you later.’
He didn’t ask about Gabby and Nell went back inside and put on her favourite Mahler, and continued restoring a small painting for John Bradbury. It was only when she could no longer see the painting that she realized she was crying.
The wind rattled the cottage windows of Elan’s house and wuthered round the walls dramatically. Elan had piled wood on the burner so that it stayed on all night and Gabby lay in the dark or wandered round the cottage, making tea and getting as near to the stove as she could.
She found it impossible to accept Mark was dead and swallowed Elan’s tranquillizers as if her life depended on it. It prevented her from thinking. It prevented her doing anything coherent or practical and in the end, small dose or not, Elan flushed them down the loo.
Gabby walked miles along the coast in all weathers, but Elan knew he could not play guard dog. He said quietly, ‘If you ever feel like doing something silly, think of Josh, darling, and how he would feel, apart from the rest of us.’
‘I do,’ Gabby said. ‘I do.’
When Elan went over to see Nell she had already guessed.
‘It wasn’t difficult. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon. I saw the obituary.’
Elan was shocked at how defeated Nell looked. She was furious with Charlie because he was so busy with setting up his fruit for next year that he had failed to notice that Gabby had not rung for some time. He was also spending too much time in the pub with the giggly Sarah.
Elan and Nell told him together.
‘The fucking little bitch! The deceitful, fucking bitch. She can bloody-well stay out of my sight. Who else knows about this?’
‘Apart from me and Nell, no one. John Bradbury might suspect. He came round because he had seen her at the museum and was worried about her.’
‘She wasn’t working?’ Nell asked.
‘No. Just sitting in front of the figurehead.’
Charlie jumped in. ‘That was the start of this, that bloody, fucking figurehead! I’m glad that …’
‘Don’t say it!’ Nell snapped. ‘Don’t you dare say you are glad another human being is dead.’
Elan got up and went to the door and Nell walked with him. Out of earshot she said, ‘I packed Gabby some things, Elan. Changes of clothes, soap, and stuff she might need. They are just inside my front door.’
Elan hugged her. ‘Oh, what a mess, darling.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She tried to smile. ‘Sorry you’ve got landed with it.’
‘Both you and Gabby were wonderful when Patrick died. It’s a sad thing if you can’t be there for the people you love. I am not taking sides, Nell. I am simply being there.’
‘How long have you known about Gabby and the Canadian, Elan?’
‘For a while, Nell. I thought it would blow over,’ Elan lied, for he thought no such thing. The first time he spotted Gabby and Mark together at his exhibition, he saw that the Canadian had a magnetic personality, was very much his own man. Elan had liked him and the way he had looked and listened to Gabby as if she was someone very special, which she was. Then, seeing them at Paddington …
‘I don’t suppose she is in any state to think about what she is going to do?’
‘No,’ Elan said. ‘Putting one foot in front of the other is all she can manage. Oh, Nell, this is so difficult for you …’
Nell put her hands up to stop him and her pain was naked.
‘I don’t know how to react, Elan. At the moment I don’t even know how to feel … Please go before I let myself down …’
‘Oh, Nell.’
‘Go!’
‘I’ll ring you. I’ll ring you, darling Nell.’
As he drove back home Elan thought how glad he was that Josh was still out of England.
Nell felt as if a whole lifetime was about to unravel, pivoting Charlie and Josh out of their safe and sure positions in the family, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
As she scattered corn for the bantams she felt cross with herself, for believing that Charlie could get away with not addressing the inevitable needs and changes in the sad and lonely seventeen-year-old Gabby and the woman who evolved and became so much her own person, with a surprising talent for restoration.
That young Gabby had surprised them all. She had embraced the farm, Nell and Charlie with a single-minded intensity. She had adapted to pregnancy, a speedy marriage and the isolation of this small farming community as if she had been born to it.
She had been so rewarding to teach, so eager to learn. So proficient it had been extraordinary. Something in Gabby’s goodness had always made Nell anxious. She had anticipated Charlie’s needs, worked by his side, waited on him. Nell had watched his surprise grow. He had done the right thing without pressure and it was working out.
When Josh was born he had been ecstatic. Those had been the happiest years, Nell thought, the very happiest. Later, she had wanted to yell and shake Charlie awake. She had tried to warn him, urge him not to take Gabby for granted; dear God, she had tried.
Charlie had worked hard in those early days to keep the farm out of debt. There was little time or money for even small extravagances, but it was more that Charlie, like Ted, believed that putting bread on the table should be enough. Their hard work provided safety and security. Their women should know that the farm and a home was their exchange of love and duty.
Gabby had never given Charlie any reason to believe she did not understand this or appreciate it. But it does not mean it’s enough to sustain a woman from seventeen to seventy.
If Gabby kept her eyes closed she was back in the sitting room. She could hear and smell the river through the window. She could feel the polished floorboards beneath her feet and listen to the music playing softly as the candles flickered over the walls. With her eyes tightly closed she could feel Mark’s touch, feel the warmth of his body as he guided her slowly round the small room that always smelt of flowers, in a dance that was not a dance, just an excuse to be close.
They were both silent, concentrating on their bodies moving in perfect unison, bare feet never faltering on the smooth wood floor. With their eyes closed, they clung to those moments. Those moments that might slide away into an unknown future if they did not hold them, breath held, like a breakable thing.
Round and round the small room they moved to the faint slap of water, light as air, the rhythm of their bodies conjuring a melancholy so sweet and sad it was like joy, for they knew the fragility of that time in their lives as they danced to the sound of the river.
They knew they might have to move back to their other lives, but this, this perfect moment would live on, stored against the second when they heard the same piece of music, played at another time, in another place; and they would fly back sickly and with sorrow to the river, the faint scent of hyacinths and the feel of one another in the dark silent room.
Gabby was feverishly going over every moment she had had with Mark. She was desperate for the feel of his body holding her, his long arm thrown over her hips. For the feel of his breath on the back of her neck as they lay like spoons in sleep.
Nothing was real. Nothing touched her but this loss. This life she had while he was dead was her living, breathing nightmare. His laugh, his enthusiasm, the small habits of every day, the sheer vitality of him existing, of being alive, had been her reality.
She wanted to walk back into that life with Mark. Make time go backwards so that it would never erase the sound of his voice, his face. Mark Hannah. That piece of him that was part of her, that piece of her that died with him. She was smothered and blinded by the suddenness of his absence, rendered incapable by having to go on.
One morning Nell saw her from a distance as she walked Shadow. The dog whined and Nell hastily put her on the lead. She saw the flesh had fallen from Gabby, saw by the way she paced the small beach near Elan’s cottage, that she was hunched and haunted by sorrow.
Would Charlie ever understand his own part in this? Gabby had been loved by a man who was, according to Elan, going to leave a long marriage, five daughters and numerous grandchildren for her. That was some love, some regard. The same woman Charlie had so casually and carelessly disregarded for so long.
Nell realized that she had been afraid of unleashing something in Charlie; the blind and immovable intransigence of Ted. An inability to imagine any emotion which is not felt by oneself.
Catching sight of Gabby grief-stricken and rudderless was like going back twenty years. Like revisiting an old wound that never entirely healed.
Peter had let her love him for so long. At university they had gone about together for the whole of those years before he suddenly said out of the blue, ‘Nell, I think I’m gay.’
They had slept together. They had been inseparable and he had said so casually she had gasped at the pain of it, ‘I think I’m gay. I’ve just fallen in love for the first time.’
So rapt had he been in this love, in this realization, he had been unthinkingly cruel. He had made casual something that had been fundamental to her. He had not even looked into her face.
Her parents had packed her off to an aunt in Cornwall and she had roamed, like Gabby, walking in all weathers, bent huddled with her wound, so gaping, so lonely she thought she might break in two. For she had lost her lover and her best friend in one bitter, burning, astounding sentence.
I’m in love for the very first time.
My God, where did that leave her? It left her with nothing sweet to look back on. She had met Ted and he couldn’t have been more different and, at the time, it seemed refreshingly normal and honest.
Nell realized as she trudged home across the fields that she could not feel angry or deceived or hurt by Gabby. I could not love her more if she was my own daughter and that is how it is.
I have to look at my own cowardice too. I could not face what I knew to be true. What I knew in my heart was happening. That Gabby had moved on to another place and left Charlie and me behind. Perhaps, perhaps, if I am truthful, I believed in some subconscious way she deserved the blossoming that I saw when she returned each time from London. The coming alive that flared outwards and warmed us all. We all stood in the reflected rays of her happiness and chose not to question it.
The following afternoon, after ringing Elan, she walked over to his cottage with Shadow, and a bag containing the dog’s lead and bowl, some dog food and a comb. Gabby needed an anchor, a small reminder of reality, and who better than her dog. Shadow seemed to sense that Gabby was at Elan’s long before they reached the cottage. Elan had said he would be out and Gabby was not inside the house, but Shadow, crying softly, held her nose up towards Elan’s summerhouse.
Nell shut her in Elan’s kitchen, walked across the garden in the late afternoon sun and peered through the half-open door. Gabby was lying curled up with her back to the door on the hard horsehair bed. She was rocking and keening in a low eerie monotone. On her small cassette player Barber was playing Adagio for Strings. Back and forth, back and forth Gabby rocked, while outside the sun slid behind the headland and birds skittered and called in the undergrowth.
The day lost its warmth suddenly like a shadow descending, and with it a damp earthy smell rose and filled the summerhouse. Gabby seemed unaware of Nell in the doorway. She was somewhere a long way away, although she must hear the birds and feel the damp for she shivered again as she stared blankly out of the window. Her breath came in little pants. The movement seemed painful as if something was caught under her ribs.
Nell saw that Gabby was groping round like a sleepwalker with no idea how to get through the next, unreal, lonely minute. She turned away without speaking. This was a private grief that had to run. She could not help or get near Gabby. Not at the moment. But Shadow might.
She went back to the cottage and let the dog out and she bounded with her ears up towards the summerhouse, making little moans of pleasure, and Nell turned and walked home before it got dark.