Josh visited Marika before he left for his posting in Germany.
‘Did you have a good holiday?’
‘I would have preferred to go with you. Two blokes do different things. But I loved Turkey.’
They were silent, looking at each other.
‘What did you do?’ Josh asked.
‘I worked in Marks and Spencer’s and was very miserable.’
Another silence.
‘Marika, I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want something my mother did to come between us.’
‘But it is not your mother coming between us, Josh. It is a thing in you I do not understand, and which makes me afraid because you are so totally inflexible in your first judgement. And even when you have had time to think you remain immovable.’
‘Don’t you see that you too are obstinate, Marika? If I’m judging my mother, you are judging me. I thought when you loved someone you supported them whatever your own feelings were?’
‘Exactly!’ Then Marika thought about this. ‘Maybe I am judging you. But Josh, I can not understand how you can seem to stop caring and worrying about someone overnight.’
‘Did I say I had stopped caring?’
‘Of course I know in my heart that it is not possible that you do not still love Gabby, she is your mother. But to let her go on thinking you might not care … when you are so much part of her life. To go on with this for so long, that is what I am having difficulty with. I do not want that ever to be me.’
Josh said quietly, ‘I could write or speak to Gabby and say something trite I do not mean. I could do it to please you, to sleep better at night. But I would not mean anything I say now, and until I can speak words I truly feel I will not speak to her at all, Marika.’
Marika nodded. ‘I see that. You are honest.’ She held out her hand. ‘Good luck with your posting.’
Josh felt sick, could not take her hand. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I am going back to Sarajevo to teach for a while.’
Josh stared at her, laughed, threw back his head in pain.
‘I can’t believe this is happening. I’m going to wake up. This is a bloody nightmare. Marika, I love you. That’s it. I have no doubts. It’s always going to be you. I want to marry you and live in army quarters in Germany with you … I can’t get my head round … this …’
Marika was crying without sound. ‘I love you, too. Do you think I can believe this either? Can you not feel something? Say something you mean to Gabby before you leave? Can you not find anything in your heart for her before you get on that plane?’
Josh turned and made for the door. He did not look back once. He got in the car and drove and drove with no idea where he was going. It was only a few hours later he realized he was heading home to Cornwall. As he bumped down the lane he saw Nell’s familiar figure feeding the bantams and Charlie way up by the new houses, ploughing, with the seagulls flocking behind him, diving in the new-turned earth. He thought for a second Nell was Gabby, that she was home. He suddenly remembered an odd dream he had once, where Gabby disappeared in mist, and how disturbed he had felt.
He turned the engine off and sat, his shoulders shaking with grief.
Gabby, Gabby. She had always been here, at the farm, always. Not a part of his childhood, the whole of it. There at the school gates, hair as dark and shiny as a raven’s wing, smiling at his anxious little face.
There in the dark if he was ill. Long days down at the cove where she read to him until her voice gave out … Endless days running wild with friends, but she was always there in the kitchen at the end of them … and he knew, knew she loved him above all others. There was Charlie, Nell and Elan, but they all had other lives and interests.
The sea and the sky and the fields and the farm were theirs, his and Gabby’s. The canvas of his life and the security. A thing he could return to again and again with his own children. His parents, a perfect painting he could walk into any time, because the dynamics would never change.
But they had, and the shock of it … the terror of memories of happiness crumbling into something less perfect than the ones that lived inside his head, the terror of getting too close and hearing words that would shatter all that he believed he had shared here with the people he loved, was a thing Josh could not risk.
He drove the car into the side of the lane and jumped over the hedge, made his way across the fields and down into the cove. He sat on the jagged rocks throwing stones into the dark November sea. A little dinghy with a tan gaff-rigged sail was tacking bravely across the mouth of the cove, flying with the wind back and forth. It took a brave man to sail on this coast and Josh thought about his mother’s figurehead, when small boats without engines would set forth valiantly for foreign shores through seas that would make most men quail nowadays.
The fishermen, the lifeboat men, and the air-sea rescue were the heroes now. He had watched them all his life chugging back and forth across the cove from the harbour, disappearing into huge vicious seas. He had looked up at the helicopters clattering across the sky, buzzing along the coastline during long hot summers. It was partly why he had wanted to fly.
He looked up at the cliffs where the noise of the tractor and Charlie were lost in the pounding of the waves, and he felt what he suddenly realized Charlie felt every single day; the continuation of something, Charlie’s pride in the land that had been ploughed by his father and his father’s father. It would skip a generation, but Josh had a sense of his own son here and the shadows of his ancestors.
Whatever, life went on and you adapted, if you were wise. He jumped from the rocks, took a last look at the rough sea and made his way up the path, home.
He had been furious with his mother, but he knew he could never stop loving her. The memories of those long golden days were indelible, he saw that now. They could not be taken away by either words or deeds. They were a part of what he was; Gabby had made sure of that. He could and always would look back on his childhood with utter happiness.