She is in the middle of seeing a patient, when the phone rings. She leans across the table and picks up the handset. ‘Liz Deighton speaking.’
‘Hello, Liz. It’s David. I needed to hear your voice.’
‘Do you mind if I ring you back,’ she says, her heart beating fast. ‘I’m with a patient at the moment.’
‘Don’t be too long then,’ he replies. ‘I’m missing you so much, I can’t concentrate on anything.’
There is little opportunity to meet. For two weeks he is on holiday with his family. He rings when he returns and she says she will see him on the Sunday evening after church. He seems uneasy about this but agrees. Her husband wants to know where she has been and she tells him, saying that David had meetings to discuss with her.
They meet on the race course, hardly an ideal place for an assignation, except that it covers acres of land, making it possible to get away from the crowds. But who knows whether the person walking their dog might be a near neighbour, a work colleague or a patient? When she gets into her car to drive home, he walks back over to her. She winds down the window.
‘Will you marry me?’ he asks.
Romantic though she is, even she thinks this question is unexpectedly premature.
*
At the supermarket checkout one day, she looks up to see him waiting for her. He accompanies her to the car. ‘I had to drive over,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t wait to see you again.’ They arrange a walk in the afternoon.
His good mood of the morning has evaporated. His wife has found one of her letters in his coat pocket and has flown into a rage. How could he have been so careless? Liz thinks, when she has persuaded him to tell her the reason for his bad humour. She waits for repercussions but none come. Perhaps he has told his wife that it is not what she thinks; maybe that the letter is from a deluded parishioner who thinks she is in love with him.
*
But this recklessness cannot continue. They have been spotted on the race course. He is reported to the boss. A letter is not long in coming. Either he will end this liaison or they will end his job. In the eyes of the Church it would do their cause no good at all if its vicars were to be seen carrying on such extramarital relationships.
A few days later, she enters the bookshop and there he is at the far end, flicking idly through the CDs. She walks slowly through the crowds until she is by his side. He looks up.
‘I can’t speak to you. We can’t meet again.’ His eyes stare at her, haunted. Then he turns and purposefully walks away through the shop without looking back. There is no explanation, no word of comfort. She stands rooted to the spot, looking at his departing figure. When he has disappeared, she runs through the shop and back to the car park and drives unsteadily away.
She knows that whatever happens, her marriage is over and she tells her husband this. There is little recrimination. Both realise they have tried and failed to improve the state of their marriage. At Christmas, when Tim and Rebecca are home, they will talk to their children about it, then Mike will move out and go to live with the woman he loves. She will stay in the house until it is sold.
There are no tidings of comfort and joy. Liz learns later that David has driven up and down the main road several times on Christmas afternoon, in the vain hope of glimpsing her out walking. She does indeed go for a lonely walk, but they manage to miss one another.
A month later, they meet by chance at the house of a mutual friend. She still has no idea of the reason for his decision and forces him to tell her about the Church's ultimatum. Within a week, he is writing to her again. The following month they meet. It is as though they have never been apart.
Rumours are rife in the village. At times there is a lull, but not for long and never completely. At other times, she is cast adrift in the peaks and troughs, feeling herself battered and bruised by the flotsam that is flung at her. For him it is worse, for he is hung around with all the vestments of his life that he swore to jettison – and has not the courage to let go.
Eventually she decides to move away from the village in which she has lived for so many years.
It is his idea that she look at an area to the east of where she has lived. She hasn’t heard the names of any of the small villages that long ago formed the focus of the farming communities, before the Victorians joined them together with iron rails and built stations to afford them a certain notoriety. Now the stations are shut and the farms struggle to survive. She suspects that the reason for his suggestion lies less in a consideration of her welfare and more in a desire to move her out of harm’s way ‘over the border’, but she keeps her counsel. He comes with her one day to view the property from the outside, but he will not let her arrange to take him in. He might be recognised and it wouldn’t do, in any case, for them to be thought of as a couple. But he likes the cottage. He thinks she will be happy there.
She has never considered houses that important. It is people that are important. As long as she is with the people she loves and who love her, she can live anywhere. Up until now there have always been her children, but now they have left home and there is no love left. When she finds the railway cottage, however, it is love at first sight.
It has, of course, many imperfections, some of which she doesn’t find until after she moves in. In time, she will learn that there is rising damp, that the tall ceilings attract the heat and leave her shivering at ground level and that the roof light in the kitchen leaks, but when she arrives there has been a heatwave for several days. Ivy covers the red brickwork. Honeysuckle tangles round the door. She stoops to avoid its drooping tendrils and its exquisite aroma fills her nostrils. The living room is stuffy from its two days spent under lock and key. She flings open the windows and leaves the door wide. The cat, freed from his cage, strolls outside to examine the front garden, before sitting down at the edge of the fish pond to admire its inhabitants.
The cottage is her refuge, her sanctuary, her port in the storm. No one can reach her there. Very few people know where she has gone. Safely installed, she can relax. The gossip surrounding her flitting is, as friends predict, a nine days’ wonder.
The garden between her house and the muddy track leading to the row of cottages is small but has a variety of mature shrubs and trees, some of them outgrowing the narrow space.
A few days later he comes to visit. The heatwave is continuing. They sit in the garden, drinking tea. With no more than a flicker of warning, a nine-carriage express train hurtles past. For a few seconds, the noise in the still air is conversation-stopping. Then the train is gone, its departure singing up the wires. He curses it beneath his breath.
‘I don’t know how you can stick that sound,’ he says grimly.
‘Whose suggestion was it that I move here?’ she responds evenly.
Summer gives way to autumn. She begins to decorate. The bedrooms are first in line. She is busy at work, there are long drives at the start and finish of each clinic, but, even so, there are days when she can spend hours up the ladder. It is usually when she is at the top of her stretch with a paintbrush that the phone rings and he wants to talk.
She puts no demands on him. She does not ask him to visit, waits for him to say that he will, always puts aside anything that she has planned so as not to inconvenience him.
‘Let’s see what happens in the future,’ he says.
But things will only happen in the future if we make the decision to make them happen, she thinks. And is that what he really wants?