November
As she drove back up the dark farm track with her headlights on full beam, Angela felt increasingly sick, even though nothing at all had been said about what had happened in the yard earlier that week and her mother-in-law had given nothing away – no funny looks, no pointed comments. It was all very odd and the very lack of repercussions had made Angela feel uncomfortable. Was it because she’d stood up for herself? Had what she said sunk in? Perhaps from now on things would be different around the farm. If that was the case, she wished she’d done it sooner!
She could see a light on in the kitchen, its warm glow shining out through the seventeenth century window into the yard. She could just make out Ed at the sink, probably washing the dishes. Tea had been eaten and tidied away before she went out, but Ed had offered to wash up so that she could get off out to Holly’s. His mother had made no comment at the time, but just gone as usual into the sitting room to watch TV. Something as domestic and calm as washing up being done should have reassured Angela. Instead, it raised alarm bells and her throat felt as dry as sandpaper.
She parked up, turned off the engine, and sat for a couple of minutes trying to control her increasing sense of unease. It just wasn’t what she had expected after the last week or so. It didn’t make sense.
As the kitchen door opened and more light spilt out into the yard, she looked across to see Ed standing there, his arms folded across his chest and his legs planted firmly shoulders’ width apart. His body acted like a barricade into the house. He wasn’t smiling. Angela knew her gut instinct had been correct. The temptation to start the car up again and drive away was intense, but she had nowhere to go. Slowly, she pushed open the heavy car door and stepped down into the concrete yard.
‘Angela.’
He never called her by her full name. She made herself approach the kitchen door, praying he would step aside or come towards her with his arms open in a hug. But he didn’t move. This was serious. What had happened?
‘Mother’s gone to stay with her sister.’ His voice was monotone and quiet.
‘What?’ Angela’s heart was beating so fast she thought it was going to shatter into pieces. This was not what she had expected or feared. ‘What happened? I’ve only been gone a couple of hours. She was fine at teatime.’ Angela tried to push past Ed and get into the kitchen to look at the clock on the wall. But he was like a solid piece of granite that would weather time and centuries. Immovable.
Then he relented and let her past. It was a little after eight. Yes, she’d been gone about two and a bit hours. The silence was unbearable. Why didn’t Ed tell her what was wrong with Margaret? Why was he just standing there staring at her? Choosing the right words was proving difficult and she had no idea why, except she felt guilty. Did Ed know about what had gone on the other morning?
In the end, her love for her husband, in spite of how he consistently failed to stand up for her or their marriage, proved too strong. Instead of fear of how he might react, she found tenderness for him.
‘Ed, what’s going on? Are you okay?’ She put her hand on his arms, but they were locked tight. His face was tense and his eyes red – he’d definitely been crying. ‘Ed, my love, please tell me she’ll be okay?’
He nodded, but still didn’t say anything.
‘It’s me, isn’t it? She’s gone because of what I said about going swimming.’ The instant she said it, she regretted it.
Ed moved away from her and back to the sink. He pulled the plug out and swished around in the water to get it to go down the plughole, along with any bits of food that had come off the crockery and cutlery. He was seething and upset, but said nothing, leaving her to assume that she was right. She hated the fact that it was her who had caused him such pain. Was the lake more important to her than him? It was a question she didn’t know the answer to.
‘Angela, I think you knew how Mother would react. How could you believe otherwise?’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘How could you be so selfish?’
‘Selfish?’ The word was terrible to hear and Angela’s whole body was consumed with the same rage she’d felt rise up from her belly the night she’d walked into the sitting room to tell them about the lake. She took a step towards Ed and then made herself stop. Perhaps she had been selfish to do something so inextricably and tragically bound up with this family she’d married into, but it was the only thing she had here that she could call her own and it was precious. Couldn’t her husband see that? Was he so under his mother’s influence that he had no dreams or secrets of his own?
His face was impassive and he wouldn’t look her in the eyes. So that’s it, thought Angela. Emotional blackmail. Whatever had happened to his mother was Angela’s fault. Ed’s face showed her that’s how he felt; he didn’t need to say anything else.
She felt physically sick. When Ed’s mother returned from her sister’s, where did that leave Angela? Without farming blood in her veins, maybe she would never be good enough. Old school, that’s what Ed’s mother was, and she was never going to change, even though Angela knew plenty of farming families where non-farming people had been welcomed in, along with new ideas, fresh energy, and an enthusiasm for much-needed diversification in order to protect the future of the farm.
She’d told Ed when they first met that she didn’t want children and it didn’t seem to bother him at the time. Had his mother been pressuring him about children? Had he told her that he would never produce an heir so long as he was married to Angela? He never spoke about wanting a family or needing the next generation to take over the farm – it was almost as if the only reason he put his life’s energy and focus into acres of upland and flocks of tick-ridden sheep was to keep the memory of his father alive and to make his mother’s last years more bearable.
Angela had lied to him, though. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children, it was that doctors had her told after her miscarriage at fifteen that she was unlikely to be able to have them. Not telling Ed about that time sat heavily with her, but she just didn’t know how to broach the subject after all these years. She’d been raped. The pregnancy was the result of forced sex, not love. She’d been worried he would change his mind about being with her and now she was sure he’d hate her for having lied to him. It was a no-win situation. There had just never seemed to be a good moment to tell him.
What kept her going now, though – and she hated herself for even thinking this – was that if Margaret stayed at her sister’s, then Angela could see a light, or at least a glimmer, at the end of the dark tunnel. She and Ed would be left to run the farm themselves and they were good at that, or maybe they could sell up the farm and start a new life somewhere else, just the two of them – what a relief that would be!
‘Ed, listen to me. Your mother and I had words, yes, but we can work this out. I’m so sorry she felt she had to do this. Please tell me what happened. How long will she be there? Please talk to me.’ Her voice sounded shriller than she wanted it to, but that nauseous feeling had turned to panic. Angela shook her head and plonked herself down on one of the kitchen chairs.
‘She’s staying indefinitely.’
Those words were like a huge full stop at the end of the conversation, but she needed to hear them. The next few days would be significant and might even give her the opportunity to have a real conversation with him, get everything off her chest and out in the open. But she could tell that nothing else was going to happen tonight. Ed had reached his limit and needed time to work out how he was going to deal with the situation.
He left her sitting in the harsh fluorescent-lit kitchen. The space he had left was almost instantly filled with the greasy smell of recent cooking and the slightly antiseptic own brand washing up liquid drifted up and worsened the nausea she already felt. She tried to hold it back, but she only just made the sink in time before everything she’d consumed over the last few hours poured out of her small body. And again. Until there was just a rusty taste in the back of her throat from the effort of retching. The taste instantly whisked her back twenty-seven years to when she had just wanted to die because of shame and the damage that she had suffered, both emotionally and physically.
She’d been sick like this every day for a few weeks, which was how she’d known the seed of violation and abuse had germinated. When the vomiting had stopped on the seventh week, instead of feeling relief, she had felt fear. What now? Did this mean the baby was no longer living? Or would she now start to grow a belly and have to hide away even more from her parents and friends? She was only fifteen – not a child, but not an adult either. The father of what was growing inside her lived in her street and she hated him.
Towards the end of that seventh week, all feeling of being pregnant had vanished and the bloody mess that passed from her one morning into the toilet bowl looked nothing like a tiny human being. But she cried. She cried for her innocence, which had been flushed down into the sewer, along with the evidence of a heinous crime. But most of all, she cried for the knowledge that even if she ever could bring herself to be intimate with a man again, she wouldn’t be able to enjoy any pleasure –not with the images of the toothless, dribbling old man who had raped her digging his puny but still functioning penis into that most private, sacred part of her, back and forth so fast that his eyes rolled like the devil back into his head and she prayed he would have a heart attack.
On the ninth week, she’d been rushed to hospital bleeding: the miscarriage had not been complete, so they’d had to perform some emergency surgery, which caused some damage to her uterus.
Still, she kept the identity of the man who raped her a secret and made up a boyfriend to keep her parents from further questioning.
But the perpetrator had watched her, and she had never dared tell her mother what their ‘friendly’ neighbour had done during the holidays while she’d been out at work. He was an old man who sat in his front garden in the summer watching the children play on the communal grass area. He walked his scrawny dog round the same patch of green twice a day, both of them slow and grey. Physically impossible, they’d say. They’d laugh at her. So she had kept silent.