I’ve lived in Minster Lovell for six years now. For the first year Simone lived with me almost all the time but afterwards, as I grew stronger, she went back home and only stayed occasionally. For the past two years I’ve lived alone. I go out. I greet my neighbours. Every day, weather permitting, I leave my cottage, the last in the village street, and then I take a few steps upward before quickly turning right and down Church Lane. The old vicarage, close to the bottom of the hill, is where the doctor lives. If I see him pruning or dead-heading his roses – he has a beautiful rose garden – we smile knowingly at each other, then exchange a few pleasantries as if he hasn’t heard everything there is to know about me. The lane ends at Manor Farm, so there I turn right and walk through the grounds of the Cotswold stone church of St Kenelm. I like reading the names on the gravestones and imagining the lives of the folk who have gone before me. The first time I saw how many families had suffered more than one loss of a young child, as I have, it did not make me feel gloomy. Instead I felt an affinity with these people that roots me here in a way I have never felt so strongly before. After the church I usually slip through the atmospheric ruin of Minster Hall, then down to the path where the river Windrush flows, and as I walk among the delicate flowers, the place throbs with the sounds of wild birds, ducks and coots.
I often wonder how we know when we are happy. Is it the absence of worry or the absence of sorrow? Or, in my case, is it because I have found a wonderful, gentle rhythm to my life? The right beat that at last allows me to live with ease and able to appreciate the refreshing simplicity of things. Yet for all of us, happiness is fragile. I’d be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge that.
Something inside me was broken. Maybe it still is. But now I know I can live with it. Before I could not.
I no longer live in a world of ghosts, apart from those who once inhabited Minster Hall and they are not mine alone. And, even though I sometimes strain to hear, the voice is extraordinarily silent. If it ever reappears my forward-thinking Dr Gilbert has taught me to talk to it. Don’t be frightened, he says. He’s taught me it is I who control the voice and not the other way around. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the thick dark night and I feel the dense foliage and the grasping branches of the trees in Rangoon, I fail. Then the past still has power over me, but when dawn curls around my bedroom, gradually lighting every corner, I find my way again. Overcoming difficulty is simply a part of life, the doctor says. For the first five years I lived here I saw him twice a week and there were many, many times I swore it was all a waste of time and money. Now I see him only once a month. He has saved my life and I can never repay his kindness and dedication. He, along with my dearest Simone, has been my greatest friend.
And now there is just one thing left.
I’ve been nursing feelings of guilt and loss over Annabelle for all these years and it’s time to do something about it. I long to see her again and want so much to try to find a way to make up for my neglect of her in the past, if Douglas will permit it.
And so, next week, with much trepidation, I’ll be travelling back along the road I came by. To Cheltenham.