After our brief conversation, baby Hope started crying, so the man, whose name I should really have known by now, spent a while changing her nappy and giving her a bottle and walking up and down until she would settle, just long enough for him to put her back in the baby chair where she’d start bawling again.
‘I think we’ll try a walk,’ he said, after the third attempt. ‘She normally spends Fridays with my mum, and I’m supposed to be in a video call at three. She really needs to go to sleep.’
‘What time is it now?’
‘Two-thirty.’
‘I could take her for a walk?’
He looked me up and down. ‘I’ll see if Ziva’s still in the orchard. She won’t mind.’
Before stuffing Hope back into her ski-suit and wheeling her out in the giant pushchair from the kitchen, he brought me an oversized rainbow jumper and silver leggings that I could tell with one glance belonged to Charlie, and offered me the use of the shower.
‘Help yourself to more tea, and whatever food you can find. Apart from the bananas – they’re Hope’s.’
‘Thank you. And I’m sorry again for wrecking your day.’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry for upsetting you, too.’
And with that, I was all alone in the farmhouse of a man I’d only just met and whose name I didn’t know, about to shower and change into someone else’s clothes. ‘Are you taking the mickey, here, Charlie?’ I whispered into the silence. ‘Landing me in one of your adventures?’
I might have heard the echo of a giggle wafting in from the kitchen, but by then I was crying again, so it was impossible to tell for sure.
My host found me much later, crashed out with my face stuck to the kitchen table. I woke with a start, followed by a yelp as my sore muscles protested at the movement.
‘Has my car arrived?’ I asked, once I’d accepted some painkillers and a glass of water, wincing with the pain of moving my head enough to swallow without spilling.
‘Yes. But… you really aren’t fit to drive.’
‘I’m not going far. I’ll be fine.’ What else was I going to do?
‘Ziva said you needed to be kept an eye on for at least the rest of the day.’ He took a small plastic bowl from the pile on the draining board, peering at it before giving it a wipe with a tea-towel.
‘There’ll be people there to keep an eye on me.’
‘Where?’
‘What?’
‘Where is this place, and who are the people there who can take care of you?’
‘With all due respect,’ and I owed him plenty of that, all things considered, ‘that’s not really your business.’
‘I think you’d best stay the night here,’ he sighed, lifting a banana from a bowl on the table and starting to mash it up, Hope banging out her anticipation on the tray of the highchair.
‘I can’t stay here!’ I mustered as much indignation as I could, given my current shambolic state. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘I don’t massively want you to stay here, either. But you’re Charlie’s best friend. She invited you. I can’t let you head off in that excuse for a car when we both know that you haven’t a clue where you’re going.’
‘Er, have you considered that I might think driving a short distance in my recently garage-inspected car to a nearby Travelodge on the way to my parents’ house is far safer than spending the night in the middle of nowhere with a strange man whose name I don’t even know?’
‘Daniel Perry.’
‘Daniel?’ I repeated, as another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. ‘You’re Charlie’s brother.’
‘Well, yes. Who did you think I was?’
‘Hope’s father.’
‘I am Hope’s father.’ He took a seat next to her, offering her one plastic spoon to wave about while he scooped banana onto the other one.
‘What?’ My brain was too tired to process this.
‘I adopted her.’
‘So… does she have a biological father?’
‘Well, she’s not a clone.’ He bristled, clearly not comfortable with the conversation taking this direction. ‘Charlie never said who it was. I don’t think she ever told him.’
He didn’t add: if she even knew who it was.
‘And you adopted Hope?’
He shrugged, using the spoon to wipe up a blob of food on the baby’s cheek like a pro. ‘She’d been living here since she was born. I was hardly going to pack her off to social services.’
‘What about your mum?’ Charlie’s mum, Billie, who I’d met the few times she’d picked Charlie up from university, and with whom I’d exchanged anxious (me) and resigned (her) conversations a few times since.
‘She lives in Ferrington, now. She sold off most of the land and then married and moved out a couple of years after Dad died. She couldn’t fit a baby into her cottage.’ He paused, ran a finger absentmindedly down his scar. ‘She hasn’t been back to the farm since Charlie’s funeral.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
I wondered how Daniel had managed it. Juggling work, grieving for his sister, dealing with the aftermath of such tragedy as well as a baby. No wonder the house was a shambles.
‘Charlie never mentioned that Billie remarried.’
‘She didn’t know until afterwards. Mum wanted a quiet wedding. No drama. Charlie wasn’t in a good place around then.’
I did some mental calculations. Charlie’s dad had suffered a fatal heart attack not long after we started renting a flat together in London, four years ago. I was twenty-six. So Billie married when we were twenty-eight. I’d moved to a new flat by then. Charlie had left two days before Christmas and I’d given up waiting for her to come back (or pay any rent). I remembered a message on Valentine’s Day:
Wishing my 1 true love a beautiful V-day, hope U get to spend it with someone special.
I replied several times, messaging and calling to ask where she was and to let me know if she was okay. One reply arrived, a few days later:
Yh I’m cool met a guy who got me a waitress job, bit mad out here but fun.
That was the last time I heard from her until the final messages, sent just over a year ago:
BACK AT THE FARM. WHY AREN’T U HERE?? PLEEEEEEAAASE VISIT. STAYING FOR GOOD THIS TIME. LOTS OF NEWS, I’LL EXPLAIN WHEN UR HERE.
I’d sent a brief message explaining that I had work engagements booked out for several months ahead, but I’d see what I could do. She sent one last reply:
EL I NEED U! It’s different this time. PROMISE. Please come whenever you can xxx
But I’d grown tired of Charlie’s chaotic interruptions, hurtling back into my life, letting me down and disappearing again. Also, if I’m honest, because I’d become so caught up in my own life – which had morphed into something I’d never had foreseen – I never got around to it. Until now. When I needed her.
I don’t know quite how or when but, without ever meaning to, at some point I had become a horrible, self-obsessed person.
‘So you’ll stay?’ Daniel asked, snapping me back to the present day. I considered this for a moment. Forced myself to acknowledge my aching limbs, bruised chest, the fog still clogging up my thought processes. Then I tried to picture setting off in the car and hunting for somewhere to sleep before I conked out at the steering wheel. I imagined the look on my parents’ faces when I showed up looking like this.
Damson Farm was shabby and dishevelled, and a little bit dirty, if I’m honest. But this was Charlie’s home, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her yet. Something about this place had wrapped its arms around me and welcomed me in.
Peace.
I realised this later that evening, having managed a bowl of cheap tinned soup and more toast, before Daniel showed me to a bedroom where he’d left my bags neatly lined up against the metal bedframe.
For the first time in forever, despite everything having turned on its head, despite the hideous threats, the turmoil and confusion about my career, I felt cocooned in peace. Maybe because for the first time in forever, I didn’t care about any of those things any more.
No wonder Charlie had loved it here.
It was only when I woke up the following lunchtime that I realised I’d never spoken to Lucy.