Another Life: Escape to Cornwall with this gripping, emotional, page-turning read

скачать книгу бесплатно


‘Mum and Nell give the bantams names.’

‘Yes, and you know what a fuss they both make when one goes missing or the fox gets into the pen. Bad enough to lose livestock without giving them damn silly names to make it worse … Women rushing around the yard squeaking … “Oh! Oh! Virginia Woolf has fallen off her perch … Dear, dear … Freda is headless … Fie, fie, Elton John has been in a fight and lost his pretty little tail feathers … ”’ Charlie had bounded around the kitchen throwing Nell’s apron over his head, giving little girly skips and talking in a falsetto.

Josh, by now hysterical with laughter, would decide he must be a man like his father and they would all sit down and happily devour number six. To be a vegetarian on a farm would have been like being evangelical in a strict Roman Catholic household.

‘I’ll be back in a while,’ she said to the cow. ‘I’m just going to check my answer-machine.’

Taking tea into her workroom she saw there were three messages. Message number one was from Josh, telling her she should get a mobile as he could never get hold of her. He sounded husky and dispirited. They were never off the parade ground. He was worried he would fail his next fitness test. He was finding out about suitable places for Charlie, Nell and Gabby to stay … if he ever passed out. He would ring again on Sunday … He was really looking forward to a weekend home.

Message number two was from Peter Fletcher.

‘Gabrielle. We considered your quote very reasonable indeed, even our mutual councillor friend. An official letter is in the post.

‘My other reason for ringing you is Mark Hannah. Before he goes back to London he’s keen to go and see the figureheads at Valhalla on Tresco. Unfortunately, I’m completely tied up with meetings next week. Forgive me if this is an imposition, Gabrielle, but would you be free to fly over on the helicopter with him? We will, of course, pick up the tab. It seems inhospitable to send him on his own when he has done so much for us. I will quite understand if you are too busy. Could you give me a ring on this number …?’

Gabby shakily put her tea down on her desk. Message number three.

‘Hi there, Gabriella. Peter gave me your number, do hope you don’t mind. He couldn’t get an answer so he left a message. Is there any chance of you having the time to accompany me to Tresco to see the figureheads? I would sure love to see them. I’d be grateful if you could let me know as I need to book my train ticket back to London …’

The sun was setting below the fields. Shadows lengthened across the stubby lawn outside. Bantams pecked the grubs in noisy little groups like fussy old women at a W.I. meeting. Gabby sat very still, pulling a thread from the hem of her tee-shirt. If she did not pick up the phone and dial his number this instant she would not be able to do it. She opened her diary to see which day she would be least missed from the farm, then, feeling sick, she picked up the phone and dialled Mark Hannah’s number.

As she waited for him to answer, the sun slid away, and despite the flushed sky, dusk descended quickly. Damp rose up from the grass and into the open window. In the kitchen behind her, Nell switched on the six o’clock news and lights sprang up suddenly, away on the far peninsula. A fleeting sadness, an ache, a sensation of being beyond the warmth of lighted windows, of being extrinsic within a house she knew and people she loved, descended on Gabby.

In the darkening room there was just her, holding a phone which was ringing out into a hotel room where a man lay on a bed with his hands behind his head, watching, as she did, evening come, with a sudden longing for home; for the smell of cooking and laughter and bottles of wine being opened, of small children being bathed. The safe embodiment of a familiar routine.

He lay still, waiting to see if the phone would ring, and when it did he could not answer it, as if frozen by the knowledge of what answering it might mean. Just as Gabby gave a shaky sigh of relief and made to replace the receiver, Mark Hannah, in one swift movement, turned and grabbed his up from the bedside table, aware as he did so of a premeditated and deliberate crossing from a place of safety, to something quite else.

In the early hours of the morning Charlie and David, the vet, fought to save number four and her calf. The cow managed after a long, painful labour to give birth to a healthy heifer, but collapsed and haemorrhaged immediately afterwards. Gabby knelt by her head, talking to the old cow and stroking her trembling limbs. Nell brought out more hot water and they put a blanket over her to try to minimize the shock of a difficult birth.

She managed to turn and nuzzle her calf to her shaky, stick-like feet and then she gave up the fight and with a tired, sad little sound the breath left her body. The calf bellowed and slid down to the floor again, nuzzling her mother for milk. They watched her suckling, then, still leaning against her mother, the calf fell asleep. Charlie rubbed her gently down with straw, admiring her.

‘That’s a good calf you’ve got there,’ David said, ‘but I’m sorry we lost the mother. Is there a cow you can try her with, rather than hand-rearing?’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Just one. She lost a bull calf last week. She’s young and skittish, so I don’t know if she will accept this one, but I’ll certainly try her.’

They moved out of the barn into the cool dark night.

‘Come and have a drink, David,’ Nell said. ‘Gabby, go to bed, you look exhausted.’

‘Yes, go on Gab, I won’t be long.’

‘Goodnight,’ David smiled at her before the men turned to follow Nell to her cottage.

Gabby walked across the yard to the house, the image of the dying cow still with her. She knew that it did not matter how long you farmed, you never got used to losing a healthy animal.

She showered quickly, then climbed into bed and lay on her back trying to relax. She switched her small radio on low and listened to the comfortable ragbag of the World Service and tried to drift off. She wanted to be asleep before Charlie tripped exhausted up the stairs, full of Nell’s whisky.

Gabby knew the pattern of Charlie’s drinking after a long hard day. If she was still awake she could time Charlie’s clumsy movements in the dark. He would wash his hands but would be too tired to shower. He would fall into the bed beside her with a grunt of relief and either reach out for her or fall asleep in a second on his back and start to snore gently.

Gabby preferred the latter. The smell of straw and disinfectant would still cling to him, mingling with the not altogether unpleasant sweat of hard labour. With whisky blurring any moral sensibility he would mumble in her ear, push her nightdress up to her waist, part her knees roughly with his, enter her, come immediately, or, worse, complete this isolating little act with difficulty.

Gabby would lie under him, looking out through the open curtain at the night sky, detaching herself from her inert body being rammed rhythmically under his. As he rolled off her, already asleep, Gabby would feel the bleakness of the spirit confronted by the inevitable fact of its separateness from another human being. She saw in her mind the cockerel pouncing on his bantams or the bull in the field clumsily mounting a heifer.

If Gabby was aware, in the telling and unforgiving dark, that her passivity in allowing her body to be used was colluding with the act itself, she would have had to face, head on, her own facility for smoothing over all cracks to maintain the polished facade of what she believed a marriage to be.

It was easier not to confront. Charlie would not have understood the word violation, and it seemed too strong a word for something that lasted minutes and did not hurt the flesh, only left the soul in a cold, dark place. It was simpler to make some areas of her marriage off limits.

If Gabby had understood that by avoiding communicating to Charlie on any intimate level she denied him the chance of acknowledging any responsibility for the way he sometimes behaved, she would have had to own that she did not have the courage to go there. She was comfortable, on the whole, in the place she occupied, in the marriage she had. Two people who shied carefully away from emotional intimacy. And she was sure Charlie was, too.

Tonight she slept and was only dimly aware of Charlie falling into bed beside her. He patted her bottom. ‘G’night,’ he mumbled.

‘’Night,’ she mumbled back, and, feeling sudden affection, ‘Sorry about number four, Charlie.’

But Charlie was already asleep. In three hours he would have to get up for milking.

Chapter 9 (#ulink_dcbe1f92-106b-5ea5-8e4d-56b1b96797b5)

Gabrielle and Mark stood before the figureheads in the peace of an early morning. The helicopter had departed with a roar back to Penzance and the only other people in the Abbey Gardens were the gardeners, unseen and silent. A spade stood upright in the soil, a robin pecked in the new-turned earth. A jacket lay folded on a bench, there was the sound of someone sweeping a path and the smell of damp blooms mixed with spearmint rose from the ground.

They had permission to go into the gardens before they opened to the little ferryboats full of tourists and gardening clubs. They walked silently, along paths that curled round vast tropical plants and beds of succulents of such colour and variety that occasionally they stopped in their tracks, awed by the sheer scale of the planting.

‘Each time I come I think of The Secret Garden,’ Gabby whispered, as if her voice might shatter the illusion of paradise. ‘There’s always a spade or a fork placed just so, yet I’ve never seen anyone working.’

Mark smiled. ‘Perhaps the gardeners are from some other world. Nothing would surprise me here. What an amazing place! There’s something mystical and timeless about being inside a walled garden.’

Rounding a corner they came upon a clearing and there before them lay Valhalla Museum, with the array of figureheads, bright against the lush undergrowth, extraordinary in their garish beauty. Mark drew in his breath, and Gabby, turning to look up at him, thought how open and un-English he was; unafraid to show his excitement.

They both stood silently admiring while the birds swooped and darted fearlessly at their feet, for there was little in these lush gardens to threaten them. They moved closer to examine the carvings. Gabby was especially interested in the faces, because on the St Piran figurehead the face and neck were going to be most difficult to restore.

‘Trophies of the sea,’ Mark murmured. ‘Each figurehead an individual offering of respect and affection, regardless of whether they were carved by a naïve seaman or a carver of distinction.’

Staring into an enigmatic wooden face with eyes that gave nothing away, Gabby thought of the figurehead carvers and of the sailors who had manned the ships and watched as their figureheads rose and plunged out of the waves, carrying them precariously to battle in the duty of a monarch.

How many lives, from the moment of carving to the moment of her ship sinking and being salvaged, did a carved face touch in so many different ways? Gabby could see in her mind’s eye a Napoleonic battle or a great storm breaking up a galleon. The sails unfurling at speed, masts falling with a great crack, like trees, and the screams of men jumping away from the sinking ship to drown in the angry waters.

There the ship would lie on the seabed, broken, its hull becoming a sad skeleton over the years as seaweed and barnacles enveloped it. Then, one day, divers would descend; the salvage men, swimming round the wreck in slow-moving sequence with waving arms and excited thumbs-up as they discovered a poignant wooden face, staring blindly upwards, the heart and soul of the dead vessel. They would bring her up from that fathomless dark to see once more the light of day and the lives of men.

Gabby became conscious of Mark staring at her in the amused way he had.

‘Come back,’ he said softly. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I was just thinking that each figurehead must have a story, a life of its own, and we’ll never know what it was, we can only imagine it.’

‘You would be surprised how much we can learn from a ship, Gabriella. Like compiling a profile we can build a history, based on fact. We might never discover all the names and faces of those who built or sailed in the ships, but with a date and a time we can catch a glimpse, find records, form an idea of the way these mariners lived their lives.

‘We don’t have records of the building of the early ships because the shipwrights were often illiterate so no plans were drawn up. However, models were made and some of these survive and are as beautifully detailed as the real ships.’

They moved around the display of figureheads: a sailor, a king, a damsel, a god.

‘Did the figureheads become a way of denoting wealth or origin, or just a way of honouring a monarch or a country?’ Gabby asked. ‘I know the Vikings had them on their ships until the thirteenth century and then they changed the front of their boats for war or something. We had to draw eleventh-century Viking boats from the Bayeux Tapestry endlessly at school and I’m afraid I was bored rigid.’

Mark laughed. ‘I’m probably boring you now, Gabriella. The figureheads became superfluous when the Vikings developed the forecastle on the front of their boats. But before that happened the Viking longships carried serpents and dragons. There were two in the British Museum, as well as on the Bayeux Tapestry, which you must have seen, depicting William of Normandy’s invasion fleet of 1066, all decorated with lion and dragon figureheads.’

Gabby said hastily, ‘I’m not in the least bit bored. There is a huge difference between being taught by a bored nun with no interest in the subject herself, and going to the British Museum, which I loved. Or standing here in front of figureheads, some of which have been pulled up somewhere out there on the rocks …’ She gestured towards the sea.

Mark stood looking down at her. Gabby had never met anyone who looked as if they were always about to laugh, as if life itself was one huge joke. It did not fit in, somehow, with her idea of a historian.

He turned back to the figureheads, casually placing a hand under her elbow.

‘A figurehead could be many things. Originally it was most likely religious. The head of an animal sacrificed to appease a sea god. Then it would have become symbolic and a means of identification. The Egyptian ships had figures of holy birds or eyes painted on the sides of the bows so the ship could see. The Phoenicians used horse heads symbolizing speed, and the Greek rowing galleys favoured bronze animals, usually a boar’s head, their most hunted and frightening animal …’

Gabby listened to Mark Hannah’s fluid and easy voice. It had a beautiful rhythm and symmetry. His enthusiasm was catching, making it all the more … seductive shot into her mind, and she jumped away from his hand under her elbow as if this thought could transfer itself up her arm into his hand.

‘Can you give me five minutes?’ Mark was rummaging in his haversack and brought out a small tape recorder. ‘I just want to make some notes, then we can go look for a coffee?’

‘Of course.’

Gabby wandered away. She could hear voices now, the day was waking up and the gardens would be open soon. Visitors would begin to stream in and the helicopter would return. The ferry would arrive at St Mary’s and the small boats would chug to and fro from the islands, depositing visitors until dusk.

She sat on the grass cross-legged and closed her eyes and held her face up to the sun. She felt an unaccountable surge of happiness. Scilly always felt like another country. Only a few miles of water separated them from the mainland and yet it always felt abroad.

Gabby felt that small, familiar tug of longing which surfaced occasionally and which she would quickly squash. A sensation that the world was flowing fluidly on without her. It was not unhappiness, it was not boredom. She could never catch and hold on to the feeling. It slid slyly away from her, as if momentarily her soul had migrated to a dry desert, a landscape without feature or water, or enough life to sustain her.

Like running through sand, she knew that beyond the horizon there was an oasis, a lighted city twinkling and pulsing with life, but somehow her feet could never retain the momentum to reach that place of light and laughter. The days of her life slid by in an effortless rhythm, each day dissolving into the next with little change or interruption, each day forming a pattern, a whole, indivisible except for the tiniest domestic detail.

Since Josh left home she had started to get up early with Charlie in order to get through her work. Each morning she took Shadow for a walk across the top field and down the coastal path to the small cove. She would watch the sea mist lift to reveal another day, then she would return to the house to cook Charlie’s breakfast, already thinking about the painting waiting in her workroom.

After hours working, stiff, she would get up from her chair and stretch, lean out of the window perfectly content, and a sudden yearning for something indefinable would swoop, a burning ache, deep in her bones, for something to break the continuity of the measureless days.

Behind her the faint sound of the soft Canadian drawl had stopped. Her back prickled, the heat of her body felt strange to her. She kept her eyes closed, focusing on the sun blobs behind her eyelids, merging into the soft noises around her and the heady, dizzy smell of flowers.

What she felt in every nerve of her body and what she determinedly allowed herself to think were horribly diverse. It made her want to run away down the narrow paths dripping with flowers like bright jewels. It felt too bright, too nightmarishly large and foreign and unknown. An unmapped landscape, the geography a language she had never learnt and felt stunned to recognize.

She opened her eyes when Mark blocked out the sun. He was standing in front of her, not smiling, his expression unreadable as he gazed down upon her. She looked up into his eyes and they were both still, staring at one another. She glimpsed a sudden hesitancy, a fleeting loneliness or vulnerability.

The strength of emotion that flooded Gabby must have shown in her eyes for Mark smiled suddenly and put out his hand to pull her up from the grass, and somehow, on the narrow paths, where it was necessary to walk close, he forgot to let go of it until they reached the café.