by Carmen Reid
He turned to face her, really losing his temper now: ‘You will do it. Because it has to be done and I’m not staying to do it. You came here with me,’ he spat out.‘You bought this place with me. You said you wanted to do this. But ever since we’ve got here, you’ve run away from it, run away from me. Well, it’s my bloody turn to run away now. See how you like it. You stay here and face the bloody facts, Pamela. Take a good look at this place and decide what you want. And even if you do want to stay here with me, I don’t know yet if I’ll have you. You’re a nightmare right now . . . I can’t cope with you any more. I know it’s hard, I know it’s the worst thing that could have happened to us . . .’ She knew he wasn’t talking about Lachlan, knew he was about to open up the pain they had managed to leave alone for months now.‘Not having children . . .’ there was a break in his voice – ‘But at some point you are going to have to accept it. Really face up to it and move on. Move forward. Move somewhere – and not into some messed up “not important” affair with a married man. You prat.’ He raked a hand through his hair and looked around the room: ‘I thought this place was the answer. I thought you would get some peace, rest . . . a change . . . a chance to get better. Instead you’ve gone even more bonkers than you were before. I mean, what are you thinking? What is going on? I thought you were starting to settle in, but maybe you want to move back to London? Do you want a divorce? I’ve no idea . . . You don’t talk to me any more. I’ve no idea what’s going on.’
‘You’ve cut me out too,’ was the first thing she threw back at him.‘You’re working even longer hours here than you did in town. Every spare moment is spent reading about all sorts of bizarre stuff.’ She went to the kitchen bookcase, hauled out a selection of titles and held them out to him: Five Acre Independence, Greener Than Green and the rest.
‘You’re convinced there’s some plot afoot to poison your land. Don’t you think you’re going more than a little bit bonkers out here yourself?’ she added.
He folded his arms across his chest, glancing at his wristwatch as he did so.
‘Well, thank you, Pamela. That’s given me plenty to think about. Now, I have to leave this enlightening conversation and catch a train.’
‘You’re not taking the car, are you?’
‘You’ll need the Land Rover,’ he shot back, ‘for the deliveries.’
The reality of the days ahead of her while he was away was just beginning to sink in: ‘For God’s sake, Dave . . .’
‘Goodbye, Pamela.’ He picked up the two bags she now saw had been at the back door throughout the row and headed out, managing with his elbow to slam the door shut behind him.
‘Are the cows OK?’ it occurred to her to shout after him.
‘Yes,’ he shouted back.‘They’ll need water later.’
‘I’m not doing this,’ she shouted at him.
‘You bloody are,’ came back at her.
She sat at the table for a full twenty minutes, staring into space, thoughts chasing madly round her head, before it occurred to her to open a bottle of wine and cope with this in the first instance in the time-honoured tradition of drinking too much. She would phone Alex, tell her what had happened, persuade her to come up and stay.
Should she tell her parents? Ted would know . . . would he tell them? She decided she didn’t want to talk to her family yet, didn’t want to face explaining this yet.
Halfway into her second glass of wine, she thought she’d better water the cows. She pulled on boots at the back door, but there was no need for a jacket; despite the showers earlier, it was a warm night, smelled of drying rain, reminded her of Barcelona. Ha! Maybe she should have just stayed there. Then she wouldn’t be out in the dark middle of nowhere with a seriously pissed off husband, heartache for an Aussie farmer – a married-father-of-three Aussie farmer – and days of vegetable picking ahead of her.
But without the farm, where would she be really? Working for Sheila, probably, enduring the daily hell of life at WLI. And wasn’t Norfolk beginning to grow on her just a little? Wasn’t it sneaking up on her how much she liked to wake up to the quiet, the green? The drive through the countryside, instead of the rush from one side of town to the other? The friendliness offered by most of the people she’d met here? It was only the farm and the house she hadn’t settled into . . . part of the endlessly postponed decision about whether she was going to stay with her husband or leave him. He was right: she had run away from it, run away from him.
All this was rattling about her head as she went out to the shed to get the water buckets for Dave’s three small, shy cows. They weren’t even cows, they were ‘heifers’, ‘steers’, whatever – something that meant they were boys.
Beside a tap on the side of the wall were the huge buckets. She filled them up and heaved them into the back of the Land Rover. The cows lapped at the water with pinky blue tongues. From the safety of the other side of the fence, she thought they looked quite sweet. But she would double-check the fence and the gate very carefully. There was no way she was doing any cow herding on her own while Dave was away.
Her mobile was out by her side for the rest of the evening. She shouldn’t have, of course, she shouldn’t have. But it had been too hard to resist, so she had finally sent Lachlan a little, tiny text.
OK now. How u?
Now, she was pretending not to notice that there had been no reply . . . not for two further glasses of wine.
Alex was out. Pamela left brief ‘call me back’ messages on both her phones and sank into the quiet evening ahead of her.
Just as she’d decided she really should go to bed, her phone bleeped at her and she knew at once who it was.
Pete in hospital but going to be OK. Good u OK.
Pls txt for biz only. Lx.
She spent a long time scrolling the words up and down the screen, taking them all in. Pete was in hospital? She wondered what had happened to him in the hours since she’d seen Lachlan.
And then the brutally blunt ‘Pls txt for biz only’. Maybe Rosie had been at his phone? Maybe she knew all about them? Pamela wondered if she would ever find out what Rosie knew. If she and Lachlan would ever be close enough to have the conversation.
Lx.
The first and, no doubt, the last time he would sign off with a kiss. She thought of their few snatched private moments – velvet skin, lean muscles, arms clasped round her, Lachlan moving inside her. Gone. Leading to nothing. Wild slices of time they might both think about now and again, otherwise, absolutely no proof that anything had happened at all . . . Well, except that her husband had somehow found out . . . might divorce her for this.
Chapter Twenty-nine
ALL THROUGH THE first night Pete spent in hospital, Rosie had stayed by his bed and tried to keep awake so that she would be there when he came round. Over and over again she imagined the TV perfect moment when she would see the first flutter of his eyelashes, when he would open his eyes and say, ‘Mummy.’ But when Pete did wake up, she had finally fallen into a doze and was roused by the sound of him being sick. Never had she been so glad to see child-puke.
‘Feel sick,’ he’d announced and promptly thrown up all over the bed again.
In the days that followed, it was obvious that Pete was going to make a complete recovery and Rosie could feel at least one great knot of tension inside her gradually loosening. But she stayed on at the hospital for the three days and nights of scanty sleep it took before they would let Pete come home.
She wanted to be with her little boy. But also, she didn’t want to be at home, facing Lachlan, until she was ready. She nursed her fury for him. In the grey hours of the night in the chair beside Pete’s bed, she tried to cope with the pain of his betrayal, and wondered where she was to go from here.
Lachlan came at visiting time without the other children, spoke mainly to Pete, made nothing but small talk to his wife because this wasn’t the place to have the blow-up with bells on that they both knew was coming.
When Pete came home,
they drove back from the hospital in the Isuzu, all five of them together: Lachlan, Rosie and their three children, the nurses smiling at them, looking to outsiders like such a happy family.
Back at home, Willy and Manda were touchingly sweet to their brother. Pete, drained by the excitement of the journey and his return, was ordered to lie and rest under a blanket on the sofa. There, Willy triumphantly brought him the golf club which had caused the damage.
‘Here, you can keep this,’ he told Pete.‘This is the club I hit you with – by mistake,’ he added quickly.‘Look, I think that brown stuff is your blood.’
They both spent some time examining it with fascination, scraping out the grooves on the head, trying to decide what was dirt and what was blood. Finally, Pete tucked it in under the cover beside him.
Manda, sensing that the occasion required gift-giving, got her favourite dog out from her cot and trailed it down the stairs for Pete to tuck in beside him.‘Dwog,’ she told her brother, trailing drool onto his chest, one of her cheeks a hot red as back teeth made a painful breakthrough. Then she clambered back onto Rosie’s knee, overjoyed to have her mother back, determined not to let this woman out of her sight ever again.
Lachlan offered to make supper and all evening, while the children were awake, their parents were polite, almost unusually civil to each other. Rosie watched him smiling and joking with his children and wondered if he had any idea how angry she was with him. Just wait, she thought, just wait! She had been suspicious in the past, but this was the first time she knew. And she was determined to make sure that it was never, ever going to happen to her again.
They put the children to bed early and the sight of the three of them cuddled up in their beds – Willy protesting through yawns that he wasn’t tired – took some of her anger away. They were all there, safe and sound: Pete with a fresh dressing over his stitches, almost asleep already, so happy to be back home.
Lachlan put an arm round her waist as they left the room and squeezed, felt it too, the relief that they were all here . . . all OK now.
‘I’ve got stuff to do upstairs,’ she told him in the corridor outside the children’s room.
‘I’ll do the kitchen then come up and help you,’ he offered. She nodded in reply but was seething again. Oh, he would come and help, would he? As if a sudden interest in domestic chores could redeem him.
When he came up to the bedroom to join her, she was folding washing on the bed and he picked some of the clothes up and began to help, annoying her with his clumsy, botched attempts. His things were all odd shapes which wouldn’t fit into their piles in the drawer now.
‘I’ve just looked in on them,’ he told her.‘They’re all asleep. All fine.’
She didn’t make much of an answer to this, wondering what he might try to talk about next.
He chose Pete, repeated what they both knew about his recovery and the doctors’ instructions for his care. Then he moved on to the picking squad and how he’d managed to find some replacement foreign students.
‘OK,’ she interrupted him finally, feeling the surge of adrenalin hit her veins, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this. It doesn’t matter what you try to talk about . . . I’m not going to forget what’s happened.’
He made no reply to this, just leaned back on the bed.
She remained standing, heart hammering – too bad – she was going to get it all off her chest. She was going to say all the things she wanted to.
‘How long have you been seeing her?’ she demanded first of all.‘And don’t even think about lying to me.’
‘For a few weeks, just now and then . . .’ There wasn’t much he could do to soften this blow.‘It’s over now, Rosie. Totally over. I’m sorry.’
‘Well, I’m not having this.’
For a moment, he thought she was going to cry, but then saw her blink, swallow and cross her arms.‘I’m not having this,’ she repeated.‘And you know what, I’m beginning to think you’ve done this before, haven’t you?’
He shook his head, not trusting himself to speak, frightened a denial would just give more away. But she took the shaking head and silence as an admission of guilt.
‘And with such a townie,’ she added, beyond furious with every single aspect of what he’d done, even that.‘With some dressed-up, high-heeled townie. I didn’t even think she was your type.’
He shook his head again and made no reply.
‘Well, I’ve obviously been wrong all these years. I should have worn skirts, low-cut tops. Maybe then, you’d have been faithful to me.’
‘Rosie, please, stop this. You’re way over the top. It was a mistake. A big mistake. It really didn’t mean anything.’
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There would be no big apology, he wasn’t pleading with her to take him back, the way she’d imagined. He was actually daring to get angry with her, suggesting that somehow she was making too much fuss. Ha! He hadn’t even begun to understand what a fuss she was going to make.
‘It didn’t mean anything?’ she spat back at him.‘Well, what a big stupid arse you are. You would end our marriage over nothing, would you? For nothing?’
She had his full attention now.
‘Because that’s what’s going to happen, Lachlan. I’m not staying married to some pompous shit who thinks he can screw around and get away with it. How stupid do you think I am?’
Her fear was falling away from her, she could hear all her rehearsed words spilling out . . . and then some. She would let him know just how this felt.
‘You have to go. Now. Tonight. I’ve packed your bags for you.’
To his astonishment, she walked round to his side of the bed and dumped a suitcase and a bulging holdall at his feet.
‘You can come back for your other things later on, but that should do for now,’ she told him.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked her.‘I don’t want to move out.’
‘Oh sorry,’ she fired back.‘Did you think you could stay? Did you think I wouldn’t mind? “Don’t worry, it’s all over, let’s pretend it didn’t happen”? You haven’t even had the sense to apologize properly. Stupid, stupid man.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but it sounded as if it was coming through gritted teeth.
‘No,’ she kicked his holdall towards the bedroom door.‘You’re going. And you know what: you’re sacked. I’m sacking you. I’m the legal executor of this farm and you’re not my manager any more. So take your bags and get out of my life. Go on, you can go back to Adelaide for all I care. I mean it. I really mean it.’
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had never seen her like this: hands on hips, cheeks red, eyes flashing, roaring at him.
‘What are you talking about?’ he countered.‘What about the children?’ Of course he was aware that as her husband, their father, he must have some rights, but didn’t dare to mention them right now. Not with her in this nuclear rage.
‘The children?! It wasn’t them you were thinking of on your little secret meetings with her, was it?’ she thundered back at him.‘I hold all the cards here. You should have thought of that too. It’s my father’s farm, my father’s house, it’s me you work for. I’ll get custody of the children . . . You should have thought of all this.’
Before he could make any reply, she added: ‘I’ve taken money out of the savings account so I can start doing up this hole of a house, no matter what you think. And the rest of it is frozen, so you can’t disappear with it. I’ve spoken to Alan.’
Rosie had already spoken to their solicitor?! When? From the hospital? Lachlan was stunned. For the very first time in his married life, it was occurring to him that he had taken Rosie for granted, taken everything for granted. Always thought she would be here to come back to, that she would never dare go it alone. Now, he was seriously beginning to wonder if he was wrong as the whirlwind of a cheated wife hit him with terrifying force.
‘Rosie, I don’t want to leave you,’ he tried. ‘We’ll
talk about this. But not tonight. You’re very tired. You’ve been in the hospital for days . . . it’s been hell.’
‘Don’t talk to me about what’s been hell,’ she threw back and he heard the break in her voice, the crack of pain in the anger. Shit.
‘You can go to the cottage,’ Rosie told him, as if she was awarding a big concession.‘The one that isn’t finished yet. You can sit in there and think about her day and night. But don’t you dare even consider seeing her there again. On my land!’ This barked out with the ferocity of a landowner staring down the barrels of a shotgun.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, still sitting, legs up, across their bed.‘This is crazy. We are both going to get some sleep and talk about this in the morning.’
Rosie went out of the room without another word and he listened to her footsteps heading down the stairs, along the lino towards the kitchen, but then the distinctive drawn-out creak of the office door being swung open and shut.
Several long minutes passed, then came the creak of the door again and the footsteps returning.
Why had she gone into the office? he wondered.
Her footsteps were near the top of the stairs, turning towards the bedroom, as he guessed – with a jolt of shock – what she might have got down from the carefully locked box on top of the big wood and glass bookcase in the office.
‘Get out,’ Rosie commanded, walking into the room and levelling her father’s antique, but nevertheless extremely accurate, double-barrelled 12-bore Holland & Holland shotgun at her husband.
Fuck!!
‘Whoa, Rosie.’ Lachlan rolled straight off the other side of the bed and stood up to face her, just five and a half feet of king-sized marital mattress between them. Her finger was on the fucking trigger! The visible shake in her hands was terrifying. The bloody thing could go off without her even trying.
‘Never, ever tell her that I knew about the two of you,’ Rosie was saying from behind the gun. He was shaking his head vehemently.‘I don’t ever want her sympathy . . . And anyway, this isn’t about her. This is about us.’
