Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  Marika sensed Gabby’s puzzlement at Josh, who appeared to be avoiding her, and as they walked Marika wondered how she could explain to Gabby what she thought Josh might be feeling. She had been careful not to question him on anything until he felt ready to unload.

  When men were in danger or about to die they often called out for their mothers; Marika knew this, she had heard it. When they survived they viewed this as a weakness and had a need to close off, shut out the child in them. It was understandable.

  Josh’s life was not taken, but he had glimpsed his own mortality, and now knew that even belonging to a military force you believed in did not protect you.

  Marika had seen it in soldiers of her own country. Her male cousin had been beaten, stripped and humiliated by a group of Serbs from his own village, in front of his peers. She hesitated to speak because she knew Gabby might see her as a threat to her close relationship with Josh. As they walked, she tentatively started to tell Gabby about her cousin, and how long it took him to put the violent act behind him.

  ‘His mother was the one person he could never talk to about it. I do not mean Josh’s experience was the same, only that I think most people want to forget bad things and sometimes pretend they never happened.’

  Gabby looked at Marika. She wondered if she had been able to put her childhood, and a life she once lived, so firmly behind her.

  Marika met Gabby’s eyes and knew what she was thinking. She was silent and then she said, ‘No, it is not possible for me to pretend. It is always there inside me, buried, but there … so hard to talk about … because then it is real again, not like a terrible dream … You have to acknowledge it then; This really happened. Silence keeps it at bay. Silence protects the present.

  ‘It is all Josh is doing, Gabby. I think he is afraid that if you are alone you will ask him about it and he will be back in that particular nightmare; vulnerable, and not in control.’

  Gabby said, hurt, ‘I would never question him about anything. Josh must know that.’

  ‘Well, maybe he does, but you are his mother and you are the closest person to him, and I guess that makes him vulnerable because you know him better than anyone.’

  They had reached the bottom of the cliff path and crossed the cove for the narrow path up to the next cove and Elan’s cottage.

  ‘I suppose,’ Gabby said slowly, ‘there is an overriding need, if you are a mother, to know your children are safe, mentally and physically … and it is this tendency to automatically protect, as you would a child, that threatens the grown adult you love.’

  Marika stopped and turned to her; ‘Yes! Gabby this is exactly right, you have hit the nail on the nose!’

  ‘Head!’ Gabby smiled, delighted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hit the nail on the head!’

  ‘Oh!’ Marika laughed too.

  They perched on a boulder before the climb uphill and looked down at the sea swirling in on the rocks just below them. The waves were quite dramatic and Marika shivered.

  ‘I am in awe of the sea. I do not understand how Josh or anyone can dare go into those cruel waves and surf. My brother and sister shared a boat, they loved the water; but I am like my mother, I like my feet on the land.’

  ‘Tell me about your mother,’ Gabby said.

  ‘She is very happy with my stepfather. They have a little boy. She has grown to love England, although of course it was very difficult for her at first.’

  ‘I imagine it must have been.’

  Marika was staring straight ahead at the sea and her body was tense.

  ‘She had this need to protect me, Gabby, all the time, even when we were safe in England and nothing more terrible could happen. It was like being buried in her pain. I felt I was wrapped in a shroud because I was the only one she had of another life; I was all she had left of a whole family. The responsibility was … terrible.

  ‘I hurt her. I asked if I could be sent away to an English boarding school like other army children my age. I wanted to get away because while I was with her that other life we had lived stood between us and the future. I was not able to get on and pretend I was an English girl of fifteen who had not lost her father and elder brother and sister … but she dare not let go of me …’

  Marika turned away from the sea and looked down at her hands. Gabby sat very still.

  ‘At first, my mother lived her new English life as if it was the only one she had ever known. She threw herself into being an English army wife, frantically volunteering for everything, maybe because she was so grateful to be alive.

  ‘Then she got pregnant with my little brother and …’ Marika swallowed ‘… she slowly began to fragment. It was very frightening to watch her disintegrating a little more each day … She had always been so brave and strong …’

  Marika’s hands trembled and Gabby reached out to take one.

  ‘Marika …’

  ‘It is all right.’ Marika’s fingers curled round Gabby’s. ‘It is just I have never spoken of it, even to Josh. Now my mother is so together you could not believe she was once so broken … She was lucky. She had my stepfather. Army men are not known for their sensitivity, but he is special. He did not call in doctors or therapists, he took my mother away to Italy for a month and he listened to all the things she had never told him, even though he had been there and seen much, and could understand as others could not. He listened and he listened and he let my mother grieve openly for all that she had lost … Helped her to see that having another child in another life did not negate or betray the children she had lost. He is a wise and clever man.’

  Marika’s hand tightened on Gabby’s and her voice wobbled. ‘You see, my father was shot in our cellar in front of her, at the beginning of the war, while my sister and I were at school. They told her that if she closed her eyes they would shoot to wound him, bit by bit, so she kept her eyes open.’

  ‘Marika!’

  ‘I was the only member of my family not to be hurt. Everyone else but me; my father, my brother and my sister. I carry the guilt of it.’

  Gabby took her hands, would have loved to hug her fiercely to her.

  ‘Marika, you must not feel guilty for being alive …’ My God! What right had she to be sad? She had lost no one.

  ‘I know this of course, with my head but not my heart. I am alive and I was given, with my mother, another chance of happiness. I cannot change the past, Gabby, but I must try and enjoy each day that I have …’

  ‘You make me very humble and ashamed.’

  ‘Why?’ Marika looked at Gabby, startled.

  ‘You look cold, let’s start walking uphill.’

  They climbed the steep path and reached the top puffing. Gabby thought, Marika is totally innocent in the way children are, unafraid to be honest, to say simply what she means and how things are. It’s the courage that comes with having suffered, which strips away cant and shallowness.

  ‘You are a very open and honest person, Marika. I have spent most of my life carefully closed so that no crack of my past escapes. I’ve never been able to talk about my childhood to anyone, not even to the people I love …’

  ‘It is easier talking to strangers, they do not judge.’

  Gabby smiled. ‘I suppose you’re right. When I was very young I made up a make-believe family I talked about at school. My make-believe mother was based on my Aunt Bella … Then she went off to America and got married and I never saw her again … My real mother grew to loathe me as I grew up. She was unmarried and would never tell me who my father was. If I’ve ever been over-involved with Josh, Marika, it’s because I had a mother who never put her foot across a school gate and was rarely there when I got home from school … rarely there at all.’

  Gabby paused. ‘My recurring nightmare is that I am a child again. I’m very ashamed of what I still sometimes feel … when I hear a story like yours.’

  ‘But, Gabby, I have the most wonderful childhood to look back on, to keep here …’ She thumped her chest. ‘I
cannot imagine what I would be like if I had had only one parent, and one who did not care what happened to me every moment of my growing up as my parents did. As you do with Josh. Without love in my childhood I do not think I would ever feel safe. You have managed it, Gabby, Josh says he had a wonderful childhood …’

  ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Marika turned to Gabby. ‘And you have made a happy life for yourself, despite everything.’

  Marika watched an expression pass across Gabby’s face. One she did not understand.

  ‘Is your mother dead?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I should think so, she was an alcoholic.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘When I was seventeen.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘I ran away.’

  ‘For a particular reason?’

  ‘For the reason my mother had a predilection for boyfriends who liked schoolgirls and she never, ever believed me.’

  Marika watched Gabby’s face closing.

  ‘Marika, look to the left, you’ll see the roof of Elan’s cottage. It used to be the coastguard cottage. He’s got a curved granite terrace with a telescope set up over the coast. Josh used to spend hours there … I’m hoping we can persuade him to come back with us for a meal …’

  Marika put her hand on Gabby’s arm and bent her tall, slim body down to kiss Gabby’s cheek in a small quick movement. They stayed close for a second, then Gabby smiled and they walked towards Elan’s front door which was suddenly thrown open and Elan cried, ‘Two beautiful women beating a path to my door … How wonderful!’

  He pointed to his watch. ‘And … it is ten to twelve and the sun is over the yard arm, I can open something special …’

  Gabby grinned at him and turned to Marika. ‘One thing you will have to learn, wherever Elan is, here or in London, the sun is always over the yard arm …’

  ‘But,’ Marika looked bewildered, ‘what is this arm yard thing?’

  As the three days of Josh’s visit came to an end, Gabby still had not seen or had a conversation with him on her own. Nell had watched Gabby wounded and puzzled, then quietly resigned, and felt distressed. When Josh came over to the cottage on his own one day she asked gently, ‘How are you doing, darling?’

  He made a face. ‘I’m OK, Nell …’

  ‘Do you feel all right about going straight back to the ship, flying over Iraq again, Josh?’

  ‘Nell, flying is what I do. I’d feel mortified to be grounded even for a short time. It’s like falling off a horse … I have to get back in there. Don’t worry, it was just bad luck, it won’t happen again.’

  Nell picked up something in his voice.

  ‘All the same, it would be unnatural not to be nervous.’

  He grinned and swallowed his drink in one gulp.

  ‘That’s why I need to take off with Marika somewhere neutral. Do you think I’ve hurt Gabby by not spending my whole leave here? I just need space, Nell.’

  ‘I can understand that and Gabby would, too. Have you got time to go for a walk with her before you leave, on her own, and explain it to her?’

  Josh turned Nell’s glass round in his fingers, staring down at it.

  ‘Sure, Nell,’ he said at last. ‘It’s just … I really needed to have Marika with me.’

  ‘Of course. If Gabby and I love you a little too much, a little too eagerly, don’t hold it against us, darling.’ Nell smiled and refilled Josh’s glass.

  He glanced at her quickly, didn’t know what to say, looked miserable for a moment and Nell said quickly, ‘Josh, your emotions are going to be all over the place; expect them to be for quite a while. Go easy on yourself. I don’t want any of this stiff-upper-lip crap.’

  Josh burst out laughing and Nell said, changing the subject quickly, ‘I think you have hit the jackpot with Marika.’

  Josh’s face lit up. ‘I have, haven’t I? I’ll go and find Gabby. Will you go over and keep Marika company? Dad’s conversation is sometimes a bit limited.’

  They walked across the yard together. ‘Don’t you dare give us any more frights, Josh Ellis.’ Nell linked arms with him.

  ‘I’ll try very hard not to, Granny.’

  In late afternoon, before Josh left, the sun came out from behind thin cloud-cover and flared through the turning leaves, making them a mellow gold. The sea was iridescent, forming differing thick lines of blue and green, aquamarine and grey. Nearer, in the cove where Josh and Gabby walked, the white waves were gold tipped by the setting sun.

  The cove was deserted and they hung their clothes on the jagged rock at the foot of the cliff path.

  ‘Right,’ Josh yelled. ‘You’ve got to run, Gabby, it is no good doing this slowly … One, two, three … Run …’

  Gabby ran and yelled, ‘I must be mad! It’s the end of September … Oh my God … Josh, it’s freezing …’

  Josh was ahead of her and dived straight into the waves, coming up like a seal, throwing his hair out of his eyes. He looked frozen. Gabby dived next then swam madly because she couldn’t feel her limbs, automatically keeping an eye on Josh. He waited for her to call, ‘Josh, don’t go too far out, mind the current.’ And she did.

  He smiled to himself. Something began to shift back into place. It was so good to be home. He loved this place, it was a part of him. Gabby and Charlie and Nell were always exactly the same, waiting for him each time he returned.

  He sighed and swam towards his mother. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Look at that sun going down. It’s not that cold, Gabby, once you get used to it.’

  ‘No,’ Gabby agreed, ‘but it’s bracing! I’m going out to do press-ups! Don’t get pneumonia, Josh!’

  Gabby ran up the beach and wrapped her towel round her, moved into the last rays of the sun and jumped up and down, trying to get her teeth to stop chattering. She watched Josh swim in and then stand facing out to sea, jumping the waves and surfing in on them.

  She had stood here hundreds of times in so many summers, watching Josh do exactly what he was doing now. Barbecues lugged down the path with lots of excited little boys. Lying on rugs in the dying of the day reading the very trying Mister Men; Noddy; Rupert Bear; CS Lewis; Just So Stories; Stig of the Dump; A Tale of Two Cities. Even when Josh could read he loved to be read to. Later they would read avidly side by side for long stretches of the summer. Josh, growing up and needing her less. And it was all right.

  He turned and started to wade in, breaking into a run up the beach. The last rays caught his limbs, water shone off his dark skin. Josh. Young and fit and alive. Josh, grown up and gone, madly in love with a Croatian girl. It was all as it should be.

  Gabby smiled and held out his towel as she had always done. They both grinned at each other. Everything’s fine.

  Chapter 62

  When Isabella woke, Richard had gone. She returned to her own room where Lisette was filling her bath.

  One look at Isabella’s face told Lisette everything. They did not speak but went on doing the things they did every morning in silence.

  As she dressed, Isabella kept seeing Richard’s distraught face. She realized in a blinding moment of truth that, had she not been carrying Tom’s child, she might never have been able to leave Richard. It was Tom she loved, but to deliberately injure another human being in the way she had done … She had never understood, or had chosen not to, the depth of her husband’s feelings for her.

  An unnatural silence hung over the house. The housemaids did not chatter but went about their work in silence. Trathan, who had looked after Sir Richard since his naval days, had the same sense of dread as Lisette.

  Sir Richard had risen early, asked for his horse to be brought round, refused Trathan’s concerned offer to ride with him and had taken off in the direction of Falmouth. Trathan could have saved him the journey, for Lisette had sent him last night with a message for Tom Welland. Trathan was the only person Lisette could trust to keep silent.

  Lisette had written to warn Tom that
she suspected Sir Richard knew of his relationship with Isabella. She felt angry. What good could come of a man Sir Richard’s age marrying an unworldly girl young enough to be his daughter? And as for Mr Vyvyan, he had sacrificed his daughter for weak and selfish reasons.

  ‘Oh, Madame!’ she whispered to Helena, as she carried Isabella’ laundry down the back stairs. ‘How I wish you were still alive. You would never have allowed this ill-advised marriage.’

  Lisette returned upstairs to Isabella in the breakfast room. It was a beautiful day and the French windows were thrown open to the morning. Isabella was drinking tea but had eaten nothing.

  Lisette placed an egg and thin slices of bread and butter in front of her.

  ‘My Lady, you have an unborn child to think of now, not just yourself. Eat.’

  Isabella looked up quickly. It was the first time Lisette had ever used her title. ‘Miss’ was now inappropriate as an affectionate reminder of childhood. My Lady, too, seemed an unwise title, for Richard would disown her.

  Lisette sat heavily on a seat by the window.

  ‘Sir Richard has ridden off towards Falmouth. I sent word to Tom Welland last night as I guessed Sir Richard knew the situation. Tom must warn Ben of the possible consequences for St Piran, Isabella.’

  She got up with a little cry and left the table, went out into the warm autumn day and walked towards the woods. Lisette, fearful of what she might do, called out and ran after her.

  ‘Isabella, stop. Wait a moment … Please, Isabella.’

  Isabella turned. When Lisette reached her she took Isabella’s hands, firmly.

  ‘Listen to me. You must keep your head and wait. You are carrying a child. That life is sacred. It did not ask to be born, but it is a life created and your responsibility.’

  Isabella held on to Lisette’s hands.

  ‘It was created with love, Lisette.’

  ‘Then,’ Lisette said gently, ‘it is all the more reason for you to take care of yourself. Come, will you rest for a while in the morning room? I will bring my sewing and sit with you and maybe you can sleep a little.’