And Then She Ran

by Karen Clarke

  The queen-sized bed was where Lily had been conceived, the narrow kitchen where Patrick once cooked for me, the velvet sofa the place where he’d talked about his brother’s death and – on one occasion – a trip we might take to England. I wished I had a better story to tell Lily one day, but at least I could honestly say she’d been conceived with something close to love.

  In danger of becoming maudlin, I focused on wringing out the cloth before putting it away, then dried my hands. Kneeling down, I clasped Lily’s tiny fingers in mine. ‘You’ll soon be crawling at this rate.’ After spending some time talking nonsense to her, marvelling at how much more solid she seemed than just a week ago, I decided to prepare the rabbits for dinner and make a hearty stew.

  With a bracing breath, I opened the fridge and took out the plate. Odd. There was only one rabbit there. Had Morag disposed of the other? It seemed unlikely, and I doubted Skip had managed to open the fridge door and help himself. I pondered for a moment, feeling my heart pick up pace, then found a casserole dish and a chopping board and began to prepare the meat, slipping into practical mode. There wasn’t much, but it wasn’t as if I was cooking for a food critic. With a heap of vegetables, it would be a satisfying meal.

  The motion of chopping and slicing was as soothing as ever, taking me back to the early days at Julio’s when prepping had been my job in the kitchen. I’d picked up several minor injuries – most notably, an almost severed thumb that required a trip to the hospital, my hand bound in a bloody tea towel while Ana propped me up and I tried not to faint.

  Once I’d figured out how Morag’s oven worked and the casserole was in, I cleared out the grate in the fireplace, sweeping cold ash into a bin bag. There was no reason not to light a fire now I was certain Patrick somehow knew where I was. It would be less expensive than using an electric heater. I scrunched up the pages of an old newspaper, arranged some of the logs in the hearth on top, and set it alight with a match.

  Leaving it to catch, I stepped around the sofa to the telephone on the dresser, keeping Lily in my eyeline. My heart thumped with anticipation as I checked the time. Nearly 5 p.m. It would be lunchtime in New York. Ana, who now worked as a nutritionist for a public health company, would likely be out for a run, a habit she’d got into because she hated getting up early to do it before work like most New Yorkers, and believed the evenings were for socialising.

  Ana’s was the only number I knew by heart, apart from Mum’s – I hadn’t been given Patrick’s – and it came to me easily. I picked up the handset, which felt cold and smooth in my hand, picturing Ana, long and lithe, her chestnut hair scraped back in a sleek ponytail, mouth on the verge of smiling. Then I realised I was imagining the girl she’d been when we met on our third day at secondary school. I’d been worrying about not having a best friend, head down, feeling close to tears. Ana was plugged into a brand-new, highly sought-after iPod and literally bumped into me in the corridor. She tugged one earbud out, her cheeks flushed, dark eyes shining, and without even apologising said, ‘Listen to this, it’s brilliant.’

  That’s how I’d been introduced to Pink and met my new best friend, Ana (‘one n’) Miller, whose mother was Spanish and who was so fun and friendly it was impossible not to love her. I was sure if she’d bumped into anyone else that day, she’d have become their best friend, but I was the lucky one; the one she’d stuck by through everything, not judging, even when I told her that Patrick was married and staying with Elise. She’d judged him, but never me. But even Ana didn’t know the whole story and I knew I could never tell her. I just wanted to speak to her, hear her news, tell her mine – chat normally, like we used to.

  I’d started pressing in her number when I realised there was no dial tone. Weird. It was definitely a working landline, despite the phone’s antique appearance. I put the receiver down and picked it up again, pressed it to my ear. Nothing.

  I traced the yellowing cord to the socket on the wall above the skirting board, checking it was plugged in. Maybe the telephone company were doing some work. It wasn’t unusual, especially out here, for the weather to bring down the phone lines. I picked up the receiver and put it down a couple more times before admitting defeat.

  Feeling thwarted, I lifted Lily up and went outside, calling for Skip. He bounded up from the bottom of the garden, stopping halfway to finish chewing something in his mouth.

  ‘What have you got there?’ I said when he reached us. It looked like an animal bone. He wagged his tail and swallowed before running around the side of the cottage. I followed, holding tightly to Lily, checking the stone walls for the phone wire that would feed into the building. The sun was still out, warm on the back of my neck, but as I moved into the shade thrown by the bank of trees at the back of the cottage, goose bumps pimpled my arms.

  Glancing up, I noticed a thick black cable trailing along the side of the wall to a rusty connector box. ‘Here it is,’ I said to Lily, who was twisting in my arms. Looking closer, I froze. The cable wasn’t attached to the box, where coloured wires poked from the casing. It had been neatly sliced across. Someone had deliberately cut the phone line.

  Chapter 17

  When Morag returned, I mentioned the phone line as casually as I could.

  She shrugged, seeming unconcerned. ‘I’ll ask Ifan to take a look; he’s good with things like that.’

  ‘I think it’s been cut.’ It sounded too dramatic.

  Morag frowned, one hand resting on the wall while she removed her boot with the other and gently nudged Skip away. ‘It’s probably corroded,’ she said. ‘That side of the cottage takes the brunt of the weather.’

  ‘When did you last use the phone apart from when I called you?’ I heard a thread of anxiety in my voice. Despite running inside and locking the door, leaving Skip to roam the perimeters – though all he did was whine and scratch at the wood – I couldn’t banish the image of a shrouded figure, sneaking up to the cottage, gloved hand holding a pair of wire cutters.

  Morag’s frown deepened. ‘I can’t remember. Sometimes people phone with an order for fruit and veg, but not that often now I’ve got my regulars. I rarely call anyone.’

  So, it could have happened before I arrived. It wasn’t necessarily anything to do with me. So why did I feel sick?

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Morag kicked off her other boot, sending it spinning across the newly cleaned floor. Skip chased after it, claws clattering on the tiles.

  ‘I just think you should be able to ring for help if you have to.’

  ‘Haven’t so far.’ Catching something in my expression, she added, ‘I take your point though, especially with the baby here. We’ll get it fixed, don’t worry.’

  After dinner, which Morag declared, ‘Not bad at all,’ clearing every scrap on her plate while I ate more slowly, I cleared up while she watched Lily and then shrugged her coat back on. ‘I’m going to the pub.’ It was a declaration of intent, no explanation, or apology for leaving me to my own devices. I wondered whether she went there every evening. I had the feeling that, like me, she rarely drank – there was no alcohol in the cottage and she’d stuck to water at the pub the day before – so maybe she liked feeling part of something at the pub. Maybe she hoped to see Ifan. Maybe she was avoiding being alone with me. I didn’t want to ask and see her evade the question.

  Once she’d gone, the van engine unnaturally loud in the fading light, I let Skip out before feeding Lily and bathing her in the kitchen sink, keeping one eye on the clearing outside, in case a figure appeared. I sat Lily up and supported her head, splashing her with warm water, glad I’d thought to pack baby shampoo and soap. Covered in bubbles, she smiled and kicked, blinking in surprise like she always did when I tipped her back gently to rinse her hair. I smiled, flooded with love. Life could be so simple, so perfect. This was all we needed – a roof over our heads, food in our bellies and each other. Why couldn’t he let us have that?

  After she was snuggled into her Minnie Mouse sleepsuit, dozing in the Moses basket, which I
’d brought down so I could see her, I picked a novel off the bookshelf and settled onto the sofa with a blanket over my legs. I tried to absorb myself in a story about spies in war-torn Germany. It was ages since I’d had the time or headspace to read, but my mind, weary from a tangle of worry and fear, wanted to rest. My eyes kept closing, craving sleep. It was as if my body was making up for the hours I’d lost over the past few months; to Lily, who’d needed feeding every two hours, and the sickening burden of worry about our futures. My thoughts started drifting to Patrick, flitting from his face in the article I’d read, to the night he ordered me to leave, to the unexpected softness in his eyes when he found out I was pregnant.

  I hadn’t intended him to know. When he made his decision to stay with Elise something had shifted, like a veil being lifted. Deceit wore away respect. He’d deceived his wife, and me too, by telling me their marriage was over. She’d become real to me then, a woman who, despite Patrick’s belief that she only cared about getting drunk as discreetly as possible, must love him deeply.

  I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, including Mum when she called for one of her irregular updates. Only Ana had known, after catching me that day in the toilets, and I’d sworn her to secrecy. As the nausea quickly passed, I carried on as usual, disguising the tiny swell of my stomach with baggier than usual clothes. No one I knew suspected, used to my single status and commitment to work. It hadn’t occurred to them I was even seeing anyone, my brief affair with Patrick conducted in total privacy.

  I hadn’t wanted a baby, hadn’t planned to fall pregnant. I didn’t see a doctor. I didn’t look on websites to see what stage it was at. I didn’t try out names, buy bootees, or research the best pushchairs. I simply continued with my life as if I’d never met Patrick. When six months had passed, and Ana eventually asked what my plan was – adoption or single parenthood (it was somehow understood that a termination was off the table) – I said lightly, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.’

  I wasn’t hanging out with her family as often, when I wasn’t working, not wanting them to see that I was pregnant. They were Catholic, her cousin Maria a midwife at Mount Sinai; they wouldn’t understand.

  I knew there was a baby inside me, that I was growing a whole new person, cells dividing, tissue growing, but it seemed abstract – beyond my full comprehension. Right up until I felt a flutter beneath my ribcage, like a butterfly taking flight. I’d been in a cab on my way to meet a new supplier, overwhelmed with tiredness and trying to ignore a dull ache in my lower back. I gasped out loud, catching the driver’s attention.

  ‘Everything OK back there?’

  ‘I just felt my baby move.’ It had sounded strange, saying it out loud to a stranger. I laid a tentative hand across my stomach feeling slightly sick, not sure I liked the sensation.

  ‘Your first?’ The driver, stopped in traffic, turned, a smile on his leathery face.

  I nodded, sitting back, my breathing shallow. I felt as if I’d been forced over a threshold into a different way of thinking that wasn’t natural; wasn’t the me I recognised. And this was just the beginning. Once the baby was born, a lifetime of caring for another human being would follow; a life of worry, dread and possible disaster; a life no longer my own. I’d started to cry, gulping sobs I tried to hold in with a hand pressed to my mouth as tears splashed down my face. ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I sobbed. The driver had somehow managed to pull over and hand me a pack of tissues from the glove box.

  ‘The first’s the hardest; it’ll be easier next time around.’ His voice was unbearably kind, his expression weighted with experience. ‘I have four daughters and my wife, she was sick the whole way through each pregnancy. She wanted to kill me, but the second she held each of our girls it was all forgotten. It’ll be the same for you, you’ll see.’

  I wanted so much to believe him, but the fear persisted, swelling whenever I felt another movement inside – my baby reminding me that he or she was there, waiting to meet me; waiting for me to decide his or her fate. And then, Patrick was back and everything changed again.

  *

  ‘Come to the market with me,’ Morag said the following morning, looking as though she’d slept well. Her eyes were bright, her hair brushed back, the sofa bedding folded away in the dresser. I’d heard her come in the night before and tread softly to the top of the stairs. I’d kept my breathing even as I looked at her outline through my lashes, watching her watching us – probably longing to call Skip down off the bed where he’d taken up residence as soon as I climbed in. I hadn’t stopped him. His presence made me feel safe.

  ‘You can help on the stall or sit in a café, I don’t mind.’

  It was preferable to being left alone at the cottage, plus I could use my mobile to call Ana from the village.

  ‘OK.’ I nodded, biting into a slice of buttered toast, burnt on one side. Morag had made breakfast while I was feeding and changing Lily. ‘Shouldn’t you be there already, setting up?’

  ‘Biddy’s turn this week. She runs the post office, makes jam, honey, chutneys, that sort of thing in her spare time. We run the stall together. I don’t have enough produce on my own.’

  ‘I probably won’t be much help, with Lily.’

  Morag shrugged. ‘You can get to know the place.’

  ‘What about Skip?’ He looked up sharply at the sound of his name and padded over to the table. ‘It doesn’t seem fair to leave him here on his own.’ Especially as he was proving a less than useful deterrent. I thought of the phone line and how Skip hadn’t barked once while he was outside. Unless he knew the culprit?

  In the light of a new day, I was trying to convince myself that Morag was right and the ruined cable was weather-related, but my churning stomach said otherwise.

  ‘We can take him with us in the van, I suppose.’

  Skip’s tail beat, as if he understood, and I gave him the crust from my toast.

  ‘You shouldn’t spoil him,’ Morag said, as she rose from the table with her empty cereal bowl, but there was no heat in her words. ‘I’m going for a shower.’

  *

  The farmers’ market was in full flow when we arrived, the main through-road lined with stalls. There was an eclectic array of goods on display: foodstuff, garden plants, craft-ware and pet food.

  Morag bumped the van carefully across the cobbles and parked beside a stall selling local produce, where a woman was sitting in a deckchair with a mug of tea. She was sixtyish, wearing a woolly bobble hat over her flame-red hair, and a green waxed jacket as though expecting rain. Although the sky was a watery blue, pale sunshine giving the illusion of warmth, downpours were forecast for later.

  ‘Biddy, this is my niece Grace and her baby,’ Morag said, once she’d jumped from the van. I felt compelled to clamber out too, once I’d transferred Lily from car seat to carrier. I submitted to an appraising look as Biddy placed her mug on the ground and rose to her feet. She was smaller than me, but wiry and broad-shouldered.

  Apparently satisfied with whatever she’d seen in me, she switched her attention to Lily. ‘She’s a bonny one.’

  ‘Her name’s Lily,’ I obliged, trying not to pull away when Biddy stroked a coarse finger across Lily’s cheek, her wide smile revealing large, uneven teeth.

  ‘Got a look of your aunt about her, poor bugger.’ A raucous chuckle split the air. Lily twitched but didn’t make a sound.

  ‘Take no notice,’ Morag said, but couldn’t hide the gleam of pleasure that entered her eyes. ‘I’ll get my stuff.’

  As she arranged her selection of tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions and cabbages on the trestle table, next to Biddy’s jars of berry jam and clover honey, their colours jewel-like in the sunshine, I moved aside, hoping Biddy wouldn’t bombard me with questions.

  Instead, she surprised me by tilting her head and saying, ‘You came at the right time, Grace.’ Her eyes were round and intensely blue, reminding me of Ifan. ‘It’s just the lift your aunt needed.’

  ‘Really?
’

  Skip sprang from the back of the van where he’d panted and whined throughout the short journey, demanding to be fussed.

  ‘Oh, you’ve ended up with the runt.’ Biddy snorted out another laugh as she stooped to stroke his ears. ‘You really must have won your aunt over,’ she said. ‘The Joneses have been trying to find him a home for a while, but your aunt was very firm in her refusal.’

  ‘What did you mean about her needing a lift?’ My curiosity was piqued.

  ‘She’s not been her usual self lately.’ Biddy lowered her voice as Morag came round the back of the van. ‘There’s been some trouble locally,’ she said. ‘Bored lads with nothing to do but make trouble. They broke into the gift shop a few nights ago, stole the takings, and smashed the windows in the pub a few weeks back. Your aunt’s sure they’ve been up at the cottage.’ My heart picked up speed. It explained the bolts on the door. Could it explain …? No. My spirits sank. The note, the missing ring. It was personal. ‘Not even my cousin could put a smile on her face,’ Biddy was saying. ‘Just when I had high hopes they might actually, you know …’ She winked and nudged me violently with her elbow. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said, when Lily pouted and her face reddened. ‘I didn’t mean to upset the little one. I remember how hard it is when they’re babies, never sleeping more than a few hours. When my two – I’ve got twin boys – were born, I don’t think I slept through the night for two years.’