by Jan Ruth
‘Look, the veterinary practise has just won a huge contract with an animal rescue centre. If you’re desperate, I can get some of the animals collected and re-homed there.’
‘Desperate all right, yeah! I’ll have to talk to Fran first, that’s the tricky part.’
In truth, all the parts were tricky. He took Becca to her father’s flat, and she traipsed up the stairs with her stuff. She was quiet and pale throughout the whole ordeal. Al remained on the pavement and leant against his car with his arms folded. On sight of his closed-up eye, George had the decency to look sheepish.
‘Well… thanks for bringing her.’
‘At the moment, it’s better for her to be here.’
‘We agree on something, then.’
Al nodded. They always used to agree, deep down they probably still saw much of life from the same perspective, after all they’d been brought up with much the same values and viewpoints. Al always felt it only accounted for half of who he was though, the other fifty per-cent was still out there somewhere, rootless and drifting.
*
The following morning, he told Fran he was going to the doctor’s about his eye and he’d make her an appointment for a check-up. This was met with the usual indifference. She peered at his face.
‘Did George do that? Tell me the truth.’
‘He’s angry, that’s all. I just didn’t want to say, in front of Becca.’
‘He’s a pig! Why can’t he leave the past behind?’
‘Fran, it’s not just about that,’ he said gently. ‘He can’t cope with me being here all the time, but it’s about other stuff as well. We need to have a serious talk.’
‘You’re never serious, Al.’
‘I am today.’
He told her about Maisie’s offer of finding new homes for the ponies, the pigs and the ducks, and maybe some of the dogs. To his utmost relief, she nodded ever so slightly, in the affirmative. ‘But what about us? Where will we go? Stay together, that’s the main thing.’
‘Let’s just take one step at a time,’ he said carefully.
But even one step needed an effort of some sort. It was disconcerting to feel so totally worn out and his eye was streaming and painful. The doctor asked him to look up at the ceiling and manipulated his lower lid, squinting at his left eye with a tiny torch. ‘How did this happen?’
‘My brother hit me with a wok.’
‘Have you reported him for assault?’
‘He didn’t mean it.’
‘Bit old to be fighting with pans, aren’t you?’ He began scribbling on a prescription pad. ‘Flucloxacillin… and then something for the burns. Could have been so much worse. Come and see me again if the eye doesn’t improve. Do you need any painkillers?’
‘No, no thanks.’
‘Is that all?’ he said, tapping away at his keyboard.
‘Not quite. Can you come round and see my sister-in-law? I think she might be having a breakdown.’
‘What makes you think that?’
The answer to this was complex and of course, hopelessly lost in the red tape of the health service the second he opened his mouth. Apparently, Fran had to make the first move, how stupid was that? He drove to the chemist to collect his prescription in a black shroud of despair, then on impulse walked into the grotty pub on Mostyn Street. He’d never been one to sit drinking by himself, but the circumstances were extenuating. Sometimes, staring into a crystal ball of beer could produce the most amazing obvious solution.
When his mobile trilled in his pocket, several other solitary drinkers looked up as if it was the call they’d all been waiting for. It was Kate. Al stood up and knocked the table, spilling beer from his untouched pint.
‘Kate, Hi.’
‘Where are you?’ she said sharply, no hello or preamble.
‘In the pub.’
‘There’s been an accident. Fran-’
‘What accident?’ he said, grabbing his jacket off the back of the chair.
‘Just come back, all right?’
It wasn’t the kind of sign he’d wanted. When he arrived back at Chathill, the sight of Kate’s car gave him a warm buzz but that soon vanished when he saw the scene around the ambulance. Fran was strapped onto a stretcher, out cold from the looks of it. Kate, white and shaken, had a blanket across her shoulders. She did a double-take at the sight of his face, but he ignored this.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘I found her on the floor.’
‘Where?’
‘Outside. It’s okay, she was coming round, talking.’
George arrived, skidding dramatically to a halt, and began barking questions at everyone but only Kate knew the answers, well, some of them. It seemed she’d turned up at the farm and discovered Fran’s dog pacing and whining in the hall. She’d followed the collie to the old feed store where she discovered Fran spreadeagled on the ground, surrounded by a jumble of floorboards and straw.
‘I told her not to go up there!’ George yelled.
‘What are you shouting at Kate for?’ Al said, ‘Fran’s been telling you for weeks about the state of that shed!’
‘And what have you done about it? It’s you who bloody lives here!’
‘I wedged it shut, closed it off!’
‘Oh, shut-up the both of you,’ Kate said.
One of the paramedics closed the back doors of the ambulance and informed George that their destination was Bangor Hospital, A & E. There was a slow awkward departure as the vehicle bounced it’s way down the drive, and George climbed back into his car. He immediately slid the window down and said something about collecting Becca from school. Kate said she’d go for her, and he nodded a curt thanks, then they stood in the rain until the ambulance reached the main road, poised for the wail of a siren. To his relief, there was none forthcoming which had to be a good sign.
‘We should go up there too,’ Kate said.
‘In a while, let’s give George some space.’
She agreed and followed him inside. He made for the left-over Christmas brandy, grabbing two glasses and waving them. ‘I need a drink. I don’t know what other disasters are waiting to happen, but I’ve had enough of this year already and we’re only just out of January.’
To his astonishment, she came and put her arms around him. It felt so amazingly good that he planted the bottle and glasses elsewhere, hugged her back and inhaled the scent of her. ‘Scrap what I’ve just said. I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘I’m sorry I ignored you.’
‘I don’t blame you.’
She pulled back from him slightly. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’
‘My brother.’
They sat at opposite sides of the kitchen table with the brandy and face to face, it felt awkward. ‘Right,’ she said, scrutinising his wounds. ‘Tell me what’s going on here, I need to know.’
The silence was almost too acute, loudly punctuated by rain-water dripping into a bucket somewhere. It was the sort of loaded silence that made his flesh crawl for no good reason. ‘Fran and I… we shared a kiss once, and she’s always had a bit of a thing for me. I think she still does.’
Kate took a deep breath and pursed her lips slightly. For a moment he just stared at her beautiful, disappointed face as the cogs worked away in her mind, trying to slot it all together and no doubt finding a big hole in the middle.
‘Well, thank-you, for being honest,’ she said, ‘Is that all?’
‘There’s backstory.’
‘I’m sure there is.’
Since she didn’t object, he began to tell her about the dark time he’d lost his adoptive mother to a heart attack, just six weeks after the death of his father. The double bereavement materialised as an obsession to find Ruby. ‘When I eventually disappeared to go and meet this woman, Helen was furious with me for squandering all the family resources, mostly down to hiring private detectives. She kicked me out for a while and at t
he time I thought we were finished. And then when I finally faced Ruby she told me to clear off, she wasn’t interested in me or my family and how dare I track her down. George and Fran came to my rescue, well, mostly Fran.’
‘I think I can fill in the rest.’
‘I got drunk a lot; we got drunk a lot, on home-made elder wine. Not very original, or clever.’
She dropped her eyes from his and studied her nails and he reached across and touched the tips of his fingers to hers. ‘There’s nothing going on with us, never was.’
She leant back in her chair and folded her arms. ‘She told me she married the wrong brother. That intimates rather more than a stolen kiss.’
‘That’s a load of bullshit. I’ve never had those kind of feelings for her.’
‘In a way, that makes it worse! And I don’t know, but I suspect she may still have feelings for you.’
‘I don’t know what’s going on in Fran’s head, not sure I want to know! I think I need to get away, wrap up this sale and get out.’
He suddenly scraped his chair back and set about making coffee. There was just enough of the ground variety to make a cafetiere for two. By the time he’d gone through the motions of boiling water and measuring the Columbian dark roast, his angry anxiety had tempered.
Kate said, ‘Once, my Mother ordered a catheter in a posh hotel.’
He flashed her a quick smile but she didn’t smile back, just watched him with enigmatic eyes, no doubt still digesting everything he’d said. He hoped that telling her the truth - at least a small part of it - would be the wild card in his favour.
‘Is it the only way?’ she said, ‘I’m talking about selling Chathill. It seems such a waste, for all of you. I’m not convinced George is as blase as he makes out about the farm, or Fran come to that. It all seems blown out of proportion to me.’
The letter, secreted in his inside pocket, began to burn against his chest. He pulled it out and threw it across the table to her and she scanned the few sentences with a deepening frown. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry Al. I saw a news clip about her death, it was one of the reasons I came over to see you. I wasn’t sure if you even knew.’
‘Why are you sorry?’ he said, then raised a hand in apology. He still didn’t know how he felt; angry, sad, full of regret? Mostly he just wanted to kill something.
‘So, have you called the number?’ She handed the letter back.
‘No. I’m not sure I want to.’
‘Why on earth not? It could be the answer to all your problems!’
‘I know, it’s just-’
‘What? Pride?’
Was it? He couldn’t accuse his brother of misplaced pride and then succumb to the luxury of it himself. ‘Maybe…’
‘For what it’s worth, I think you need to do it anyway, then you can draw a line under it.’
‘Closure, is that what they call it?’
She half smiled and nodded and he knew then, he knew that he had to call the number and make the trip, and steel himself to whatever he discovered; maybe even banish some of the demons from the last trip. ‘Do you fancy an adventure? I still owe you something special.’
‘Does the reading of your mother’s will cover all that?’
‘I’ve no idea. It wouldn’t be just about the will. It could be about us, spending some time together, somewhere it doesn’t rain so much. You know how you said it was only one of the reasons you came over?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Then why not come with me?’
She pushed the plunger down slowly through the coffee and it seemed like there was a long suspension of time and a deep intake of breath before she actually spoke.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Think about it, please?’
Shortly after the coffee, she went to collect Becca from school, with a view to continuing on to the hospital and he felt surprisingly positive to the point where he braced himself to shave the burnt part of his face.
Of course he had to wait till the evening to call Ruby’s lawyer because of the time difference, but he asked Maisie to send someone to collect whatever animals they could take. It was a horrible decision carrying out this act behind Fran’s back but now that he had decided to make the overseas trip, with or without Kate, it was more a question of practicalities. The place was done-for anyway. Even if, by some miracle he managed to acquire enough money to put it all right, it wouldn’t fix his brother’s marriage, would it?
Telling Kate about the biggest mistake of his life had been a snap second decision, a little like the time he’d blurted it out to Helen, as a last resort. The fact that he’d told Kate the truth but not the whole truth, was a risk he was prepared to take. At least she hadn’t screamed and run away. In fact she’d carefully applied the eye cream for him, and he could still feel her hands on his jaw, angling his face to the light.
It was dark outside, cold and wet, but he managed to beg some hay from next door in exchange for gifting the battery hens. He went to take a look at the shed where Fran had fallen through the first floor, presumably trying to get to the remaining couple of bales up there. A call from Kate revealed that Fran had a broken arm and a sprained ankle, mild concussion and dehydration. It was lucky Kate had turned up when she did, otherwise they may have been adding hypothermia to the list.
He shivered and kicked at the pile of wood and the rotten ladder, then fondled the warm ears of Fran’s border collie, Fig. The dog followed him like a shadow, catching his eye whenever he glanced in its direction, as if fearful for the future. The sheep dogs had followed him and George everywhere when they were children, like surrogate parents, barking and whining if they went near deep water or climbed the forbidden crumbling ruins of farmhouses.
‘Don’t worry, your time’s not quite up,’ he said to the dog. ‘Unlike mine.’
Maisie had agreed to temporarily home the three dogs, until matters were sorted out, whatever that meant. At least miserable Marge would be in good hands, she must be due to give birth any day if the amount of dirty looks and snarling was anything to go by.
When he couldn’t put it off any longer, when he couldn’t think of any more excuses, he picked up the letter, and dialled the number.
Chapter Sixteen
Kate.
Tia seemed fascinated by it all.
‘Okay, so… now he wants to take you away, somewhere hot? And you’re running this by me?’
Kate stood looking out at her dismal garden, sodden with February rain, cupping the phone under her chin as she stacked pots in the sink. It seemed such a long time since the sun had shone.
‘Actually, it’s more to do with the reading of his mother’s will.’
‘Yeah, well that part is a bit weird, but then so is dressing up as a clown. Where is it, anyway?’
‘New Zealand.’
‘But you hate flying!’
‘Who said I was going to go? Who said I was going to get involved?’
‘Why does agreeing to go away with him mean you’re involved? Can’t you just look at it as a holiday? You know that simple concept? Get drunk, have sex on the beach and get a nice tan?’
‘You do that with all your male friends? Anyway, I don’t tan.’
Tia just laughed. Kate tried not to be too starchy about it, since the lines of communication were thrumming very well between them. It helped that Tia seemed to have found herself a reasonable job, a sort of Girl Friday with childcare.
Whenever she allowed herself head space, to try and make a rational decision about going with Al to New Zealand, all she could think about was them both rolling about on a beach, waves crashing on the shore. Utterly ridiculous. She blamed Tia for this image but maybe that was unfair, because when she’d been standing in the kitchen at Chathill, trying to drop eye cream in the right place without blinding him, she was filled with the same intense feelings, with no help from the idyll of sea and sand. Oh yes, the sexual attraction was there, tied up with the d
angerous quantity that was Alastair Black but so often, one went hand in hand with the other.
She thought about this aspect quite a lot. He was steady in some respects; funny, caring… okay, occasionally unreliable. But look how good a father he’d been, and his marriage had lasted some thirty years, hadn’t it? So now he was divorced, useless with money and likely had unresolved issues with his blood mother. Then there was the pregnant ex-girlfriend who’d had an abortion, leaving goodness know what scars. Frequently beaten up by his brother, both physically and emotionally, because he’d kissed his sister-in-law and her feelings for him had been resurrected on his return to the family fold.
Stop.
Did a marriage break up and a brother’s love turn to hate over one, forbidden kiss? Deep down, she doubted it. So he was possibly a liar too, by way of omission. She sometimes wondered if she was too old and sensible to have a bad-boy love interest, but then Tia’s face would appear like an apparition on her shoulder with that lip curl. And he wasn’t really bad, just misunderstood. Good grief, had she really thought that? The soul-searching went on, but she kept coming back to the bottom line; he was Jim Silver and she fancied him to the point of combustion.
They were talking again, mostly over the phone and Internet. When she saw his name flash on her phone screen, there was a delicious moment of anticipation before she accepted the call and heard his voice. She tried to remember if she’d felt like this with Greg, but nothing came to mind. He always had specific times when he’d phone. Al had no such order in his life and would call her randomly, whenever something popped into his head. Marge had given birth to one huge puppy. He called to discuss this when she was shopping, suggesting she went to the butter counter to find a good name. To be caught out in the supermarket, feeling like a giddy teenager at the age of fifty was deliciously disconcerting, but it felt okay. It felt very good indeed.
The trip was planned for the beginning of March and apparently, the money for two return tickets had automatically been forwarded to him via the solicitor in Auckland. This information had put Kate in a lather of uncertainty but Al told her it had been part of the will.
