‘I can feel your pain,’ Tessa said, stroking his brow. She slid cool fingers into his hair and gently massaged his throbbing scalp.
‘That’s awesome,’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m pretty useless right now. I get terrible migraines. Sometimes they last for days, and no one seems to know what causes them. I hang together when I’m under pressure – I keep going and make the right noises, if you know what I mean – then, as soon as the pressure stops, the migraine arrives. Like it’s stopping me having fun.’
Tessa put her arms around Paul and cradled his head against her breast. He gave a deep sigh, and she felt him relaxing, letting go of whatever he was guarding so tightly. She wanted to give him healing, to talk quietly in her special voice, to send him colours and music through her fingertips. But it changed, in a flash of energy. Paul reached up and tweaked her nipple through the satin of her blouse. He sat up and looked at her with starved black eyes. ‘God – I need you, Tessa. I need you so much.’
He didn’t ask if she was okay. He just pushed her into the deeply sprung, quilted bed and rolled on top of her. Tessa felt a sudden throbbing power from him, from his eyes first, then from the wire strength of his muscles. ‘I’m not ready,’ she tried to say, but he smothered her in a kiss that took her breath away. She felt him tearing her skirt, unwrapping her savagely like a forbidden parcel. He’s my husband. I’ve got to let him, she thought. And she was afraid. Afraid, as if the migraine had an unstoppable alien power to turn love into violence.
‘Go on – scream,’ he said. ‘I like that. I like you to scream.’ He got hold of her hair and yanked her head sideways, then his arms held her bare shoulders down. As he thrust himself inside her, all she could feel was his desperation and his need.
It was over very quickly, leaving her crying silently, feeling the heat of what might have been. Frustration. Betrayal. Self-hate. Darkness. And a name, crying in her heart. Art. Always Art. Always and forever.
Paul groaned, turned his back on her and went instantly to sleep, the migraine still a taut, white mask across his cheeks. Tessa ran a bath for herself and found her bottle of expensive bubble bath. Tiara, by Lenthéric, Lucy’s wedding gift to her. ‘You only need a capful,’ she’d said. But Tessa was feeling abandoned, disappointed and dirty. She tipped the entire bottle into the bath and immersed herself in the foam.
In the morning the migraine still had Paul in its grip. ‘You go and explore the island,’ he said. ‘I’ll be better tomorrow.’
‘Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?’
‘No, I don’t need a quack. I’m used to it. It’s like a storm, Tessa. There’s nothing I can do but hunker down and let it blow over.’
Tessa walked out into the pristine morning. I’m free, she thought, and a burst of euphoria lifted her spirits. A day to herself, on an enchanted island. Alone with the song thrushes and the seabirds. Exactly what she needed.
Kate was lying in wait for the postman, hoping every day for a card or a word from Tessa and Paul. They’d gone off so happily, but she needed to know where they were. The end of the wedding had left a gaping hole in her life. While Freddie got on with making bird boxes, she and Sally set about cleaning up the post reception chaos, slowly restoring their home to normal. Kate worked at the sink in the window so that she could see the postman arrive.
‘He’s got a card!’ she cried, and ran out. She exchanged the usual banter with the postman, and stood on the garden path in the morning sun, tingling with joy as she saw the colourful postcard. A white ship on a dark blue, foam-flecked ocean. The Scillonian! Kate burst into Freddie’s workshop. ‘They’ve gone to the Isles of Scilly! Isn’t that wonderful? How clever of Paul. Oh, Tessa will love it.’
‘Ah, she will.’ Freddie wiped his hands on an oily rag, and they put their heads together to read the treasured words on the back of the card. Dolphins. Manx shearwaters. Tresco. A world away from Monterose.
‘I’m so happy for them,’ Kate said, ‘and I can see you are too.’
‘We shall see,’ Freddie said non-committally.
‘How I’d love to go out there on that white ship,’ Kate said.
‘Well – we can – what’s stopping us?’
‘Money?’
‘Ah – money.’
Freddie picked up his hammer again and continued nailing slats of larch on the roof of a bird box. ‘We can’t go on like this, Kate. I gotta get the lorry going again. No matter what the doctor says.’
‘If you think so, dear.’ Kate knew the wedding had cost them a lot of money. It would take time to build their savings again. She took Tessa’s card into the house to show Sally.
‘Lucy rang,’ Sally said. ‘She’s coming over this afternoon, with Tim. She said they’d got something to tell you.’
Kate gasped. Grandchildren, she thought immediately. Lucy might be expecting. She saw herself knitting matinée coats and booties.
‘Don’t get your hopes up, Kate,’ Sally said.
‘Why not? What did she tell you?’
‘Nothing, dear – it was just her tone of voice.’
‘Well – it’s either grandchildren, or trouble,’ Kate said, deflated.
Sally was looking at her with serious eyes. ‘I know you’d love a grandchild, Kate – but maybe you and Freddie might have another baby – I know you wanted a boy.’
‘Mum, I’m too old,’ Kate said. ‘I’m in the change of life now. Hot flushes and all that.’
She was glad to see Lucy and Tim arriving.
Tim didn’t usually come in. He still felt awkward, despite Kate’s efforts to accept him. She’d worked at it and felt they were progressing. Tim would even look at her and give a curt sort of smile, but he never really cracked his face.
They were both in jeans and baggy sweaters. Lucy had her hair cleverly twisted into a deliberately untidy bun, with tendrils escaping like graceful springs around her face. She wore a pair of diamond-shaped enamelled earrings.
‘Tessa and Paul are on the Isles of Scilly!’ Kate said proudly, pushing the postcard across the table.
‘Good for them,’ Lucy said with carefully guarded sarcasm. She hardly glanced at Tessa’s card. She seemed edgy.
‘I’ll go and make some tea,’ Sally said tactfully, ‘and leave you to talk.’
‘Where’s Dad?’ Lucy asked.
‘In his workshop.’
‘I’ll go and get him,’ Lucy said. ‘We’ve got something to tell you – both of you. It’s okay, Mum. Don’t look so anxious – and no, I’m not pregnant.’
Kate hoped Freddie wasn’t going to go wooden and refuse to come in. But he did, in long strides, his face wary and vulnerable under his cap. He sat down as far away from Tim as possible, and the two men eyed each other uneasily.
Kate tried to break the ice with chat about the unseasonably warm weather. She sat close to Freddie, feeling protective towards him. His little Lucy, the child with the bouncing curls and laughing eyes, was all grown up and hard-faced. It hurt Freddie to see her with Tim, and he’d dealt with the pain by shutting it off, losing himself in his work.
‘Mum, you don’t have to talk about the weather!’ Lucy said. She and Tim looked at each other, and Tim lit a fag. He offered one to Freddie.
‘He’s given up smoking,’ Kate reminded him, and Tim shrugged and blew smoke towards the ceiling. She wished he wouldn’t smoke. It was hard for Freddie to see someone else enjoying a fag. She took a box of New Berry Fruits from the sideboard and offered them round.
‘Mm – I like the raspberry one,’ Lucy said, taking it.
They sat munching the fruit jellies which had a hard capsule of sugar at the centre, with a sharp tang of juice inside.
‘So what have you come to tell us?’ Kate asked, licking the taste of lemon from her lips.
Lucy swallowed the rest of her raspberry sweet. She took Tim’s hand and looked at him. He nodded, and Kate saw him squeeze Lucy’s delicate hand. The silence felt prickly.
‘Well – Mum,
and Dad.’ Lucy hesitated and Kate saw her eyes grow ominously bright. ‘This might be a shock – but, the fact is – Tim and I are going to Australia.’
‘Australia!’ The word splashed down into the silence like a huge pebble being dropped from a great height into a lily pool.
‘To live,’ Lucy added.
Time alone on Tresco had a profound effect on Tessa.
At first she stood, mesmerised, outside the hotel, gazing at opaline views of rock ridges and tantalising islands, scattered cottages and boats. Dazzling light on turquoise seas. Hot yellow squares of bulb fields nestled between stone walls. Primroses bursting from granite walls, impossibly abundant as if painted there in the palest cream. The scent of them on the salt air was soporific.
On hushed feet she wandered, listening in awe to the song thrushes, her eyes seeking out each individual bird, always alone, high up, trembling with energy as they sang. Though the song was different, it called up her memory of nightingales in the woods of Monterose. Tears hovered, and she let them roll down her cheeks and dry in the crisp sunshine. Tears of joy this time. Welcome, healing tears. She didn’t long for Art, or Paul, or her dad, or even Jonti. She loved, loved, loved being alone.
Enormous Monterey pine trees grew in clumps all over the island, and especially around the Abbey Gardens. Tessa felt drawn to explore, but first she wanted the beach. Appletree Bay was a perfect crescent of moon-white sand. Tessa took her shoes off and paddled along the shoreline of glass-clear water, lattices of sunlight spangling her toes. It was deliciously cold. With her jeans rolled up she stood knee deep, listening. The song thrushes were distant now and there were seagulls and the high-pitched cries of oyster catchers. Beyond the singing was an unfathomable ringing sound from the sea, something she remembered from St Ives. Here on the Isles of Scilly it was stronger, from the bell buoys far out at sea.
Tessa sat down on soft sand, her hand full of shells she had gathered. Limpets in myriad colours, sea snails in bright yellow and russet, pink cowries and fragments of pearl. She planned to take them home to London and make something with them, a trinket box or a lamp, something to touch and dream of Tresco.
It was annoying to feel tired and headachy. She’d wanted to swim, but the echo of her concussion made her more cautious than usual. A feeling of being fragile. Needing to sit still and just be.
Appletree Bay was deserted. It was all hers. Tessa lay back in the sand, the March sun warm on her face and legs. She allowed herself to daydream, something she hadn’t done for a long time, not since Art. It had been too painful.
Her mind responded instantly, as she gave it permission to dream, and it focused on the shining sea stretched out before her, with the islands of Bryher and Samson floating in the jade green waters. They were hill tops, Tessa thought, the mountains of a drowned land. And she had lived there! She had climbed those rocks, she had dreamed on those summits and gazed at emerald valleys far below.
The ringing sound from the sea became intense, drawing her into a tunnel of resonance, down, down into a place of chiming bell towers and pale stone palaces. Her city. The city under the sea.
I’m home, she thought, it’s where I lived, centuries ago, before I became Tessa.
She saw herself strolling between pillars of polished stone, where ancient sunlight glistened in the crystals of white granite. She saw her robe of silk and sea-pearls swirling as she walked, her hair tumbling from a jewelled tiara. Then came the alarm bells, and the screams. Hundreds of people fleeing for their lives, dying like ants in the tsunami, their hair flung like seaweed into the mountain slopes. While she still lived, high on the mountain, in a safe palace of white granite. Forever haunted by an overwhelming thought: My work is not finished.
She sat with her back against a rock, her fingers caressing the white sand, watching points of light from grains of sand and the winking colours of seashells. Then she did something Starlinda had taught her. With her eyes closed and the palms of her hands upwards, she sat still and sent the question into the light. What work? What is the unfinished work? Who am I, and what is my destiny?
She waited.
And waited.
The lapping of the waves and the piping cries of seabirds faded. She found herself in her field, under the elder tree at the source of the Mill Stream. The water was burbling, and Art was there, playing his guitar, looking at her with immense love in his grey eyes. He got up and walked away, up the field and into the wood. He went through a gate, and locked it behind him. Tessa frowned as her reasoning mind kicked in and reminded her there was no gate, and no fence such as the one she was seeing. And why couldn’t she follow? Why lock the gate? She saw the glint of a chain and a heavy padlock, and it hurt. It was like a symbol. The way to his heart was locked.
Starlinda had trained her well. At one time, Tessa would have wallowed in the pain. Now she was able to lift her consciousness, rise above the pain and into the world of light. What is my work? she asked again, and felt an ache of intensity woven into the question. The answer came, swiftly, like a shimmer of wings against the sun. Just four words. You are a healer.
She longed to ask How? and When? and Where? but she remained still and let the words flow into her heart, and as she did so, a garden sprang up around the source of the Mill Stream, with lilies and roses, and a path winding through trees. The field had become an enchanted garden where bees and dragonflies flew with the sun on their wings. The winding path led down to a building at the bottom of the field; strangely, it was a barn that looked like a temple. Even stranger was the queue of people waiting at the door, some with cats and dogs in their arms. They’re waiting for me, Tessa thought, coming suddenly awake from the meditation, holding the dream in both hands like a precious jewel.
Driven in from a distant time, the dream alighted in a corner of her mind like a windblown seed arriving in the place where it intended to grow. At the top of the beach there were dandelions in the grass, in full bloom. Tessa studied one of the yellow flowers, so total in the way it opened its thousand petals to the sun, so mystically perfect in the way it made the seed head into a geometric globe. Another memory surfaced, of Freddie carrying her round the garden as a baby. She’d been crying, and he’d picked a dandelion clock and shown it to her. He’d made his face look like the North wind in a story book as he’d blown it, counting ‘one o’clock, two o’clock’, each time looking at her with his blue eyes sparkling, until she’d felt a smile ripple her cheeks and heard the startling sound of her own laughter.
Thanks, Dad, she thought now, you were the only person who knew how to reach me. The only person who believed there was a bright soul inside that screaming bundle of a child. And now I’m doing the same, for Chandra and all the children I work with.
Another, less welcome thought arrived like the tolling of the deepest bell. The death bell.
I have to do the same for Paul – and he’s supposed to be my husband.
CHAPTER 15
Silent Spring
‘’Tis the saddest day of my life.’ Freddie held Kate’s hand tightly as they waited at the garden gate of The Pines.
‘We should go indoors,’ Kate said, ‘and get on with something.’
Freddie shook his head. He put his arm around Kate’s shoulders, his fingers finding comfort in twiddling strands of her hair. ‘I gotta stand here. ’Tis like – a funeral,’ he muttered, and the words hurt his throat. Men don’t cry, he thought, annoyed to feel a tear trickling through the stubble on his cheek. He wanted to rage at God, and shout at the sky, tell the world he cared and why didn’t they care?
‘Don’t upset yourself, dear.’ Kate slipped her arm around his waist, her work-worn hand loving on the edge of his old tweed jacket. Then she tensed, listening. ‘They’re coming!’
They clung together, shocked by the finality of it as three huge lorries roared past, making everything tremble. They pulled in and parked on the grass verge outside The Pines. ‘Look at that,’ Freddie said in disgust. ‘Three of them – blimin�
� great things. What do they need THREE for?’
‘Well, one’s got a crane on it – and the tools, I suppose,’ Kate reasoned. ‘What a lot of men in tin hats. Do you think I should make them some tea?’
Freddie looked down at her bright brown eyes. ‘You stay here with me, Kate. I – I need you by my side. No need to make tea for that lot.’
‘I’m going to make you a ham sandwich and bring it out here,’ Kate said firmly. ‘You’ve had no lunch. I won’t be long.’ She put a wooden garden chair next to him, and disappeared into the house.
Freddie sat down, numbly. It seemed easier to think while he was sitting. He watched the nine helmeted men unpacking chainsaws and coils of rope. Butchers, he thought, and his mind trawled back through the years, creating a requiem for the land he had loved since boyhood.
The elm trees had always been there. He had trudged to school under their guardianship. Trees that stood, invincible, through wind and weather, and wartime. He’d spent happy hours playing in the drifts of golden leaves that filled the lanes in autumn. He’d watched flocks of linnets, yellowhammers and fieldfares moving through the branches, and caterpillars of the tortoiseshell butterfly making their cocoons in a crevice. He’d seen woodpeckers high up drilling for insects, and the red of hibernating ladybirds hidden in the texture of the bark. The elm trees supported a vast range of wildlife which he had studied as a boy. Elms grew profusely along the hedgerows all over Somerset. Thousands had died, leaving their bare trunks like white bones, leafless and dead, killed by Dutch Elm Disease. Without them, the countryside would be desolate.
Freddie’s ham sandwich lay untouched on the willow-patterned plate, and Kate sat on a rug at his feet, her arm over his knees. He knew she felt powerless, as he did, against the whine of the chainsaws. ‘It’s like they’re cutting me friends down,’ he said. ‘And no one seems to know or care about the wildlife. Where’s it gonna go? All that life? Even the dead wood had dozens of insects, and birds, and fungi. There’ll be nothing left but a sterile world.’
Born to Be Trouble Page 20
