Summer with the Country Village Vet

by Zara Stoneley

  ‘Ah. You said Miss Harrington wanted you to have one of the pups. Maybe it’s a new strategy, wear you down. Send you in there alone, shower you with doggy goodness.’

  ‘They are gorgeous. I guess it’s dangerous to have got that close.’ She laughed, but it sounded hollow. She could have hung on to that puppy forever, taken it home, promised to look after it. Something to hold, something to love of her own, that would never let her down.

  ‘I daren’t ask what you’re thinking.’ Charlie had somehow moved in closer again, his fingertips brushed over her cheek. She glanced up. Met that soft gaze head on, and when he dipped down she leaned in. Closed her eyes. Felt the gentlest, sweetest kiss as his lips covered hers.

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I really shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s, er…’ Okay sounded a bit lame.

  ‘I think it’s probably time I checked up on that cat before this gets embarrassing. Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Right. Good, you’re welcome, er Charlie?’

  But he was already up off the bench and heading across the green, covering the ground easily with long strides.

  Lucy stared after him, her fingers resting on her lips. That had felt and tasted so good. She swallowed hard. Too good.

  Who’d have thought that the hardest part of living in Langtry Meadows would be trying not to fall head over heels in love with the village vet?

  Chapter 16

  A mass of bright colour tumbled across the narrow, winding footpath and Lucy stood, secateurs in hand, wondering where to start.

  She’d promised herself that she’d spend as much time as she could during the half-term holiday out in the garden. It was rapidly spiralling out of control, but now she wasn’t quite sure what to do. Glorious was the first word that sprung to mind, followed by abundant, and despite the fact that she normally liked everything tidy and under control, she appreciated this wild abandon. It seemed so wrong to chop any of the plants back, just to make them look neat.

  She twisted from side to side, biting her lip, torn with indecision. She could cut some of the flowers and put them in vases in the cottage, and she could tie back some of the more sprawling plants. But then what?

  ‘What a fantastic garden.’

  Lucy jumped and spun round, nearly falling over. ‘Mum! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought it was about time I saw where my little girl was hiding out.’ She smiled. ‘Have you got a little hug for your mum then?’

  Lucy had more than a little hug. She dropped the secateurs, and the few flowers she’d snipped off, and wrapped her arms round her mother. It was true that she often hid out, but it wasn’t because they had a poor relationship, but rather because it could be easier. Her mum would admonish her for working too hard, ask why she didn’t go out with friends more, why she hadn’t got a boyfriend. Why she hadn’t even got a dog. And it was simpler to hide from it. She’d realised that since she’d moved to Langtry Meadows, since she’d realised how much she actually liked it here, and how much she’d miss the place when she left. And one person in particular. Even if they were now doing a spectacularly good job of avoiding each other. Stolen kisses seemed to have that effect on them.

  ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d love one, Lucy. Let’s sit out here in the sunshine, it’s beautiful. How on earth did you find a place like this? They must be paying you well in this new job!’

  Lucy laughed. ‘The place kind of found me, and they aren’t even paying me masses, but as I’m house and pet sitting the rent is next to nothing.’ She suddenly stopped. ‘How did you get in without Gertie spotting you?’

  Her mum grinned. ‘I just said hello and she seemed quite happy, much more easy-going than some geese are. You probably don’t remember, but the farm up the road from where we used to live had lots of them, the lady there told me they needed to know who was boss! Right, you put the kettle on dear, and leave the snippers with me. I’ll do a bit of tidying, I used to love pottering about in our old garden. It wasn’t as big as this, but it was pretty and more than a little wild if you took your eyes off it for more than a day or two.’

  ***

  ‘You look well, darling. I think losing your job might well have been the making of you.’ Trish Jacobs put her cup of tea down and studied her daughter.

  Lucy grimaced. ‘I still have to find another permanent job.’

  ‘You can’t stay here? Oh that’s a shame.’

  ‘I’ve got the house and…’

  ‘Well houses can be sold.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Okay, okay, you know it’s always your choice. But it is lovely here, and you do look well on it. Just look in the mirror, Lucy.’ She lifted her cup again, and watched Lucy over the rim. ‘It’s different to the village we lived in when you were little. I don’t suppose you really remember it.’

  Lucy knew this was the opening, she could ignore the comment, the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, they could move on. Or she could ask all the questions that had started to niggle at her, ask about the gaps in her background that she’d never thought existed until she’d come here. ‘Not really, Mum. We never talked about it after we left, did we?’

  Her mother ignored her. ‘When I popped into the village shop to ask where your house was, they were lovely in there. Very friendly and helpful.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘I suppose if things had been different between me and your dad then it might have been the same in Stoneyvale,’ she pursed her mouth in the way she used to, just before she said never you mind, now do as you’re told, ‘but we just weren’t compatible, love. We got married too quick, to prove people wrong, and then I stuck it out as long as I could. I really did Lucy.’ Lucy didn’t say anything. She’d always thought her mum had just walked away. And changed their lives forever. But she knew now that there was more to it than that.

  ‘What was he like?’ She could hear the tremble in her own voice. He’d just been a father to her, she’d accepted him at face value, trusted that he was the best dad he could be. Built all her beliefs about her childhood on a foundation that she was sure had never existed. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the full truth, but she needed to.

  ‘Your father? Well we were younger than you are now when we moved in together.’ Trish took a biscuit and chewed it slowly, as though working out how much she should say.

  ‘Mum,’ Lucy waited until Trish looked up, looked into her eyes, ‘you know we need to talk about this, we said we would last time we chatted on the phone.’ She hated herself for this, pushing her mother into bringing back memories she’d obviously tried to bury in the past. ‘I need to start growing up, Mum. I can’t be that little girl you protect forever.’

  ‘You are my little girl though, Lucy.’ She blinked and Lucy had a sudden urge to say it didn’t matter. Her mother never cried. Never.

  ‘I did come here to sort it all out though, explain. I owe you an explanation.’ The words were hesitant, brittle, as though they’d crumble if she interrupted them.

  ‘You don’t owe me anything, Mum, it’s just I need to understand.’ She was whispering, but she knew that her mother heard every word.

  ‘I know love.’ Trish sighed and looked away from Lucy, out over the garden, and when she spoke again her voice was stronger. The voice of the resilient, determined mum she’d grown up with. ‘I’ve been selfish hiding everything from you, but it was easier for me to just pretend none of it ever existed. I met your dad when we were at University, everything was new and exciting.’ Her voice was almost wistful. ‘Life was one big adventure.’ A sad smile settled across her features. ‘He could boss me around a bit, but it didn’t seem wrong, it was quite fun, quite nice having a masterful man instead of one of those dopey boys who kept asking what I wanted.’ She put the biscuit down. ‘When you were born, he wanted to move back to Stoneyvale. He’d been brought up there, he was part of the village and it sounded wonderful – a country cottage w
ith the man I loved sounded like a dream come true.’ She sighed. ‘I jumped at the chance, I didn’t even think about it. He said it was the ideal place to bring up children, and he could have been right,’ she studied Lucy, ‘in different circumstances.’

  ‘Dad said you were a city girl, you didn’t belong, he said we were both outsiders and nobody really liked us.’

  ‘Oh he said it alright, Lucy, and if somebody tells you things enough times you can start to believe them. But it wasn’t true.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘He wanted to alienate us, love. He wanted us to rely on him.’

  ‘That’s what you meant on the phone the other day when you said it wasn’t me, it was him?’

  ‘What you said about the piano was true darling. He didn’t want you to do the things you loved, which is why he got rid of it. It was only fun to him when he was in control, when he was making you play it.’

  ‘He didn’t want me to have friends, did he?’

  ‘No, he didn’t want you to have friends, he wanted,’ she broke the biscuit into tiny pieces, ‘he wanted you to only have him.’ Trish looked her straight in the eye for a moment, then looked away, started shifting the biscuit pieces around into a pattern.

  ‘And what about Amy? Why didn’t Amy write to me, come and see me? How could he stop her?’

  ‘That wasn’t your father, Lucy. I’m to blame for that. She didn’t get your letters. I’m sorry Luce, but when we moved I thought a clean break was better. I thought you’d make new friends faster if you weren’t trying to stay in touch with the old ones.’

  She put a hand over Lucy’s, then pulled back. ‘I never wanted to tell you this,’ she pushed a strand of hair back from the side of Lucy’s face, the tips of her fingers cool, ‘but I do want to be honest with you. Amy didn’t even know where we’d moved to. Nobody did. I couldn’t tell them and I couldn’t go back to take you to see them.’ She frowned. ‘They weren’t ignoring you Lucy, don’t ever think that.’

  ‘You didn’t want anybody to know where we were?’

  ‘Lucy, look at me.’ When she met her mother’s gaze she was shocked at the raw emotion there. The pain. Ashamed she was causing it, that she was making her discuss this. ‘No. I was scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’ But even as she said it, she knew. She remembered that wary stillness, the look on her mother’s face that she’d only realised recently had been fear. This time it was her that reached out, grabbed her mother’s hand. ‘You were scared of him, Dad. It was him that you didn’t want to find us.’

  ‘I was. I was scared for both of us, Lucy. I’ve made mistakes, lots of mistakes. I realise that now. I should have told you the truth before now, lies always cause problems. But at the time my head was spinning, it was all just too much and I just did the best I could for you. You were only young, but one thing that broke my heart was not being able to let you keep your dog.’ Her eyes were damp as Lucy stared into them. ‘I had to give him to a friend of mine. If I’d left Sandy with,’ she paused, ‘him, he would have killed your dog.’ She squeezed Lucy’s hand tighter. ‘I know you were on your own, but he wouldn’t even consider a brother or sister for you, Sandy was all we were allowed.’

  ‘Allowed?’

  ‘Yes, allowed.’

  ‘But that’s…’

  ‘Ridiculous?’ She nodded. ‘But that’s how it was Lucy, he laid down the law and heaven forbid if I tried to do anything different. The house had to be cleaned every day, he’d check out for dust, and meals had to be on the dot.’ Lucy was surprised to see a wry smile playing on her lips.

  She remembered now, the way her mother would constantly check her watch. She’d be agitated, double checking that everything was in its place. She’d just thought of it as normal. Never questioned it.

  ‘That’s why you didn’t tidy our new place.’

  ‘It was my tiny act of defiance.’

  ‘But why couldn’t you have just said no?’

  Trish Jacobs slowly turned, and all of a sudden she looked old to Lucy’s eyes. Sad. Not the cheerful we-can-do-anything mother she’d always been. ‘I could have never said no to your father, never. I should have told you, but the time never seemed right, and then it all seemed so long ago. Best forgotten.’

  Where had she heard that before? Elsie Harrington had said something similar. ‘I never realised. He was just Dad, I thought it was normal.’

  ‘I know, love. I thought our marriage was just normal at first. But in a way I just wanted you to remember the good bits, not find all this out.’ Trish stood up, and slowly followed the little path in amongst the flowers. Lucy followed, watching the petals fall from flowers as her mother brushed past them. Smelling the camomile crushed beneath her feet. ‘It was fine at first, good, I loved him. Then he started setting down rules. It was funny at first, but then I realised he was serious. He was scaring me.’ She stopped and turned round. ‘I was petrified that he’d take it out on you, and he knew.’

  ‘When he held me tight and said we didn’t need you, he was just taunting you wasn’t he?’ An involuntary shiver ran down Lucy’s spine as the full horror hit her. Her life could have been so different, so much worse, if her mum hadn’t done what she had. It could have been her with the bruises, her always looking out, never having the opportunity to make friends. To change her life.

  ‘Having you was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and that gave him power.’ Trish’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I thought somebody in Stoneyvale would notice, that we weren’t allowed out, that I walked into more doors than a blind man,’ she took a deep inward breath, ‘then I realised that they wouldn’t help me. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, but they knew your dad, his family, they just couldn’t see it, couldn’t imagine somebody they knew doing that. People don’t see what they don’t think is possible. They believed the excuses not the truth, and he gradually, one snip of a thread at a time, cut off all our contact with everybody else.’ She sighed, a long drawn out sound that made Lucy suddenly afraid. ‘For a very brief time I thought I’d be better off dead, then I looked at you,’ she swallowed, and when she spoke again her voice held a hint of the briskness Lucy was used to, ‘and knew I couldn’t do that.’

  She reached out to grab her mother’s hand. To hold on, make sure she’d never go. ‘Oh God, Mum, no, no you should have never thought that.’

  Trish smiled. ‘I couldn’t leave you, darling.’

  ‘And he didn’t leave us, and marry somebody else.’ Lucy spoke slowly, the words slotting into place as she spoke. Completing the jumbled up jigsaw of her life.

  ‘No, Lucy. He didn’t leave us. We left him, I walked out, ran out, because I knew that one day he’d really hurt me, or worse that he’d turn on you. He always said he would if I told anybody. After your party, the last one you had, he said that if I did it again he’d kill Sandy and make you watch, and that I’d know it was my fault. I’d made him do it.’ She gulped. ‘I never meant to tell you that,’ she’d gone pale and Lucy instinctively moved even closer, put her arms round her mother, ‘you shouldn’t hear horrible things like that, but you need to know. I hated him Lucy.’ She stared at her daughter. ‘I would have killed him if he’d laid a finger on you, then what would you have left?’ She rested her hands on Lucy’s shoulders. ‘When you were a baby he was nice, a generous father, but once you got a bit older you were just another bargaining tool, a way of making me do what he wanted.’

  ‘He scared all my friends off, didn’t he? It was him.’

  ‘He liked to control who you mixed with, cancel play dates, respond to invites and say you couldn’t make it. It was his game, he didn’t want you to know, that way you’d cling to him not hate him. After your party when he’d lost his temper some of the parents decided not to have anything to do with us.’

  ‘Heather’s parents?’

  ‘Oh yes, they didn’t think about how cruel it was when they left you out. In their minds they were just sending him a message, but h
e didn’t care.’ She gave a short, bitter laugh that held an unexpected sadness. ‘I couldn’t stay after that, after hearing you crying your heart out and him complaining about the noise. He told me to shut you up or he would, and it was the last straw. That party was my trigger Lucy, I hung on like hell to the sheer anger that he’d upset you like that, and I packed, did everything in a whirlwind, as fast as I could before he came home. If he’d walked in that door before we left then I’d have never been able to escape the nightmare.’

  ‘He never loved me, did he?’ Charlie’s words jumped into her head, his total dedication, his passion for a daughter who might not even be his.

  ‘He loved you in his own way, but I don’t think he loved anybody in the normal way. He would never have let anybody else harm a hair on your head, but he thought he was different. We were his, Lucy. Belongings. I’m not asking you to understand or forgive me, I know you hated it when we moved but I just tried to ignore it, pretend everything was alright, I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted you to have a proper life, to be able to make your own decisions. Be independent. It wasn’t alright, was it?’ Trish shook her head. ‘I was so busy trying to make a home for us that I didn’t help you like I should have, I wasn’t a good mother.’

  ‘You were.’ She had been, even if the chaotic life hadn’t been what Lucy wanted. But she carried on as though Lucy hadn’t spoken. ‘You gave me everything, Mum.’

  ‘I was scared, I had to go where he couldn’t find us, that’s why I cut you off from your friends. I had to disappear. Start again or he would follow us,’ she gave a wry smile, ‘he would have made us go back, he was very persuasive your father. People like that are. Clever.’ She squeezed Lucy’s shoulders, then let her hands drop to her sides and stood up straighter. She turned away, suddenly unsure of herself. ‘Don’t hate me, Lucy, please. I didn’t mean to mislead you. It was just once I started…’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Mum.’ Lucy put a hand out to stop her. ‘I could never, ever hate you. You’re the best mum anybody could hope for. I just wished I’d realised what you were going through, and I hadn’t been such a selfish brat.’