by Gwyn GB
It’s been a difficult few years for Katherine since Anne’s death. She started work with an accountancy firm and threw herself into it, desperate for a distraction to keep her mind off her friend. The burden of guilt she carries is always there, a continuous pain within her; and even years on it remains, a coiled tapeworm inside her. Should she forget, should she dare to enjoy life just that bit too much, she can feel it tighten, constrict, demanding attention. She even withdrew from the teenage social scene, scared in case she bumped into Darren or Mark and distrusting of others.
It’s during one of Katherine’s dark days she first sees John. The depression doesn’t happen so much by now but occasionally something will trigger it. Today she’s been tidying her room and has found an old school exercise book covered in messages from Anne: notes about their friendship, about boys, about things they would do after exams - and a little heart with Mark and Anne written inside. So, Katherine ended up on her bed staring at the ceiling, going over and over the events at Sands, trying to work out what could have happened, if she could have helped, and what if she hadn’t said anything to Darren the day of their exam results. Perhaps if she’d run after Anne at Havre de Pas beach the last time they’d seen each other. If she’d tried harder to talk to her, to support her. In her head Katherine’s still stuck there, paralysed, watching events unfold.
Margaret pops her head around the door and finds Katherine lying on her bed.
‘Hi could you come and help me with this skirt I’m making please?’ she asks, but Katherine can tell by the change in her face that Margaret realises her sister isn’t going to be of any use for the rest of the afternoon.
‘In a bit.’ Katherine replies, although she knows neither of them expect her to be going anywhere.
John has been with the Binets for a couple of days and he comes into their yard to introduce himself. It’s his voice that reaches through the black fog and into Katherine’s ears, filling her head with thoughts of youth and banishing the images of the past. He sounds young, but not too young. A lovely voice, soft, but at the same time deep and manly. A real Jersey man with the accent of the island so many tourists mistake for a South African lilt. It pulls at her, drawing her from the bed and to the window where she stands just peeking around the granite wall framing the opening. He has his back to her, talking to her mother who is smiling, a look of girlish pleasure on her face.
Katherine’s come to recognise this in her mum, a hidden sexuality she’s only recently started to notice. It’s been about ten years since their dad died. Their mother slowly emerged from her grieving, re-hydrating her sexuality like one of those dried sea sponges you see in the tourists’ shops abroad; at first hard, scratchy, almost brittle and then swelling becoming soft and pliable again. She never lost the tenderness of maternal love, but as a woman she’d withdrawn into a chrysalis like state. Right now, Katherine longs to see what her mother sees, giggling and chatting with this young man whose back is tall and broad, his hair hidden under one of the hats which are de-rigueur for farmers out under the sun all day.
Katherine must have peered around the window just a little too much because her mother spots her, suddenly waving and calling her name, and he is turning round. She has no choice but to lean out of the window and say hello. The moment he sees her he smiles, there’s no mistaking the fact that what is going through her head and heart, is also going through his. She’s instantly attracted to him, and is also suddenly grateful she’s up in her bedroom, separated by space and a thick granite wall so he can’t see the sloppy clothes she has on. As it is her thoughts go instantly to her hair which has come to look like a pile of beached seaweed of late.
He takes his hat off and runs his fingers through his thick black hair. His features are strong, and although she can’t tell his eye colour from her vantage point, they sparkle at her. He’s handsome, rugged and he smiles straight into her eyes.
Margaret is engrossed in sewing her skirt and listening to some pop chart programme on their mother’s old Murphy portable radio. She’s surprised to say the least when Katherine suddenly appears at her bedroom door and asks,
‘Right, so if I help you with your skirt, will you help me with my hair?’
John gives Katherine a new lease of life; he is her target, her goal to achieve. In the following weeks he pops into their kitchen increasingly frequently, helped in some large part by her mother.
The moment Marie meets John she knows he is just what Katherine needs. He has a maturity that comes not with age, but from character. A man who considers life, not rushes through it eager to take all he can. His kicks don’t come from persuading another girl to kiss him or go to bed with him, his pleasure is gleaned from what he creates, what he grows in the fields. Not from what he devours. Katherine doesn’t see this, she sees a handsome young man, but Marie can see in him the qualities her daughter needs, that of gentle nurturing and encouragement.
It doesn’t take Katherine long to spot Marie’s somewhat unsubtle matchmaking and she’s sure John hasn’t missed it either. If they all sit down for a drink her mother will suddenly have to go off and do something. If Margaret is with them she’s always dragged away too.
Afterwards Marie will grill Katherine, ‘What did he say? Has he mentioned a girlfriend? Did he ask you out?’ Eventually he does.
They start dating a few weeks after Katherine first saw him from her window. On their first evening together he confides in her he’s been wanting to ask her out from that first day but was worried it might not look good as he’d just started his new job. She’s relieved, Katherine had begun to worry he’s only asking her out because of the pressure from her mother.
They go to Le Hocq for a drink, sitting in the corner of the pub as far away from everyone else as possible, desperately craving some intimacy, some privacy for their conversation.
Afterwards they stroll along the beach, heading down the granite cobbled slip, next to Le Hocq Tower, and onto the sand. It’s fresh, especially after the smoky bar, with not much of a breeze to talk about but the unmistakable stickiness of sea salt hangs in the air peppered with the tang of seaweed. In front of them the big brown rock which dominates the natural harbour is nearly surrounded by water, the tide silently sliding in. Some of the small boats, moored on ropes in the sand, have started to float and right themselves. The ones furthest out are just beginning to bob on the water, while others, closer to the land, still lay stranded on their white keels awaiting the sea’s touch. The sky is red, the sun setting behind Green Island to their right. It’s a beautiful spring evening.
John takes her hand as they walk so she doesn’t trip over in the dark - or so he says. His hand feels big and rough against hers. The evening is getting chilly as the sun slips into the sea, and he envelopes her thin cold fingers in a warm socket of flesh. They chat and talk, giggle and laugh, walking on, clambering over rocks where the sea has taken away the sand; until they decide the beach has all but gone and a retreat up the nearest slipway is the most sensible course of action. Then he walks her home, stopping in the yard to say goodnight. He doesn’t kiss her, just says thank you, but he does ask if they can do it again.
John has never been into dancing and loud discos, smoky rooms or drinking as much alcohol as is physically possible in a few hours. Their dates are completely different to the ones Mark Vibert or Darren Le Brocq take their girlfriends on. They stick mostly to the pubs on the east side of the island, quieter, more rural than the ones in St Helier. John sees no pleasure in hanging out with the gangs on the Weighbridge in town, and Katherine discovers she enjoys this maturity, as well as knowing she’ll be less likely to see Mark or Darren.
They often start off in a pub, but it’s the need to be together in their own personal space which will usually see them out walking. Even in the bar they stay close, ensuring they’re always touching, leaning into each other, almost stealing each other’s breath. Not to hurt the other one but to take it, make it their own and then give it back again - blende
d. Watching everything about each other. Needing to. Needing to concentrate on every detail, every mannerism, every millimetre of skin, so when they are apart they can conjure each other up.
Katherine likes to sit, her Martini on the table untouched, drinking John in. The way his skin around his eyes creases like sun rays when he smiles. His mouth with lips that are capable of such tenderness and which, at the start of the day, are surrounded by soft skin, but by the end of it hundreds of tiny little bristles poke through his sun tan. His hair is black with a hint of brown the sun will do its best to find. When he gets embarrassed he’ll fidget and look away, but she can always draw him back; gently bringing his face round to hers with just the touch of a finger.
Then there is the smell of him. He will clean up after a day out working so there’ll be the slight perfume of soap, usually Imperial Leather, often a splash of his aftershave, and then him. Most delicious of all is the smell of a man, not sweat, not acidic, but musky, full of pheromones and testosterone - the natural chemicals of love and lust. She will seek out and latch onto them, trying to lose herself in their redolence.
More often than not John becomes self-conscious in front of his fellow farmers and islanders. Many of them will tip the nod or come over for a few words, breaking into their bubble and causing John to suggest they go for a walk where he can relax and enjoy their courtship alone. Sometimes they’ll head off around the coastal cliff paths in the north, the stunning views of the sea and France wasted on them. Or they’ll walk up the small path that leads past St Clement Church and its graveyard, after a drink in The Priory Inn at the bottom.
It’s a fairly steep climb, but they’ll walk slowly using the hedgerows as a distraction from the effort. Hawthorn bushes and small Elder trees line the banks, created many years ago to act as wind breaks for the fields and orchards of cider apples. The apple trees are mostly gone now, replaced by the green spread of Jersey Royals, and in late spring the tractors and the farm workers will be out well into the evenings digging up the valuable crop.
The footpath starts to grow narrower in the spring, nature’s own taking over. Hogweed and Hemlock growing tall, their white blooms almost identical, but John points out the purple blotched stems of the poisonous Hemlock, and tells her how his cousin in Britain died from the plant after making a pea shooter from its hollow stem. His two friends survived, but he didn’t. He was just six. Katherine makes a mental note to tell their children of the dangers, and feels a tingle of excitement at the thought of a family with John – and the act of creating it.
They walk past bindweed and grasses of all types, sometimes mixed with the brown heads of Ribwort plantain, or interspersed with the small green Lupin-like flowers of the Navelwort, the tiny yellow blooms of Alexanders, giant Dock leaves, and the small Dandelion-like flowers of the Sow Thistle. If she has to be a plant she wishes she can be the Ivy which entwines itself around the Hawthorn trees, clinging to their bark with tiny finger like tendrils. She would wrap herself around John, becoming a part of him - one living thing.
In autumn, the leaves fall from the trees, and John falls onto one knee and proposes. Katherine delightfully accepts. On hearing the news Mr Binet announces his retirement from farming and suggests John approach Marie with a view to taking on her land himself, and if he wants, rent the land and equipment belonging to the Binet farm. It’s a great opportunity, Katherine’s mother is delighted and immediately offers the couple the dowager’s cottage attached to the house. It hasn’t been used in years and needs a fair bit of TLC, but John rises to the challenge, and within a few months they have a handsome two-bedroom home. They can’t believe their luck. What more could they want from life than each other, a home, a livelihood. Except of course, a family of their own.
19
March 3rd 2008, Jersey
Margaret watches Katherine walk out to John in the yard. She can’t help it, but her sister’s apparent complete disinterest in him infuriates her. What the hell is she doing back here anyway? How can she just turn up here after all this time and not even bother to make an effort to re-connect with her husband? If there’s a man she never deserved, that’s John. Why he has let her treat him like this all these years she can never understand. He even tried to move over to London to be with her, but she was far too busy lording it up with her professional friends to realise he’d been choked by the City. His feet are firmly rooted to soil, soil he can work on, and life in London was not for him. What Margaret never understood is that why, once he came back to Jersey, Katherine didn’t put him out of his misery. Let him go, tell him she wanted a divorce, instead of leaving him just hanging on a tiny thin thread of hope all these years.
The Katherine who left Jersey twenty years ago was her sister, they were close, but she’s not the same person as the woman who is out there now. This Katherine is distant, she’s a stranger, she’s been obsessed with nothing but her career and money for two decades. So, she’s coming back home is she? Why? Is it to claim her inheritance? Has Katherine stopped to think about the impact of what she does? About what it could mean to other people? Of course even if she doesn’t insist on selling their home she could say they have to pay rent. That would put an end to any hopes of James going to University, let alone Sophie. They’d never be able to afford the fees, but then Katherine wouldn’t think about that would she? She has nobody but herself to spend all her money on. In fact, she seems to have positively avoided having to share, especially with a family of her own. She doesn’t even seem to like children. The second Sara was born she did everything she could to avoid her. Margaret and Robert asked her to be Godmother in the hope of at least getting her to show some interest in her niece, but it never happened. She didn’t even send the girl a card for her twentieth birthday last week, her with all her money and nobody else to look after, you’d have thought she could have at least remembered a card for her Goddaughter! How can two sisters be so different?
Then of course, if she doesn’t lower herself to kicking them out of the main house is she going to try and evict John out of the cottage, his home for the past twenty-six years? He’s built up a nice little business on the farm, it’s been great to see the land being used by somebody in the family.
Margaret is positively seething by the time Katherine and John’s brief exchange is over. She watches her sister walking back, looking all around her, taking it all in. What’s she doing, sizing up what she’s going to do with the place, what she’s going to alter?
Thankfully Sophie takes Katherine out of Margaret’s line of fire. She’s left to bang around the kitchen muttering to herself while her sister reads a bedtime story to the niece she has barely ever met. By the time she comes back down Robert is home, a buffer for the growing tension, but even he can only hold back Margaret’s wrath for a limited time. Fuelled by alcohol the cork inevitably blows later that evening.
It’s Robert who is the innocent catalyst to the argument. They’ve eaten dinner and are sitting around the fire in the lounge drinking yet another bottle of wine, chatting about the island, talking about somebody they’d known when they were younger. Katherine is struggling to remember and Margaret has been getting more and more agitated.
Even Robert has noticed her knocking back the wine rather too fast and commented on it. He feels the tension building as his wife seems to be revelling in Katherine’s difficulty to recall their old friend and so he changes the subject.
‘So Katherine is there any particular reason why you’ve come back now, or did you just fancy a break?’ Robert thinks it an innocuous question.
Margaret, seething by his side, jumps at the opportunity. ‘Yes Katherine, why have you come back?’
Katherine looks a little stunned at Margaret’s ferocity and Robert notices it too, turning to look at his wife. ‘Well, I just felt it was time to catch up with everyone. You know Jersey’s been in the news a lot lately and it just got me thinking that’s all.’ Katherine replies.
‘Thinking about what? About your husban
d, about us, or maybe about this house?’ Margaret viciously retorts, leaning forward in her chair, spoiling for the fight.
‘Well... about everything really…but what do you mean Margaret, about this house…’ Katherine is beginning to realise she’s under attack.
‘Well it’s half yours isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but...’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about getting your money out of it, with the land it could be worth a million each. You’d like a million wouldn’t you?’ Margaret is slurring her words slightly.
‘Margaret I think you’ve had enough.’ Robert tries to intervene, but he’s no match for a sisterly argument that’s been brewing for twenty years.
‘I’m fine,’ she snaps. ‘So you telling me you haven’t thought about the house at all?’ She directs her latter question back to Katherine.
‘Not in that way no.’ Katherine looks from one to the other.
‘In what way then? Don’t tell me you still think of it as home, not after twenty years away. Twenty years!’
‘Margaret are you annoyed with me because I went away? I don’t understand. You chose to stay here; I chose to live away for a while…’
‘Yes I chose to stay here that’s right and I’m glad I did. I really am. I also chose to stay with my husband,’ Margaret waves her hand in Robert’s direction, ‘To build a family, a home and I’m bloody proud of it too.’
‘So you should be. You don’t need to say that to me. I don’t understand what’s wrong? Why are you angry at me?’
