Gabby shakily put her tea down on her desk. Message number three.
‘Hi there, Gabriella. Peter gave me your number, do hope you don’t mind. He couldn’t get an answer so he left a message. Is there any chance of you having the time to accompany me to Tresco to see the figureheads? I would sure love to see them. I’d be grateful if you could let me know as I need to book my train ticket back to London …’
The sun was setting below the fields. Shadows lengthened across the stubby lawn outside. Bantams pecked the grubs in noisy little groups like fussy old women at a W.I. meeting. Gabby sat very still, pulling a thread from the hem of her tee-shirt. If she did not pick up the phone and dial his number this instant she would not be able to do it. She opened her diary to see which day she would be least missed from the farm, then, feeling sick, she picked up the phone and dialled Mark Hannah’s number.
As she waited for him to answer, the sun slid away, and despite the flushed sky, dusk descended quickly. Damp rose up from the grass and into the open window. In the kitchen behind her, Nell switched on the six o’clock news and lights sprang up suddenly, away on the far peninsula. A fleeting sadness, an ache, a sensation of being beyond the warmth of lighted windows, of being extrinsic within a house she knew and people she loved, descended on Gabby.
In the darkening room there was just her, holding a phone which was ringing out into a hotel room where a man lay on a bed with his hands behind his head, watching, as she did, evening come, with a sudden longing for home; for the smell of cooking and laughter and bottles of wine being opened, of small children being bathed. The safe embodiment of a familiar routine.
He lay still, waiting to see if the phone would ring, and when it did he could not answer it, as if frozen by the knowledge of what answering it might mean. Just as Gabby gave a shaky sigh of relief and made to replace the receiver, Mark Hannah, in one swift movement, turned and grabbed his up from the bedside table, aware as he did so of a premeditated and deliberate crossing from a place of safety, to something quite else.
In the early hours of the morning Charlie and David, the vet, fought to save number four and her calf. The cow managed after a long, painful labour to give birth to a healthy heifer, but collapsed and haemorrhaged immediately afterwards. Gabby knelt by her head, talking to the old cow and stroking her trembling limbs. Nell brought out more hot water and they put a blanket over her to try to minimize the shock of a difficult birth.
She managed to turn and nuzzle her calf to her shaky, stick-like feet and then she gave up the fight and with a tired, sad little sound the breath left her body. The calf bellowed and slid down to the floor again, nuzzling her mother for milk. They watched her suckling, then, still leaning against her mother, the calf fell asleep. Charlie rubbed her gently down with straw, admiring her.
‘That’s a good calf you’ve got there,’ David said, ‘but I’m sorry we lost the mother. Is there a cow you can try her with, rather than hand-rearing?’
‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Just one. She lost a bull calf last week. She’s young and skittish, so I don’t know if she will accept this one, but I’ll certainly try her.’
They moved out of the barn into the cool dark night.
‘Come and have a drink, David,’ Nell said. ‘Gabby, go to bed, you look exhausted.’
‘Yes, go on Gab, I won’t be long.’
‘Goodnight,’ David smiled at her before the men turned to follow Nell to her cottage.
Gabby walked across the yard to the house, the image of the dying cow still with her. She knew that it did not matter how long you farmed, you never got used to losing a healthy animal.
She showered quickly, then climbed into bed and lay on her back trying to relax. She switched her small radio on low and listened to the comfortable ragbag of the World Service and tried to drift off. She wanted to be asleep before Charlie tripped exhausted up the stairs, full of Nell’s whisky.
Gabby knew the pattern of Charlie’s drinking after a long hard day. If she was still awake she could time Charlie’s clumsy movements in the dark. He would wash his hands but would be too tired to shower. He would fall into the bed beside her with a grunt of relief and either reach out for her or fall asleep in a second on his back and start to snore gently.
Gabby preferred the latter. The smell of straw and disinfectant would still cling to him, mingling with the not altogether unpleasant sweat of hard labour. With whisky blurring any moral sensibility he would mumble in her ear, push her nightdress up to her waist, part her knees roughly with his, enter her, come immediately, or, worse, complete this isolating little act with difficulty.
Gabby would lie under him, looking out through the open curtain at the night sky, detaching herself from her inert body being rammed rhythmically under his. As he rolled off her, already asleep, Gabby would feel the bleakness of the spirit confronted by the inevitable fact of its separateness from another human being. She saw in her mind the cockerel pouncing on his bantams or the bull in the field clumsily mounting a heifer.
If Gabby was aware, in the telling and unforgiving dark, that her passivity in allowing her body to be used was colluding with the act itself, she would have had to face, head on, her own facility for smoothing over all cracks to maintain the polished facade of what she believed a marriage to be.
It was easier not to confront. Charlie would not have understood the word violation, and it seemed too strong a word for something that lasted minutes and did not hurt the flesh, only left the soul in a cold, dark place. It was simpler to make some areas of her marriage off limits.
If Gabby had understood that by avoiding communicating to Charlie on any intimate level she denied him the chance of acknowledging any responsibility for the way he sometimes behaved, she would have had to own that she did not have the courage to go there. She was comfortable, on the whole, in the place she occupied, in the marriage she had. Two people who shied carefully away from emotional intimacy. And she was sure Charlie was, too.
Tonight she slept and was only dimly aware of Charlie falling into bed beside her. He patted her bottom. ‘G’night,’ he mumbled.
‘’Night,’ she mumbled back, and, feeling sudden affection, ‘Sorry about number four, Charlie.’
But Charlie was already asleep. In three hours he would have to get up for milking.
Gabrielle and Mark stood before the figureheads in the peace of an early morning. The helicopter had departed with a roar back to Penzance and the only other people in the Abbey Gardens were the gardeners, unseen and silent. A spade stood upright in the soil, a robin pecked in the new-turned earth. A jacket lay folded on a bench, there was the sound of someone sweeping a path and the smell of damp blooms mixed with spearmint rose from the ground.
They had permission to go into the gardens before they opened to the little ferryboats full of tourists and gardening clubs. They walked silently, along paths that curled round vast tropical plants and beds of succulents of such colour and variety that occasionally they stopped in their tracks, awed by the sheer scale of the planting.
‘Each time I come I think of The Secret Garden,’ Gabby whispered, as if her voice might shatter the illusion of paradise. ‘There’s always a spade or a fork placed just so, yet I’ve never seen anyone working.’
Mark smiled. ‘Perhaps the gardeners are from some other world. Nothing would surprise me here. What an amazing place! There’s something mystical and timeless about being inside a walled garden.’
Rounding a corner they came upon a clearing and there before them lay Valhalla Museum, with the array of figureheads, bright against the lush undergrowth, extraordinary in their garish beauty. Mark drew in his breath, and Gabby, turning to look up at him, thought how open and un-English he was; unafraid to show his excitement.