‘Settled,’ the vicar said. ‘Come on, Gabrielle, off we go.’
Peter moved away to talk to him and Gabby was left with the Canadian. She felt suddenly, infuriatingly tongue-tied. From the moment she entered the church she had been aware of his eyes constantly on her face.
He was a tall and lean man, and in the sunlight she saw he was older than she had first thought. His eyes crinkled with amusement as he bent to her.
‘Now what the hell could you have possibly done to upset that asshole?’
Startled, Gabby snorted with laughter. ‘Not me! Nell, my mother-in-law. She upset his brother, an untrained restorer, who ruined a valuable painting belonging to an old friend of hers and then charged her the earth. Nell wrote an article in the local paper. She didn’t name him but everyone knew exactly who she was talking about. It was the end of his career. Councillor Rowe has never forgiven her.’
They sat inside in the cool and Rowe pointedly ordered himself a pasty and orange juice and left. As the door closed behind him everyone relaxed. The young reporter started to quiz Mark on the details of shipping the Lady Isabella back to England while John Bradbury ordered sandwiches.
‘How’s Nell?’ Peter asked Gabby. ‘Still working, I hope.’
‘Oh yes. Nell will never really give up. She’s working on a huge painting at the moment.’
‘I met a guy in London who knew your mother-in-law,’ Mark said suddenly. ‘She’s still very highly thought of. I understand she worked for the National Portrait Gallery and then gave it all up to become a farmer’s wife.’
‘I don’t think she’s ever really stopped restoring. She just took on work locally instead of from London, when Charlie was old enough to help around the farm.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you Cornish?’
‘No. Charlie is.’
Now, why did she not want to talk about Charlie, as if it might make her less interesting to the Canadian?
‘They have the most beautiful farm,’ Peter said, ‘miles from anywhere and hell to find.’
The Canadian – Mark, for heaven’s sake, he has a name – was still firmly concentrating on her rather than the reporter. Gabby, who hated the focus of attention being on her, turned the conversation back to the figurehead to the relief of the earnest young man.
Back in the church car park they said their goodbyes. The two men thanked her for coming. The young reporter got on his motorbike and roared off. John Bradbury walked home to his vicarage. Peter sent his love to Nell and went to unlock his car and open all the windows.
The Canadian took Gabby’s hand and looked down on her in the amused way he had, as if laughter was never far away. She wondered if he found them all very quaint and British and tried to draw her hand away, feeling suddenly cross with him for staring, for making her tongue-tied, when she would think later of all the questions she wanted to ask him. He hung on to her hand, still smiling down at her.
‘Please could I have my hand back?’ she asked.
‘Of course you can,’ he said. ‘I’m only borrowing it – for now. It’s a very nice hand indeed.’
He let it go. ‘It’s been great meeting you, Gabriella. I’m so happy Lady Isabella is going to be in your hands. She will be, you know.’
‘I would really love to restore her,’ Gabby said, hot all over. ‘Goodbye.’
She climbed into her car and banged the door shut, deeply grateful to her sunglasses that she hoped were hiding her face.
‘Goodbye, Gabriella, take care,’ Mark said through the window and turned and walked back to Peter, who waved at her as she drove quickly past, eager to get round the corner and back onto the road home.
The sun was beginning to fade and the shadows over the fields lengthen. Cows were making their way down a field to be milked. She wondered how long Charlie could keep his herd and how diminished the farm would be without the sight of them in the yard every morning and evening. Wistfulness for everything to stay exactly as it was overtook her so suddenly that tears sprang to her eyes. She made the little car go faster, as if the farm might have disappeared altogether in the time it took her to drive home.
Nell watched as the girl and the small boy crossed the edge of the daffodil field down towards the coastal path. The morning was still, the wind from the south-west soft and teasing. The sky and sea merged in the distance, blue on blue.
The day was held, breathless and hovering, like the kestrel poised, wings fluttering, over the hedge of the field where the girl walked.
It was one of those days that was too still, the lack of wind unnerving, making the morning seem as if it had drawn in on itself, gathering and collecting in a silence that should be listened to.
Nell stood, shading her eyes, holding the bowl full of corn, staring out towards the small figure of the girl in the distance. There was no hint of cloud, just the endless shimmering ocean meeting the lush green of the fields dotted with buds of emerging daffodils.
She could hear the tractor now, moving along the farm track. As it came into sight above the hedge the girl stopped and lifted the child, and he called out, waved vigorously with his small, fat hands. The driver stopped and jumped out and walked to the field gate that lay between them. The child let go of his mother and ran along the stony edge of yellow daffodils so fast he fell, and the man leapt over the gate and scooped him up, threw him up over his head. Nell could hear the child’s laughter blowing over to her like dandelion fluff on the fragile stillness of the day.
Maybe it was going to work, Nell thought, against all the odds. Watching from a distance they looked like a little textbook family; content, happy in their skins. Charlie had a son. He had never doubted for a moment that his firstborn would be a son. That had made everything easier.
The man ruffled the girl’s dark hair lightly and they stood talking for a moment before he lifted the child up onto his shoulders, walked away and climbed over the gate and placed the child in front of him on the tractor. The engine started up again and they continued down the lane, towards where Nell stood in the yard holding the bowl of corn for the hens, watching.
Silently the kestrel dived, steep and sharp. Nell could hear the sudden squeal of the baby rabbit as it was caught and pulled out of the hedge. The girl turned, startled, and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.
‘No. No. No,’ Nell heard faintly on the wind. Then the girl made little runs up and down, crying and shouting in impotent anger at the kestrel, which lifted its prey swiftly upwards over the hedge and away in low flight.
The girl was left small and alone in the vast rolling greenness of the field. Some nebulous, disturbing feeling caught at Nell as the girl, shading her eyes, watched the kestrel until it was a pinprick in the sky.
Nell had rarely seen any show of emotion in this girl. Placid, cheerful, so careful to fit into country life, to be accommodating, to be loved. Nell realized in that brief moment that her daughter-in-law had been smothering any spontaneous expression of anger, joy or misery. She suddenly perceived Gabby as a sleepwalker in her own life. It was safer to sleep sometimes than to question how or why we came to be in a particular place at a particular time with a particular person. Nell knew this protective passivity only too well.