Chapter 6
6
Once Jade had got used to the idea of having a double wedding and she’d realised Finn wasn’t averse to it either, she was excited.
‘To be honest, I’d envisaged us having a really quiet do with just your dad and Dorrie and Ben. And Sarah and Callum, of course,’ she told him when they chatted about it over the next few days. ‘But it would be fun to tie the knot together.’
‘It could be – as long as Sarah hasn’t got anything too crazy planned. I think Ben would love it. She’s right about that.’
‘So, are we going to say yes then?’
‘Subject to us all agreeing on the type of day it is, I don’t see why not.’
Jade grinned. She didn’t imagine Sarah would want too quiet a day. Quiet and sensible weren’t adjectives she’d ever have used to describe her best friend, but there was wriggle room. The two of them had always complemented each other well because they were such complete opposites.
Sarah wasn’t keen on exercise or getting her hands dirty, unlike Jade who had always been more comfortable pottering outside beneath a big sky. Sarah was a genius on a computer. She wrote the software for marketing databases that sold to multinational companies, which was where she’d met Callum, who sold the databases. Jade was never sure which one of them made the most money, but they were both high flyers.
Jade was serious and tended to play by the rules, whereas Sarah had always been a natural rebel, whose instinct was to do exactly the opposite of what she was told.
Sarah hated authority and Jade thought it was a necessary evil which occasionally had to be tolerated. Although deep down Jade had an anti-authority streak too. If she hadn’t she probably would have followed her mother into the hotel business, which was what had been expected of her, instead of rebelling and insisting on following her own path.
Fortunately, they loved each other dearly, and the only thing they’d ever really fallen out about had been the issue of Ben’s father. Jade had always thought Sarah should try to track down the stranger she’d met at a drunken Christmas party and Sarah had always flatly refused.
Thankfully that had been resolved when Finn had come back to Arleston two years ago and both women had finally realised who he was.
Things had ended happily when it came to that dangerous secret.
Keeping secrets from Finn was not something Jade ever planned to do again.
What with all the excitement of Sarah’s proposition, Jade forgot all about her mission to ask Farmer John about his retirement and selling up plans.
Finn had been busy too – he was spending all his spare time painting, which was apparently the only advice his new agent had given him. He took his easel into the surrounding countryside at every opportunity. As well as Stonehenge, he painted other famous local landmarks like the Westbury White Horse, a fifty-five-metre-high white horse carved out of chalk on a hillside. There were seven chalk horses dotted around Wiltshire but Westbury was the biggest and most distinctive.
Occasionally Finn just painted ordinary scenes with no recognisable landmarks. One of Jade’s favourites was an old wooden stile by a footpath that led across a field of golden barley. Scarlet poppies dotted the field of gold while the dusty brown path meandered into the distance before disappearing over an unseen horizon into a bright blue sky. There was something about the picture that made Jade’s throat ache.
‘If you can’t sell that one, maybe we can put it in the lounge,’ she said when she told him how much she loved it.
‘We can put it in the lounge now. It’s my favourite. It reminds me that there’s always hope, if you just keep on the right path.’
‘That’s very spiritual,’ she said, looking at him in surprise. Finn rarely came out with profound sayings like that.
‘Is it? That must be Eleanor’s influence. She said I should think about titles for my work, based on what I was trying to capture when I was inspired to paint them. I’ve called that picture Hope .’
Hope went up in their lounge on the biggest wall. Every time Jade looked at it she thought about what he’d said. Hope was one of those things everyone needed.
A couple of days after this conversation, Jade bumped into Farmer John as she was walking some dogs in her field. It was a mid-week morning and he was in the field alongside them doing something to the wheel of a tractor but when he straightened up, he saw her and strolled across to the fence that divided their land.
‘Jade. It’s good to see you. It’s been ages.’
‘Yes, I know. It seems mad when we’re next-door neighbours. How are you?’
‘I’m good, Jade, thanks. Hello, boys.’ He put a hand through the fence to greet the two waggy-tailed terriers, now dancing on their hind legs on the ends of their leads. ‘There’s a fine couple of ratters if ever I’ve seen them.’ He met her gaze again. ‘I’m counting down the days to retirement. Never thought I’d be saying that but the day has finally come.’
‘You’re not old enough to retire, are you?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I’d say seventy-six is old enough even for a die-hard old farmer like me, wouldn’t you?’
She was genuinely dumbfounded. ‘You can’t possibly be.’
‘I’ve been lucky with my health, there’s no doubting that. But yep, I’m afraid I am and farming’s a young man’s game. I’ve slowed down lately. The bits that haven’t already fallen off are getting decidedly creaky.’
It was the perfect opening. ‘So, do you have a young niece or nephew to take over the reins?’ She was fairly sure he didn’t have children.
He shook his head and his eyes shadowed. ‘Sadly, I don’t, no, so this place is on the market. I’ll miss it, that’s for sure, but there’s no point in having all this land if you’re not going to farm it.’ He gave her a direct look. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Jade. I’ve had a couple of developers sniffing around already. I’d rather sell it to a farmer, or another landowner like yourself, of course I would, but the reality is I’ll sell to the highest bidder.’
‘Would you consider splitting it up and selling off some of it to me?’ The words were out of her mouth before she could change her mind. Until that moment she hadn’t even fully made a decision about expanding. But now, in that split second, she was certain.
The old farmer put his head on one side. ‘I’d consider a reasonable offer – yes. Of course I would. What did you have in mind?’
She told him and he nodded thoughtfully.
* * *
Finn, who was out collecting Calor gas refills, which they used for the stoves that heated the outside animal enclosures and also for the caravan cooker where volunteers could heat up soup, had just had a call from an unknown number. He hadn’t answered it because his hands were full, and it was probably a sales call anyway. But his phone had just pinged to indicate they’d left a message.
He put the gas cylinders in the back of his Toyota and then sat in the driver’s seat and listened to the message.
An unfamiliar Irish accent filled his ears.
‘My name’s Caitlin Neale. Am I talking to the voicemail of Finn McTaggart? If I’m not talking to him, I apologise, and please put this message out of your mind. But if I am talking to the right number I’d be grateful if you could give me a ring back, Finn, at your convenience. I think you’ve been trying to contact me.’
Finn sat bolt upright in the car as shock straightened his spine. It had been over a week since he’d sent the Belfast Caitlin Neale a message, and he’d already decided she couldn’t be the right one or she’d have got back to him.
For a few moments he wondered what to do. His instinct was to phone her back instantly right now while he had a decent signal and she was obviously available – her message had been left less than five minutes ago – but what would he say?
He didn’t want to scare her off by going in too heavy and telling her he was her long-lost nephew. Especially as he was a nephew she might not know she had.
On one long-ago drunken evening, when Ray was half cut on Christmas whisky, he’d told Finn that Bridie’s family had never approved of him.
‘They thought I was too old for her and the wrong religion. She never told them about you. She didn’t dare.’
With hindsight, Finn had realised this was probably why she’d never come back. She’d literally blocked out this part of her life, him included, and while he’d been devastated at the time, once he’d reached adulthood and had been able to re-examine the past with fresh eyes, he’d understood how she might have been able to do it. If not one single person in her own birth family knew she’d ever had a child then maybe she’d managed to block out the fact too.
Or maybe she’d missed him every day since and longed to see him again. Finn had swung between these two extremes for much of his life. The not knowing was tough but it was better than finding out she hadn’t missed him at all and had gone on to have another six replacement children, all of whom she loved far more than her firstborn.
Now he was on the brink of finding out, he felt as though he’d opened a Pandora’s Box. Even though, right now, it was still firmly locked. Like his mobile, which felt slippery in his hands. He glanced at it. He should go back to Duck Pond Cottage, tell Jade everything, and see how she felt about it all.
They had a rule. No secrets between them. Especially not a whopping great big one like this.
The sun through the windscreen felt hot on his face. He did up his seatbelt, glad he had a plan. But then his mobile burst into action again and Finn looked at the incoming call and saw the same number that had left the voicemail flashing on his screen.
He answered it. ‘Finn McTaggart.’
‘Hello there, Finn. I was wondering if I’d phoned the right number, so I was. Would it be you who sent me the Facebook message?’ She sounded even more Irish than she had on her message.
‘It was me.’ His voice came out croaky, which wasn’t surprising as his tongue was so dry it felt like a bit of old leather in his mouth. ‘Thank you for calling me. I was just going to phone you back.’
‘Now I’ve saved you the bother. How can I help?’
Finn gathered his courage and launched into his prepared generic spiel. ‘I’m trying to track down Bridie Neale. She knows my father. They were friends back in the early nineties when she was living in England. We think she moved back to Belfast some time towards the end of 1998.’
There was an intake of breath. ‘OK, I’m with you.’ Caitlin sounded more surprised than anything else. ‘Now let me see. That is going back a bit. Would you bear with me?’
‘Sure.’ He heard her shout something to someone else in her vicinity. ‘Sean – can you remember when our Bridie went over to England to live?’
The answer was too muffled for Finn to hear the reply and there was some more back and forth conversation which he couldn’t catch either. She must have either moved away from the phone or muffled it somehow.
He held his breath. There was sweat pouring off his face now and running down the back of his neck. Stress. It wasn’t that hot. But he opened the driver’s door to let some air in while he waited for Caitlin to come back to the phone.
It seemed to take forever, but then she was back and talking again.
‘Sean, my better half, he’s agreeing with you – Bridie went to live in England in the early nineties. We’re saying the summer of 1990 would be about right. So that would fit in with what you think. Am I right?’
Finn could feel himself quivering with impatience. He’d managed to work that bit out already – although he realised he’d never asked his father where they’d first met. Or how long Bridie had been in Nottingham – or even what she was doing there. He felt so ill prepared for this conversation. ‘But she came back again to Ireland,’ he went on hesitantly. ‘Would you have any address for her? Somewhere we can contact her?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know that, son. That’s as much a mystery to us as it seems to be to you. Bridie never came back to Ireland. She stayed in England, so she did.’ Caitlin sounded suddenly sad. ‘It’s years since we’ve heard from her. The last known location we had was the south of England. Hampshire. Or it could be Wiltshire. We’re not entirely sure. I am sorry.’
‘Hampshire or Wiltshire?’ Finn felt shock ricochet through him for the second time that morning. It didn’t make sense. Why would Bridie have left him and his father and stayed in England? He’d always thought – because that was what his father had told him – that she’d run back home to Belfast.
He gathered his wits and forced himself to speak casually. ‘Do you have any idea of a town or a city?’
There was another long pause and more muttered discussion. Then Caitlin finally came back to the phone again.
‘We think maybe a place called Southampton. Would that be in Hampshire or Wiltshire?’
‘It’s in Hampshire. Do you by any chance have a contact number for her?’ He held his breath.
‘I’m so sorry, I don’t. I wish I did. I miss her, but…’
‘It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ He hoped his despair didn’t show in his voice, even though his heart was sinking. ‘You’ve been really helpful.’
‘No problem. Good luck, son. And if you do get hold of her, tell her Caitlin sends her love and would love to hear from her. She won’t be Bridie Neale though. We’re pretty sure she got married.’
Finn heard the ache of regret in her voice and he wished he could tell her who he was. Caitlin was his auntie – one he’d never known he had – and she’d sounded as though she’d missed Bridie too. Why had his mother decided to cut off so completely from her whole family?