Chapter 28
28
‘ R ed mite.’
Dazed, Caro turned to see Tomasz holding up a strip of sticky paper. She frowned; she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be looking at.
‘I’m going to have to take them all out and disinfect.’
It was only as he put the paper on the garden table that she saw. Where there should have been white, the paper was black, covered in the carcasses of hundreds of tiny red mites.
‘Does it have to be done now?’ she said. The last twenty minutes, sitting in the garden listening to the hum of bees by the lavender had been such a respite, such an unexpected sanctuary from six days of self-inflicted torture, she did not want to leave the sunny spot she had found. She didn’t want to break the spell.
On Friday evening she had arrived back at Hollybrook close to midnight showering for a full half hour before creeping into bed next to Thomas. Hoping he wouldn’t wake, she had barely ruffled the bedcover. But he had woken, and his warm arm across her stomach had left her unable to move, stiff with regret, pinned down as surely as if she’d been felled by an oak. And although she had been sure she would never sleep again, within a few minutes she was snoring, her body capitulating to exhaustion.
That felt like the last sleep she had had. In the days and nights that had passed, her agitation and her distraction, had become obvious. In bed, she tossed and turned, at the table she picked and prodded. Tomasz had gone from concern to impatience, and now to this: a reserved detachment as he went about fixing and digging. It was a week in which she had lived so many different scenarios. The life in which she confessed all to Tomasz and he forgave her, and they carried on happily ever after. The life in which she said nothing, and they carried on, happily ever after. Or the life in which he didn’t forgive her, ending it instead, so they didn’t carry on. Or the life in which she ended it. The more she thought about it, the more the knot in her stomach tightened. How could she live happily ever after knowing what she had done? How could he?
He leaned across for his coffee. ‘Isobella is preening herself to death in there, Caro. We can’t leave it, not with Laura and Neil coming. You know what they said.’
Caro nodded. She did remember and if she didn’t it was there anyway, under R, in the manual. A special chapter dedicated to Red Mite with specific instructions on how to clean the coup, how it affected the chickens, how, if it happened, they needed to act quickly. ‘Of course.’ Hands wrapped around her cup, she looked to the chicken village. The chickens had red mite, a couple she had nothing to say to were coming to dinner and six days ago she had slept with another man simply because she could.
‘See you there?’ Tomasz drained his coffee.
‘See you there,’ Caro said, but she didn’t move. One evening she would have decided. Watching him turn the pages of the instruction manual, her heart would contract with regret, her body shrink with self-hatred, and she would know that she could not say a word. The next morning, up early in the garden, with the dark peaks that filled her horizon watching her guilty footsteps, and she would feel with a cold certainty that she had to tell him. Confess not just the act, but the vanity that had led to it. Her load would be relieved completely then, and it would be up to Tomasz to decide. And then there were the times when, brushing her teeth, she would catch sight of herself in the mirror: Caro looking back at Caro, neither of them having any idea what to do.
She put her cup down and stood up. Two months ago, when they had visited Hollybrook for the first time, those hills had felt as exotically different as the sand dunes of the Sahara. Now, more and more, they felt like the walls of a prison. She was paralysed with guilt and weary with indecision, a darkness spreading inside her that she felt sure no amount of Cumbrian sunshine would ever reach again.
‘All done.’ Forty minutes later Tomasz emerged from the henhouse, with a bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other. ‘All the perches need to be disinfected now,’ he said, looking to the pile of wood they had, together, removed. ‘Then fresh straw laid.’
Caro nodded. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She peeled off a pair of bright-blue gloves.
‘Powder the hens?’
‘I can do that.’
But she couldn’t. And it wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to grabbing hens by now, it was that the temperature was thirty degrees, and the hens resisted, and snows of grey powder settled in the crevice of her collarbone and along the fine hair of her nostrils. Frustrating her, distracting her, causing her guard to drop so images crashed through. The way she had leaned back to show her legs, his thickened waistline. Words echoed, words she would like to forget she had ever said or ever heard: No train today. It’s just that I have an appointment at six. Which you answered . As if it was she that was infected, as if thousands of mites had nestled in her skin, infecting her, torturing her, she shook herself from head to foot, reached down and grabbed the next bird. But its squawk was shrill and as it twisted, her grip loosened and all she felt was a searing sting on her forearm! ‘Shit!’ Caro jumped back, a pool of blood forming at her wrist. ‘Shit! Stupid, fucking …’ And nursing her arm she kicked the bench so hard it collapsed. The bird screeched, turning to her with a flap of wings and an angry stare of its strange orange eyes.
Tomasz looked up from the rafter he was disinfecting.
‘It pecked me,’ she said, nursing her arm.
He didn’t speak. He looked, she thought, utterly exhausted.
‘It pecked me.’
‘Go in, Caro. I’ll finish up.’
Caro pulled at her lip. ‘I can’t leave you with all this.’
‘Just go,’ he said and turned and carried on with the next rafter.
By late afternoon, the sting had faded to a small sullen bruise. She had showered and dressed and was standing now in a kitchen flooded with light. From the Aga came the delicious scent of rosemary and thyme, the herb crust on a roasting joint of lamb. Her neck ached a little and her fingernails still carried a trace of earth, but she had shelled a bowl of fresh peas and scraped the dirt from new potatoes, and the table looked as if it had walked straight out of the pages of Country Life. Laid with willow-pattern crockery, and dressed with a vase of lavender, linen napkins and rush placemats, it was the most beautiful table she had ever set. Looking at it, calmed her. ‘You can do this’, she said as she straightened a fork, ‘you can do this’.
And she might have done. If Laura and Neil hadn’t been as dull as she had remembered, she might have got through the evening, might have stood side by side with Tomasz as they washed glasses and re-lived the worst parts, the funny parts. Together, the two of them, making another deposit in the memory-bank of this life they were building together. And then, who knows where it might have led? A slow walk upstairs? A night where they held each other close, waking the next day to a fragile but tangible peace that would have allowed them to move past her prickly moods, forward to their happy ever after?
No-one would ever know, because Laura and Neil were just too dull, and with dessert served and eaten, they were showing no sign of leaving. Worse, they had only just reached K, in the manual, which Neil had insisted Tomasz bring to the table. As if they were schoolchildren, sitting an exam.
‘R: Record-keeping,’ Neil said, his thumb splodged across the page. ‘Now this is important.’
Beside him, Laura nodded.
‘You really do need to keep accurate records of just about everything.’ Reaching across the table, Neil went to pour himself another glass of wine, but the bottle was empty. ‘Planting schedules, equipment maintenance ––’
‘Yields.’ Laura interjected. 'It’s really helpful to be able to look back at numbers when you’re pickling and making sauces. You can see if you’ve got less jars of something.’
‘Laura’s right.’ Neil flipped the pages of the manual. ‘But you’re getting ahead of yourself, sweetheart. We’ll cover that on Y.’
Y? Caro glanced at the clock.
‘I’ll get another bottle.’ Tomasz went to stand.
‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and the scrape of her chair was loud. As she walked to the larder, she was thinking about the cabbages she’d thrown in the bin, the week every inch of bench space had been covered with jars of sauce she had zero appetite for. She reached up for another bottle and stood holding it to her chest. How long could she stand here, until M … maybe even S …
‘We’re still on R,’ Laura whispered, as she came back to the table.
Caro sat down, her smile as thin as wire.
‘Six am on a Saturday morning,’ Neil was saying, ‘and I didn’t recognise any of them.’ He turned to Caro. ‘R for rural Network,’ he said, ‘and this is important, because you tell me, what three strangers were doing sitting in a van, outside the brickyard at that time in the morning?’
Caro pressed her lips together. ‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ Her irritation was obvious and rude.
‘A what?’
‘Well,’ she said tightly, ‘as we obviously have no idea what they were up to, I’m presuming you’re not actually expecting an answer.’ Her face ached, her nerves were razor thin and every cell throbbed with resentment. As she glanced up, she saw Tomasz watching her.
Oblivious, Neil re-filled his glass. ‘I’m just saying you’re going to need your rural network. Malcolm, from the stables, clocked them and called Jamie to let him know he better get down to the yard pronto. That’s the beauty of a place like this. Everyone knows everyone. We look out for each other. You’ll find they have your back up here.’
‘I see.’ Her lips barely moved. She was thinking about the day she’d walked back from the station. The men outside the pub. Did some shopping in the big smoke? In London, in her flat she could be gone for weeks, and often was, without anyone noticing. Like Spencer, who she supposed would be back in New York by now. The thought slipped in easy and light as a feather. She put her glass down.
‘I’ll miss that,’ Laura said. Caro looked up. Laura wore a wraparound dress in a size too small and a fabric too thin to offer support. Her chest sagged, her arms were covered in freckles and the thin gold necklace she wore had irritated her skin, so patches of red bloomed along her throat. ‘Have you met many people so far?’
‘Not so many.’ Tomasz smiled.
Probably, Caro thought to make up for her curtness just now, which only irritated her more.
‘We’ve been to the pub a couple of times,’ he added. ‘But I don’t drink, so…’
‘You don’t drink!’ Neil guffawed. ‘Not at all?’
Tomasz shook his head.
‘Well, the rugby club in Alston does a fantastic 80s disco every other month.’ Laura looked to Neil. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else, can you?’
Caro nodded. I’ll take you for cocktails at One World. Show you a view of my town. She stood up, as much to silence the voice in her head as anything else. ‘I’m sorry,’ she started, and having started, had no desire to stop. ‘I’m not feeling wonderful.’ She looked to Tomasz, but his head was dipped. ‘Maybe you could carry on without me.’
No-one spoke.
‘Yes.’ Caro picked up the bottle she had just placed on the table. ‘Anyone for more?’ she said, ‘before I go?’ But it had only been Neil and her drinking, and Neil had just filled his glass and …
‘Leave it, Caro.’
Slowly she put the bottle down again. She’d never heard such a tone in Tomasz’s voice before.
‘I think,’ Laura started as she folded her napkin. ‘I think we’d better be going. We can finish another time.’
But Caro didn’t speak, she was looking at Tomasz, who was looking back at her as if he didn’t even know her.