Chapter Two
Two.
I step outside the front door most nights at ten o’clock, which is really the time I should be turning off my light.
But I’m never in bed by ten because of this: this deep lungful of moorland air.
This wild space under the stars, thatch creaking above, bats zigzagging like demented bullets overhead and owls calling through the darkness. This time is for me.
Since Robin and I got the twins to sleep earlier I’ve ignored all the warnings I used to give my patients about googling their medical conditions—or, worse still, their children’s medical conditions—and have been googling recent research on chronic lung disease.
The medic in me despairs of this kind of behavior but I don’t have a phone full of clinical contacts anymore and besides, I’m a parent first.
I’ve also been messaging my sister, who lives in Colorado.
I sent her pictures from this evening’s nativity play: Raffy dressed as a tube of Rolos and Maeve as an “elite gymnast.” Maya sent me photos of her dog eating a block of smoked tofu, which we both found disturbing.
Inevitably, though, our messages turned to our father.
Dad’s partner Nicola and I have accepted, finally, that he needs residential care.
None of us can take the anxiety any longer; my body pitches into fight-or-flight just at the sound of my phone and my once-mellow stepmother can’t sleep for fear of him disappearing onto the moor at night.
Maya is flying over here for Christmas to help with the move, which is a great relief. Nicola and I have been managing the situation for three years now; things only worsening, never getting better. We are both exhausted, especially Nicola. We need a break.
And so, no matter how happy I am to be seeing my sister, there’s a river of deep grief flowing through her forthcoming trip. Neither of us is ready for this to be happening. Dad, for all his faults, was always the solid one. He was the place we called home.
—
The sky is clear after a day of rain and fog, the moon fat and gibbous above the moor.
Up at Buckland Beacon I can make out black clumps of bracken and gorse as the hill climbs; a few windblown, ancient hawthorns silhouetted darkly against the ink-sheet sky.
Seawater has hung like curtains around our house all day, but now it’s lifted the air bears all of my favorite smells: wet moss, damp peat, the gentle spice of wood smoke from our neighbors’ house over the hill.
Raffy, of course, will be fine; he’s tough, my little boy.
There’s no reason he shouldn’t outgrow his lung disease in time.
And in the moments that I can switch from daughter to doctor I’m able to accept that my father deserves to be safe.
He will soon be in the hands of competent, trained professionals and that’s exactly what he needs, no matter how great the ache in my heart.
I lean against the cold stones of our porch, repeating these words while my nervous system settles. He deserves to be safe. Competent, trained professionals. What he needs.
Bats swoop and dive above the narrow stream that cuts our garden in two, and a soft square of light from Robin’s office lies quietly on the grass at the side of the house, near our little holiday let, the Pig Shed.
We’ve got guests from London at the moment.
They took pictures of the Pig Shed door sign and posted them on Instagram.
Their caption described this as “the REAL countryside.”
People often ask: What brought you down here? Most are curious, but plenty see us as blow-ins from London. We aren’t Londoners, either of us, but I’ve stopped explaining that because nobody listens.
“I grew up here” is what I normally say.
And I did: you could see the ancient loaf of Hameldown from my bedroom window if you leaned out at an angle.
But when I left this place for medical school, I never imagined coming back.
I craved the richness and experiential intensity of city life.
In the years that followed I worked in London, Manchester, Johannesburg, Newcastle; a fellowship in Chicago was on the cards.
I worked in Major Trauma centers in major cities and I thrived.
Then I delivered my twins three months early, spent six months in NICU, and stopped thriving.
I limped on in London for nearly two years before accepting as truth my need to move back here.
To this otherworldly land of operatic seasons and enormous skies.
To the healing peace of the moor with its ancient lanes, moss-covered boulders, that light breaking through the clouds in quivering plates: rose, copper, gold.
And so we came back here, to the REAL countryside.
—
Robin’s unboxing what looks like a secondhand camera lens when I come in.
Next to the parcel is his laptop, open on the NASA space station tracking website.
On the other side is a large Pyrex dish of macaroni cheese from dinner, hardened and cold.
A fork has been speared into the top of it.
My husband is an unapologetic defender of comfort food.
He has an app full of recipes for shepherd’s pie and jam roly-poly and he laughs out loud at the fastidiously healthy lunches I make myself these days while he eats fish finger sandwiches.
“Carrie! Look at this,” he says, holding the lens reverently. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I walk over to pick it up. “Oh yes. Stunning.”
I have no idea if it’s stunning, or how he could possibly need another one, but astronomy is a nonnegotiable part of him and I have given up questioning the frequency and scale of his kit purchases.
He has promised me he will only ever need the one appallingly expensive telescope that takes up half of our already small spare room, and as long as he honors that I can live with the cameras and lenses and all the sweet retired folk he chats to about supernovae and exoplanets.
He sticks out an arm and pulls me down next to him. “Hello,” he says. This dear man. I lean sideways into his armpit, enjoying the tired, sandy smell of him, the steady rhythm of his heart beating through his jumper. His ribs creak as he lets out a long, quiet yawn.
Robin has supported us single-handedly, often working crushing hours, since I walked away from my career. Encouraging him in his one hobby feels like the least I can do.
“It’s satisfyingly heavy,” I say, moving the lens from hand to hand. “I like it.”
This seems to please him. “The space station’s going to be visible tomorrow night,” he says, nodding at his laptop.
“Providing the weather holds up. I was looking at it online with Maeve earlier and she was really interested—I’d love to show it to them.
It’d mean a late bedtime, but we could have hot chocolate up in the field. What do you think?”
“That would be lovely. Although it’ll depend on how Raffy’s doing.”
Robin’s face falls. “Our poor furious little tube of Rolos. When did you last check him?”
I look at my watch. “Twenty-one minutes ago. He’s doing OK.”
We took Raffy and Maeve home for dinner after school but then drove back in for their nativity performance at five.
“It’s the middle of the night!” Maeve breathed as our headlights scythed through the dense blackness of the moor.
She couldn’t believe it. “I bet everyone else is asleep.” She was disappointed and quite angry when we arrived back in town to the sight of still-open shops.
The nativity was a little unorthodox. Miss Redmond had had the kids design their own costumes and they’d made a “very funny” plan to dress as sweets and chocolate.
Except for Maeve, who made me dress her as a professional gymnast with scraped-back hair and a sparkly leotard.
Visibly nervous, she reverted to her default showing-off and did two cartwheels and a roundoff on her way to the Baby Jesus—she was one of the Wise Men—then took out a sheep with her heel.
The sheep’s mum deliberately left us out when she circulated with mince pies afterward.
We drove home in high spirits nevertheless, belting “Little Donkey” through open windows at the ponies grazing by the road, but when we got out of the car at Cold East Cross to look at the blazing fire of stars above us, I realized Raffy was wheezing, and after that things were a lot less jolly. He’s been fighting a cold all week.
When we got home he didn’t want to take his salbutamol and started to have a meltdown.
His breathing deteriorated quickly. Robin, good cop, had to defuse things with all the bribes and tricks you’re not meant to use while Mummy, bad cop and doctor, hovered with his inhaler and spacer and called the pediatric ward at Torbay.
Maeve, who’s already outgrown her relatively minor lung complications, carried on doing gymnastics, ignoring what was happening around her.
She’s witnessed this enough times to know there’s little point interrupting.
But when we took Raffy up to the bathroom to build up steam, her finite six-year-old’s patience vanished.
She started yelling at Raffy to stop “being stupid” and when he didn’t stop crying she burst into the bathroom with her giant stuffed dog, bashing at his Rolo costume, shouting “Stop it! STOP IT!” over and over again, until Robin had to pick her up and carry her out of the room.
Poor Raff’s prized Rolo outfit, a cardboard tube we had painted at midnight on Sunday, got badly dented and he went to bed furious and very, very sad.
I’ve been up there every hour to monitor his sats since he went to sleep and I’ll be giving him salbutamol through the night.
He’s doing well—it was a minor attack, and the on-call pediatrician wasn’t overly concerned—but I’ll be checking him all night, because I’m his mother and I can’t not.
“He’ll be OK,” Robin says gently. “We’ll see what the hospital says tomorrow. But it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it’s been in the past. A blip.”