Chapter 3 #2
Jules blinked. Carrie understood. Of course she did.
She’d been here. Well, not quite here, nobody else could be as stupid as that, to be duped by a man like Gavin.
But she’d been at rock bottom and look at her now, brown hair bouncy and loosely curled, skin clear and lightly tanned, but above all happy.
No, it was more than that. Content. It radiated from her, a sort of groundedness, a belonging, a knowledge of who she was and what she wanted for herself.
‘What?’ Carrie asked, leaning forwards slightly.
‘I just…’ Jules looked around, at the garden with its butterfly-laden summer flowers, neatly mown lawn and the soft borders of the fields beyond leading the eye towards the silver sliver of sea. ‘I just don’t know how I got here. It’s like a dream.’
‘I told you. You have your mum to thank. She was frantically worried. She said she’d peered through the keyhole and you looked really thin. She thought you’d barely eaten for a week.’
‘Toast,’ Jules murmured. ‘I had toast. And tea.’
‘Better than nothing, I suppose,’ Carrie said, ‘but not exactly nutritious.’
‘I suppose I should let her know that I’m okay,’ Jules said.
‘I phoned her from the service station and said that I was bringing you back here,’ Carrie replied. ‘She knows that you’re safe.’
Safe… the very word made Jules want to burst into tears.
‘But she’d love to speak to you. They both would. Your sister, too.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jules muttered.
‘You’ll have to use the landline though,’ Carrie said, as if Jules hadn’t spoken. ‘Phone signal here is awful and, as you know very well, there’s no internet.’
Jules pressed her lips together. Carrie had been so cross when she’d first arrived at the cottage to find that she was without the internet, but Jules had thought it would be good for her. She threw her head back and let the sun warm her face. She just felt cold all the time.
‘I don’t think I can face speaking to either of them just yet.’
Carrie stood up and placed a hand lightly on Jules’s shoulder.
‘They’ll be there for you, Jules, whenever you’re ready. And your mum knows not to fuss.’
Jules wanted to raise an eyebrow, but the effort was too much.
‘I know she can be a bit suffocating, but she does love you. Remember that. I’m going to get some lemon for your tea and you’re right, that is a pretty big piece of cake. I’ll cut it in half and we’ll share it. It’s made with the best butter from the island and the sugar will do you good.’
‘Sugar’s bad for you, didn’t you know that?’ Jules murmured.
‘Sometimes,’ Carrie replied, ‘you need sugar. And this is one of those times. Besides, the chocolate and eggs contain iron and the orange has Vitamin C, so we can also pretend that it’s one of your five a day!’
‘Like the toast with a scraping of jam,’ she said, with the ghost of a smile.
‘Exactly!’
Jules sat back and listened as Carrie’s flip-flops slapped across the patio and back into the kitchen.
Who would have thought that the tables would have turned like this?
Back in Manchester, she had been the one to reassure Carrie, persuading her to eat properly when she was stressed, boosting her confidence when she got down.
She’d always thought of herself as the dependable one, the person who everyone could come to when they were depressed or in trouble and now look at her, in total pieces and no good to anyone at all.
‘Will you be all right?’ Carrie asked a little later. ‘I’ll only be half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most. You can come with me if you like?’
Jules shook her head. Now was not the time to meet Guy for the first time. In fact, now was not the time to meet anyone.
‘No, you go. I’ll be fine.’
But watching Carrie’s car pull out of the drive, she’d felt a rising panic.
Once again, she was alone, totally alone with her own thoughts.
She walked back through the house and out into the garden, the sun already dropping slightly and changing hue.
Jules slipped out of her green suede sandals and walked barefoot across the soft, springy grass towards the boundary.
Off to the right was an old barn and seated on the ground, hidden from the rest of the farmyard, was a girl, her back leaning against the shaling brick wall, her hand moving quickly across the pages of a notebook resting on her lap.
She looked up as if suddenly aware she was being watched and hesitated before sending a small wave.
Jules raised her hand to wave back, but just at that moment, a woman in white linen trousers and a pale lemon shirt strode into the yard.
Instinctively Jules’s hand moved to her hair, as if her intention all along had been to brush it back from her face.
‘Tasha! Where are you?’
The woman’s voice was serrated with irritation. The girl shrank back, almost turning herself into a small ball, her forehead pressed tightly against her bent knees. Jules twisted away towards the house.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman called in a sharp, don’t-ignore-me kind of voice, ‘you there.’
Even in her stupor Jules felt a stab of objection to the ‘you there’, but deeply ingrained politeness got the better of her.
She swivelled somewhat stiffly towards the angular woman who was now striding towards her.
Thank goodness there was a prickly hawthorn hedge, a well-worn farm track and then a rusty five-bar metal gate between them.
Maybe she was a bit more present than she thought after all.
‘You haven’t seen my daughter, have you? She came out to collect the eggs, but she’s been a long time. Scruffy-looking fourteen-year-old with tousled hair which needs a good brush. She’s probably red-eyed from crying. She’s always crying.’
Jules avoided eye contact with the woman who even from this distance was obviously immaculately made up. Do not look towards the barn, she instructed herself.
‘Did you hear me?’
The woman was craning over the gate now, miraculously managing to avoid touching it with her pristine clothing.
‘Yes,’ Jules replied. ‘I heard you and no, sorry, I haven’t seen your daughter.’
The woman stared at her for a moment, and Jules felt herself begin to flush.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the girl shuffle along the side of the barn.
The woman took a step forward as if to venture further into the yard and peer around the corner of the old building.
Jules took a couple of steps forward herself, almost falling into the hedge.
‘If I do see her, I’ll tell her you were looking for her.’
Without so much as a brief thank you the woman swivelled and wove her way carefully back across the farmyard. When Jules looked back towards the barn, the girl had gone.
Tasha reached up and unlatched the heavy old door to the barn. She slipped inside and closed it behind her, pausing for a moment to lean against an upright timber beam and regulate her breath.
Her eyes quickly adjusting to the gloaming, she tucked her diary under one arm and, sticking her pen between her teeth, scooted up the ladder to the hayloft.
She’d done this so many times she could do it blindfold; knew exactly the amount of space between each rung, where to place her feet, which part of the handrail was rough with splinters.
Once on the first floor she padded across the boards and squeezed herself between the bales of hay to where she had formed a hiding place.
There was just enough light coming through from the gap in the upper doors for her to see, but she kept a torch up here as well for dull, wintery days or when it was getting dark.
It was one of her favourite places, warm, scented with the sweet smell of the hay and quiet; away from the complications of life.
She had Granny to thank for it still being used to store the bales.
She insisted upon it for ‘old times’ sake’.
‘Used to love going up there when I was younger,’ Rita said when it came up in a family discussion, as it did with increasing regularity. ‘Would settle myself in with a book and a packet of pear drops and time would fly by.’
‘Well, you’re not going to do that now, Mum, are you?’ Alastair had snapped.
It was always a statement rather than a question, which Tasha thought was presumptuous.
She’d felt that familiar thudding in her chest when a row was brewing.
Often Dad had the knack of saying just the wrong thing at the wrong time.
She’d been sitting in the big, worn leather chair in Granny’s kitchen, another of her favourite places.
She’d squirmed and dug her nails into the seams, which were starting to come apart a little.
It had been Grandpa George’s chair and Tasha tried to take herself back to when she was little and sitting on his knee as he read her a story.
When she was older, she would sit at his feet as he talked to her about the birds and the wildflowers and cricket.
Sometimes he produced a sketchbook and a pencil sharpened to a point with the penknife he always carried and they would draw together.
In spite of the pressures of the farm he always had so much time for her and Will.
She wished he was here now. Dad wouldn’t dare speak to Granny the way he did if Grandpa George was around.
‘I might go up to the hayloft,’ Granny replied defiantly to Dad.
She sent Tasha a wink as if to reassure her.
‘Your father and I had some fun times up there when we were courting.’
‘Mum!’
Dad had looked so shocked Tasha almost laughed. Will put his hand over his mouth to unsuccessfully stifle a giggle.
‘Oh, don’t be such a prude!’ Granny snorted. ‘They both know all about the birds and the bees.’
‘What Alastair means,’ Mum had weighed in, brushing some imaginary crumbs from the kitchen table before leaning across it just enough to indicate earnestness, but not far enough to make Hercules growl properly, ‘is that he doesn’t think it appropriate for you to be climbing that ladder.’