Another Life: Escape to Cornwall with this gripping, emotional, page-turning read

‘Shouldn’t Gabby be home by now?’ he asked Nell.

‘Any moment, I should think.’ Nell was getting a casserole out of the Aga and peering at it. ‘The last helicopter is about seven or seven-thirty. Is Matt doing the milking?’

‘No; Darren. Matt’s been out at Mendely with me all day today, he’s whacked, I’ve sent him home to Dora.’

‘Oh dear,’ Nell said, ‘I’m sure to bump into Dora in the village.’

‘He’s not as young as he used to be …’ Nell and Charlie intoned together. ‘I hope your Charlie isn’t taking advantage.’ They grinned at each other.

‘I’m dreading him retiring,’ Charlie said, reaching for a towel. ‘The younger lads just don’t have the interest or staying power.’

Nell finished stirring the casserole and put it back in the oven. ‘You can’t blame them, Charlie; low wages, long days in all weathers.’

‘I don’t,’ Charlie said. ‘I just can’t afford to pay more. You’d think the incentive of a tied cottage would be attractive, but not in the middle of nowhere, it seems. I look after those cottages, too. You should see the state of the accommodation John Tresider offers his workers. His houses have to be seen to be believed. It gives all farmers a bad name.’

‘Then it’s a disgrace,’ Nell said crossly. ‘There’s no excuse, they got a huge grant last year. His father was as bad. He couldn’t keep his workers either. I’m surprised the environmental health people haven’t been round to condemn them.’

‘It’s only a matter of time.’

This was a conversation Nell and Charlie often had in different guises, and both fell into comfortably.

The wind hit the window in a sudden squall.

‘I wonder where Gabby’s got to. It’s getting late and there’s a gale coming in. I’m just going out to check on Darren.’

‘Charlie?’ Nell knew Charlie liked everyone safely in before dusk and as Gabby did not like driving in the dark. She was not often late. ‘I do think it’s about time Gabby had a new car. She’s starting to go further afield now and that old Peugeot is not reliable. She really needs something with a large boot to hold paintings.’

Charlie was irritated because he knew Nell was right.

‘Nell, I can’t afford to buy a new car at the moment.’

‘Look, Charlie, Gabby puts everything she earns into the farm. If she didn’t, she could afford a new car for herself. Doesn’t that strike you as rather unfair?’

‘No, Nell. It’s how we survive. We have to pull together like you and Dad did. Gabby only has to ask, you know that, she doesn’t go without.’

Nell stared at him. Sometimes it was hard to swallow her frustration or stifle a sharp retort. It did no good. It had alienated Ted and it alienated Charlie. Once entrenched, neither would budge an inch, and she was never sure whether it was obstinacy or misplaced pride.

In her marriage to Ted she had perfected a duplicity which she guiltily maintained over the years of her marriage. Like Gabby, she had pooled her income back into the farm willingly, but she had withheld a small amount each month for her own needs. She had bitterly resented having to ask Ted for things from money she herself had earnt.

When she had first married she had been nineteen and in those days she was unable to open a bank account until she was twenty-one. For her twentieth birthday she had desperately wanted a portable radio. Her parents had sent her a large cheque so that she could choose her own. Ted had cashed the cheque, but when she found the radio she wanted he refused to let her have the money. He told her it was a sheer waste to spend that much on a radio. He bought her a cheap plastic one and the rest went towards a new bailer.

Nell never forgot or forgave him. The meanness froze her heart. Her mother coming to stay and seeing the cheap radio had been quietly livid. Her generous and liberal parents never made the same mistake again. They had, all their lives, schooled Nell for a career and independence. Even as a child Nell had always had a small allowance and it taught her to budget. From the age of sixteen she had never had to ask anyone for anything. The marriage her parents had thoroughly disapproved of had been a shock.

Nell, on the rebound, had married young, full of hope, captured by a good-looking face; seduced by a long hot Cornish summer and Ted’s single-minded intent which she had mistaken for devotion.

When she became twenty-one she had persuaded Ted it would be a good idea to have a joint account so that she could write cheques on behalf of the farm. Eventually, as she was doing the farm accounts, he had reluctantly agreed, but had made their joint account a business account, while keeping the personal account in his own name, thus keeping control of all domestic transactions. Even then he had perused each statement for evidence of female waste or frippery, but when he saw none he had relaxed.

What he did not know was that Nell often asked to be paid in cash for her restoring, and this money she placed in her own secret account.

‘Good girl,’ her friend Olive had said. ‘Every woman should have a running-away account.’

From then onwards it was Nell’s R.A. account. When Ted died and she saw the amount in his personal bank accounts, she stopped feeling guilty. She just felt sad at a lifetime of endemic meanness. They had had to work so hard all their marriage, then when they could both have slowed down and relaxed, enjoyed what they had, he had let her go on believing they owed the bank money.

He had not even been able to enjoy the money himself, just given himself an early heart attack. She realized she had never really ‘done the accounts’ for Ted, just faithfully added up the milk quota and feed bills Ted put in front of her.

Later, when sadness turned to anger, she had been glad of Ted’s thrift. It had enabled her to help Charlie and Gabby and put a lump away for her beloved Josh.

She said now to Charlie, knowing it would annoy him further but needing to say it, ‘How on earth would you know if Gabby goes without? She would never say. You would never even notice.’

‘What’s got into you, Nell? Gabby often tells me what she’s bought. Things for Josh, usually. We have a joint account, for goodness’ sake.’

‘I know you do, but has Gabby ever bought anything biggish, or personal – clothes, for instance – without asking you first?’

‘Of course not. We have to budget, we both need to know what we can afford and what we are spending each month.’

‘So you talk it over with Gabby before you buy anything major, like a new tractor, do you?’

Charlie clicked up the latch of the back door. He knew it was pointless trying to talk to Nell when she was having what his father used to call ‘a feminist moment’. Or, and this had on one occasion caused Nell to throw one of his grandmother’s vases at Ted’s head, ‘the wrong time of the month’.

‘You know perfectly well that Gabby and I have a joint domestic account and I run a farm account with Alan that has absolutely nothing to do with Gabby. It’s business.’

‘Yes. But you hold the strings for both accounts. If Gabby contributes largely to the domestic account, why can’t a new car for Gabby, who is also running a business, come out of the business account she indirectly contributes to? That would be fair, don’t you think?’

Charlie stared at her in much the same way Ted used to; as if she had flown from another planet and was talking a foreign language impossible to decipher.

‘Nell, I don’t understand where you are suddenly coming from. When I can, I will buy Gabby another car, perhaps at the end of the summer. I can’t afford one before that. Gabby hasn’t mentioned anything about her car. You seem to be the one with the problem.’

He shut the door carefully behind him.

Nell stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the closed door. She had been dismissed so often in the years of her marriage, she should be used to it. But the small personal trigger spread like a stain across her heart. Like an interior bleed spreading into something beyond tears. An isolation that might have turned into a wail of anguish, if she had ever let it.

This moment in the flagstoned kitchen, full of the things I touch every day, is the life I led with two strangers. Until Gabby.

Charlie was right, in a way. It was her problem, this terror of meanness; because meanness slid slyly into all areas of life. Emotion, time, love and sex. But she knew her attitude to Charlie was coloured by Ted, and this was not fair. How could Charlie possibly understand why she randomly pounced?

People blamed mothers for selfish or thoughtless men. Nell did not. She believed it an entirely genetic thing that might be mitigated by example, but that was all. Despite Ted’s rampant chauvinism Nell had always insisted that Charlie helped with certain chores and cleared up after himself. As a child he had complied, but as soon as he married Gabby he appeared to take it for granted that all domestic chores were now her role.

Gabby, young and eager to please, had been complicit in this assumption. Once started, how difficult habit and conditioning were to break. There was nothing offensive, not even self-conscious selfishness on Charlie’s part, but his and Gabby’s roles were clearly delineated.

Charlie, like Ted, had never bothered to find out how painstaking and scientific restoring could be. How tiring. Hours of matching and patching, testing, waxing – all with someone else’s precious property.

It pained Nell to watch Gabby clearing up after her son. Mud under the table where he had not bothered to take his work boots off. Never replacing the lid of the marmalade. The paper would be left scrumpled in a heap as if a cat had had a field day with it. It never occurred to him to carry his plate or mug the short distance to the sink. Small, thoughtless things, not important in themselves, yet indicative of his general attitude to who it was who cleared up after him.

Out of the kitchen window the day was dying, the sky crimson, covered with dark cigar-shaped clouds. In the fields a cow mooed repeatedly for her calf. Nell thought of Elan, standing with his whisky watching the same sky from his cottage. No children, no lover. Just the fading embers of another day with canvases full of the thing that lay unspoken in his heart.

She stood listening for the sound of Gabby’s car. Elan had said once, watching a childish, pregnant Gabby, ‘The girl wraps herself so close, Nell. She is too contained, too careful to oblige. This Gabby is easy to love, yet I have a sense of someone else, infinitely more complex, carefully hidden, but I don’t think we are ever going to be allowed to glimpse that little person.’

Out of the growing darkness Nell heard the sound of Gabby’s car coming up the lane. She relaxed, smiled, moved quickly flicking lights on, busy creating order and warmth at the end of the day. As she had always done for Gabby, so that she should never come home to darkness and an empty house.