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

Josh glanced at her. ‘No time at the moment. I’m at a sort of premature middle-aged crisis. I can only think about one thing at a time, which is staying fit and not pulling a muscle or doing my back in, or breaking a leg or a knee going from yomping …’

‘Yeah, well, you must be a barrel of laughs! Do you have girls on your course?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Yes.’

‘Are they like men, you know butch and lesbosses?’

Josh suddenly felt thoroughly irritated with her. ‘For heaven’s sake, Zoë! They are no different to any other bloody women. Pretty, plain, fat and thin. Stupid remark.’

Stung, Zoë was silent. It was unlike Josh to snap.

After a moment, he said, ‘Sorry.’

He knew why he was annoyed. He knew her too well. She had made the remark in the hope he would agree, thus reassuring her he wasn’t interested in anybody on the same course. He just wished she could find a bloke and they could go back to being mates.

Then you shouldn’t have bloody well slept with her, should you?

Josh groaned inwardly. He wished he could take that evening back. He had been pretty pissed, and she was so up for it, it had seemed almost insulting to walk. It had felt like incest, like fucking your sister. He was too familiar with the geography of her body; there was nothing to discover, no surprises in limbs he had known from childhood. It had all felt wrong, like the biggest mistake he had ever made. But not for Zoë, it seemed. He didn’t have the courage to say, I don’t fancy you. You are a perfectly attractive girl, but there is no chemistry. I have never felt like that about you and I never will.

They had both been too drunk to use anything and Josh had spent a month in a cold sweat every time he thought about the possible consequences. He had been lucky. It was too near home. His parents were obviously OK, but he hadn’t needed to be a brain surgeon to work out Gabby must have been pregnant when his parents married.

Gabby and Charlie were suited. He and Zoë were definitely not. When he picked a girl it was not going to be one he had gone to kindergarten with.

He saw he had really upset her. She was staring out of her side window biting her lip, trying not to let him see she felt like crying. He turned the radio on low in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

‘How are your parents?’

Zoë blew her nose. ‘Bloody awful. They seem worse since Andrew and I left home. Every time we go back they argue and contradict each other and vie for our attention. They are far worse than any of my infants. Andy and I don’t know why they don’t just separate. Now that we’ve left home they have absolutely nothing in common.’

Josh grinned. ‘Except arguing. Perhaps that’s what keeps them going.’

‘Andy reckons he was on the way and they had to get married. Awful, really, the way people mess up their …’ She stopped and flushed red. ‘God! Listen to me … One drink too many and it can happen to anyone …’

Josh took a deep breath. Get it over with.

‘Zo, what I most regret about that is we are not mates any more.’

Zoë looked startled. ‘Of course we are! Whatever makes you think that? We still ring each other. I tell you nearly everything.’

‘It feels different. As if you want more. I love you, Zoë, but not in that way.’

Zoë was silent, then decided on truth. ‘I suppose it is different. It’s like it never happened, or was so unimportant to you that it wasn’t worth mentioning, let alone repeating. If it had been with anyone else I would have felt much worse. At the time, I suppose I thought I’ve got to lose it sometime and I would rather it was with someone I knew.

‘The evening wasn’t … like calculated, it just sort of happened. It’s not like the earth moved for me, Josh. I just wanted you to acknowledge that it had happened. It’s as if I have to make something of it or file it under humiliation.’

Josh turned the car abruptly into a lay-by and stopped. He didn’t look at Zoë for a moment. He felt ashamed and embarrassed. She asked abruptly, ‘Do Gabby and Charlie ever argue or interrupt each other? Only, I’ve never heard them.’

Thrown, Josh looked at her puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not in front of me, anyway. Charlie and Nell argue a lot. What an odd question to suddenly ask.’

Zoë smiled. ‘You should know my magpie mind by now. I just thought, Gabby is quite young and I wondered if she got caught, like my mum; but your parents always seem happy.’

Josh turned in his seat. ‘We are talking about you, Zoë. I’m an insensitive bastard. I’m sorry. I guess I was ashamed … of myself,’ he added hastily and picked up her hand. ‘I’m sorry I’ve hurt you. It just felt wrong, Zo, like … incest … I know you so well’

‘I suppose that was my … point. I’m sorry, too, let’s forget it.’ She bent and kissed his cheek. ‘The stupid incident will fade anyway … in time.’ Like a bruise, she thought.

Josh said, because he must, ‘Despite what I’ve just said, never think it wasn’t a lovely experience for me. It was. I’m glad you chose me.’

He pulled her to him and hugged her so she could not see his face, and felt her relax against him. He did not like himself, or lying, and the dichotomy of his words did not stand up to scrutiny.

‘Tell you what,’ he said carefully, letting her go. ‘I’ll ask you up to the next party and introduce you to some good-looking soldiers.’

‘OK,’ she replied, matching his tone. ‘You’re on.’

After he had dropped Zoë off in Bristol and had criss-crossed onto the right motorway, Josh suddenly remembered what she had said.

Do Gabby and Charlie ever argue or interrupt each other? Only, I’ve never heard them.

Josh tried to think of an instance of his parents having a long conversation, about any issue other than the farm. He couldn’t. He tried to remember them arguing or having a heated debate or throwing things or raising their voices at each other, and failed. Nell and Charlie argued all the time, and Gabby and Nell talked to each other in the shorthand of familiar conversations. But he could not make a picture come of Gabby and Charlie engaging together in any fiery exchange, affectionate or otherwise. For some reason this unsettled rather than reassured him.

At the gates to Sandhurst, as he showed his pass to the soldier on the gate, he suddenly spotted a tall girl with blonde hair and sunglasses waiting to drive out the other way. He whistled under his breath and the soldier laughed.

‘Out of your league, sir. She is the Commandant’s daughter.’

Josh smiled at the girl. She was a stunner. He got back into his car and drove up the wide road to his barracks. It was dusk and the huge trees made shadows across the road. He realized with relief that he was actually glad to be back. He had put last week out of his mind. It had been good to go home, but Zoë had reminded him of one of the reasons he had needed to leave Cornwall. In a small village it was just too easy to get trapped in the wrong life.

Chapter 17 (#ulink_8beafec4-38d8-59a4-8516-a8acc5957771)

The room on top of the museum was warm when Gabby arrived. John Bradbury had been over and switched on a heater and left her a kettle, a jar of coffee, tea and a packet of biscuits. The sun streamed in at the large window over the graveyard and glistened on the sea in the distance; sea that met the sky so seamlessly it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

Lady Isabella still lay on her back, cushioned by foam. Before Gabby began to treat the flaking paint with consolidant she walked round the figurehead, carefully looking for anything she had missed. Then she photographed Isabella from all angles for her record of work in progress.

She had to stand on a stool to take the photos, and as the camera clicked it seemed to Gabby a flicker of expression passed over Isabella’s face. Gabby knew it was a trick of the light, the lift of her arm causing a shadow, the sunlight full of dust motes making her blink; but all the same her heart leapt and she experienced a strange and sudden physical reaction as she looked down on that impassive and beautiful face.

Shakily, she moved away and got her magnifying glasses, a plastic pocket and tweezers. This won’t hurt, this will make you see again. I need to discover the colour of your eyes. With the tweezers she lifted a speck of paint from beneath one eyelid and dropped it into the pocket. The blind eyes stared upwards, unblinking.

Gabby then laid Japanese tissue gently over the damaged eyes and held it in place with a weak solution of gelatine. The wood under her fingers seemed to grow warmer. Gabby closed her own eyes for a moment. The sun streamed into the room and outside the birds sang among the gravestones. Gabby, with her fingertips pressed to Isabella’s bandaged eyelids, felt the silence swell and grow inside the room, as if time had stopped or was holding its breath. As if this single touch of her fingers on the damaged face could, like a surgeon, reactivate a life unfulfilled.

The sensation was so real, so profound, that tears came to Gabby’s eyes. She felt overwhelmed by an intense and incomplete emotion she could not place, and the sudden powerful need to know who Isabella had been.

Isabella noticed that the snowdrops were out under the trees and the daffodil buds were unfurling to show cracks of yellow and green. Below the lawn, where she stood beneath the branches of the macrocarpa, lay the creek on a full tide. The branches of the great fir were reflected in the water, rippling and moving, changing shape dizzily as she watched.

Everything in the garden was about to burst forth in a riot of colour. Isabella could feel the excitement tingling in the tips of her fingers. The birds felt this, too, she was sure of it. They swooped and flew low, beginning to gather twigs and moss for their nests. Spring was poised, waiting, it seemed to Isabella, for the sun to breathe warmth upon the tight buds; and like magic the garden would be transformed and radiant.

Isabella looked upwards. The sky was Prussian blue with small floating scraps of cloud. Far away down on the creek curlews called out, small lonely echoes like a madrigal. She closed her eyes, her face upturned to a sun not yet warm, and she experienced a moment of pure exhilaration in being alive, in being there in the garden; in being Isabella.

So acute was this sensation of herself, it felt like pain. It caught in her throat, made her shiver with some primitive instinct that she should not acknowledge this happiness, but recognize the transitory power of joy. Yet, this knowledge of herself was set so perfectly in this fleeting moment of her own life that she did not yet have the wisdom to pay homage to fate. She gathered the folds of her long skirt, lifted the heavy material above her ankles and set off in a run across the grass. Her footsteps made small indentations on the wet lawn and her laughter carried in little pockets of sound across the still garden.

Isabella was fourteen years old, and her body, like the garden, was beginning to stir. She felt acutely alive, but in waiting. Confused and excited as if she was poised on the edge, the very beginning of her adult life. As she ran across the garden she laughed without knowing why. Perhaps it was a last goodbye to childhood or just the sensation of being part of the earth, part of this cycle of nature; hidden, but stirring with new life and about to burst forth upon a waiting world.