A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (20 page)

“Phew!” I cried as I cannonballed into the passenger seat, struggling to haul the door shut against the wind, while Jeremy ran around the front of the car to get into his seat. The windshield was completely awash outside, and it quickly fogged up inside with our panting breath.

Jeremy started the engine and drove hurriedly away, just as another forked tongue of lightning split the sky. Once he got the windshield wipers going, we could see that the main road of the town was flooding quickly, so Jeremy turned the car away and took a side road that climbed up to higher ground and the country lane that led to the farm.

“Eek!” I cried involuntarily as a new round of thunder bellowed directly overhead, and seemed to rattle everything like chattering teeth, including the car and the ground we were travelling on.

Jeremy’s nice little zippy Dragonetta was designed for tooling around sophisticated,
dry
Riviera highways. It was certainly not a car made for plowing through wild and wet dirt roads. The very farm paths that had been so hard and dusty just scant hours ago were now fast becoming sticky mud trenches. But the Dragonetta gamely chugged forth and, despite the gobs of mud that spattered her beautiful deep-green fenders, she got us to the farm just as a fresh wave of rain came hurling down on us.

When we pulled up to our cottage at last, I struggled to shove the car door open and get out. By now my clothes clung to me uselessly like limp old lettuce leaves. My hair was plastered across my face, no matter how I pushed at it. Jeremy had to use all his strength to haul open the cottage front door against the bellowing wind, and then he had to hang on to the door to keep it from being blown right off its hinges.

Once inside, we didn’t even have time to catch our breath, for the sky had become as dark as night. I stumbled about, gasping, fumbling around to turn on the lights. The very walls and windows seemed to be shuddering in dismay.

A moment after I’d turned on the lights, the power blew out. But Jeremy anticipated this and had already yanked open the cupboard that contained the lanterns, candles, flashlights and batterypowered instruments which Geoff and Shannon had shown us when we arrived. Back then, the whole thing seemed cute and quaint. Like ooh, sure, how nice, something to know about in case of a storm.

Now we set about planting the lanterns in strategic places—bedroom, kitchen, bath. But it had grown eerily cold and damp as the temperature outside plunged rapidly. Well, you just try lighting a fire in a fireplace when it’s raining elephants outside. It was as if Neptune himself was spitting on our fire.

We peeled off our wet clothes, and hastily toweled each other dry, then ended up in bed, snuggling under the extra blankets that were also tucked away for “a rainy day” such as this, when a guy like Noah would be busy counting pairs of animals.

For a moment, we just lay there, panting, silent.

“Wow,” I said finally, master of understatement that I am. “It’s a whopper.”

“Huh,” Jeremy answered, shivering. Then he added ruefully, “I get the feeling that even Mother Nature is pissed off at us for screwing up the whole Shakespeare connection.”

I giggled, but then found myself quaking at each new roll of thunder. The rain was still furiously lashing the sides of our poor little cottage.

“How long can it last?” I asked.

It turns out that this innocent question of mine was key. Because there was a deep, dark secret that all the sly Cornwall residents had failed to share with us. That nice, sunny summer weather—which had been so pleasing to the many tourists who flocked here, booking every hotel room and cottage in sight for the entire season—was, it turns out, a complete aberration. It had already lasted far too long. The earth must have had some strange cosmic blip, some jolt of its axis, making the Mediterranean countries wet in the past weeks, and the British Isles sunny and balmy. Perhaps the stars and moon had been pulling the tides in odd directions. Or perhaps the clouds and oceans were temporarily distracted, recalibrating themselves in an attempt to compensate for man’s contribution to global warming—and thereby permitting a sunny July in Cornwall.

But in any event, Mother Nature had now finally decided to redress the imbalance and put things back the way they used to be. The sun returned to the Mediterranean where it belonged for the rest of the summer . . . and the cold wet weather for which the West Country of England is so famous returned with a vengeance to the land of King Arthur.

And as far as I could tell, this tempest was here to stay . . . for a long, long while.

S
trange things can happen to two people when you’re stuck with each other for days on end, in a small, confined space. When you can’t even venture outside because the weather is so evil. When you finally get the TV going again and the reception is so awful that you just switch it off. When your Internet connection, which was tenuous to begin with, repeatedly gives up the ghost. When telephones sound so squeaky and squitchy that you think you’re talking to someone on Mars.

The first bad thing was that Jeremy got sick. And that’s when I came to realize how much I’d grown to depend on him. The sweet guy just does things without complaining, so I had gotten spoiled, often awakening to discover that he’d already made coffee and boiled eggs for breakfast, or that he’d cheerfully chopped wood to feed the little black stove, or that he’d worked in the garden to pick us some nice vegetables for dinner.

But now, here he was, sick as a dog, for the first time since I’d known him. A guy like him doesn’t stay in bed unless he really can’t get up. At first, all he said that morning was, “I feel weird,” and he kept pausing after each chore as if waiting for his energy to return. By noon, he had no appetite for lunch, which was totally out of character for him. By five o’clock, his forehead was burning.

“Take your temperature,” I commanded, handing him the thermometer from my first-aid kit, which my mother gave to me when I was eighteen, fully stocked with Band-Aids and all, and which I’ve replenished and carried with me like a talisman my whole life.

Now, the thing about men who never get sick is that they don’t really know how to be sick. So when Jeremy impatiently took the thermometer and stuck it into his mouth, three minutes later he took it out and announced dubiously, “I’m 94, all right?”

“Gimme that,” I said, examining the thermometer suspiciously, then shaking it down again. “Only a lizard has a temperature of 94. Try it again,” I said, and this time I watched to see what he was doing wrong. “You’ve only got the tip of it in!” I said incredulously. “Put practically all of it on a diagonal under your tongue,” I admonished. “Even a two-year-old knows that.”

“Thanks a lot,” he mumbled. Sulkily he complied. Three minutes later . . .

“Oh my God,” I said. “Your temperature is 102.”

Jeremy swore under his breath and then said, “No wonder I feel like death warmed over.”

“Don’t die, Jeremy!” I exclaimed, running to get him some aspirin. He was sitting in the kitchen, shivering a little, despite the way the old-fashioned wood-burning stove was warming the room.

“Hah-choo!” he said in response. He paused. “That,” he said ominously, “was a particularly bad sneeze. I don’t think you should come near me. I’d better sleep out on the sofa.”

“No, I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I volunteered. “You need the bed.”

He coughed again, too miserable to argue, and he trotted off to the bedroom, flinging himself on the bed, where he fell asleep instantly.

He slept and slept. It scared me a little. I kept tiptoeing in to make sure he was still breathing.

But the next day, despite the aspirin, he still had a fever, which climbed even higher. He was coughing and so congested that I put a little pan of water on the hob, to mist the room.

“Everything aches all over,” he admitted, “even my hair hurts!”

 

“What’s the matter with Jeremy?” Shannon asked a few days later, having stopped by to show me some of the new cheese she was making. When I told her, she frowned.

“I know. There’s something like that going around; the other farm families had it. Better let Doctor Calthrop take a look,” she advised. “He’ll come today if I tell him I’ve got his favorite cheese ready for him.”

A few hours later, the doctor rapped on the front door, waking Jeremy from the sleep he kept drifting in and out of. The doctor was about fifty, and had curly grey hair, a fuzzy grey beard, and the sort of tweedy suit that seemed more indicative of an absentminded professor.

He didn’t say much at first, just fell into a sort of tuneless humming at regular intervals between taking Jeremy’s blood pressure and pulse, examining his throat and listening to his chest.

Jeremy eyed Doctor Calthrop with undisguised dubiousness. But apart from asking Jeremy key questions, like, “Does your throat hurt more in the morning, or is it the same all day?” the doctor basically ignored Jeremy’s gaze and instead talked to me as I hovered worriedly in the doorway.

“Bacterial throat infection. Seen lots of it this summer. He’ll be needing antibiotics,” he said matter-of-factly.

Doctor Calthrop handed me some pills, and a cough syrup. “He should eat if he has any appetite. Start him slowly, on toast and tea,” he advised as he packed up his bag. “Bananas if you can find them. Then some clear soup, and rice. If he’s hungry enough for real food, feed him eggs or some plain chicken. Whatever he has an appetite for is okay. Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids.”

“What about Penny?” Jeremy croaked from the bed. “What if she gets it?”

The doctor smiled at me. “Call me if you do, but I think you’d have come down with it by now. When he’s been on the medication for three days, you’re pretty safe from contagion.”

As Doctor Calthrop wrote out Jeremy’s name for the prescription, something must have rung a bell in his mind. “Laidley,” he mused. “Nichols and Laidley? You two must be the ones who screwed up on the Shakespeare, eh?” he asked cheerily.

“Right, that’s us,” Jeremy said. “Thank you very much.”

The doctor chuckled. “Keep quiet and calm, m’boy, and you’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time.”

Doctor Calthrop had barely gone out the door when Jeremy said sulkily, “He’s talking to me like I’m some little kid.”

“You are,” I said comfortingly, tucking the covers around him again. “Everyone’s a little kid when they’re sick.”

 

At first, Jeremy was a good patient and I was a good nurse. But as he started to recover, he became a restless pain-in-the-butt, always wanting to get up and about without realizing that he would only teeter and have to return to bed.

Meanwhile, I made tea and toast, and I kept the fire going in the stove and fireplace. Then, whenever the rain let up temporarily, I drove into town to search for everything else the doctor ordered.

The village of Port St. Francis was still thronging with summer visitors, but they, like me, were restless and disappointed with the damp, soggy weather. As with any vacation town, what at first seems quaint soon becomes a bit of a nuisance, once you’ve bought all your souvenirs and fudge and T-shirts, and all you’re really looking for are the basics—bread and milk, soap, can-openers, aspirin, paper towels.

Furthermore, I know I am not exaggerating when I say that I got a fair share of dirty looks from most of the proprietors, who by now knew me on sight, and who’d been counting on Jeremy and me to make them rich by turning Port St. Francis into a Shakespeare tourist mecca.

I found myself darting in and out of the shops as quickly as possible, not breathing easily until I was on my way back to the farm.

The pills did their job, with Jeremy improving enough so that I was able to launder the bedding and resume sleeping with him. Everything was fine . . . until he started to get hungry for real meals again.

“I’ll make dinner,” he offered, and over my protestations he hurriedly got out of bed, then became dizzy and sat back down on the bed, appearing mightily surprised. “My knees buckled,” he said, looking outraged.

“Right, it’s called being sick,” I said in as bossy a tone as I could. “Lie down.”

“You just bought that fresh chicken,” he objected, still clutching the bedpost. “It has to be cooked or it will go bad.”

“So, I’ll cook it,” I insisted, tucking him back into bed. “The doctor said plain chicken is best. Like roasted, maybe?”

“A roasted bird is not as simple as it sounds,” Jeremy warned, looking sympathetic.

“I can do it,” I said stoutly.

And here’s the thing. I did everything right. Really. Almost. I cleaned it, I dried it, I rubbed it with a mixture of olive oil, fresh sweet butter and lemon; and I put a small onion and some newly picked thyme in the cavity, and sprinkled some nice cracked pepper and sea salt over the bird. The oven was properly preheated, and I also put in a small tray of potatoes, lightly glazed with olive oil and thyme. And I sat there at the kitchen table and snapped the ends off the green beans that I’d painstakingly picked fresh from the garden, and I put them in a steamer pot on the stove-top to gently cook.

And it all would have made a perfect dinner. Except for one thing. That last essential twenty minutes, which can make or break a dinner.

In which we both fell asleep.

Now, Jeremy was entitled to. He was the sick-o. But I was on duty, and I was supposed to stay awake. Maybe I had a touch of whatever he had, because I fell into a thick sleep, sitting on the parlor sofa. But in any case, we were both awakened by the smell of burning chicken. And I’m not talking barbecue.

“Yikes!” I exclaimed, rushing into the kitchen, stumbling in the dreary darkness of the late afternoon. I raced to the oven door, opened it . . . and smoke poured out.

I grabbed the oven mitts, yanked the roasting pan out and placed it on the cold stove-top. The tips of the bird’s legs were charred black, and the wings were total goners. The rest at first didn’t look that bad, not black, just mahogany-colored all over, and wizened.