Sheltering Rain (34 page)

She had been quite pleased about the Justin thing, even if she hadn't let Kate know. But it was so obvious that he had dumped her mother, and not the other way around, and somehow that made it even harder for Sabine to have any respect for her.

She told her grandfather in the end. It was quite easy to talk to him these days, now that he didn't yell at her to speak up all the time, or get cross about mealtimes. He just liked her to sit with him and chat away; she could tell because his face would sort of relax, like melting butter, and occasionally, when she held his hand (it was actually sort of papery and soft—not creepy, like she had expected), he would squeeze it ever so faintly when she finished talking, like he understood.

“You'd probably like him,” she told him, her socked feet up on the bed beside him. “Because he's into hunting, and he's quite a good rider. He doesn't hold the mane or anything when he goes over jumps. You might even know his family. They're called McAndrew.”

(Here she was sure she felt a soft increase in pressure.)

“But it's not a serious date or anything. I mean I'm not going to marry him and have his babies. It's just good for me to make some friends.”

A thin, clear trail of saliva had somehow leaked out of the side of his mouth, like a tiny river making its way down a mountainside. Sabine took the handkerchief from the bedside table and wiped at it gently.

“I once did that on a tube,” she said, grinning. “I had been out really, really late the night before, although Mum doesn't know this, because I was staying at my mate's house, and I just fell asleep on this man next to me. And when I woke up there was this little damp patch on his shoulder where I'd dribbled on him. I wanted to
die
.”

She paused, and gazed at him.

“Well, I was really embarrassed, anyway. I suppose it's not a bad trick though. If I decide I don't like this Bobby McAndrew, then I can always just dribble on him in the cinema. That should see him off.”

Sabine jumped off the bed, conscious that it was nearly time for the nurse to return from her lunch break.

“I'll let you know what happens,” she said, cheerily, planting a kiss on his forehead. “Stay cool.”

Behind her, buried under the layers of quilt, and surrounded by his bleeping sentries, Sabine's grandfather closed his mouth.

K
ate had written four options on pieces of paper:
GO BACK TO LONDON; GO BACK TO LONDON IN A WEEK; GO AND STAY AT A HOTEL AND BUGGER THE COST; AND DON'T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN
. According to Maggie, you were meant to fold them up, throw them in the air and grab one, and fate would decide which instruction you should follow (or perhaps it was Freud, Kate could never remember). As a method for action, it never failed to provide the wrong answer. While every cell in Kate's body urged her toward the ferry back to Fishguard, the paper method suggested number three, which, sensibly, she couldn't really afford and knew that it was the least likely to provide any kind of solution anyway.

But this is what a week in the parental home had reduced her to, she mused, as she strode furiously through the mudlocked fields that ran alongside the river. Schoolgirl tricks and superstitions. A sulky resentment of her parents. An inability to speak without saying the wrong thing. An emotional age of fifteen.

This was not how she had planned her return; she had wanted to sweep back in, serene and gracious, a successful writer, perhaps with a couple of books to her name; a handsome, intelligent partner, a happy, loving daughter; possessor of a natural self-confidence that would have forced them all to acknowledge that she had been right—that there had been other ways to live than theirs. That's why they're being nice to you, she had wanted to shout at her daughter. Because you're doing it all their way. It's easy for them to be nice to you when you're doing what they want. It's when you do what
you
want that it all gets complicated.

But of course life didn't work like that. She had returned as—if not the family black sheep, then something definitely downtrodden, apparently stupid, and ready for the chop. She was just the misfit again—the one who didn't ride, who looked eccentric, who couldn't hold down a proper job, a decent relationship—a view so pervasive that now even her own daughter was viewing her through those same unrosy spectacles. And because she didn't have that well-paying job, or that decent man, she couldn't even take herself off for a drive, or disappear to the pub, or perhaps to watch a film, like any normal adult might, but was left impotently tramping through wet fields as her only real option to escape the horrors of the family home.

Ballymalnaugh didn't even have particularly attractive countryside. Just row upon row of featureless, hillocky fields, their supposedly emerald green turned brown under the ceaseless gray skies, lined by scrubby hedges and punctuated by bleak, windswept crossroads. It didn't have the undulating charm of the Sussex Downs, or the wild, untamed beauty of the Peaks. What it did have, she thought sourly, was wet sheep. And skeletal, dripping trees. And mud.

Of course, it had begun to rain. Because her whole life was part of some big cosmic joke. And of course, being a stupid townie, she hadn't thought to bring either a waterproof or an umbrella. As water began to seep determinedly down the back of her collar, Kate glanced up at the glowering sky, darkening as the evening began to close in, and thought longingly of option number one. Just go, she thought. Go back to London. Daddy seems stable enough; he could go on for months yet. She couldn't really be expected to put her whole life on hold until something happened, could she? But then there was the matter of Sabine; Kate had the unsettling suspicion that if she were to disappear to London, any chances of bringing Sabine home would disappear with her.

As if echoing her mood, the rain suddenly came down harder, turning the gently permeating misty shower into near-solid, glassy sheets. Kate, pushing forward toward a copse, realized she could hardly see, the gray, wintry scenery around her becoming blurred and indistinct. Why don't they make windscreen wipers for glasses? she thought crossly, shivering in her near-sodden wool jacket, as she made for the slight cover of the trees.

It was then that she heard the sound: a muffled, thumping sound, irregular in beat, punctuated by a distant jingling. Squinting, Kate glanced through the trees in the direction of the noise. She could see almost nothing through her blurred lenses, but gradually, through the rain, was able to make out the shape of a horse, coming toward her through the woodland. Huge and gray, snorting fearfully, and surrounded by the shifting steam of its own body, it looked like that of a medieval knight, returning from some awful battle. Kate shrank back into the trees.

But the beast had apparently seen her. It slowed, and walked closer, its head lowering to confirm what it, in turn, thought it had seen. It was then that she saw him. Astride the horse, half hidden under a huge brown waterproof and a wide-brimmed hat, was Thom. He glanced over twice, as if making sure it was her, and then pulled up.

“You all right?”

Kate had to fight the paralysis that his sudden appearance had provoked. Her voice, when it came, was glib and urban, determinedly distanced from her true feelings.

“Nothing that an umbrella, a complete change of clothes, and a new life wouldn't cure.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “I'm just waiting for the rain to die down, so I can head back.”

“You look soaked.” He paused. “Do you want to get up? This boy's good as gold. It'll get you back an awful lot faster.”

Kate eyed the huge gray horse, its huge, plate-sized hooves moving restlessly too close to her feet, its massive head shaking up and down with impatience to get out of the rain. Its eyes swiveled, flashing hints of white, while its breath came in shots of hot steam, like a dragon's.

“Thanks. I think I'll wait.”

Thom sat, very still. She could feel his eyes upon her, and felt suddenly disadvantaged, being so far beneath him. She rubbed at her glasses.

“I'm fine, honest.”

“You can't hang around here. This rain's not going, it's settling in. You could be waiting all night.”

“Thom, please . . .”

But he had leaned forward, and swinging his leg over the back of the saddle, dismounted. Holding the horse's reins in one hand, he walked over to her, his boots squelching in the wet earth, and pulled the brown hat from his head.

“Here,” he said. “Take this.” He rubbed his hand through his short, dark hair. Where his hand was wet, the hair stood up in short, sleek spikes.

“And this.” He had removed his waterproof, and thrust it at her. She took it wordlessly, gazing at him in his thick jumper, already dusted with the first drops to force their way through the sparse canopy above. It was impossible to tell about his arm, she noted, unless you looked at that hand.

“Go on, put it on,” he said. “I'll walk you back.”

“But you'll get soaked.”

“But not for long. If you stay here in that thing,” he pointed dismissively at her jacket, warm enough for the worst that London could throw at it, “you'll catch pneumonia. C'mon, it's sheltering rain.”

“I feel . . . I feel . . .” she hesitated.

“Cold. Wet. Go on. The quicker you do, the quicker we can get back.”

She put the coat on. Cut to cover the saddle as well as its passenger, it reached down almost to her ankles and swished around her shins. He grinned as she placed the hat on her head.

“Why don't you trot back,” she said, pleadingly. “Then you won't get so wet. I'm fine with this lot on.”

“I'll walk you back,” he said, firmly, and she decided not to argue any more.

They followed the stream, their silence punctuated by the slop-clop of the horse's hooves, and the occasional metallic jangle of the bit against its teeth. Beyond the hedge, the mist had come down so that where one could usually make out Kilcarrion's distant chimneys, only a silent gray nothingness remained. Kate, despite herself, found she had begun to shiver.

“Is there a reason why you're out on your own?” They were having to speak unnaturally loudly, shout almost, to be heard above the thrumming of the rain.

“As opposed to being on a horse?”

He laughed. “You know what I mean.” Kate stared at her boots. Her footfall trudged sludgily, out of rhythm.

“It's not very easy,” she said eventually. “Coming back, I mean.”

“That's for sure.”

“So, why did you?” She stopped, and looked at him. “Why did you come back?”

Thom, who had also been watching his feet, glanced up at her, and then looked away.

“Ahh. Too long a story.”

“We've got at least half an hour. Unless a taxi comes past.”

“True. But you first.”

“Well, I came back because my father is dying. Or at least I think he's dying. But you probably know more about that than I do.” She paused, and stared at him, but he shrugged slightly, as if in contradiction. His jumper, she noted guiltily, had started to hang lower from the extra weight of the water.

“And I wanted to see Sabine. But something seems to have happened while she's been here, and she . . .” Kate lifted her head, trying to keep the choke from her voice. “She doesn't seem to want to come back.”

There. She had acknowledged it. She glanced at him, waiting for some response, some suggestion of judgment on his part, but he just kept walking, staring down at his feet.

Kate sighed.

“I can't say I blame her. There's been . . . well, there's been a lot of upheaval at home. I left my partner for someone else, and then he turned out . . . well, he turned out to be not what I'd expected. And so in the end I ended up on my own.” She tripped slightly, and glanced up at him, trying to smile. “Probably no great surprise to you.”

But Thom kept walking. She paused again, fighting the swelling urge to cry.

“Still, I thought she'd be pleased. I thought she'd want to come back, and just be the two of us. Because she's never really liked anyone I've been with. And I thought she'd hate it here, with all the rules and stupid deadlines for meals, and hunting, hunting, hunting. I always wanted her to grow up free of all that, you see. None of that rigidity. None of that formality. None of that constant sense of things being either right or wrong. I just wanted her to be happy, to be my friend. But . . .” Here she pulled up her spectacles and rubbed at her eyes, grateful that under the broad brim of the hat, it would probably just look like she was struggling with the rain. “She seems to have liked it. In fact, she seems to prefer it to living with me. So, the reason I'm out here in the rain is, frankly, that I feel a bit of a spare part. I don't know what to do with myself. And I don't think anyone here really knows what to do with me.”

She let out a long shuddering breath, glancing over at Thom. “Bit of a mess, really,” she said, apologetically.

Thom, one arm now thrown over the low-hung neck of his horse, didn't look at her. He appeared to be deep in thought, oblivious to the rivulets of water running from his hair down the lines of his jaw and dripping onto his collar.

They walked on in silence until they reached a five-barred gate, which, solicitously, he opened, holding his horse back and away from her until she'd gone through.

“Stupid, really,” she said, feeling a desperate need to fill the silence. She didn't think the countryside could be this quiet. “There's me, thirty-five years old, and still not able to sort my life out. You'd think I would have worked it out by now. My brother has. Most of my friends have. Sometimes I think I'm the only person who has not been given the set of rules . . . you know, the ones that show you how to grow up.”

Her voice, she realized, had begun to rise. She had begun to babble.