The Healing Stream (16 page)

‘Mr Masters has been a real brick.’ Tessa tried to follow her lead. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t lent Gerry to us. We can hang on to him until we sort ourselves out, but he – Mr Masters, I mean – insists that Gerry is on
his
payroll.’

‘How kind.’ The reply only emphasized that no matter what Tessa said, there was no way of breaking the protective armour of Naomi’s calm politeness. Both of them found it easier not to talk at all. And so, in silence, they covered the miles from Deremouth to Marlhampton.

As they came along the lane towards the farm, Tessa glanced at Naomi, expecting that surely the sight of Chagleigh would break through her defences. And perhaps it did, but the effect wasn’t what she expected. The expressionless mask dropped and in its place was a look that was hard to read. Was it determination? Was it hope? Then something that might even have been a slight smile as the older woman turned her head to look across the lower meadow where the cows were happily grazing.

‘He’ll help me, give me courage,’ she said, seemingly speaking her thoughts aloud. Then, looking at Tessa as if she had only just realized she was there, ‘I won’t fail him.’

‘We’ll help with the dairy work, Auntie, Deirdre and me. I know Gerry is only on loan but I expect Mr Masters will let him stay a while. Perhaps he might even leave Fiddlers’ Green and come here to the farm permanently. He’s very keen.’

Naomi shook her head. ‘I’m going to do Richard’s work. He’ll help me. He won’t leave me, he knows . . .’ But whatever it was Richard knew was lost in a sob that refused to be held back a second longer just as they turned into the yard. Switching off the engine, Tessa instinctively put her arms round Naomi, but her action was met with no response. She felt rejected.

‘Auntie, it’s so awful. He was . . . well, he was a . . . a rock.’

‘Don’t! Let’s go indoors.’

In the lobby were their wellingtons set in a neat row just as they were always left. Naomi kept her chin high and looked straight ahead as she unlocked the door to the kitchen. Tessa wasn’t so brave. She looked at the neat row of boots and was filled with foreboding. Soon she wouldn’t be there to support Naomi; she would be utterly alone.

‘You must be starved,’ Tessa said, thankful that with Deirdre’s ‘help’ she had prepared a cottage pie with the remains of last night’s beef before they took the delivery to Sunshine House. Her idea had been that it would be ready to cook as soon as she heard Richard was being brought home. ‘It won’t take very long to cook the supper. Why don’t you have a nice warm bath while you wait? You must be tired and hungry.’

Like an obedient child Naomi did as suggested and returned half an hour later wearing a nightdress and dressing gown. The cottage pie was brought from the oven looking good and smelling even better, bringing forth a loud rumble from her empty stomach.

‘I didn’t have time to prepare a vegetable. We’ll have to have tinned peas. Is that all right?’

‘Of course.’ It would have taken more than unappetizing processed peas to break through Naomi’s reserve. As soon as her plate was put in front of her she took up her fork and started to eat, bolting her food as if she were starved. The last meal she had eaten had been the previous evening, although she had been given two or three cups of weak, sweet tea at the hospital.

They made no attempt to talk and Naomi had more or less cleared her plate when, with no apparent warning and making no sound, her body jerked convulsively. With her hand over her mouth she got up from the table so suddenly that her chair fell backwards with a crash as she rushed through the adjoining scullery to the outside lavatory. From the kitchen Tessa could hear her retching and then the sound changed. There was nothing restrained in Naomi’s crying. She howled, she wailed, she called Richard’s name. Feeling utterly helpless, Tessa followed her and found the lavatory door wide open.

‘You were hungry and ate too fast,’ she said, putting her arm round the shaking figure that leant against the whitewashed wall as if it hadn’t the strength to stand alone.

‘Like Richard, last night.’ Naomi’s words were hard to understand. ‘Please God, take me like you’ve taken him.’ No longer protected by the armour of numb reserve, she gave up the battle for control.

A house full of love
. Amelia’s words came back to Tessa. What would she say of it now?

The night seemed endless. Naomi’s mind jumped from the present, to the recent past, then back down the years. Since she’d been a schoolgirl all her hopes, dreams and aspirations had been shared with Richard, just as his had been with her. Suddenly she was alone, frightened to look ahead to an abyss of loneliness. Her near-hysterical bout of crying had left her weak and drained.

‘Richard,’ she whispered, ‘Richard, please hear me, please give me a sign, tell me you’ll be with me.’ She remembered the fear she had felt through the first of those awful wars, the Great War as it was known; she had prayed with all her heart and soul that he would be safe. But now, lying alone in the bed where they had turned to each other with love that was too much part of their lives to need words, she couldn’t pray. She could form the words in her mind, but that’s all they were, just words while the anguish of her spirit cried out to Richard.

Wriggling over to his side of the bed, she rested her head on his pillow as if she expected that would bring him closer. Instead it forced on her the reality she couldn’t bear to face. Richard was gone. Burying her face against his pillow she felt the burning tears sting her eyes and made no attempt to hold them back.
I can’t bear it. If you’re not here, Richard, there’s nothing. I want to die. How many years have I got to get through? Help me. How could you leave me? You’re my life.

Tessa crept along the corridor and listened. Ought she to go in? She wanted to, she wanted to hold Naomi close and share her grief, yet as her hand reached for the doorknob she knew she mustn’t. She was an outsider. How could she possibly give comfort to a woman whose very heart had been torn from her? Turning away, she crept back to her own room, but sleep was a million miles away.

Any day Giles would come back and when he heard that they were to have a child they would be married as soon as it could be arranged. Then what would happen to Naomi? Even if Gerry worked for her instead of for Mr Masters, she would be alone in the house. Tessa imagined her sitting at the meal table with no one to share the food, no one to speak to; she’d bank up the fire to give hot water and there would be no one to use it except her. There
must
be a solution. Lying in bed, haunted by the memory of Naomi’s muffled tears, into the gloom of Tessa’s thoughts came something so simple that she couldn’t believe she could have been so stupid as not to see it sooner: if Giles came back quickly, before anyone bought the cottage, or if she could find a way to contact him by phone, she could persuade him to take Hideaway Cottage off the market. Then, even after they were married, she could still be nearby and Naomi wouldn’t be so dreadfully alone. The trouble was, she and Richard had never looked beyond each other for friendship. They had plenty of acquaintances in the village, but no intimate friends.

Satisfied that she had found a solution, Tessa slept. And, despite herself, exhaustion got the better of Naomi, but not for long. As dawn broke she was again awake. If she put her hand under Richard’s pillow she could feel the cotton material of his pyjamas; and yet here in the room that had held so much of their lives she couldn’t bring him close.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Tessa woke, hearing the sound of movement in the yard. It must be Gerry bringing the cattle in for their morning milking. Getting out of bed she grabbed her dressing gown to cover her nakedness, then went to the window. What a mercy Mr Masters had let them borrow him; it would give them time to advertise for someone experienced to take over the work of looking after the animals – the bread and butter of the farm, as Naomi called them.

So went Tessa’s thoughts until they were pulled up sharply by the sight in the yard. The cows were ambling out of the milking shed while Naomi kept them in a group with the help of the stick Richard had always used. But that wasn’t the only thing of his she had taken as a boost to her determination: dressed in her usual workman’s overalls and wellingtons, on that first morning without him she had taken his battered felt hat from the hook in the lobby and put it on her head. As she steered the cattle into Lower Meadow and shut the gate on them, Gerry arrived. Tessa watched as the two talked; even from that distance she could see that Naomi’s shut-in expression was back. No doubt Gerry was expressing sympathy, something she was still too shocked to acknowledge. Would the young man understand her cool, withdrawn manner? Or would he feel rebuffed? Tessa felt that her presence was required and hurried to run her bath. Even working at high speed it was twenty past seven when she ran down the stairs. She, too, wore workman’s overalls and in a minute would be pushing her feet into her wellingtons, but her face was made up with care and her short hair shining from the ministrations of the brush.

And so started Day Number One on Chagleigh Farm with the ghost of Richard everywhere, bringing no comfort.

The morning was half over when a shadow fell across the open doorway of the dairy. ‘Hello?’ Tessa called enquiringly.

Into the open doorway stepped a portly man of some sixty years, rosy faced and with greying, bristly sideburns and hair of the same hue which curled to frame the back of his tweed cap.

‘I take it Mrs Pilbeam won’t be on the farm today? My name is Huntley.’ The visitor introduced himself. ‘You may have heard of me; I farm next door.’ He was certainly nothing like the working farmer Tessa had conjured up in her imagination. His booming, jovial voice was in keeping with his expensive tweeds, and she was sure his highly polished boots knew nothing of mud and worse in the farmyard. Her immediate thought was thankfulness that she hadn’t called on him for help the previous morning. ‘And you – you’ll be the niece, I dare say. Shocking thing to happen. How is the poor lady?’

‘You’ve heard about my uncle?’

He gave a bark of a laugh. ‘My dear, the whole of Marlhampton will have heard. In the country news travels with the speed of a heath fire. I got out my pen to write to Mrs Pilbeam, but then I pictured her predicament and I thought – no! Better to call and have a word with her. She’ll be in the house, I expect? Although I did ring the front bell and no one answered, that’s why I walked round here. Dreadful for her, dreadful, dreadful. I always marvelled how they managed with just the two of them.’

‘They managed perfectly.’

‘Where did you say I shall find her? Or has she gone into Exeter? So much to do with all the arrangements. One thing you can be sure of with death: it leaves plenty for other people to deal with; and perhaps that’s as well, and it gives less time for grieving.’

‘You’ll find her up in the top field. If you don’t want to walk you can drive through the lower meadow as long as you take care to shut the gate going up and coming back down. Then there’s just the stile so you have to leave the car and walk the last bit.’

The visitor beamed affably. ‘You’ve got me sized up right enough. I’m not the man to walk up a hill if I can drive. A pity the same couldn’t be said for Pilbeam. Worked himself into the grave – and she’ll do the same if she isn’t made to see reason.’

‘To them it was never work. It was a life they loved.’ She thought of herself trying to drive the cows for milking the previous morning and how near she had come to calling on this tailors’ dummy of a countryman for advice. From there her mind took a sideways jump and she pictured Richard in clothes more suitable for a scarecrow and a heart belonging to the work he and Naomi shared. Perhaps she ought not to have let Geoffrey Huntley carry his condolences in person; it might have been less painful for her to read his message of sympathy.

She heard the car start on its way up the hill, and ten minutes or so later heard it stop as he let himself through the gate from the lower meadow, then when he’d closed it the sound of the motor told her he was leaving Chagleigh. That would be the first of so many who could try to bring Naomi comfort by their words of sympathy.

Naomi seemed metaphorically to have stepped into Richard’s shoes (or wellingtons, rather), for she made no attempt to break off her work and organize lunch. So when Tessa and Deirdre returned from taking the daily delivery to the village, they went indoors to see what they could find. There were still plenty of vegetables and so it looked as though it would be soup and bread. It was evidence of how removed Naomi was from normal living when she accepted without comment that there were four places laid.

‘You’ll have to fill up with bread,’ Tessa told them as she carried the tureen to the table and started to ladle out the soup. ‘I’ll need to do some shopping this afternoon, Auntie. Is there anything else you’d like me to do?’ She didn’t want to put it into words that there was the death to register. ‘I expect you’d rather stay and work with Gerry.’

‘We’ve been checking the sheep’s feet,’ Gerry said when Naomi didn’t answer. ‘Mrs Pilbeam said she’d never done it before, but she’s a real natural. Learnt to sort of sit the animal on its behind and get it between her knees so it couldn’t move a darn sight quicker than I did when I came to do it first. It’s a knack and to see the way she tackled it she might have been doing it for years.’

Tessa’s glance met Naomi’s and a silent message passed between them, both remembering what she had said as she looked towards the fields. Could it be that Richard was giving her the strength and courage to do what she had to? All Naomi said was, ‘We’ve got more than half of them done and penned separately. It’s something I’ve learnt to do, and I’d like to get it finished this afternoon. I’m grateful to Gerry for teaching me.’

‘Today I’ve looked after the pigs,’ Gerry told them, ‘but come tomorrow Mrs Pilbeam will take over. I tell you, you’d never guess she’d not had dealings with the livestock side of things, she’s a real natural, like I said.’