A Heartbeat Away (10 page)

For a moment, she clung to my arm.

“But running away isn't the answer, Lucy.”

“I'm not running away,” I insisted. “I'm…I'm just trying to get on with my life.”

She kissed my cheek then and sighed, a heavy, heartrending sigh.

“Don't forget us, Lucy,” she pleaded. I wrapped my arms around her, fighting the emotions that told me to stay.

“How could I ever forget you?” I cried.

 

I managed to rent a tiny apartment just across the park from the offices of Fawcett and Medley, and threw myself into my new life. Forgetting my old life was easy when everything was so new, and late at night, when the memories haunted my dreams, I would take a couple of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed and wake late for work with a thick head and a dull empty ache in the place where my heart used to be.

The girls at the office were kind and friendly, but I kept my distance, not wanting to share myself with anyone. I was always the one who offered to work late, and often after work, I would walk along the busy street to the swimming pool in the city center, to swim and swim and swim until I felt so tired that all I wanted was my bed.

And so I survived. For the next six months, I existed in a world with no emotion, not allowing myself the acute and necessary experience of pain.

Mrs. Brown wrote to me every week. In a neat and tidy hand, she told me, with almost clinical detail, of everything that was happening on the farm, but she never mentioned Daniel, never mentioned the love of both our lives. I could cope with those impersonal letters, and even looked forward to the link with a past I dared not face, until one day her letter was different, filled with a kind of intensity that was too closely linked to pain. She talked of the horses and how much they had meant to him, and she told me that they were going to keep them both for me to ride when I was ready to come home. Didn't she understand that I would never come home?

After that I kept her letters tied up with a blue ribbon in a little wooden box, but I never opened them, for I was too afraid. Instead, I wrote to her. Every week without fail, I wrote of the typing I had done today and how many lengths I had managed to swim and what was on TV the night before; shallow, empty letters that could have been penned by a stranger.

Aunt V drove her elderly car to the city every other weekend just to see me. I would wake up on the Sundays she was due, tidy my tiny apartment and then sit in the tall narrow window overlooking the street, watching and waiting until her car chugged around the corner. A warm comfortable feeling would fill me when I spotted her short upright figure march across the pavement, and I would run down the three flights of stairs and fling my arms around her whether she liked it or not. Aunt V was never one for displays of emotion.

After I had made her a cup of tea and she had appraised my one roomed apartment, we would walk into the city to window-shop, before stopping somewhere for a leisurely lunch. I loved those Sundays, especially on the rare occasions when she brought my mother with her. The three of us would stroll through the park, wrapped up warm against the winter's chill, and chat of nothing in particular. It suited me, “nothing in particular.”

All in all, I suppose I allowed my life to slip into a sort of comfortable vacuum, living from day to day, with no dreams for the future and no thoughts of the past. But I found out before too long that escape is not always such an easy route to take and life does have a habit of throwing you back into the fray, just when you least expect it.

 

Aunt V had come to see me and for once I thought she seemed a bit preoccupied. Before she left, I took hold of her hands and made her look at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

She shook her head and tried to pull away, but I held her fast.

“Tell me,” I insisted.

Her shoulders slumped uncharacteristically. “I'm worried about your mother.”

My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean…what way? Has she had another of her funny do's?”

Aunt V shook her head again.

“No, no, it's nothing like that. I just don't think she's very well.”

Suddenly she leaned toward me, a fierceness in her eyes.

“I think it's time you returned for a visit,” she said.

It was the first instance that she had put me under any pressure since I'd told her all those months ago that I was moving to the city to start a new life. Now it seemed that my poor mother needed me after all, and duty was about to draw me back to the place I was so afraid of.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Has she seen the doctor?”

Aunt V shrugged. “You know your mom. She isn't easy to talk to at the best of times. It's just a feeling I have, a feeling that something's not right. Come home, Lucy. Please. Just for a short visit. You owe us that at least.”

How could I refuse? How could I harden my heart against such a plea? She was
my
mother, after all, and if not for Aunt V, I would have had to take full responsibility for her.

“I'll be home on Saturday,” I promised. “And I'll stay overnight.”

The expression on her face said it all.

 

The week passed slowly. As usual, I kept myself to myself, but it had become more difficult lately, since the arrival of Mr. Medley's new personal assistant, Nicola Birch. She was just so alive and full of fun. The whole office buzzed when she'd walk in on a Monday morning, eager to share her exploits from the weekend. For some reason, she had embarked on a quest to improve my “quality of life,” and was constantly attempting to persuade me to go out clubbing with her. So far I had managed to resist her invitations, but my excuses were wearing thin, so I was glad for once to have a genuine reason to say no to Saturday night.

She waved at me as she jumped into a taxi outside the office after work that Friday.

“Next week, then, Lucy,” she insisted. “No excuses. I'm going to make sure that you have some fun whether you like it or not.”

I smiled halfheartedly, cringing inside.

 

As soon as I saw my mom, I knew that Aunt V was right to be worried. Her face was ashen, and she was constantly short of breath.

“You'll have to go to the doctor on Monday,” I told her.

“You see, Mary? Lucy agrees with me,” said Aunt V. “I'm making you an appointment, no ifs or buts.”

“I've seen enough doctors to last me a lifetime,” grumbled my mother.

“But they were for your nerves.” I butted in. “This is different. You aren't well.”

She muttered something, rambling in her usual way, then she took herself off to bed early. When Aunt V brought her a cup of tea next morning, her limp body was already turning cold.

Two deaths within one year. It seemed impossible, and yet life is adept at the seemingly impossible. The first death, Daniel's, drove me into an apathetic vacuum. My mother's, in a way, rekindled my desire to live, but by throwing caution to the wind and caring for no one.

I was fine until the funeral. Fawcett and Medley were only too happy for me to take a well-deserved leave, and I flung myself into helping Aunt V with the funeral arrangements. I had missed all that with Daniel. Left it for others to deal with. Hidden from my responsibilities, I suppose. This was different; I felt much stronger now and took a great satisfaction in being there for my aunt, who would miss my poor mother far more than I ever could.

Edna Brown was our rock. She arrived unannounced, offering sympathy and support in just the right doses, making things so much easier for Aunt V and me, despite the fact that my mother's death must have been painful for her, too. She walked tall again, but with a new serenity, and the scent of violets followed in her wake once more. I wanted so much to ask her how she had managed to move on with her life. However, the right moment just never seemed to come.

 

The day of the funeral dawned bright and clear. A spring day filled with life and promise. I think it was that that nourished the canker that beginning to fester inside me. I remember walking into the village church behind the coffin and seeing the yellow and purple spring flowers scattered across the emerald-green of the grass. It seemed so wrong that my mother should be dead, so unfair that her life had been snuffed out so when the whole world was bursting with energy and beauty. But was it for my mother that my heart grieved so badly? Or was it for Daniel, whose loss I had never really learned to live with…whose loss was eating at my soul?

I couldn't bear to make small talk with the kindly villagers who had crammed into our tiny cottage after the service, so I quietly let myself out the back door and walked in a kind of daze along the lane, feeling like the little girl again who had walked that road a thousand times. Every tree was familiar, every scent, every sound. Nostalgia engulfed me. I thought about the red shoes that seemed to me to have been at the very start of the changes in my young life. And I thought about my handsome charming, selfish father, who had destroyed my poor dead mother. Or had she destroyed herself?

Just ahead of me now, I could see Homewood Farm, the place that was once to be
my
home, nestling beneath the mighty fells that loomed in the clear spring sky. Memories devoured me, eating at the core of me, twisting the knife in my heart. Daniel and I had spent so many happy hours riding way up those mighty slopes and together at Homewood, the place of my dreams. Hours that I had then believed would last a lifetime. But life is a fickle, treacherous beast that lies in wait to drag you down.

I sat on a rock at the base of a fell, hopelessly trying to find inside myself the apathy that I achieved in the city. The words of a poem by T J Darling sprang, unbidden, to my mind, a poem that I used to recite to Daniel. “Like the backs of colossal elephants, motionless against the sky, here doth winter flourish, here stay I…”

They
were
like the backs of colossal elephants, those mighty hills I used to love. All of a sudden something snapped inside me. Emotion flooded me taking my breath and drowning my senses. I had to get away, had to get back to that safe place where nothing could touch me. I stood sharply and started to run, my breath coming in great heaving gasps, and as my feet pounded along the lane, the familiar poem sprang painfully into my head again. “I walk these bleak and mighty slopes where the fell sheep roam and my heart is filled with joy. For
this
is my home.”

But it wasn't my home anymore, was it? It could never be my home again.

 

I knew that I shouldn't be leaving Aunt V. In the few days since the funeral she had changed so much. Throughout everything—the shock of my mother's death, the agony of the post mortem and then, finally, the funeral—she had remained stalwart, carrying me along with her powerful personality as always. Now, suddenly, she seemed to have shrunk and fresh lines marked her pale cheeks. Yes, I shouldn't leave her, but I just had to go, back to the safe anonymity of the city.

I had avoided close contact with Edna, but she singled me out before I left, touching my cheek with a gentle finger. I saw the sadness that still lingered in her eyes and I looked away.

“Don't run from the memories, Lucy,” she told me. “You have to learn to live
with
them to find peace again.”

My whole body shuddered. “But what if I can't? What if I can't face the memories?”

“You will,” she said firmly. “One day you will face them, and then you can come home.”

I smiled at her with tear-filled eyes and hardened my heart, for I knew that I could never come home.

“Look after Aunt V for me,” I whispered.

Before I left, the coroner told us that my mother's poor tired heart had just stopped beating while she slept. And who could ask for a better end? All I could think of was the needless violence of Daniel's death. He had been returning home especially to meet me and his life had been snuffed out by the act of a careless driver. So his death was really all my fault, then, wasn't it? Yes, I had to get away from this place, had to get back to my other life before the grief drove me crazy, too. But my other life was no longer there; my comfortable vacuum was gone for good. Oh, why hadn't Daniel kept his promise?

B
y the end of the following week, I was relieved to find Aunt V already brighter. She called me on Thursday evening, sounding so much like her old self that it brought a lump to my throat.

“Edna and I have been into Appleton today,” she told me. “We had lunch at that little pub near the town center. Whatever is it called?”

“The Woolpack,” I told her.

“Yes, that's it. I had the most delicious home-baked steak pie, and Edna ordered one of the specials—I think it was venison. Anyway, she said it was very good. We'll have to go there next time you're home.”

The enthusiasm in her voice relieved my guilt a little. Dear Edna Brown had worked her magic as usual.

“Oh. And I'm going to start helping her with Meals-on-Wheels,” she went on. “It will do me good to be useful, don't you think?”

“Aunt V,” I cried, “It's wonderful that you are getting on with your life. You'll be helping with the Riding for the Disabled next and—”

“Funny you should say that,” she cut in. “Edna was just on about the Riding for the Disabled Association. There's a riding school on the other side of Appleton that has a riding group for disabled children, and we thought we might go along and take a look. Perhaps you could come with us.”

“I'll see,” I promised, knowing that I never would. I felt so distanced from everything now, and sometimes I almost felt a kind of anger. Anger at Daniel, I suppose, for breaking his promise, and anger at life for taking mine.

When Nicola approached me as I left work that Friday, I was ready with my answer. “Yes, I'll come,” I told her. “But what sort of thing do you usually wear?”

She looked at me with disbelief.

“You are not seriously telling me that you've never been clubbing?”

“Well, of course I have,” I retorted, feeling stupid. “But the clubs in Appleton are very…you know…casual.”

Nicola raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course. I almost forgot.” She giggled. “You're from the country aren't you?”

I gave a high-pitched, hollow laugh, but underneath I was bristling. “Yes, I am, but we're really quite civilized in the country nowadays, you know.”

“Never mind.” She clasped my arm in a gesture of sympathy. “At least you escaped before it was too late. Black pants will do and a nice sexy little top. I'll meet you in the Duck and Dove Pub at about nine o'clock.”

As I wandered along the busy street toward my tiny apartment, my mind kept going back again and again to Nicola's comment.
At least you've escaped
before
it was too late
. But I had escaped because it
was
too late.

Images of a bleak fell flashed into my mind. I froze in my tracks, and there on the pavement, amid the faceless people scurrying eagerly about their business, claustrophobia took me in its grip. Oh, how I longed to have the cold wild wind in my face and to feast my eyes on the awesome space of the open sky. What was I doing here, so far away from home? The answer arrived at once. Surviving, that was what I was doing. Getting on with my life in the only way I could see how.

 

My feverish desperation stayed with me as I set off to meet Nicola that evening. The streets were alive with a bustling excitement that caught me by surprise and heightened my mood, making me feel more alive than I had in months. I lifted my chin and increased my pace. It was time to move on.

I spotted Nicola as soon as I walked through the door of the Duck. She was in the farthest corner, surrounded by a group of young people, all trendily dressed and wearing the same excitement on their faces.

“Lucy,” she cried, beckoning me over.

I slid into the smokey cloud that surrounded them all.

“This is Lucy, everyone,” she declared, clapping her hands.

“Drink?” offered a tall, angular man. His girlishly handsome face had a too-dark suntan and his auburn hair was carefully styled and streaked with blond.

“You don't need to worry about Rodney,” whispered Nicola. “He's gay.”

“Th-thank you,” I stuttered.

“Large dry white wine,” he called across to the slightly built, wide-eyed barman, who held his gaze and gave a provocative wink.

Did I really want white wine?

“Ignore them,” Nicola murmured in my ear. “They're actually quite good company, totally harmless, and at least you know that they aren't going to come on to you.”

I reeled in shock at first, feeling like an intruder, until my second glass of wine was emptied, and then the whole scenario took on a different feel; I took on a different feel.

Nicola's friends were not so bad. Chatting to Rodney was just like having a conversation with another girl, and everyone else seemed so intent on listening to what Nicola had to say that they didn't take much notice of me. When she glanced at her watch and announced that it was time to go to the Union, I felt quite disappointed. I felt comfortable here.

Rodney shrugged when I asked him why we were leaving, and I noticed he flashed a disappointed glance toward the barman as we stood and downed our drinks.

“It's just the way it is,” he told me. “We always go on the same circuit. Everyone does. First it's the Duck and then it's the Union, and that just gives us a few minutes to get one in at the George and Dragon before closing.”

“And then we go to Idols,” Nicola stated. “Don't worry, Rods. I asked Jeremy and he said he'd meet you there when his shift was finished.”

Who were these people? What was I doing here?

I was getting on with my life—that was what, transported into a wine-induced feverish state.

By the time we arrived at Idols, I felt as though I was on another planet. Everything anyone said made me giggle. I stood next to Nicola in the line, listening to the throb of the music, as eager as she was to get past the two thickset doormen and join the heaving throng of bodies we glimpsed whenever the heavy oak doors opened.

At last it was our turn. Nicola flirted with one of the burly young men who sported some kind of headset attached to his head, with a speaker in front of his mouth. I gazed at him in disbelief. In fact, the whole place filled me with disbelief; it was like being in a dream, an exciting, dangerous, unfamiliar dream. I liked dangerous, I decided.

“Come on,” Nicola ordered, pulling at my arm. “Quick, before he changes his mind.”

As she hurried past him, he boldly cupped her buttocks. She tittered, rolling her eyes in his general direction.

“Don't forget,” he told her. “I'll see you later.”

“In his dreams,” she muttered to me as soon as we turned away, and then there was no more chance to talk, for the thumping vibrating noise took us over.

I had never danced as I did that night. Or was it just the alcohol that made it seem that way? The music took me over. I didn't have to think anymore or speak or remember. I just
was.
Undulating with the overpowering rhythm of the music, shoulder to shoulder on the packed dance floor. Thrusting my hips and allowing my body to move however it wanted. When I noticed a pair of glittering black eyes staring at me, for just a moment I faltered. I felt crazy, wicked, sensual, as if a stranger now lived in my body.

I glanced away and then looked back, mesmerized. They were still there, burning into me. A tingle of fear set my senses on fire.

“Follow me,” urged Nicola, dragging at my arm. Her face was damp with perspiration and her hand on my arm felt clammy. Or was it me who felt clammy?

“Let's sit down,” she suggested. I trailed her reluctantly, back to the table where Rodney was in deep conversation with the barman from the Duck. Two more drinks were waiting for us and I drank half mine in one go before sinking onto the empty chair next to Nicola, fanning my face in a desperate attempt to cool down.

“I'm going to the loo,” she announced. “It'll be cooler in there.”

Again I followed in her wake, staggering as I pushed through the crowd, and then suddenly a tall figure blocked my path. When I gazed up into the same impenetrable dark eyes that I had seen on the dance floor, fear washed over me. I liked fear. It made me feel alive inside again, in a place that I thought was dead.

“Come on,” cried Nicola anew, reaching back to drag me past the hypnotic stranger into the relative quiet of the ladies'.

“Stay away from him,” she ordered.

I eyed her in surprise. “Who? Stay away from who?”

“Alex Lyall,” she declared. “I saw him looking at you on the dance floor. He's bad news, Luce, and way out of your league.”

“Whose league is he in, then?” I giggled, but she didn't laugh.

“The league of drugs and violence and who knows what the hell else,” she told me.

“You are serious,” I gasped, abruptly sobered by the intense expression on her face.

She gave me a friendly shove. “Too right I am.”

“You mean he's
on
drugs?”

“I think
in
drugs would be more like it. Honestly, Luce, I mean it. Keep well away.”

When we went out into the hot, seething buzz of the club again, to my relief, he was gone. We pushed through the crowd to find that our table had been taken over by someone else. Rodney and his friend had disappeared and Jane and Ros, Nicola's other two friends, were so tightly wrapped around two guys on the dance floor it didn't appear that they would be returning in a hurry.

“Great,” groaned Nicola, glancing at her watch. “Let's go, Lucy. We may as well share a taxi home. It's been a total disaster of an evening, anyhow.”

I clung to her arm as she elbowed her way out into the foyer, then she stopped dead and regarded me with a horrified expression on her face.

“Oh, no,” she lamented. “There's that bouncer.”

My head was swimming pleasantly and I felt distanced and fuddled.

“What…what are you on about? What about the bouncer?” Then I remembered and started to giggle.

“It's not funny,” snapped Nicola. “He'll come on to me when I try to go out, and all for a damn fiver. You'll have to go and grab a taxi, Luce, I'll run straight out and jump in when he's not looking.”

I hesitated and she gave me a push.

“Just go outside and wait until a taxi pulls up—any one will do—then hop in and wait for me…And don't let anyone push you out.”

A wave of dizziness swept over me as the cool night air hit me with a bang. I could see a row of taxis waiting at the curb but groups of young people were jostling to get into them, shoving and yelling at one another. I couldn't do this—I really couldn't.

“Here…allow me.”

I pulled back from the hand that cupped my elbow firmly, my nerve ends tingling with terrifying anticipation at the sound of the deep voice in my ear. When I turned around, those glittering black eyes stared into mine with such hypnotic passion that my whole body froze into immobility.

He kept his firm hold on me, raising his other hand, and miraculously a taxi slid right up alongside us.

“Thank you,” I croaked. As he opened the door, I remembered Nicola and hesitated.

“Your friend is here now,” he told me, and as I collapsed on the seat, suddenly she was clambering in beside me and the taxi was roaring off down the street. For a moment I tried to glance back, but everything was a blur, including my head, which didn't want to let the thumping music go.

Within minutes I was climbing out onto the road. “See you on Monday,” called Nicola. Then I was alone on the pavement outside my apartment, fumbling in my bag for my keys with hands that didn't seem to work properly.

 

I awoke next day with a blinding headache, made worse by the jarring ring of the phone. Inching groggily out of bed I grabbed the receiver.

“Hello?” I rasped. Aunt V's familiar voice in my ear unexpectedly made me want to weep.

“Lucy! Are you all right? You sound awful.”

I drew in a deep breath. “I'm fine,” I told her. “Just a bit of a cold that's all.”

“Should I drive over to see you?”

“No…honestly. I'll be fine.”

I tried to make my voice sound normal, and in doing so probably made it ten times worse, but she was so full of her own news that she didn't notice.

“You'll never guess what,” she announced.

Her words spilled forth in a torrent in her eagerness to get them out.

“Edna wants to open a tearoom and farm shop at Homewood, and I'm going into partnership with her. I'll be in charge of the day-to-day running of it and she'll do all the baking. Just think. Me in business. Oh, Lucy.”

When she finally stopped for breath, I made an effort to take stock of my feelings.

“I'm so happy for you,” I cried, fighting off the emptiness that filled my soul. Even Aunt V and Edna Brown were getting on with their lives.
And so are you,
I told myself.