A Heartbeat Away (9 page)

“Is that what we've been doing?” I asked her. “Playing games?”

She shrugged, glancing across at my mother, and a frown flitted across her face.

“Perhaps that is what we all do.”

The strangest thing happened then. As if a light had suddenly been switched on deep down somewhere inside her, my mother stood and walked toward me.

“I'm so happy for you, Lucy,” she cried, holding out her arms.

Nowadays, I could understand my mother's behavior much better. I knew that if she took her medication, she would be distant and strange, and if she didn't, she was likely to become agitated and overexcited, but this, this…awareness…was very different.

“Happy for what, Mom?” I asked, holding her slight body against mine.

“V says you're in love,” she whispered against her fingers, like a child sharing a secret.

“And how would Aunt V know that?” I inquired.

“Are you?”

My aunt stood in front of the fireplace, shoulders back and arms straight down by her sides. Her stout, square figure was clad as always in sensible tweed, despite the heat, and I felt a warm rush of emotion for these two odd women who cared for me so much.

“Are you?” repeated Aunt V.

Was I? Was I in love? Is that what these strange feelings were all about? “How can you tell?” I asked her, and she smiled.

“Lucy,” she told me, “I know you better than you know yourself, and you and that Daniel Brown have wasted enough years already.”

All that night I tossed and tossed, going through the events of the day again, and again and every time I turned them around in my mind, they changed completely. When dawn's light crept at last through my window, I was no longer sure of anything. But the uncertainty was resolved the instant as I saw Daniel. At that moment, all my doubts were swept away as if they had never been. The touch of his hand, the sound of his voice, the sheer magnetism of his eyes—none of them had been a lie. His love for me was true, and mine for him was the most awesome emotion I had ever experienced.

After that weekend, that voyage of delicious discovery, there was no longer me and there was no longer Daniel; there was just “me and Daniel.”

He phoned me and we talked for hours, but when I tried to recall our conversation, I couldn't remember a word we'd said. My every waking thought included him. My every dream was about him. My future and my past were his. If that was love, then yes, I was so deeply in love with Daniel Brown that without him I had no life. And if there are those who think that is sad, then I would say to them that they are the ones who are missing out.

 

It was in the meadow at Brookbank that we first made love. On a clear summer night, with the music of the tumbling stream in our ears, I reached an ecstasy that left me weeping in his arms. And after, when my eyes found his, I saw that he was crying, too.

“Oh, Lucy,” he groaned, drawing me so closely against his hard-muscled chest that I could hear the heavy beating of his heart.

“Promise me that we'll always be together.”

As I listened to the thumping of his life force, a strange fear washed over me and I clung to him.

“You promise,” I urged. “Promise that you'll never leave me. No matter what happens you must promise.”

His answer was to cover my lips with his. And then he drew back and ran his fingers tenderly across my brow.

“No matter what happens, I will never leave you, Lucy McTavish,” he told me. “Remember that. No matter what happens, I will find a way to be with you.”

 

Our wedding was arranged for the 25th of May, almost exactly one year from the day at Brookbank when we first discovered each other. Aunt V organized it with military precision, and even my mother seemed to have uncovered a whole new lease on life helping with the preparations. I found it scary sometimes that so many people should be dependent on our happiness. It all just seemed too good, somehow; too perfect to be true. I said as much one day to Mrs. Brown, who now insisted that I call her Edna.

“Lucy,” she cried when I voiced my fears. “Don't you think you deserve some happiness?”

We were sitting in the kitchen at Homewood—the lovely kitchen that would soon be home to me.

“It just seems too good to be true,” I reiterated. She laughed with delight and leaned across to give me a hug.

“And it seems too good to be true to me that you are going to be my daughter. But believe it, Lucy. It is true. Never be afraid of happiness.”

I thought about what she said when I lay in my bed that night and I tried to chase away my fears. “Never be afraid of happiness,” she had told me. “Take it while it's there and live for the moment.”

But when the moment has gone, what then?

 

Daniel was standing in the yard at Homewood. The morning sunshine glinted on his hair, turning it to gold, and he lifted his hand to shade his eyes as he called to me.

“I'm off now, Luce. See you later. I'll pick you up at quarter to two.” He grinned—that wide, lopsided grin that took over the whole of his face—and I ran across to kiss him goodbye.

“Don't forget to bring Promise in before you go,” he reminded me.

I nodded, feeling the warmth of his cheek against my face as his lips touched mine.

“And don't you be late,” I warned as he stepped onto his motorbike.

Daniel rarely rode his bike those days. It was one of the remnants of his teenage years, and he brought the bike out only occasionally on a sunny Sunday afternoon when the urge for speed overtook him. Today, though, he was working up the fell at Brookbank and he needed to leave early to come and meet me, so Bill, the elderly part-time farm help, was driving the pickup. It was already stacked with posts and wire and all the paraphernalia required to mend the fences. Bill started up its tired engine, and as it disappeared down the lane, Daniel revved his powerful motorbike.

“Don't be late,” I reminded him yet again.

The heavy throbbing of the motor filled my ears. He rolled the bike forward, hand raised in farewell, and then he was gone, wheels spinning as he accelerated around the corner. A sense of panic rushed up my throat and an understanding hand closed around my arm.

“I wish he wouldn't drive so fast,” remarked Edna Brown from behind me.

“You know Daniel,” I responded with a worried smile.

“Never does anything slowly,” she agreed, linking her arm through mine. As we walked together toward the kitchen door, my heart doubled its beat and I took a deep breath. Only a few hours and he would be back home safe.

The sense of panic stayed with me as I mucked out the stables and saw to the horses, then took Daniel's dog, Buster, into the kitchen and said goodbye to Mrs. Brown, who was taking a steaming pie from the oven. Her round face was flushed with the heat and she flashed me a preoccupied smile.

“Don't be late for that real estate agent,” she reminded me.

“As if!” I retorted.

Today Daniel and I were going to see about renting a cottage just along the lane on the outskirts of the village. Our very first house together. As if either of us would be late for such an occasion. We had talked of little else since it had first come up a couple of weeks ago.

The trees stretched their motionless branches up into the clear blue sky and even the birds seemed to be resting in the warmth of the mid-day sun as my feet thudded along the deserted lane. Time felt suspended, and the panic that had lodged itself inside my throat made me reach for my mobile phone. I flicked down to Daniel's number, knowing that there was no signal beneath the sweep of the fell, at Brookbank. Sure enough, after two short rings my phone began an intermittent bleep. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and increased my speed, enjoying the effort that made my heart pound and my legs ache.

By one-thirty, I had showered and changed, and was eager to be off. I waited in the garden, sitting on the bench beside the front door, ears pricked for the throaty sound of a motorbike engine.

Aunt V had taken my mother into town to help her find a new hat to go with the lovely pale lilac suit she had bought for the wedding. I had never seen my mother so…normal. And Aunt V? Aunt V thought of nothing else. Sometimes I wished that Daniel and I had just run away and done it secretly because that was what our wedding was really all about, just me and Daniel and the rest of our lives, not cakes and hats and fancy outfits.

When he hadn't arrived by two o'clock, the panic that had been with me all morning swelled into a horrible foreboding. I tried to shake it off, but my breath came in short gasps and my heart fluttered inside my chest. Something was wrong; I knew it. I dialed his number again and again, but all I got was a distant, curt voice:
The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try later
. How much later, and where was Daniel? I tried Homewood, but the phone rang on and on. What was happening? Where was Edna Brown?

At two-thirty I started to run along the lane, back toward the farm, all thoughts of our cottage forgotten as I cried out for Daniel.

The battered white pickup was in the yard, abandoned outside the rear door, and old Bill Armitage stood, cap in hand, staring at the ground, his face distorted by worry as he spoke to Daniel's dad. My heart closed up as I ran toward them.

“I don't know where he is,” he was saying. “He left early, soon after twelve. I told him he had plenty of time…Then I saw his motorbike in the back of a tow truck—or at least, it looked like Daniel's bike.”

“Then where is he?”

My voice felt as though it came from someone else. It sounded hollow in my ears, hollow and distant and slightly distorted. I felt as though I
was
someone else. This couldn't be happening to Lucy McTavish.

“Where's Daniel?” I screamed.

“I'm ringing the hospital,” announced Edna Brown. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, face pale and fingers twisted into her apron.

“I'll insist that they tell me if there has been anyone admitted.”

“Now, don't jump to conclusions, Edna.”

Mr. Brown, always levelheaded, placed a hand on his wife's arm.

“Chances are his bike just broke down and Bill saw the garage picking it up.”

“Then why didn't he ring us?” snapped Mrs. Brown.

With wooden legs, I followed her into the house, knowing it was hopeless, knowing it was over. But he had promised not to leave me that day at Brookbank a lifetime ago.

Remember that. No matter what happens, I will find a way to be with you
. I could see his dear face in front of me now as he'd made that promise, the first time we'd loved each other. I clung fiercely to the memory. Whatever had happened, he
would
keep that promise. I knew it with no shadow of a doubt.

Mrs. Brown stood in the hallway, bristling with all the indignation she could muster, channeling her fear into anger as she held the phone against her ear.

“Well, you may as well tell me,” she insisted, “because I'm on my way to the hospital now. I know you had a young man admitted from a motorbike accident this afternoon, and I want to know how he is.”

There was an empty silence then, a sudden chilling silence.

“It was what…?” she whispered.

The phone slipped from her shaking fingers to clatter onto the ground, and the clatter echoed and echoed inside my head, mingling with a high-pitched distant scream as the floor came up to meet me.

W
hat do you do when the moment has gone? Exist, I suppose; if that's what you call inhabiting in a pain-filled vacuum with no hopes or dreams…except to die. For without him, there was no longer any point to life. He was my life.

 

Bill had been to fetch Aunt V to Homewood, and she sat upright in the chair at the head of the large pine kitchen table. Her face was white and pinched, but her eyes revealed nothing except tenderness for me, and that very tenderness only magnified the pain that I wanted to feel, needed to feel. She said nothing, just sat stalwart, a rock to lean on in my time of trouble.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown had gone to the hospital, and we waited motionlessly, hardly daring to allow ourselves even a shred of hope. But still the hope was there. Somewhere deep down in my tortured mind, I clung to the hope that the accident had been a horrible mistake and the man on the phone had not really mentioned the word
fatal
.

The clock ticked loudly in the echoing silence as I nursed the unbearable ache that racked my whole body. It made me want to shriek and cry and all the time my ears were finely tuned for the shrill of the phone, or the approaching hum of the Land Rover engine.

When at last the car came rattling down the lane, I leaped from my chair and raced outside to meet them. How
could
Daniel be gone when the sun was shining so brightly? It was a mistake,
had
to be a mistake, and in a moment Edna Brown would look at me and smile and tell me that everything was going to be all right.

As she stepped from the cumbersome vehicle, leaning heavily on her husband's arm, her tall, proud figure appeared to have shrunk. She glanced at me and her face crumpled, distorted by the same unbearable pain that filled my heart and soul and mind. For a moment we just stared at each other, then Mr. Brown ushered her into the house and up the stairs, while Aunt V stepped forward and placed her arm around my shoulders. I turned my face into the warm roughness of her sweater.

“Please tell me it's not true,” I begged her. “Please…please…please…not Daniel…not my Daniel.”

“Oh, Lucy,” she groaned. “Poor dear Lucy.”

After what seemed an age, Mr. Brown reappeared. His eyes were wet with tears, his jaw was set in a tight white line beneath his skin and he spoke to us in a stilted tone.

“Nothing could be done…builder's van…didn't see his bike…turned right across in front of him.” His voice cracked on the words and he shifted away, covering his face with his hands as his shoulders shook uncontrollably.

“Did you see him?”

Suddenly it was so important that I see him.

Mr. Brown shook his head. “They wouldn't let us.”

“It might not have been him.”

Hope gushed into me.

But he shook his head again, hopelessly.

“They gave us some of his things.”

He motioned toward the Land Rover, and unheeding of Aunt V's restraining hand, I ran across and rummaged through the bag on the passenger seat.

I pulled out his wallet with shaking fingers, the wallet I'd given him just last Christmas. I opened it, and my own face stared back at me, happy and smiling. Another face in another time on another person. That person was dead now…along with Daniel.

“Come on, lass,” urged Mr. Brown. “The doctor is on his way. He'll have something to dull the pain a little.”

“I don't want to dull it,” I screamed at him, my arms flailing wildly. “I don't want to shut it out. I want Daniel…please…please…please, God, tell me it's not true.”

Mr. Brown grabbed hold of my forearms and pushed them down against my sides, then he held me very, very tightly until the doctor arrived. I didn't feel the needle that brought me a blessed relief from the hysteria that had taken me firmly in its grip, but when I awoke again, I was in my own bed. I had one fleeting moment of happiness before the memories flooded back.

I grew to love that waking moment, when, just for the tiniest instant, I thought that everything was all right again, before the agony rushed back to drown me as I reentered the hell my life had so suddenly become.

 

They brought Daniel home just before the funeral, and I waited all morning until the long black car drove up, needing to see him so much, needing to try to make sense of the mockery my life had become. They carried his gleaming oak coffin into the dining room and the pain inside me twisted my guts as I followed in his wake.

“Are you sure?” asked Aunt V when it was my time to go in to the empty silence of the darkened room. I nodded, desperate to touch the contours of his face, desperate to speak to him, to ask him why he hadn't kept his promise.

His head rested back against the pillow, familiar features reposed as if in sleep. Yet, despite the familiarity, it wasn't Daniel's face at all, merely a waxen effigy of the man I loved, a caricature. I reached out to touch his skin; it felt cold and clammy beneath my fingers. I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his forehead, shutting my eyes tightly, trying to imagine his arms closing around me.

“Oh, Daniel.”

The cries welled inside me, overflowed in a torrent of salty tears that streamed down my cheeks, falling onto his silent, motionless face.

“Where are you, Daniel?”

That may have been Daniel's body, but it wasn't Daniel. He was somewhere else. I knew it with no shadow of a doubt. He had left this husk behind and moved on to another place.

At my desperate cries, soft voices sounded in the silent room. Caring hands drew me away from the heavy atmosphere, out into the sweet fresh air, but all I wanted was Daniel, and seeing the form that once belonged to him had only filled my heart with confusion.

 

That night, when the funeral was over, I walked out under the stars in the garden at Homewood, where we had spent so many happy hours. I stared up into the clear night sky and begged him to come to me, pleading with him to show himself. I sat on the wall and closed my eyes, willing him to speak to me; for he was there—I know he was. Somewhere out there he was waiting for me. I just had to find him.

I waited and waited, but still he didn't come. The cows bellowed in the field beyond the house, and somewhere a dog let out a desolate howl, but Daniel didn't speak to me that night. He didn't keep his promise.

Mr. Brown found me there much later, shivering in the moonlight, long after everyone had gone home. He placed his arm around me and gently helped me into the Land Rover to drive me back to the cottage where Aunt V, waiting helplessly, hopelessly, fed me pills left by the doctor and tucked me up in bed.

“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “What are we to do with you? First your mom and now you.”

It was those words that snapped me out of my despair and made me fight my way back to life again, and I remembered the promise I had made to myself when I was just a little girl and my mother had first turned inside herself.

I would never end up like my poor sad mom
. That was my promise to myself. I would never allow myself to give up and give in when things went wrong, as she did.

And now it seemed she had completely given up. Daniel's death and the finish of our wedding plans had sent her into one of the worst depressions I could recall. Now she was like an empty shell. Despite my promise to myself, part of me still wondered, Is that how I would be? Is that how I would survive the agony life threw at me? Was I really just like her?

 

The morning after the funeral I awoke and lay in my bed, remembering all my happy memories for the very last time, because I knew that to cope I had to forget them. I would make a new life for myself, a fresh start, be someone else. It was the only way.

If Aunt V was disappointed in my decision, she never made a criticism, and yet in retrospect, I realize how much she must have missed me.

“You do whatever you have to do, Lucy,” she told me when I scoured the Help Wanted columns for jobs in the city. “But London is such a long way off. Are you sure that it's the right thing?”

She eyed me soul-searchingly and I answered from my head.

“It's the only way I can go on,” I told her simply.

“Well then, dear little Lucy,” she said, nodding sadly, “that is what you have to do. But remember, we're all still here when you're ready. Me and your mother and the Browns; don't forget the Browns. They need you, too. They need to remember him with you, to talk it through.”

Had I forgotten the Browns in my own selfish agony, or was it just that I couldn't bear to remember them?

I drove to the city for my first job interview, and that in itself was a kick-start to my new life, for I had never driven farther than the market town of Appleton before. When I stalled in a street near the car park, it felt as though a hundred angry horns were directed at me. A man in a BMW raised his fist and yelled, and I felt the prick of tears as I struggled with the stubborn ignition. Then at last it burst into life again and I was moving forward, through the entrance to the car park. I nosed into a narrow space, switched off the engine and leaned over the steering wheel as it shuddered into silence. I had made it. All I had to do now was find the office of Fawcett and Medley and do the best I could.

“Don't you worry,” Aunt V had instructed me before I'd left. “Just be yourself and answer their questions as honestly as you can, and if they don't want you, then their loss is our gain.”

Why hadn't I seen the pain in her eyes when she'd looked at me? How could I have been so blind?

The office was starkly white, with heavy mahogany doors and quiet corridors. A tiny woman peered at me from over her spectacles and gave me a tight, expressionless smile.

“And you are…?”

“Lucy McTavish. I've come about the job.”

My voice sounded flat and broad, countrified. I twisted my fingers together, uncomfortable in my tight, gray pin-striped skirt.

“Take a seat. Mr. Lawson will be with you presently.”

She gestured at a row of hard-backed chairs upholstered in antique leather. I perched gingerly on the edge of the nearest one, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow me.

Mr. Lawson, surprisingly, proved quite pleasant. He ushered me into his office, showed me to a chair and riffled through a pile of papers for my job application.

“Bit of a change of career for you, isn't it?” he inquired, smiling broadly. My mouth was too dry to speak, so I nodded, instead.

“Any particular reason?”

I wanted to say,
Because the love of my life is dead and I can't cope with the memories
, but I simply smiled into his kindly eyes and found my voice.

“I just wanted to try city life.”

He asked me searching questions about my interests and experience, and I tried to answer them honestly. I had done word processing at an evening class while I was working at the kennel, and I was fairly familiar with most aspects of a computer. If all they required was someone to type and to be a general dogsbody, then I felt fairly confident that I could do the job.

“I make a good cup of tea,” I told him.

He laughed loudly.

“Well, that decides it, then. We'll give you a start here at Fawcett and Medley and see how you get on. Just a trial, mind. You can talk to Rosie about the details—you know, rates of pay and such.”

I stared at him in a kind of stupor. What had I done?

“Rosie…She's the girl you spoke to when you walked in….”

I forced a smile onto my face, nodding stupidly. This wasn't what I had expected at all. In my imagination, I had seen myself traveling to the city time after time for job interviews, easing myself into my fresh start, not jumping in immediately, feet first. I hadn't even told Jenny yet. My heart sank as I thought about telling the Whitfields that I was leaving. And what about all my charges? The little dog, Flint, whose hip had just been pinned after a nasty break and the new litter of puppies that were due any day—they needed me.

My heart hardened, as if a switch inside me flicked off. I had needs, too. I
had
to get away from all things familiar in order to survive.

 

Telling Mrs. Brown—I could never get used to calling her Edna—was worst. She looked at me with empty eyes and shook her head slowly.

“Oh, Lucy,” she groaned. “What has become of us all?”

I kissed her cheek, recalling the intoxicating scent of violets that had always seemed to me the essence of the Mrs. Brown I had admired and respected for so many years. Now she just smelled of soap, and her hair, once swept up neatly on top of her head, hung in limp strands that showed a lack of care.

“I don't know,” I told her honestly. “But I have to get away…or go crazy.”

I held her gaze, willing her to understand, but I couldn't make out her expression, for my eyes were blurred with the tears I fought to contain. I owed her more than this, and deep inside, I realized.