Family Drama 4 E-Book Bundle (165 page)

‘How’re your toes?’ she asked, knowing he must be in agony.

‘I’ve still got ten of them, thanks to you,’ he smiled, and she had forgotten just how blue were his eyes and fair his hair in the lamplight. ‘You saved my life.’

‘You tried to do the same for me and I never thanked you,’ she blushed, not wanting him to see how close to tears she was.

‘It’s bad out there. Do you want me to try to get to the barn?’

‘Just get those legs going up and down the stairs, up the passage. Give them a good stretch. The beasts are going nowhere. Time you had a proper rest. Happen in the morning you’ll be fit enough to give me a hand,’ she paused, recalling that he had a train to catch and a ship to board and she
might never see him again. Better make the most of him while he was around.

She poured hot water from the kettle on the hob into a stone bottle and passed it over. ‘You know where everything is. I’ve aired Grandpa’s bed. You can sleep posh tonight.’

She could see him wincing as he rose up and it was natural to give him a hand up the stairs with the lamp. Ben smelled of balsam and mothballs, soap and something she couldn’t quite fathom. It was over two years since he had climbed those stairs. He leaned on her and she could smell his warm breath.

The curtains were drawn and the drapes around the four-poster pulled across.

‘It’ll be clashy tonight. Listen to that gale blowing in, but we might get out in the morning,’ she said without much conviction.

If the storm continued they were going to be stuck together for a few more days. Judging by the look of him he was in no fit state to be let loose up the dale. Why did that fleeting thought warm her cheeks? She ought to be furious with him still, but somehow now was not the time to be going into all that.

They sat in silence, only the ticking of the wall clock, the stirring of the dogs by the door disturbing this makeshift meal. For the first time since his arrival
Ben felt awkward and unnerved by the tensions still unspoken between them. He was bone weary, propping his hand on his chin to stop it from dropping onto the table, eating the tinned corned beef hash with one fork, trying to stay awake.

They had slaved like navvies all day digging out. There were just too many trapped sheep for two of them to tackle, too many buckets of water to fetch, too much fodder and mucking out. Back and forth with freezing limbs and aching fingers, the ice biting his cheeks and nose as they trudged over the snow.

Nearly three hundred sheep were bleating for fodder, sheep trapped, frantic for release. Already they were pouring milk away and it froze into piles like ice cream. It was too cold to make butter and they hadn’t the strength to load the milk kits and try to make it to the lane end just in case a lorry might get through. They worked like two pairs of hands with nothing to think about but the next bale or the next bucket of water.

The storm was still howling the odds. There was no escape from its iron grip. It was going to be some battle to fodder the beasts in their stalls. Every journey was an excavation, and dangerous. How on earth would Mirren have survived without help when none of the farm hands would make it back for days? Until then he was her only hope and he owed her his life so he was staying put.

Now they sat speechless, lost in their own thoughts. Sooner or later Mirren’s drinking must be brought up but now was not the time. He’d noticed the house was still stripped bare of any trace of Sylvia’s presence; not even the photograph of her sitting on the bench taken as a baby, no toys or reminders. The house was sanitised and empty, not how it used to be, cluttered and welcoming. The big rooms were never used. They were too big to heat now. Mirren lived in the kitchen and in the bedroom with the little parlour off it upstairs.

It was dark by the time they staggered back after their chores. First job was to thaw their frozen coats, to hug the fire until they stopped feeling numb and only then did they look round for something easy to fill the belly: soup, porridge, scrambled egg, anything quick.

‘I’ll have a go at digging out to the lane end tomorrow,’ Ben offered.

‘Don’t waste your strength. The more you dig, the more the wind just blows it back,’ Mirren said. ‘Can’t wait to leave us?’ she smiled, but her eyes were cold.

‘Just thought it might help getting the milk out. It breaks my heart to chuck it out,’ he snapped back, hurt that she was so quick to see his offer as a desertion. ‘Any road, I’m not budging until you and I’ve cleared the air. I can’t go halfway across the world knowing I’m not welcome here.’

‘Who said that?’ she replied.

‘Why do you think I kept away for all these months…after what you said?’

‘That was ages ago! We were all in shock and said stuff better left unspoken.’

‘I hear you sorted yourself out.’ There, it was out on the table now.

‘No thanks to you this time, but you did me a favour, made me work it out for myself. It was like a madness. Drying out is never easy but I was in a safe place, in the madhouse where it all began,’ she said. Her voice was clipped and her words carefully measured.

‘Was it awful?’ he asked.

‘What do you think? Finding out you’re not little Miss Perfect after all, finding things about yourself, but I had to do it for their sake. I dosed myself up to stop the pain and it was poison, just like you said, but you can’t be told so you just have to find out for yourself the hard way. I have to live with the consequences and I do every day. I guess men and women do things differently.’ She stopped and eyed him again. ‘Is that why you’re off to Aussie land, to put all this behind you?’

‘Don’t be daft. No…it’s just there’re opportunities there for land, to be my own boss.’

‘Uncle Tom always looked to you to fly the Yewell flag here and you beetled off and left us to it.’ There was a ring of accusation in her words.

‘I couldn’t stay after…Florrie wanted me to get away. It wasn’t just me. You were so angry. We could never have worked together, and after Jack, well, it was not right to stay.’

‘His heart was never here after the war. He drowned his sorrows. This was never what he wanted. Sylvia bound us together and when she…something snapped between us. I hated his drinking…but got hooked on it myself. It got worse and it reminded me of my dad all of a sudden, the very person I’d hated for letting me down. You know, on that night I left you, I found my way back to the line where he died when I was small and left me an orphan. I loved my dad but hated him drunk. Jack began to remind me of him, but it was me as lay on that track and wanted to end it all.’ She eyed him. ‘Do I shock you? Well, I shocked myself but someone stopped me and I got up and chose life. I’m not my dad, I’m me, but if I drink again I could end up back down there and I don’t want to feel like that ever again.’

It was the longest speech he’d ever heard from her. She looked up at him, rising quickly. ‘The war has a lot to answer for but it’s over now and you’ve a new life to lead. I wish you well, Ben,’ she whispered, patting him on the shoulder as she darted towards the door. ‘I’ll bid you good night. There’s a hot brick in the oven. Wrap it in the towel. We
can’t spare water now for bottles. If you need a shave…’ She paused, seeing his stubble.

‘I think I’ll grow a beard. It’ll keep my face warm and the ice off my lips.’

‘Pity,’ she quipped. ‘It’ll grow red and won’t match your hair. You’ll look like a Viking on the pillage.’

‘Who cares in this weather?’ he laughed. ‘You look like a walking eiderdown.’

‘Precisely; anything to keep warm,’ she replied. For a second there was a flash of the old banter between them. He’d heard more about her history today than in the whole of the time they had worked together. Perhaps because he was leaving she felt she could share stuff with him, trusting he’d tell no one. Perhaps she was relieved that he was off to pastures new, perhaps not; it was hard to tell with Mirren.

Yet Sylvia’s name had been spoken just the once and before he left he wanted to beg a snap of his godchild from her. Surely that was not too much to ask.

Mirren lay in the dark, too stirred up to sleep. Grief never ends, she sighed and just the mention of that precious name brought back every second of that terrible day, and just that sniff of whisky in the snow brought so much back into her mind again. How easy it would be to slip, but the need was more bearable now. There was a sadness to
the edge of it that softened each haunting memory.

Death is for ever, and for months she couldn’t let go of the hope that it was all a nightmare and she would wake up to see her baby’s dark head on her pillow. It was never there and she’d gone on living, but it was a different life, with the terrible knowledge that awful things could happen again. She needed someone to hold her together in case she fell apart again.

Jack had been too shattered to do that and she hadn’t been able to let anyone else near enough. Ben was strong but she had pushed him away and now he was going to the far ends of the earth to get away from her. All that anger and blame and fear had driven away friends and family until she was set up alone with strangers, her heart iced over with hurt and fear. Ben would find love and comfort, but she couldn’t risk ever letting anyone close. For the first time for months she wept quietly, sitting up in the chill, fiddling for the candle, and that was when she felt something strange again. She was not alone. The house creepers were back.

For a second she tensed but it wasn’t a physical presence, more a comforting presence all around her of women: farmers’ wives who had paced these floors, treading the same Gethsemane road, a company of weeping women, Rachels weeping for their own lost children in the wee small hours of the night, mothers who couldn’t be comforted. It
was this sharing of loss that bound her to Cragside for ever. A bit of Sylvia was here within these walls. How could she leave? She buried her head in her pillow.

Grief has its own milestones, its own sad progress, perhaps: Sylvia’s birthday, Christmas, the anniversary and the ones to come. Each of these needed marking, and she had hidden all her pain away in suitcases or it had been done for her, and she had never bothered to sort out her daughter’s clothes or her toys. What the eye didn’t see…Now there was time. They were confined indoors, fast in, and Ben was the one person in the world who might help her face her fear. It would be the one last task they would share before he left. It was up to her to open the door, to clear the air once and for all.

At first she was cross because his coming messed up her solitary routine. It was duty that had dragged her out in the snow and duty that revived him, and yet the thought of him going away for good…He looked different, older and more careworn. He had suffered too in his exile. Tonight his presence was companionable and welcome. He smelled of earth, woodsmoke; honest sweat glistened on his brow in the firelight.

She noticed his broad hands stretched out for warmth; farmer’s hands, chapped, gnarled with wind and rain, rough and even bigger than her own
spades. His palms were callused, blistered from all their shovelling, and just for one second she wondered what those hands would feel like dusting over her skin.

A frisson of shock sparked through her body. She had undressed him and sponged him down like a brother
in extremis
, but now she was curious and not a little shocked by the realisation that Ben might be her cousin and a friend, but in the firelight he was first and foremost a man.

‘Remember how Grandpa Joe used to say that a good bit of wood gave two heats?’ Ben shouted as he split the logs with an axe.

‘Could we ever forget? The first was in the chopping and the second when it was on the fire,’ Mirren said as she was loading the logs onto the foddering sled, layered up in coat, scarf and sacking hood.

Splitting the wood, crashing blade onto bark, was strangely soothing, releasing all his tension and stiffness. The pile was drying off by the fire. The last of the fallen trees stored under tarpaulin was damp, but dry enough at the core to eke out the peat.

Day was following night, and still it snowed. Their daily routine was digging a tunnel out to the cattle in the byre, which bellowed in protest at having only half-portions. Ben looked out across
an arctic landscape, snow on ice whipped into monumental sculptures. He thought of their flock still not rescued, heavy with lambs. No amount of wool would save them from this devouring monster. He turned back to his chore with a heavy heart.

There was relief in Mirren’s eyes when he tackled something extra, but he felt uneasy. Something was shifting between them as if being stuck together was forcing some change. There was a tension that he couldn’t explain, a restless nervous energy that was making them both busy themselves, always on the go, jumping up to see to a chore or to the stove, the dogs. When Mirren did sit down her right leg was bobbing up and down like a piston and she only did that when she’d something on her mind. He knew her so well, or he thought he did, but she was softer round the edges, her voice quieter and there was a look in her eye he’d never seen before when they talked about the old days at Cragside.

‘This house’s a bit too big for one to manage,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t.

‘Tom and Florrie are talking of giving up Scar Head and moving back here, I think to keep an eye on me,’ she smiled. ‘They say it could do with knocking back.’

‘You can’t do that! It’s Cragside, it wouldn’t be the same.’

‘I suppose it makes sense but I don’t know what
the old ghosts will think about it if we do. Josiah Yewell spent his life turning his sow’s ear of a farm into a silk purse and nearly beggared himself to keep his wives in china and embroidery silk, so Granny Adey told me once, but I don’t know if it’s true.’

‘I heard he stole a picture and was so in fear of hell that he sent it back to the artist but Dad said Grandpa was always full of fanciful tales. I wonder what tales will be told about us?’

‘You’ll find gold in the outback, raise ten kids and make a fortune,’ she laughed.

‘And you? Why aren’t you at World’s End and what’s all this about it being a refugee camp, a holiday house for down-and-outs, as Florrie says, a proper league of nations up there?’