Precious Time (42 page)

Now, whenever he looked at his son, he saw Anastasia staring back at him. She was in Jonah’s eyes, the turn of his head, the shape of his mouth. The pain of his guilt went so deep inside him that sometimes Gabriel had to sit down and wait for it to pass. But the one thing he couldn’t do was face Jonah and confide in him. He was too ashamed. Ashamed to admit that for all this time he had harboured such a monumental and misplaced grudge. That was why he continued to rebuff Jonah. Having him around only added to his grief. Because that was what it felt like. Since that appalling night when he had broken down, it was as if he was being forced to grieve for his darling Anastasia all over again.

Plunged further into misery, he pressed on down to the copse where, in the dense shade of the trees that were in full leaf now, a blanket of bluebells shimmered, their colour brightening the darkness.

Though not the darkness by which he felt so consumed. That would never lift. That was his punishment. It was no more than he deserved. But he’d had enough of the burden, the strain of knowing that in this life he would never be released from the shame and the guilt. It was too much for him. He wanted to be with Anastasia. He needed her forgiveness for what he had done.

The weight of the gun pressed heavily on his arm. He shifted it to a more comfortable position and entered the wood, feeling at once the welcome cool shade offered by the trees. He paused, making up his mind where he wanted to be. As to the rest, he had thought it all out, had prepared himself so that he could at least get this right.

The triumphant entrance Ned had hoped to make was spoiled by Gabriel not answering the door.

‘Shall we go inside and find him?’ Ned asked, assuming that the door would be unlocked. He pressed his forehead to the door, peered in through the letterbox.

Clara tried the handle and stepped inside, Ned at her heels. ‘But we’ll only go as far as the kitchen,’ she said. ‘We ought not to intrude any further.’

She was surprised to see that her hard work had not been in vain.

While the kitchen had gathered a few extraneous piles of paperwork - mostly bills and bank statements - the place was still reasonably clean and orderly. She wondered if Gabriel had found himself a cleaner. Leaving Ned to call him, she noticed the postcards lined up along the windowsill. Touched that he had kept them, she went over to look at them, recalling exactly when and where each had been written.

Still not getting any response to his eager cries, Ned joined her at the sink. ‘Do you think he’s gone for a walk?’ he asked, his elation fizzling into disappointment.

‘I think that’s precisely what he’s done. Shall we see if we can find him?’ She had seen the battered old Land Rover in the courtyard, so it was a safe bet that he hadn’t gone far. Unless, of course, Jonah had given him a lift somewhere.

They shut the back door and set off towards the copse, which, according to Ned, was where Gabriel liked to go. ‘He makes sure the badgers are all right,’ he informed Clara.

It was a truly glorious day. The sun shone brightly in a perfect canopy of blue, and the air smelt sweet from the grass beneath their feet. In the distance, the hills were golden with flowering gorse bushes. Nearing the copse, Clara was overcome by the most beautiful sight: bluebells, hundreds of them. She had never seen so many in one spot before. It was breathtaking: a magical infusion of colour. She stood for a moment to take it in. It was so tranquil here. So perfect.

High up in one of the trees, a wood pigeon broke the calm, clattering its wings as it flew out of the copse. It came towards them, and ahead of her, Ned came to a stop. He tilted his head so far back to watch the bird, she thought he might fall over. She caught up with him, and together they passed from the sunny brightness into the dappled, shadowy gloom. The fresh meadow-sweet fragrance of crushed grass was replaced by the earthy smell of moss, rotting bark and mouldy damp leaves.

‘He usually goes this way,’ Ned said knowledgeably, pointing towards a leafy path that twisted through the thicket of trees.

They had only taken a few steps into the cool woodland when Clara stood still. She craned her neck. Ned looked up at her. ‘What?’

‘I thought I heard something.’ She smiled. ‘It was probably one of Mr Liberty’s badgers.’

But within seconds, they had stopped again, and this time she knew she wasn’t imagining it. Someone else was in the copse.

Remembering that day down by the river when they had first arrived in Deaconsbridge, she held Ned’s hand firmly. The sound grew louder and she wasn’t sure what it was she could hear. It was a groaning of such guttural rawness it was animal-like. Bravely she carried on, until at last they came to a small clearing and she saw the source of the noise.

It was Gabriel Liberty. He was on his knees, crumpled over the trunk of a fallen beech tree, and beneath his waxed jacket, he was shaking violently.

‘Stay here, Ned,’ she commanded. Confusion written all over his anxious face, he did as she said, and she moved in closer to Gabriel who seemed to have no idea that they were there. She reached down to himself, placed a hand lightly on his shoulder. He didn’t react and the racking groans and rasping breath continued. ‘Mr Liberty,’ she said, ‘it’s me, Clara - Miss Costello. Are you hurt?’

He stiffened and turned towards her, his face contorted with abject misery. Disbelieving eyes, brimming with tears, focused on her. It was then that she saw the shotgun cradled in his arms. Her instinct was to step back, to get as much distance between herself and the gun, but instead she prised it out of his shaking hands, and placed it on the other side of the tree-trunk. Then she got down on her knees on the soft cushion of leaves and took him in her arms. She held him tightly, hushed him with soothing words, as if he were Ned, until finally, he gave one last, shuddering sob, slumped against her and gradually became still.

It took all of her strength to pull him on to his feet and sit him on the damp, moss-covered tree trunk. When she had settled him and found a grubby old handkerchief in one of his jacket pockets, she beckoned Ned over.

‘Mr Liberty isn’t very well, Ned,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Come and sit down and help me make him feel better.’

With one of them sitting on either side of him, the poor man’s first coherent words, were ‘I - I can’t bear you to see me like this.’

She took the handkerchief from him and dabbed at his eyes. ‘And I can’t bear to think of you suffering like this all alone. What’s been going on?’

He dropped his chin to his chest. ‘It’s - it’s Jonah …’

‘Jonah? What’s happened to him?’ Alarmed, Clara thought of the last time she had seen Jonah. How his expression had transformed when he had dropped his guard. She thought too of all she now knew about him from reading Val’s diaries. ‘Has … has there been an accident?’

Gabriel looked at her, confused. ‘No,’ he murmured, ‘it’s me. It’s what I’ve done to him. Terrible things. I’m - I’m so dreadfully ashamed. And there’s no going back. I know that.’ His voice cracked and she felt a tremor run through him. She took his hands in hers and squeezed them firmly.

‘There might not be a pedal for going backwards,’ she said, ‘but there’s always one for going forwards. Do you think with my help you could make it up to the house?’

He raised his red-rimmed eyes to hers. ‘Miss Costello, I honestly believe that with your help, I could do almost anything.’

She kissed his stubbly cheek, then helped him to his feet. ‘Well, before we take on the world, let’s start with the short walk home, shall we?’

In Clara’s opinion, the best place for Gabriel was bed, but he refused point-blank to do as she said. Just as he had vehemently rejected her suggestion that she ought to ring Jonah or Dr Singh. So she removed his cumbersome jacket, sat him in the chair next to the Aga, sent Ned upstairs to fetch a blanket - the poor man was in shock and shivering despite the warmth of the day.

While Ned was out of the room, Clara knelt in front of him. She rubbed his hands. ‘We can’t talk now,’ she said, ‘not really talk, but later tonight, when Ned’s asleep, I want you to tell me what’s been going on here. But for now, all I can do is dose you with hot, sweet tea and some chocolate cake we brought for you from Haworth.’

He turned his bloodshot eyes on her. ‘Dear girl, why are you so good to me? I don’t deserve such kindness.’

‘Ulterior motive, I’m still hoping to seduce you and get that ring on my finger.’

He laid a hand over hers. ‘What made you come back so soon?

Did you forget something?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ she hedged, ‘but we’ll talk about that later too.’

Puffing from his exertion, Ned burst into the kitchen. ‘Will this do?’

Clara took the heavy, feather-leaking eiderdown from him with a smile. ‘Perfect, Ned. Here, help me to wrap up Mr Liberty. We want him as snug as a bug in a rug.’

They sat with their mugs of tea and plates of cake. Clara let Ned do all the talking: sitting on Gabriel’s lap, with cake crumbs falling from his fingers as he waved his arms in the air, he told him all about their travels: of the castles they had seen, the mountains, the lakes, and the people they had met. ‘We even stayed on a farm,’ he said proudly, ‘where I learned to milk a goat. And I fed the chickens. And I rode a pony too. I had to wear a hat that kept slipping over my eyes.’ Drawing breath, he paused before saying, ‘But nowhere was as nice as this. We didn’t meet anyone as nice as you, Mr Liberty.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

Clara topped up Gabriel’s mug with more tea, relieved to hear a glimmer of his old spirit returning.

When the time came for Ned to go to bed, Gabriel said he wanted them to be proper guests and stay the night inside Mermaid House.

Apart from his bedroom, Val’s old room was the only one Clara had cleaned and sorted, and though she had irrational reservations about using it, she made up the double bed to share with Ned.

When she bent to kiss Ned goodnight, he hooked his hands round her neck and pulled her closer. ‘I’m glad we came back,’ he said.

‘I’m glad too.’

Then, more seriously, he said, ‘Is Mr Liberty better now?’

She kissed him and unhooked his hands. ‘He’ll be fine. He just needs a little tender loving care. He’s like a flower that someone has forgotten to water. We need to water him and make him nice and strong again.’

He considered this. ‘How long will that take?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to see.’

‘Two days? Three days?’

She kissed him again, amused that he was subtly negotiating with her. ‘Like I say, we’ll have to wait and see.’ He seemed happy enough with her reply and didn’t push her any further. Instead, he yawned; he suddenly looked sleepy. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s late and you need to get some rest or you’ll be the one in need of watering. Enjoy your night’s sleep in a proper bed. And no kicking me when I join you later.’

He yawned again, turned on to his side, and reached under the pillow for Mermy. ‘I promise,’ he said drowsily.

Turning out the light, Clara felt the day catching up with her.

More tired than she had felt in a long while, she took the stairs slowly, knowing it would be several hours before she would lay her aching head on a pillow. It was now time to get to the bottom of Gabriel’s problems. Having read Val’s diaries, she had a fair idea that raging guilt would be mostly to blame. Chances were it had finally caught up with him. The question was, why?

She thought of that moment when, just before entering the copse, she had paused to admire the bluebells. She remembered thinking then that she was in the right place at the right time. She wasn’t one of those cranky types who believed in synchronistic events shaping collective destinies - making sense of coincidence with the benefit of hindsight was child’s play - but there was no avoiding the extraordinary timing of her arrival here today.

Call it luck, call it predetermination, call it what you will, but it was a good thing that someone had been there for Gabriel Liberty when he most needed a friend. Thank goodness for Val’s diaries!

Thinking of the diaries, Clara decided that it would be better to hang on to them until Gabriel was feeling a lot stronger. In his present state they might upset him too much.

He was waiting for her in the kitchen. He had moved from his chair by the Aga and was clumsily stacking their supper things in the dishwasher. Despite his protests, she shooed him back to the chair.

‘Leave that to me.’

‘I’m not an invalid,’ he argued, a little more of his old spirit shining through the clouds of his melancholy. But he relented anyway.

She tidied up, then poured two glasses of whisky, wondering who needed it more. She felt unaccountably lethargic and headachey, and wondered if she had a cold coming. When they were settled at either side of the Aga, she said, ‘So what drove you to think about killing yourself?’

Gabriel flinched. He had known that this straight-talking woman would not couch her questions in polite euphemisms, had known, too, that her candid approach was what he needed and that it would bring him equal measures of pain and relief. But even so, hearing her put into such plain words what he had tried to do, filled him with self-loathing. How desperate he had been. And how typically self centred. Once again, he had put himself first, prepared to leave his family to clear up the mess he had made of his life … and his death.

He was nothing but a coward.

He took a gulp of his drink. ‘Failure,’ he said, at last. ‘I’ve been a lousy father and it’s only just dawned on me the harm I’ve done.’

She looked at him over the rim of her glass. ‘Who do you think you’ve failed the most?’

‘The lot of them. But especially Jonah. I’ve … I’ve also failed Anastasia.’

‘Not Val?’

He kept his eyes lowered. ‘Her too. I never gave her the credit she deserved. She was a good wife and, against all the odds, a good mother.’

A silence settled on the room. Not rushing to fill the pause, Gabriel took a long sip of his drink.

‘Tell me about Anastasia,’ Clara said softly. ‘She was the true love of your life, wasn’t she?’