by train, but somehow I already knew I’d have to take some just to keep her happy.
The bedroom Molly had prepared for me was just as I had expected it to be. A big metal-framed bed was piled high with layers of blankets and feather pillows, topped with a home-made patchwork quilt, and next to it, on a small pine cabinet, was a lamp with a frilly edged, slightly faded shade and the vase of flowers I would have bet money was going to be there. Deep-red dahlias, a couple of their spiky petals already detached and lying alongside.
Across the room, facing the window, was a small dressing table with one of those old-fashioned three-sided jointed mirrors that let you see yourself from all angles at once. The top two drawers had been cleared to make space for my things, and the lower ones, which I shouldn’t have looked in but did, were crammed full of all sorts of old stuff left behind by the previous occupant, Dan’s now-married sister, Jane. No wardrobe, which worried me a bit, having brought the kind of dress that would definitely benefit from being hung up for a few hours to de-crease itself. I later discovered that Jane had taken the wardrobe with her when she’d left, her new home having a greater need for it than her abandoned and now little-used bedroom here. Still, when I closed the door to get changed in private, I did find a plastic hook glued to the back of it. That would just have to do.
The small window looked out over fields; not that I could see them until the next morning as it was so utterly, scarily, pitch dark outside on the night we arrived. Not a streetlight or a passing set of headlights to shed even a glimmer across the all-enveloping blackness. And the quiet! I couldn’t get to sleep, and in the end, I had to open my door just enough to pick up the distant comforting sound of Dan’s familiar snoring seeping out from his room across the hall.
***
Dan’s family was nothing like mine. Different places, different values, different lives. If it wasn’t for that chance meeting with Dan at the party our paths would never have crossed. But that’s probably what happens to all of us, isn’t it? How friends, colleagues, couples come together. Sheer chance. A meeting of place and time, and circumstance. If he’d arrived a few minutes later at the door I would have been long gone, out into the rain. Earlier, and I would have been still upstairs, just another blurry face, merging into all the others in the dark of the party.
They say opposites attract, don’t they? Farm boy, city girl. Him so careful, always planning and worrying, while I just took my chances, took life as it came. Together, and happy, nevertheless. But sometimes I think we just wanted different things. Expected different things. And, even though it was Dan who broke us, I know I played my part. Maybe we were doomed to fail, or is that just the sad me, the defeated me, talking? Star-crossed lovers. Isn’t that what Shakespeare said? Not that Dan and I were anything like Romeo and Juliet, but we did love each other. Shared something passionate and caring, and special. For a long time, we did.
The girls think I’m off communing with nature somewhere. I never elaborate, never try to explain, how much I need these talks we have, how much I need to get away sometimes, just to be alone. How much I need you. I sometimes think you’re the only one who understands, the only one who never judges, who sees me exactly for what I am. I don’t think of you as my guilty secret. Never that. I don’t want anyone to think I’m mad. Or desperate. But you are my secret, just the same.
***
Twenty-five years! I watched Dan’s parents taking an inexpert but exceedingly happy turn around the dance floor, and wondered how different things might have been if my dad had lived long enough for my own parents to celebrate such a momentous anniversary. As it was, there was just Trevor, like a big balding cuckoo in the nest, trying to fill my dad’s shoes and failing miserably.
It was hard to imagine being with the same man for so long. Day in and day out, living, breathing, eating, side by side. Sharing the same bed, going on holidays together, making babies. None of my boyfriends had lasted more than a month or two before Dan, and most of them I would be perfectly happy never to set eyes on again. It made me wonder what I’d seen in them in the first place, how I could have been dragged in by some phoney chat-up line or the lure of muscly arms or twinkly eyes, but I suppose you have to work your way past the initial attraction to find out if there’s anything solid enough underneath to make a man worth keeping. With Dan, I knew I had finally found it, and this weekend, with me being included in the celebrations and so thoroughly embraced by his family, I was getting the impression that Dan felt the same way, that this really could be some kind of trial run for something more permanent. Our future together was starting to feel more secure, more certain, more wonderful, every moment we were here.
I had never been to a party quite like it before. It was in a big open-fronted barn tucked away behind the house, on their own land, with a couple of spotlights attached to electric cables draped high over the beams and managing to provide enough light to dance by, while fat white candles flickered more intimately on the tables. I did worry the flames might be a little too close to the bales of hay, or straw, or whatever it was, stacked around the edges, but that was just the townie in me talking. These were country people who lived with barns and straw every day of their lives, and I had to suppose they knew what they were doing. They certainly knew how to have a good time.
There was a long table stretching right across the back wall, heaped with so much food I couldn’t help thinking that the local pigs would have a field day with all the leftovers in the morning, but everyone who arrived seemed to squeeze on yet another plate of food they’d brought from home, until it was just about impossible to see the tablecloth any more. Some had even brought their dogs along, so nothing dropped on the floor stayed there for long.
A couple called Dolly and Frank were providing the music, perched on stools with two battered old guitars and a tambourine, switching over to an enormous ghetto-blaster that pumped out disco hits whenever they needed a break or the dancing needed livening up. It was very amateur but strangely hypnotic, and enormous fun too, with nobody too embarrassed to let themselves go a bit, all whooping like kids, kicking their legs up and swinging each other around the floor.
Dan was like a different person that night. He had stopped being the quiet, smart, suited accountant I had grown to know and love and transformed into Dan Campbell, farm boy. He wore an open-necked checked shirt I was sure I had never seen before, and moved around the room, kicking his heels and swaying his shoulders to the music and greeting every newcomer as if he’d known them all his life, which he probably had. Every now and then, when he could tell from my face that I was struggling, he would come and rescue me from a baffling conversation about milk quotas or silage and pull me back into his arms to dance.
‘Well? What do you think? Is country life what you expected?’ he said, sitting me down in front of a plate of bread and cheese and spooning a dollop of his mum’s home-made pickle out onto the side.
‘Not at all. But I’m sure it’s not like this all the time, is it?’ I gazed at his face as his warm fingers brushed against mine and the candlelight sent tiny flecks of colour bouncing and sparkling in his eyes, and just for a moment I wondered what it would be like to give in to what I was feeling, to forget the world outside, Mum and Trevor, my job at the bank, and just stay here in this magical place for ever.
‘Of course not. Dad will be up milking at the crack of dawn as usual, and Mum will be out here with a broom in one hand and probably feeding the hens with the other! It’s who they are. Creatures of habit. Hard workers. At one with the land and all that. But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and probably not mine, to be honest … Now, come over and meet Helen. She was the first girl I ever kissed! A long time ago, in the playground when we were five, but I’ve never forgotten it, even though she probably has!’
The floorboards creaked later, on the landing between Dan’s room and mine, as he crept across and closed the door behind him, like a naughty schoolboy sneaking about after lights out, but suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of us sleeping separately, and if anybody heard us they were probably too tipsy to care. I couldn’t bear the thought of him kissing anyone but me either, even if it had been years ago when this Helen friend of his was just a little girl with pigtails. I’d met her tonight and she wasn’t so little nowadays, particularly