‘You’re here! Already?’ Pippa looked stricken as she walked across the snowy yard, delightfully scruffy in an old raincoat, thick woolly jumpy, jeans, wellies, her auburn curls tied up in a loose ponytail. ‘Just look at me, I haven’t even changed yet.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Dan, his heart singing. Pippa could have been wearing a brown paper bag and she’d still have been gorgeous. He resisted the urge to pick her up and swing her in his arms, just in case her parents were looking out of the farmhouse window. He’d only met them again once, since he and Pippa had got together at the Farmer’s Ball, though of course he remembered them from when he and Pippa had been at school together, a lifetime ago. Pippa’s parents had been nothing but friendly and welcoming, but he didn’t want to get in their bad books this early on in his relationship with their daughter.
‘You did say, Christmas Eve, your place, 7pm, didn’t you?’ said Dan, puzzled. ‘We are still going to the Hopesay Arms, aren’t we?’ They’d made the arrangement earlier in the week, but what with it being Christmas week, he’d been flat out helping his own parents on their farm, and presumably Pippa had been doing the same.
‘Oh!’ said Pippa, her face dropping. ‘I thought we said eight. Mum and Dad like going to the early Christmas service at church, so they can be up early for the cows on Christmas Day. I offered to take charge of milking tonight for them. One of the farm hands was supposed to be coming up to help me, but he’s just rung to say he’s down and out with flu. I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to be ready for hours.’
‘I can help,’ said Dan, who didn’t care where he spent time with Pippa, so long as they were together. Ever since their first date, he’d been pinching himself that she was interested in him. Pippa North, the girl every guy in his year at school had fancied. And now she was his. Permanently, he hoped.
‘Would you really?’ Pippa looked like she might burst into tears.
‘Of course,’ said Dan with a grin. ‘Where do you want me?’ Luckily, he hadn’t dressed up too much for their date, and he didn’t mind if he got his clothes dirty. He’d do anything for Pippa, he realised, anything at all. Every time he met her, she astonished him more. How many other girls her age in Hope Christmas would be milking the cows instead of heading for the pub on Christmas Eve?
‘You’re amazing,’ said Pippa, throwing her arms around him in an embrace which he wanted to last for ever. ‘Let me find you some overalls to wear.’
Which is how Dan found himself half an hour later, sitting in the milking shed, listening to Christmas carols on Pippa’s old cassette deck over the hum of the machines and the cows bellowing, laughing at the way the evening had turned out.
‘And there was me planning to show you a wild night in Hope Christmas,’ he said, grinning. ‘At this rate we’re going to be too knackered to do anything.’
‘That would be difficult,’ said Pippa, smiling as she expertly removed a cow from the stalls and cleaned it up before patting it on its rump and sending it out to the yard. ‘Hope Christmas is hardly a hub of night life. I am sorry I’ve kept you from the pub though.’
He loved that about her, the way she was always so positive and kind.
‘Don’t be,’ said Dan. ‘I don’t care where I am so long as I’m with you.’
She looked at him shyly, and blushed.
‘Me too,’ she said, and he was hit by a sudden revelation.
‘I love you, Pippa,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever said that to any girl, ever.
‘Oh Dan,’ she said, her eyes shining, ‘I love you too.’
He wanted to kiss her there and then, but there was a cow between them, and work to be done. But as Dan watched her, focussed completely on the task in hand, totally at one with the animals she was dealing with, he was hit by a second revelation. Come what may, Pippa North was the girl he was going to marry.
Marianne walked down the lane, feeling gloomy. It was a crisp clear January morning, but the Christmas snows had melted, leaving patches of forlorn looking but lethal ice. The twins had just gone back to nursery after Christmas. After a hassle to get them out of the door, they had readily raced down the lane, reminding her of the way Steven, and Pippa’s boys had run the same way when she’d first met them.
Now Steven, Nathan and George were turning into strapping young teenagers, their childhoods almost a distant memory. She should hold onto these moments with the twins. They would be over in the blink of an eye. Time seemed to be moving faster than she’d like. It seemed like only yesterday that she’d first moved to Hope Christmas, newly in love with stunningly good-looking Luke Nicholas, who’d promptly broken her heart. She’d nearly fled back to London then, but the lure of the beautiful countryside had been too strong. And then of course, there’d been Gabriel …
Even now, Marianne still found it hard to believe she could have been lucky enough to find Gabriel. He too had been left heartbroken when his wife Eve, who suffered badly from depression, left him, and slowly they had built something new together. And now, seven years on, Marianne was married, with a stepson and two lovely children of her own. Life couldn’t be better. And yet, and yet …
Marianne tried to shake off her feelings of melancholy, but she felt unsettled and as if she’d lost her sense of purpose. Another year and a bit, and the twins were going to be at school. Although Gabriel wasn’t putting her under pressure, Marianne felt she should be thinking about what she was going to do next. There was plenty to do on the farm, and Gabriel could always use extra help. But while Marianne loved being a farmer’s wife, she wasn’t born to it like Pippa. And although she also loved looking after the twins, she missed work.
‘I don’t know,’ she said out loud to a passing crow, ‘should I stick at being a farmer’s wife, or is it time I went back to teaching?’ She looked across at the fields bordering her home. It was lovely being out here, and she enjoyed working outside with Gabe, particularly in lambing season, but she missed being in front of a class. Not that she’d want to go back to Hope Christmas Primary, where the current head teacher had made her feel worse than useless. But if not there, where? And how? Marianne felt unfocussed, muzzy. Maybe when the twins were older, and maybe to another school …
Besides, work wasn’t the total reason for her discontent. Not really. She sighed, as she walked up the garden path and let herself into the home where she had been so happy for the past seven years. Where she still was happy, she corrected herself. It was just that Gabriel seemed a bit distant at the moment.
When questioned about it, all she got was a curt, ‘I’m fine,’ but he had admitted to being shaken by Pippa and Dan’s divorce. ‘I still can’t believe they’ve split up,’ he told Marianne, ‘they seemed so right, so solid. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘Not too much I hope,’ Marianne joked, but Gabriel hadn’t responded, just taken himself off to the fields, retreating into a taciturn silence at home.
It had been like that since Christmas. Marianne tried to be supportive. This was the start of Gabriel’s busiest time of year, and he often came in late from lambing, usually too late to see the children. Which was a pity, because the only thing that seemed to cheer him up was the twins. He always came to life when they jumped on him as he walked through the door, or at the weekends when Steven was home from school. But the rest of the time, Gabriel seemed to brood. Marianne knew that brooding look of old – it was the way he’d looked when she’d first met him. Unhappy, sad, lost. Marianne had hoped never to see that look again, and she had a feeling she knew what