turned away from the figure making its way back towards her, a small, clear silhouette against the horizon of sea and sky. She clucked at the hens and scattered the corn in a wide arc as she identified this intangible feeling of unrest. What happened when Gabrielle woke up? No one could sleep for an entire lifetime.
Nell turned Josh’s postcard over and looked at the soldier on horseback. How quickly the years had slid away. Hard to think of that little curly-haired boy in uniform. Hard to watch the green field he loved so much with its annual rash of mushrooms, disappearing into piles of earth, forming trenches for foundations that would house another generation on land she knew like the back of her hand.
Who would have thought Josh would become a soldier, not a farmer? Who could have guessed he could permanently leave the farm he loved, the friends he had grown up with? She slipped the postcard into her pocket. She loved Josh with a fierce love and pride and was suddenly shocked at her own duplicity.
She understood exactly why Josh had turned his back on the farm. How could she, of all people, not feel honest and grateful that he had needed more than a lifetime embedded in the harsh Cornish landscape? That he had chosen not to be smothered by the seasons, the weather, disease, and animal husbandry.
She would have been bitterly disappointed if he had grown up incurious about anything outside the parochial world in which he had spent his childhood. There would be no more grandchildren, she had had only one chance to instil in him a need for something outside the farm and county, a craving to learn; for him to soak up like a sponge all that a country childhood had made him, by distance, ignorant of.
She had taught him about paintings, about art, about conserving the past, the environment; all that she herself felt passionate about. Gabby had given him a ferocious love of books and Charlie an abiding pride in the land they owned. This was why Charlie had difficulty in understanding how Josh could turn his back on the physical thrill of working land that had belonged to four generations of his family.
Yet, Josh, the scholarship boy, had come away from university with a first and gone straight to Sandhurst. Nell found it mystifying. It was also humbling. What right had she to try to mould Josh, from a baby, to compromise? Here she was, believing she had widened his horizons when he would have certainly done so without her help. Josh had always seemed to know what he wanted from life. Possibly, it was away from the two women who loved him, in a way, Nell had begun to realize since he had left, that might well have been suffocating.
She and Gabby had each other, their restoration work, and Charlie. Josh must forge his own life. Nell smiled. The lorries had gone, the cows were coming up the lane for milking. Soon Gabby would be home to tell of her day.
She took Josh’s postcard out of her pocket and placed it in the centre of the mantelpiece. Thank God for Gabby.
Extraordinary. Mark did not know who he was expecting. A middle-aged spinster? An earnest academic? A hugger of trees in ethnic sweater and bright sandals? Whoever it was, it certainly was not this small, dark girl hovering on the other side of the museum gate.
She stood peering at them in an enormous pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. With her hand on the gate she seemed poised for flight and ready to bolt. The kindly priest next to him turned and saw her, called out her name, and it was only then that she lifted the latch and walked towards them.
The little pompous guy was telling Peter that he considered Gabrielle Ellis to be too inexperienced. He was cut off by the priest who moved away to greet the girl. Introductions were made and Mark saw, closer, that Gabrielle Ellis was not a girl, but a small, very pretty woman.
They had unpacked the figurehead on the ground floor in a corner near the window at the back of the museum where there was the most light for Gabrielle to look at her. He watched Gabrielle’s face as she caught sight of the Lady Isabella. A little involuntary sigh escaped her. She moved forward to peer at the wooden face he had grown to love, tentatively, as if the impassive face of Lady Isabella was alive and carried secrets from the ocean she would love to know.
Gabrielle Ellis had dark hair to her shoulders and she tended to flip it forward to hide her face. As she listened to everyone her face was concentrated and rapt. She kept glancing back at the figurehead, bending to look at her face and neck, her fingers hovering and framing Isabella’s face as if she longed to touch or was offering comfort to a patient.
As she leant forward to examine the many small craquelures and fissures, her hair fell forward to reveal, against her suntanned shoulders, a tiny triangle of startling white neck, as soft and tender as a baby’s. Mark had this sudden overpowering urge to place his lips upon that tiny place of whiteness.
He brought himself back abruptly to the conversation. The councillor seemed determined that Gabrielle Ellis was not going to get the job of restoring the figurehead. This project, he thought, has been my overriding passion for too long. If a local restorer can do the job, I’m damned if I’m going to let this sententious little man, with some agenda, ship her back to London.
Mark said his piece and a sticky silence followed. He wondered if Gabrielle was feeling undermined by the attitude of the councillor, but he watched her face and it did not appear so. John Bradbury was beginning to get mad, though, he could see a small tic starting up in his cheek, and Mark grinned to himself.
As they walked over to the pub he made Gabrielle laugh, but she seemed shy and talked little over lunch. She scribbled a quick estimate on a pad and it was obvious that both John and Peter Fletcher wanted to give her the job. Cock Robin disappeared in high dudgeon and he wondered who had the deciding vote; the council, the Heritage people or the museum.
He studied Gabrielle while he ate his sandwich. Without the sunglasses, and out of the dim church, her face was small and elfinlike. She had extraordinary blue eyes with flecks of grey and brown in them. Her hands were small, like a child’s, with dimples in the wrists. Dear little hands.
It was her stillness that struck him most. Her movements were slow and tranquil, but somehow detached, as if a piece of her was somewhere else. He knew he was making her self-conscious by looking at her for too long, too intensely, but he found it almost impossible to turn his gaze anywhere else. As soon as he tried to concentrate on the Tristan guy, who was earnestly trying to elicit information for his local rag, his eyes would return to her face as if pulled by a magnet.
They all walked back to the car park to go their separate ways. Peter was driving him back to his Truro hotel. The afternoon was still hot but the colours were changing as the sun got lower in the sky. The sea beyond the languid fields was aquamarine. Loneliness seized him; he did not want to return to his impersonal hotel room, he wanted to watch the sunset on a cliff top with this woman.
He took her hand, held on to it, said goodbye, smiled down at her with the pure exultation of a discovery. She asked, rather severely, for her hand back, got into her quaint little English car, still hidden by those ridiculous sunglasses, and sped off.
He felt, as he held that small hand, such a surge of desire that her hand in his had trembled. He knew, as he felt the heat emanating from her small body and down into her hand like a tangible thing, that she was as acutely aware of him as he was of her.
He turned and walked away to Peter’s car. The curator was watching him with an expression Mark found impossible to read, and he thought suddenly, I am a married man, at least twenty years older than Gabrielle Ellis. I have a wife I love and five grown-up daughters.
The car turned out into the road and they both reached out to pull the visors against the sun moving down the sky in front of them. They had to stop while a herd of cows idled along the road in front of them, flicking their tails. Huge great beasts with sweet, grass-smelling breath, shoving against each other and mooing noisily as they turned into a muddy farmyard to be milked.
‘I’d like to take you out to supper,’ Peter said.
‘That would be great.’
‘Can