‘I’ve missed you,’ he blurts, and I bite the inside of my cheek, feeling myself shrink a little. I can’t tell him I’ve missed him too, not yet. Not until I know his secrets.
‘You have a lot of explaining to do,’ I tell him, coolly. ‘And I won’t settle for any of your nonsense about not being able to tell me. You can, and you will.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I lock the door and turn the sign so it reads ‘Closed’.
‘Come on,’ I tell Elliot, making my way to the little kitchen at the back of the bookshop.
Elliot hasn’t said a thing all the way Down-along, and I used the walk to prepare myself for whatever it is he’s going to tell me. I can’t get the anger in Minty’s voice out of my head. What is it that she knows about Elliot? The incendiary thing he couldn’t tell me before now?
‘Sit,’ I say, and like an obedient puppy, Elliot pulls out a chair. I make us both sweet tea. ‘Ready?’ I present Elliot with his mug and sit down at the little table.
He nods, sips his tea, then clears his throat. He’s struggling with this. ‘It’s hard to know where to start,’ he says.
‘Start at the beginning,’ I urge, and so he does, and as he speaks I watch his eyes darken as he sinks back into the memories of recent months and I finally come to understand the weight of the secret he kept from me, and I can’t help but cry.
‘Before I start, you need to know it was an accident, OK? I didn’t mean any harm,’ he begins, ominously, and I take a deep breath and try not to show that I’m shaking. Elliot steels himself with a deep breath and slow exhale too.
‘So… it was last Christmas. My parents always host the entire family – they come from all over the surrounding counties and some come up from London. It’s always a big affair and it’s best not to upset Mum by staying away, so I left Cambridge and headed across the counties to get home. My,uh… girlfriend was with me.’
I try not to start at the words but Elliot must see my eyes widen because he quickly blurts, ‘my ex-girlfriend! We,uh, we shared a flat together in Cambridge. She’s a biologist. I was lecturing on a veterinary degree programme at one of the colleges and working at a very smart practice nearby. It was a life, you know? A steady life. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it looked OK from the outside, and it made my parents proud, so…’ He shrugs resignedly. ‘Anyway, as much as I enjoy seeing my family on Christmas day, it’s a lot, you know?’
I don’t know, but I nod. Our Christmases were always so small and cosy at Marygreen, just Mum, Dad, Gran and me, with Daniel and his parents just next door, and there was always so much lovely baking. Mum’s mince pies, Dad’s Christmas pudding and the biggest Christmas cake I ever saw – the centre of our bakery’s window display all December long and our family festive treat.
Elliot’s Christmases sound like a far bigger social occasion than anything I’ve ever known. We’re from different worlds, just like Mack and I were. Unaware that I’m sinking deeper into despair at how radically dissimilar our backgrounds are and how, as a consequence, we must be utterly unsuited to each other, Elliot talks on.
‘Antonia – that’s my ex’s name – she had to leave to go to her parents’ cocktail thing, like she does every Christmas day after lunch, and so I’d always escape in the afternoon and walk across the fields to the Broom and Antler. There’s always farmers and vets in there who I’ve known all my life, and sure enough, there were old friends at the bar that night too, and there was live music, and the fires were lit… It was so good.’ He smiles warmly at the memory. ‘You’d like it there,’ he adds suddenly, glancing at me, then back to his hands clasping his mug.
I’m still reeling from the words ‘like she did every year’, and the revelation that Elliot’s been in a long-term relationship until recently. The glow in his amber eyes fades as I watch his mind working through the memories.
‘That was the last normal day of my life,’ he says. ‘The last time I was in control of it, anyway.’ He blows out a heavy breath.
I reach for his hand as his chest hollows and his shoulders slump but he doesn’t take my hand in his own, he only looks at it warily as though he’s afraid I might snatch it back once I’ve heard what he has to say, and he carries on.
‘I don’t remember much about the walk back to my parents’ that night. I’d had quite a few pints and then the landlady had brought out the mulled cider, and I’m sure I drank something that was flaming and blue that one of the young farmers paid for, and…’ he shrugs. ‘I don’t really remember, but it’s a long way across country back to my parents’ place where I was staying for the rest of the holiday, and I always cut through the fields to get to the pub. It’s a good hour, hour and a quarter’s walk. I know those fields and footpaths like the back of my hand; I spent so much of my childhood out wandering, spotting wildlife, looking for birds and insects…’
I wait for him to come round from the memories of his childhood that he’s getting lost in. He almost looks happy, but his expression quickly clouds again. ‘It must have been long after midnight. The moon wasn’t quite full but there was enough moonlight not to need a torch and there were so many stars… I guess I was just staggering home, like I’d done a thousand times, a bit worse for wear, but still…’
He sinks into silence, reliving the cold, dark trudge across country alone. I watch him silently, not wanting to interrupt, not now when he’s finally sharing his burden. I’m too afraid to speak, anyway. What is he about to tell me? Something that’s so bad Minty’s got wind of it all the way out here in Devon?
Suddenly, Elliot seems to flinch at his memories and his eyes flicker, dark and wild. ‘I was almost home when I heard a noise from far behind me, a couple of fields off, and I knew what it was straight away. Horses. It sounded like thirty or forty of them thumping over the frosted stubble fields, and the night was so quiet. The birds scattered from all the bushes and everything that could run and hide did, except for me.
‘The dogs reached me first. I suppose I threw them off the scent they were tracking, and suddenly I was surrounded by them. They were circling and sniffing, totally confused to find me interrupting their trail, but then they picked it up again and in an instant they were off, heads up and alert, rushing into a corner of the field.’
‘A fox hunt?’ I spit out, and Elliot talks on.
‘I could hear the horses approaching fast and I realised they were likely to come leaping over the hedges and on top of me, so I ran, trying to get clear of the field, and then… It happened so fast – it sobered me right up, I can tell you.
‘I ended up in the same corner of the field as the dogs, under a big oak. It was pitch black in there but I knew if I leaned myself against the oak’s trunk I couldn’t be crushed by the horses, and that’s when I saw it. The vixen, or just a glimpse of her brush, rather. She was limping, her tongue out, exhausted. The hounds chased her into a covert and they were howling mad, digging away with their paws, and one by one the horses flooded into the field too and they were upon me in an instant. I fell backwards into a ditch beside the oak and I just lay there, dazed and… just watching it all happen.
‘One of the men climbed down from his horse. He wasn’t in hunting scarlet. This guy was all in camo, but he was with the hunt all right, a terrier man. He had a shovel in his hands. I saw the lights from vehicles that seemed to have arrived from nowhere – five or six of them out on the road in the distance – and there were people talking on phones, and guys recording everything on camera, and great hunting lamps being brought over right to where I was lying. I’m not surprised nobody spotted me at all. Someone called the dogs off the covert, but there were five or six of them that wouldn’t stop scraping at the bank, trying to get to the vixen. The place was in chaos. Then I heard the shouts from across the field – like a fight breaking out and someone swearing and there was shouting into a radio, something about “bloody sabs”.’ Elliot looks at me to see if I’m following. ‘Saboteurs.’
‘It sounds dangerous,’ I say, almost in a whisper. My voice has left me.
‘It felt it too. The atmosphere was so charged, and the voices so aggressive. I didn’t know what to do, but when I saw that man coming closer with his shovel ready to dig out the fox I just stood up, like, automatically, and before I knew it, I was shouting at him to get back, to call off the dogs, to leave the fox alone.
‘The huntsmen all got back on their horses – I don’t know, I guess they thought I was a saboteur too, and these other blokes came at me, a bunch of heavies, the kind that are used to intimidate saboteurs, and they’re filming me and swearing and telling me to get out the field, and one of them was holding what I’m pretty sure was a metal bar. So, I backed away, with my hands up, telling them I was just a bloke walking home from the pub, but I was a vet too and I knew hunting was banned and what they were doing wasn’t legal.
