‘Better than nothing, I suppose,’ Carrie said, ‘but not exactly nutritious.’
‘I suppose I should let her know that I’m okay,’ Jules said.
‘I phoned her from the service station and said that I was bringing you back here,’ Carrie replied. ‘She knows that you’re safe.’
Safe… the very word made Jules want to burst into tears.
‘But she’d love to speak to you. They both would. Your sister, too.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jules muttered.
‘You’ll have to use the landline though,’ Carrie said, as if Jules hadn’t spoken. ‘Phone signal here is awful and, as you know very well, there’s no internet.’
Jules pressed her lips together. Carrie had been so cross when she’d first arrived at the cottage to find that she was without the internet, but Jules had thought it would be good for her. She threw her head back and let the sun warm her face. She just felt cold all the time.
‘I don’t think I can face speaking to either of them just yet.’
Carrie stood up and placed a hand lightly on Jules’s shoulder.
‘They’ll be there for you, Jules, whenever you’re ready. And your mum knows not to fuss.’
Jules wanted to raise an eyebrow, but the effort was too much.
‘I know she can be a bit suffocating, but she does love you. Remember that. I’m going to get some lemon for your tea and you’re right, that is a pretty big piece of cake. I’ll cut it in half and we’ll share it. It’s made with the best butter from the island and the sugar will do you good.’
‘Sugar’s bad for you, didn’t you know that?’ Jules murmured.
‘Sometimes,’ Carrie replied, ‘you need sugar. And this is one of those times. Besides, the chocolate and eggs contain iron andthe orange has Vitamin C, so we can also pretend that it’s one of your five a day!’
‘Like the toast with a scraping of jam,’ she said, with the ghost of a smile.
‘Exactly!’
Jules sat back and listened as Carrie’s flip-flops slapped across the patio and back into the kitchen. Who would have thought that the tables would have turned like this? Back in Manchester, she had been the one to reassure Carrie, persuading her to eat properly when she was stressed, boosting her confidence when she got down. She’d always thought of herself as the dependable one, the person who everyone could come to when they were depressed or in trouble and now look at her, in total pieces and no good to anyone at all.
‘Will you be all right?’ Carrie asked a little later. ‘I’ll only be half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most. You can come with me if you like?’
Jules shook her head. Now was not the time to meet Guy for the first time. In fact, now was not the time to meet anyone.
‘No, you go. I’ll be fine.’
But watching Carrie’s car pull out of the drive, she’d felt a rising panic. Once again, she was alone, totally alone with her own thoughts. She walked back through the house and out into the garden, the sun already dropping slightly and changing hue. Jules slipped out of her green suede sandals and walked barefoot across the soft, springy grass towards the boundary. Off to the right was an old barn and seated on the ground, hidden from the rest of the farmyard, was a girl, her back leaning against the shaling brick wall, her hand moving quickly across the pages of a notebook resting on her lap. She looked up as if suddenly aware she was being watched and hesitated before sending asmall wave. Jules raised her hand to wave back, but just at that moment, a woman in white linen trousers and a pale lemon shirt strode into the yard. Instinctively Jules’s hand moved to her hair, as if her intention all along had been to brush it back from her face.
‘Tasha! Where are you?’
The woman’s voice was serrated with irritation. The girl shrank back, almost turning herself into a small ball, her forehead pressed tightly against her bent knees. Jules twisted away towards the house.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman called in a sharp, don’t-ignore-me kind of voice, ‘you there.’
Even in her stupor Jules felt a stab of objection to the ‘you there’, but deeply ingrained politeness got the better of her. She swivelled somewhat stiffly towards the angular woman who was now striding towards her. Thank goodness there was a prickly hawthorn hedge, a well-worn farm track and then a rusty five-bar metal gate between them. Maybe she was a bit more present than she thought after all.
‘You haven’t seen my daughter, have you? She came out to collect the eggs, but she’s been a long time. Scruffy-looking fourteen-year-old with tousled hair which needs a good brush. She’s probably red-eyed from crying. She’s always crying.’
Jules avoided eye contact with the woman who even from this distance was obviously immaculately made up. Do not look towards the barn, she instructed herself.
‘Did you hear me?’
The woman was craning over the gate now, miraculously managing to avoid touching it with her pristine clothing.
