Friday
John shouldn’t be driving
John shouldn’t be driving, they discussed it with the doctor yesterday, but Maggie sees the look in his eyes and puts the key into his outstretched hand. His fingers snap closed around it.
He gets into the Land Rover without loading the bags of clean linen and towels into the back, but Maggie doesn’t say anything; she hefts them in herself. The dog jumps in and lies down, bracing her back against the bags, tongue out, gaze taut. Maggie shuts the door.
The wind is cold this morning and cuts right through her. It’s only the start of September yet autumn has arrived abruptly. There’s the feeling of a storm coming. Clouds race to gather on the horizon, their shadows grazing the solid stone-and-slate farmhouse below where it’s nestled in a hollow in the side of the valley.
John starts the Land Rover and over its growl, Maggie thinks she hears the whine of another engine. She frowns. Their guests aren’t due to arrive until later this afternoon. The lane that winds up here doesn’t lead anywhere else. If you’re on it, you’re either on your way to the Elliott farm or you’re lost.
Drystone walls divide and organize the land around the farmhouse. Acres of unenclosed rough grazing surround it, steep, harsh terrain, only semi-useful. Beyond lies an unmanageable wilderness of exposed moor concealing boggy wetlands and cleft by isolated valleys and sheer-edged ravines, slippery with scree. Rocky outcrops disrupt the summits of distant peaks.
The boundaries of the farm are ill-defined. Elliott land encompasses some of this wilderness and has done for centuries. John and Maggie shepherd three thousand acres and eight hundred head of sheep. There’s good grass and bad; there are good years and bad. The sky is always huge and the stars at night brighter than anywhereelse they’ve ever been. Guests who stay at the barn always remark on this.
Maggie waits for a moment, to see if she hears more, but picks up nothing over the noise of the Land Rover. She doesn’t linger. Up here, sound can play tricks on you. And she has work to do.
She fastens her seat belt. “I thought I heard someone driving up.”
John doesn’t react. His foot is down, the Land Rover moving already. She glances at him.
“Are you all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” He maneuvers the car out of the farm gate. It bounces as the wheels hit the potholed surface of the lane.
“Don’t be like that.”
“Sorry.”
He stares ahead and she watches his profile. His cheeks and nose are riddled with broken veins, his skin knitted thick onto his bones. He’s done a shoddy job shaving today, but his eyes are as full of soul as ever. This is a good man. She knew it the day she met him.
She looks harder at him, searching for outward signs of what’s invisible: the areas of his brain riddled with connections as broken as his veins. “We suspect dementia with Lewy bodies. I’m so sorry,” the consultant said. That appointment lost in a sea of others by now, but she’ll always remember hearing the diagnosis and that apology, and John flinching as if he’d been struck.
She’s so lost in staring at him that she doesn’t see the motorbike round the bend in the lane, tilting, black, and powerful. Coming right at them. Too fast.
John hits the brakes hard, bracing himself at the last instant. Maggie is thrown forward and back, the air punched out of her lungs.
“Sorry,” he says in the shocked silence afterward. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. You?” Her heart thumps and she winces at the sudden arrival of pain where the seat belt cut into her chest and her shoulder.
“Hurt?” he asks.
“It’s not too bad.”
John nods and looks behind to check on the dog. She shows him the whites of her eyes but seems fine, only a towel fallen onto her from one of the overstuffed bags.
“Good, Birdie,” he tells her.
The bike has skidded to a stop at an angle across the lane, frighteningly close to the front of the Land Rover. The biker’s a big man, dressed in plain black leathers and a black helmet. Even with his helmet on, they know he’s not one of their local couriers.
He dismounts. The surface of his visor reflects the dark trees gathered on each side of the lane. Maggie is suddenly afraid that he might be angry with them and try to blame them for the close shave. They’d be defenseless against a man like him. She’s breathing hard.
John winds down the window. “You need to watch where you’re going,” he shouts. A vein pulses in his temple.
“Don’t,” Maggie warns. She used to feel safe from everything except the elements up here. She loved the isolation and the sense of living on the very edge of civilization. But the change they’ve been through since John’s diagnosis is like today’s stiff wind. It has rattled everything, and Maggie is afraid that she and John have reached a stage in life where once something’s rattled, it stays loose.
Birdie growls and gets to her feet. Her head pokes between their shoulders. She shows her teeth.
