What happens next is out of my hands, though, and my nervesare jangling at the thought. Directing a piece of theater long distance isn’t easy.
I have to hope the Elliotts do as I’ve asked, putting the props precisely in place so that the curtain can rise on Act 1.
Outside the car, rows of trees crowd the edges of the narrow road, densely packed, trunks straight and foliage overhanging low, absorbing the dying afternoon light. Emily takes out one of her earbuds. “It looks like a fairy tale,” she says.
She clears the hours of silence from her throat, tugs the sleeves of her sweater over her wrists, and wraps her arms tightly around herself. She should ask Jayne or Ruth to turn up the heat, but she’s too shy. They intimidate her with their closeness and the decade they have on her. Emily feels like an imposter.
Jayne, in the driver’s seat, raises her eyebrows. Finally! Emily speaks! she thinks. Emily has been either asleep or plugged in for most of the journey.
“Like a fairy tale in a good way?” Ruth asks, turning round. Emily is a mystery to Ruth and someone Ruth is determined to get to know better over the course of this weekend.
“Not really,” Emily says. The fairy tales that were read to her as a child were terrifying.
Ruth isn’t sure how to respond. Emily’s relative youth sometimes leaves Ruth at a loss for words. It shouldn’t, she knows, but somehow, the ten-year age gap is always there between them, making Ruth afraid that whatever she says will sound patronizing, even though that’s the last thing she means to be. She faces the front again and consults the sat nav.
“Not long until we’re out of the woods,” she says. “Literally. And around fifty minutes until we get there, according to this.”
They’ve been on the road for hours, heading north. Muscles are stiff, minds dull. Ruth insisted on packing lunch for them all, lackluster sandwiches which she apparently made at the crack of dawn. It adds to the school trip feel of the journey for Emily.
As the car breaks out of the forest, light floods the windscreen, and the landscape reveals itself. Jayne smiles for the first time since she woke this morning with Mark’s hand on her flank. She thought at first that he wanted to make love, but it was a more careful touch, an apology. Phone in his other hand, Mark was waking her with the news that he wouldn’t be able to join them on the drive up north today, meaning he would miss the first of their planned three nights away.
Jayne was cross. The news bruised her and so did the row they had over it. They bickered clumsily, both tired and both upset with how the other was taking it, both feeling like the injured party.
But Jayne’s sense of well-being has grown with every mile they’ve traveled north, the banality of the motorway soothing her, happy anticipation of the long weekend ahead reemerging, reframed.
Now the weekend will consist of a girls’ night followed by two nights when all six of them will be together. It’s not what she expected but it’s fine, and she will still be able to surprise Mark, the way she planned to. And as Mark pointed out, perhaps she needs to work on handling change better. And she will. There are always improvements to be made in life and she’s not afraid of putting in the graft.
She focuses on the positives. She’s been looking forward to this weekend for weeks. She needs a break. And it feels as if she’s hardly seen Ruth since Ruth had the baby. It’ll be nice to have time to catch up properly. That’s sometimes easier when the men aren’t with them, dominating the conversation with their in-jokes and reminiscences.
Alone in the back of the car, Emily has fallen quiet again. Sheblows on the window glass and traces her initials and Paul’s there, with a heart around them. Her nails are manicured and painted a pretty pale blue; the back of her hands tanned. A large emerald on her ring finger is a match for her eyes. Paul held it up beside them when he proposed, comparing the green of the jewel to that of her irises. The smile on his face was so broad and unfiltered that it touched her. He looked like the cat who’d got the cream, which is exactly how she felt.
The idea of being a wife is still thrilling to Emily. She never expected to be married at this age, only twenty-three, especially to a much older husband, but she fell in love, tumbled into it, and so far, it’s been amazing. She adores Paul and adores their life together. And as a bonus she gets to flash that big rock at the doubters, including her mother, who never managed to get a ring on her own finger. After Emily’s dad left them, her mum mostly collected toxic boyfriends, nasty bruises, and a deepening alcohol addiction.
Emily’s breath evaporates from the window, taking the initials and heart with it and the magical memories. Outside the countryside crawls by. Walls and gates, fields and hills. Many black-headed sheep. A horse, waiting for something. So much emptiness. Dull.
Ruth and Jayne are talking about a play that’s on the radio. The play and the conversation sound pretentious and worthy, confirming Emily’s impression that the two of them are boring. Though while she’s got no desire to join in their chat, she wishes that she’d accepted Ruth’s offer to take the passenger seat for the journey. Sitting in back makes her feel even more like a kid.
She wants Jayne to put her foot down and get them to the cottage quicker because she’s fed up with the drive, but the white lines have disappeared from the center of the road and it seems to be constantly narrowing and forcing the car to decelerate. It’s as if the road is taking control.
She puts her earbuds back in and shuts her eyes, thinking of the holiday in the south of France that she and Paul have just returnedfrom. The business-class flights, the hotel, the spa, the sex. It was lush. Paul is perfect. He was a gentleman. She felt like a princess, even when the air hostess gave her that knowing face, as if to say, you’re not the only young thing I’ve seen in this cabin beside an older man, and you won’t be the last. Emily took pleasure in flashing her ring, then.
Marriage isn’t all fun, though. She’s annoyed with Paul today. She wishes he was here with her. If she’s honest it’s more than annoyance. She resents him for insisting he had to work today and for making her come on this long weekend ahead of him, with these other women, whom she barely knows.
“Come on, Em,” he said. “It’s just one night. Make the effort. It’s really important to me that you try to get to know my friends.” Emotional blackmail.
She’s been happy to avoid these women until now, shying away from group nights out or Sunday lunches, feeling acutely that she has nothing in common with them. But there it hung, the implication that Paul would be disappointed in her if she didn’t do what he wanted. So, she agreed. And now she wishes she hadn’t. Especially since the other husbands aren’t here either. Mark and Toby are more fun than their wives, but they couldn’t come either, also at the last minute, so now she faces twenty-four hours in the draining company of Jayne and Ruth. Already, Ruth has been fussy and patronizing, and Jayne has stared at Emily in that penetrating way that makes her feel vacuous and stupid.
She sighs and once again her breath mists the window. She draws another heart. But this time she’s too annoyed with Paul to put their initials inside it.
John’s impulse is to take the package back to the farmhouse, to toss it in the dustbin, and to say good riddance to it. He’d like to toss the guests away with it, if such a thing was possible.
This bloody special delivery is yet another display of ridiculousness and arrogance from the people who come up here to stay in the barn, he thinks. They only want to party and to play. They’re totally disconnected from the land that his family have been custodians of for more than a century.
With every set of guests to arrive at Dark Fell Barn over the past year—since Maggie made a website and began to advertise it—John’s unhappiness with the situation has burgeoned along with his sense that something sacred to his family is being invaded. He restored the barn himself, to preserve it for the use of William, his son, and for the generations of Elliotts he hopes will follow.
Hardly a day passes when John doesn’t think of the people who walked his land before him, and of how you should learn from the past, how we are all rooted to it.
The past contains warnings, he believes. You must respect it. In this part of the world, deepest Northumbria, the past is bloody and suffused with myth and history. The rugged beauty might photograph well, but it’s no playground.
