Chapter One
Grace
Present Day
The Dales
My story starts, naturally, with death.
The death of my mother.
I knew her death was coming soon. I’d read about it in preparation; at least, to prepare for the physical signs of death. The changes in her breathing, the sunken nature of her eyes. Once mother took to her bed, that was when the process began, and the clock started ticking.
I did the only thing I knew how to do, and that was to prepare.
It was early autumn, and I thought it very fitting that mother should choose then to die. All the leaves on the path leading to our crumbling farm house in the dale had curled up and turned brown, and thebranches were gnarled and withering, twisting in on themselves as if to protect from the bite of the sleet and hale. How fitting, then, that my mother should take her last breaths in autumn, joining nature as it dressed in its cloak of death for the long winter.
Our house was a lonely one; two storeys of crumbling brick interwoven with a pervasive ivy which mother and I had spent many mornings plucking and digging out with garden tools, to no avail. Grief, I thought, was very much like the ivy and weeds which rooted themselves between the cracks and split apart the mortar. It destroyed the bones of the house just as it destroyed mother’s, until it could no longer support itself with its own integrity.
Only, unlike mother, the house had nobody to care for it. All the while I tended to my mother, and took care of the few cows and chickens we kept on the farm, there was nobody to tend to the house’s structure. Naturally, it eroded away piece by piece, falling apart around our heads. It wasn’t unusual to be changing my mother’s nightgown in her bedroom and feel the tickle of crumbling brickwork as the dust fell behind my collar, coating the nape of my neck. Sometimes I would take a bath and lift my head in time for a beam to split and a chunk of wood to splash in the murky water between my legs.
Life had never been easy, though, in Heather House.
Mother lived in the manner she’d always been accustomed to, before her parents died, and naturally I was raised in just the same manner. Heather House, named for the fields of beautiful purple heather that surrounded us in summer, had no indoor toilet or running water, and what electricity we had was installed midway through mychildhood. Central heating, similarly, was never installed. Now that I was twenty-one, what wiring the house had was faulty and unreliable, blinking in and out at its own whim.
Water was collected from the same stream the cows drank from, just a hundred yards from our door, with a bucket. This was a pleasure in summer, when I could feel the warmth through my clothes as I walked barefoot in the grass – but in the dead of winter, it was a terrible, treacherous task as I trudged through the calf-height snow in my Wellington boots, and had to crack the frozen surface of the stream with an ice pick. It was a morning’s task just to collect water for a cup of tea.
Baths required pans and kettles full of boiling hot water, and toileting was done outside in the shack, directly into the composting hole in the ground. We were used to it, accustomed to it...but that didn’t mean I didn’t envy the modern conveniences when I visited the shops, or neighbouring farms and houses, with their piping hot radiators and comfortable bathrooms with heated towel rails.
Now that mother was finally dead, my heart ached and yet felt also...relieved. Relieved that the fight was over and my work was done. That I could sleep under my ten-inch-thick bundles of blankets in the big wood-framed bed and not listen out for mother calling or bashing the wooden floor with my father’s old cane to rouse me from my sleep and help her.
I’d no longer have to trudge to the old telephone box by the main road at three in the morning to beg for the doctor, or wait with a gas lamp to aid him back to our house. No more walks to the library to use their computer andGoogle mother’s symptoms. It was over, and I was alone and afraid.
But I was also free.
The morning of mother’s funeral had arrived, and it would be almost time to lay her to rest. Soon the hearse would arrive with mother in the wicker basket in the back, and the funeral car behind it to take me to the church.
I wasn’t too nervous; mostly because, being autumn, the skies were grey and my skin wouldn’t be assaulted by the sun. My skin condition and pale complexion made outside work very difficult indeed, especially in the summer. I needed to cover every inch of skin and wear a wide-brimmed hat to ensure that the direct sunlight didn’t burn my crepe-paper skin or bring me out in a hideous rash.
But right now the weather was perfect, and I had one less problem to worry about. As I dressed in my long-sleeved blouse of silvery-white silk, like the inside of an oyster, and my long stiff skirt, I glanced up at the portrait of my father that we kept over the fireplace. I hadn’t seen him in eighteen months, since he'd keeled over from a sudden heart attack.
“Mum is with you now, Dad,” I whispered, studying his deep dark eyes and the furrowed brow that was stern above them. “And I’m alone.”
I couldn’t anticipate who might turn up for mother’s funeral. Some of the locals, I was sure, would come. David who ran the pub in the town, and Mavis from the post office and sweet shop, and mother’s hairdresser would come, of course. Our accountant, and our contactsat the market for the cows. Some neighbouring farming families, especially those who knew my father when our farm was much bigger and more prosperous, and the house wasn’t falling apart.
And Tom Stoddard, the farmer’s son from down the way, would come. He was a farmer in his own right, having taken over the family business so his father could retire. But to me, he was always the farmer’s son, never the farmer. To me, he was the little boy I knew down the lane, who would trudge with me through the ditches and bogs, and play poo-sticks with me over the crooked bridge.
When the rapping sound came from the front door, I flinched, startled – but I knew it would be him. Nobody else ever knocked here, and I hadn’t yet seen the funeral cars arriving through the window in the sitting room. It could only be Tom.
When I answered the door to him and saw him standing there, wrapped up in his black woollen coat, gloves, and his flat-cap pulled down over his brow, I met him with a brief smile. Tom was tall with a broad chest and thick thighs that were always dressed in tattered denim year-round, with Wellington boots that hugged his built calf muscles with a snug fit.
I knew I should feel some fluttering of pleasure for Tom, and I did, when I admired only his body. I felt stirrings down below, and wondered if there might be something there – but then my eyes would catch his solemn face, his simple expression, and I’d feel nothing. The absence of feeling was startling.
All my life, as we’d grown up on neighbouring farms, I’d hoped I would develop feelings for Tom. I’d tried so veryhard to allow him to be everything I could wish for in a man – even if I only counted his physical attributes and discounted our lack of any personal connection beyond our childhood friendship. But I couldn’t. He was just Tom – my friend, at most – from next door. He’d make a reliable husband one day, for someone else.
“Good morning, Grace,” he said, taking his cap off and holding it by his groin. “I thought you could use some company.”
He was right about that. It would be nice to have somebody by my side; a warm body who knew me and understood me, while we took mother to her final service and resting place.
