she was asking herself, was she not shy and embarrassed with Brian? Why should this man be the only man with whom she had never felt afraid – save her father, who had gone away so long ago and left an aching void in her life? She leaned forward to look more closely in the mirror, remembering suddenly how he would swing her up in his arms so she could wind her legs into the small of his back and bury her face in the strength and security of his chest. Always he had been there and she had known that he always would, until the day she came home from school and found her mother crying bitterly, face down on the bed. She knew now that her father had no strength, no security to offer and that he had made her mother miserable till the day he left, but rational adult explanations could not dispel that secure safe feeling which he had engendered and which lingered in her longing.
Brian seemed to have that feeling about him too. She knew instinctively that his were the kind of hands in which a wild creature would lie without fear and so – if ever he should ask it – would she.
She shook her head wearily and picked up her hair brush. It wasn’t as though he were that much older than she either. Ten years? Probably less; automatically she ran her fingers over the tiny web of lines beneath her eyes, gently easing them flat. Then slowly she began to brush her hair.
‘I hear you were talking to Brian Dexter up on the moors yesterday,’ Mrs Finch commented as she fed Jacie scrambled eggs next morning. Who had told? The rocks? The lonely gossiping buzzards? ‘He’s a nice man, he is; but that wife of his … no better than she ought to be that one – Ann, she’s called – having an affair with young Jim Lloyd like that! Serve her right that he’s divorcing her. Divorce is too good I reckon. And he still loves her, you know; they say he still loves her. Some say he nearly went out of his mind when he found out and now he spends all his time alone on that moor, brooding. It’s a wicked, wicked shame. And he’s worth a hundred Jim Lloyds any day of the week.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Jacie was gazing fixedly at her eggs. There was a pause and then she went on quietly, ‘He never talks about himself.’ Nor of course did she.
She stared at the coffee pot as Mrs Finch picked it up, conscious of a sudden weight of sadness. It threatened her, this new intimate detail of Brian’s life. She wished she didn’t know, although it explained perhaps the nature of the bond between them now. For he too must mistrust the world, he too find himself apart …
That day, consciously, Jacie looked for him on the moors, but she didn’t find him there and she didn’t dare go back to the abbey. It belonged to Brian and his pair of kites. He would take her there in his own time to see his birds if he wanted and she must wait. For the first time since she had begun sketching the moors she found them lonely and a little melancholy as the warm summer wind rippled the heather and the green bracken and stirred the thorn bushes clinging to the scattered outcrops of rock.
He found her when he chose, which became more and more often as the weeks wore on. She never mentioned what she knew. She put the knowledge behind her as being part of his life which must never come between them, never spoil their careful impersonality. They talked though, all the time, and went for long walks across the countryside, climbing the hills and sitting on the edge of the river watching for kingfishers and laughing at the antics of the dipper as it plunged from its rock to walk beneath the water on the bed of the stream. And stealthily they went to visit the eyrie in its tall tree within the ruined walls of the abbey and Jacie saw the three ridiculous bald-fluffy heads of the young craning for their food as the parents swept down out of the sky.
They would picnic together, she and Brian, sharing her packed lunches which, though nothing was said at the farm, had mysteriously doubled in size and it seemed to Jacie that for the first time in her life she was almost happy.
‘You must sketch the birds for me when they’re flying,’ he murmured as they crouched side by side behind the abbey wall watching the nest.
She nodded, her fingers gripping the cold crumbling stones which sheltered them. ‘How long will it be now?’ To her, the gaping beaks and the long necks visible in the nest seemed enormous already.
‘Not long. Look! The hen bird.’ His whisper made her look automatically up, but all she noticed was the firmness of the hand he had laid upon hers on the stones of the wall.
For a moment they forgot the birds and looked at one another and she saw the unspoken emotion in his eyes. Then he had turned away and abruptly releasing her fingers he raised his field glasses once more to the tree.
It was Brian who taught her, after he had teased her for huddling habitually under a scarf, to walk fearlessly in the rain, throwing back her head to feel the cold freshness of it on her skin as he made her shake out her hair to the damp and the fresh soft-scenting drizzle. And it was in the rain that he first kissed her gently, holding her against him and kissing her again as the cool drops ran down her upturned face, before he turned sadly away.
Summer grew heavy and languid and fearfully she began to count the days which remained of her holiday, willing time to slow down. In the abbey the young tested their wings and jumped up and down on the edge of their untidy nest high in the tree. They were ready to fly – and Jacie knew she was in love. But it was a humble, sad, compassionate, half fearful love that could not declare itself and dared not hint at its existence before the pain of the man at her side who still loved his Ann with such despair.
When at last the nest was empty they went more often to the abbey, walking up the cart track through the waist high ripening corn; they explored the woody valley in which it lay and the dark stone walls which so easily evoked an echo of pure voices sadly intoning the plainsong down the centuries. Jacie loved it there in spite of – perhaps because of – its sadness. It was Brian’s place more than any other.
And there it was that she broke the spell of the summer. ‘I have to go home soon, Brian. I hate to leave, but I must. I have to go back to work.’ They were standing in the long seeding grasses in the chapter house of the nuns.
Silently he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ll miss you, Jacie.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Brian, I shall come back. Next year.’ And then it had happened. Her love and anguish had betrayed her and she had rushed on: ‘By then the divorce will be over and you’ll be free … I know you’ll be free. You’ll forget her one day.’
He didn’t question how she knew. He said nothing, but his face tautened with pain and she saw misery and memories where only a moment before had been clear happy laughter.
In silent despair she walked away from him then, and there in the corner of the lichen-powdered wall she saw the neat intricacies of the spider’s web looped across from stone to stone. She gazed at it for a moment and then bitterly swept her hand up through the threads, watching them snap and coalesce and cling fragmentarily to her fingers. That easy it was to break something fragile and beautiful. She could feel the childish tears welling under her eyelids. Then Brian was beside her. He said nothing, but she saw him looking at the ruin of the web and she felt desperately guilty and ashamed. She wanted to help him, to stand by him, to give him strength. But she did not know how. She wanted to be with him, but she didn’t dare remain. Instead she walked away.
That was the last time she saw him. Two days later she packed and went home, her shell once more tightly and protectively around her.
Mrs Finch sent her the notice of the divorce from the local paper. There was no editorial comment, just the bland headlines ‘Well-known local farmer divorces wife’ and a few lines giving the names and addresses of the three people involved. So few words to cover so much that had happened.
She started to write to him then. But what do you say to a man
