light by the time she’d finished so she gave up on sleep, freshened up under the shower and trailed downstairs to make a huge mug of tea.
She tried to put some hours in on her real job, the interior decorating she actually charged for and which paid the bills, but couldn’t concentrate. She should be putting the finishing touches to the scheme of works for a basement kitchen-diner conversion with utility room and shower room, the old ground-floor kitchen being knocked through to the sitting room to make ‘a generous living space’. She’d thought it would be the last substantial job she’d schedule before leaving the village, but now she wondered if what had happened to The Angel would put her new role with Elton back a bit.
In any event, her heart wasn’t in it today. She grabbed the key to The Angel’s temporary front door, which Dion had dropped off, picked up her jacket and went out.
She found The Angel dreaming under a sun that glowed through the merest suggestion of September mist and paused outside. The front view was misleadingly intact. The thieves had been smart enough to resist even the beautiful moulded brickwork between the windows so their crime wouldn’t be immediately obvious. She supposed she ought to be grateful for small mercies instead of standing in the road, her heart a tonne weight. Now she was here she found it hard to go inside and confront again the indignity the gracious old building had suffered.
She reversed her route and crossed back to Main Road, ignoring her own home and taking instead the track that led to Gabe’s.
Gabe was feeding his chickens and collecting eggs, a waistcoat over a shirt that used to have a collar. He took one look at her and said, ‘Want to take Snobby a couple of carrots for me? He’s a good listener.’
Alexia laughed. ‘Do I look woebegone enough to need Snobby’s listening ear?’ But she took three carrots from the feed store by the back door and set off for the paddock. Snobby, black all over, his long mane blowing in his eyes, looked like the pony equivalent of an emo. Planted in the middle of the field he regarded her unmovingly until she waved his snack and he knew it was worth the trip to the gate to meet her. He arrived with his neck extended and his mouth already open.
‘Life sucks,’ she told him, holding a piece of carrot in her palm and feeling his velvet muzzle shiver over her skin as he hoovered it up. ‘And I think it’s going to get a lot suckier.’ Breaking the carrots into the smallest pieces she could, she fed the thick-coated pony slowly, running her free hand down his smooth neck, letting his coarse mane slither soothingly between her fingers as she told him her woes. Snobby’s ears flicked back and forth as if paying close attention. Until the carrot supply dried up, then he tossed his head out of her reach and ambled back into the middle of the field to graze.
Alexia sniffed. ‘So now you’ve had what you want, you don’t want to know me? Reminds me of someone else I know.’ She stayed for a while, deriving comfort in Snobby’s serenity as he tipped up one hoof to rest his leg, tail streaming in the quickening breeze.
At length she headed back, finding Gabe still in the chicken run. He passed her a rake. ‘And how’s Snobby?’
She surveyed what had once been grass before the chickens got at it. ‘Behaving like a man.’
Gabe grunted as he scraped the chicken litter from the hen house into a bucket while Alexia raked up chicken droppings, wishing she could rake up the poo in her life and discard it as easily. Then she took the bucket out to Gabe’s compost heap while he dusted disinfectant powder around the hen house and added fresh bedding.
Accepting her help unquestioningly as he moved through his morning’s chores, Gabe didn’t ask Alexia why she was there. It wasn’t because he didn’t care, she knew. Gabe just had an uncanny knack for letting people be.
It wasn’t until they stopped for elevenses of homemade mint tea with Eccles cakes, consumed leaning companionably on Snobby’s gate, that he enquired whether Ben had spoken to her again. Snobby rested his head on Gabe’s arm because Gabe was the one person he’d come to without a bribe.
‘Nope.’ She sipped her steaming drink and stroked Snobby. ‘Looks like his coat’s thickening for winter already.’
He nodded. ‘Probably it will be a hard one.’ He sighed, making Snobby sigh back. ‘Alexia, I’m not excusing Ben’s clumsiness but he has had a dreadfully shitty thing happen to him. He pretends he’s coping but I can’t tell you how unBen-like it is to isolate himself in the woods.’ He gave Alexia a nudge to encourage her to look at him. To read the sincerity in his brown eyes. ‘All the people he loved most let him down. He’s full of anger and he doesn’t know how to let it out. I think I understand why he was so maladroit yesterday and then didn’t seem able to retrieve the situation. It was like he was a boiler with a tiny crack. The steam that escaped was under pressure.’
Alexia put down her Eccles cake as she relived the stomach-plummeting feeling of being made to feel like a criminal by the man whose body she’d caressed. ‘Are you talking about his divorce?’
Gabe hesitated. ‘It’s a hard thing to face, not being able to keep your wife. But there’s so much more to Ben’s situation than that.’ He finished the final bite of Eccles cake before continuing. ‘I’ve always had a special relationship with Ben. I see him as a bit of a kindred spirit. For most of my life I tried to conform. I let my parents influence me into joining the bank, a very stuffy institution in those days, just because I was good at maths. I tried to give my wife the kind of marriage she wanted, with dinner parties and a modern box of a house. I was thrilled when the bank gave me the opportunity to retire early but she was horrified that I wanted to get an allotment and animals. I wasn’t trying to winkle her out of her precious six-bed detached in Orton. I would have carried on with all that nonsense if she’d given me a bit of understanding, but she wanted me to fritter away my days on bridge parties and coop myself up on cruises. We had the most extravagant rows about it.’
His laugh held an echo of an old relief. ‘When we finally gave up on the marriage, I came here to the simple outdoor life I’d always wanted and my wife was happy with that as long as she got the lion’s share of the money in the divorce settlement. Ben was the only one of my family who seemed to understand, who glowed as he explored every inch of the place, asking question after question. The rest of our family looked down their noses and said they were wearing unsuitable shoes.
‘In time, it was me who supported Ben’s wish to study arboriculture instead of whatever boring subject my sister Penny had earmarked for him. Because I recognised a square peg in a round hole when I saw one.’
Despite herself, Alexia was interested. She still tried not to show that her interest extended to Ben, though. ‘Do you think of your wife much?’
He gave her a wink. ‘I called my pony Snobby, didn’t I?’ With a last squeeze of her hand he rose. ‘Shall we pick those beans?’
Before they could, his phone began to ring and he slid it from his pocket. As he listened, the laughter died from his face. Presently he said, ‘Hold on a moment. Alexia Kennedy is with me. I’ll ask her.’ He took the phone from his ear. ‘A detective constable from Bettsbrough Police. Would we like to go in and make our statements this afternoon?’
The sun went behind a cloud as reality made itself felt again. Alexia sighed. ‘I suppose. Let’s go together. Get a time and I’ll pick you up, because I don’t suppose the police station has a hitching rail for Snobby.’
Ben
