I seemed to have been doing a lot of that lately. ‘Have a cup of tea and some of this fruit cake. It’s really good.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ he yelled in a fury, ‘I can not work here. It is utterly impractical. Out of the question. We can’t stay here. End of. Put your bag back in the car. We’ll have to find somewhere else. Maybe the pub for tonight until we find something else. Come on.’ And he walked out of the warm, welcoming kitchen and back to the car.
I started to follow him and stopped. As he stood by the car waiting for me, his jacket billowing out in the wind, I thought about how tricky things had been with Jake. I thought how he seemed to have changed lately. I thought about how I seemed to spend so much of my time trying to please him, keep him happy—and failing. I thought about how we hardly spoke about his work and never ever spoke about mine. I thought about the way we just didn’t seem to fit together any more. I thought about the long silence all the way up the Great North Road. And I wondered if what we had was really worth another row, another few days of tiptoeing round him trying to keep him happy. I thought about that stream and the ford and the packhorse bridge. And without really meaning to, I made a decision.
‘I’m not coming with you,’ I said, my voice shaking only a bit.
Jake looked at me as if I were mad.
‘Come on, Tilly, don’t be stupid. It’s no time to play games. It’s been a long day. I’m tired. We need to find somewhere else to stay.’
‘I’ve got somewhere. I’m staying here,’ I said, very calmly, though I knew as I said it that it was about much more than where we stayed tonight. Or where we stayed for the next two weeks. I knew that—as far as Jake and I were concerned—after two years together, this was a point of no return.
Jake was quieter now, but impatient, exasperated. ‘Look, be realistic. I can’t stay here with no phone reception and no Internet. And you can’t stay here by yourself.’ He looked at me as though I were terminally stupid. Come to think of it, he often did that. And suddenly I’d had enough.
‘Why not?’ I thought of the little packhorse bridge and the stream. My family had lived here. It might be strange, but I had roots here. Already I could almost feel them tugging at me. I wasn’t going to turn round and go before I’d had even a day to explore.
‘Because you’d be on your own and—’
‘Maybe I want to be on my own.’
My words hung in silence. Jake stood and looked at me for a few, long seconds. I stared back. Coolly. Calmly. I hoped he couldn’t hear my heart thudding.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ve got no time to play games with you. If that’s the way you want it, suit yourself.’ And he got into the car, slammed the door and drove angrily down the track.
I watched him go, watched the car twist down the hill, sploosh through the ford, past the farmhouse and the bridge, and then disappear, like a little Dinky Toy along the winding track over the moor, getting ever smaller until he was out of sight, and I was alone. In a little house on the top of a moor, miles from anywhere.
For a moment I wanted to run down the hillside after Jake, saying sorry, sorry, all a mistake. For another moment, I felt desperately sad and abandoned—even though I was the one who had done the abandoning. For yet another moment I was panicking, terrified of being alone miles from anywhere.
But then, while all that was going on, I felt the small stirrings of a strange new feeling. I was so surprised that it took me a moment to work out what it was. Then I realised. It was relief—relief at not having to put up with Jake’s increasingly sour moods, of always having to do things his way, of living with the feeling that I didn’t quite measure up somehow. And there was something else too—a sort of excitement at a sudden sense of freedom.
This was my decision. My choice. I’d taken control. That’s it. Deep breath. I had taken charge of my life. So now what do I do? There was only me to ask, only me to answer and only me to worry about. This took some getting used to. Wonderful but frightening. I tried to think, be practical.
It was late afternoon and already getting dark. I quickly explored the rest of the house. Up a steep narrow staircase was a double bedroom where you could lie in bed and look straight out at the miles of hills. There was a smaller bedroom and a tiny bathroom that looked reassuringly new. I unpacked my bags, which didn’t take long. My few things looked a bit lonely all by themselves in the wardrobe. I drew the bedroom curtains and put all the lights on.
Then I went downstairs, sat on the sofa and wondered what to do next. I looked at the stove. The house was warm enough, but a stove would be cheery, wouldn’t it? A house like this needed a real fire. It should be fairly easy to light. There were even instructions. I’d never been a girl guide, but I reckoned I could light a fire. Of course I could. Buoyed up by new optimism, I had no doubts. Well, not many. I knelt down in front of the stove as if I were praying to it, found matches and a couple of firelighters, handily left on a shelf, followed the instructions carefully. Ow! The first time I let the match burn down and scorched my fingers. But at the second go it was suddenly blazing, flames licking round the sticks. Result! I left the doors open and sat back in the glow to feel the heat. Lighting a fire was very satisfying in a deeply primitive sort of way. I felt quite proud. Already in my new independent life I had achieved something I had never done before.
For the first time I noticed the samplers hanging on the wall above the stove. Framed pieces of needlework, probably done by a child and, by the look of it, many years ago. Age had faded the bright colours of the embroidery, but the tiny, careful stitches were as sharp as ever, the message clear.
‘Tell the truth and shame the Devil,’ it said, firmly. Right. No messing there.
The other sampler was more difficult to read, the reflection of the glass blanking out the message. I looked at it from different angles until in the end I stood with my nose almost on the edge of the frame and suddenly the letters snapped into focus.
‘Carpe diem,’ it said. ‘Seize the day.’
Well, that’s what I’d done, hadn’t I? I had seized the day, well, the moment anyway. To be honest, I wasn’t usually very good at spur-of-the-moment. I always wanted to know whether the day was going to be worth seizing first. And by the time I’d done that, it was often too late. Letting Jake drive off without me was the boldest thing I’d done.
Had I been right to let Jake go? My new-found confidence after the fire-lighting success was beginning to ebb away. Never mind just now, this evening, tonight—what about next week, next month? What was going to happen?
As I drew the sitting-room curtains I could see that outside everywhere was grey and misty. Seriously creepy. My heart thudded in panic. Where were the lights? There were no lights! All my life I have lived with streetlights, advertising lights, car lights, lights from shop windows, petrol stations, tube stations. I don’t do darkness. Don’t think I’ve ever really seen it. There was a glow of murky yellow light from the farmhouse below and, apart from that, nothing. Just a thick, misty, grey silence, smothering the house and miles of moors in all directions, swallowing everything up. Despite the heating and the fire, I shivered. What was I doing?
There was a sudden noise outside. I leapt back from the window, my heart racing. Then laughed at myself, a little shakily. A sheep. Of course it was a sheep—there were hundreds of them outside. I listened carefully and I could hear the sound they made as they tugged the grass up with their teeth and chomped away. Amazing what you can hear in the country. I closed the curtains again carefully,
