care where I am so long as I’m with you.’
She looked at him shyly, and blushed.
‘Me too,’ she said, and he was hit by a sudden revelation.
‘I love you, Pippa,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever said that to any girl, ever.
‘Oh Dan,’ she said, her eyes shining, ‘I love you too.’
He wanted to kiss her there and then, but there was a cow between them, and work to be done. But as Dan watched her, focussed completely on the task in hand, totally at one with the animals she was dealing with, he was hit by a second revelation. Come what may, Pippa North was the girl he was going to marry.
Marianne walked down the lane, feeling gloomy. It was a crisp clear January morning, but the Christmas snows had melted, leaving patches of forlorn looking but lethal ice. The twins had just gone back to nursery after Christmas. After a hassle to get them out of the door, they had readily raced down the lane, reminding her of the way Steven, and Pippa’s boys had run the same way when she’d first met them.
Now Steven, Nathan and George were turning into strapping young teenagers, their childhoods almost a distant memory. She should hold onto these moments with the twins. They would be over in the blink of an eye. Time seemed to be moving faster than she’d like. It seemed like only yesterday that she’d first moved to Hope Christmas, newly in love with stunningly good-looking Luke Nicholas, who’d promptly broken her heart. She’d nearly fled back to London then, but the lure of the beautiful countryside had been too strong. And then of course, there’d been Gabriel …
Even now, Marianne still found it hard to believe she could have been lucky enough to find Gabriel. He too had been left heartbroken when his wife Eve, who suffered badly from depression, left him, and slowly they had built something new together. And now, seven years on, Marianne was married, with a stepson and two lovely children of her own. Life couldn’t be better. And yet, and yet …
Marianne tried to shake off her feelings of melancholy, but she felt unsettled and as if she’d lost her sense of purpose. Another year and a bit, and the twins were going to be at school. Although Gabriel wasn’t putting her under pressure, Marianne felt she should be thinking about what she was going to do next. There was plenty to do on the farm, and Gabriel could always use extra help. But while Marianne loved being a farmer’s wife, she wasn’t born to it like Pippa. And although she also loved looking after the twins, she missed work.
‘I don’t know,’ she said out loud to a passing crow, ‘should I stick at being a farmer’s wife, or is it time I went back to teaching?’ She looked across at the fields bordering her home. It was lovely being out here, and she enjoyed working outside with Gabe, particularly in lambing season, but she missed being in front of a class. Not that she’d want to go back to Hope Christmas Primary, where the current head teacher had made her feel worse than useless. But if not there, where? And how? Marianne felt unfocussed, muzzy. Maybe when the twins were older, and maybe to another school …
Besides, work wasn’t the total reason for her discontent. Not really. She sighed, as she walked up the garden path and let herself into the home where she had been so happy for the past seven years. Where she still was happy, she corrected herself. It was just that Gabriel seemed a bit distant at the moment.
When questioned about it, all she got was a curt, ‘I’m fine,’ but he had admitted to being shaken by Pippa and Dan’s divorce. ‘I still can’t believe they’ve split up,’ he told Marianne, ‘they seemed so right, so solid. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘Not too much I hope,’ Marianne joked, but Gabriel hadn’t responded, just taken himself off to the fields, retreating into a taciturn silence at home.
It had been like that since Christmas. Marianne tried to be supportive. This was the start of Gabriel’s busiest time of year, and he often came in late from lambing, usually too late to see the children. Which was a pity, because the only thing that seemed to cheer him up was the twins. He always came to life when they jumped on him as he walked through the door, or at the weekends when Steven was home from school. But the rest of the time, Gabriel seemed to brood. Marianne knew that brooding look of old – it was the way he’d looked when she’d first met him. Unhappy, sad, lost. Marianne had hoped never to see that look again, and she had a feeling she knew what was causing it.
Eve. Gabriel’s ex. Since that frantic phone call on Christmas Day, things had gone from bad to worse with Eve. Marianne and Gabriel had dropped everything and gone to rescue Steven, kids in tow. They had been greeted with sobbing hysterics, and while Gabe had worked his magic (born of years of practice), calmed her down and persuaded her to take her medication, it had only been a temporary fix.
A day or so later, she’d been on the phone telling Marianne that she was being spied on, and nothing Marianne could say could calm her down. And after that they’d endured a week of late night phone calls, of worsening degrees, till eventually one morning they had a call from a neighbour to say Eve was outside her house, dressed only in a nightie.
Gabriel and Marianne had dropped the twins with Pippa and rushed over straight away, to find Eve, looking lost and bewildered, sitting sobbing in her neighbour’s kitchen, her feet bleeding, where she’d cut them on the garden path.
‘We have to call an ambulance,’ Marianne said as Gabe tried unsuccessfully to coax her back home.
‘I can’t go there,’ Eve said anxiously, gripping hold of Gabe’s arm, ‘they’ll find me.’
‘Who?’ asked Gabe with patience acquired from years of experience. ‘Eve, there’s no one here but us, and we won’t hurt you.’
‘Them,’ said Eve stubbornly. ‘Can’t you hear them? They’re whispering about me all the time.’
Marianne, Gabriel and the neighbour exchanged helpless glances, and when Gabe questioned her further it transpired Eve had stopped taking her medication altogether. By now Gabe had got onto Eve’s mum, Joan.
‘She’s the worst I’ve seen her in a long time,’ Gabe said. ‘I really think she needs to go to hospital.’
In the end, on the advice of the doctor who came out, to Gabriel’s evident distress, Eve had to be sectioned for her own safety, as she clearly couldn’t be left alone. It was an upsetting business, Eve screaming that they couldn’t make her go, the doctor saying she had to. In the end after Gabriel made numerous promises that he and Steven would come and see Eve as soon as they could, she was persuaded to get into an ambulance by the kind paramedics.
‘I wish there was another way,’ Gabriel said desperately to Marianne as they followed Eve to the hospital. ‘I’m never convinced hospital helps her.’ He was really shaken up by the whole thing, clearly reminded of the time when Eve was living with him and had done similar.
‘It makes me feel so helpless,’ he said to Marianne. ‘Even now, after all this time, I want to help her, and I can’t.’
It was really sad, Marianne could see that, and she felt particularly for Steven, who was very distressed by his
