A Cornish Christmas (13 page)

Genevieve answered my unspoken question. ‘He came home to find you and Catherine bouncing off the walls as you'd just signed the biggest deal of your careers to date... the one that would make your books not just a national, but an international success, and pay off all your debts. You were so happy. He didn't want to risk that. I never said anything, he told me not to, but now, well, someone should. Especially now that you've just given up on trying for a baby.'

The phone clicked off. She hadn't even given me the courtesy of a chance to respond.

I sat down hard on the bench in the hallway. Muppet scratched my shins, eyeing me with that soulful look of hers. I placed my hand on her silky fur. It couldn't be true, could it?

Stuart hadn't given up his dream just so that I could live mine, had he? We weren't like Smudge and Mark, with one half of a couple feeling like their lights were dimmed by the brightness of the other, were we? He'd always said that we were on the same team. When had he decided that my needs were more important than his own?

I closed my eyes. He'd loved the Red Agency. For years he'd done consultancy work for them and always said that if an opening came up anywhere in the marketing department, he'd jump at it, even if it was a demotion, as it would be incredible to work for them. But it had never happened.

What happened was the economic downturn. Several failed pregnancies. And two mortgages. So he took a marketing director position for a major pharmaceutical organisation while we tried to pay it all off.

The added insult to injury came when he began to realise how much their marketing efforts covered up the multitude of unethical practices the company turned a blind eye to. It had slowly started to eat him alive, especially when on more than one occasion he was tasked with cleaning up the bad publicity and fallout. While he went about it as ethically as possible, threatening to leave if they didn't at least try to admit some of the blame, he still felt sullied by the experience. And yet when finally his success at the pharmaceutical company meant that he was offered a job at his dream firm, working on cutting-edge campaigns, he had turned it down. Why? Why hadn't he said anything to me?

I felt a rush of nausea, and barely made it to the downstairs toilet. As I dry-heaved into the porcelain bowl, tears streamed down my face. I'd been so sure that Stuart and I were on the same page – he was the one who insisted on Cornwall, hadn't he? I thought he had, but maybe, maybe in my excitement, I'd made the suggestion and he'd been so considerate that he'd swept his own wishes aside for the sake of mine.

I'd never considered that Stuart hadn't wanted what I did. He'd been so enthusiastic about our move down here, talking about a change of pace and his idea of becoming a self-sustaining smallholder that it had never occurred to me that there was a possibility that he'd just been putting on a sporting face.

I set off for the village, trying to walk away my queasiness, while sorting out what Genevieve had told me. I should have been furious with her. And a part of me was. What she'd done was cruel. I'd been completely blindsided. But then how could he have just left me in the dark like that?

How could he just roll over and let me get what I wanted without even mentioning his own wishes?

I wasn't this person; I would have been blissfully happy to have lived in the Collingswood House and for him to take his dream job. Sure I loved it down here but not at the expense of my husband's dreams. How could he have made this call? How could he not have spoken to me about any of this?

I popped into the post office, barely listening to the octogenarian post-mistress Mrs Aheary while she told me about the plight of the Royal Mail office in the village, and how pretty soon robotic drones would be delivering the mail. ‘Drones! What is this,
Star Wars
?' she said in disgust, looking at me with beetle-black eyes in a face that resembled a sunken mattress. ‘'Tisn't right, Ivy-Rose... 'tisn't right at all. Mark me words, we'll be closed down soon enough if these emmets get their way...'

Mrs Aheary's definition of
emmets
weren't just people across the river, the Tamar, that divided Cornwall from the rest of the world (aka foreigners), but anyone who wanted to change the way things worked, young people, the wrong sorts of old people – ‘them with modern ideas' – and pretty much anyone who disagreed with her, really.

I ignored her speech. Mrs Aheary had been telling me a similar tale since I was twelve years old, just with different bad guys threatening the Royal Mail. Faxes... faxes were replacing letters. Then ‘The Email', then courier companies, Eastern Europeans... I'm not sure what they had to do with it, but she blamed them too, despite having a young Polish girl named Paulina working for the office in earshot. (Paulina, we all knew, ended up doing most of Mrs Aheary's work while the latter worked her motor mouth.) Now it was an article about mail-delivering drones that were going to finally close down her post office, the one that had been going for more than two hundred years. Sort of around when she was born, I often imagined.

I must have grunted a response of some kind, because soon enough she brought over the package from my publisher, which was a box of marketing paraphernalia for the latest edition of
The Fudge Files
– The Case of the Missing Brolly
.

Even that failed to give me the usual jolt of happiness. All I could think of were Genevieve's words and Stuart.

Mrs Aheary mentioned something about a storm warning over the next week or two, but I didn't pay it any heed. Living this close to the sea, I knew that daily weather reports weren't just the aperitif at the end of most conversation but often the main course. The subject of the weather came up all the time in Cornwall, even more so than in ordinary British conversation.

A typical exchange in the village often went something like this:

‘How's your knee doing now, Mrs Blume?' April Blume ran the local pub in the village, The Cloud Arms, and complained of her knees any time you dared ask for a refill. Though, once pressed, the enquiry was likely to be followed with, ‘Much better now them squalls down in Penwith have finally calmed down.'

‘Your new arthritis medication starting to kick in, Mrs Glass?' someone would ask Robyn, the village baker from my mum's Thursday Club, where a lifetime of kneading dough and supplying all of Cloudsea and the neighbouring town with their daily bread had taken its toll on her elbows and wrists, and she'd say, ‘Oh yes, thanks, but should take a turn now with the first frosts arriving... Have half a mind to take up sticks upcountry to me Aunty Sheryl, where the weather is better to ride it out, but it wouldn't be right, would it?' she'd ask with a look of worry.

The sad part was that most of the villagers were likely to shake their heads that yes, it wouldn't be right. A Cornishman or -woman, as it were, stuck it out. Even if the weather in Northamptonshire would be better right now for arthritic elbows.

So, of course, I didn't really hear the storm warming.

All I heard, on repeat, were Genevieve's words, like an overplayed Christmas song on a repetitive loop in a shopping mall.

I left the post office and took my package up under my arm, trying to keep my face as close to my jumper as possible and away from the icy chill on the long walk back home. The more I walked though, the angrier I got. When I got to Sea Cottage and saw that Stuart's car was now there, I thought,
right,
that's it.

When I got into the garden I heard the sound of the radio and followed it to the little shed, where Stuart kept his gardening equipment, along with an old, worn leather sofa and his Xbox, which since we moved down here seemed to have grown a layer of dust as, even in near winter, a smallholder's job was never done. I found him with his feet beside a heater, a scarf wrapped around his head, humming along to the sounds of the Rolling Stones.

His brown eyes were barely conspicuous above the thick wool of his brown and green tweed scarf, while he sat with a protractor and a pencil, and pored over what looked like self-made blueprints.

‘Hi,' I said, rather brusquely. Generally the sight of him here would have melted my heart, but today I was immune.

‘A sun dial,' he said in return. ‘See here...' he added, pointing to a really old book from the library with ancient-looking French-styled gardens. ‘This is how the old masters laid out their gardens to get in more light... They used nature as borders to shelter out the worst of the battling winds, including the mistral, that really vicious wind that sweeps down southern France, which is no joke apparently. I was chatting to Tomas, and it got me thinking that I could apply some of these measures here, give or take a few modifications for sea and our weather...'

‘That's great...' I said with little enthusiasm.

He looked up at my short tone. ‘You okay, love?' he asked.

‘No. No, I... I don't think I am, actually.'

He looked suddenly worried. ‘Is it... the baby?'

I shook my head. ‘No, the baby is fine. Were you offered vice presidency of the Red Agency? And did you decide never to tell me?'

He turned pale.

‘Ivy... what?'

‘Is it true?'

He blinked once, twice. ‘Ivy, where has this come from?'

‘Just tell me,' I said, my jaw clenched.

His face grew tight. ‘The Terrorist,' he said, not a question, just a statement of undeniable fact. Like the sun rising in the west, and the tides going in and out, his mother could always be relied upon to not leave anything well alone.

‘My
mother
,' he spat, eyes darkening.

I closed my eyes. So he had deliberately kept it from me. Why?

‘Why did you keep it a secret?' I asked, trying, yet failing to keep my voice steady. ‘Why would you just decide to keep that from me?'

‘I'm going to kill her,' he said through gritted teeth, digging out his phone from the pocket of his jeans.

I snatched the phone out of his hand. ‘No, you're going to explain to me why you didn't tell me about it first, and why I had to hear it from your mother. Why she seemed to think that I was responsible for killing not one but two of your dreams.'

He looked shocked. ‘She said
that
?'

I gave him a tight smile. ‘Not exactly. She phoned to tell me that I shouldn't give up on having a baby when you'd given me everything I wanted. Which isn't exactly fair as you told me that you wanted to move down here and start a new life too. But thanks for making me look like the completely selfish one, that was great,' I said, with dripping scorn. ‘Please explain. Why. Did. You. Keep. It. From. Me?' I demanded.

He looked up at the ceiling boards, leant back in his chair and sighed. Then, shoving his hands into his hair in annoyance or frustration, or both, he gazed back at me and shook his head slowly. ‘It just didn't matter. You were so excited. It meant we could finally move to Cornwall... what we'd been talking about for years. And Dr Tam said that once we were more relaxed, we'd probably have a better chance of having a baby... which was true, it seemed a small sacrifice. David Mortimer – the Red Agency's CEO – understood.'

‘Oh, the CEO of the Red Agency understood, did he? But obviously, not your wife? I had no say... It was just fine for me to be the selfish one, the one whose dreams could come true, while yours didn't?'

Stuart's eyes widened. ‘It wasn't like that, Ivy... it wasn't selfish, it's what you'd always wanted. So I found a new dream, here with you, and now we're finally going to have a baby – even Dr Harris said that she thought the move was one of the biggest reasons it has finally happened.'

I looked at him. ‘And if it hadn't have worked out... if I hadn't have fallen pregnant, what then? Would the sacrifice that you never needed to have taken been small then?'

He frowned. ‘I didn't marry you so that we could have children, Ivy. Obviously, if it didn't happen I'd have been disappointed, but I would have got over it, and anyway it worked, didn't it?'

Not
the right thing to have said.

I shook my head, furious. ‘Yes, you'd be the one allowed to “get over it” while I'd be the monster who dashed all your dreams, and as far as your mother is concerned couldn't even be bothered to keep trying to have a child. You couldn't even give me the chance to have a say in what may have been best for both of us. I was absolutely fine living in London...'

‘No, you weren't,' he said flatly. ‘You wanted to come home, you always spoke about it.'

‘So what! People speak about things like that all the time, it didn't mean we had to do it! Despite what your mother seems to think, I'm well accustomed to being an adult and not getting every bloody thing I desire. It's give and take, isn't it? Except, of course, not when it comes to me and my “child-like” nature, is it? Where you just get to be the one who makes all the noble sacrifices.'

It wasn't fair to throw Genevieve's words at him, I knew it. But still, perhaps there was some measure of truth in it – particularly in the way Stuart was treating me. You kept information like that from a child, not from your partner. I didn't enjoy the fact that somehow, after everything we had faced, Stuart saw me as someone who could or should be infantalised.

His face paled. ‘What? Ivy? It wasn't like that! I just thought that it wasn't the right time to take up the job... You, we, wanted to really try for a baby, and I didn't want to be the one signing us up for potentially never having children as a result.'

I pursed my lips. ‘It wasn't a binary issue, Stuart. People make these things work all the time. You might have been busy, but you would have been happy, which as Dr Harris said, if you remember, was the major reason she thought that it had finally worked... because we weren't stressed. She said that it wasn't because we moved to Cornwall, precisely. But no, you were so sure that I'd have chosen this path for us,' I said, my arms waving to indicate Sea Cottage. ‘Did you ever consider that just maybe I never wanted to be the one who made you “just get over” your dreams? That actually I'd much rather be the sort of person who helped make yours come true as well?'