Page 3 of Sunset at Embthwaite Farm
“It didn’t seem to mean much to you, in the end,” Harriet tossed back, her tone caught between flippancy and jagged pain.
Anna resisted the urge to close her eyes, will it all away. Of course Harriet was lashing out. She understood that. She really did. She just wanted it to stop…eventually. “You’re very busy with your baking enterprise,” she said steadily. “And Rachel’s trying to get her own business going. I’m here, kicking around, wanting to do something. Will you let me?”
Harriet shrugged. “No one’s stopping you.”
Actually, they more or less had, always fobbing her off, telling her they could manage, taking Peter his meal trays and medication, checking on him throughout the day. That had come more from Rachel than Harriet, it was true, but there still had been a definite sense from both of them that she wasn’t needed.
“All right, then,” she said, trying for a smile, determined not to cause an argument. “I’ll take him his breakfast when he wakes.”
Harriet hesitated, and then shrugged again. “Fine. He likes a fried egg, runny in the middle, and toast with marmalade, no butter.”
Anna had to press her lips together to stop the instinctive reply.I made your father breakfast just about every morning for twenty years. I think I know what he likes.Somehow, her leaving this farmhouse all those years ago had negated, in her daughters’ eyes, all the time she’d spent in it. All the meals she’d made, the toilets she’d scrubbed, the Halloween costumes she’d sewn by hand, the birthday cakes she’d decorated, the medicine she’d doled out, the clothes she’d ironed, day after day after day. None of that counted for anything anymore.
“Great,” she replied lightly. “I’ll get started.”
“Fine,” Harriet said and, taking her tea, she left the kitchen, leaving the pot of oats on the Rayburn, untouched.
Chapter Two
Since the oatswere there, Anna made porridge, stirring it slowly, recalling all the quiet mornings she’d done just this, before the girls had got up, and Peter had been out in the barn. There had been a peacefulness to it, along with a sorrow, a sense of loss and longing she’d never, in all her marriage, been able to shake.
When the porridge was made, she tiptoed down the hall to ask Rachel if she wanted any; her daughter was sat at the dining room table, frowning at her laptop, a cup of coffee cradled in her hands.
“No thank you,” she said, all stiff politeness. “I’m good with coffee.”
Harriet must have gone back upstairs, and Anna wasn’t brave enough to beard her daughter in her bedroom. She’d leave it on the stove, she decided, and then doled out a bowl for herself, drizzling it with honey.
She ate by herself at the kitchen table, recalling the many mornings her daughters had sat with her, teasing or bickering good-naturedly while she’d savoured her second cup of coffee of the day. Invariably, Peter would have come in at some point, grunting a hello before sitting at the head of the table and waiting for her to put a plate in front of him.
She couldn’t blame Peter for who he was, Anna knew—a stoic, somewhat surly Yorkshire farmer, from a generation of men who didn’t know how to fry an egg or wield a Hoover and were most certainly not about to learn. A man who didn’tdoemotion, who thought that providing a roof over his family’s head was all that was required of him, because it was all he’d been given, and his father before him, on and on, back through the generations.
Admittedly, when they’d first met at a country fair while she’d been on holiday with some uni friends, that rugged, brooding stoicism had been attractive, even sexy—he’d been twenty years older than her, handsome in a taciturn, craggy-faced way that at twenty-one Anna had found exciting. She’d thought him a modern-day Heathcliff, and having actually readWuthering Heightslater in life, instead of just hearing about it, she wondered if that was in fact about right. The trouble was no one actually wanted to bemarriedto Heathcliff. At least she hadn’t, which she’d realised far too late.
Anna had just finished her porridge when she heard the sound of someone moving about upstairs. The heavy footfalls had to be her ex-husband rather than her daughter, and in alarm that he might be trying to get out of bed—according to Rachel, he hadn’t been able to do so without assistance since before Anna had arrived—she hurried up the stairs. Harriet poked her head out of her bedroom as Anna rounded the landing, her face alarmingly blotchy, as if she’d been crying.
Anna’s steps faltered. “Harriet—”
“Are you seeing to Dad?” Harriet asked abruptly, and Anna nodded.
“Yes—”
Her daughter shut her bedroom with a decisive click. Deciding to tackle that particular problem later, Anna hurried to the door of her old marital bedroom. She’d only been in there once since she’d arrived, and then only very briefly, and now, with her hand on the knob, she felt her heart stutter. She wasn’t sure she was ready for this.
And yet she could hear Peter moving around, sounding like a lumbering bear, and she was afraid he might fall and hurt himself if she didn’t hurry. She tapped once and then turned the knob.
“Peter?” she asked gently as she came into the room. The curtains were drawn, and she had to blink several times in the gloom before she was able to make him out—he was standing by the bed, hunched over and wearing a worn pair of pyjamas that Anna vaguely remembered from their marriage. His sparse white hair was flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, and his bushy eyebrows drew close in a scowl as he caught sight of her.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, although the words were so slurred it took Anna a few seconds to realise that was what he was saying.
“I’m here to help, Peter,” she replied quietly. She suspected, from the grumpy and confused look on his face, that he didn’t remember seeing her from before. Carefully she closed the door behind her. The room smelled stale, of sickness and medicine. Peter’s legs trembled as he flung one hand out to the bed to balance himself. “Let me help you back into bed,” Anna suggested, taking a step forward.
“Where’s Rachel?” Peter demanded querulously. “I want Rachel!”
Anna reached out to put one arm around her ex-husband; he stiffened at her touch. “Rachel’s downstairs working, Peter,” she said gently. “Let me help you—”
He flung her arm off with more force than she’d expected, so she took a stumbling step back.
“Damn it, woman, I don’t need your help!” he exclaimed in a garbled roar. “I want Rachel, because I need to take a piss!”
