Page 30 of Sunset at Embthwaite Farm
Harriet was sliding scones off a griddle pan on top of the Rayburn; as Anna came into the kitchen, she gave her a swift glance before looking away again, back to the scones. Fred, from his usual position in front of the Rayburn, lifted his head and thumped his tail once or twice in greeting.
“You’re an expert at stepping around dear old Fred,” Anna remarked to Harriet as she stooped to pat the dog’s head. “What are the scones for?”
“Afternoon at the hotel. Quinn wants three deliveries a week.”
“Wow, you’re really taking on a lot, aren’t you?” Anna exclaimed, pleased for her. “Well done, Harriet. That’s wonderful.”
Another quick glance from her daughter; Anna couldn’t tell how she was feeling. In a moment of confidence, she decided to grasp the nettle. For too long, she’d waited for her daughters to ask questions, make overtures. She hadn’t wanted to press, or maybe she’d felt as if she didn’t have the right to force anything, and so she’d always acted the supplicant, silently begging for the scraps of their attention.
Not today.
“I know Rachel told you we should talk,” she stated carefully as she sat down at the table and folded her hands in front of her. “It might be that we should have talked about all this before. But I said something to her that I want to say to you, just so you understand where I was coming from, when I left all those years ago.”
Harriet finished sliding the scones off the pan and then moved it off the Rayburn and closed its lid. “All right,” she replied neutrally, and Anna was grateful she was being so even-tempered about it all. Rachel sat opposite Anna, and Harriet took the seat at the end. They both waited expectantly.
Anna decided she might as well rip the plaster off. “I told Rachel that your father was in love with another woman,” she stated baldly. Rachel gave a little nod while Harriet’s jaw dropped.
“What…”
“I found out about her a year after we got married, when I’d just had Rachel.”
“You mean…they were having anaffair?” Rachel asked, and Anna almost laughed. What had her daughter thought she’d meant, when she’d said Peter was in love with another woman? That he’d gazed longingly at her photograph every night before bed?
“Yes,” she confirmed. “They were.”
“But Dad never went anywhere,” Harriet protested. She didn’t sound disbelieving, just confused. “How could he have had an affair?”
“He didn’t go anywheremuch,” Anna agreed, “but he did go to the livestock market in Selby almost every month.”
“What are you saying?” Rachel asked. “That’s where he first met her?”
“He knew her before we were married,” Anna explained. She was surprised to realise reciting these facts didn’t hurt her anymore, although they still made her feel sad. “He proposed to her, actually, I found out later, before he met me, but she’s a farmer herself and she didn’t want to leave her farm for his. He didn’t want to leave his for hers, so they ended it. He met me a few months later, and we had a whirlwind romance. I think I was the opposite from her in just about every way, from what I’ve gathered, and of course I didn’t have a farm myself, so there was no problem there.”
She fell silent, remembering howenchantedPeter had seemed with her, at the start. She’d realised later it was because she’d been so naïve, so thrilled with the idea of the farm, the moors, thelife. So different from Ruth, who had been completely self-sufficient and hadn’t wanted to fit herself into someone else’s life at all. Anna, meanwhile, had been doing backbends to make it happen.
“I can’t believe it,” Harriet said, her voice hollow. “So, Dad was…what, visiting this woman every month in Selby?”
Anna nodded. “Something like that.”
“How did you find out about it?” Rachel asked, and she sighed in memory.
“In the most unlikely way, really—from an old school friend who had come to our wedding. She saw your father with—with her out in York. She’d been there for a holiday, and she walked up to him. He went completely red, apparently, and blustered something about how he was visiting a friend. She felt she had to tell me.”
“And did you confront him?” Harriet asked. She had the hushed tone of someone who was listening to a fascinating story and maybe that was what it seemed like—nothing more than a story, and certainly very little to do with the man upstairs in bed, barely tethered to this life.
“Yes, I did. I was heartbroken and furious, plus sleep-deprived and emotional from having a newborn, and so I burst into tears when I told him what I’d found out. He didn’t deny it.” She paused. “To be honest, he didn’t even apologise. He just said he’d always loved her, and he had room in his life for both of us.”
“What!” Rachel smacked the table with the palm of her hand, half-rising in indignation.
Anna smiled faintly. “Would you really expect your father to be any different, Rachel? The funny thing is, I could almost see his point. He’d chosen me…mostly. He only went to Selby once a month, sometimes not even that. He told me he would never leave me, especially not with you in the picture, Rachel. In his own way, your father was a family man. So, the end result was, I had to like it or lump it.”
“But couldn’t you have left?” Harriet asked quietly. “You’d only been married a few months…”
“I thought about it,” Anna admitted. “And in some ways, it was as much pride as practicality that kept me where I was. My parents had warned me not to marry him, and I didn’t want to prove them right. But there were also the facts to consider—I had a newborn baby, and I was more or less estranged from my parents at the time. I’d never held down a proper job. I had no money. And,” she admitted fairly, “whether you can believe or not, I still loved him. I convinced myself that eventually, I’d be enough for him, but I never was.”
“Are you saying he kept up this affair the whole time?” Harriet demanded. “All those years? And we never knew?”
Rachel leaned back in her chair. “So much makes so much sense now,” she murmured, shaking her head, and Anna suspected she was thinking about how unhappy she’d seemed, so much of the time.
