Breakdown (27 page)

Yes, I know all about nightmares.

“I looked into other things,” Jon went on. “No openings here in Hurleigh. The bus costs too much to get a job in Frome or Bath. And I don’t want to get a flat by myself.” He shrugged. “So I work on the farm. There’s plenty to do. I don’t hate it.”

“Would you do something else if it were closer? What would you do?”

“I don’t know. What about you? I can’t see you loving farming, but you’ve been at it for the better part of a year, haven’t you?”

Chris had to think about that. Would he have stayed so long in Breton if not for Pauline? If it was only a matter of helping out with the work and nothing else? He remembered the satisfaction he’d got from working alongside others in a community and seeing the crops greening the fields.

“I like farming,” he said.

Jon went back to the beans. “What about music? Do you ever wish you could do that again?”

“No. What use is it now?”

“You were good at it.”

“I was lucky at it.”

“You loved it. You kept at it after you left for New York.”

Chris sighed. “It’s all I knew. I had connections, and I was good enough. But it’s not who I am anymore. Everything is different. My definition of what’s important has changed.” He straightened and caught Jon’s eye.

“You’ve given it up, then? Forever?”

Chris pulled a face. “Bookings might be hard to come by, don’t you think?”

Apparently, Jon didn’t want to let it go. “Those were some of the best times of my life.” He continued to stare at Chris.

Chris didn’t remember it that way. He remembered worry and the nearly unbearable stress. “It kinda screwed up your life, didn’t it? I know it screwed up mine.”

Jon narrowed his eyes, and Chris thought he might bring up Brian, but he didn’t. They both went back to picking.

“Do you do road crew?” Chris asked, remembering why Brian wasn’t home.

“Sure, everyone does, in rotation. There’s a hard day’s work. Hell, I used to come home from a ‘hard’ day at the office. I’d have driven clients around to see properties, sat at the computer for a couple hours, made some phone calls. And I thought I was tired.”

“Is there a pub in town?” Chris asked to change the subject.

“Yeah, the Ram. The beer is good.”

“They had great beer in Breton.”

“I’ll take you, when your restrictions are over.”

After lunch, they walked around the grounds of the house. Jon pointed out the solar panels on the roof, showed him the greenhouse with its rows of vegetables, the well house, the garage. They went into the barn.

“That’s a nice tractor,” Chris said. He climbed up to check out the enclosed cab. He supposed it always started with a quick turn of the key and never leaked oil from degraded seals. “George would love this.”

When he jumped down, Jon was watching him with the unsettled expression Chris had seen on his face a few times already.

“What?”

“Hell, you’ve changed,” Jon said. He didn’t smile.

“Everything’s changed. But I’m still your brother.”

“We should get back to work.”

Jon worked several rows away for the rest of the afternoon.

CHAPTER 23

P
reston came to tell them it was nearly teatime.

“Mum says you should wash and put on a clean shirt.”

“I’ll have to borrow another,” Chris said to Jon. But when he went up to his room, he found his laundry neatly folded on his bed. He took his turn in the loo and went downstairs.

“You have to let me fold my own laundry,” he said to Fiona, who was whipping cream in the kitchen.

She grinned at him. “We all have our jobs about the place. You’ll settle in.”

He gave her a stern look, but she only reached her foot out to nudge him.

Chris figured he could worry about laundry some other time. He looked over the plates of food on the table. “This looks amazing.”

Laura came in from the sitting room. “Shall I put the water on to boil?”

“Yes, I think we’re about ready,” Fiona said to her, testing the consistency of her whipped cream. “Brian’s not back yet, but let’s get started anyway.”

“Brian’s not here?” Chris said.

“He’s usually back by tea. I suspect he stopped off at the pub. He knew we had a tea planned. After the way he acted last night, it would serve him right to miss out.”

Laura picked up a plate of cakes and gave Chris a glance as she carried them out to the sitting room.

“Can we wait for him?” Chris said.

Fiona straightened up and met his eye. “If you like.”

“There’s no point in punishing him,” Chris said in a low voice as he heard the boys thumping down the stairs. “I don’t want to make it all worse.”

“Of course.” Fiona smiled and turned as the boys came into the kitchen. “Boys, run out to the gate and look for Daddy on the road. Tell him to hurry; we’re waiting.”

Vivian came in from the sitting room. “Is Brian late?”

“Of all days,” Fiona said. “Oh, good, that’s the bowl I wanted for this cream.”

Chris left them to the last preparations and went into the sitting room. Alan was already there, in one of the big chairs, with his foot propped up on an ottoman.

“Did you hurt your foot?”

“Last year. It still gives me trouble sometimes. I rest it when I can.”

Jon came in from the stairs. “Here’s aspirin,” he said and put the pills into Alan’s hand.

“I’ve got something stronger, if you need it,” Chris said. They looked at him with raised eyebrows.

Simon came in and said, “Stronger than the tea?”

“No, pain pills. I found them on the way here. In the same house as the tea,” Chris explained.

“It’s not that bad,” Alan said. “But thanks.”

“They’re available, should the need arise,” Chris said to all three of them.

“Where was this house?” Jon asked.

“Three or four days from here,” Chris said. “I forget exactly, but I marked it on my map. It seemed nearly untouched.”

“At all?” Simon said with disbelief in his voice.

Laura and Vivian both came in carrying plates of tea cakes. “What was untouched?” Laura asked. They set the plates on a table off to the side of the room with the rest of the tea things.

“A house. Where I found the tea. They’d been living in it since the Bad Winter, that was clear. Oil lamps and candles. All the electric stuff moved out. But they’d been dead well over a year, I figure.”

“How could you tell?” Vivian asked.

Chris blinked. He unexpectedly relived that moment when he’d opened the bedroom door, and his gut clenched. “They were upstairs. In bed.”

For a long five seconds, no one moved or spoke.

“You don’t expect to find that, these days,” Simon said.

“No,” Chris said. “I found a bottle of scotch at the back of a cupboard. I got well and truly drunk.”

“The government hadn’t been in?” Vivian asked.

“No.”

“But doesn’t that mean that no one ever missed them? How could no one miss them?” Laura said.

Chris was sorry he’d mentioned it.

“Any sign of my errant brother yet?” Simon said, moving to a window. The others took the cue and said nothing else about the dead occupants of the house, but Laura’s expression remained troubled as she arranged plates and silverware and teacups. Vivian went back to the kitchen.

Chris moved closer to Laura. “Where’s David?”

“He went back to Frome early,” she said, and her pursed lips told Chris he had again brought up an awkward subject.

“Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut,” he muttered.

“No, it’s all right.”

“Here’s Brian,” Simon said from the window.

Soon they were loading their plates from the elegant display of food on the table. Fiona poured the tea into the delicate china cups.

“Oh, it’s been so long since we’ve used these,” she said. “Preston, don’t touch. You have one of these.” She handed him an everyday mug.

Chris stirred sugar into his tea and watched as the rest of them held their cups under their noses and made happy sounds. He tasted it when he noticed they were watching him.

“Still good,” he said, and they all grinned and sipped.

Brian kept to the other side of the room, but otherwise acted normally. Chris tried to steer the conversation away from himself when he could. He kept thinking how much Pauline would have enjoyed drinking tea from fine china and nibbling on sweet cakes in this grand room. She would have fit in, in her green gown and elegant shoes. He could see her, turning to him with a warm smile.

Fiona was watching him and raised her eyebrows. He gulped, made himself smile and nod.
Sure, I’m fine.
He concentrated on the conversation.

They all ate so much that supper was a simple affair of bread and soup.

* * *

The next morning the registrar came to the house after breakfast, a stern little man with the same attitude as the constable. Chris spent a good while sitting at the kitchen table, filling out forms and answering questions.

“Right, that should cover everything,” the man said finally, stacking up the papers. “Here’s a few odd coupons, but your official book could take some time. You can call in at the post office in a fortnight, see if it’s come in.”

“After my blood test?”

“Yes. After.” He gave Chris a look.

Jon was waiting for him outside when the registrar left.

“I’m surprised he didn’t wear a mask,” Chris said, watching him hurry off down the road. “He’ll wash his hands when he gets home.”

“I wonder if he’ll go in for another blood test?” Jon said, and they both chuckled.

“How often does the post go?” Chris asked. “I should write to them, in Breton.”
To Pauline.
“Tell them I’m all right.” Jon promised to get him some paper and envelopes.

“Look, I have to go over to the Dealy farm for a while,” Jon said. “The vet’s coming to do some inoculations. He’ll need a hand.”

“I guess I need to stay here.”

“Might be best. I’ll be an hour or so.”

“I’ll find something to do,” Chris said, and Jon went off.

Chris wandered around the grounds of the house. He thought he should probably find Fiona and ask what he could do to help, but he wanted to be alone for a little while. The boys were at school. Brian and Alan had gone off to another farm to help out in a labor-sharing arrangement the community had worked out. In a few days, men from around the town would be coming to Hurleigh House. Chris wondered if he would be expected to stay away, since he was unofficially quarantined.

Eventually, he came across Laura hanging laundry.

“Preston says you cut everybody’s hair,” Chris said.

“Would you like me to do yours?”

“You always used to. Do you think it needs it?” He smiled.

Laura cast him a look. “Oh, yes. I’ll get my scissors.”

Chris hung the last pairs of trousers from the basket while she was gone.

The sun came out. They sat on some stone steps set into a slight incline in what must have been a fancy garden at some point in time, Chris with a towel draped around his neck. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw against the feel of her fingers in his hair, trying not to remember Pauline’s fingers.

“Do you want a trim or a cut?”

“You might as well make it short.”

“You haven’t cut it in a while,” she said, snipping. “You used to keep it short.”

“Yeah.”

She cut in silence for a few moments.

“I’m sorry about Sophie and Rosie,” she said quietly. “Fiona told me.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry about Stephen.”

“Thank you.”

“Was it at the beginning?”

“Yes, he died that first winter, in January. He had volunteered at the hospital. They needed people to help, so many were getting ill. I didn’t want him to go, but he did anyway. That was before we knew what it was going to be like, of course. I tell myself that if we’d known how bad it was going to get, he would have stayed with me. Once he got ill, he just didn’t come home. They wouldn’t let me in to see him.”

“You can be proud of him, though, stepping up to help.”

Laura stopped cutting, and Chris turned his head to look at her. “It was pointless,” she said, her voice and her face hard. “They all died, and so did he. I could have been proud of him anyway. He was a good man. I’d rather have him alive.” She began snipping again, repositioning his head lightly.

“No guarantee of that, even if he didn’t try to help.”

“Simon had the right idea. Get out fast and stay away. It worked for everyone here.”

“Some people just won’t ever get it,” Chris said. “I’ve never got it. I’ve been exposed, over and over.”

“Did you volunteer?”

“No. At the beginning I was holed up in a friend’s cabin in the woods, away from everyone, for months.”

“By yourself?”

“Um, not at first. But later, yes.”

“What happened?”

Chris took a breath. “Archie went off to town to find out what was going on, and he never came back. And his girlfriend killed herself.”

Laura rested a hand on his shoulder without saying anything. Then she took up cutting again, turning his head this way and that, and the hair fell onto the towel on his shoulders. “How long were you alone?”

“I don’t know, a few months.” He thought back, but that time was jumbled in his memory, no clearer than when Pauline had asked him. He had not kept the journal for nearly a year. “I don’t remember everything.”

“My sister came to live with me,” Laura said. “She’d lost her husband—you never knew him, did you? But she got ill in the second wave, in late February. She had a job at the post office, and she was still going to work, for the paycheck, so we could eat. After that, there was no one left I knew. I went round to Brian’s house one day, I was so desperate, but they had gone. About a week later, I ran into Brian in the street, and he brought me here. Just in time. If I hadn’t chanced across him just then...well.” She paused, blew her breath out. “He was looking for Jon. Found him a couple weeks after that.” She tilted his head forward, snipped at the back of his neck.

“I guess I owe a lot to Brian,” Chris said.