Selected Stories

Robert went away. He didn’t look for Teresa to tell her about the conversation. Every year at this time he erected a corral where his ewes paddled through a trough of disinfectant. They crowded it now, while he remembered his half-hearted protestations and Connie’s unsatisfactory responses. ‘Oh, come on, come on! Get on with it!’ Impatient with his sheep, as he had not been with his daughter, he wondered if Connie hated him. He had felt she did, although nothing like it had showed, or had echoed in her voice.

From the roof she saw a car she’d never seen before, and guessed why it had come. In one of the drawers of the rickety Welsh dresser she’d found a shopping list and thought she remembered its being lost. Ironing starch. Baking powder, she’d read.

The car that had come was parked in the yard when she came down from the roof. A man was standing beside it. He referred to the furniture that was to be sold, as Connie had thought he might.

‘Anyone around?’ he asked her.

He was a big red-faced man in shirtsleeves. He’d thought he’d never find the house, he said. He asked her if he was expected, if this was the right place, and she wanted to say it wasn’t, but Teresa came out of the house then.

‘Go and get your father,’ she said, and Connie nodded and went to where she’d seen him from the roof.

‘Don’t sell the furniture,’ she begged instead of saying the man had come.

One night, when the wedding was five days away, Teresa drove over to the farm. About to go to bed, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep and wrote a note for Melissa, saying where she was going. It was after half past one and if there hadn’t been a sign of life at the farm she would have driven away again. But the lights were on in the big drawing-room and Robert heard the car. He’d been drinking, he confessed as he let Teresa in.

‘I don’t know how to make sense to her,’ he said when they’d embraced. Without asking, he poured her some whiskey. ‘I don’t know what to do, Teresa.’

‘I know you don’t.’

‘When she came to stand beside me while I was milking this afternoon, when she didn’t say anything but I could hear her pleading, I thought she was possessed. But later on we talked as if none of all this was happening. She laid the table. We ate the trout I’d fried. We washed the plates up. Dear Teresa, I can’t destroy the childhood that is left to her.’

‘I think you’re perhaps a little drunk.’

‘Yes.’

He did not insist that there must be a way; and knowing what frightened him, Teresa knew there wasn’t. She was frightened herself while she was with him now, while wordlessly they shared the horrors of his alarm. Was some act, too terrible for a child, waiting in the desolation of despair to become a child’s? They did not speak of what imagination made of it, how it might be, nurtured in anger’s pain, in desperation and betrayal, the ways it might become unbearable.

They walked on the avenue, close to one another in the refreshing air. The sky was lightening, dawn an hour away. The shadows of danger went with them, too treacherous to make chances with.

‘Our love still matters,’ Teresa whispered. ‘It always will.’

A calf had been born and safely delivered. It had exhausted him: Connie could tell her father was tired. And rain that had begun a week ago had hardly ceased, washing his winter seeding into a mire.

‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ he said.

He knew what she was thinking, and he watched her being careful with the plates that were warming in the oven, careful with the coffee she made, letting it sit a moment. Coffee at suppertime was what he’d always liked. She heated milk and poured it from the saucepan.

The bread was sawn, slices waiting on the board, butter beside them. There were tomatoes, the first of the Blenheims, the last of the tayberries. Pork steak browned on the pan.

It was not all bleakness: Robert was aware of that. In moments like the moments that were passing now, and often too at other times, he discerned in what had been his daughter’s obduracy a spirit, still there, that was not malicious. In the kitchen that was so familiar to both of them, and outside in the raw cold of autumn when she came to him in the fields, she was as events had made her, the recipient of a duty she could not repudiate. It had seemed to her that an artificial household would demand that she should, and perhaps it might have.

Robert had come to understand that; Teresa confessed that nothing was as tidy as she’d imagined. There were no rights that cancelled other rights, less comfort than she’d thought for the rejected and the widowed, no fairness either. They had been hasty, she dared to say, although two years might seem a long enough delay. They had been clumsy and had not known it. They had been careless, yet were not careless people. They were a little to blame, but only that.