She squinted. The same slight gap she remembered in the top of one of the doors let in a shaft of sunlight that, if you stood in the wrong spot, hurt your eyes. The stage was still there at the end of the barn nearest to the double doors. Harvey had built it for Barney the year before Melissa left, around the time they’d been busy making plans to move to London, perhaps travel through some of Europe together if they had enough money. Her need to leave the Cove had increased by the day and they spent hours under this roof discussing what they were going to do, what they could see, how free they would be.
In an odd way, Melissa knew she’d been more trapped by leaving – she’d shut off a part of her life that was very real because that was the only way she knew how to cope. Being here now made her question whether she’d been right to do it that way. But, then again, she’d landed the job that she’d dreamed of, that took her on all kinds of adventures, she’d met Jay and was engaged.
She brought her focus back to the here and now, crouching down in front of Barney as Harvey reappeared and began taking off the hinge on the door ready to replace it. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ He’d shut his eyes, his legs still in the shaft of sunlight coming in through the open doors.
‘Tired, that’s all.’
‘Thank you for coming out here with me. It’s still a beautiful space.’
‘You always did like it in here.’
‘We got you outside,’ she beamed. ‘Perhaps we should do little and often when it comes to exercise, we’ll get there in the end.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy.’
‘Since when have you ever given up?’ She toyed with a piece of hay she’d pulled from the bale.
‘It might be time I accepted this place is too much for me.’
‘The barn?’
‘The barn, the house, the garden.’
‘You can’t mean it…remember you have plenty of people who care and who will help.’
‘People look after themselves.’
‘Rubbish.’ She definitely had, and she didn’t miss the irony of her suggesting people did otherwise.
‘I’ve been thinking…perhaps it’s time I moved into one of those places.’
‘One of what places?’
‘For the over-seventies, you know, where there are people of my own age.’
Harvey swore when he caught his shirt on something.
‘Everything OK?’ Melissa asked.
‘Didn’t see a protruding nail, caught my shirt, that’s all.’
Most likely distracted by Barney’s comment, Melissa suspected, as Harvey got his hammer and banged the nail to blame back in again before checking the rest of the surface for anything else threatening.
Her attention back to Barney, she said, ‘You and this barn, this house, this land…well, you go together, that’s all.’
‘I’m getting old, Melissa. In one of those places I’ll be looked after.’
Harvey jumped in on the conversation, leaving Melissa in no doubt that’s what had distracted him. ‘This is crazy talk, you know that. And we’ll look after you, Barney. You’ve no worries on that score.’
‘Melissa doesn’t even live here anymore, and you have a job and a life.’
‘I won’t let you down,’ he insisted.
‘And I won’t be a stranger, I promise,’ Melissa added.
‘Time moves on, for all of us,’ Barney replied simply. ‘Maybe I need to start realising it and not live in the past.’
‘Is this why you don’t want to run the Wedding Dress Ball?’ Melissa ventured to say. ‘You think it’s living in the past?’
