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‘I wish she had told me,’ she said. There were so many things her mother had never said, so much she would never understand.
‘Why would she? You were only a bairn. She wouldn’t have wanted you to know she’d given us up for you. You were always scared of me, I remember that.’
‘You and my mam. I don’t … were you in love with her, Peter?’
He turned away, hiding his eyes, looking up to the fells. ‘I loved her, she loved me, but she loved you more.I could never forgive her for that — nor you. Jen always said one day, when I had children of my own, I’d understand what she had to do. But without her, I was never going to have kids, was I?’
‘Because of me?’
‘Oof. Well, it weren’t your fault,’ he said, stopping to lean on an old wooden gate which looked down over the valley towards the cottage, the farm and the rest of the valley and the village beyond. Everything was lit by a golden haze of an early summer morning, and the birds were singing louder than ever. ‘You were too young to understand. You didn’t like me. I remember, sometimes, in a morning when you came down for your breakfast and there I was, sat at the table with your mam —’
‘You weren’t bringing the milk those days, were you?’ She understood with sudden clarity, leaning on the gate beside him, the old ridges of the wood warm beneath the skin of her forearms. ‘You’d been there all night.’
‘Sometimes I brought the milk in the mornings so I could see your mam. Once or twice maybe I’d been there all night with her, but not often. Problem is, the older you got, the more you noticed and the more you noticed the less happy you were.’
‘Like Oliver. He didn’t like you kissing his dad!’ Harry helpfully commented, climbing onto the gate beside them. ‘That’s just like you!’
‘Come on, Harry. Down off the gate,’ she suggested.
‘He’s alright there, aren’t you, lad?’
‘Yeah. I can climb really high.’
‘As long as Mr. Thompson says it’s okay. I don’t want you to damage his gate.’
‘I won’t,’ he assured them, and proceeded to climb up and over the gate, and then back again as the adults talked.
‘I don’t think you ever saw us together. She made sure we were careful.’
‘What happened in the end?’
‘She said it couldn’t go on. We had those few summers, living in the here and now, and they were good ones, but we couldn’t look for anything more, that’s what she reckoned. No future, you see. You weren’t happy, and she had to put you first. She didn’t want you to have to grow up here in the back of beyond. Folks were more old-fashioned out here in them days. She worried things might have been said. It wouldn’t have been easy.’
‘Because she was a single mum? Or because my dad was black?’
Peter didn’t answer her question. ‘Made no difference to me, like. I loved her, and if we’d’ve wed, you’d’ve been my lass just as much as if you were my own. Ah, that’s all water under the bridge. Jen left at the end of that last holiday, and she never came back. I never saw her again, and now I never will. I thought about her all the time, wondered where she was, how she was doing, but never thought I’d hear of her ever again. We agreed it was for the best, and we had to get on with our lives. Then one day you turn up, out of the blue, with your son and your man in his campervan.’
‘He’s not my man. We’re just friends.’
‘Ay, well, whatever you say. Don’t you make the same mistake I did. Don’t you let them lads come between the pair of you.’
‘It’s difficult,’ she said. There was a long silence between them.
‘Did your mam … Did she ever find anyone else?’ he asked, at last.
‘It was always just the two of us. Just her and me. She said she didn’t want anyone else.’
Peter nodded.
‘I guess I can understand that. Your mam loved you very much.’
‘She must have done to give all this up for me. Was there ever anyone else for you?’
He shook his head brusquely.
‘Never looked for anyone else, not after that. Jen was the only one. Never wanted another woman, only ever her. Now, I’m headed up to the sheep pens. That’s enough of that. Work to be done, sheep to be sheared.’
He turned his back without any pleasantries and stomped away from them, up towards the footpath to the foot of the crags. He sounded as gruff and grumpy as ever, but she realised there was more to it as he turned abruptly away from them and headed up towards the fells. There had been tears in his eyes.
