AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“How often? How severe?”
Her dad shrugged irritably. “Often enough, and bad enough that I notice.”
“Have you any trouble speaking? Any slurring of speech?” She kept her gaze trained on him while he sputtered his affront.
“Slurred—! No. Of course not.”
“Any trouble walking? Tripping, stumbling, that sort of thing? Feeling a little unbalanced sometimes?” She cocked her head, smiling in sympathy.
“No,” her father said, but after a pause. Then, gruffly, “Not really.”
“So sometimes?” she pressed. “A little unsteady on your feet, perhaps?”
“A little,” he conceded, parting with the information reluctantly. “Now and again.”
“And the headaches? Are they severe enough for you to take medication?”
“Some ibuprofen, maybe. Nothing more than that.”
Rebecca put down her notepad and folded her hands in front of her. “Mr Mowbray, I’m going to recommend that you have an MRI. You’ve done very well with the questions I’ve put to you, but with some of your responses, especially in regard to your headaches and the loss of balance, I think it’s worth having a scan just to make sure.”
“Make sure of what?” her dad asked belligerently.
“Make sure everything is as it should be,” Rebecca replied, her tone briskly placating. “I’ll put you into our system now, and you’ll get a letter through the mail about your appointment, which will be in Middlesbrough.”
“Middlesbrough!” her father spluttered. It was an hour away.
“I’m afraid that’s where the closest neurology services are,” she replied with a smile. “They have a very good team there. You should receive a letter with your appointment date within the next ten days.” It was said in a kindly tone, yet was also clearly a dismissal.
As they walked out of the room, her father straightened the cuffs of his coat, a slight spring in his step. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he said, loud enough for the doctor hear. “There’s clearly nothing wrong with me.”
Chapter Four
The sun hadgone behind the clouds just as Rachel set out from the farmhouse later that afternoon. After dropping her dad back home, she realised she didn’t want to hang around waiting for Harriet to fly at her for whatever reason she’d chosen to, and so she decided to go for a walk while her dad had beat a quick retreat to the comforts of the milking parlour.
Grabbing an old, waxed jacket and a pair of well-worn welly boots from the clutter in the hall, Rachel set off across the pasture behind the house, heading up the hill towards a stand of trees she and Harriet used to play in. Not big enough to be a proper wood, but still fun, at least, to pretend to get lost in. They’d climbed trees and built dens and chased each other, weaving between the trunks, their laughter echoing through the valley.
Those days seemed a long time ago now. How many times had she come home in the last twelve years? Rachel wondered. She could count them if she tried; it was hardly a large number, and yet she was reluctant to tally the visits, afraid of what it might show about her.
During her university years, she’d come home abitmore, she recalled. Always at Christmas and usually at Easter, especially right after her mum had left; she hadn’t left Harrietquiteas high and dry as she liked to remember. The truth was, Rachel had tried to hold everyone together when she’d come home during uni, making meals for the freezer and doing a big clean of the house, jollying them along as best she could, but her father had been completely uncommunicative, and Harriet had seemed so hostile.
If you want to go, go.
Rachel still cringed inwardly at that emotional scene, the first time she’d come home after their mum had left. Harriet begging her to stay and then telling her to go, while she’d stared helplessly on.Hat, I have my exams! And you’ll be gone in just a few months, too. You just have to hold on a little while longer…Her sister had stared at her stony-faced and then walked away. Rachel had come back for Easter, yes, but not that summer, except for a couple of weeks; she’d taken an internship in London instead, which she’d felt guilty about, but it had been a good opportunity and she wasn’t even sure what the point of going home had been, when neither her sister nor her father seemed happy to have her there.
As the years had gone on, it had become easier and easier to stay away, months sliding by without a single visit. Work was always an excuse; she’d had a demanding job as an entry-level financial analyst, required to work all the hours God gave to get those necessary promotions. A handful of holiday days a year meant a trip to North Yorkshire was time-consuming and usually impossible, or at least difficult enough that Rachel only did it when she had to—a few birthdays, the time Harriet had had pneumonia, early on when she’d texted Rachel that she couldn’t cope, and Rachel had rushed back only to find her sister angry that she’d come at all. Well, what had she been supposed to do?
It had been three years since she’d last come home, though, the longest she’d been gone. It had just been so much easier, not to go. Not to face the hostility, and yes, the guilt. Harriet hadchosento stay, she reminded herself again, even if her sister always seemed to act as if she’d been heartlessly abandoned. The truth was she hadn’t been. Not exactly, anyway.
Rachel had reached the brow of the hill, huffing and puffing as she squinted out at the meadows and moors rolling to the horizon in a patchwork of yellow and green. It really was all so ridiculously beautiful, she thought on a sigh. The air was crystalline clear, the sky—for once—a lovely, bright blue. A cow lowed in the distance, the sound mournful yet also holding a certain peace. The knots between Rachel’s shoulder blades that hadn’t had a chance to loosen in Ibiza shifted, just a tiny bit, now. Away from the house, from her father’s silence and her sister’s hostility, she felt as if she could breathe.
She started along the top of the hill, following an old path through the shadowy woods, the trail familiar even though she hadn’t walked it in decades. When had she last been up here? she wondered as she breathed in the clean, earthy scents of cedar and pine. She, Harriet, and Ben had played up here all the time, an unlikely trio in some ways. Ben insisted he only played with them because there was no one else around; his own sister Izzy was five years older than him and way too cool to mess about in the woods.
Still, unlikely as they’d been as a friendship group, they’d all got along—she and Ben always competing, Harriet doing her best to keep up. Her mother, Rachel recalled, had had a dinner bell—a very loud warden’s air raid bell from the Second World War—that she rang to get them to come home. The sound of it would echo across the valley, and she and Harriet and Ben would clamber down from trees or wade through the stream on the other side of the hill, and run home, the long grass scratching their bare legs; Ben veered off at the bottom of the hill, towards the farm whose buildings Rachel could see now, peeking through the stand of trees that separated the two properties. Those had been happy days, blurred by the mists of memory. Sometimes, because of everything that came after, she forgot they’d existed at all.
Rachel came to the end of the wood and hesitated, on the brow of the hill, as she considered which way to go—straight down and cut through the Mackeys’ farm, or follow along the top to the bridlepath that led to Wood Lane and circled around before joining up with the lane that led to their two properties.
She decided on the second path. She really didn’t feel like seeing Ben, and she wasn’t sure he’d appreciate her striding through his farmyard, anyway. She hadn’t been on the Mackeys’ property since—well, she didn’t even know since when. A long time. A very long time.
