Now, though, as she stood there holding something Dominic had once touched, she couldn’t help but bring him to mind. It wasn’t that she missed him, exactly – she probably wouldn’t have spoken to him since his visit anyway as their contact had dwindled to almost nothing recently – but there was a sadness there that he was gone, that that part of her life was over. But it was like she was in a theatre watching someone playing her life out on the stage in front of her, rather than living through it herself. Objectively, it was a very great shame that her relationship with a man she thought she loved had broken down and come to nothing, but it felt as if it was happening to someone else. She could see that it was upsetting and that she should feel dejected and disconsolate, but actually she didn’t feel anything. The wiring inside her just wasn’t joined up properly any more. Maybe it never would be again.
She had extracted a stamp and stuck it firmly in the corner of the envelope. Then she dropped the business card in the bin.
Later, she and her mother were working side by side in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. As a teenager, Pip had prompted many an argument by complaining about the gender-stereotypical way her parents ran the farm. Now, though, she could see that even though her father did labour in the fields whilst her mother tended to hearth and home, this arrangement actually served them very well. They were a team. Her father could not work as well as he did on the farm without her mother providing him with hearty meals, clean clothes and a safe, warm home to come back to, and without the money her father earned, her mother would have to look for work elsewhere, which would prevent her from running the house. On top of that, each of them was happy with their allocated tasks and wouldn’t have wanted to do either what the other did, or, indeed, anything else. Gender-defining though the arrangement was, their lives were symbiotic, each one vital to the well-being of the other. It was a true partnership.
Being happy with your lot, Pip thought, now there was a concept she had struggled with over the years, but she was starting to see that perhaps there was more to it than she had given her parents credit for. Before the accident she had been dismissive of what she had seen as their narrow vision of the world. Their apparent lack of ambition had always frustrated her, but now she wondered whether what she had always seen as a weakness could actually be more of a strength.
‘Did you have a nice drink with Jez?’ her mother asked as she scrubbed mud from the carrots, passing them to Pip to peel and chop for the pot. ‘That’s twice you’ve been out now, isn’t it?’
The question was innocently asked, Pip knew, but she baulked at it. Her default setting as a teenager had always been to guard any information about her life preciously, but what harm could it possibly do to share her thoughts with her mother now – or even then, for that matter?
‘Yes, although tonight’s was a bit spur of the moment,’ she said. ‘It was lovely to chat, though. He hasn’t changed a bit. I’m not sure why I left it so long to talk to him, to be honest.’
‘You’ve had a lot to deal with,’ her mother said simply.
‘And he’s getting married?’ Pip continued, anxious to make light of the news before her mother mentioned it. ‘You never said.’
‘Didn’t I?’ replied her mother casually. ‘I must have forgotten.’
Pip could see straight through her mother’s attempts at insouciance.
‘I was never going to marry Jez, Mum,’ she laughed, although a tiny part of her was still smarting at his announcement.
‘You could have done a lot worse,’ her mother replied. ‘He’s a good man.’
Pip thought of the trouble she and Jez sought out when they were young, something her mother had either forgotten or had never known of in the first place. Or perhaps she was just choosing to overlook that, now Pip was very firmly on the shelf and Jez was about to tie the knot.
‘Jez and I would never have worked,’ she said. ‘In fact, we’d have been disastrous together.’ She had been aiming for confident, but her voice sounded closer to wistful. ‘What’s she like, anyway, the fiancée? Have you met her?’
‘Teresa? Oh yes. She’s very . . .’ Her mother paused, and Pip knew that she was searching for a way to express her doubts without being critical. ‘Very . . . confident.’
Pip smiled to herself. Pushy, then.
‘I think there’s money there,’ her mother added, in that way that she talked about people she considered socially superior to her and that Pip had always hated. ‘Jez has never said, but there’s something about the way she holds herself. You can tell. And her clothes. I think she’s quite posh.’