The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [170]
We all looked at our hands. Even Caro had the grace to look uncomfortable.
Tim spoke first. ‘Thank you, Felicity, but there's no need. Even with the money, it's still not enough to keep us going here. We'd still have to sell up.’
I glanced at him, shocked.
‘We'd already decided that, hadn't we, darling?’ he said gently, turning to his wife. Caro didn't speak. Her face was very pale. She looked in real pain now. Suddenly I understood where all this anger had come from. And possibly been misdirected.
‘Look at me,’ he appealed to us, holding out his arms crucifix-style, his crutch hanging from his wrist. His legs, we knew without looking, were splayed from various operations. They might meet at the knees, but you could kick a football through his ankles. ‘This isn't a farmer. This isn't a man up to working the land.’
Even his wife didn't have the gall to gainsay this. Even Caro, who'd been in denial for years, kept her counsel, her eyes on the bedcover.
‘This is a man who needs a desk job,’ he finished bitterly. ‘A man who needs to stop wincing every time he goes to work in the morning. I can't do this any more.’
He limped to the window and gazed out, perhaps to hide his face. He leaned heavily on his crutch. As he stood there looking out, it occurred to me that no amount of money would have found a way around this. We all, Tim included, had fumbled and fudged our way round this for years, around what was essentially a disability. Felicity's money wouldn't have helped, and looking at Caro, I felt she knew this too. Her eyes were less bright now; no longer burning with injustice. There was a resigned inevitability about the slump of her shoulders on the pillows, as if the fight had gone out of her. I also believe, in her heart, she knew that even if Felicity had come round in a panic, waving the scrap of paper, Tim, whose call it was essentially, would have screwed it up, said – forget it, Felicity, it's not worth the paper it's written on. We can't possibly take your money on the strength of this. What's done is done; we are where we are – silencing, in one glance, the protests of his outraged wife. I don't say that simply because I know my brother, because he's a nice guy, but because it seems to me that if people behave well, it encourages others to do the same. Who knows, maybe even Caro might have been impressed; wrong-footed.
Yet when people behave badly… I looked at Felicity. She was not one I'd associate with human frailty, but fear is a powerful motivator, and once it had gripped her, once she'd found herself looking into what seemed like an abyss, her whole future dropping away from her, and once she'd given in to the vertigo, failed to rush round here, or pick up the phone, I could see how it became harder to inch towards the edge again. Much easier not to. And as the months and the years slipped by and no lightning bolt struck her from the heavens, no divine finger pinned her wriggling to the floor, as the world, in effect, revolved as usual, as she'd given her lectures, done her meals on wheels, pottered at home in her garden, as life went on, so the whole wretched business would have faded into the background. But maybe as she climbed the stairs to bed one Sunday evening, after lunch here at the farm, cooked by Caro, haggard with the perpetual motion that was her life, and maybe around the time Henry had been bullied at school and his parents had tried but failed to afford a private one for him, maybe as Tim had come in from the fields, yet again well after dusk, shattered, maybe the guilt had closed in on her then and she'd had trouble going to sleep. Maybe after all, as she'd said, it hadn't been worth it.
Footsteps padded down the corridor and the next face to pop round the door, wreathed