Reluctantly Home(3)

‘It’s just my work name, Dad,’ said Pip, anxious not to get caught up in the discussion around what she called herself yet again. She had tried to get her parents to call her Rose when she first came back to Suffolk. Her mother had made an effort initially, but had given up. Her father, however, seemed tickled by the suggestion and still wouldn’t let it drop.

‘Pip was christened with two names,’ said her mother patiently. ‘It’s up to her which one she chooses to use.’

Pip gave her a grateful smile, but she had already turned away and Pip glimpsed the tail of her hurt look as it crossed her face.

‘Well, I still can’t see what’s wrong with Pip,’ her father muttered under his breath.

Pip thought she could sense Jez staring at her, but she ignored him. She didn’t need him judging her on top of everything else.

The men finished their breakfast, the chairs scraping across the tiled floor as they pushed them away from the table. After one last, noisy slurp of his tea, Jez took his plate and mug and placed them neatly by the sink, ready to be washed. Her father kissed her mother on the cheek and then they were gone to put their boots back on and head out to the fields.

Pip pulled a tea towel from where it was hanging on the Aga and began to dry the dishes her mother had already washed. She stacked them neatly in the cupboards, moving around the kitchen instinctively, although it hadn’t been her home for a third of her life. It was disheartening how easily she’d slipped back into life on the farm. She’d spent ten years trying to escape the place, had grabbed hold of her dreams and turned them into reality, and yet now she was right back where she’d started, helping out in a charity shop and having her breakfast burned by her mother.

Her mother was busy decanting eggs from a bucket into cardboard egg boxes. The family had always sold what they couldn’t eat by way of an honesty box at the end of the farm track, and as a child, taking the little key down to the road, opening the coin box and emptying its contents into her waiting hands had been a highlight of Pip’s week. Sometimes she had been allowed to keep a coin or two to buy sweets or a comic from the corner shop. More than once her friends had encouraged her to syphon off a little of the egg money for themselves, assuring her that her parents would ‘never know’, but Pip had always refused. Partly, she liked to think, this was to do with the inherent integrity that had steered her towards a career in the law. Truthfully, however, she could never be sure that her mother wouldn’t know exactly how much should be in the box and catch her stealing. A fear of being caught and causing disappointment was the greatest deterrent of all.

‘Will Dominic be coming this weekend?’ her mother asked, without looking up from her task.

The question was lightly posed, but Pip could hear a thread of tension in her voice.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, even though she wasn’t expecting him to come. ‘He’s very busy, Mum. You don’t get to be a QC by sitting around on your backside, you know.’

‘No,’ her mother said quickly. ‘No. I’m sure you don’t.’

Pip was pretty sure her mother didn’t know that QC stood for Queen’s Counsel, nor what a prestigious position that was to hold, but she had given up trying to explain how the bar worked a long time ago.

‘And his diary is full with non-work stuff, too, things that I would have been doing if I wasn’t stuck up here. You do realise, Mum, that we’re big news, Dominic and me? We get invited to all kinds of events, parties, shows, gallery openings. You name it. He can’t just drop all that because I’m not there to go with him.’ Pip sounded petulant, childish, but she didn’t care.

‘No, no, of course not,’ said her mother. ‘But you have been quite ill, Pip. I’d have thought he’d try to make a little bit more of an effort to come and see you. I hear him ring sometimes . . .’

Pip bristled. Did she have no privacy, even with her mobile? It was like being a teenager and having to sit on the stairs to use the landline whilst her mother earwigged.

‘. . . but a phone call isn’t the same as actually coming to visit.’

But she knew her mother was right. Dominic’s trips to the farm had tailed off, and she missed him, missed the glimpse that he gave her of her old life. And when they did speak, she could feel him floating further away with every conversation. He seemed to struggle to find a connection with her when she wasn’t in London, as if a link in the chain that held them together had broken. He told her his news, but when she had almost nothing to say in return, the conversation fell flat. Pip knew she should trust that everything would work itself out when she got back home to London, but that was getting harder to do with each passing week.

‘No. Well, sometimes we all just have to make do with what we’ve got,’ Pip snapped.

Her mother seemed to recoil at the sharpness of her tone, and she felt guilty. Again. It wasn’t her mother’s fault she was in this situation, so it was hardly fair to take it out on her, but somehow Pip just couldn’t help it.

‘Are you going into the shop today?’ her mother asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper. She didn’t look up as she brushed a little straw and mud off the last of the eggs and popped it into a box.

Pip muttered a yes. What else would she be doing?

‘Audrey says you’re doing very well. I bumped into her in the Co-op yesterday.’