A Question of Guilt(2)

I couldn’t help wondering if I was irritating him too. There was an impatience in his manner, as if he blamed me for what had happened – and perhaps he did. He hadn’t wanted me to take the skiing holiday at all and I knew he didn’t think I should have ventured off-piste. He’d said so often enough. Foolhardy, he’d called it.

‘Surely there must have been weather warnings?’ he’d said. Weather warnings loomed large in his life as a pilot. ‘Surely you checked?’

‘Of course I did. I’m not stupid.’ I sounded petulant, I knew. Being incapacitated and in more or less constant pain wasn’t doing much for my temper, however hard I tried to remain positive.

Tim’s expression told me he wasn’t altogether sure he agreed.

‘The trouble with you, Sally, is that you don’t always stop to think about the consequences of your actions. When you get an idea in your head, you do tend to jump in with both feet.’

‘Not any more,’ I retorted ruefully. ‘Not with a metal pin in my leg and a plaster cast.’

‘That,’ Tim said, ‘is a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

‘Oh, give it a rest Tim, please! We can’t all be perfect like you.’ I snapped. And immediately felt guilty and miserable. I wasn’t the only one affected by this. It wasn’t a lot of fun for Tim either. And however much I might protest that I’d taken all the right precautions, that the avalanche was a fluke and I hadn’t been the only one caught out that day, I still felt like a naughty child who’d brought all her troubles on herself by her disobedience, and inconvenienced everyone else into the bargain.

‘The best thing would be for you to go home for a while, until you’re stronger and more mobile,’ Tim said, and I knew he was right.

Twelve years ago I’d been only too ready to leave; the family farm on the outskirts of a small country town, which my father ran himself with the help of just one regular farmhand in winter and some casual local labour in summer, had felt like a prison when I was eighteen. Now, battered and bruised mentally as well as physically, I longed for peace and tranquillity and the time and space to consider my future. I looked forward to Mum fussing over me, cooking the delicious meals I’d sorely missed, putting hot water bottles in my bed, bringing me a mug of warm milk with a tot of whisky in it. I thought nostalgically of cows in the lane, jostling as they were driven in for milking, instead of city streets with nose-to-tail traffic. And I pictured the night sky inky black and studded with stars instead of the orange street-light glow I’d grown used to.

‘It would be the answer, wouldn’t it?’ I said.

Mum had offered, of course, when she and Dad had come to visit me in hospital, but I hadn’t been quite ready then to sacrifice my independence. Now I was. And the fact that Tim seemed pretty relieved at the thought of getting shot of me and the difficulties I was causing him made up my mind.

I went home to Rookery Farm, Stoke Compton, ensconced in the rear seat of Dad’s comfortable 4 x 4 and for the first few weeks it was heaven on earth, balm for my battered body and soul. But as I began to get better the rural idyll began to pall, and I found myself remembering just why I’d been so keen to leave in the first place.

I missed my job as a reporter on a regional daily; I missed my friends; I missed the hum of the city; I even missed arguing with Tim. I was going crazy with boredom – there’s a limit to how much daytime television you can take – and I was even fed up with reading, though it had been such a luxury in the beginning. When I moaned about it to him on the phone, Tim suggested I should use the time to try to do some freelance journalism, maybe a magazine article instead of the hard news that was my bread and butter when I was at work, and I did toy with the idea. But I couldn’t think of a single thing to write about. Nothing ever seemed to happen in Stoke Compton; I couldn’t imagine editors falling over themselves to buy pieces on Mum’s WI meetings, or the price of animal feed, and the same torpor that was driving me crazy seemed to have sapped my ability to think outside the frame.

And then fate took a hand.

It was a wet February day when rain was pouring down relentlessly from a leaden sky. The gusting wind threw it in angry flurries against the windows and roared like a dragon in the chimneys. Last year’s leaves lay in sodden piles in the farmyard, mixed with filthy bits of straw and silage and the gateway leading to the lane was ankle-deep with churned-up mud. There was no way I could take my usual constitutional – a short walk to exercise my leg and try to get some strength back into the muscles – and I was feeling even more fed up than usual.