She yawned, a huge, deep chasm of a yawn that completely took her by surprise. Yes, of course she’d been up half the night, if not more, but to suddenly feel so tired really did shock her. She was used to the constant feeling she had of being utterly fatigued, but to be this weary so very early in the day was something of a new sensation.
Judging by the ever increasing light she knew it was just after dawn, but she realised she didn’t quite know what time the sun actually rose at this time of year. She’d long given up wearing her wristwatch when the batteries had worn out and she’d found that she never quite got around to getting any replacements. After a while, she’d found it quite liberating to not be constantly looking at her wrist and being a “slave to time” as she’d tried to put it when she was attempting to explain it away to Brian.
Brian, of course, had grumbled something about always having to wait for her and how she was never on time anyway so it would hardly make any difference anyway and they’d had another of their silent mealtimes.
She stood up, took a deep breath and stepped forward so that she was standing right on the edge, where the land fell steeply away to the black pointed rocks below. The seabirds were now starting their day’s activities, pecking and digging at the pools of water and abandoned kale and seaweed. One gull worried at a gap between two of the larger rocks until it victoriously dug out a large and juicy looking starfish, which immediately triggered a tussle between it and two other nearby gulls who sensed an opportunity for an easy meal.
Caterina saw all this and found that her empathies were siding with the starfish in the midst of the resulting melee. She thought that was strange. It wasn’t as if there were three different factions fighting over her or her time, but the image of that starfish, just minding its own business and getting on with its life only to be torn apart by things beyond its control, would stay with her throughout the day.
She paused, wondering for just one sad little moment quite what would happen if she just stepped forward off the cliff top, and whether it would really matter to anyone if she did, and then turned and set off back down the path towards the village and the little house she shared, or at least lived in with Brian.
Just for a few seconds she convinced herself that she might be able to slip back into bed without him ever even noticing that she wasn’t there, but then she remembered that it was already Monday morning and Brian would have been up and off well before dawn and wouldn’t be back until Friday evening. This cheered her up slightly. She could stay up here with the Alderman all day if she chose to, and not only that, it meant that another argument had been avoided or, at the very least deferred, until the weekend.
Having realised that she had all the day to herself, she considered for a guilty moment heading back to the Alderman for a little longer, but a glance at the sky rather put her off. The crisp, clear morning she’d predicted had already started to become a less likely prospect. Dark clouds had appeared from over the horizon and were beginning to tumble inland. There were already a few drops of moisture in the air and the breeze was becoming stronger.
“It’s a good job I’m not a weather forecaster,” she muttered to herself as the first light drops of rain of the day started to fall and she gathered the cardigan around her once more. Not, she realised, that there was any hope of her ever being one. Images of all those bright young girls that the “Met. Office” insisted in plastering across her TV screen all the time popped into her head and did little to improve her mood or her view of herself. Brian always seemed to be very distracted by them whenever they popped up after the news or on the “Berkfest” programmes (as he insisted on calling them) that he sometimes watched before heading out in the morning, which, of course, always made her feel just wonderful, especially as one or other of them always seemed to be visibly pregnant and flaunting her happiness to the nation.
Funnily enough, studying meteorology had been one of the things she’d thought about doing after she’d left school, but it hadn’t quite happened for her. Her exam results hadn’t quite lived up to the expectations put upon her and she’d quietly had to accept that she might want to consider some other options. She still loved looking at the clouds though, and being able to look out to sea and see so much weather every day was one of the reasons she’d refused to change her mind about which house she and Brian were going to buy. He’d wanted something much more modern on an estate somewhere, but she’d preferred the old fishing cottage they now had, and for once, she’d got her own way.
Of course, there had been a cost. With Brian there always was. He was forever complaining about how difficult it was to drill those solid stone walls, or worrying about the state of the horsehair plasterwork, or the fact that none of the walls were flat. Either that or else he’d be fretting about the damp or the cold. He would constantly go on and on about how they wouldn’t have had any of these problems in a new house, and, even now, he was pestering her almost daily about putting the cottage up for sale and moving nearer to his job. She was beginning to think he’d only taken that wretched job because he thought it would mean they would have to move house eventually, but she wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
Or was she? She really felt that, when it came down to it, she didn’t actually have that much fight left in her. Brian was living away from her for most of the week nowadays in a nice modern little flat he was renting. She’d started thinking he actually preferred it there because he always seemed in a much better mood when he came home (did he still think of the cottage as home?) on Friday evenings and always seemed to be in a foul temper when he headed off on Monday mornings. In her darker moments, she convinced herself that he was living some complete other life during the week, with another woman who probably was younger and prettier than her and looked just like one of those weather girls. For all she knew, maybe it was one of those weather girls he was seeing, someone who’d be able to have lots of babies as well, she presumed. Maybe, sometime soon, on one of those dark Friday evenings, Brian might just not bother to come back at all and just prefer to spend the weekend under the duvet with his celebrity conquest…
Caterina pondered on this. She wondered whether she would really mind if he left her on her own to spend her weekends chatting to the Alderman and getting all those sympathetic looks from the walkers and the tourists and the locals who used to pass by whilst she was doing so. She realised that she wasn’t sure that she’d mind too much, so long as he didn’t want to sell the cottage to pay for his new life. That came as a bit of a surprise, she thought when she realised quite what it was she’d actually been thinking. She’d probably miss the cottage more than she’d miss Brian.
She reached the bottom of the path and came to the gate where it joined the pavement. There, not a hundred yards away, standing where it had proudly stood for more than a century-and-a-half, was the cottage itself. She stopped for a moment and just stared at it. The cladding was looking a bit filthy and it was flaking a little in places, but it was still a lovely little house and she knew this morning that she absolutely adored it. In fact and today it was even better than usual because Brian wouldn’t be indoors to spoil it for her.
“How could he even consider selling this place?” she thought, “Just so he could run off and make babies with some glamour girl?”
She realised that she’d probably already answered her own question and her spirits fell again. She tried to convince herself that there was no “other woman”, and reminded herself that he kept saying “we” should move nearer to his job, not “I”. Plural. Both of them. Sadly, despite all those thoughts, she still didn’t really convince herself, and she was feeling quite gloomy as she strolled round to the back door and let herself in out of the increasing drizzle.
No comments:
Post a Comment