Healers Read Free Page B

become even more suspicious. She enjoyed his uncertainty. It served him right. She was certain that he’d been having a fling with a bright, postgraduate student called Heather for more than a term.
    “I shouldn’t be late.” she said. “Not very late.” She could hardly tell him that he bored her to the point where she had been physically ill and that if she didn’t have an evening away from him she would do something desperate.
    Chapter Three
    Although the Old Chapel opened on Sundays Lily Jackman had the day off. Yet she woke early, was suddenly wide awake and realized that Sean was not there. The night before he had arrived back at the caravan soon after her. He had eaten a tin of beans and gone away again. Just for a walk he said, and she knew better than to ask where he was going. Now it seemed he had not come back all night. He had never done that before.
    She opened the caravan door and looked out at Laverock Farm. Everything was very still. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, no clatter of machinery. Only a dog barking furiously and that bloody cockerel which had probably woken her in the first place.
    Then she saw Sean, walking across the farmyard. He bent to slide between the struts of the five-barred gate, as if he were too tired to push it open. She shouted before he was halfway across the field:
    “Where the hell have you been?”
    He looked up as if he were surprised by her anger. His eyes were bleary and his coat was crumpled.
    “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I’d be back before you woke.”
    “You haven’t been walking all night?”
    He shook his head. “I met some people. Parked at the gypsy transit site on the way into town. I knew them from Wales. Wes and Lorna. They had a blue Transit, still have. You must remember.” He leaned over her, strangely insistent.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “There were so many people.”
    “They’ve got a kid now. A girl, pretty little thing. They’re talking about settling down so she can go to school.”
    She turned away. Sean was always talking about settling down. He blamed his midnight wanderings on the fact that he was unsettled. Because she wouldn’t give him a commitment that their relationship was permanent. She saw it as a sort of blackmail.
    “I’m going to get ready,” she said. “Are you coming to the Abbots’ or do you want to stay here?”
    “No,” he said. “I’ll come.” To spy on me, she thought. To see who I talk to. He pretended that he wasn’t jealous, but she could tell from the way he looked at her that he saw her as a sort of possession.
    “You can go to the launderette then,” she said, to punish him, ‘while I go to Magda’s group.”
    On Sundays they went to the Abbots’ for lunch. Every week, Daniel and Win Abbot,
    acupuncturist and homoeopath, the founder members of the Old Chapel Alternative Therapy Centre, had open house. Sean and Lily were always there. Lily suspected they were invited to salve the Abbots’ consciences and to provide a topic of conversation. It was the Abbots who had brought them to Mittingford in the first place and then dumped them in Ernie Bowles’s caravan to keep them out of the way. This Sunday, unusually, they were the only guests. Lily could tell that the Abbots had not put as much effort into the food and its presentation as when other people were present. Lunch was a scrappy affair and the couple seemed distant and rather fraught. Lily and Sean sat at the kitchen table eating macaroni cheese as if, Lily thought, they were the deserving poor.
    Otherwise it was all much as usual. Daniel spoke smugly about his work. The Natural Therapy Society in Otterbridge had invited one of his old lecturers to give a talk, he said, and he’d been asked to do the introduction. Win fussed over the children. Lily was reminded of Sunday lunch in the large and gloomy house in Clifton where she had spent her childhood.