The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,71

against the wind, with my car working hard, rocking at every gateway we passed. Cars were being diverted along the road, away from the coast, everyone driving cautiously in vehicles that were as prone to shying across the road as skittish horses. The wind boomed and crashed through empty trees and telephone wires and when we reached the clifftop we could hear the surf being forced high onto the beaches and rocks.

Gabriel seemed unconcerned. ‘We get storms every autumn,’ he said, cleaning his glasses on the sleeve of his coat. ‘They go through right into winter. It’s why we always tell tourists to spend a whole year here before they buy their “perfect houses”. Dorset is a very different place out of summer.’

He was carefully not looking at me directly, although I could sense little covert glances now and then from the passenger seat. He’d got the two pumpkin lanterns balanced on his knees, the carvings looking just like random slashes now they were unilluminated. I took a few covert looks of my own at his capable hands, cupping the fruit carefully. Long, artistic fingers, Sensitive hands. A sensitive man.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ I said suddenly, fighting to hold the line as the car was buffeted by a gust where hedges ended. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put all that on you.’

He turned his head as though he was looking out of the window. Since I knew he could barely see past the end of his nose I knew he was trying not to let me see his expression. ‘I’m glad you did. It explains a lot.’

‘Me being a bit overprotective of Poppy? Yes, I know. It’s just hard, she’s exactly the age I was when… well, when it all happened.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I can’t bear to think of her having even one-tenth of the feelings I had when I was fourteen. It should be all pop bands and arguments about shoes and staying out late, not—’ I stopped. Not crying in the night, hearing the horses being loaded and taken away. Not the way my mother looked at me, with a quiet, resigned contempt. Not moving from the big farmhouse with the dogs and the acres of space to a London flat, sealed against noise and weather. It struck me then that we’d done almost the literal opposite. I’d moved Poppy from her centrally heated flat-dwelling life to this open wildness. Was I trying to undo what had been done to me?

‘I mean, it explains why you seem to understand. About the bullying.’

I had to concentrate to steer the car though heaps of windblown detritus on the road. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, weaving us in and out of large lumps of branch from the hedge and hoping not to catch a tyre.

‘You were bullied too, just in a different way. Mine was being picked on for being different, yours was being pushed into being different. You didn’t want to be an eventer but your mum thought you should be and so she – well, bullying takes all kinds of forms, doesn’t it? It’s not all being shoved into swimming pools. It can be insidious and it can come from the people who are meant to love you.’

I turned the car down the narrow track that led to Warram Bay, without replying, although I’d got a little weevil of acknowledgement making its way into my heart. I’d often thought that I let Luc bully me; when we were married he’d practically dictated the terms of our marriage. He’d be allowed to come and go as he pleased but I had to stay at home and look after Poppy, bring up our daughter in the way he saw fit. Even now we were no longer together he still turned up when he felt like it and expected to be welcomed and fêted. But then, the amount of money he spent on Pops when he did visit bought him a fair bit of welcome and fêting.

I’d never thought of my mother as a bully. I’d thought of her as someone who wanted me to have something that she had never had – a career in eventing. But now I came to think of it, those subtle digs about me spending time doing other things, practically anything other than riding, those had all been geared towards making me change my behaviour, hadn’t they? Those hints that she’d be disappointed if I didn’t do as she said and