Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke

‘Hello.’
    He was in his sixties, she guessed. ‘Good morning,’ she replied.
    ‘It’s a blowy one,’ he remarked.
    ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. ‘Quite cool.’
    He turned down his collar, and she saw that he was the priest. ‘Anything I can help you with?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh … no.’
    ‘Just sheltering?’
    ‘Yes. Just for a minute.’
    He looked into her face. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked.
    She heard the concern in his voice. ‘No, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I must get on.’ She gathered up her bag and gloves from the floor. When she had come in, she had been blinded for a while; she had thought she might faint. It had been sheer panic, but it had passed. ‘I must get on,’ she repeated.
    She thought that perhaps he was watching her progress as she stepped out and started across the green, but she didn’t look back. She walked down towards the car park behind Long Street, purposely looking into the shop windows, taking more time than usual. It wasn’t until she reached the car that she realized she had forgotten to buy the food she wanted, and the flowers for the table in the hallway. She had been going to get a few daffodils for there and for Zeph’s room to brighten the place up. She looked back across the car park, and it seemed a marathon, all the way back along the street and up the hill to the grocer and the florist, negotiating the cobbled lane and the uneven kerbstones.
    For the second time that morning, she wanted to cry.
    The first had been with her solicitor. The tears had sprung quickly as she had gazed down at the papers on the desk in front of her.
    The solicitor had got to her feet immediately. ‘Oh, Mrs Ward,’ she had said, ‘there’s a solution, I’m sure.’ She had given Cora a tissue.
    She was a nice girl, although Cora had never quite got used to Alan Rendall retiring and this pretty, black-suited professional taking his place.
    ‘Won’t you reconsider selling the land alone?’ Miss Miles asked now. ‘It would keep the wolf from the door.’
    ‘They would need to have access through the lane for their machinery,’ Cora said. She wiped her eyes.
    ‘You might build a separate access.’
    ‘I’d have strangers coming up and down the lane at all hours. There would be no privacy.’
    ‘But you would keep the farmhouse,’ Elizabeth Miles said. ‘Or you could reconsider selling the barn, perhaps, and keep the business.’
    Cora put her hand to her head. She felt an overwhelmingly loyalty to Richard. She must keep together the farm and the land, everything for which he had striven so hard. But all she heard everywhere was ‘diversification’. Divide and rule. Or, more accurately, divide and survive.
    All around her, farmers were selling off or letting their buildings and taking up sidelines: craft workshops, bed-and-breakfast, holiday cottages. But she couldn’t bear the thought of a continual stream of outsiders coming through the house.
    ‘Did you get a valuation for the barn?’
    ‘Yes,’ Cora said.
    ‘And that would be … how much?’
    ‘Fifty thousand,’ Cora said. ‘It’s the oldest part, older than the house.’
    ‘Fifty thousand is a great deal of money. It would solve your current problems.’
    Cora had looked out of the window. Fifty thousand pounds would restock the orchards, replant the trees: the majority were coming to the end of their thirty-year life. It would pay for transport for the foreseeable future. It would renew the irrigation lines and pumps, and she could repair the roof of the house, which was long overdue. But it wouldn’t pay for anything to be done inside – the boiler, the bathroom, the kitchen. It wouldn’t pay for the lane to be resurfaced or for a new generator. She would be living in a house that was falling down around her, and forced to witness the barn’s conversion into some ghastly executive home.
    And there would be people. Builders, contractors, then the family who moved into the barn. People