Ann Cleeves - The Healers

“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.

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. Occasionally her mother returned from London to join them and there was an attempt at gaiety, at real family life. Lily had known that it was an pretence and had the same sense now. Perhaps the Abbots weren’t the model couple everyone thought them to be. She would have liked to believe in them and the idea depressed her. Sean was no help. He seemed more dazed than usual, shovelling food into his mouth with a fork, his eyes on his plate.

When she had first met them Lily had thought Win and Daniel the most together couple she had ever seen organized, hard working, still idealistic. Not a bundle of laughs, she’d had to admit from the beginning. Not exactly fun to be with. They took themselves and everything they did too seriously for that. But successful in every way. Now she wasn’t so sure. Something about Daniel gave her the creeps and Win never seemed happy.

Lily supposed that professionally they were doing well for themselves. They had that in common. She had heard the story of their conversion to alternative medicine many times. Both, for different reasons, had been interested in health since childhood. Daniel’s father had been a consultant neurologist and Daniel had enjoyed the reflected glory, the status, the power. He had applied to medical school himself but had been turned down. These days nepotism could not overcome mediocre exam results. At the interview it had been suggested that he go in for nursing but that would hardly have provided the same rewards. He’d drifted for a while after that, travelled. Subsidized by affluent and indulgent parents he’d made it out to India, joined second-generation hippies seeking enlightenment had his consciousness raised. Or so he claimed. Came across the idea of natural therapy, took to acupuncture like a duck to water. It was logical, he said. It made sense. And it made him feel useful.

His parents were sceptical but determined to be liberal. He was their only son. They funded his training at the Traditional Acupuncture College at learning ton Spa. When he set up in his original practice they paid the first six months’ rent and when he and Win moved to Mittingford they paid the deposit on the house. The venture at the Old Chapel soon flourished. He was everything his patients required in a practitioner grave, calm and authoritative. He wore a white coat and they treated him as an old-fashioned family doctor. He encouraged them in the belief that he was infallible.

Win’s childhood encounter with medicine had been as a consumer. Her father had died, when she was a baby, of one of those strange genetic disorders for which there is no cure. She had suffered dreadfully from asthma and eczema. In the playground she wheezed and scratched and was picked on by other children. Her mother was a remarkable woman who had survived bereavement without bitterness, but she was determined not to lose her child too. Win was dragged along to a variety of doctors, all of whom diagnosed her illness as psychosomatic. Only after she consulted a homoeopath did the condition improve. Both mother and daughter were instantly converted to the benefits of complementary medicine. The mother, as she admitted wryly later, rather went overboard. She went on numerous courses, took up strange diets and settled for a while on reflexology as her preferred method of healing. Throughout Win’s adolescence their house was filled with unfamiliar people who exposed their feet to her mother’s gaze. It was quite natural for Win to follow in the same path. She had never been a natural rebel. She believed, quite literally, her mother’s assertion that homoeopathy had saved her life, and saw it as her mission in life to spread the word to others.

In time Win’s mother had moved on from reflexology to re birthing Now she was an establishment figure in the movement, an old hand, regarded as a guru and a leader by the younger people who followed her. She had written widely and had been featured in the national press. “The Acceptable Face of Quackery’ one of the headlines had said. She gave advice on childbirth, relationships and her photogenic face made her one of the strong women loved by the colour supplements. Her fame gave her a special mystique. She had a reputation among her young disciples for wisdom, though they never defined what that meant. She set up a clinic in a house in Hampstead and had politicians and rock stars among her clients.