Fit For Purpose, Julian Parrott [most recommended books txt] 📗

of him and waved as he walked across the station’s small concourse. He’d snoozed only lightly on the train but felt more refreshed than he had in years. They hugged.

“How was Canada?” Rachel asked.

“It was good. It was great to see Jacques. He sends his love,” Tom replied.

“Flight okay?”

“It was… fine.” Tom paused and then added, “It was quite interesting, actually.”

Rachel cocked her head quizzically.

“What?” he said.

“What?” she said.

“What nothing,” Tom said emphatically.

They stepped outside. He looked over to the vehicle she had driven.

“Oh, Rachel, you had to bring the bloody Land Rover? I hate those things.”

“You know the more you get used to these kinds of things the better it will be. Look at it, it’s blue not army green,” she replied.

Rachel drove and they talked of his trip to Canada, Jacques Gagnon’s PhD defence and subsequent party, the food, hotel rooms, the flights again. Tom looked out of the Land Rover’s windows at the increasingly familiar countryside. Icy frost still clinging to hedgerows and trees sparkled in the afternoon sun. It felt magical, it felt different, more vivid somehow. He shut his eyes momentarily wanting to enjoy the memory of the recent flight.

Rachel had looked after Tom’s Jack Russell terrier while he had been on his Canadian trip and she talked about the terrier’s enjoyment of farm life. She talked of the farm, how hard her husband Owain still worked, pushing sixty. But Rachel sensed there was something. She had been concerned that Gagnon’s post-army accomplishments, a career position with Canadian military intelligence and now the doctorate, would send Tom deeper into his shell. Tom’s reticence worried her and she began to fear that the trip had not gone well.

“It’s going to snow,” she said.

“Looking likely,” Tom answered. Ah, the comforting feeling of the classic British conversational topic of the weather, he thought.

Almost as soon as they entered Rachel’s farmhouse the kettle was put on. “Tea?” she asked more of a statement than a question. Jack, the Jack Russell, bounded up to Tom, Tom knelt, with some difficulty keeping his right leg outstretched, and rubbed his dog’s powerful chest. Jack licked Tom’s hand repeatedly.

“She does look good,” Tom said.

A few minutes later Rachel passed him a big mug of tea; steam twirling from the mug.

His tiredness was mixed with a fresh excitement.

“Okay, little brother,” Rachel began emphatically. “Tell me what’s up.”

Tom stared into his tea.

“It’s crazy but I think I’ve met someone,” he said. He surprised himself with the remark as he and Rachel, although close, increasingly so over the past five years, did not regularly share personal intimacies. But Tom felt the need to say something. He felt lighter for saying it as if sharing the information made it more real somehow.

“You think? Well, you either met someone or you didn’t.” Rachel then twigged. “Oh, I see, you think you MET someone.” She was stunned.

She knew her brother had the occasional fling with women he would meet in a canal-side pub or a single female boater who made herself available; two narrowboaters that pass in the night. He was a good-looking chap, but Rachel knew that he had avoided any real connection since leaving the army. She didn’t think it was because of the residual feelings for the ex-wife, those wounds had long healed. She looked up towards the sideboard to the framed picture of Tom in dress uniform. Other wounds were taking a lot longer.

“Yes,” Tom smiled. “Met in that way, but I’m not sure.”

They both sat down at the kitchen table, cups of tea in hand.

“Well, you can’t just say something like that and go all quiet on me,” Rachel said. “Come on, who is she, what’s she like?”

Tom felt embarrassed by candour, but in for a penny in for a pound.

“She’s smart and funny and lovely. She’s an actress,” he said. “Quite well known, apparently.”

“Oh yeah,” Rachel responded. “Would I know her?”

“Maybe. Nia Williams.”

Rachel’s face registered shock.

“Oh my God, the Welsh Spitfire?”

***

Rachel dropped Tom and Jack off at the narrowboat basin at the small, pretty Welsh village of Llangollen. Light flakes of snow seemed to drift in a mild breeze. Tom unlocked the rear door of his narrowboat. Home. He had had no idea what he was going to do after he left the army, but remembering an enjoyable family holiday from his youth, he impetuously sold his house, his Mini, and bought a forty-eight-foot narrowboat.

The boat, Periwinkle, was in good shape when he purchased it. He asked the boatyard about changing the name but was advised not to as changing boat names brought only bad luck. The boatyard gave him a thorough training on the boat operations and maintenance and even accompanied him on a thirty-minute test sail. After about another thirty minutes of solo boating, he was hooked. He had since spent five years living on the Periwinkle and had travelled a few thousand miles on the canals of England and Wales. It had become his lifestyle, his profession, his therapy. Tom loved the Llangollen canal and the region around it, its proximity to Rachel, and had decided to winter up at one of the canal’s marinas.

He stepped down into the boat, dropped off his small flight bag. Everything was familiar but everything felt different. The boat was cold and Jack immediately curled up on her bed in the front cabin. Periwinkle was plugged into an external electrical outlet, so Tom switched on a small electric heater, while he started a fire in the boat’s little pot-bellied Danish Morso stove. He fired up the kettle and emptied the contents of a supermarket plastic bag he’d carried under his arm. It contained a few essential groceries and a selection of DVDs which spilt out onto the small galley table. They were the fruit of his and