Page 6 of The Women at Ocean's End

This track ended at a locked gate. Beyond it, she could see farmland, stretching out and back up the mountain. It was good land, obviously cleared back and drained when that was the way farms were managed. Ten years ago, farmers were still clearing land, heedless of the wildlife they were evicting as the price for an additional acre for their dairy herd. Thank goodness things were now changing back again.

The vehicle, when it arrived, was one of those awful off-roader things, ancient and billowing black smoke behind it. Not a scat of road tax on it either, Ros noticed.

She stood out before the jeep, fearing otherwise the driver would run right over the injured kid.

‘Hey!’ the man shouted out his open window. ‘What the…’ He was looking behind her, trying to make out the crumpled goat on the road.

‘Hey,’ Ros repeated back to him, but she kept her tone determinedly friendly. ‘Can you help me?’

‘I… well, I’m just about to check on my ewes…’ he said, but they both knew there was no passing her.

‘It’s just, I was walking along the clifftops and I found…’

‘You shouldn’t be walking along the cliffs alone. Not this time of day and not this time of year either,’ he said grumpily, but he jumped out of the van and stalked towards the injured goat. He stood next to her for a moment and she couldn’t help but register the sheer presence of him. It was not so much his size, although he looked like a man for whom physical hard work was a way of life; there was a definition about him that she’d never seen in men who spent their time in the gym. Hard to put an age on him, beards did that to a man, didn’t they sometimes. Well, maybe not a beard so much as thick dark stubble; thirties, she figured, early thirties, at the very most.

‘Do you want me to get rid of it?’ he asked, looking about, as if this was something he’d done many times before. She could imagine him, hoisting the poor mite up as if he was no greater weight than a mug of tea. Definitely a tea man, she decided. How on earth had she not run into him before? She’d have remembered him for sure, his dark curly hair, unshaven ruggedness, but then, she reminded herself – farmers, she considered them a breed apart.

‘NO, of course not. God, no. He’s only got a broken leg, he’ll be fine with a little TLC and a splint.’

‘Oh, so you’re a vet, are you?’ He eyed her suspiciously. Everyone knew there was no vet living on the island now. There had been one, but he’d moved away years ago. These days farmers were reluctant to call a mainland vet, because the call-out fees alone were rarely worth it if they wanted to make a living off the animals they farmed.

‘No, but I’m not stupid either.’

‘You are if you think you can bring a wild goat home with you and make a pet of it.’ He looked around; maybe the penny had begun to drop. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘I don’t intend to make a pet out of it, but I’d like to get him back on his feet and release him as soon as he’s mended. Better that than your solution. You’d probably throw him over the side of the cliff…’ She paused: after all, she was hoping this man – bad-tempered and all as he seemed to be – would help her bring the goat back to her cottage. ‘Actually, don’t answer that, I’d rather not know.’

‘It’s called natural order. But I don’t suppose someone like you would know much about that,’ he said and he bent down to look more closely at the goat. For a minute, she thought he might do something terrible to it.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “someone like me”, but I’m Ros Stokes, the local ranger here, filling in for Max while he’s away. So, I think I might know a thing or two about wildlife…’That took the wind from his sail, she thought smugly. ‘Will you help me or not?’ She stood, her hand on one hip, not really expecting any help at all, but at least knowing she was the ranger meant he wouldn’t drive his bloody jeep over the poor animal in an effort toput it out of its misery.

‘Sure. I’ll help you. My name is Jonah Ashe by the way,’ he said, more on an out breath than with any great enthusiasm. ‘But I will say, even if you know what you’re doing, I guarantee you have no idea what you’re letting yourself in for.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘I have to check the field first, I have some late lambing ewes, then I’ll take the pair of you back to the village, or wherever it is you want to bring him.’ He stood up then and opened the gate to his field before stomping out of sight for almost half an hour.What an infuriating man, Ros thought, a typical pig-headed farmer, thinking that because she was a woman she had no clue. She was leaning against the bonnet of the jeep when she spotted him returning from the field. He looked nothing like any of the local farmers she’d met already. He was tall and angular,walking with a slight limp; his accent was west of Ireland but still not quite local. Mostly, the farmers here were all pension age or not too far off it. Younger people tended to leave the island. The only ones arriving were married couples intent on living their version ofThe Good Life, hoping to scrape by on a few acres and a dream of bohemian life that invariably involved some sort of crafting pursuit on the side.

‘And you’re sure you want to do this?’ He looked at the kid on the ground. Ros had a feeling he was only asking because she was the ranger, otherwise he might have tossed the little fella into the ditch.

‘Absolutely, if you’ll just bring us back to my cottage, I’ll take care of things from there.’

‘You know he won’t make it.’ Jonah shook his head. ‘Even moving him could cause enough stress to kill him before we get him into the truck…’

‘I know what I’m doing.’ She didn’t, but she certainly wasn’t going to admit that to this bloody know-it-all.

‘You’re in luck, mister,’ he said as he walked around the goat. ‘No other passengers, you have the back of the jeep all to yourself.’ He went round the rear of the vehicle, opened out the drop-down door and took a length of tarpaulin, unfolding it as he walked. ‘Come here,’ he called to Ros. Between them, they unfurled it beneath the goat and managed to make a stretcher of sorts for him. For someone so gruff, she couldn’t help but notice Jonah was surprisingly gentle in the way he moved the little goat. ‘I don’t want it touching the sides of the van, it’s not good to have him too close to where I might have to place my own sheep or lambs.’

‘Of course,’ she wanted to say, she wasn’t a dummy, she knew about diseases and how easily something could spread from one species to another. She wanted to say, ‘Diseases go both ways,’but she didn’t, because she needed to get this lift back to her cottage.

To break the uncomfortable silence, Ros tried to start some conversation as they drove. It was like squeezing sun out of December. He’d grown up on the island, left when he was a teenager and returned a few years earlier to take care of his uncle’s farm when the old man fell ill. ‘It was old age and self-neglect mostly, there isn’t any proper treatment to cure a lifetime of that. He spent six months in hospital, but in the end, he just gave up,’ Jonah said and maybe, Ros thought, she could glimpse a heart underneath that wax jacket and his serious expression.

‘So you stayed on then?’ she asked. They were speeding along, bumping over the uneven roads and each time they hit a pothole she winced thinking of the kid being bounced about in the back of the jeep. There hadn’t been a murmur from him. She could only hope that Jonah wasn’t right and the stress of being close to them hadn’t finished him off already.

‘My uncle died in the middle of lambing season, what was I meant to do? I couldn’t just abandon the place, could I?’ he snapped.

‘Of course,’ she said, almost regretting she’d asked. ‘Anyway, we’re here now.’ She was never so relieved to catch a glimpse of the chimney pots of the cottage rising over the hedgerows in the distance.

After they turned in to the small yard behind the cottage, Ros raced in through the back door and pulled out a huge plastic bed that had been home once to Max’s old German Shepherd. Jonah waited, talking on his phone while she set about tearing up newspapers and positioning the bed in a corner of the porch where it wouldn’t be a trip hazard and still wasn’t in a draught.

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