I’d been searching for something and as far as I knew, in this farmhouse on the Somerset Levels, I’d found it. Security, safety, a home of my own with me and him; in my mind I was in bliss. For six months I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, made candles for the candle shop, labelled bottles for the incense shop, fired chai pots in the pottery, struck up friendships in the high street, fetched water from the Chalice Well. I watched his mind at work and thought it brilliant, watched his hands describe the mathematics of business and thought him the king of Glastonbury. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage gone wrong, his wife was a traveller, their child lived with him on and off, she was sweet but I don’t remember much mothering on my part, I was practically a child myself. We made a horoscope bed in the garden for his herbs and planted them according to the moon. We cleared brambles and had bonfires. Where his land ended and the levels began, he’d built a low stone circle. Beside it was a yurt, green and damp. Murmurations swept across the glass Isle of Avalon, my father came to tea and named him Pigtails. Supper at the scratched kitchen table, ducking our heads to see out of dusty windows, the floor uneven, books falling over on shelves and in the evenings, we’d settle in the sitting room, he in his armchair smoking and reading, and I in the nook of the enormous fireplace writing and rolling joint after joint. We flew to Goa for Christmas and danced on the beach, banishing ghosts he wasn’t aware of. We came home and he told me about a girl who was coming to stay. I was yet to read my Simone de Beauvoir. She was the daughter of a friend. He’d been at her birth. He said, You’ll love her. He said they were two peas in a pod. I remember the day she arrived. Her lean in the doorway of the kitchen, I in the sitting room saying hello. The confidence of her. The smile as she took me in. Her black hair and rosy cheeks. The immediate command. He was thirty-five, I was twenty-three and she was seventeen.
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