The Catalyst by Angela Jardine Page B

better and she was relieved she now felt no more threatened by his glowing youth and intermittent ardour than she did by amiable old Tom Batten. She felt she had made another friend in the village and that was a good feeling. She found herself smiling as she sat down on the sofa to rest her aching ankle but then wondered again about her constant thoughts of David.
    She had rarely lived in the past and had never longed to go back to the good times of her youth like so many of her friends. That had never been part of her mental remit. It had always been easier to stay firmly rooted in the present and she could not say why she was now constantly thinking so much about the past, unless it was some sort of mental clearing process she was undergoing as she grieved. Perhaps it was just another aspect of bereavement.
    At that moment her ankle throbbed with just enough intensity to break in on her thoughts and she found herself replaying the recent scene on the cliff, when she had slipped and fallen headlong at Jimmy Fisher’s feet. She had gone over the incident many times since it had happened but she could not have said why, unless it was embarrassment.
    On the face of it nothing remarkable had happened. She had slipped and fallen and a stranger had helped her to his home on the cliff top, put a makeshift bandage on her ankle and very kindly taken her to the casualty department in the hospital in Dehwelyans. So why, every time she remembered the scene, was there an inexplicable feeling of euphoria lurking beneath the embarrassment?
    Trying to call out her apologies for her inappropriate laughter when he had tried to warn her about the dangers of standing on the edge of cliffs, she had had to hurry to catch Jimmy as he walked rapidly up the cliff path. He had rounded on her fiercely and she had caught sight of his scowling face the second before she slipped in the mud and lurched forward.
    Despite the speed at which it happened she had just been able to put out her hands to save herself from falling face down on the one of the many rocks that punctured the cliff path but the fall had shaken her and she had had to turn over and sit on the ground to recover. Her hands were trembling and she inspected the grazes on the heels of her palms before becoming aware of the pain in her ankle, and the fact that Jimmy Fisher was standing over her.
    Instantly he had crouched down beside her with a concerned expression.
    ‘Good grief, woman, you balance like a mountain goat on the edge of the rocks over a sheer drop above the sea and then trip up and fall your length on a simple pathway!’ He took her hands in his, checking the cuts and grazes on them. ‘Now, where does it hurt most?’
    She shook her head, too choked with emotion to answer. All of a sudden everything seemed too much. The fall, coming after the turbulent emotions of her morning memories, was just another symptom of her apparently disintegrating life and Jimmy’s face had blurred in front of her as her eyes filled with tears.
    She had put her head down and, resting her forehead on her knees, had allowed despair to take over, weeping inconsolably and feeling as if she would never stop. Jimmy had released her hands as if they had stung him and stood back, watching her cry. A maelstrom of emotions rose in him of which, he had to admit, dismay was predominant.
    Usually he was a past master at contending with female tears, after all he’d caused enough of them during his life, but those tears had usually left him unmoved as, with a brief and superficial ‘there, there’ sort of solicitude, he had edged out of the door.
    He had never been able to deal with Jenny’s tears quite so efficiently though. They had usually touched some raw nerve and he had covered his feelings of guilt with anger, hating having to admit to a feeling of blame. He never understood how she could make him feel so guilty so easily. Now here was another bloody woman crying in front of him, for fuck’s