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The rain thunders steadily against the windscreen, so relentless that she cannot see the drops as individuals; it hits the glass in sheets. All the cobbles around them are submerged under a good inch of water and several of the fields they'd passed to get here had been flooded. It's been all anyone will talk about for weeks: the eternal, awful rain, bleak and dull and draining, how it's swamping the crops and drowning the pastures. James and Tris and Siegfried have been run off their feet lately with hoof rot in the sheep, weak and bedraggled chickens and, on one memorable occasion, seven half-drowned hypothermic cows. They've not had a good night off in two weeks, any of them, but tonight it is James' turn. Siegfried had promised: hell or high water, whatever crisis must be averted tonight, he and Tristan will deal with it.
Beside her, James drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Neither of them move, watching the rain beat its futile fury against the glass. She takes a moment to be glad they're not in the lovely soft-topped Rover.
James opens his mouth and Helen beats him to it. "It's the ford, isn't it."
He lets loose his breath in one gusting sigh. "I'm sorry," he says, genuinely contrite as though the awful weather were anything like his fault. "We'll never make it through. It's already taken longer than usual to get here from the farm - by the time I've changed my shoes we'll be late for the reservation, and if it carries on like this I don't know if we'll make it home. I'm sorry, I know you wanted-"
"James," she cuts him off gently, "what I wanted was to have dinner with you. As long as you don't get called away by some sick cow, we can still do that at Skeldale."
"That was rather the advantage of not being at Skeldale, I'm afraid," James says, pulling a face.
Helen shrugs. "I'll take my chances with the farmers rather than be washed away by floodwater, I think. Besides, Siegfried said he and Tris would handle everything."
"Oh," James says, raising an eyebrow at her as the corner of his mouth pulls up in a grin, "you are feeling lucky this evening." She laughs, sharp and inelegant, and he beams at her. "Come on then," he says, hand on the door handle, "Le Mans-style start."
She takes her own door handle. He does look handsome, her James, in his glad rags and farm boots. That's part of tonight's treat for them both, getting all dressed up and seeing each other as pretty young people for a change, and she does mourn that the nice waves she's pressed her hair into will be thoroughly ruined by the time they reach the front door - but then, sitting here, with James grinning like an outsized schoolboy all ordinary and so, so charming, she thinks is treat enough.
"Three," she says,
"Two," James replies,
"One," they say together,
And then they both hurtle from the car, shrieking in the downpour. It's a matter of steps for her to reach the porch whereas James has to run around the car, but in her heels it takes just as long and their hands hit the doorbell as one. Her shoes squelch slightly, James' hair is sodden, and there's water dripping off his nose, and as soon as their eyes meet she's laughing. James shakes his head like a dog and she flinches away from the spray, taking his face in her hands to wipe water from his cheeks. His eyes sparkle, delighted to have pleased her, and his hands settle broad and steady on her hips to support her as she tips up onto her toes to kiss him.
"-yes, alright, I'm doing it," Siegfried is calling over his shoulder as he opens the door. For a moment Helen can only blink at him in confusion: he's as dressed up as they are, in his second-best black suit with a white tea towel folded over one arm, and generally not looking like a man ready to pick up any veterinary crises that Tristan might not manage on his own.
"We're going out tonight," James says blankly. "I mean, we're not, actually, but - we could be. You're-"
Siegfried clears his throat magnificently and bows slightly as he pulls the door wide. "Bonsoir, madame et monsieur," he says, with absolutely no attempt at a French accent, "a la maison Skedale. If you would care to step inside."
Helen leans close to James. "What is happening," she says.
He leans in to mirror her. "I believe we're stepping inside," he says, handing her over the threshold. "After that, I've really no idea."
"May I take your coats?" Siegfried says. He seems to be quite enjoying playing this character, so she allows him to help her out of her sodden coat with a sort of bemused indulgence. It only occurs to him that he has no idea what to do with the wet coats once James has handed his over: they are treated to a brief moment of watching Siegfried think, and then he opens the door of the consultation room, throws them both haphazardly over the table, and quickly shuts the door again. "This way!" he announces, striding off toward the dining room and entirely ignoring their laughter.
James offers an elbow and she tucks her hand into it, squeezing gently. "Never say I don't take you anywhere nice," he says, grinning.
"It's the service that makes a place like this," she tells him solemnly.
"Hurry up!" Siegfried calls from down the corridor.
She has to admit, they have done a lovely job with the dining room: the table is set just for the two of them, decked out with candles in the cosy gloom of the lamplight. It's enough to see by, but it turns the white tablecloth golden and the shadows around the edges of the room give the place an elsewhere feel, as though there might be other tables, other diners, in this space that is, for tonight, no longer their dining room.
Siegfried pulls out her chair and then, once they're settled, produces a bottle of wine from the sideboard which he ostentatiously presents to James. James makes a show of inspecting the label and then gestures for Siegfried to pour.
He sips it thoughtfully. "Yes, that'll do nicely," he decides, and Siegfried gives another little bow before pouring them each a full glass. "My compliments to the sommelier on what was, I'm sure, not just the only thing we had in the cupboard."
"It wasn't, actually," Siegfried says, "but Mrs Hall said I wasn't to serve you that lethal homebrew Mister Orlow gave us last week."
"Thank heaven for small mercies," Helen says, sipping what is, actually, a rather nice red wine.
"Siegfried, are you really going to serve us all evening?" James says, brows tilting in confusion even as he smiles up at Siegfried. "What if something happens, or we get another call?"
"Sir," Siegfried says, returning to his plummy self-important waiter voice, "I'm sure I don't know what you mean as this is clearly a fine dining establishment and not some kind of veterinary practice. But if it were, I would certainly remind sir that Tristan is on call this evening and that if something were to happen before he returns then your waiter would handle it, and the head chef would have the honour of serving you personally for the remainder of the evening. An evening off was promised. The evening shall be had."
"Thank you, Siegfried," she says softly. She's almost alarmed by how touched she is; not so many years ago, none of this would have happened. It wouldn't have occurred to him, and he wouldn't have seen the importance if it had. But a new word Jimmy learned recently is promise, and Jimmy wants to live here at Skeldale, and so the new word they're both learning, Helen and Siegfried, is compromise.
He nods at her, eyes soft and brow solemn. They're learning.
"Well then, waiter," James says, watching them both and tugging gently back towards jollity. "You'd better bring us the first course. Quickly, if you want to earn your tip."
Helen puts her chin in her hand to better admire, delighted, the way Siegfried's mouth drops open in indignation at being treated this way, and then closes again as he remembers himself. He briefly makes a face like he's sucked a lemon, eyes narrowed at James, and then he smiles perfectly artificially and bows deeply. "Certainly, sir," he says, all saccharine charm, and then stalks off to the kitchen in a huff.
Helen tilts her charmed smile at James, who looks equally delighted with himself. "He's going to kill you," she sighs happily.
"Oh yes," James says cheerfully. "His vengeance will be swift and terrible. This might be the best date we've ever had."
She feels the laugh bubble up inside her, from deep in the space behind her ribs where she keeps all those who are most dear to her. She lifts her glass as his other hand snakes across the table to take her own, tangling their fingers with the ease of long experience. His eyes sparkle as they crinkle at the edges, mirroring her joy and reflecting it back to her. "The best we've ever had," she agrees, and their glasses kiss in the candlelight.
They've been left to linger a little too long for ordinary restaurant service, and though they don't have to settle the bill, they do agree that they'd like to offer their gratitude. Particularly to Mrs Hall, who cooked up a storm for them with presumably very little warning. But as they creep down the corridor to the kitchen in socks and stockings, their wet shoes whisked away to dry earlier in the evening, Helen hears voices and pulls them to a gentle stop.
"Weren't you supposed to be stopping by Dorothy's this evening for a brief visit?" Mrs Hall says, voice level but not quite relaxed.
"I don't like eavesdropping," James breathes in her ear.
"I don't want to interrupt," Helen whispers back.
"One minute," James says, and she nods.
"I telephoned," Siegfried says easily. "Said we were putting on the Ritz this evening, or our best impression thereof. She understood."
"She didn't want to join in? I would have thought she'd like something fun."
She can practically hear Siegfried shrug. "She said she'd leave us to it. I'm not quite such a catch that I've never heard a polite decline before. But I wasn't expecting her to fancy it, either."
"Oh? Well," Mrs Hall says, "I suppose you'd know her best."
Helen leans, very carefully, around the corner until she can just about see into the kitchen, ignoring James' little huff and shuffle of discomfort at the idea of spying. They're sitting at the table, their own empty plates stacked to one side; Mrs Hall has her hands wrapped around a glass of Scotch and Siegfried, looking rather louche as he sprawls in his chair having at some point lost his jacket, tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt, is watching his own glass as he swirls it absently. They're both tilted slightly into one another over the table between them; neither has noticed Helen peering around the corner.
Siegfried frowns slightly. "I don't think so. You've know her far longer; she's your friend."
"She's your-" Siegfried glances up, frown deepening, and Mrs Hall gestures vaguely. "That must count for something."
"Not to the tune of years of friendship. I know you better than I know Dorothy, for instance," Siegfried says, back to examining his glass; Mrs Hall's face solidifies awfully for a moment, flinching as though from a blow. "I've known you longer. We've been friends for longer. I knew you would enjoy putting on a date night for James and Helen, so when the rain became truly awful I suggested it; I didn't think Dorothy would find much appeal in it, so I didn't expect her to join us; and in all cases, I was right."
"Aren't you always," Mrs Hall says dryly, and he laughs. After a moment, in which she turns the glass in her fingers three times clockwise, and once the other way: "Is that what we are, then?" He looks up, expression interested but blank, and she goes back to staring intently at her glass. "Friends, I mean. Not sure you've said so, before."
He watches her for a moment. "I hope we are," he says eventually. "Or rather - yes. I think so. And I am, as discussed, always right."
She laughs faintly, ducking her head further, and Helen's chest aches so tightly that she puts a palm to her sternum to alleviate it. James wraps his hand around the ball of her shoulder, and when she turns to look at him, he looks as sorry as she feels.
Mrs Hall looks so sad.
James squeezes her shoulder once more, pulling her back into the corridor, and then lets go. He reaches out his toe and nudges the boxes of equipment that Tris has left stacked haphazardly in the corridor so that they rattle, and when they both turn the corner Mrs Hall and Siegfried are both looking up at their arrival, perfectly pleased to see them.
"Best date we've ever had," James announces brightly, and Helen arranges her own face to match.
"I should think so too," Siegfried says firmly, with a smile at Mrs Hall. "You won't get better food or service anywhere."
"Any time you fancy it, just let us know," Mrs Hall says.
"Well, not any time," Siegfried corrects. "Some times. Intermittently."
"Make Tris be the waiter," Helen suggests, and he brightens. "We really are grateful. Thank you."
"It was rather fun," Siegfried says, looking more than pleased with himself. "Mrs Hall and I make quite the team."
Mrs Hall watches him carefully, and ducks away when he glances over. "Oh, yes," she half-laughs. "We're certainly something."
Her smile, when she looks up again at Helen, doesn't quite ring true.
On Sunday, for the first time in what feels like aeons, it does not rain.
Helen tips her head up to the thin light, eyes closed against the wind that hurtles about on the hilltop like a restless child; her own reckless children are storming through the wet heather and shrieking to one another like migrating birds trying to stay in touch through changeable skies. Every so often, one of them - usually Jimmy - crashes through the brush and into Siegfried's knees, and she hears him murmuring interestedly, gently, in reply to her boy's enormous and rapidfire questioning.
"Hard to believe, isn't it," Siegfried says, "that the sun has carried on existing, all these weeks."
She opens her eyes to find him watching her, head tilted slightly on one side as though he's thinking hard about something; trying to understand her, perhaps. She thinks she's quite explicable. But then, he probably thinks he is, too.
"Mm. No rain, patches of actual sky: I forgot such things were possible."
"Spring," he intones solemnly, staring out over the dale. "It may yet happen."
It's just the two of them, this morning, getting the children out from underfoot while Mrs Hall cooks lunch, James mans the telephone, and Tris does his duty with Charlotte's family. There had been a time, not too long ago, when Siegfried would have simply stolen her children out from under her and vanished into the hills with them; brought them back hours later windswept and bright-eyed and so tired that they'd fight her, screaming and crying, to avoid the nap they both desperately needed. It had felt, not infrequently, as though everyone got to enjoy their time with her children except Helen.
But now, he's trying, and so she comes on these walks in the dales with them. Rosie offers up her finest sheep calls, Jimmy shows his mum various spoors he has found and identified, and Siegfried makes him promise to wash his hands properly when they get back. Siegfried has to promise in turn to help him write up their findings, and Jimmy tries to get him and Helen to promise extra cake in exchange for Jimmy tidying his room; this is negotiated down to a larger serving of dessert, rather than an entire extra cake, and Jimmy makes them all shake on it very seriously. Rosie makes them shake her hand as well, though without any demands: just her father's broad and open smile at being involved.
Compromise. They're trying, both of them.
"I can see why you take them up here," she says. "It's beautiful."
He smiles, his whole face shining even in the weak sun. The heather rolls away from them, gilding in the light, with islands of purple-grey stone and shadow like pools in a endless sea. It goes on forever, this vast wild view, and here they stand at the head of it like captains of a ship bound out into the clouding sky.
"Whoever made these hilltops so spacious and so free, I know not why or wherefore but," Siegfried recites, "they're God enough for me." He looks at her from the corner of his eye. "It's the finest place in the whole word, this one. I hope I never leave it."
"I never really have," she offers.
"Don't bother," he says, slightly too quickly. "The rest of the world will only disappoint."
"Jenny likes London well enough."
He sniffs. "No accounting for taste."
She grins at her feet, and then returns to squinting into the weak light. "I really am grateful for dinner the other evening," she says eventually. "It meant a lot, us having a night off after all."
Siegfried narrows his eyes at her. "You're not asking for another one already, are you?"
Helen laughs. "No, you can have at least a week off. I just meant - thanks. We're doing better, you and me, and I appreciate it."
"Well," Siegfried says, watching Jimmy and Rosie crouching over some mystery interest in the lee of a gorse bush, "when one's own godson accuses a man of being a shellfish, what else can one do."
Helen winces. "I did only say that once. And I didn't think he'd heard it."
"It regrettably does not make you wrong, however. I-" he cuts himself off with a huff, turning his head away from her. "I like," Siegfried pronounces into the wind, "having you all around me. All of you, everyone. So."
He makes an awkward little hand gesture, palm open to her and the children and the view. It's a small thing. It means rather a lot.
She nods, lets the moment sit for a minute. Jimmy bounces up and bounds off; Rosie cries like a hawk and scrambles off in his wake. "Does that mean," she says in the end, "that we're about to have Dorothy move in one of these days?"
Siegfried makes a wholly unexpected and quite horrifed face. "Oh, lord, she's not going to do that, is she?"
Helen frowns up at him in bafflement. "Well, not spontaneously, no, but if you at some point invite her, then-"
"Do I have to?"
"No, but it is the expected conclusion of - good grief, Siegfried, what are you seeing this poor woman for?!"
Siegfried scowls enormously and kicks at some heather with the toe of his boot. "It's just very sudden," he complains.
"I didn't mean you had to ask her tomorrow, just, eventually," Helen says, folding her arms and turning to face him fully. "You answered as though I was asking you to muck out a cow shed with your bare hands."
Siegfried rubs his palms over his face. "I just - can't imagine it. Her, living with us. Me, living with her. She is lovely," he says, to mitigate whatever expression Helen's face is making and which appears to have instilled in him some degree of fear, "but - I don't know. It doesn't seem likely. I thought your dinner was rather fun; Dorothy… didn't, exactly."
Helen frowns. "She didn't think you should've?"
"Not exactly," Siegfried says, wincing. "She just - didn't think it would be fun. Said she would leave me to the ordeal." He looks at the ground, rather put-out. "It was fun."
She tilts her head, combing her hair out of her face where the wind snatches jealously at it. "Why are you doing it, Siegfried?" she asks gently. "Dorothy's too nice for you to mess her about. But you don't seem to really want it."
He shrugs helplessly. "It's what you're supposed to do, isn't it," he says, his voice very small and unlike himself. "When you're - when the person you want doesn't want you. You get over them. Get back on the horse, so to speak."
Helen blinks at him. "What do you mean, doesn't want you," she manages after a moment.
He shrugs again. "Just that. Well, I mean, what's a man supposed to think? One does everything short of open confession: one makes it clear by thought and deed where one's allegiances lie, I tell her how I want her with me and value her opinions, I share in my joys and seek her help with my sorrows, and she-"
His voice has been steadily rising, more and more agitated, until he notices that Jimmy is looking up curiously in their direction. He takes one deep, slow breath.
"She sets me up with her best friend," Siegfried says with studied calm. "At Christmas, too; which feels worse, though I recognise that this is a ridiculous point to focus on. A man can take a hint."
Helen turns her gaze on the skyline again, blinking hard against the wind. "Oh, Siegfried," she murmurs.
"Well." He sniffs, thrusting his fists firmly into his pockets and refusing to look anywhere near her.
"I don't think Audrey saw it all that way," she offers, and Siegfried emits a short, bitter laugh.
"How else could she have seen it?" he says. "I'm not prone to sonnets. I said she was the answer to any question I could ask. I did try."
Helen closes her eyes. "Dorothy is too nice," she repeats, "for you to use her to sort your feelings out."
"I'm not-" Siegfried begins indignantly, and then there is a pause. "I dislike that phrasing," he says eventually, stiff and stilted.
"I dislike you doing it," she says tartly, "so stop and I won't say it. And - I'm not saying sonnets. But people like hearing things said out loud as much as they like actions, so maybe tell her, in so many words, how you actually feel, and see where that gets you."
"You just said," Siegfried complains, rather petulantly, "how grateful you were that I had changed my behaviour. An action."
"Yes," Helen agrees, opening her eyes to glare at him, "I said it. Consequence of us being out here, saying things. We're better, you and me, when we talk: you tell me things you don't tell anyone else, and I tell you to get your head out of your arse."
"What does arse mean?" Jimmy pipes up, having drifted closer without their noticing.
"You have very inconvenient ears," Helen tells her son sternly. "Promise me not to say that in front of your dad or Auntie Audrey."
Jimmy tilts his head on one side, thinking; next to him, Rosie copies the movement. "Do I still have to clean my room?"
Compromise. She sighs and sticks out her hand; Jimmy shakes it, beaming.
"What if it goes wrong," he says later as they pick their way down the hillside in pursuit of the children.
Helen shakes her head. "It won't. If it does, at least it clears the air - it's better out of a relationship you're not sure of than in it, trust me - but it won't." She turns her head to grin at him; he looks rather more like he's walking to the gallows than his own home. "Promise."
She's tidying up after the children while they have their Sunday afternoon nap when James comes home.
"I'd begun to think you weren't coming home," she says over her shoulder at his familiar tread on the stairs. It sounds rather bouncy and cheerful; a successful call-out, then. "Did you get any lunch before you handed off to Siegfried?"
James, grinning wildly, sweeps her up off the floor and away from the sleeping children. He toes the door shut quietly and cuddles her in close. "I did not get any lunch," he tells her delightedly.
She grins in helpless, baffled return. "This is very mysterious, James. If you've been at the Orlow homebrew, you have to tell me."
"I have not," he says. "I have been eavesdropping."
She swats his chest. "James Herriot, I'm ashamed of you."
"Spying, even," he says, eyes wide. "It was an accident. I was going to get lunch and pass the shift to Siegfried, but I didn't make it." James grins, pressing his forehead to her own. "And you'll never guess who I saw kissing in the kitchen."