Devon

Devon is the rural county where Robbie Dexter lives and works, and where Rachel Elliot travels to test whether their rekindled relationship can become a future together. The journey takes her out of the professional world of London and into the demands of Robbie’s rural life; rather than guaranteeing the domestic idyll she imagines, the county becomes the setting in which their hopes meet work, uncertainty, and silence.

Location and setting

Rachel identifies Drakeshead as being in Devon after remembering the place name from a television interview with Robbie. She checks an atlas, having previously thought he lived in Wiltshire, and uses a directory enquiry service to locate his telephone number. The search converts a half-remembered place into a reachable destination: two minutes after calling, she is speaking to Robbie himself.

The route to his home makes the change of setting concrete. Robbie gives Rachel directions involving a dead-end sign beyond the Fox and Hounds and a tight turn; she later follows narrow lanes to Station Cottage, whose hand-painted sign is partly obscured by brambles. The last stretch includes deep ruts made by tractor wheels. These are not the open, effortless roads of an imagined escape but a specific approach to a working rural home, reached with care and directions that Rachel must decipher as she leaves the motorway.

Robbie’s home and working life

Devon is not simply a backdrop to the reunion. It is where Robbie’s everyday responsibilities gather around him. He keeps animals, including sheep and chickens, and Rachel imagines helping with fire-laying, collecting eggs, and chasing sheep when she arrives for a weekend. Lambing is due to begin, giving the visit an immediate practical context: Robbie is occupied not only by his relationship with Rachel but by work that cannot be put aside for it.

His livelihood is vulnerable as well. During Rachel’s later surprise visit, Robbie explains that a substantial job on the other side of Drakeshead has fallen through. The failed work and the approaching lambing season have made the week difficult and left him preoccupied. Devon therefore contains both the rural life Rachel finds appealing and the pressures that make that life less like a ready-made refuge. Robbie’s home offers a place for her to imagine taking part, but it also requires her to encounter the obligations already governing his days.

Rachel’s visits and expectations

Rachel’s first journey is charged with more than curiosity about Robbie’s address. On the long drive, she examines why motherhood has begun to appeal to her: it might offer fulfilment beyond her career and give her hopes another focus. She has not settled whether to leave McKenzie Cartwright, and she recognizes that work has occupied too much of her sense of the future. Visiting Devon seems to open another avenue, even as she privately carries an unresolved wish connected to having a child.

As Drakeshead approaches, memories of Rachel and Robbie’s earlier life return: shared holidays, favourite films, jokes, and the passion of their young relationship. The recollections sit beside memories of her first years in advertising, when she prized professional ambition and judged a colleague’s decision to be late for a meeting because of his baby’s first smile. Looking back, she recognizes that she had mistaken commitment to family for a weakness, and that women with children at her workplace might fear being judged if they showed comparable priorities. The drive toward Devon thus prompts a reconsideration of the values she once brought to her career, before she has even arrived at Robbie’s door.

The arrival itself brings the remembered relationship into the present. Rachel sees Station Cottage and Robbie’s mud-splattered van, which recalls an earlier intimacy between them. On a later weekend visit, she surprises him by taking a day off and presents herself as ready to help with the tasks of country life. Robbie welcomes her and says he has missed her, but the reunion does not immediately produce the conversation or certainty she might hope for. His concern about work and lambing, and her efforts to be useful, shape the visit as much as their affection does.

A setting for uncertainty

Devon becomes the measure of a possible shared life, but the promise remains unsettled. Rachel’s longing for a rural future with Robbie is intertwined with her uncertainty about motherhood, her career, and the honesty their relationship requires. She has taken a pregnancy test and is relieved by its negative result; she also knows she must tell Robbie about her concealed hopes and the unprotected sex between them if they are to have a future. The county is therefore the destination of a reunion that carries unresolved questions rather than a settled domestic plan.

The later weekend there ends without a decisive conversation. Rachel leaves on Saturday under excuses, surprised that Robbie does not resist her departure and relieved by the lack of a confrontation. They both promise to stay in touch and arrange another visit, but a long silence follows. She considers writing to explain that the relationship may not work and that even her desire for a child has become uncertain. In the end, Devon does not secure the long-term rural life Rachel had imagined: the visit exposes how hope can coexist with avoidance, and how a desired place cannot by itself resolve the personal choices brought to it.