* * *
Once upon a time there had been a fairy tale, Alistair Vane could almost remember it. The farm that had belonged to his family for hundreds of years was set in the kind of place where people dreamed of living and when he had been a child there had been a happiness which was there no longer.
There had been a stable full of big working horses, Clydesdales for the fields. There had been women to help in the house and men and boys outside. His grandfather had owned a big car, had ridden to hounds, had taught him over those long childhood days how to fish and ride and shoot, his grandmother had spent the evenings playing card games with him and reading him stories and they had talked to him about the future, or so it seemed to him. But they had died and it was as if the future had become the past without anyone recognising its passing. His father complained loudly and continued to complain that his grandfather had left death duties because there was no will.
They were still better off than most people in the dale. For a start the farm was theirs and it was on good land and there was a lot of it, it was bigger than most of the other farms. The farm was built in a square, the house making up one side and the buildings the other three. Nobody seemed to know how old the farm was, tenth or eleventh century. It was a good house, with stone mullioned windows and pretty with a garden in front where there were sloping lawns and big cherry trees and an orchard beyond that with a tiny stream and a rickety bridge. There were kitchen gardens too and at either side of the house dovecots where tumblers had fascinated him with their wonderful flying. In the evenings, as they came down the road towards the farm in his grandfather’s big car, the doves would come to meet them and fly down like an escort tumbling white and sun-kissed at the day’s end. Alistair thought that God must have touched his home, such a place it was.
It was changed now. Every modern convenience was theirs and in the evenings while he retreated to his room his father and mother entertained the local doctors and business people, the solicitors and the better off, and the smell of roasting meat wafted up the stairs towards him until Alistair felt sick. And then the cars would arrive, their big lights illuminating the yard, the women with their high voices and their laughter, the men with their low voices and their enthusiasm. He remembered being younger and being brought down to say goodnight, the smell of gin and tonic and cigarettes on his mother’s breath, the women with their perfumed necks and jewellery, the men standing with their drinks by the big fire. There was never a cat or a dog inside the house. All the old familiar paintings had been relegated to the attics. There were drinks in strange-shaped bottles, green liquid and orange and brown which he knew the guests drank with their coffee. When it was late and the people went home livelier than when they came for the alcohol they had consumed he would lie awake and wonder how many days it was until he should go back to school. Strange to think that there was a kind of peace there, at least he could sometimes get away to draw in peace. It meant getting into trouble for missing games or chapel but after a while they had stopped punishing him for doing that. He was good at his school work and that compensated. He would go to university, he would get away and when he had some decent kind of education behind him he could do anything.
* * *
After Easter Blake and Annie went back to school for their last term. They both hated it. Madge and Elsie went off together early but Blake and Annie lingered until the last minute and then walked slowly up the road to the village.
‘Good of you to join us,’ said Mr Ward when they finally arrived some ten minutes late.
It was strange to Blake to go to and from Grayswell to school along the main road in the bottom of the valley, rather than coming down the hill from the farm where he had lived and then toiling back up thankfully at the end of the day. He tried not even to look in that direction. The Austin children, two of them, also came to school, a girl and a boy both a lot younger than him. They seemed so carefree, so settled. They talked about Bessie as though she was their dog. Blake was glad for her sake.
The schoolwork was easy and boring and Mr Ward shook his head and said for the umpteenth time that Blake should have taken the scholarship and been at the grammar school. Blake had not been there for the tests but he knew that it would have been no good. His grandparents could never have afforded either the uniform or for his attention to be that diverted. They had needed him and he was glad that he had been able to help them while they needed him. It was a lot more important than things like books. Mr Ward thought it something special that he could recall what he read, that his memory was good, that the mathematics were easy to him. Blake thought Mr Ward was a poor creature for a farmer’s son. What on earth was he doing sitting in classrooms on fine days like these when he could have been outside producing something rather than trying to instil knowledge into silly little minds?
Weekends and holidays were the best times. Blake worked with Mr Lowe and when Tommy started speaking to him occasionally everything seemed to come all right as long as he didn’t get in Tommy’s way or try to act like one of the family when Tommy was there. The rest of the time it wasn’t bad. Mr Lowe seemed more and more pleased with him and he was unstinting in his praise so that Blake worked harder than ever. Mrs Lowe sat Blake next to her husband and herself at mealtimes as though he was another adult and Blake began to eat heartily because her cooking was almost as good as his grandmother’s had been. She told him that she had worked in a bakery when she lived at home. Her home was at Seaton Town near Sunderland. Her father had been a miner there and after she left school she helped in the local bakery. It was obvious that she had learned a great deal there. The crust on her rabbit pie tasted better than anything Blake had had before and her cakes and bread made the whole house smell wonderful.
At night sometimes Tommy still put frogs into his bed or worms or cowpats, but only dry ones because Tommy was rather afraid that his mother would find out and Blake had discovered that Mrs Lowe had a temper. You stayed well clear of her when things were not going as she wanted or she shouted.
One day when Mr Lowe came in in a bad mood and grumbled about the dinner she had put in front of him she picked the whole plateful up off the table and threw it through the small open window. It sailed clean over the yard wall and smashed into the byre opposite.
‘There’s your dinner,’ she said and walked out and Mr Lowe never said a word.
The girls helped in the house. Annie tried to get out of it and since she was a good help outside, especially with the milking, her parents let her get away with it. Elsie and Madge helped in the house. Their mother said that Madge was as good as any housekeeper. She had been taught to cook from an early age and her mother could go and leave her in the kitchen now to make the dinner, only popping in from time to time to make sure that everything was all right.
One night early that summer when Blake had got used to being there he heard a noise in the middle of the night coming from the girls’ room and he lit a candle and ventured through. It was a warm night but dark because it had rained and rained. Madge stood with a lit candle by the window. She was a sight in her long nightgown, like a ghost reflected in the window. Elsie was asleep but Annie who slept in a single bed beside them was out on top of the covers and when Blake ventured into the room she put her finger to her lips and clasped hold of his arm and drew him down on to the bed.
‘Don’t say anything,’ she whispered, ‘not out loud anyroad.’
‘What’s she doing?’
‘She’s asleep. She does it a lot.’
‘Shouldn’t you tell your Mam and Dad?’
‘You would,’ she said scathingly but she regarded Madge with concern. ‘She did this all last winter. It made her chilblains worse and they were that bad she could hardly straighten her fingers.’
‘Hold that,’ Blake said, shoving the candle at her and he went cautiously to the window and said to Madge, ‘It’s time to go back to bed now,’ and as he spoke she turned around blankly and blew out the candle and put it down and climbed back into bed.
Annie’s brown eyes sparkled as she held the candle.
‘She won’t remember. You won’t tell her?’
Elsie whimpered in her sleep.
‘It’s all right, Else,’ Annie said. And to Blake, ‘I suppose you think that makes you clever?’
‘No, but it makes me cleverer than you,’ Blake said and retrieved the candle from her. He did not miss the grin she gave him. He was almost happy when he went to bed.
* * *
Best of all that summer Blake liked the haytiming, the hot days, the food and tea which Mrs Lowe and Elsie brought to the fields, the broad-backed horse and the smell of the hay and the work done and the sun setting and the big suppers which Mrs Lowe set out in the large kitchen for all the workers. By then Blake was a head taller than Mrs Lowe and to Tommy’s dismay as big as him.
When he and Tommy were working together they became better friends. Tommy had stopped picking on him by then partly because he had got used to him and partly because Tommy was now more aware of being older. It was beneath his dignity to fight with Blake.
Frank was home from school and came to help in the fields. Annie’s best friend, Clara Evans, came as well. She lived up on the hillside and had been a neighbour of Blake’s when he lived there though he had rarely seen her. She was an only child and Annie envied her her pretty clothes.
She and Blake had left school now but instead of the freedom which she had hoped to gain she had to go daily to Alistair’s house to help with the milking and dairying. Annie didn’t mind the milking or going to the house but she was ashamed that she had to go out to work for the money. She had tried arguing with her father but it didn’t make any difference. He had insisted. Alistair wasn’t there in the autumn when she began working at his farm and she was glad of it. She didn’t want him to see her there as though she was a servant.
She came to understand why Alistair didn’t like being there. His father was a perfectionist and he expected other people to be like that too. The house was always spotlessly clean and the cars were washed daily. He came every day to the dairy to check that there too nothing was amiss and as far as he was concerned something always was. It was hard work keeping to his standards and also he was rude, he shouted at Annie. He was so big and so dark and so angry that he frightened her. She wondered what it had been like for Alistair growing up there with a father like that.
The house was colourless and everything was new and expensive, everything had to be polished, Annie heard the maids talking, and the three huge bathrooms had to have fresh towels and be cleaned every day. There were great vases of flowers which Mrs Vane constantly attended to and changed and the cook laboured in the kitchen to turn out perfect meals for the constant stream of guests.
Annie didn’t get fed when she was there, she didn’t even get invited beyond the kitchen or the dairy but the cook was a kind woman, and since Mr Vane rarely went into the kitchen as long as nothing was wrong, the cook would sit Annie and the maids down at the kitchen table whenever she could and give them newly-baked bread with jam, lemon curd tarts and cups of strong tea. She never dared give Annie any main meals or any meat because Mr Vane would have known instantly. Annie thought that he was the meanest person she had ever met and told her mother so. They paid her as little as they could, knowing that work was difficult to find. Annie proudly took every penny home to her mother who received it thankfully.
As the Christmas holidays drew nearer she worried about being at Western Isle as the dairymaid and one Sunday afternoon when the others were sitting around the fire because it was cold she walked down to the river by herself and stood, watching the grey water running over the cold stones.
She was there a while before she sensed that she wasn’t alone and when she looked up Blake was walking down the field towards her. It was late afternoon now and the light had almost gone.
‘Is the tea ready?’ she greeted him. She loved Sunday afternoons even though Monday lurked after them. Her mother always made Sunday tea special even though they had already had a big dinner. There would be ham-and-egg pie and custard tart and little diamond-shaped sandwiches and maybe tinned peaches and cream with bread and butter.
‘She doesn’t want you out in the dark,’ he said.
Annie tossed her head.
‘What on earth does she think is going to happen to me here? It’s the last place God made.’
‘I thought you loved the dale.’
‘I used to. It’s boring now. Don’t you get bored?’
‘Everything I care about is here.’
‘You haven’t got anything,’ she said flatly. Alistair would have coloured up and retreated at such scorn.
‘Try not to be so obvious,’ Blake said. ‘What are you doing down here by yourself?’
‘Nothing. I can’t think at home, there’s too many of us.’
‘Think about what?’
‘It’s none of your business, Blake.’
‘Walk back up with me then before it gets completely dark.’
‘I’m not a child. What does my mother think I’m going to do, fall in?’ But she turned with him and began walking slowly.
Part of the reason for coming out had been so that she could walk back up the fields watching the buildings which made up the farm, seeing the cream light which spilled out across the field directly in front of the house, knowing that the people she loved best in all the world were gathered there around the fire and that her mother and Elsie and Madge would have been back and forth between the little back kitchen and the front one until the table was covered with good things to eat.
She walked towards the house knowing that she would be out of the cold and into the warmth within minutes, that the fire would be blazing high up the chimney from their own wood. The tea would be brewing in the big pot, the cutlery winking in the firelight. Sunday afternoon was the best time of all and it was magical now, walking slowly with Blake. She wished that she could hold the moment, having it go on being that time, capture it somehow so that she didn’t have to go on or back but just be almost home, almost warm, almost full of custard tart and strawberry jam and peaches. In the almost-dark the birds were silenced and Blake was walking more slowly than he usually did but she wanted to prolong the moment and he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t say anything either. He didn’t ask any more questions. He wasn’t irritating like Tommy would have been or a nuisance like Madge or Elsie, he was just there and the moment of happiness was captured for ever.