Homecoming (12 page)

‘Aye, that’ll do.’ Max has taken his coat off, lain it on a banquette and has sat down, chatting to Tal and Jake, who are one table along. Bartholomew brings their drinks to the table.

‘The wanderer returns,’ says Jake.

‘How’s things, Bartholomew?’ asks Tal.

‘Fine thanks. Happy Christmas.’ He raises his pint to them and sits down on a stool opposite Max.

‘Brass monkeys out there,’ says Jake.

‘It is,’ says Bartholomew.

‘How’s life down south?’ asks Jake. ‘Garden centre going well?’

He is smoking a roll-up. A snaking coil drifts up from its tip and he squints as it hits his eye.

‘OK,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Not bad. Make a living.’

‘Business-wise, though. Is it a good earner?’ Jake asks.

Bartholomew can feel Max’s gaze on him.

‘Hard to say. It’s so seasonal. If you have a good spring, then you’re OK, but the winters are a bit hardgoing. Quiet.’

‘What would you say, though, per year?’ Jake asks.

God, he’s relentless, thinks Bartholomew. ‘Why do you want to know, Jake? You thinking of branching out?’

‘Not me. Farming’s bad enough.’

‘How bad?’ Bartholomew says, looking at Max. He has been silent, watching Bartholomew’s answers; sipping his pint and glancing over to the bar where Sheryl is serving. She is wearing a skin-tight leopard-print top. She’s looking old, Bartholomew thinks. Her make-up sits thickly over a leathery face.

‘Bad,’ says Max. ‘Worst I’ve seen it. Stores going for less than twenty pound. Mule gimmers getting little over sixty pound. And feed is dear. Just ’ave to see if we can make it through till lambing.’

‘If?’

Max glances again at Sheryl. Not at her face, Bartholomew notices.

Tal has put another song on the jukebox.

‘The Streets,’ Bartholomew says as the song comes on. ‘Good choice.’

‘Aye, well, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was doing my head in,’ says Tal.

‘You heard about Talbot – he’s experimenting w’ all sorts of new fuel crops,’ says Max. He has half an eye on Jake. ‘Willow’s his latest thing. Burn it for heating. He’s got some government grant to grow it instead of set-aside. Supposed to be an alternative to fossil fuels. It’s carbon-neutral.’

‘Sounds like a good idea,’ says Bartholomew.

‘Yeah but no one’s got wood-fired heating, have they?’ says Jake. His voice is quick, his face red. ‘Plus, they need a bloody great lorry to shift it anywhere.’

‘Still,’ says Bartholomew, ‘surely it beats being paid tuppence for a lamb. Is that what you were thinking – growing fuel?’

‘S’ up to dad. He wants to carry on with sheep for now,’ says Max.

‘Yes, but if you’re taking it over –’

‘Dad knows what to do.’

‘You could take it in a new direction.’

‘We’re alright as we are,’ says Max, his gaze still on the bar. ‘Don’t you worry. Here, how old d’ye think bairn’ll be before dad has him driving the John Deere?’

‘Six or seven months at least,’ says Bartholomew. ‘There’s health and safety to think on. Course, he’ll let him play with power tools in the barn.’

‘And a ewe roll to suck on, ’stead of a rusk,’ says Max.

They chink their pints.

‘He’s buying a new tractor – getting a loan. Don’t tell mum. I’m sworn to secrecy,’ says Max.

Bartholomew frowns. Max is leaning too hard. ‘Can they
afford
that?’ he says.

‘Says he wants to build the farm up, for when I take it over.’

‘Maybe it’s you who should be doing that,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Build it up yourself once it’s yours. Get your own loans.’

‘Dad’s happy to do it.’

‘I don’t think that’s the point, is it?’ says Bartholomew.

‘And what would you know about it?’ says Max.

‘I’ve got me own loans. I’m not living off my father age thirty-five.’

‘You’re not helping him either,’ says Max.

‘Go easy lads,’ says Tal.

‘I’ll get another round,’ Max says.

Bartholomew watches him lean both elbows on the bar, his broad back sloping up towards Sheryl. He has one foot on the bar’s skirting rail. He can see Sheryl laughing, fingering the gold pendant around her neck. Max is smiling, murmuring, though Bartholomew cannot hear what he is saying.

Eventually, Max returns to their table.

‘You want to watch yourself there,’ says Bartholomew.

Max smiles at him, raises his pint and drinks half of it down without drawing a breath.

Bartholomew sits down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. He can feel his head swim with the pints he has consumed at the Fox. His mother has her back to him, scooping wet piles of potato peelings into the composting bucket. On the side are several pans and various bowls draped with tea towels. Joe is watching television next door and the muffled sounds of clapping periodically drift in to them.

A marshy gas hits Bartholomew’s nostrils. ‘Oof, Tess, that’s revolting,’ he says to one of the dogs, who is asleep in her basket.

‘She’s getting on a bit,’ says Ann. She is wiping the kitchen surfaces now. ‘Happens to us all.’

‘Not the flatulence I hope.’

They hear Joe turn off the television and the creak of the stairs as he climbs them. They hear the scrape of the landing chair being pulled away from the wall. They are looking at each other. Ann rolls her eyes.

‘Has it all been finalised yet?’ asks Bartholomew.

‘About Max and the farm?’ says Ann. ‘I don’t know, love. You’ll have to ask your father about that.’

‘D’ye think he’s ready to take it over? Why does he even want it? No one’s taking over farms these days.’

‘Did it ever occur to you,’ says Ann, ‘that it might be nice for us, that he’s taking it over? Nice for us to have ’im around?’ She is cross again. He always seems to make her cross. ‘No? Well, shurrup then.’

He is silent, not wanting to irritate her any more than he has already. A coldness seizes his heart. He wants to leave Yorkshire, now, this instant. He wonders if he could catch a train this evening, after his parents have gone to bed. Then remembers it’s Christmas Eve and he must sit it out.

‘Do you want me to help you bring down the presents?’ he asks.

‘I did it while you were out,’ she says. ‘Right, well I think I’ll turn in. Switch off the lights before you come up.’ She stops in the doorway. ‘Are you going to ring Ruby?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, maybe you should. Be nice to wish her a happy Christmas.’

Bartholomew is left alone in the kitchen, where the tired light shines on neat surfaces and washed crockery on the draining board. He can hear the murmuring of his parents on the landing and a door close. In the absence of people, the house begins its amplified ticking – the uneasy creaking as it shifts and settles, the hum of fridge and boiler. Bartholomew sits, unable to begin his slow journey up to bed.

Poupff.

Tess lets out another sulphurous wet guff. He notices, as he sits there, how shabby the room is. The paint on the skirting boards is flaking. The armchair next to the Rayburn has frayed fabric on its arms. The yellow walls have a greasy sheen. They haven’t decorated the place in more than fourteen years. But he also notices the precision in all the hooks Joe has put up for Ann – little tacks banged in for spare keys; larger ones for her pans; the short shelf by the sink for her scourer and single hook beneath it for her washing-up brush; the coat rail next to the back door. And the neat square of newspaper on which are lined up various working shoes, hardened and muddy. He is touched by this thrifty DIY orderliness. It speaks to him of collaboration. He and Ruby haven’t built up any systems for living. It doesn’t seem as if they can.

He switches the lights off and walks down the hallway, stopping at the open door to the living room, which is dark except for the rich multicoloured glow of the Christmas tree lights and the sheen they cast onto the wrapped presents below. He can smell the fresh spruce needles and the generalised wood-smoked air of the house and it brings up a surging childish thrill, except now he knows he can walk past the presents without rattling them, and that he will be able to get to sleep.

Reaching into his pocket for his mobile phone, he presses ‘Names’ and ‘R’ for Ruby. Looks at the little screen whose illumination gradually fades out. He switches the phone off.

Bartholomew stands holding his book in one hand, a glass of water in the other, gazing down at the narrow single bed in his parents’ back bedroom. Staring back at him is a superhero dressed as a banana, the faded corners of the duvet tucked in tightly, smoothed by his mother’s house-proud hand. At the end of the bed is a fraying hand towel, folded to a square.

He pulls back a corner of the duvet and gets in, inching his way down, wondering if single beds were always this narrow. He breathes in the washing-powder smell of the pillowcase, its fabric thin and cold like a compress. The feeling of being back at the farm has brought back his childhood frustrations, especially the teenage ones when he’d have to work with Joe and Max through the interminable school holidays – cutting and baling the grass (smelt like human sick once it started to ferment, if you asked him, which nobody did); returning strays to neighbouring farms (Max did all the heavy lifting. Bartholomew bolted the ramps); checking those on the in-bye for foot rot (Bartholomew seemed mostly to open and shut gates). He’d wanted, those summers, to be left alone to eat cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, think about Claire from Form Three and listen to the Fine Young Cannibals, nursing the way he felt apart from them, his family.

He remembers sitting on the fence, which looked out on the field where the fattening lambs were grazing, Lily snuffing around the mud and straw behind him in the yard.

‘Everything alright, Bartholomew?’ his father had said, coming to lean on the fence.

‘Yep.’

‘Why’ve you got a face like a wet weekend then?’

Bartholomew didn’t answer. They had been separating off the weak lambs earlier in the day and he’d watched as Joe pulled the tiller gate towards him to take off the smallest of the lot, had heard the cries from its mother and its healthier twin as they were forced the other way. Panicked bleating. The weak lamb, not fine enough for breeding, would be fattened on the in-bye and sold for meat.

‘What you listening to?’ Joe had said at his side.

‘Fine Young Cannibals.’

Joe crouched then to stroke Lily.

‘Would you send Lily to the slaughterhouse?’ asked Bartholomew.

‘Make a nice Sunday cut that,’ Joe had said, running his hand down the back of Lily’s haunch, then patting her hard.

‘I don’t know how you do it.’

‘Come on, don’t be so dramatic.’

‘Because you know them. You know who they are. What they feel – like when you take the lambs off at weaning and they cry out all night.’

Joe had stared at the ground. For a moment, he’d seemed bewildered. All Bartholomew had wanted, he thinks now with his arms behind his head on the pillow, was for Joe to say that he felt it. Really felt it – what he was doing to those animals, year in, year out. Tending and killing. Working so hard to keep lambs with their mothers only to tear them away from them come September, when their cries would echo all night across the farm and the family, they’d lie in their beds listening to it.

Christmas morning and Ann sits in her apron on a dining chair, which has been brought into the living room. She has set it close by the door, so that she’s got easy access to the kitchen. She holds a glass of fizz in one hand, put there by Joe, and the fizz is going straight to her head because she’s not used to drinking at 11 a.m. And she feels woozy, too, from being up so early and so frantic.

When she’d woken at seven, Joe had rolled over and placed a heavy arm over her body. ‘Give us a cuddle,’ he’d said drowsily but she was up and out of bed like a whippet out of the traps. ‘Give over. I’ve far too much to do.’

Downstairs in her dressing gown, she’d pulled the bird from the cold store (it was too big for the fridge). Her hands, now, are swollen and chapped with all the washing and forcing them under the cold skin of the bird, peeling it gradually from the flesh so she could push the parsley butter in between.

She takes a sip and looks at Bartholomew who is sat forward on his armchair, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together; that intense look he often has on his face, watching Max turn the CD in his hand. Bartholomew leans further forward still, saying, ‘It’s a good album. One of my favourites. Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy it.’

Come on you miserable beggar, she thinks. Give him something back.

‘Right,’ says Max. ‘Thanks.’

And her heart sinks when she sees him set the CD down on the floor by his feet, where it becomes part of the pile of gifts that she has bought him – the pile which is identical to Bartholomew’s (socks, underpants, wash bag, shave foam, nail clippers) because even now – and honestly, they’re grown men – she is anxious not to throw petrol on to that flame.

‘Bartholomew,’ she says. ‘This one’s from me and your dad.’ In her peripheral vision she can see Max alert, watching. Calm down, she thinks, for heaven’s sake. It’s only fudge.

She blows out into her cheeks, gazing at them. It was a myth that fierce motherly love blinded you from seeing your children clearly.

She remembers the simplicity of her feelings when they were small – how physical her love was then: lifting them out of the cot after a sleep, holding them pressed against her body, their hot bread-loaf legs circling her waist; how she would sink her face into the skin at the nape of their necks and breathe in very deeply and it was as if they were a drug and she could feel this tingling sensation right up into the follicles of her hair. Fierce pockets of protectiveness – a primal thing. Knowing you’d throw yourself in front of a car ahead of them.

But by god they were annoying.

She looks at them now, Bartholomew full of these high ideas as if the ordinary stuff of life were beneath him. She watches him take another handful of bacon bites from the bowl on the side table. And Max, visibly doing an audit of Bartholomew’s present pile. Always counting up.