Homecoming (29 page)

‘He’s resting. I’ll get him when lunch is ready.’

‘No I’m not,’ says Joe. He is standing in the doorway with Baby Lamb by his side. ‘Hello son,’ he says to Max.

Bartholomew and Ruby stand with their backs leaning against the kitchen counter. Joe and Ann look down at Max.

‘We’re a right pair, aren’t we, son?’ says Joe, smiling at Max and rubbing his shoulder with one hand. ‘All lost we two, aren’t we?’

Ann puts her arm around Joe and kisses his cheek. She has her other hand on Max’s back and she kisses the top of his head.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Come on. Lunch.’

‘I can do it,’ says Ruby. ‘Leave it to me.’

‘Thank you, lovey,’ says Ann. ‘Bartholomew, you can lay the table.’

Joe has taken a seat at the head of the table. Ann is placing jars of chutney and mayonnaise at its centre. Ruby is busy at the counter, with her back to the room. Bartholomew walks around the table, putting a plate in front of each seat.

‘I do think we need to set a timetable,’ Bartholomew says, and the room erupts into groans. ‘For the auction.’

‘Here we go,’ says Ruby. ‘Could you clench those buttocks a bit tighter?’

‘What?’ says Bartholomew.

‘Excuse me,’ says Ann. ‘That’s enough from you, Bartholomew. Let’s get the lunch out shall we?’

‘I just think we have to sort it out,’ he says.

‘You sort out your dahlias,’ says Joe. ‘Leave the farm to us.’

‘I don’t know why I bother,’ says Bartholomew.

Ann has a hand on the bread loaf and is sawing it on a chopping board. She places a thick slice on each plate.

‘Everything alright with Primrose?’ Joe says to Max. ‘Is she coming?’

Everyone stops for a moment.

‘Primrose,’ Max begins. Ruby puts a cup of tea down in front of him and he lifts it to take a sip. ‘We’re, she’s . . .’ He rubs his palms on his knees.

‘Not feeling well?’ says Joe.

‘That’s right,’ says Ann. ‘She’s not well. Stomach thing.’

‘Ah well,’ says Joe. ‘You can report back to her.’

The activity in the room resumes, Ruby washing tomatoes in the sink and setting them on the table in a bowl. Bartholomew reaches for the packet of ham and puts a slice on his plate.

‘No,’ says Max loudly and all eyes are on him. ‘Primrose left me,’ he says to Joe. ‘Gone to live in Lipton with a friend.’

The table absorbs this statement with a criss-crossing of arms fetching ham, cheese, butter, knives clattering, gulps of tea. Ann notices how slow Max is to fight his way in. He’s no appetite, she thinks sadly. ‘Is there anything I can pass you, Max love?’ she says. ‘Something for your bread?’

‘I’m alright with tea for now,’ says Max.

‘You all know we’re going to be selling up,’ says Joe, gruff and powerful.

‘We want a bit of a retirement,’ says Ann. ‘Take things a bit easier.’

‘We talked to Talbot,’ Joe says to Max. ‘He says there’s a position for you there if you want it. Nothing grand, but not labouring. Land management, he said.’

‘He’ll see you right,’ says Ann.

Then Bartholomew says, ‘I don’t think that’s what Max . . .’

‘No, you’re alright,’ says Max. ‘It’s a good idea – to work for Talbot. He’s a decent enough chap.’

Ann sees Bartholomew cast a look at his brother and Max avoiding his eye.

‘Autumn,’ she says into the room and everybody stops. ‘Auctioneer says late September would be about right. Once lambs are weaned.’

‘Here we are,’ says Lauren, pulling up the handbrake.

Ann sits in the passenger seat while the car ticks and looks out at the wide cul-de-sac. Bilious clouds scud over a series of lurid red roofs. The newly tarmacked road is lined with bungalows, flat and low. There is too much space between them, as if they’re sharing some pretence of detached snobbery. Bland rectangles for windows, bricks that are a sickly shade of yellow. Noddy boxes, Joe would call them.

‘Right,’ says Ann, and they both get out of the car. They follow a black, glistening path to number six where the agent greets them at the door.

It takes about ten minutes to clack around the empty rooms.

‘And how much did you say it was?’ Ann asks at the end of his tour.

‘£137,000,’ says the agent.

Ann’s eyes bulge. ‘Lauren,’ she says, but Lauren stops her arm.

‘Thanks ever so,’ Lauren says to the estate agent, ‘do you mind if we take a minute?’

‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’

They wait for him to leave the room – a bedroom, he called it, but barely wider than a double bed. The rooms are boxy, all of them. Mean, with low ceilings. Yes, there are down-lighters, but they don’t seem like Lauren’s. Some of them are wonky, so the hole’s exposed and you can see how cardboardy the plasterboard ceiling is. And the doors are thin, and the floors are orangey and in places they creak in a sticky way.

‘That’s a hell of a price for a rabbit hutch like this,’ says Ann to Lauren, who is by the window looking out to the garden where a postage stamp of newly laid turf is surrounded by bare fencing.

‘It’s a bit steep, I’ll grant you,’ says Lauren. ‘That garden’s charmless.’

‘We’ll not get near that price,’ says Ann. She pats her collar-bones. ‘Everything’s so expensive. God, Lauren, we have to be out in less than six weeks. Auction’s in two. What a mess.’

‘Calm down. We’ll find you something. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you lunch on the high street – just to cheer you up, like.’

‘You don’t have to keep saying that,’ says Ann. ‘I’ll let you buy me lunch.’

They walk together up the steep incline, Ann’s arm looped in Lauren’s, towards the Wooden Spoon café at the top of the high street. To their right, on the opposite side of the road, is the Conservative Club. To their left, the grand old Victorian shop fronts, dark-grey stone, blackened around the edges, cut in big old slabs. Same colour as the pavement, as the dry stone walls out on the fell. Past the newsagents, the bakery, the bicycle shop, Drapers, which sells hiking boots and expensive anoraks to walkers. Ann looks up to where the old clock hangs between the upper windows and there she sees a ‘For Sale’ sign, above the bookshop.

‘Look at that,’ she says to Lauren, pulling back on her arm.

‘What? Oh yes. Must be a flat. Shall I ring? See if we can see it?’

They climb the musty stairwell. Dark, it is, the stair carpet maroon, laced with dog hairs and thinning at the treads.

‘Doesn’t bode well,’ says Lauren, her face turning back to Ann from a few steps above.

The agent is up ahead, shoving his shoulder against the door. ‘It’s recently vacated,’ he says – same chap as earlier. Happened to have the keys on him. ‘Not as good nick as the place I just showed you.’

They walk through to a room which stinks of dog. The walls are the colour of cigarette tar, the old gloss woodwork yellowing too, and the carpet is patched. But it has the highest ceilings Ann has ever seen, lined with a cornice of carved roses – the stately proportions of a Victorian drawing room. Two enormous arched windows stretch up, big as a church’s; impossibly bright and warmed by the sun. A view of the sky, and below them the bustle of the high street. Ann immediately pictures a Christmas tree in the corner.

‘It’s on at £75,000,’ says the agent. ‘Not been that much interest because it needs a bit of work. Two bedrooms above and a bathroom.’

‘It’s a maisonette?’

‘Yes.’

‘But no outside space.’

‘No.’

Lauren and Ann look at each other. ‘Baby Lamb,’ they say in unison.

‘Oh, but Lauren it’s so beautiful,’ says Ann, feeling excitement bubbling in her chest as if she might lift right off the ground with it. She runs up the stairs, where the bedrooms have the same elegant proportions, with little cast-iron fireplaces, and there is a shabby avocado bathroom. Ann walks slowly back down the stairs in a daze.

‘Bit grubby,’ says Lauren from the hallway. She disappears and Ann hears her shoes tap on linoleum. ‘You’ll need a new kitchen.’

Ann joins her in the small galley room next door to the lounge, with beige units, an exposed old fifty-pence meter and torn-up floor. ‘Yes, but the rooms,’ Ann whispers urgently. ‘Lauren, the feeling of it. Right in the centre of the shops, too. Joe could walk over the road for a pint at the club.’

‘That’s all I need,’ says Lauren. ‘Eric at the club more often.’

Ann’s not listening. ‘Just needs a lick of paint is all. Me and Joe and the boys could do it.’

‘Slow down. It’s still a lot,’ says Lauren. ‘God, look at you. We’ve got to see what the auction gets you first. Come on, let’s go for lunch, I’m starving.’

‘Five more minutes,’ Ann says. ‘Let me have another look upstairs.’

Ann stands beside an industrial-sized tea urn, borrowed from the church kitchen. It rumbles and spits. The trestle table before her (also borrowed) is spread with cakes and sandwiches wrapped in cling film; Kit Kats in their box, the cardboard lid folded back and ‘10p’ written in marker pen on the lip; sausage rolls on a white tray. It is a bright day, with a playful wind and delicious unexpected heat to it: a real Indian summer. She feels the dampness under her arms and on her forehead. She can smell her lavender bubble bath rise off her too-warm skin. She glances at Lauren, standing next to her, immaculately turned out as always in a white sleeveless shirt and pearls.

She looks out across the in-bye, now the auction site. Over in the yard, their vehicles and equipment are lined up: the
tractor
and its various attachments, quad bike, gates, lamb adopter, sheep bars and metal mangers, sorting pen; each with a lot number. Joe is there, she’s sure, has been all morning. Pacing among the lots with Baby Lamb on a lead. Earlier she’d seen him standing too close to those that were looking around. She watched him frown, as Granville Harris picked over the metal, Granville saying to a man next to him, ‘Bit o’rust on that one,’ and Joe had muscled in, saying, ‘There is not. It’s in perfectly good nick.’ She’d had to pull him away or they’d not sell anything.

Here in the field, the sheep are penned, also in lots. Lambs just weaned earlier in the month, now ready for sale. Adrian and Eric had brought in around two hundred and fifty mules at lambing, twins and singles. And there’s another two-hundred-odd pure Swales that had lambed on the fell by themselves. And a few tups. They can’t sell the dogs, not yet. That’s more than they can take. The field is thronging with men in jeans and T-shirts and green Hunter boots. There are overweight women, their arms wide in vest tops and cropped trousers, and children climbing on a parked tractor which has been brought in as a plaything. The toddlers are petting the lambs or running in circles.

They come for the day out, as much as anything, for the chat and the cakes and to see how low the prices have sunk. They did it themselves – her and Joe – when the boys were small. She puts a hand up as a visor over her eyes and squints as the sun burns dry and powerful. Sees Bartholomew standing chatting to Adrian and Tal beside the sheep pens. He has his arm around Ruby’s shoulders – he always seems to have an arm around her these days. Holding on tight. She’s a pretty girl, Ann thinks, in her jeans and that bright-orange flowery shirt. She’s pleased for Bartholomew, to see him settled and happy. She scans the field, sees a small girl, maybe six or seven, in a blue dress running circles around the pen, pursued by a friend. Our field – same field the boys played in – and the one next door which had the perfect pitch for rolling down. Max must’ve been that girl’s age, Bartholomew about four, and they’d clasp onto each other and roll, one over t’other, giggling so hard that Bartholomew wet himself and she’d scolded him for it. No one’ll want to play with you, if you keep pissing your pants. And Max pushed him off, saying ‘Yuk’. She’d never imagined a moment like this would come. Never thought she’d get old. And she has an urge to shout ‘No, I can’t do it, I’m not ready.’ But to whom? And who could make it stop?

‘Yes, love,’ she says, sensing a customer in her peripheral vision, waiting in front of her table. ‘What can I get ye?’ And she turns to the man and squints as the sun obscures her view with its shards.

‘Tea please,’ says Joe, ‘and a slice of that beautiful sponge. It looks light as air does that.’

‘Oh Joe,’ she says, and she walks out from behind the table and puts her arms around his shoulders, burying her face in his neck which is as much home to her as this place. ‘Oh Joe.’

‘Come on, now,’ he says, his hands on her hips. ‘We’ll be
alright
, Annie.’

To their left is the auctioneer, holding his loudhailer in one hand and stooping to find the face of Brenda Farley, whose debilitating hunch has forced her eyes to the grass. Ann lets go of Joe. She stands beside him and the two of them look out together. Groups of people chat in huddles. They sip their drinks. They wolf down Ann and Lauren’s cakes. She notices a couple of teenagers talking awkwardly to one another. The boy is flushed red all along his jawline, just like Bartholomew when he was that age.

‘Where’s Max?’ she says.

Joe nods to his right. ‘Over there, talking to Talbot.’

Ann follows his gaze and sees Max, his body angled towards the older, bigger man who is in full countryman uniform despite the heat. Max is listening to Talbot, cocking his head, alert as a sheepdog. He nods and listens again.

‘Think you might have to give up your position as font of all wisdom,’ she says to Joe as they both watch Max.

‘Gladly,’ says Joe.

‘Right,’ Eric says. They turn and he’s standing with an arm around Lauren, on the other side of the trestle. ‘I think we’re about ready to begin.’

‘You’ve done a grand job, Eric,’ says Joe. They stand, the four of them, looking out across the field at the cheerful scene. Here she is in her summer dress, serving tea and cakes, thinking how glorious the field looks filled with her community, standing here with her best friends and greeting all the many nice people they know . . .

She frees herself from Joe’s arm and looks out across the field behind them, where the cars are parked in lines. Hot as August it is. She sees a family sitting at their open boot, eating sandwiches and passing around a flask. How the English love to sit at the boots of their cars. The mother unwraps a foil parcel and hands some food to two children who sit cross-legged on the grass. The father, sitting low in his foldaway chair, reaches into a bag and pulls out a newspaper. Ann thinks she can see the
woman
frowning. Why is it, she thinks, when they went to events like this – a country show or an auction or a church fair – times when they were younger and the farm was still going and the children were young – why hadn’t she enjoyed it, in the way she was enjoying this one? Tasting it. Noticing. She had so often been angry or tied up with how the boys were misbehaving and not getting enough help from Joe. Oh the mind is perverse, that she should feel pleasure on this funereal day which is trussed up like a garden party and peevish when it had been there for her to enjoy. Why must it take a lifetime to learn to live in the present and to have the knack of it arrive just when the present is running out?

Behind her, she hears Joe’s gruff voice saying, ‘Eric, I don’t know how to say –’ And she hears Eric stop him, saying, ‘Shurrup man. Buy me a pint later when you’re rich.’

And then another voice, distorted by the funnel of a loudhailer, saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I shall be opening the bidding on Lot 32 of the Hartle estate.’

‘Am I bid fifteen pound, fifteen fifteen. Come on lads, gimme fifteen pound. Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen pound. Fine Swale stores these, come on folks, seventeen pound, seventeen, seventeen, eighteen, let me see eighteen, thank you sir, eighteen pound.’

Joe and Ann close their eyes against the auctioneer’s rotten song of numbers, a mean reckoning on the animals they’ve cared so much for.

‘Not sure I can listen to much more o’ this,’ says Joe.

‘It’s the breeding ewes next,’ says Ann. ‘They’ll get more.’

Lauren crosses two of her fingers in the air.

Bartholomew and Ruby have wandered over to stand beside them, and Max too, to the other side, and it seems to Ann as if they’re forming some circle of protection around her and Joe. Joe’s gaze is on the ewes and she knows what he’s thinking – that he knew them, from birth many of them, when they followed their mothers up onto the fell; that they were his – his flock, his family. And which stranger would they go to? And would they look after them right? And she thinks people don’t understand it, because sheep are reared for meat, but if you’re not looking after them well, you don’t feel good in yourself.

‘Forty pound, forty pound, forty pound. Can I see forty-five? Good  ewes these, fine breeding animals, forty-five, forty-five, forty-five, thank you sold!’

He lowers his face so she can put her forehead against his forehead and they both have their eyes closed as the auctioneer says, ‘Four Swale tups . . .’

‘We’ll be alright, Joe. We’ll rent somewhere,’ she says. ‘Get jobs, both of us. I can get some cleaning, you can do odd jobs, shepherding if we keep the dogs, help w’ harvests and what have you. Not the end o’ the world.’

Against the black of her eyelids she pictures the lovely flat on Lipton High Street. No hope of it now, not with these numbers. That lovely drawing room where a Christmas tree would have looked . . .

‘Oh Annie,’ Joe is saying. ‘At the end of our lives, nothing to show for it. What would your father say?’