Homecoming (6 page)

Joe doesn’t respond. She cranes back behind her to look at him. He is staring at the screen, his mouth hung slack like he’s catching flies.

‘So Ann,’ she says, all am-dram. ‘How was Barry Jordan? Oh it was fine thanks for askin’. Subsidies going down the toilet, but let’s buy a harvester shall we?’

‘How was it?’ he says.

‘Same old doom and gloom.’ She leans her head back into the soft back cushion. She can hear Joe behind her head, clicking with the mouse. ‘Single farm payment’s not going to do us any favours. I can’t talk to you when you’re on that thing. Can you get off it? I want to email Bartholomew.’

‘Gimme a minute. Anyway I’m going to ring him – with Max. Tell him about the baby.’

‘If you even think about buying a new tractor I’ll thump ye.’

‘We’ve got to build it up for Max.’

‘There’s nothing spare, Joe.’

‘That’s why I’m going to turn it round, bring in the lambs. Leave it good for ’im.’

He has stood up, pushing both hands into the small of his back as he straightens. She looks at him. He is impossible, that man. But he is smiling at her as she heaves herself out of the armchair for her turn at the computer. He comes over and puts an arm around her neck so she’s near deadlocked. He is chuckling and saying ‘A little babby!’

They hug each other and he says into her hair, ‘We have to help him, Annie. Max is not strong like Bartholomew.’

She looks at his face up close to hers. It is leathery from a life worked outdoors, his hair grey now. He’s improved with age, like most men do. He was always like this about the boys, used to knock her out of the way to get to them after a day out working. And them at the top of the stairs waiting for him in their pyjamas.

He kisses her. ‘We always said we’d give them everything we could.’

‘Yes, well I’ve changed me mind.’

‘You act all bluff but I know you,’ he says. ‘You’re soft over those boys, just like me.’

‘Not as much as you, Joe.’

She looks at his back as he walks out of the room.

It is her great achievement, this marriage. When they were first wed the slightest disagreement would last a week or more. Grievances harboured until she was sore with it. Children soon knocked that out of you. You never solved a fight, she’d come to realise, you just got good at looking the other way and getting on with the next thing. Letting love have the upper hand. If she could give her boys one piece of advice it would be to let it slide – that sense of outrage that it’s not better. She begins to type the word ‘Bartholomew’ into the recipient field and the computer fills out the rest. Her youngest, especially, seems to be still holding out for the perfect thing – the one where there’ll be no disappointment to swallow down. Well, he’ll have a long wait.

Bartholomew is lifting the kettle and shaking it to judge its water level when his phone vibrates in the pocket of his jeans. Ruby’s passion for texting is beginning to feel like a persecution.

He texts back:

He switches his phone off and puts it back in his pocket, eases out the kettle’s rubber lead. As he carries it to the sink, the landline starts to ring. Will she never stop?

‘Garden Centre,’ he says.

‘Hello garden centre!’ shouts his father. He can hear a thrashing sound and bleating, and immediately can smell those outbuildings – the dry straw mixed with some kind of chemical, like creosote, emanating from their timbers.

‘In the pen are you?’ says Bartholomew. He holds the phone between his cheek and his shoulder while he fills the kettle.

‘We are,’ says Joe.

He turns off the tap and a faucet squeaks somewhere in the warehouse roof. He hears his father shouting ‘No Max, he’s done that one – look at her back,’ and knows that Max must be
silently
obeying him as usual.

‘How’s tupping?’

‘Marvellous,’ shouts Joe. ‘We’ve had some fine rams this year. We’ve wonderful news, Bartholomew. Max and Primrose are having a bairn.’

‘Ah that’s grand,’ he says. Struggling for life is a genuine
excitement
on behalf of his brother.

‘Isn’t it?’ Bartholomew can hear pure joy in his father’s voice and feels the stab that he wasn’t the source of it. ‘First Hartle grandchild,’ Joe is saying. ‘You and Ruby had best get a move on!’

‘Can I speak to Max?’

‘I’ll put him on. Hang on.’ He hears Joe saying, ‘He doesn’t seem to like that one, we should let her out. Here, your brother wants a word.’

‘Hello?’ says Max.

‘So, I hear congratulations are in order. When’s it due?’

‘May the twentieth or thereabouts.’

‘There’s lead in your pencil then.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘How’s Primrose?’

‘She’s grand. No sickness or anything. Mum and dad are right pleased.’

‘I’ll bet. Well, sleepless nights ahead then.’

‘No worse than lambing.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘You’ll have to visit when it arrives,’ says Max. ‘If I can prise the baby off mum. She’s that excited.’

‘Yes, I’ll bet,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Right, well, I’d best go. Give my love to Primrose.’

‘Will do. Hang on, dad wants another word.’

‘Bartholomew? One other thing,’ says Joe.

‘Yes?’ says Bartholomew, weary with his father again and making it known in his voice. This has become a habit, his shortness with Joe.

‘Nothing, never mind,’ says Joe. ‘We’ll talk at Christmas. When you come up.’

Bartholomew hangs up.

He looks across the warehouse at the lagoon of tat which is spreading across the floor, growing ever more garish with the approach of Christmas. Leonard is opening some boxes with a Stanley knife. Beside him is a huddle of statues: a boy with a bit of copper piping for a penis, a cherub with one foot missing, a Victorian lady bending with an umbrella. There are buckets of glass globes and butterflies on sticks; tables groaning with plastic toadstools, random painted figurines, pots shaped like handbags. Oh how it sold.

‘Where d’you want these?’ asks Leonard.

‘What are they?’

Leonard lifts one out of the box – a plastercast dog, nut-brown with a white tummy, carrying in its mouth a large Victorian lantern. Its neck is garlanded with red tinsel.

‘Solar-powered apparently,’ Leonard says. He holds it away from his body, as if to avoid contamination.

This was the kind of extraneous guff that Maguires excelled in. Last night, Bartholomew had driven out of town for the champagne evening on the outskirts of Guildford and had wandered, glass in hand, through the vast hangar, its aisles empty of people and smelling of sawn timber. He’d marvelled at the banks of children’s toys, power tools of every make and model, troughs full of bulbs (all the really suburban varieties). The staff were spotty adolescent boys mostly, and for all their corporate orange jackets, they appeared to have even less energy than Leonard. That pleased him, at least.

‘Put them next to the wrought-iron frogs,’ he says to Leonard. ‘With any luck they’ll eat each other. Cup of tea?’

‘Yes thanks. Don’t leave the bag in too long though. I don’t like it stewed. It should just glance the water. Skim it.’

‘Right you are,’ says Bartholomew. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through in the next couple of days. Can you sort through the bare-root trees and roses and make sure the labels are right and they’re priced up?’ He approaches the counter with two mugs. ‘I was thinking, you know, about our winter footfall. How to get people in the door, and I had this idea for a farm collective, well a shop really. We’d clear all that crap from the far corner—’

‘That crap sells,’ says Leonard.

‘Yes, but Maguires is going to do that stuff on a massive scale. I thought we should go in another direction.’ He is hoping he might sweep Leonard along, somehow make of him a ‘we’ until together they took flight. ‘We’d get together a collection of local farmers who’d come in and sell food in a farm shop and maybe people could order veg boxes through us too. It would bring people in during the quieter months.’

‘Actually I have to ask you something,’ Leonard says.

Bartholomew presses on. ‘I’m quite excited about the idea, don’t you think? I mean, early days. Thought I’d try to set up some meetings with some farmers.’

‘Can I have tomorrow off?’

‘Oh god Len, why? There’s masses to do.’

‘I’ve got a pair of No-Iron Comfort-Waist Chinos arriving from the Lands’ End catalogue.’

‘And you have to take a day off?’ Bartholomew can’t bear to look at him.

‘It’s due tomorrow. I’ve tracked my order on the Internet.’

‘People don’t take days off work to wait in for parcels. Why didn’t you just get it sent here?’

‘I was worried it would get lost in the system.’

‘What system? It’s you and me in a shed.’

‘And if I chanced it, it could be sent back to the depot, and I’d have to pick it up from there and that would be another day off.’

‘Well, not really.’ He can hear Ruby’s voice saying, ‘So how much time is it that Leonard’s had off this year? Fifty-two weeks?’ And him saying what he always said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I hate managing people.’

‘I don’t think you’re seeing things from my point of view,’ Leonard is saying.

‘That’s an understatement.’

‘This parcel’s really stressing me out. I’ve been tracking my order twice a day for two weeks. Tomorrow is D-day, the eagle is landing. I have to be there. For the trousers.’

‘Why don’t you shop on the high street, like normal people?’

‘Because Lands’ End does special wrinkle-resistant fabric. And I like the elasticated waist. Can I have the day off?’

‘I was hoping we could get these deliveries unpacked. There’s a hell of a backlog.’

‘I’m getting really stressed about the trousers.’

‘Oh d’you know what? Have the day.’

‘Appreciated.’

Bartholomew makes for the door, frowning. ‘God help us if they don’t fit,’ he says quietly.

A week later, Primrose is sitting on her high stool behind the till, one hand on her lower belly, filled with the new idea which is making her body tingle.

The midwife had told her it was only the size of a broad bean, but Primrose thinks of the baby as occupying her whole middle, and wonders, when she stoops to pick up a receipt off the floor, say, whether the baby is folded over. Or stooping too.

When she’d cycled in this morning, down the lane to Sinnington and then up the steep incline for the short stretch across the moor, she’d thought about her middle all the way. As if her middle were somehow a thing, brand new. Her legs were pumping on the pedals, her ears were rushing inside her hood and the wind on the moor was blowing hard into her face, but her whole mind was on her middle.

It seemed to Primrose that there were two of them cycling across the moor, two of them switching on the strip lights inside the Co-op. Two of them, together, pouring the change from little clear bags into separate compartments in the till. And so when she finally came to sit on the high stool behind the counter, she laid a hand on her little friend, who was her secret, and served a customer one-handed, half hoping the old lady might notice and ask her when it was due.

‘Primrose? Keeping you up are we?’ says Tracy in that hard voice of hers. ‘You can go on your break if you like.’

Primrose steps out into the bright autumn sunshine. Lipton High Street is peppered, as usual, with a handful of pensioners and a couple of young mothers with children in buggies. She walks past A Cut Above, where an elderly lady is sat under a plastic-domed heater; past the chemist, with its bottle-green gloss paintwork unchanged for decades; past the trays of warm sausage rolls in Greggs’ window. She turns down a side road towards Al’s Electrical shop.

A bell rings over the door as she inches into the shop’s dark, crammed interior. Bulging shelves reach to the ceiling, set with trays of rivets and tacks, and rolls of electrical flex hang from hooks in the rafters. Cable clips. Consumer units. Crimp lugs and heat tape.

‘Hello Prim,’ says Al from behind the counter. ‘Beautiful day out there. The trees are in great colour. I haven’t seen them that bright for years. Must be all the rain we’ve been having.’

‘I need another junction box,’ says Primrose.

‘Right you are. Which type?’

‘Thirty-amp. Three-terminal. In brown if you’ve got it.’

‘I’ll have a look.’

She stands at the counter, flicking through Al’s laminated catalogue while he goes out back.

She stops on a page and reads the text more closely. Al comes back carrying a white cardboard box.

‘Have you got any of these in?’ asks Primrose, swivelling the catalogue.

Al stoops, putting his glasses on to read. ‘Arh, no,’ he says. ‘Not much call for video entryphones round here.’

‘But if someone wanted one, you could order it in, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t see why not. They’re quite fast, this supplier. Would take three to four days to come in, or thereabouts. Shall I order it now?’

‘No.’ Primrose hesitates, her mind is racing. ‘No, not yet. I’ll just take the junction box for now.’

Joe’s hand guides the steering wheel, turning his Land Rover right onto Lipton High Street. The low autumn sunshine flashes hard, piercing through the smears on his windscreen like shards (he must get that wiper fixed), so he pulls down the sun visor and lowers his head to look under it. He sees Primrose’s back, turning off the High Street. Going to Al’s no doubt. Sometimes Joe wonders if Primrose should have married Al, but then he remembers that for Al, it’s just a business. For Primrose . . . well, Joe doesn’t pretend to understand it.

He has a feeling of satisfaction – not just because of the baby. Tupping has been fine this year and it’s given him a feeling of looking forward – to lambing and to the kinder weather that comes with it. They’ve let some of the fattening lambs graze on the beet tops, and defecate on them, and now those in-bye fields are taking the plough, turning this goodness over into the dark soil so that it’s brand new again. Wonderful work, ploughing.