by Carmen Reid
Pamela cut in: ‘Alex, you’ve never seen anything like it. Dave and my brother Ted took advice from Harry, the previous owner, and decided to investigate, meanwhile the rest of us have to go in the garden, which the children think is hilarious and they’re all waving bare bottoms about in the freezing cold, Liz having a heart attack about pneumonia . . . And my parents . . . they’re quite laid-back, but I could see a lot of leg crossing going on. Then finally, after about two hours or so, Dave and Ted appear at the back door and they’re naked!’
‘Why?!’
‘We were covered in it!’ Dave replied.‘We’d been digging out the tank. I can’t describe how bad it was. We were in such a state, we’d both been sick and we had to strip everything off in the garage. I was going to hose myself down out there, but it was December.’
‘I had to bring warm buckets of water to the back door, so they could wash their hands and hair before they went into the house to shower properly,’ Pamela added.
‘Well, that’s the worst Christmas story I’ve heard this year,’ Alex decided.‘And you have to stop now because our food is coming.’
The main course arrived and as everyone began to eat, Alex teased Dave.‘So these vegetables – not nearly as good as yours, are they?’
‘No, no, I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m being very good, on best behaviour tonight, no ranting about chemical sprays and toxic slug pellets and residual poisons.’
‘Oh good,’ said Pamela.
‘But I bet your Christmas sprouts were sensational, weren’t they?’ Alex nudged him.
‘They were. They were perfection. You know, I think sprouts need just a touch of frost to bring out the sweetness in them. And you can only eat them freshly picked, they don’t keep, get all cabbagey, that’s why townies don’t like them. And now . . . see . . . I’m getting carried away.’
Rob made the mistake of asking why organic food had to be so expensive, and got a mini lecture about the care and effort that went into Dave’s produce.
‘It should cost more,’ he argued.‘We work so hard to grow it.’ He thought of himself, frozen fingers picking veg in the mornings, out in the dark by torchlight destroying slugs by hand, working from dawn till dusk, thought of Harry getting up in the night to check on calving cows.
How many people would like a life like his in the future? How many people would be prepared to take on the work when there was never going to be any money in it, always just the scrimp and scrape to pay the mortgage?
‘What about you, Rob? What do you do?’ Pamela asked, hoping the man wasn’t an agrochemical producer, fish farmer – something at the top of Dave’s hate list.
‘I’m a nurse.’
‘Oh, so how did you and Alex meet?’
Rob laughed at this; it turned out he’d known Alex since primary school.
‘So you can stop fishing,’ Alex told her.‘He’s strictly a friend.’
‘But there was that time when you were in the fifth form,’ Rob reminded her.
‘Fifth form? ‘Alex looked at him blankly.‘Oh yes . . . no, no, no I haven’t forgotten that!’
Eruption of giggles, but neither would confess what it was about.
‘Which trust do you work for?’ Dave wanted to know, when the hilarity was over. He was keen to hear all the latest news.
‘So, you had fun, didn’t you?’ Pamela asked as they got back to their hotel room, close to 1 a.m., woozy with New Year’s champagne – although the bill had been a sobering moment.
‘I did, I did have fun.’ Dave was loosening his tie.‘Did you?’
‘Aha.’
‘Do you know what would be more fun?’
‘No.’ But she suspected she did.
Dave was moving towards her, putting his arms round her waist, catching her up for a full-on, mouth to mouth kiss.
Her first impulse was to pull away, but she thought she would stay in just a little bit longer and see if she liked this . . . see if it was OK. He looked good in his suit. She put her hands under the jacket, pulled the shirt out of his trousers and touched his skin.
He moved in closer to her, was making a start on the zip at the side of her dress.
‘I don’t know if . . .’ she began.
‘Please don’t . . . shh,’ he said and put his mouth over hers again, then gently pulled the zip down, slipped a hand against her back and drew her in.
She let him. Let him kiss her, touch her breasts, slide her dress to the floor, move fingers down, tease her to the edge of wanting him. But by the time they were on the bed together, Dave so turned on, so desperate to please her, she was already being pulled away from him by the deep, cold undercurrent. Nothing had changed: the only things she felt at the thought of making love to him were sadness and a long-suppressed anger.
He couldn’t make her pregnant. There it was bubbling over as she let him move inside, fill her up. What was the point? Why bother? She put her arms around him but clenched her hands into fists to stop herself from grabbing him, bit her lip to stop herself from shouting it out: Why are we doing this? It’s useless. It just reminds me of what I can’t have.
Afterwards, wrapped in his arms and the stark white hotel sheets, she cried, leaving him hopelessly sad for her and guilty.
Chapter Twenty-one
DAVE WAS ALREADY in the pub, pint in front of him, busy with the newspaper when Harry arrived.
‘We’ve got the hippies in tonight,’ Jeff announced as Harry got to the bar.‘You’ll be wanting a pint of organic beer and maybe some wacky baccy to go with it, will you?’
Harry took it in his stride: ‘Oh, very funny. You’re busy tonight.’
‘Quiz night,’ Jeff informed him.‘You and Dave going to join in?’
‘Um . . . not sure about that. We’ll let you know.’
‘So, how’s it going?’ Harry settled down beside Dave and they began to talk through their latest farm news.
Dave had found Harry a priceless fund of information, encouragement and, most importantly, friendship. It was a lonely business farming, and regular phone calls and pub summits with Harry kept him going through the times when nothing seemed to go right. When it rained so hard that all his seeds washed away and he had to start again, when half of his precious, new seedlings were eaten in a bugfest caused by some kind of worm which would have hatched out of the soil and flown away if he’d known to wait a week or two.
Dave listened now with sympathy to Harry’s latest cow trouble, before he began to outline his big concern.
‘I think Dexter Hunter is polluting the watercourse,’ he told Harry.
‘Bloody hell,’ was Harry’s reaction.‘Are your streams full of stuff?’
Dave nodded.
‘Bloody hell,’ again.
When Dave had first moved to the farm, Harry had warned him to keep a close eye on the water. He’d explained that the drainage ditches and streams running all over the farm were the best way to make sure that his neighbours were behaving.
‘The farm to the east is fine,’ Harry had told him.‘Old boy, old-fashioned pig man. Lets his animals out all day, grows fields of turnips for them, has grazing for the Pony Club. He’s nothing to worry about. It’s the farm on your west that’s the problem. The houses have all been sold off, the farmer, Dexter Hunter, lives somewhere else. Mr Big in chickens and chicken shit, he is.’
Every time Dave had gone to inspect the network of ditches and streams, the water had looked clear and untroubled. But on his last scramble down to the little valley at the bottom of the farm, he’d known immediately that something was wrong. In just three weeks or so, the stream had changed completely: where the water had rushed and tripped, it was now choked with greenery. A whole load of nitrogen, or something like it, had to be not just leaching, but absolutely flooding into it.
He told Harry how he’d waded into the water, skidding on the green, slippery stones, and walked upstream, crossing the fence into Hunter’s land.‘It got even greener,’ he explained.‘I passed thi
s home-made rubbish tip. All sorts of stuff had been dumped over the banks, old machinery, broken wooden crates, potatoes, earth, old straw bales . . . a total mess, but I don’t think that was causing the problem.’
Harry shook his head.
‘Then I found a ditch, coming down from the fields which was really dark and murky. Stank, in fact. So, I scooted up the bank and took a look from the top. Just a ploughed field, totally ordinary apart from a deep pit in the middle of it. There were two tractors driving about at the shed, so I couldn’t really snoop about.’
‘You’ve got to sort this out,’ Harry told him.‘That stream is the farm’s main run-off, you can’t let it get choked up or you’re going to have all sorts of problems and anyway, you can’t risk anything leaching into your fields that isn’t supposed to be there.’
‘Do I call someone in? Isn’t there an environmental protection agency or something?’
‘You’d be better off finding out what the hell it is first,’ Harry informed him.‘Otherwise they’ll roll up in a car, knock on his door and say, “Mr Hunter, stop polluting the water please,” and roll off home again. They haven’t got the resources to investigate a slice of mouldy bread and they can’t do all that much anyway. Speak to the council as well, there might be an application for whatever the pit is. If he’s dumping waste, it’s against the law unless he has a licence.’
‘Did you move because of him?’ Dave asked.
‘Well . . .’ Harry took a swig from his drink.‘You know our reasons for moving, but I wasn’t desperate to keep Hunter as a neighbour. That’s why I’ve always told you to be on the lookout. Seen any tankers going up the road?’ Harry asked.
‘One or two.’
‘He’s got 20,000-odd chickens up there. He’s got to put their crap somewhere. It’s either going away in the tankers or he’s dumping it on the farm and the tankers are bringing even more stuff up there to dump. That’s what you need to try and find out.’
‘And our opening category for the night: geography!’ It was hard to ignore Jeff’s voice booming from the bar to signal the start of the quiz.‘One for the Galloping Grandads: What’s the capital of Bolivia?’
‘La Paz,’ came the swift reply.
‘Every quiz I’ve seen, the Grandads have won,’ Harry told Dave.‘The Ravers put up a good fight but I think the Loons are just here for the beer . . . So, what else is happening? How’s Pamela?’
‘She’s fine,’ Dave answered.‘Busy. In London most of the week.’
‘Miss her?’ Harry asked.
‘Too busy.’ Dave gave the jokey answer because the truth was complicated. The farm, bought partly to bring them closer together again, seemed to be having the opposite effect. He was absorbed with it and she was hardly ever there. The distance between them was growing daily, creeping up. He’d thought peace, no more IVF, no more arguing would heal the wounds. But he saw now that at least when they’d been arguing, they had cared, they had wanted to change things, had raged against everything that was going wrong. Now, they seemed to have given up, they were distanced, separate, said goodnight at the top of the stairs, didn’t seem to care any more.
Harry wouldn’t have found out much more about his new friends, except that he began to talk about his children, told a funny story about them and ended it with: ‘They’re priceless, absolutely priceless. So, you two must be thinking about children? No-one moves out of town to a farm without babies on their minds.’
And Dave, who had brushed off so many variations of this question, had never spoken about it much, found himself answering: ‘Actually we’ve moved out here to try and get babies off our minds. We’ve been trying to have one for seven years.’
Harry was apologetic and sympathetic, he didn’t ask any details, but nevertheless, Dave began to unburden himself. Hinted at some of the strain of the IVF.
‘Hell of a thing to go through,’ Harry acknowledged.
‘Worse for Pamela,’ was Dave’s verdict.‘She’s not the same.’ He couldn’t express how lost she seemed to be, searching about for something else to believe in, something else to be, something else to channel herself into. Perhaps even jealous of how much the farm meant to him. He didn’t have the child he so wanted, but there was a comfort in growing things, nurturing them. He wished he could share that comfort with her.
‘Loons, if you were on “the roof of the world” where would you be?’ Jeff in full quizmaster swing.
‘The North Pole?’
‘No . . . Shut up, Stan, I know this one, the highest mountain . . .’ But Loon number two was fatally interrupted by his team-mate.
‘Ben Nevis. You’d be on Ben Nevis.’
Peals of laughter all round the pub.
‘Come about 8.30ish on Friday,’ Ingrid had instructed.‘The Murrays are coming, so their children will sleep over. But by then we should have bribed them all to stay upstairs, either that or we’ll have drugged them with an overdose of Tixylix.’
‘You drink, I’ll drive us home,’ Pamela offered Dave on the way over. She was still in shock about the cows. Dave had bought three small, barely beyond the calf stage cows, telling her his own manure supply was essential.‘Christ, but cows,’ she’d said out in the shed taking a look at them, registering the nervousness these animals were provoking in her.‘Couldn’t we just have got chickens?’ But then she remembered what Ingrid had said about chickens: R-A-T-S.
‘No, you drink,’ Dave insisted.‘You seem much more nervous about tonight than I am. You have a few glasses of wine, it might help.’
‘Thanks.’ She flipped down the passenger visor to check her make-up again. Just what had given him the idea that she was nervous?! The hour-long bath, the hair fuss, the multiple outfit changes, clothes strewn all around the bedroom . . . perhaps?
And when she’d finally come down, all bare arms and satin, Dave had warned: ‘I’m not sure it’s that kind of dinner party,’ and she’d had to rush back upstairs and make the decision all over again. Aaaargh!
‘You look very nice,’ he told her now. But she crossed her arms against the compliment and looked away. This wasn’t for him. All this curled hair, creamy off the shoulder sweater and lip-gloss was not for him. She was fidgety out of all proportion because Lachlan was going to be there. It had preoccupied her for the last few days more than she would have liked to admit, even to herself.
She was nervous of blushing, flushing, somehow giving herself away . . . but knew that she almost wanted to, was daring herself to give Lachlan a clue to see how he reacted. The whole cocktail of thoughts, attraction, intentions, was so heady, she didn’t think she’d felt so nervous, but so excited, for years. He was provoking all sorts of feelings in her that were uncomfortable, Mr Rock Solid Alpha Male and his three children. She wanted a part of him. Desired him. There wasn’t any other word for it, but it was desire motivated in no small way by envy. Stupid, ridiculous, harmful to want him like this. But nothing seemed to block the want. In fact, she was busy blinkering all the reasons why she shouldn’t even be thinking like this. Rosie, Dave, the children – she was tuning them all out, selfishly sharpening her desire for Lachlan. Thinking of him, imagining him . . . dreaming about him. And why? Because maybe it would be easier to just forget all this hard stuff that her life was right now and cling onto the distraction of Lachlan, the thought of sparking some sort of reckless romance.
‘Here we are then, have fun,’ Dave announced as he drew the car to a halt and pulled up the handbrake.
And then Harry, Ingrid and the bloody dogs were on them. No, it definitely was not that sort of dinner party. It looked as if Ingrid’s only concession to glamour had been to put on clean jeans and a pair of silver earrings.
‘Oh look at you,’ she told Pamela with a big smile.‘You’re gorgeous, you’ll put us all to shame.’
And what was the correct reply to that? She felt caught out.
‘No, no, I just . . . I didn’t . . . You look really well.’ That was it.
‘Come in.’
They were ushered to the front door, into the sitting room and there – lurch of stomach – there he was, standing up, back to the fire, beer bottle in his hand.
‘Hello. It’s my decorator.’ He cracked a grin, came over and shook her hand, eyes on hers, but then moved on quickly to Dave and offered the explanation that Rosie would be down in a minute: ‘Still settling the children.’
Harry pressed the evening’s first big glass of red wine into their hands, as Rosie appeared. Rosie, who had made an ill-advised foray into dressing up which involved too tight a vest top, a big shawl and lipstick that didn’t suit her at all. She shot glammed Pamela ‘A Look’ which couldn’t be interpreted as particularly friendly . . . but still, the evening kicked off.
Supper in the kitchen – velvety pea green soup, then a great orange casserole dish of stew – ‘our first cow,’ Ingrid announced, scooping up a spoonful of the stuff and landing it on a plate. No-one apart from Pamela seemed to think that this was horrifying.
More wine, more wine, to swallow down the lumpy mouthfuls of casserole; talk of their crops, their children, the weather, the town. Pamela, feeling the swirl of energetic chatter whirl about her, chipped in as often as she could. But really, where was he sitting? Where Ingrid had directed, right next to her, and although she hardly dared to look round at him, unless he asked her something directly, he had all her attention. The hairs on her right arm were lifting up and leaning over to get closer to him. More wine, more wine. She heard not just every word he said, but every scrape of his spoon, every mouthful he swallowed. He couldn’t breathe without her close attention.
Ingrid cleared plates noisily and with a proud ‘da-naah!’ brought out a mountainous meringue, cream, raspberry and spun sugar concoction, which every guest protested at, then ate up anyway, belts straining.
‘So, Dave, I hear you’re the competition now?’ Lachlan was asking him, with a teasing smile.‘Five acres of strawberries?’