by A. L. Lester
Chapter 13: Accounts
A couple of weeks later, Laurie sat at the dark mahogany desk in the small office, with its tooled gold and green leather writing pad and put his head in his hands in despair.
None of the papers spread out on the surface in front of him made sense. Partly because he was so tired and foggy all the time—his brain just didn’t seem to work the way it had before. And partly because there were so many bits of paper and notes on the back of envelopes and in one case, genuinely, on the back of a fag packet. He had no idea where to start. Clearly no-one had done any paperwork since he had last opened the study door six months ago, just piled things up on the dark mahogany desk in his absence.
He opened the black boards of the ledger and began to leaf through it. There was his writing, plain as the day to him, but making no sense at all once it got past his eyes and in to the roiling cloud of his brain. Neat lists of purchases and sales going back more than a decade. At the beginning of the ledger the hand was Uncle Matthew’s elegant copperplate script. Then a period where his own and Uncle Matty’s had alternated. And then just his own.
He stared at the most recent page, rubbing his hands over his face and taking a deep breath of the slightly musty air in the little-used room. He was looking at September last year, the month before he keeled over. The wages, marked down weekly. Sixteen pounds each for the men. Twelve pounds for Sally. He leafed forward and found blank pages. Who had been paying them while he’d been sick? He had no idea. Jesus. What a mess. He poked dismally at a pile of papers and a cheque from the Milk Marketing Board for three hundred and sixty pounds fell out, dated the middle of October. That needed to go to the bank, for a start. It slid to the floor and he watched it settle on the dusty faded red, blue and brown patterned carpet.
“Sally!” he called loudly, hoping she would hear him from wherever she was in the house. “Sally?”
“Coming!” she yelled back, cheerfully. She poked her head round the door, drying her hands on a tea-towel. “I was sorting out dinner,” she said, coming to stand next to him. “Are you all right in here?” She looked around, skeptically. “I just put everything on the desk as it came in, so it should be in date order for you to go through when you have time. And I took money out of the tin to pay everyone. I wrote the amounts down on a bit of paper each week and tucked it at the bottom under the money tray.” She gestured to the battered black and gold cashbox at the back of the desk. He hadn’t even touched that yet.
“Yes,” he said, swallowing. “Yes, that’s brilliant. Thank you, Sal.” He leaned his forehead briefly against her arm and then straightened up again. “Thank you for keeping everything going.”
“It wasn’t that hard, you know,” she said. “Everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. Jimmy’s been here longer than either of us has been alive. Or alive combined, probably, come to that.” She patted his shoulder. “It’s good to have you back and getting on top of everything again, though, Laurie. You’ve been missed.” She pressed a perfunctory kiss to the top of his head. “What did you need me for? Do you need help getting up?”
“No,” he said. “No. Just…are there any more receipts? Is this everything? And where are the bills?”
She gestured toward the little Victorian writing desk against the adjacent wall. “I put the bills on the spike in the desk over there, separately. And I couldn’t find the paying in books, so I just tucked the cheques in the cashbox.” She saw the Milk Marketing Board one and bent down to pick it up off the floor. “Oh. Except this one.” She moved it over to a teetering pile on the writing desk and turned to go, patting his shoulder in passing. “It’s really good that you’re picking up the reins again, love. And it’s great that you’re keeping busy, even though you can’t get outside.”
As she shut the door behind her, the slight draught of its movement caused the precarious pile on the top of the writing desk to give a final, slippery shudder and waft apologetically to the ground.
He put his elbows back on the desk in front on his, rested his head back in his hands, and silently began to weep.
* * * *
Phil found him like that, or not much better off, when Sally sent him through an hour or so later.
“Wow,” he said, looking round, apparently in lieu of greeting.
Laurie had pulled himself together a bit by then. He’d stopped crying but hadn’t been able to make himself move from his seat in the old rolling office chair. The inconvenient urge to weep seemed to be another lingering result of his autumnal collapse and it had returned in force this morning. It left him drained.
He raised his head from his hands and looked at Phil. “Yeah. That about sums it up.”
Phil gestured expansively. “Is this all…since…?”
“Yep,” Laurie pushed the ledger apathetically to the edge of the desk. “The fifth of October. Last entry is the end of September, by me.”
Phil moved closer and turned the book so he could read it. “Weekly payroll?”
Laurie nodded. “Sally’s been paying them out of the cashbox and tucking chitties under the money tray, apparently.” He rubbed his hands over his face again. “It’s on the top of the little writing desk.” He gestured toward it. “It was only today that I thought about any of the bookwork. I’m an idiot. I’d forgotten completely.”
Phil shook his head, still leafing back through the pages. “No,” he said absently, without looking up. “You’re still convalescent. Don’t give yourself stick for something that’s not your fault.”
“I’ve been worrying about whether they’d get the wheat in the bottom field on time, whether they’d get the right rams in with the ewes, if they were feeding the in-calf heifers enough, all of that. It didn’t occur to me that this would be the thing that I’d be overwhelmed by when I got back.”
Phil made a sympathetic noise, still leafing backward and forward. Laurie swallowed, and confessed. “None of it makes sense, Phil. I can see the words and numbers on the page, but I can’t make sense of them. I read a line and I can see that…I don’t know…I paid Jimmy sixteen quid on the last Thursday of September…but then if I have to add that up with the rest of the pay and then subtract the feed merchant…I’m stuck.”
He drew a breath, trying to stave off the panic that was rising once again. He leaned forward and clasped his bad hand with his good one, elbows resting on his knees.
Phil’s glance flicked up from the page and whatever he saw made him give Laurie his full attention. “Hey…” His voice was gentle. “Come on, none of that.” He put a hand on Laurie’s shoulder, moving a bit closer as he did so. “I know I said that I wouldn’t push you. But this is something I can help with, Laurie. I’m good with numbers.”
Laurie couldn’t answer. He swallowed around the lump suddenly rising again in his throat. “Phil…” he said, for no particular reason. He stared fixedly at the floor between his feet. He really needed to ask Sal to come in here with the Hoover. And he needed new slippers. These ones were wearing through at the toes and the sheepskin lining was poking out. And they slipped a bit on the tile floor in the hall.
He was blinking frantically all of a sudden, again. Stupid, stupid emotions. The first bloke he’d really fancied for months and months, the first bloke he’d met for months and months who had touched him with anything other than a clinical, medical, passing touch, and here he was, crying like a girl. Although, when Sally cried it was louder and she threw things at him, so not like a girl really. Just…like someone weak and pathetic and unattractive.
“Phil,” he said again. He didn’t have anything else. Phil, I really like you and please bog off so that I can have yet another good cry without you seeing? Or, Phil, I really wish I’d met you before this happened to me? Or Phil, from where I’m sitting I’d really like to suck you off but I’m pretty sure my co-ordination isn’t up to it at the moment?
“Laurie,” Phil replied, seemingly finally fed up with waiting for him to do anything other than stutter his name.
“It’s fine, Laurie. Hey. It’s all fine.” He took his hand off Laurie’s shoulder, but instead of stepping back and leaving Laurie to wallow in his own misery and embarrassment, he went to his knees on to the musty-smelling carpet beside the chair and slid both arms around Laurie, unapologetically shuffling as close as he could get.
It felt so nice to be held. Laurie drew a deep breath and let it out, letting Phil take his weight, resting his head on the sweater-clad shoulder. Phil ran a hand up and down his back, soothing and slow, and rested the other palm in his hair, combing softly through the over-long strands with his fingers and organising the two them so that Laurie could turn his face in and press his nose against the warm skin of Phil’s neck above his shirt collar.
“It’s all right, I’ve got you. Just take a moment, sweetheart. It’s all right.” His voice was a low, comforting murmur in Laurie’s ear and he closed his stinging eyes, letting the stupid, weak tears seep out from beneath his eyelids and trickle against Phil’s neck below his ear as he breathed. “That’s it. It’s just you and me here, just us. I’ve got you.”
He rocked them to and fro a little, mouth pressed close to Laurie’s ear as he murmured, Laurie all gathered up against him, wrapped up safe. Laurie allowed it. No-one had held him for years. The grief and sense of loss flowed over him in waves. What was he going to do? How could he carry on like this? He couldn’t do anything outside on the farm. He couldn’t do the books. It took him half an hour to walk down the drive. It was insupportable.
“I can’t manage it,” he voiced his fears in a whisper, in the safe haven Phil made for him. “I can’t manage any of it.” He wasn’t sobbing. The tears were just…flowing undammed. So many years of tears. “I don’t fit any more. They all fit, like a jigsaw. But there’s no place for me anymore. My shape has changed.”
“Shhh,” Phil hushed him. “You’re fine, Laurie. It’s just a different shape, that’s all. It all just needs rearranging a bit, then it’ll make sense again.”
“What am I going to do if I can’t? I can’t live anywhere else, Phil.” He drew a sharp breath in, absorbing the Old Spice and TVR-engine-oil smell that he only associated with Phil.
“I don’t know what else I can do. I’m better than I was. You know I’m better than I was.” His voice trembled a bit and he kept his face hidden. Phil’s arms were still wrapped safely around him. “The farm’s been in the family for two hundred years, nearly,” he said. “I don’t want to sell, but I’m useless. I’ve got to rely on Jimmy and Tom and Paul to manage the stock and do the actual work. And Cat. It seems like she’s going to stay. I thought perhaps I could do the books and tell them what to do. Work out what needs doing when, like I’ve always done. Perhaps even get well enough to drive down to Taunton, take things to market, go to the sales. But Phil.” He drew back and rubbed his hands over his wet cheeks, needing to see the other man’s eyes. “But Phil, what if I can’t do that either? What if I can’t drive again? These numbers…” He gestured at the papers spread out all over the surfaces like the residue of an archaeological dig. “…I’m looking at them and they don’t make any sense. It’s easy stuff, Phil! I used to do it in the evenings. When I was too tired to do anything else, I’d do the bookwork. But none of it makes sense.”
Phil looked at him for minute, brown gaze steady. And then he raised a big hand and used it to cup Laurie’s jaw, sweeping a thumb over his cheek where the stupid, stupid tears continued to flow unchecked. “Sweetheart,” he said, his voice pained. “Laurie, listen to me now. You’re still convalescent. You’ve been out of hospital less than three months. You can’t expect to suddenly pick it all up as if nothing’s happened. You’ve been really ill. You were in hospital four months. Think back to how you were when you first went in? Think about those first weeks. I know that we didn’t know each other when you were in hospital, but I’ve known other people who had similar things happen. It’s slow, Laurie. You come back from it slowly. You might not get all the way back to how you were. But you’ll get further back than you are now. You need to pace yourself. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Pace yourself.”
He kept his hand on Laurie’s face but he dropped his eyes slightly and then looked back up. “And Laurie, it’s okay to ask for help. People want to help. People care about you. I’ve not seen much of the farm men. But they’ve stayed, haven’t they? They’ve been here years.”
Laurie shook his head, not exactly agreeing or disagreeing. “People just have a job and want to keep it, Phil. It’s not personal loyalty. What other jobs are there round here? It’s not like London. Farming’s all there is round here. What other jobs are there?”
It was Phil’s turn to shake his head. “No. That’s not it, Laurie. They’ve stayed, they’ve kept things running the last six months without you here. They did it because they like you. They want to be here. And that girl. Cat. Is that her name?”
Laurie nodded. “She says so.”
“Appropriate. She’s like a cat, too. Only comes in when it’s too cold in the barn or when there’s food for her. She wants to be here.”
Laurie sniffed a smile and the tears began to dry up. “She is like a cat,” he said.
Phil said, “She stayed because she likes you. She stayed because she wants to be here. And me. I’ve.” He stopped. He dropped his hand and stood up again and shoved his hands in his pockets, turned his back to Laurie. “I like you too, Laurie,” he said softly. “I like being here.” He turned back toward the desk, fingering the edge of the ledger with those long-fingered hands Laurie enjoyed watching so much. “Let me help, Laurie. Let me sort out the paperwork. It’s something I can do.”
Laurie dug through his pockets and found a relatively clean handkerchief to wipe his face with. “I’ve made you all wet,” he said regretfully, looking up at Phil.
Phil brushed his hand over his shoulder. “It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t change the subject.”
Laurie looked up at him. “But you’re going back,” he said. “You’re only here on holiday, or on a career break or whatever it is. Getting over your divorce.”
It was Phil’s turn to look at his feet, quietly fanning the edges of the ledger with his thumb. “Hmmm. That,” he said. “Divorce is the wrong word.” He shot Laurie a sidelong glance and paused again. He swallowed. “It wasn’t a marriage. Although we were living together.” The edges of the ledger clearly needed his full concentration.
“My boyfriend set me up.” The words dropped like little stones into a pond. Ripples of silence, weighty and important, radiating out and overlapping, one after the other.
Laurie didn’t say anything, waiting for whatever else Phil wanted to share. He thought there might have been a boyfriend, from the way Phil had been twinkling at him on their increasingly frequent meetings. No completely straight bloke would be coming on to him like that. But Phil hadn’t made a move or said anything and Laurie hadn’t liked to ask. You still didn’t, unless you were sure, despite the change in the law.
“Phil,” he said, finally, into the continuing silence, “you don’t have to tell me this.”
Phil bit his lip and shot him another sidelong glance before becoming very interested in the columns of figures again.
Eventually, he took a breath and said, “But I think I do. I do, don’t I, Laurie?”
Laurie drew a breath too, and looked down and then back up at that quiet, brown-and-gold gaze. “Yes,” he said. “If you want to tell me, I’d like to know.”
“He’s called Richard,” Phil said. “He defrauded the company and he tried to make out it was me when they noticed.”
Laurie said, “Is Sally still out there?”
Phil shook his head. “No, she was going on home when I arrived. She was finishing the washing up.”
“Come on,” said Laurie. “Let’s go and have a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.”
Chapter 14: Pool
Early May, 1972
It wasn’t so far up to the pool. A
half hour walk maybe, across the top field. Until very recently though it might have been to the moon and back.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Phil asked, as they set out across the yard. “We don’t have to do this today, you know.”
It was still early. The day threatened to be hot, but so far it was only a pleasant freshness that made Laurie pleased he’d put on his long-sleeved shirt and had the sleeves rolled down.
“We don’t have to do this today, you know,” Phil said, eyeing him dubiously as they crossed the yard slowly together.
“No, I think I do,” Laurie said. “I need to get out of here today.”
Phil nodded, seeming to understand without Laurie saying any more. Laurie couldn’t bear it. This time last year, he’d been up in the top yard with everyone, the ewes milling round, the dogs giving an occasional commanding bark to keep them in line. The splash and scrabble of the dip as each ewe went through and then clambered out the other side and shook frantically as they milled about on the draining slope. The green shade of the chestnut tree over the men working. Leaning on the gate having a bit of a rest as someone else took a turn pushing the ewes under.
And then, six months ago in the autumn, lying under the tree, looking at the leaves that were copper in the last gasp of the late summer, hearing voices around him, unable to move, confused.
The spring and the autumn dips had always marked an ending and a beginning—the changes of the season. He couldn’t sit at home by himself today, thinking back to the last time they’d been dipping in the top yard—and all the times before that. He had to get out.
He didn’t say any of that to Phil of course. He distilled it down to one sentence. “I had the stroke when we were doing the autumn dip.” And Phil being Phil understood without needing any more words.
“Of course,” he’d said. “I’ll bring a picnic. We’ll leave early, straight after breakfast. I’ll bring the car. I can drive you.”