Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Apples just don’t pay. His uncle Will had said more than once.

  Renoir skipped breakfast and had a quick coffee in the kitchen before the visiting guns arrived for the shoot. On his way out he saw the beaters gathering around Hal, the keeper, by the stables, where soon Roddy and his guests would meet for the ritual invocation of the minimal rules – no shooting ground game (i.e. foxes), no shooting after the horn had sounded at the end of each drive – before driving off in assorted Land Rovers and four-wheel drive vehicles to the winter wheat fields on the northeast corner of the estate where the shoot’s first drive traditionally took place.

  Part of him wished he were shooting too, even if Roddy was among the guns. Kate loathed it, which was curious considering her attachment to Belfield, where shooting was such a major part of life. There was no swimming pool at Belfield, and the tennis court built by Kate’s father had long ago crumbled (wild roses sprouted where one service line had been). No fish worth catching lurked in the lake, and none of the local hunts made foray into the Belfield acreage. But Kate was scathing in her aversion: ‘What is the point?’ she would say. ‘It contributes nothing to the countryside and it’s completely artificial. When the birds are too cheap it’s not even worth selling them. In Norfolk one year they were burying them. Why can’t they just shoot clay pigeons and be done with it?’

  Renoir himself had been taught to shoot by his uncle, with clay pigeons thrown with a hand spring. The farm was not game-rich, and when out for birds, his uncle usually only fired his gun once or twice in an afternoon; the bag limit was a brace in any case. Renoir was therefore staggered when he first saw the Belfield game wagon, loaded with three hundred birds, and watched a guest switch guns because his barrels had grown too hot from firing so many shells. The conventions of an English shoot (plus-twos, those heavy green coats, sloe gin after the second drive) seemed a palaver to Renoir, as he supposed they would have to most Englishmen. But he soon grew to understand that to the extraordinarily small slice of English society who did shoot, it was a way of life.

  When first asked, reluctantly by Roddy, he had not imagined the shooting itself would be especially difficult – after all, were not the birds virtually driven onto the point of your gun? But he had been wrong – it was very difficult, for the birds moved at fantastic speed, diving and swooping in the wind, often flying impossibly high.

  Now Renoir walked down through the formal gardens behind the house, then around the west side of the lake and up the track – wide enough to take the farm tractor to the Old Orchard and Burdick’s Field – that climbed through the firs and Corsican pines of Treefall Down. There were pockets of snowdrops in these woods, and yellow aconites and early primroses. These and the imminent crocuses seemed to deny the winter he had expected in England. The climate was surprisingly mild, much like San Francisco, and on the one occasion it snowed the winter before, it was gone by nightfall.

  He walked through the Old Orchard, part of the fifty acres Kate was acquiring. Thirty of them surrounded the gatehouse they were renovating and extending, including the large garden they had planned around it, the sweeping chunk of hillside that ran below it called Burdick’s Field, the site planned for his eight thousand trees. The remainder was mainly woods, situated on this flat plateau, a hardwood mix of beech, oak and ash, though in its centre, effectively hidden and a surprise to anyone coming upon it unawares, were two acres, shaped in a long rectangle, of old untended apple trees he was now trying his best to revive. It was a labour of love.

  He entered the woods on the far end of the Old Orchard, thinking of how the legal process of extricating their holding from the larger estate was almost mindlessly involved. He stayed aloof from it, since he both gauged it none of his business and knew he would find its complications exasperating. Trust me, Kate had said, as he began to plan his tree orders. Of course I trust you, he’d answered. I meant trust him, she elaborated, meaning her brother. In the resulting silence lay his unspoken refusal.

  As he emerged, the Gatehouse was before him. It sat on the crest of the hill just clear of the woods; beneath it ran the gentle slope of Burdick’s Field. He had initially resisted their move into the Gatehouse and its expensive renovation; it would cost over £200,000 when all was said and done. It was not that he wanted to remain in the Hall, but that he would have preferred a place of their own, outside Berkshire, away from Kate’s mother and brother. But Kate was adamant, arguing that the land and house were ideal for them, that they could never afford such a large house with such a beautiful setting anywhere else. Behind these arguments lay a visceral attachment to Belfield; sometimes it seemed as if she thought that without the estate the family would fall apart, which made Renoir wonder just what – considering Kate’s ambivalence towards her mother, the problems of Roddy – Kate thought was being preserved. Only with her sister did she enjoy unequivocal closeness, and Sarah and Alastair had their own place and their own distance from Belfield. But then perhaps it was not the family which lay behind Kate’s insistence that he and she live there, but some idea of the estate itself as inviolable. If it were whole, the implication seemed, Kate would be whole too.

  He entered the Gatehouse by the back door, where the ground floor had been extended to hold what Kate called a tack room, though she didn’t ride any longer, and a small spare bedroom room for visitors. Behind these was a large kitchen, with windows facing down the hill. He was pleased to see the large refectory table had arrived and the hardwood cabinets they had bought in Wantage were now installed. The large gas cooker sat against the wall; Kate had been happy to share his doubts about an Aga. They had kept the old larder, which was a thin, long windowless room with the solid walls of the original building; its thick oak door locked from the kitchen side with an enormous iron key. Kate had pointed out light-heartedly that it could double as a jail cell if he misbehaved.

  He walked down a corridor and opened another door, stepping into the entrance hall, where a new oak staircase led to the rooms upstairs – three good-sized bedrooms and a study for Kate. Crossing this hall he went into the sitting room, the largest room of the house, over thirty feet long and almost as deep, created by taking down an interior wall that had sat between two rooms before. At the far end a door led to a small office intended for him, which also had windows facing the field in front. Panes had not been puttied into the sitting-room windows yet, and the late January wind made the room especially cold, so as he walked into his study he closed the door behind him and turned on a small space heater next to the desk.

  He sat down in a director’s chair with a frayed canvas back, looking at a pad of paper and a pen – all the instruments he needed to feed his dream. He looked out the window, down the hill at the field where his fantasy would be played out. There was something unnerving about this view of his future source of livelihood, though Kate had plans for a small meadow to front the house. She had already strewn the ground, dug up by the contractors, with wildflower seeds, and they should see the first results that spring.

  He worked for most of the morning, trying to put the projections of his ambitions on paper. He forecast earn-out in five years, with positive cash flow in three; ten years down and . . . I’ll be rich, he thought, and laughed at his self-delusion. He was determined to make it work, yet he was pursuing a small, individual and counterintuitive route. Not the intensive farming of post-1990s Britain, which saw yields of ten to fifteen tons of fruit an acre from two thousand ballerina trees planted per acre, none more than a yard apart. The orchard as assembly line.

  He would instead take the dramatic step of farming entirely organically, with fewer trees spaced far more expansively, so that at most he’d have four hundred on each acre. He planned a mix of standard and half-standard trees using M9 rootstock, spacing them ten feet apart both sideways and up and down the hill, which meant he could run the tractor with its three three-foot cutting blades, leaving just a little circle of grass around the tree to stop evaporation from the soil.

&nb
sp; He had hesitated before opting to go organic, deterred by a vision of sandals and vegetarians, bad folk music and hash brownies, roll-up cigarettes and too much cinnamon in apple pies – just the sort of things he didn’t miss about San Francisco. But the independence and the premium on offer overcame these prejudices, which he could not seriously defend, even to himself. There was growing demand for any organic produce, the price paid was more than double what he would receive for pesticide-sprayed crops, and he would not be in thrall to the supermarkets.

  Of course his prospects were improved by having the land already: he would have been looking at paying almost £4000 an acre for organic land, at least half that for conventional. And he was blessed too by the fact that his fortunes would be based, quite literally, on ‘green sand’, the geologists’ label for the richest of soils, named for its green components, which were sometimes so plentiful as to give a green hue to the black earth. Green sand came in belts, long thin bands crossing England, the longest running all the way from the Wash to Southampton, and on its way running through a large portion of Belfield.

  There was a noise next door and he sat still, listening. Burglars? He dismissed the thought; there wasn’t really anything to steal. Though burglary did seem to be the national disease. Belfield couldn’t be left unoccupied, for example, when Beatrice went on holiday, and he supposed he and Kate would need an alarm here when they finally moved in. Kate, whose view of crime in the United States derived entirely from cop shows on TV, didn’t believe him when he explained how uncommon burglary was in rural America, and indeed how even in the Irish neighborhood where he grew up burglars didn’t try it on – too many off-duty cops living there, too many households with guns.

  The noise from next door continued, and he got up more out of curiosity than trepidation and opened the door. A man was standing on a wooden chair in the middle of the room, screwing a light bulb into one of the holes made for the recessed spotlights Kate wanted installed across the ceiling of the room. ‘Need some help?’ asked Renoir in a low voice that seemed to come out of nowhere in the vast blank space of the room. The other man was so startled that he swayed on the top of the step ladder, brought both hands down from inside the hole, and fell off. He managed to put a foot out to soften his landing, but then crumpled on the floor.

  Renoir advanced on him, then relaxed. ‘Stacey,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The man sat up and then slowly got to his feet. ‘You scared me, Mr Renoir,’ he said. Stacey was very young – not much more than twenty – but built like an Afrikaans farmer. Pleasant but slightly incompetent, he was a handyman on the estate and general assistant to Hal, the head keeper. ‘I didn’t think anybody was here. I just wanted to finish the lighting here.’

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Well, Hal’s got the shoot today.’

  ‘I know that. But the others?’

  Stacey shrugged. ‘You better ask Hal. I know some of them are beating – two of the regulars couldn’t make it and he persuaded a couple of these blokes to help him out.’

  Renoir cursed silently. The schedule was already tight enough without Hal poaching workmen to help out with Roddy’s shoot.

  Stacey came off his ladder and wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘It’s awfully busy now that Mr Palmer’s renting out the shooting.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was.’

  ‘It’s only a few days. But it’s got to be right.’

  It certainly did. At a charge of £25 per bird downed, you could not afford a dud day. You would need to guarantee two hundred birds as well, though the keeper kept a tally of shots fired with a clicker, so if the paying guests were hopeless there would be no refunds. Two hundred was comparatively small, compared to other paying shoots in the county, but the birds here were high and the scenery exquisite.

  ‘I’m sure Hal can manage it just fine,’ said Renoir dryly. ‘I only hope you all stay busy over here, too.’

  Stacey nodded, and Renoir realised there was no point complaining to him. He was too junior, and probably scared of Hal, who was famously bad tempered – he had once knocked down a beater who questioned his orders.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Stacey and changed the subject. ‘You know Burdick’s has been sold?’

  ‘I heard.’ Burdick had two sons, one into drugs and the other simply feckless, so after the old man’s death a sale of the farm had been inevitable. Renoir missed the old man; Burdick had encouraged his own fruit-growing aspirations, and helped him turn a fantasy into a plan. He asked, ‘Who’s bought it?’

  Stacey shook his head. ‘Someone from London. Lots of money. They’ve started fixing the house in a big way – Hal says they’ll spend more renovating than if they tore it down and started again.’

  City bonus money, probably – an extra million one year, though it would have taken more like two to buy Burdick’s, rundown house and all. He said as much to Stacey, who replied with a laugh, ‘Or else he’s got a rich wife.’

  Suddenly, Stacey blushed – it looked like he’d spilled plum juice all over his face. Poor Stacey, Renoir thought, not even slightly annoyed. He didn’t look at the younger man, to spare him further embarrassment.

  At lunch-time he left the house, noting that Stacey had managed not to finish installing the recessed lights, and walked back to Belfield. In the stable yard the beaters were gathered around a fire in a disused oil drum, eating sandwiches and drinking squash from plastic bottles. Renoir didn’t want to join the shooting lunch in the house so drove to the pub again, where he ate fishcakes with caper mayonnaise and a side bowl of rocket salad with lemon dressing. He politely ignored Annie’s suggestion that he try some local wine and drank a large glass of French Sauvignon instead. Resisting the temptation to drink another he had a large espresso and drove directly back to the Gatehouse, coming up through Burdick’s Field below it. It had a year before been in terrible shape, clumpy and filled with ragwort that had taken him days to remove through a mixture of spraying and backbreaking pulling out by hand. He had hired a JCB for five days and a man to run it for one; by the end of the first day he had learned enough to use it himself, and by the end of day five his swept mounds were almost as smooth as the hired man’s. He had ‘demogulised’ the field as best he could, so although the trees would be planted on the moderate downhill slant of the field he could cut the grass around them easily with a tractor and an attached six foot cutting blade, which was not for decorative purposes but so the trees didn’t have to share water and nutrients with the competitive rough rye cut.

  And most important he had dug the vast sloping hole that had filled up from the descent of water from the natural spring – two springs really – which came up next to the small stand of hardwood he had just walked through between the Old Orchard and the Gatehouse. And from the pond he would be able to water the entire orchard. Most organic farmers would not water, seeing it as needless waste of aquifers, but since he had carved out the pond, fed by two natural springs, he had no compunction about using water that would otherwise simply drain away. Recently, through assiduous reading, he had discovered T-Tape, an Israeli invention designed for watering in the Negev Desert, in which every metre of plastic pipe contained a tiny valve that dripped water in a slow and constant economical way. He would try that out in the Old Orchard if the coming summer proved dry.

  Inside, he worked some more, chiefly trying to calculate (or predict really) likely yields to see what kind of cold storage he would need to lease in the coming years, and watched the rugby on television with the desultory eye of an only semi-interested foreigner. He was thinking of stopping before dark when he heard a car behind the house. When he went to the back door he found Alastair in the tack room, dressed for the shoot in standard green wool jacket and plus-twos, holding a shotgun broken over one forearm. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he said with a grin. ‘We’re about to have the final drive. I thought I’d alert you. Better still, I thought you might like to join us. Abeling had to leave early – he hates driv
ing after dark.’

  ‘Thanks, Alastair, but I haven’t got a gun.’ Renoir gestured at his clothes, old khakis and a flannel hunter’s shirt, and said, ‘I’m not exactly dressed right either.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Alastair. ‘What’s the point of a family shoot if you have to stand on ceremony? Come on, I’ve got a gun in the car.’

  ‘Roddy will have a fit. Best leave it.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Alastair sharply. ‘Roddy won’t say a bloody word. Not if he knows what’s good for him.’

  And so against his better judgement Renoir closed up the Gatehouse and joined him. As they drove the few hundred yards down the hill to the pegs spaced neatly in a line a stone’s throw in from the road, Renoir remembered what Kate had said about the financial underpinnings of the shoot: ‘The shoot is half Alastair’s, actually. He pays half the costs, but he lets Roddy pretend it’s all his. That’s the way Alastair is. Unfortunately, that’s the way my brother is as well.’

  They parked by two other four-wheel drive vehicles, and when they got out Renoir saw that the other guns were already on their pegs between the last half-acre of field, where he’d staked wire lines for the raspberry canes, and the hedge just inside the road. He recognised several of them, unsurprising since in looking through the game books of Belfield he had seen how year in and year out the same people were guests. One man he noticed particularly looked only vaguely familiar. Like the others he wore the standard issue shooting coat, but with the dandyish addition of a fur ruff of silver fox around the neck.

  The light was beginning to go, but in the distance Renoir saw Roddy pointing to their left, and he followed Alastair to the west edge of the field where it was adjoined by a scraggly plantation of scrub oak, young ash and gorse. Alastair took the last peg in the field by the alder wind break and directed Renoir into this mix. The beaters would come from over the hill, driving the pheasants from the Old Orchard down past the Gatehouse. Those that swerved wide of the new plantings would come over Renoir’s head.