by Rebecca Tope
The bottom of the pit was not smooth and obvious, as the bottom of a swimming pool might have been. The straw content of the slurry sank to the bottom, creating hillocks and valleys; a miniature landscape. Once all the semi-liquid matter was gone, there was still a lot of work shovelling the dense slabs of residue into a pile in one corner, and then left to dry out further, for use on the garden. Various objects then came to light.
The three attending policemen lined up with Lilah and Roddy, watching Sam fish the objects out. A brick; a horrible shapeless lump which turned out to be a dead hen on closer examination; several chunks of wood, apparently fallen from a dying oak tree growing above one end of the pit; and a shoe.
The last created real excitement as Sam presented it on the end of his shovel, and Roddy fetched a bucket of water to wash it in. He and Lilah stood back and let the officials get their hands dirty. Before long they held it up. A training shoe, complete with laces, its original colour blue or grey.
‘I’d say a size six, or thereabouts,’ said one of the men.
Lilah wished passionately that she could say it was hers, lost months ago after some silly game with Roddy. Or that it was from an old pair, no longer used, and given to the puppy to play with. There was a boxful of outgrown footwear in the house, she told the policemen. They were welcome to sift through and see whether this shoe’s partner was in there. Even if it wasn’t it might still be possible that someone – Miranda was the most likely – had impulsively removed their shoe to throw at an errant cow or cat, and it had landed in the slurry. Nobody was going to bother to get it out again, if that happened. Easier to go into town and get another pair from the stall in the weekly market.
They all looked at each other and again at the shoe. ‘It’s quite a new one, I’d say,’ said the man holding it. They carefully sifted through the shoebox in the house, without finding what they sought.
‘Seems as if this trainer belongs to someone from off the farm,’ concluded the man, and bagged it up with impressive ceremony. The police left then, wrinkling their noses at the stench of slurry.
Restless and suspicious, Lilah began to walk down the lane to bring the cows in for milking. The lack of a dog still felt strange at moments like this; normally Lydwina would have come wagging up to her, knowing it was time for her to assist, running around the stragglers and chivvying them gently along. Guy had never permitted more than one dog on the farm at a time, but had insisted on that one receiving all the attention and affection it needed. He had taken dogs more seriously than other animals, training each one in turn to respond to words and whistles which made it more useful than any human assistant could have been. If Lydwina hadn’t died, nobody could have got away with murdering Daddy, Lilah thought. The dog’s untimely death made her feel that the hand of fate was over them, victimising them however much they tried to resist.
The image of Guy face down in the slurry remained with her, more vivid than it had been at the time. Although today she had been scrupulous in calmly describing what she had seen, she knew her answers conveyed only part of the whole event. There were facets which evaded description. Guy’s character; the normal reliable routine; something intangible in the air when she finally found him – she had mentioned none of these things, but as the men drove away Lilah was slowly beginning to entertain the idea that her father had been murdered, however much she tried to cling to her insistence that it was an accident. She desperately wanted it to have been accidental. If it was murder, then he had been killed by somebody who hated him with profound passion. The sheer cruelty of the act was almost beyond imagining.
But even Lilah, devoted daughter, with nothing to reproach him for in his role as her father, knew that quite a substantial number of people had hated Guy Beardon.
The afternoon had turned dry and warm, and that evening, after milking, Sam sent Lilah to the bottom field to have a look at the grass. ‘See if it’s ready to turn the cows back in there tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It’s had over a week now – should be enough.’
She hadn’t known how much she would welcome the chance of a spell alone until she was clear of the farm buildings and into the soothing rhythm of a brisk walk. And inevitably she thought about her father, remembering him as he had been with her, trying to blot out the manner of his dying. All her life she would carry memories of their relationship. Her mind swarmed with them: the summer evening when she was seven and had just been given her first pet rabbit. Dad had walked her around the orchard, and the many weedy paths between the outbuildings, showing her which plants the animal could safely eat. Plantains, dandelions, chickweed, dock (in small quantities), groundsel as well as clover and plain grass. ‘But never give them buttercups, pet. Buttercups are poisonous to rabbits. If they do get poorly, or off their food, parsley is the best medicine.’ Lilah had remembered every word with crystal clarity. Even now, when the rabbits had all gone, she couldn’t pass a lush patch of plantains or clovers without itching to gather them.
Dad had been patient in that way. Patient and kind and magically understanding. He seemed to know what she was thinking and feeling. He knew, for instance, she was really, genuinely, frightened of spiders, and so he would deftly remove them from her room, or the bath or wherever one threatened her. Mum, in contrast, mocked the fear as nonsense, accusing her of hysteria and attention-seeking.
When she had been poorly, it was always Dad who nursed her. He took her temperature twice a day, sponged her hot head with a cold flannel, cut wafer-thin slices of white bread and spread softened butter on them. And he listened gravely and knowingly when she described the terrible feverish nightmares she suffered. When she babbled about ladies who got fat and then thin again, he seemed to know what she meant, whereas Mum simply backed away, almost as frightened as Lilah had been. Both the children had learnt very early that when someone reliable was required, it was Dad, not Mum, they must call on. Endless small proofs of the wonderful success Guy had made of fatherhood filled Lilah’s memory.
But had he been a wonderful man? She had been aware that most of the villagers did not like him. Over the years she had overheard too many references to his bad temper, his arrogance, his disregard for the usual rules of behaviour, to be able to convince herself that he had been popular. She had noticed only too acutely all the things the vicar had not said about him at the funeral. Successful, high-profile in the village, yes – but not a word about his character. Had he been good or charitable or courageous? An effective farmer – but what about his showing as a husband, a friend? What was it he had done to justify being killed, as she now felt certain he had been? And who was it who had been so afraid of capture that he had murdered poor old Isaac for good measure?
CHAPTER FIVE
Two more days passed and Lilah took over many of her father’s routine tasks on the farm. She checked all the cows’ feeding programs on the computer, and adjusted the charts in the milking parlour accordingly. She dealt with the endless sheaves of papers from the Ministry, claiming compensation for the young beef animals which had been incinerated because of the hysterical public response to the so-called BSE crisis. ‘It’ll all be forgotten in two years’ time,’ Guy had raged, almost in tears at his helplessness in the face of implacable officialdom. Lilah had shared his feelings, and waded through the paperwork now, grinding her teeth at the stupidity of it, the waste of money, the waste of those innocent bovine lives. They should have gone to feed people, not to be dyed purple and rendered down to nothing. Guy’s rage had been all the more bitter for knowing that through a single act of carelessness, he had neglected to complete all the Soil Association paperwork the previous year, and was therefore unable to save his beef animals from the exemption they were perfectly qualified for.
At moments like this, Lilah could convince herself that in a sense she was her father, that he had somehow taken over a share of her body in a benign sort of possession. Restless with the need to explore her feelings, she roamed the places that Guy had spent most time in. His big ol
d chair in the living room became a favourite spot, as did the barn outside. If it had been winter, she would have spent long sessions leaning against the chrome bar of the Rayburn, as Dad had always done. As it was, she wore one of his lighter jumpers, hugging it to her, savouring the smell of him.
But none of this was enough to help her make sense of her fears and suspicions as to what had befallen her father. More than anything, she needed some support from her mother. Surely Miranda must be the person who knew Guy best? She must hold the answers to at least some of the nagging questions. Lilah rehearsed how she might ask them, how she might slip them into casual conversation – ‘Tell me, Mum, what was he really like?’ It sounded so stupid, when she already knew the answer: he was big and kind and sweaty and angry and funny and … the list went on and on. But Lilah knew this was all much too subjective. This was stuff that any daughter might say about her Daddy. Lilah wanted much more than that. She wanted nothing less than to know why he had lived, and – supremely – why he had died.
But her mother was no help at all. For the first week of her widowhood, Miranda Bearden had retreated to her bedroom for the best part of each day. It was a large, light room at the front of the house, cluttered to bursting point with the kind of massive furniture that tended to find its way into farmhouses. Much of it had been bought by Guy at giveaway prices in local auctions, when they first came to Redstone with their two little children. Every surface was crammed with a miscellany of dusty objects, many of them untouched for the past ten or twelve years, and almost all of them generated by Miranda rather than her husband.
Miranda collected small useless knick-knacks because they struck a chord with her. She liked wood and stone and clay. She liked corn dollies and rush baskets and raffia mats. She very much liked the idea of herself as a real countrywoman, living on the land and surrounding herself with the products of country crafts. In practical terms, she was shockingly incompetent; entirely ineffectual in persuading a cow or pig to turn a certain way, limp and slow in the fieldwork, ineluctably ignorant about matters which were part of her husband and children’s blood. One cause of her near-prostration now was a helpless despair at the prospect of making decisions regarding the future of the farm.
Guy’s impact on the bedroom had always been minimal. His clothes were confined to one side of the great yellow wardrobe with art deco designs stencilled onto it, and a single drawer of the tallboy. His daily working things were permanently kept on an old chair near his side of the bed. On the wall, some years ago, he had tacked up a large poster of a blue whale that Roddy had given him. It now had cobwebs holding it to the wall as well as some fossilised BluTack. A cupboard, once used for the chamberpot, stood beside the bed on his side. Inside it were three old copies of Farmer’s Weekly, a large white dusty hanky scrunched into a hard ball, (evidence of a cold which had swept the family two years earlier – Guy had crossly put his hanky in there, saying it was the only way he could be sure of retaining at least one for himself), a defunct biro, and a thermometer in a metal case.
On top of the cupboard there was a bedside lamp, a torch, his watch and a pottery pig which Lilah had made for him at school. Guy was not a man to read himself to sleep at night. His evening routine had been unwavering. Promptly at ten, he would round up and eject the four cats from their places in the Rayburn fender or on the kitchen table to do their duties out in the barn; and (until it died) he would take his dog a dish of the complete dry food it lived on, pausing to stand listening a moment in the yard; switch off any lights; and plod heavily upstairs to bed. Washing and teeth-cleaning took only moments, before he climbed beneath the heavy, old blankets, sighed once and fell into the sort of sleep which only a man who spends his day in physical labour knows.
Now Miranda lay full-length on the bed for hours at a stretch. Sometimes she glanced through a magazine, almost experimentally, as if testing to see whether she could still make sense of the words. Sometimes she made odd little lists – ‘pension, insurance, bank loan, phone school, relief milker??’, jotting down thoughts as they occurred, one concern after another. Sam must be given his days off, despite his insistence that she could leave all the farm business to him. Were Lilah and Roddy capable of doing the milking on their own? Who was going to make the decisions now? Guy had been like the great central pole of a tent; without him there, they all flapped and fussed and fought their way through the confusion he’d left by his going.
And yet – despite all the worry, the blank inability to foresee any viable future – Miranda’s prime emotion following the funeral was relief. It was relief, more than panic, which had stranded her helplessly on the bed. The abrupt cessation of the tension she had lived with for over half her lifetime was like having her spinal column removed. With every new day that came, she reminded herself that there was nobody watching her any more, nobody despising her feebleness, or keeping her on tenterhooks with his volatile changes of mood. No more casually cruel jokes at her expense, no more hysteria if a meal was ten minutes late, or she was out five minutes longer than she’d said she would be. The repressive habits of the past twenty-two years could be abandoned now. She was free, and the heady intoxication of it paralysed her more effectively than any alcohol or drugs might have done.
Relief was sometimes mixed with darker feelings. Two decades of bottled-up resentment came surging to the surface, and although it was physically exhausting, she let it take its course, until it left her weeping and cursing into her pillow two days after the funeral.
A faint ‘Coo-ee’ at the back door saved her. She sat up, wiping roughly at her face.
‘Hello!’ she responded, as she rolled herself off the bed. ‘Is that you?’
The visitor was already in the kitchen when Miranda got downstairs. Eagerly, they embraced, holding tight. Then the newcomer rested her cheek lovingly against Miranda’s head, leaving it there for a moment. Sylvia was a good four inches taller than her friend and proportionately wider. Miranda freed one hand, then slid it with absent-minded affection up and down the other woman’s bare arm.
‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
‘Not really, thanks. Tell me how you are.’
Miranda blew out her cheeks, and rolled her eyes. ‘We-e-ell, let’s see. Li’s cross with me, because I said we’d have to sell up and live like normal people. I’m cross with Sam, because he’s behaving as if I’m some kind of time bomb. Roddy’s cross with everyone. The police think Guy was murdered, because of what happened to the Grimms. Did you hear about that?’ Sylvia nodded. ‘Yes, well, it was horrible, but honestly, it can’t have had anything to do with Guy. The vicar seems to think he committed suicide, which is even more idiotic. They’re all working their backsides off out there and resenting me for sitting in here like Lady Muck.’
Sylvia gurgled in an attempt to stifle the laugh that erupted. Miranda only slowly understood why.
‘Oh, yes, muck’s a taboo word now, I suppose. Do you think I’ll have to spend the whole of the rest of my life avoiding it?’
‘Either that, or you’ll have to say it twenty times a day to everyone you meet, to assure them that it’s all right.’
‘Oh, God. Who’d be a widow!’
‘Me, for a start. However much you miss the bugger, there are any number of compensations. Especially if you have a clear conscience, like me.’
‘Hey! Who says I haven’t?’
‘Several people, I imagine. I blame Hetty Taplow, though I’ve got no proof. Don’t forget that I hear all the gossip where I am. Not only about you.’ She began to digress. ‘This business with Guy has got everyone crawling out of the woodwork and swapping stories. All kinds of stuff’s getting passed around – nothing to do with you and Redstone, half of it.’
‘For example?’
‘Well, Phoebe’s got her knickers in a twist about Elvira, apparently. They’ve been screaming at each other, and Elvira’s taken to storming off and refusing to go to her day centre.’
> ‘That doesn’t sound very earth-shattering. Go back to Hetty Taplow. Feeling unwanted as usual, is she?’
‘Not noticeably. But you’re not her greatest friend, I must admit. Some would say she has good reason.’
‘Oh, don’t start that again. It’s all in your imagination – you know it is.’
‘It isn’t, Em. I know for certain that she’s fancied Sam since she was about eighteen. She won’t look at anyone else. And she blames you for coming between them. Ever since that time—’
‘Shhh. Li might come in and hear you.’ Miranda glanced nervously out at the yard. ‘It’s all nonsense, anyway. I’d have been delighted for Sam to marry Hetty. It would have been very convenient for everyone. If anyone got in the way, it was Guy, not me.’
‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter now, I suppose. Though, come to think of it, maybe it will come right for Hetty yet. Unless you’ve already moved Sam in here?’
‘Far from it. He hasn’t been anywhere near me, since … He has a very perverted set of values, that man. It was fine when Guy was alive, but now he’s dead, it’s all very different.’
‘Well, I guess I can see his point,’ sighed Sylvia, suddenly looking sad. ‘I have to admit I’m a bit surprised that you don’t feel the same. It’s called having respect for the dead.’
‘Oh!’ Miranda shouted, suddenly angry. ‘Why is everyone always so superior? How is it that I can never be mature or sensible, compared to all of you? Even my own daughter makes me feel like a foolish child.’
‘Come on, Em. That’s just you – the way you are. We all love you for it. We’re not superior – just dull and boring and hidebound. Even Li. But we admire you – and envy you, too. I mean, who else would dare name a child Lilah, for a start? I probably already told you that when I heard that was your daughter’s name I was determined to be your friend. It said it all.’