by Angela Huth
He glanced at her profile, then returned his eyes to the horizon, the edge of his land.
‘I suppose, too, when a man has just jogged along for almost thirty years, neither unhappy nor consciously happy, and then his life, his entire being is changed by the arrival of a wife … Well, what happens? It’s hard to register anything outside the small perfect world in which he finds himself. I mean, these days, building up the farm is my prime concern and pleasure simply because you exist. Do you see that? I’d always thought that love and work must be intertwined, and now I know that they are. As I finish doling out silage to the ewes, or the day’s ploughing, I think: now back to Lily, my wife. You busying about in the kitchen, reading your books, whatever. A dozen times a day I’m tempted to return to the house to see you.’
Lily gave the slightest nod of her head. George took his hand from her knee, put it round her shoulder. They both looked up at the sky, the veiled quartz-pink that precedes the sinking of the sun at the end of a fine day. There was no cloud, but a paling of the colour behind distant high land. A crow flew across the garden, wings blinking like thick black lashes. Its shadow ran with ghostly speed over the lawn.
‘That’s how it is,’ said George, feeling the weight of Lily’s head on his shoulder. ‘How it goes on being, thank God. There’s never a moment of the day when I’m not looking forward to you. Heavens, such declarations from a man not much good at saying things. How about that?’
‘I love you,’ said Lily. ‘But I sometimes wonder
In the thrashing of his own astonishment at all he had just confessed, he was vaguely conscious that it was not the moment to enquire what Lily sometimes wondered. Besides, George had not finished explaining the reasons for his lack of appreciation. He wanted Lily to be absolutely sure of his regret at his failure to have told her a thousand times how much she had brought not only to him, but to this, the place he most loved.
‘Does it ever occur to you,’ he asked, ‘that complete happiness can reduce, as well as expand? It can reduce your life to just the things you love, making the outer world irrelevant, or it can make the outer world feel more important, simply because of the strength of what you’re feeling.’
Lily nodded. George, looking down at her hair, so full of lights, felt she was only half concentrating on his words. Sleepy, she was, perhaps. She was up by six every morning. No wonder that at the end of a long day’s manual labour in the garden she was sometimes tired.
‘Shall I go on? For four years, I’ve been so completely … marinated in the happiness you’ve brought me – ’ he broke off to give a bashful laugh – ‘that I’ve been neglectful of the world beyond us.’
‘You have,’ said Lily, ‘a bit.’
‘So what I’m going to do is make amends. Let’s call this a watershed evening. From now on I’m going to involve myself beyond our acres, make more effort in the community. With all my privileges I ought to take the chance to be of more positive help, somehow. God, Lily: when I think about it I can see I’ve been a bloody disgrace.’
‘Don’t be so silly. You’re going too far. You help a lot of people. Those who depend on you are never let down. You look after your land, and your animals, with rare passion—’
‘I don’t look,’ George interrupted, ‘in the way you would have me look. But I vow to change …’ He gave a small laugh. This time, Lily joined him. She turned to kiss him on the cheek, then rose to go into the house.
‘Supper in half an hour,’ she said.
‘I’ll be in. I’m just going to have another look at what you’ve done to the orchard
The longest day of the year was still two weeks away: dusk among Lily’s new trees still held that summer lightness that never deepens into the sable dusks of autumn, but promises a night sky, thinned by the moon, that later merges confusingly with dawn. George, making his way through the trees (so carefully planted, he now saw – with a rhythm in their spacing, as his father would have said) felt strong with resolution. Happiness upon happiness. Layers of contentment that, now he reflected on them, were hard to believe.
He came to the fence that divided the orchard from Rising Meadow, a small field whose furthest boundary began to ascend the hill. Some of the Friesians were grazing here: fine specimens from the herd that had doubled since he had taken over the farm. Prodge, with his extraordinary eye for a prize cow, had helped choose most of them. The neighbouring herds were now almost equal in excellence, though George left competing in agricultural shows to Prodge. Prizes held no interest for him: they meant much to his old friend.
The wide silence was chipped by the cows pulling at the grass: a sound so familiar to George that sometimes, striding across a field full of cattle, he did not hear it – as on occasions a soft wind, or the rustle of trees, goes unheard. He remembered that as a boy of thirteen or fourteen he had tried secretly to find an adjective to describe the sound of a cow grazing, but had failed. He had come to the conclusion that there was no word in our language that could convey various sounds: music, or animals grazing in a field. One of the cows raised its head and stared at him, its jaws moving. Then, apparently uninterested in the sight of its reflective owner, it returned to eating. After four years of working closely with his animals, George felt no better able to guess what, if anything, went through their minds. He remained intrigued.
His own mind turned now to events beyond his life on the farm with Lily – things that had affected others. Cocooned in his own sense of tranquil – smug, perhaps – well-being, they had scarcely touched him. He had shown sympathy, of course, concern. But there was no lurching of the heart, none of the sickening worry that accosts a man when his own world is threatened.
He remembered, for instance, the evening he had found Lily in tears: the post office, she said, had finally given up the battle and was to close. The post office was the only shop in the nearest village two miles from the farm. For generations it had been run by the Head family: Jenny Head had taken over when her sister Betty, Saul’s wife, had died, and had continued to run it with the same dedication as Betty before her. She had done everything she could to make it an agreeable meeting place. She had persuaded local women who were good bakers to sell their bread and cakes from her newly painted shelves: fruit and flowers from people’s gardens were also willingly sold. She had added magazines to the range of newspapers, and postcards, that could never be called brash or vulgar, of local places for the tourists. The small shop, once the front room of a beamed cottage, smelt of peppermint and twine and beeswax polish. It was a place made for lingering, gossip, running into friends and neighbours. There was an air of permanence about it: its regular opening times part of the beat of the village. Should it vanish, God forbid, there would be a sense of irreparable loss. The pub, with its different atmosphere and function, was no substitute. No one ever imagined the post office would one day have to go.
But a few years ago a supermarket had been built on the outskirts of the market town five miles away. There was already a supermarket twenty miles away, but that had had little impact on the community: few people had the time, or could afford the petrol, for a forty-mile journey to buy their food. Jenny Head hoped the new supermarket would have as little appeal for the locals. At first, it seemed this was the case: they scoffed at the desecration of yet more green land and swore to ignore it. But eventually one or two tried it ‘out of curiosity’ and inevitably they found they could save money on basic things. By comparison with the village shop it was very cheap, and the choice impressive. Others followed.
Within a year of the place opening Jenny Head knew she was fighting a losing battle. Her elderly customers still came in for their meagre needs, and the better-off, with an air of guilt, still bought their stamps, but Jenny could not compete with supermarket prices. As custom declined, a cheerlessness pervaded her small shop despite the sympathy and understanding she received from many of those who had nevertheless deserted her in favour of the supermarket. They would have liked her to stay for ‘sen
timental reasons’, they said. Sentimental reasons were no good for Jenny Head: she had to make a living. Pensioners begged her not to close down, for how would they manage to collect their money?
This was the question Lily tearfully put to George when she broke the news that the post office was definitely to shut. Then she had told him her idea of taking those without transport to the next nearest post office in the market town every week. George sometimes passed her on the road, station wagon full of old ladies and gentlemen. This weekly transport of pensioners furnished Lily with tales to tell George of their concerns for the future, the fears they bore with dignity, scarcely grumbling. George felt for them. He read stories in the press that claimed there was an upsurge in the closure of rural post offices all over the country. Concern wafted over him momentarily, as probably it did over many country-dwellers who resisted change for the worse, but who knew their feelings were of little interest to those in power. But George now guiltily recalled that his concern was not so great that he had tried to do anything to help: Lily was the one who had provided practical help.
Then it was learnt that Jenny and her disabled husband, much in debt, had decided to sell their cottage in which the post office had been housed for so long. The price the agents recommended, and acquired, shocked and surprised the villagers. It was understandable that Jenny should take all she could, but the price of the cottage was quite out of reach of young local couples looking for somewhere to live. The buyers were from Reading, owners of a large Mercedes. They spent a lot of money on refurbishment. No local was ever invited inside the place. There were reports of mirrored walls, but the owners of this tasteless glitter were rarely seen. Three or four weekends a year was the most they seemed to spend there: for the rest, the cottage was forlornly barred against intruders, its shutters closed, the life gone out of it.
Dismayed though he was by the demise of the post office and its sad transformation, George was not, again, disturbed enough to do anything about it. He remembered feeling a sense of helplessness, followed by ennui, and immersed himself further in the challenges of his own farm. He should have been writing some of his beadier letters to national newspapers, he thought now. He should have been protesting in the way he was best able – though he doubted this would have had any effect. The fact was that the rich were greedy, and sympathy for the decline of rural communities was not going to stop them from buying second homes.
George himself, at that time, was better off than he had ever been. The money from the family firm was well invested. The farm was thriving. Subsidies were modest compared with those of the grain farmers in the east, but they were generous. George decided to buy the small farm, whose land touched his, on the opposite side to the Prodgers. It had a dilapidated house surrounded by rotting farm buildings, but the potential was there, and the view. He remembered it in better days, and thought Lily would enjoy restoring the house while he supervised the outside.
But he was too late. The tenant farmer, a shy man with many problems, had not had his lease renewed and left the district with no farewells. The landlord, who had bought the property as an investment in the seventies, rightly judged this a good time to sell. A private deal was conducted with such secrecy that no one in the village knew about it. All was signed and sealed by the time George had made his decision. All he could do was join in the local horror when the new owner, a businessman from Cardiff, razed the spread of farm buildings to make a clock golf course and an ornamental pond. Plastic urns of geraniums (which had no hope of withstanding the wind from the moor, but he would learn) and an electronic gate earned the derision of everyone. But at least on the only occasion the businessman went to church he put a fifty-pound note in the plate.
Still leaning against the fence, all colour gone from the sky, the cattle now a single smudged shape huddled by the hedge, George realised that these things were all indications that had been amassing for several years. Statistics give no clue of the plight of individuals, but these were signs that were beginning to cause a shift in British country life, and there was reason for both sadness and alarm. The thing about change, George reflected, is that it’s so easy to assess in retrospect, and so easy to anticipate. It’s when the process is actually taking place that it’s harder to be certain of what’s happening. This, at least, was his excuse for not having looked more carefully, seen, appreciated, acted. It was with a sense of profound self-reproach that he turned at last to go back to the house. He pondered whether he should tell all this to Lily, but decided against it. The best antidote to regret, in his estimation, was privately to work out remedial action.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Lily asked.
As always she had laid supper with care. There were folded napkins and a jug of peonies on the table. She had taken trouble with the food, grilling fish in the way George liked and making a salad of lettuces and herbs from the garden. These suppers had come to seem like a prize at the end of each day: George could never quite accustom himself to such spoiling, and floundered about what he could do in return. Lily had so often said she required no help indoors that he had given up trying.
‘I was thinking …’ said George, in a sudden quandary about which of his thoughts to reveal, ‘I was thinking, among other things, about various reports I’ve been reading: the gradual erosion of wildlife, plant life, rural life … the general slaughter, as it were, of the country. It seems to be creeping up on us.’
He paused. Lily looked at him.
‘I realised—’ But no. He did not want to elaborate on what he had realised. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he stumbled on, ‘I’ve heard both linnets and corn buntings quite recently, but I understand their numbers are dropping alarmingly. Skylarks, even nightingales …’
‘Oh, there are signs,’ said Lily. ‘There are signs everywhere. By the end of the century the country will be one huge theme park, and farmers will be extinct.’
‘Nonsense. That’s ridiculously pessimistic. There’ll always be farms, farmers, crops, animals. The nation couldn’t survive without them for a thousand reasons. Besides, farmers have been doing well with the subsidies. Look what Prodge has managed. Many of them are rich. There’s no danger—’
‘I just have a feeling.’ Lily shrugged. ‘The accumulation of signs – it frightens me.’
George put his hand over hers. He never was able to understand how often she could read his mind. Sharply, Lily pulled her hand away, turned to look out of the window. It seemed to him that she had retreated a little. For all her care of him, her usual attention to the pleasures of the evening, she had distanced herself in a way George couldn’t quite comprehend. Or perhaps, he thought, he was misreading everything, and her coolness was merely a reflection of his own melancholy this evening.
‘A leaf,’ George said, surprising himself by his own cheerfully enquiring voice.
‘What?’
‘Do you remember when we first met you described yourself as a leaf blown about, or something?’
‘I do, I think.’
‘It occurs to me you’re not… blowing about so much, are you?’
There was a dying fall in Lily’s eyes which passed so quickly, before she gathered together a smile, that George could not be sure it had existed. She shrugged.
‘Well: I don’t believe custom stales if custom is good enough, which of course it is. But we all stop blowing about quite so frenziedly after a while, don’t we?’
‘But you’re still just as happy?’
Lily nodded. ‘I think I am. Why?’
‘I sometimes wonder.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, me. I’m less airborne than you. Boots firmly stuck in the ground. A very straightforward fellow, your husband, as you may have noticed.’ He gave the kind of twinkling smile which she used to say was the most beguiling smile of any man she had ever met. Then he switched to his perfect imitation of a German farmer he knew. The German farmer had provided many an anecdote. Apparently she didn’t mind how many times the stories w
ere repeated: she always laughed. Tonight, he could see she tried to respond – she gave a small puff of laughter that was hollow at its centre. To keep impending silence at bay, he switched with a certain desperation to his equally good French farmer giving a lecture on the art of castrating a boar – a story he had not told since their honeymoon. Again Lily laughed a little, but the old warmth that used to emanate from his funny stories eluded them both this evening.
When they had finished eating, Lily took her customary place in the armchair by the unlit fire. They rarely sat in the study these days. Lily picked up her book on Vermeer. George skimmed through the pages of Farmers Weekly but could not concentrate. He flicked the magazine on to his knee, which did not disturb Lily’s concentration. Then, while he contemplated his wife, he fell to wondering again.
In the first two years of their marriage, George recalled, Lily had been like an excited child. She kept declaring her happiness, but such daily pleasure, as is the nature of acute happiness, made her restless. It was hard to know, she explained, where to put such intense feeling. She skittered about from project to project: once the house was newly painted, and the curtains in place, she started to catalogue old David Elkin’s vast collection of books. One moment she would be halfway up the library steps reorganising a shelf of leatherbound tomes: the next she was scattering pellets for the sheep. She walked the dogs several miles a day, she rode twice a week with Nell. Her energy seemed uncontainable. It fizzed about her, almost visible, infectious. George only had to be in her presence for a moment to be dazzled.
Her love of the farm and their acres of land was as keen as her love for George. She was thrilled by the acquisition of a larger herd, more sheep, further fields. She joined George’s disappointment when the experiment with pigs failed, and no more were bought. She sympathised when the next-door farm was sold before George could buy it. As for her own work, its significance seemed to have diminished with the novelty of being a farmer’s wife. She still wrote a few articles for minor art magazines: she was occasionally called upon to assess some West Country collection of watercolours for an auction house, or to review an exhibition. But she came to refuse work if it took her from home. She hated being away even for a night, she told George. She seemed to have no desire to see old friends in London or Norfolk. George, and the small world of the farm, was all she wanted.