by Angela Huth
George sat back, uncertain what to do. He wanted desperately to give up, go and heat the soup that Dusty had left on the stove. But the work hanging over him chafed his conscience. The weight of the empty room lapped over him. He had not bothered to light the fire, and it was cold. He wanted Lily to be here. He wanted her brightness, the warmth that emanated from her always, always …
There was a tap on the door. Wrenching himself from his reverie, George half expected her to walk in. Instead, it was Saul. He held his cap in his hands and wore the expression of acute indignation that preceded the bad news he frequently felt it was his duty to impart.
Saul always wore his father’s old flat cap for outdoor work. By now it was a strange object held together by a glue of sweat and the dried-out rain of a thousand showers. The definite browns and greens of its youthful tweed had merged like the waters of a trout stream, only faintly indicating the bold patterns they had once made. Saul was often chided by both George and Ben about the state of his cap, but he was adamant. He would not replace it until the day it crumbled to dust in his hands, he said. It was his prop, as important to him as his crook, his father’s old penknife and the silk handkerchief, sewn by his late wife, that he wore on Sundays to church.
Saul rarely came into the farmhouse. Lily had never been able to persuade him and Ben into the kitchen for tea breaks. They liked to go back to their cottage. But when he did, he always gently removed his cap and held on to it for comfort, for strength, or for whatever was needed on the particular occasion. This afternoon it was for the outrageous news of a visit from a man with his measuring tape. The man, George knew, was only doing his job – measuring the fields for which he had claimed subsidies. It was an unenviable job, to ensure no farmer was cheating. To the dutiful men from the Ministry who had to face the hostility of farmers while trying to carry out their work, such tasks can have held little appeal. George could imagine the scorn in Saul’s eyes, in his bearing, as he led the measuring man to the fields.
‘Him in his thin shoes came over this morning,’ he said. ‘I forgot to tell you, milking time.’ He laughed – a bass note that was more of a snort than a response to a humorous thought. ‘It was all plain sailing till he got to Top Meadow. Seemed to think everything you’d put in for was in order. Then – as I said to Ben, you can’t really believe this – he spotted the water trough in the corner by the gate. He was on to it like light.’ Saul paused, enjoying the imminent climax of his story. ‘Tape measure attacking it. A lot of rechecking. Shook his head to tell me he was on to something big. Anyways: seems you got it wrong, there, Mr Elkin. You should’ve subtracted four feet by two feet in your total calculations as to the size of the field. Only of course Mr Thin Shoes spoke in centimetres. And what was he going to do, I asked? Take it off, of course, he said. Deny you a few pence, or whatever. He got out his calculator. Funny thing was, he was so overexcited, in my opinion, about finding this one little matter you’d overlooked that he dropped the calculator in the trough.’ A real smile cracked Saul’s face. ‘So I stood there looking on while he tried to decide what to do. Getting it back, I could see, was beyond him. He couldn’t go through with rolling up a sleeve, plunging his arm into the icy water – not in front of me, he couldn’t, anyhows. Too humiliating. He couldn’t ask me to help and I wasn’t going to offer. In the end he said he’d leave it. Have to report it, of course. He said he’d most likely be in trouble. I thought, if that’s your only trouble
His story over, Saul gave a sneeze that turned into a laugh. There were not many funny moments in the farming business these days, he said, but this was one of them. George laughed, too. He had always admired Saul’s fierceness when it came to the protection of his employer or his land, and his somewhat unconventional methods of support. George offered him a cup of tea, but Saul declined. He said he wanted to take his dogs for a walk before it was dark.
‘Old Thin Shoes was going on up to the Prodgers after us,’ he added. ‘Nell was in a bit of a spin about that. She said she could never get measurements quite right. She was dreading trouble. I don’t know how she manages, that girl. And what with Prodge himself in no great shape these days.’
‘I’ll go on up there when I’ve had a go at this lot,’ said George, his eyes travelling over the menacing piles of papers. ‘No: on second thoughts I’ll go now.’
His business over, Saul preceded George out of the kitchen door, settling the fragile cap on his head at the very moment they stepped outside to meet the dank November air.
George decided to walk up to the Prodgers. He felt in need of air, of stretching his limbs. A thick winter dusk was beginning to muffle the farm buildings, the fields and the distant rising land. Leafless trees were still scribbled precisely against the sky, but they would be blurred within moments. There was a sweet-sour smell of silage, and of fallen leaves marinated in mud and rain. George felt for the torch in his pocket and set off.
These days he approached Nell and Prodge’s farm with a feeling of dread. Prodge was increasingly depressed though there were moments when he seemed cheerful and almost optimistic about the future. But these moments, which encouraged George and Nell to believe he was improving, were short-lived. He could be laughing at supper one evening, drinking toasts to the downfall of ‘bloody Brussels and all it had done to British farmers’, and the next morning resume his rigid, silent demeanour. Sometimes, Nell reported to George, she would find him at the kitchen table, head buried in his arms. When she managed to prise him into a sitting position she would see he had been weeping.
To banish images of his wretched friend for the mile he had to walk, George thought instead of Saul, and of his debt to him. He was what George’s mother used to call ‘a rural saint’. Her belief was that there were thousands of such people spread across the country (fewer of them in cities, was her other belief) – people who would never be rich, nor had any great desire to be so, but who worked hard and willingly all their lives for what they believed in. The backbone of small communities, they were, always there to help each other out in a crisis. Their only complaints concerned policies made by people who had no knowledge of how the land worked, and their only rewards were the good harvests and fine animals it was their life to produce. Saul was the most reliable, skilled and able man George knew: the Elkin farm had been for almost three decades in great part dependent upon him. It was hard to imagine the place without him, although – as George had been reminded by the man’s weary face this evening – Saul was getting on, and one day he would be forced, reluctantly, to retire. The particular hardship for him, when this day came, would be that he could not pass on the job of farm manager to Ben, for by then Ben would have long gone into the electrical industry. George knew what his son’s decision meant to Saul, though he was not the kind of man who would have indulged his feelings to his employer or anyone else. Having briefly expressed his sorrow the other day, George knew it would never be mentioned again.
Saul had his funny ways, of course. His loathing of chickens meant that after Mrs Elkin died – she looked after a fluctuating number of free-range birds – he had given his ultimatum: either the Rhode Islands had to go, or he’d have to give in his notice. George had been puzzled by the vehemence of this announcement, made not long after his mother’s funeral at a time when Mr Elkin had gone away for a few days. George had observed Saul’s fast-blinking, frantic eyes as he made it, and realised he suffered from some phobia. Saul evidently despised himself for this weakness, but was helpless to fight it. When Mr Elkin returned he suggested the birds were taken to the market, and Saul had hurried off with a brief word of thanks.
One of his favoured pastimes was to give various authorities the benefit of his opinion by letter. Since the anti-hunting bill had threatened, every Sunday afternoon, after milking, Saul would change back into his Sunday best to write another letter to the Prime Minister. Each week he would provide another reason why, should the sport be abandoned, the effects would be catastrophic for farmers. Holding the n
ot unreasonable belief that those in power were incapable of taking in many rational arguments at once, the weekly letter provided only one – ‘so that a store of reasons can be built up’, he explained, ‘but studied one at a time.’ Despite the sense of this idea, Saul never received an acknowledgement from Downing Street. He himself had little time in which to hunt, but the few hours he managed each season either on his brother’s old cob, or on foot, were to him more pleasurable than a month’s holiday. (Not that he had any experience of a month’s holiday: he abhorred the whole concept of going away. The furthest he had been from home was as a lad of twelve on a daytrip to Weymouth which had put him off such excursions for ever.)
Saul, who had farming relations in both Wales and the north, was the one on the farm who kept most closely in touch with the grim news that increasingly spread throughout the country. Every morning he listened to Farming Today, which he considered was no longer of any real service to farmers, and copiously read half a dozen weekly papers and magazines concerning rural life. It was Saul who would come to George, cap in hand in deference to the news he was about to convey, and apprise him of some new outrage. In his opinion, even a man of intellect, like George, could only take on board small particles of gloom at a time. So, like the Prime Minister, George was treated to small shavings of information. There was the occasion – on seeing the flutter of a common blue in a hayfield about to be cut – when he whipped off his cap and turned to George with saddened face. Seventy per cent of British butterflies were now extinct, he said. On an August evening, even more sadly, he announced that for the third year running there were far fewer swallows and swifts gathering on the telegraph wires. The birds had given up in many parts of Britain, he said. With so many rivers being dredged – though praise be to God that had not happened here – there was no mud for their nests. They might never come back. How many people, he had asked George, would find that a shame – no, more than a shame, a tragedy?
As Saul returned his cap to his bowed head, George had agreed it was a tragedy, as indeed was so much of what was happening to rural life and work today. The greatest tragedy of all, he thought, opening the gate into the Prodgers’ yard, was the cost to the human heart: the despair, the fear, and, in so many cases, the end.
There were no lights on in the farmhouse. George made his way to the shed. The sky was by now a dense indigo, but it was still not quite dark. He had no need of his torch.
At the entrance to the shed he stood peering into the gloom, listening. A single sheep in a pen moved restlessly, bleating to its absent friends. The smell of dung was sour, rank, not unpleasant. George moved away, on up the path hedged with obsolete and rusting machinery, to the small barn. This was where the sheep had been housed in winter before Prodge had built the large shed. He had never had the time, energy or money to restore it. Its roof had partially caved in. Many of its beams were rotten. Its floor was perilously uneven. These days it was used for parking the tractors and storing a miscellany of farm implements. Only Prodge knew where to find anything in the iron jungle that grew ever more unruly in this rotting building.
George thought it unlikely Prodge would be there, but it was worth glancing in on his way to the cowshed. He stood with one hand on a mudguard of the old Fordson tractor. The place was empty. Prodge was not there.
He was about to leave when he heard the faint hoot of a barn owl in the rafters. Saul would be pleased, he thought. Not all birds are extinct. I must tell Saul … He reached for his torch, swung the small tunnel of light across the solemn army of machinery up into the roof. No sign of the owl, though it hooted again, its voice less distinct. The torch’s beam speared down to a cross-rafter about ten feet high. From it hung some old bits of harness left from generations ago when Suffolk Punches still pulled the plough. Fascinated by the occasional patterns of blackened brass that punctuated the leather and the hugeness and heaviness of the tackle the horses had had to carry, George slowed the beam, edging it along the remnants of different farming days. The narrow light came to the end of the rafter and stopped on a hanging body.
For a second, in sickening disbelief, George left the beam where it had landed on Prodge’s shoulder – he recognised the old shirt that he had been wearing for days. He swallowed back the sour bile that rose in his throat. He forced himself to tilt up the torch till the beam reached the back of his head, which was tipped so far forward that the only visible feature was a single, strange-looking ear. Then the light swooped downwards on to the hips of Prodge’s grimiest jeans. In that moment, the whole of George’s life with Prodge and Nell spun before him, the thousands of small events so blindingly refracted that he had to shut his eyes against them. The stillness of the corpse told him that it was too late to save him. He had failed his friend: his friend was dead.
George had no idea how much time passed till he reopened his eyes. Time was meaningless. He knew that his hand, shaking violently, still clutched the torch. He was not conscious of moving it, but saw that the beam had stuttered down the terrible legs to the feet.
Except that there were no feet. Instead, twists of straw hung from the bottoms of the trousers. On the ground beneath them lay two old socks.
November the fifth. This forgotten fact burned slowly through George’s being. The hanging corpse was not Prodge, but a guy to be burnt on the village bonfire. Every year, Prodge made the guy and lit the fire. The realisation, gradually cancelling out George’s discovery of death, buffeted his whole body with uncontrollable shaking. He backed into a pile of sacks stuffed with straw, let himself fall on to them. The owl hooted. The torch went out. George wept.
It couldn’t have been more than a few moments since he had entered the barn, but time still played havoc in his head as relief, guilt and amorphous emotions he could not name spurred tears and more tears. Moments contracted and expanded, confusing and exhausting, until suddenly his weeping was interrupted by the sound of a car swishing through mud. He wiped his eyes, listened. A car door banged.
He heard Nell shouting his name. He let her shout several times, not trusting his voice, before he answered. Then she was beside him, out of breath. She carried a torch whose powerful beam, swirling about the barn, by chance missed George’s face.
‘We’ve been down in the village finishing the bonfire. I’m just back for the bags of straw and the guy. What’re you doing in here?’
‘Came over on a whim. I’d forgotten it was Guy Fawkes night.’
‘Well, come on down with me. You can help me with the sacks. I’ll take the guy.’
Had she suggested George do this, he knew he would have hesitated. Reality had not yet completely obliterated the nightmare. It was pushing through, slowly, but George’s heart still pounded. Nell moved to the hanging guy, now lighted by her strong torch, and flung it over her shoulder. George caught a brief glimpse of its painted eyes, loathsome grin and pink plastic ears. A flash came to him of a distant childhood game involving false ears and noses fixed on with elastic. Prodge must have found the ears in some attic box of rubbish. He’d employed them to terrifying effect, thought George, calmer now that the shock was subsiding. He picked up a couple of bags of straw, pillows that had supported his moments of agony. They deserved to be burnt with the guy. He followed Nell to the car.
‘I persuaded Prodge to go to the doctor yesterday,’ she said. ‘He seemed to think the trouble was nothing to do with contamination from sheep dip. He said that before organophosphates were licensed, lots of farmers were badly affected with mysterious ailments – Prodge had become convinced he’d been poisoned somehow. But when he said of course we’d been vaccinating our sheep against scab for a good many years, the doctor assured him there was nothing to worry about these days. You’re suffering from understandable depression due to lack of sleep and the general worry of farming today, the doctor said. Prodge was so relieved he even agreed to take some pills, just for a while.’
‘Good. Thank God for that.’
‘So there’s hope he’ll get b
ack to his normal self. As much as anyone can … present conditions.’ She stuffed the flopping guy into the back seat of George’s car. ‘But guess what? There’s less good news as well. Letter from our landlord this morning – not exactly a surprise. I’d been waiting for it. He said he’d sold his other two farms where the tenants had been having trouble with the rent, and he’d left us as long as he could because we’d always been good tenants. But now it was our turn. He’s obviously sold the other two well, to townspeople who’ve had no interest in farming, just want a weekend place.’