by Angela Huth
On the way, they ran into Saul, cap in hands – its almost permanent place of late. The trauma of the last week had aged him with dreadful speed: his stubbled skin was the chipped blue of a dead starling, his eyes had moved further back into deep hollows. He showed no surprise at seeing Lily, but put his hand to his head to raise his cap. It was only when he realised it was not there that confusion increased the trembling in his hands.
‘Welcome back, Mrs Elkin.’
‘Saul. . .’ They shook hands.
‘Not the best time.’
Lily shook her head.
‘Ben’s taken it bad. It was the cows that finished him. Awake all night he was. Said he didn’t dare sleep for fear of nightmares.’
‘I’ll be down to see him,’ said George. ‘Tell him I’ll be down.’
In the kitchen they stood one each side of the table. Lily spread her hands on its battered wooden surface as if for confirmation. Then she sat in her usual chair.
‘I don’t know what we do, with all that outside,’ said George.
‘There’s time,’ said Lily, looking at her hands. ‘We just tread water for a while.’ Her desire to look, to scour the room she had transformed with such sympathy and spirit, seemed to have left her in the difficulty of the moment. Her eyes did not explore. Perhaps they would later.
The telephone rang. George moved to answer it. He listened for a moment. Then he spoke quietly.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry Prodge. Bloody hell. Who’s going to escape round here? We’ll speak this evening.’ He put the receiver down and turned to Lily. ‘Their turn tomorrow, apparently. Prize herd of healthy animals. Years of work to be blasted in a moment.’ He returned to the table and sat opposite his wife, looking on her with the dazed regard of one who cannot be sure that what he is seeing is real. ‘Their farm is being sold: they’ve got to get out anyway. It’s so unfair, what’s happened to Prodge and Nell, after their years of work. But I’ve been thinking hard about how to help. I do have an idea that might work.’
‘I wonder,’ said Lily, ‘if it could possibly be the same idea as mine?’
‘Perhaps,’ said George, with a shrug – not a gesture lacking in care, but one of supreme exhaustion. This was not the moment to discuss practicalities for Prodge and Nell. They sat in silence for a long time.
‘You realise we’re prisoners here, for the time being?’ George asked at last.
‘I know,’ said Lily. ‘I knew it was breaking the rules to come. But I had to. I was scrupulous about disinfecting at the gate, and there was no one to stop me.’
‘You’re staying a while, are you?’ George’s voice sounded to him like a distant echo, empty as the hoot of a far-off train.
‘If that’s all right with you.’
‘That’s all right with me.’ George longed to put a hand over one of hers, but resisted. ‘In fact, it’d be difficult for you to get away, now, unless you want to break more rules.’ He made no attempt to lend humour to his observation. All the same, Lily smiled.
Once again, time jerked, stopped, started. George spent much of it trying, and failing, to get through to the authorities to persuade them to come before Thursday. Lily sat beside him. At some point in the evening he carried her suitcases upstairs, obeying her request to take them to the spare room where she had first stayed. After a supper of tinned soup, scarcely touched by either of them, George went to the cottage to spend an hour with Ben, whose eyes were shrunk from weeping, and listened to his repeated words of incomprehension: his cows, his cows gone. At nine, Prodge rang.
‘Bloody hell, George,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘You were lucky with your killers. We got a right bunch of incompetent cold bloods here, shooting an animal several times without killing it. One dunderhead left Jessy thrashing about, half dead – said she’d die in a minute or two. I took a gun to her myself. I couldn’t bear it.’ He paused. ‘George, I shot sixteen of my own cows. I can’t say any more. Here, speak to Nell.’
Nell, too, was in a devastated state.
‘What finished me,’ she sobbed, ‘was the bantams. Even worse than seeing the calves go. My bantams, my hens, George. They said everything had to go. Can you believe it? Prodge and I are just sitting here, nothing to do, stranded on an island in a sea of slaughtered healthy animals. It’s a nightmare. Not a single good thing left.’
‘Just one good thing,’ George said. ‘I only tell you at this ghastly time because it might cheer you up. Lily’s back.’
‘Lily?’ Nell stopped sobbing. ‘Let me speak to her.’
The two friends were engaged on the telephone for a long time. George went into the study. He sat in his father’s office chair, gently swinging from side to side as if moved by a languorous tide. His mind was frozen by the events of the past few days and the spectre of the carnage outside. There was no space in his heart, for the moment, to reflect on the implications of Lily’s return.
In the two long days they spent marooned in the house, Lily kept her quiet distance. If she made any changes, George did not notice them, but he did see her looking out of various windows at the garden where most of her hard work had fallen into disrepair. They did not talk of themselves, of the lost years, or of the future. The clearing of the farm and the dead animals was their only concern.
By now the smell of them was terrible. Lily closed all windows against the stink of rotting flesh. But it was pervasive, sickening. It slunk into the house like a snake and resisted all efforts to extinguish it. Everywhere, it was – in hair, in clothes. George, putting his hand to his face, smelt it on his flesh. And outside, by now, it was far worse. An invisible mould, the stench clung to the buildings, the cobbled yard, the stone walls: it was rampant in the air.
George, holding a handkerchief to his nose, forced himself to do a final round of his animals. He was shocked by the speed of their deterioration. No longer singular sheep and cows, each one had become merely a part of the pile of putrid flesh contorted into obscene, swollen shapes. Effluent ran from them. A pale sun lighted the liquid mess. George felt the rise and fall of bile in his throat. It had been necessary to do this inspection in order to persuade MAFF of the speed needed to rid his farm of this vile matter. It was the most horrific morning, he later told Lily, of his life.
On the Wednesday evening he was assured by the local MAFF representative (apologetic, sympathetic, but evidently helpless) that collection of the stock would definitely be the next morning: the pyre was ready for burning hundreds of animals in the locality. As he talked on the telephone, George saw through the window that Ben was pushing a wheelbarrow, stacked with sandbags, towards the cowshed. George opened the window, shouted at him not to bother: it wasn’t worth it. The men were coming in the morning, he said.
‘I want to soak up some of the mess,’ Ben shouted back. There’s not many sacks but it’s the least I can do for my bloody cows.’ Purposefully he moved on, a young man shed of all his tears, strong in his determination to carry out a final, useless job on the farm he had loved all his life.
From a distance, early next morning, George, Saul and Ben watched their bloated animals scraped ignominiously from the ground into open lorries. The huge diggers employed to carry out this task were driven by skilled men, but there were still errors of judgement. A stiffened cow would fall from the jaws of the machine, recalcitrant in death, and have to be prodded this way and that by the great steel teeth until she was secured again and dumped in the truck. The sheep and lambs, by now no more than wool soup flecked with heads, were ladled up more easily – all distinguishing features, thank God, thought, George, now disappeared.
By evening, they had gone, leaving nothing but Ben’s sodden sandbags to blot the emptiness. Fierce sprays of disinfectant to scour the place would come next, but first there was to be the burning. Saul and Ben came up to the house to say they were on their way to the pyre.
‘Best we go ‘n show our farewell,’ said Saul.
‘I’ll want to remember these last days,’ added Ben. �
�Every time I’m fiddling with some bastard of an electrical thing and I ask myself if I was right to give up farming.’
They went on their way, walking far apart.
In the kitchen, George sat at the table trying to make up his mind whether to join them. Lily put a mug of tea in front of him. He felt her hand on his shoulder. At least, he was aware of her touch, but it caused no sensation within him. Until the final event was over, he continued to be a man – in common with so many thousands of others – too traumatised to feel anything at all. Feeling nothing, he reflected grimly, was the reason Lily had left.
‘I’m going too,’ he said.
George walked across his fields. From a cloud of acrid black smoke flakes of ash were falling. They flew about like flocks of small silent birds, sometimes touching him. As he approached the pyre the noise of hungry flames grew louder.
Saul and Ben, along with Prodge and Nell and several others, were already there: a stiff little row of farmers who watched in incredulous silence as the machines tipped the carcasses into the giant fire. Behind its flames the sky was a clashing, ugly red which made the fields beyond the pyre into a stretching sore of land. Smoke – the vile, stinking smoke from roasting, rotted flesh – joined in confusion with the rose-edged clouds and, as if in final outrage, the legs of dead animals, like giant hatpins, pierced the whole bloody mess of sky and flames.
George felt Lily beside him. He shifted, to show he was glad. Then he turned to look at Prodge and Nell. Prodge’s eyes, in his empty, exhausted face, were on Lily. Nell, her wild curls reddened by the fire, stared at the flames that were the end for her and Prodge. It was too soon for her to acknowledge Lily with more than a slight nod. Saul stood close to his son. The rigid Ben was committing the sight to memory, for when he was an electrician in a less cruel world.
Gradually darkness fell, but the men in charge kept feeding the fire. The savage scarlets and oranges of its flames, flaring across the sky, could have been taken for a wild sunset.
17
That night, within the house, George was able to feel the emptiness without. The shadow and stench of the slain animals now gone, he shut the kitchen windows against the smell of disinfectant and turned to contemplate his wife.
It occurred to him that externally she hadn’t changed – neither thinner nor fatter, she was: nor older, nor less burning with life. But there was about her a new steadiness, a less frantic way of looking, a touching quietness in response to his own melancholy that he found profoundly moving. There was time, at last, to look on her with hope and wonder.
With Lily’s return, Dusty had changed her mind about the regulations and had not been up to the house since the day of the slaughter. (She hadn’t left, she assured George, she was just taking a break.) So Lily cooked a simple herb omelette and found a new candle to light their supper. George opened a bottle of her favourite wine.
They talked little of themselves. Drained by the events of the last two days, they acknowledged there was plenty of time for that: this was not the moment. Instead, they discovered that their ideas concerning help for Prodge and Nell were as one. In the joy of this discovery the evening rose on an invisible wave. They sat by the fire, when they had finished eating, for a long time, planning.
‘We divide the house in two, making both ends completely independent,’ said George.
‘And our end will still have four bedrooms,’ Lily pointed out with a sudden merriness. ‘Plenty of room for at least three children.’
‘Quite.’ George paused, envisaging this. ‘And Prodge and Nell become equal partners in the farm. With our compensation money, and Prodge’s expertise, we can begin again as soon as all this business is over. Do things a bit differently, perhaps. Turn completely organic – it’s more and more what consumers want. Buy some new horses for you and Nell. It shouldn’t take Prodge too long to pay off his overdraft. I don’t suppose he’d mind if I guaranteed it for him.’
‘But the thing is, will they ever accept this? Or will they want a new life somewhere quite different – to give up farming like their parents?’ Lily asked.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. But oddly, although I’ve known them for so long, it’s impossible to guess what their reaction will be. Cautious, I would guess. We can only hope.’
They finished the wine. George damped down the fire.
‘And you, my wife,’ he said. ‘You’re back. You’re back, aren’t you? It’ll take me some time to believe that.’
‘I’m back. Yes, I’m back.’ Lily stood, stretching. Then she blew out the candle, displaying a sense of disbelief in her own words. ‘Thank you for not pursuing me. Thank you for your forgiveness, your understanding—’
‘I’m not sure I ever really understood, or ever will,’ broke in George. ‘A thousand times I nearly came after you. Prodge and Nell constantly urged me to do so. But I believed you really didn’t want that, and that if I tried I might scupper my chances. It was hard, but anything’s possible when you love someone, and the most important thing is to do what that person wants.’ George gestured towards the farmyard. He felt not drunk, but agreeably unsoldered from his base, which enabled him to make this small declaration. ‘I like to think this ending must be the right time for our own new beginning,’ he went on after a pause to see how Lily was reacting. ‘Don’t you?’
Lily, in her old familiar way, moved to him and leant her head in the place beneath his shoulder so that he could kiss her hair.
‘I do.’
George held her silently, imagining the night ahead, the empty farm outside, and the feeling of strangeness of married life regained now Lily was back, soon to be lying by his side.
Prodge and Nell came over from their own empty farm, guilty at breaking the rules. They spent a long time disinfecting their boots at the gate. Both had the constrained, expectant look of those aware of news that might not be welcome, thought George – though he could have been imagining this.
Lily and Nell hugged each other in the same restrained fashion as do mourners at a funeral: sympathy and understanding made plain in controlled, silent gestures. They had gathered, the four of them, in the study – the meeting place for so many different kinds of conferences over the years. George remembered a less solemn occasion of his youth when they had come to discuss the future of an ailing guinea pig.
Prodge made for his favourite end of the sofa and deprived George of his opening (carefully composed during the night) with an announcement of his own.
‘Mum and Dad must be feeling bad,’ he began, ‘on their Spanish terraces reading about British farmers – just like they did during BSE.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘Only this time they’ve done something about it. They’ve sent a cheque that will deal with about a quarter of the overdraft. Compensation should take care of most of the rest.’
‘That’s good,’ said George. ‘That’s a relief.’ In the following silence he chose his words carefully. He wanted to put his plan in a way that would show it was essential for all their futures, rather than a benevolent gesture on the part of a reasonably well-off friend. ‘Any ideas, have you, yet, what, when—?’
‘We’ll be off pretty soon,’ said Prodge. ‘They’re taking away the animals tomorrow. Thank God we won’t have the wait you’ve had. Nothing to hang on for, now. The place is loathsome. MAFF asked us if we’d like to do our own disinfecting – ten pounds an hour. We said yes. Give us something to do. So soon it’ll be ready for the landlord to sell as a nice little second home with carriage lamps and hanging geraniums—’
‘No need to go on,’ Nell interrupted.
‘Lily and I, it so happened, quite independently came up with exactly the same idea about a possible solution.’ George was still playing for time.
‘We thought that might be the case,’ said Nell. ‘We thought you might have something in mind for us, though God knows what. Come on. Don’t keep us in suspense any longer.’
In the most delicate terms George put to them the plan of dividing the house
and becoming equal partners in the farm. Encouraged by the approval in Lily’s eyes at his progress, he fluently sketched possibilities, reasons, details, in a way which he hoped they would find difficult to refuse. The initial huffiness in Prodge’s expression, he could see, was slowly ebbing. The slight nodding of his head indicated that he saw good sense and reason in George’s suggestions. What George could not have guessed was the relief his friend felt as he anticipated living at such close quarters to Lily. All that was fine, now. Untroubling. The curious storm she had caused him had ended the night he had burnt her photograph. He was now free of his irrational fantasy – besides, she looked older, graver, no longer a figure so mysteriously desirable. (Perhaps it had been the kindness of the light, and the confidence that sprang from the leather jacket, that afternoon by the river.) Now she held no power to disturb him. He knew he could be in a room alone with her and the will to touch her would no longer be there. So he was safe, he would always be safe in her company now. Had this not been the case, he would not have been able to agree to George’s generous plan.
‘Sounds good,’ he said, when all possibilities had been laid before him. ‘I go for all that, I do. Marvellous ideas. I could never see myself in another part of the country, anywhere else but here. This land’s in my boots, always has been. And it’d be good to put the neglected end of your house to rights – long overdue. So I don’t know about Nell, we haven’t had much time to discuss the future, but I’m on for it, myself. It’d be a future to get to grips with, wouldn’t it, Nell?’ Nell, pale, made no movement of agreement. Prodge looked back at George. ‘We’d never be able to start again without you, and I daresay our experience could be useful, choosing a new herd and so on. We suspected you might have something up your sleeve, but never guessed it was this. Thanks.’
‘You must understand we’d be equally unable to start again without you,’ said George, the relief of Prodge’s acceptance surging through him. ‘And I think we’d make a good team, the four of us and Saul. Think: a year from now we could be up and running again.’