by Susan Lewis
‘When am I supposed to be taking Dodgy to the vet for his shots?’ Shelley murmured, searching for the entry. Finding it, she added a note to pick up more pellets for their substantial family of pigs while she was out, and she still needed to talk to Giles about how he wanted to use the top fields this coming year. Maize/graze was what they called their arrangement.
At the sound of more bumps and thumps in the boot room she started to smile, and a moment later Josh burst in through the door. ‘Mum! Mum! Guess what!’ he shouted excitedly. ‘I’ve found another hedgehog and he wasn’t hibernating. He should be, because it’s bad for him not to at this time of year, but I’ve rescued him and put him with the others in the sanctuary. Hello, Grandma. Would you like to see my new hedgehog?’
‘Lead me to him,’ Patty insisted. ‘Do you think he needs anything to eat?’
‘It’s OK,’ Josh assured her, ‘I have lots of mealworms, so I think he’ll be all right. Mum, can I have a KitKat?’
‘I’m afraid Hanna took them,’ Shelley replied, ‘but there’s a slice of fruit cake left in the fridge. You can have it now, or after you’ve shown Grandma the hedgehog.’
Tearing open the fridge door, he bit into the cake, and was reprimanded for speaking with his mouth full as he tried to say, ‘Can you ask Hanna to feed the pigs, because I promised Zoe I’d exercise Madonna before it gets dark.’ Hanna had outgrown the pony three or more years ago and had generously turned her over to Zoe, who probably wouldn’t be riding her for much longer either. Would they find the heart to sell her? Probably not, knowing them, though they’d had some interest from Bella Shager, the woman at the tourist office whom Jemmie had introduced Shelley and Kat to a few years ago. She’d been looking for a pony for her five-year-old granddaughter, Vicky? Vivienne? but it hadn’t come to anything in the end. Shelley wasn’t sure why, maybe they’d found one elsewhere.
‘Grandma, can you drive me over to Giles’s farm?’ Josh asked, as they headed for the boot room to put their wellies back on. ‘He said he’s got some hibernation boxes for me.’
‘Of course, sweetheart, I’ll just pop into the cottage to get the car keys.’
As Josh explained more about his hedgehog rescue project – as if they hadn’t heard it a dozen times by now – Shelley checked the stew before going to put on her own coat and boots. She’d feed the pigs herself. It would make for an easier life, no arguments or tantrums from Hanna, just her and the snorting, grunting porcine rascals who adored human attention almost as much as they did food.
By the time she came back to the kitchen her mother and Josh had taken off for Giles’s farm and she had received five calls on her mobile phone – three from Zoe and David, who were on their way back from town (three because neither of them quite had the hang of leaving messages yet so kept repeating them); one from the mother of Josh’s friend, Ben Carter, asking if Ben could come over later; and the last from Giles wanting to know who was going to the livestock market with him on Monday, Shelley or Nate.
Deciding to try her hand at texting, she pressed a few keys on the phone, managed to bring up the right screen and spent five times as long composing a reply as she would have if she’d just made the call. Still, it was all practice, and everyone was texting these days, or so Hanna kept telling her, apart from Hanna, of course, because she wasn’t allowed to have a mobile phone.
Almost as soon as Shelley had sent the message to Giles, he rang.
‘Did you get my text?’ she asked, amazed by how speedily it had got there.
‘Yes, no. It’s not about that.’ His voice was dark and grave, and Shelley felt herself starting to stiffen.
‘What is it?’ she asked. Giles and Cathy had been through a tough time these last few years, thanks to the Government’s appalling mishandling of the BSE crisis. So far Giles’s herd had remained unaffected.
‘It’s Cathy,’ he said shakily. ‘They think … They’re saying she might have this CJD, you know, the human form of mad cow disease.’
Shelley sank into a chair. ‘But how …? What do …?’ Realizing questions were no good, she said, ‘I’m on my way,’ but before she could hang up he cried, ‘No! Don’t come. We’ve got no idea yet if it’s contagious. That’s why I’m calling, to make sure you all stay away. I’ll call when I have more news.’
As the line went dead Shelley remembered that her mother and Josh were on their way to Giles’s and she had no way of contacting them to make them turn back.
Dashing outside, she leapt into the tractor and roared off across the fields. If she went this way she might be able to head them off before they got anywhere near Giles’s farm and this terrible disease that no one knew anything about, apart from the fact that it had started killing humans as well as cattle.
They learned a few days later that Cathy’s virus wasn’t connected to CJD after all – so many panicked reactions and diagnoses these days – but whatever it was did take a while to pass. However, the doughty old lady was back on her feet by the time the lambing season was upon them, and was as keen to come over to Deerwood to help as she was every year. Jemmie Bleasdale had begun helping out a lot too, and not just with the lambing, for ever since Jack’s death she’d started dropping by regularly, or calling up to invite Shelley to local events, or simply to ask if there was anything she could do. Sometimes her concern, her eagerness to make sure the family was coping, felt almost overbearing, though Shelley would never say so. She was too fond of the woman ever to want to hurt her.
Far more entertaining – and something Jack would have loved – was the way Josh was becoming more like his father every day, not only in looks but in humour. He’d recently asserted that both male and female sheep enjoyed the mating process the way humans did, his dark blue eyes sparkling with mischief the way Jack’s always had when trying to get a reaction.
‘Well, not quite as much as that,’ Josh qualified, astounding Shelley and his grandparents with this apparent knowledge of carnal pleasure. Then he flat-out floored them as he added, ‘Actually I think some of them might be gay.’
The wickedness in his eyes as he said it was proof enough that he’d set out to shock; however, he remained adamant that it was true.
Though not yet eleven he was already in year 7 at school, putting him ahead of other kids his age, and the local vet where Jack had once been a part-timer assured the family that Josh was far from a nuisance when he was at the surgery. He was in fact more often an asset, Shelley was told, since he had a remarkable gift for calming animals in distress, and could even diagnose certain conditions that some qualified vets might have found hard to spot.
As time went on, and Josh became increasingly involved with animals and Deerwood, it seemed his sisters were going in the other direction and distancing themselves, especially Hanna. Even Josh couldn’t seem to coax her out of her constant ill humour, and as for Zoe, once she hit her teens her moods turned as irrational and unpredictable as Hanna’s. Thankfully they were not as sour or stormy; she was more withdrawn, focused elsewhere, or too often glued to the TV. After trying to engage them Josh would throw up his hands to his mother, as though to say I’ve done my best, before taking off with his cousin, Perry, to go to school, or to get on with the farm work of the day.
Something else Josh began involving himself in as the year rolled on through summer was the increasingly stressful situation at Giles’s farm. Though both Shelley and Giles discouraged him from going there, as Giles’s herd were still being regularly inspected for BSE, Josh was determined to walk the cattle, as he called it, and assure them that no one was going to hurt them.
‘I know they don’t watch telly,’ he shouted at Zoe when she pointed this out to him, ‘but they can sense that something’s happening, just like when they go for slaughter. They’re much more intelligent than you realize and I don’t want them to be scared.’
How much notice the cows took of his little talks, and how effective they really were, no one could ever say, but what they did know was that Gi
les’s livestock wasn’t among the many herds to be condemned.
‘Mum, where’s Hanna?’
Shelley barely looked up from the computer that lived at one end of the kitchen table as Zoe dutifully planted a kiss on her cheek – a requirement from them all when they left for school in the mornings, and when they came home again later.
‘I haven’t seen her yet,’ Shelley answered, squinting at the screen where she was trying to place an order for hoof-care powder. Had it gone through yet, or was it still checking her credit card? Why was she hearing the dial tone again?
Chiding her mother for swearing, Zoe grabbed a snack from the fridge and wandered through to the sitting room.
Hearing the TV go on, Shelley shouted, ‘There are animals to feed and pens to muck out. And Josh could probably use some help with his new hutches.’
Zoe ignored her.
Deciding she had to ring the supplier to make sure her order had gone through, Shelley used her mobile to make the connection. It would have been so much easier to do it this way in the first place. She couldn’t see herself ever fully trusting Internet ordering.
After receiving a verbal confirmation that the hoof-care powder would be hers by this time next week, she went to the sitting room to check on Zoe. ‘Did you hear me?’ she said, and her heart sank to see how glum her fourteen-year-old was looking.
‘Yeah, but I’ve got my period and I don’t feel very well,’ Zoe complained, her eyes not straying from the latest episode of Grange Hill.
Going to sit with her, Shelley slipped an arm round her shoulders and rested her head on hers. ‘Do you have any pain?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, loads. It’s horrible. I hate being a girl.’
‘It’s certainly not one of the best parts,’ Shelley agreed. ‘I’ll get you something for it and you can stay here, nice and snug, once I’ve lit the fire.’
As she made to get up Zoe said, ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
Zoe fell silent.
Shelley turned to look at her. ‘What it is?’ she asked, realizing that something more than period pains was troubling her easier daughter.
Zoe shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Certain it did, Shelley tilted up her chin and said, ‘This is me you’re talking to. You know you can say anything.’
Zoe’s eyes went down, but Shelley held gently to her chin and in the end Zoe blurted it out, ‘Is it true what they say about Dad?’ she demanded.
Thrown, Shelley tried to think what she meant. ‘What are they saying?’ she asked, genuinely perplexed, since Zoe’s tone was suggesting it wasn’t good.
‘They’re saying he had affairs. Well, an affair, anyway.’
Stunned, reeling, Shelley tried to process this, but found she couldn’t, not right now. Not ever. It made no sense at all; it simply hadn’t happened. In the end she managed to ask, ‘Who’s saying that?’
‘People at school.’
Shelley stared at her daughter and felt she was seeing someone else entirely: a young girl standing in the sunlight at the crematorium watching the funeral, seeming to look straight at her, or was that part of it just her imagination?
It had been with this girl in mind that Shelley, hating herself, had rung the vet in the days after Jack’s funeral to enquire after the dogs her husband had treated the night of his fatal fall. To her relief she’d been told they were doing well and that Jack had done a wonderful job with them. ‘If he hadn’t been so tired by the time he left … It was so late and it had been a traumatic few hours …’
So he hadn’t lied about where he was, and when she thought of the way he’d made love to her that night … He could never have done that if he’d been with another woman, not someone like Jack.
And the girl had looked so young, hardly more than a child. That wouldn’t have been Jack’s style at all; nothing about unfaithfulness was his style.
‘Mum? You’re scaring me,’ Zoe protested.
Pulling herself together, Shelley said, ‘It’s nonsense, sweetheart. I don’t know why people say these things. They just want to make mischief, I suppose. Ignore them. Daddy would never have done anything like that.’
Shelley returned to the kitchen having forgotten all about Zoe’s painkillers and addiction to TV; she couldn’t even focus on what she was supposed to be doing. She just kept staring at the female dancer in the niche and asking herself over and over what on earth had happened to the male.
She didn’t hear Josh come in until he asked where he could find Hanna or Zoe.
‘I’ve managed to put one of the hutches together,’ he told her, ‘but I need someone to hold the door while I …’ He broke off as Nate came in and before his uncle could as much as speak, Josh had him by the hand and was marching him out to the barn to act as his assistant.
A few minutes later Shelley found Zoe asleep on the sofa, so she turned the TV down, lit the fire and went back into the kitchen. Five o’clock already, she noticed. Her mother would be over at any minute to start the evening meal; Shelley’s next task was to take cups of tea out to the greenhouse for David and her father, who were busy watering their cannabis plants. The crop consisted of several sorts of veg really, but in a light-hearted moment recently Hanna had accused them of growing weed and it had stuck.
Where was Hanna? Shelley couldn’t remember her saying she’d be late this evening, and since she still refused to jot her movements onto the calendar there was no point in checking there.
Kat arrived at the same time as Patty, immediately uncorked a bottle of wine and filled three glasses. ‘What a day,’ she sighed, slumping down in a chair as Patty filled a bowl with peanuts. ‘Kids are so much easier than their parents. I had one woman turn up as I was leaving to accuse me of poisoning her son’s mind by reading Roald Dahl to him. Roald Dahl, I ask you. Of course she’s a complete nutter, but I didn’t realize that straight away, because it’s always the father who brings him …’ She broke off, frowning as she realized Shelley wasn’t listening. ‘Shell? Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I know I’m boring, but you seem miles away.’
Patty turned from what she was doing as Shelley said bluntly, ‘Do you think Jack ever had affairs?’
Neither Patty nor Kat could have looked more shocked. ‘No way!’ Kat cried, almost choking on her drink.
‘What nonsense,’ Patty scoffed. ‘Where on earth did that come from?’
‘Zoe,’ Shelley replied. ‘Apparently someone’s said something at school and …’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Patty interrupted, throwing out her hands. ‘You can’t take any notice of things kids say at school. They’re probably accusing everyone’s fathers, or mothers, of affairs. They’re that age! Half of them don’t even know what it means.’
Grasping the truth of that, Shelley felt it slip through her hands as she said, ‘There was a girl at the crematorium, the day of the funeral. Nate saw her too. I pointed her out … She was way over the other side of the cemetery, but she seemed … I got the feeling … Has Nate ever mentioned it?’ she asked Kat.
Kat was clearly mystified. ‘Never. What makes you think she was there because of Jack?’
Shelley shook her head and shrugged helplessly. She wasn’t even sure she did think that, yet the girl kept coming back to her mind.
Patty said, ‘She was probably just a passer-by, stopping to have a look in case we were people she knew.’
‘Jack loved you with all his heart,’ Kat reminded her. ‘There was never anyone else for him, the same way there’s never been anyone else for you – although I’m not sure that should continue, but that’s a subject for another time.’
Coming to cup her hands around Shelley’s face, Patty said, ‘Listen to me, my girl, grief can do strange things to your mind, even this long after the event, but I’m telling you, here and now, that Jack never had an affair with anyone.’
Despite appreciating the reassurance Shelley found her eyes going back to the female dancer as if there were an ans
wer there, if only the bronze could speak.
By the time they were ready to eat Josh had taken off with his grandfather David and a pack of sandwiches to keep him going through his “evening shift” at the vet’s, and Shelley had finally managed to shake off her unease over Jack. She’d never found a single thing in his papers, or pockets, or even in his business books to indicate that he’d ever been anything but true to his family. He’d been a decent, honest man with no sides to him, no guile, and certainly no lack of integrity. It simply hadn’t been in him to deceive or cheat or do anything he knew would hurt those he loved. She’d never doubted him when he was alive – apart from once, which hadn’t been a doubt at all, just a moment of ludicrous girlish insecurity – and she wasn’t going to start doubting him now.
As her mind cleared she suddenly realized that there was still no sign of Hanna, nor had she rung. She instantly felt a different kind of knot tightening her insides. ‘Did Hanna come home on the bus with you earlier?’ she asked Zoe, who was bringing dishes of veg to the table.
‘Nope,’ Zoe replied, still looking pale and fed up with the clawing pains that were getting worse for her as the months went by.
‘Did you see her at school?’ Shelley persisted.
‘I never do. She’s in a completely different building to me.’
‘Did she get the bus in with you this morning?’ Patty asked, clearly picking up on Shelley’s concern.
Zoe nodded, and groaned as she clutched theatrically at her stomach.
‘OK, Zoe, we all know what you’re going through,’ Shelley snapped, failing to cover how worried she was becoming. ‘Eat up, everyone. I’ll go and call some of Hanna’s friends. She’ll be with one of them somewhere …’ She broke off as someone knocked on the door. It was such a rare sound, since everyone they knew usually walked right in, that Shelley’s throat turned dry as her heartbeat slowed.
‘Come in,’ Nate called out.
The door didn’t open, but whoever it was knocked again.
Nate got up to answer.