Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  ‘It’s going to be the best tupping yet,’ he says.

  ‘It is, it is,’ says Joe. ‘You’re a good lad, Max. I always knew you’d land on your feet. When will it come?’

  ‘May the twentieth or thereabouts. We’ll know more at the scan.’

  ‘And Prim? She alright?’

  ‘She’s grand,’ says Max. ‘Might even pull back on the wiring now there’s something else to occupy her.’

  ‘Don’t bank on it,’ says Joe, laughing.

  Max closes his eyes, lays his head back on the headrest. ‘Might need a pay rise,’ he says, ‘if I’m to have a bairn in the house.’

  Joe starts the car.

  November

  — Tupping, and the feeling of looking forward —

  ‘Look at ’im,’ says Max. ‘He’s a look on his face like he’s off to creosote a fence, not sow his wild oats.’

  ‘Less of the wild,’ says Joe. ‘Good tup is that – I’ve paperwork to prove it.’

  They are leaning on a gate, taking a break after a period of hard work. They have driven the ewes down off the fell to the in-bye, dipped them and chosen the right ones for each tup. Joe maintains he has an eye for it – putting himself into the mind of the ram and what he might fancy. Max thinks it’s mostly guesswork but he’d never say as much. They have marshalled the ewes into pens of fifty apiece. Most of them – three-hundred-odd – are being put to the Blue-Faced Leicester rams.

  Max watches one now as he mounts a ewe and begins thrusting into her. Something about his blinking eyes, looking out to the side, gives him a dogged expression.

  ‘Any road,’ Joe is saying, ‘if you had to serve fifty-odd ladies in a fortnight, you might look a bit world-weary an’ all.’

  ‘I’d be ready for action, me,’ says Max. ‘Prepared to answer me calling.’

  ‘How very manly of ye.’

  ‘She doesn’t look like she’s having much fun either,’ says Max.

  ‘Fun doesn’t come into it. How many’s he done?’

  They look at the ewes’ backs. The tup has paint on his chest and his raddle marks are left on the ewes he’s served.

  ‘About five,’ says Max. ‘He’s not letting up. Look at that – he’s a good tup this one.’

  Max looks out across the in-bye. A faint mist swirls around the wintry trees which have only a fluttering of leaves left on them. The bracken is crisp and brown and thick with pheasant. Nowhere in the world, he thinks, more beautiful than this place.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Joe. ‘What you said, about a pay rise.’

  ‘Arh, I didn’t mean it, dad.’

  ‘No, no, it’s your time. Anyway, I’ve been thinking on, with you having a bairn an’ all. It’ll be the making of you, son. I think we should look at you taking over the farm – proper like. Build it up for you and for your son to take over.’

  Max hangs his head low, between his shoulders.

  ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted,’ says Joe looking into the field. ‘To feel the place will be passed on – that it won’t come to nothing. All that work – dad sweating his heart out – well, he’d be right pleased.’

  Max says what he feels he ought to say: ‘I didn’t mean . . . I know how tight things are.’ His words hang in the air like wet washing.

  ‘It’s your time,’ says Joe. ‘I’m getting too old for this game. I’ve not got the fight in me. But you – this’ll be the making of you. Children make it all . . . Give you a purpose.’

  Max feels the pleasure run through him again – that ahead of him, out of the ether, would come his agency in life. He just has to wait for it to happen. He wonders why he didn’t do this sooner.

  ‘How d’ye think Bartholomew’ll take it?’ he says to Joe, his concern a show.

  ‘Ah, Bartholomew expects it,’ says Joe. ‘He’ll have to take it on the chin. He chose to leave. And that’s fine. But you can’t have both. And another thing. I think we should replace the John Deere. I was going to wait till times were better, but a new tractor’d set you up, wouldn’t ye say?’

  ‘It would. If there’s money for it.’

  ‘We’ll find a way. Beg, borrow an’ steal. Come on, can we tell your mother now? It’s been murder keeping it from her.’ They turn to begin the walk back to the farmhouse, then Joe stops. ‘Let’s keep quiet about the tractor though,’ he says, and he laughs out loud. ‘No need to knock her out, eh.’ And Max laughs.

  ‘After lambing, too,’ Joe says as they walk towards the farmhouse, ‘well, that’s perfect timing. Perfect.’

  *

  Next day, Ann sits on the chair with the wooden arms, her handbag on her knee. Beside her on the floor is a plastic bag, slipping with loose paperwork. Before her is Barry Jordan’s desk, behind it his empty chair and beyond that a mushroom-coloured blind, its slats hanging at broken angles. She leans down and gathers the handles of the plastic bag, tries to marshal it upright but it slides down again onto the floor.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she says, putting a hand up comically as Barry Jordan enters the room. ‘Book that Caribbean cruise Ann! You deserve it.’

  ‘Not quite,’ says Barry, as he edges behind his desk. ‘I need to go through this change in the subsidies with you. You’re aware, I assume . . .’ He pauses while he rifles through some papers on his desk. ‘Ah yes, here we are. You’re aware that the single farm payment comes into force this year.’

  He hands her a sheet of paper. She looks down at it: The Single Farm Payment Explained. The rest is a blur.

  ‘It’s not going to do you any favours,’ says Barry.

  ‘We still get a payment though – we’ve got plenty of hectares, ha’n’t we?’

  ‘You have, but you’ll not do as well as under the headage payments. Used to be you could farm the brown envelope – keep more sheep and you got more money. But now, with a per hectare payment you’ll be down by . . . I’ve got the figures somewhere. Hilary’s got them – she’ll give you a breakdown to take away. Trouble is, moorland gets the lowest rate there is, and eighty acres of yours is rough grazing, is it not?’

  She gazes at the sheet of paper without reading it. ‘Someone up there doesn’t like farmers. That’s how it feels.’

  ‘I can get you a couple more environmental subsidies – stewardships and such like, but even so,’ says Barry.

  ‘Even so what?’

  ‘The best you can hope for is to break even. And you’ll be lucky to do that.’

  ‘Can we keep going till lambing?’ asks Ann.

  ‘You can keep going as long as you like. I’m just giving you the full picture. You’re not the first I’ve had to have this conversation with and you won’t be the last. These are very tough times indeed. I suggest you look at getting jobs off the farm. I know a chap over in Farndale, runs the fire station on the side.’

  She thinks to mention that they’re soon to be in their sixties, that they’re dog-tired, but she worries it would sound like whingeing.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ says Barry. ‘I’ve seen that many farmers go under, even take their own lives.’

  ‘Jesus Barry, I don’t think we’ve come to that.’ She pauses. ‘Our assets, if we sold – what would it get us?’

  ‘You’ve five hundred Swaledales is it?’

  She nods.

  ‘You might be best off hanging on to them at the minute – hope prices recover. Housing market is mad. Goes up every month.’

  He clasps his hands together on the desk, smiles at her – a pitying sort of smile.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, I’m sure things’ll pick up. Where would we be if farmers gave up every time the going got tough?’

  ‘Where indeed?’ says Barry, standing and flattening his tie with one hand to prevent it dipping in his coffee as he leans over the desk to shake her hand. ‘I’ll help in any way I can, Ann. As you know, my services are paid for by the NFU and that arrangement will continue for as long as you need it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says
Ann, rising, realising that she is being ushered out. She turns in the narrow space between her chair and the desk, clutching her handbag and stooping to pick up the carrier bag. ‘Right, yes.’

  At the door, she raises the plastic bag. ‘My receipts. What should I do with them?’

  ‘Leave them with Hilary outside. I’ll go through them later this week.’

  ‘Righto, well, goodbye then,’ she says.

  She sits in the warmth of the car for a minute. The suburban street is littered with curling leaves a foot deep at the gutters. All that build-up and she was out in under ten minutes. She turns on the engine and pulls out from the kerb, towards the myriad of mini-roundabouts which will take her out of Scarborough to the A-road back inland. It’s a billowy autumn day, sharp-lit and dry as dust. She is hungry and she faintly needs the toilet but she’d been too distracted to ask Barry if she could use his.

  So, there was no getting out now. Not with Max having a baby and lamb prices bottoming out. They’d have to press on, like Joe said. She feels herself adjusting to this idea. It was always bad news with Barry Jordan. Like going to the dentist – you couldn’t expect any good to come out of it except the satisfaction that it was over for another while. At least she hadn’t had to go through those blessed receipts.

  Half an hour out of Scarborough, she pulls into the forecourt of a service station to fill up with petrol. The air has a smoked, woody smell to it; huge clouds skit over the horizon and over the A170 as it dissects the rolling flat countryside. The wind is buffeting her hair and the skirt of her mac as she stands holding the petrol pump’s handle, looking in through the window of an adjacent car where a plump baby is playing with his toes. I wonder if Maureen’s got a car seat we could have, she thinks. She smiles at the baby. A bairn. To have a bairn around the house again. She’ll get some of the boys’ old toys down from the loft to have in their lounge, for when Primrose brings the baby over.

  She pays for her petrol and resists a Ginsters pasty, even though she’s ravenous. Better to save the money and make a sandwich back home. She drives back out onto the road, pulling down her visor against the low sun, shifting in her seat to ease the pressure on her bladder, and thinking about Primrose. Would any woman who took her place in her son’s affections disappoint as much as Primrose? Ann had had fantasies, she realises now, that a daughter-in-law would be the girl she never had. But Primrose, she tuts to herself, glancing in the rear-view mirror. She remembers wandering through Lipton market with her, pointing to a floral dinner set and saying ‘Ooh Primrose, isn’t that pretty?’ And Primrose had said, ‘I don’t know,’ in that blank way she had, and ‘I’m not much into household stuff.’ And she’d looked straight at her, in a way Ann half admired because it never evaded anything. Primrose. She seems to be not quite all there. Absent somehow. What had seemed like a salve for Max’s loneliness now seems a rather hasty mistake.

  An hour and an interesting episode of You and Yours later, and desperate now for a wee, Ann slows the car at the first roundabout on the outskirts of Lipton. She has followed the A170 all the way, its villages strung along it like beads on a broken string. You knew them for what you needed and what they could give: firewood and liquorice at the garage outside Kirbymoorside, pork pies from Hunters in Helmsley. And here in Lipton, their nearest market town, well there was no end to its riches: Greggs for a sausage roll, the hairdressers for a rinse if you were over eighty, scented candles and chopping boards in Coopers, and of course, the Co-op, where Primrose works. Primrose and the baby inside her.

  She thinks back to all those years ago, how they worried about Max, and just look at him now. She remembers Joe climbing into bed next to her, saying, ‘We’re never going to be shot of him. He’ll still be here when he’s fifty.’

  She’d laughed and said, ‘I suppose we could move out.’

  ‘He’d find us,’ Joe had said, cuddling up to her under the covers.

  That’s when she’d started the badgering – she blanches just thinking about it – telling Max he needed to ‘get a life of his own’.

  ‘Go out and meet some girls,’ she’d say to him, rough like, when he was getting under her feet, which was all the time.

  She passes Coopers on her way out the other side of Lipton, onto the Marpleton road. The suburban houses peter out, giving way to vivid fields; hedgerows rustling with the grouse. The countryside up hard against them, especially in Marpleton, which had little in the way of entertainment except the Fox and Feathers. And that’s where it’d all started – for Max and Primrose. It was after Tony and Sheryl Crowther came up from Essex and took it over. She still thinks of them as newcomers, even though it was five years ago now. The village could talk of nothing else.

  ‘That’s a hard-bitten woman is that,’ Ann remembers whispering to Lauren, and Lauren had nodded energetically, looking over at Sheryl behind the bar.

  ‘Batten down your husbands,’ Lauren had said.

  They’d started that quiz, the Crowthers, trying to rev the place up a bit and that was when Max started wearing his best shirt and kicking up a right stink if it wasn’t washed in time. Oof, and that deodorant of his, Lynx something. He’d spray it more freely than Round-up, so that she and Joe would waft their hands in front of their faces and grimace as he walked out of the front door. ‘Ladykiller,’ Joe’d say, winking at her.

  She parks outside the farmhouse, slams the car door and races into the house and up the stairs to the bathroom.

  When she comes back down the stairs it is slowly, her body relieved. She ambles into the lounge to clear away a couple of mugs she’d spotted there earlier this morning. She opens the curtains and jumps back.

  ‘Ooh god, you gave me a fright,’ she says. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out watching the tups with Max?’

  Joe is sitting, round-shouldered, at the computer in the dark corner of the room.

  ‘Just doing some research,’ he says without looking round. He is squinting at the screen, then down at the mouse, trying to make a connection between the two. She looks over his shoulder. farmautotrader.co.uk. Joe’s answer to pornography. On the screen is a John Deere 5100m tractor. POA.

  ‘Price on application,’ she says. ‘Or as I like to call it, OMDB.’

  He looks up at her.

  ‘Over My Dead Body,’ she says.

  ‘It’s got leather seats, climate control, telescopic mirrors. And power synchron.’

  Ann is standing behind him, hands on hips. ‘Oh, well, why didn’t you say? If it’s got power synchron,’ she says. ‘What about bells and whistles – has it got those?’

  ‘There’s a forage harvester here for fifteen grand,’ says Joe. ‘If we got one of these, Max wouldn’t have to hire one every year. In fact, he might be able to hire it out – make some extra cash.’

  Ann has flopped down into one of the armchairs. Strange to be in the lounge with Joe in the daytime. Wrong, somehow.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘but do we live on the same farm?’

  Joe doesn’t respond. She cranes back behind her to look at him. He is staring at the screen, his mouth hung slack like he’s catching flies.

  ‘So Ann,’ she says, all am-dram. ‘How was Barry Jordan? Oh it was fine thanks for askin’. Subsidies going down the toilet, but let’s buy a harvester shall we?’

  ‘How was it?’ he says.

  ‘Same old doom and gloom.’ She leans her head back into the soft back cushion. She can hear Joe behind her head, clicking with the mouse. ‘Single farm payment’s not going to do us any favours. I can’t talk to you when you’re on that thing. Can you get off it? I want to email Bartholomew.’

  ‘Gimme a minute. Anyway I’m going to ring him – with Max. Tell him about the baby.’

  ‘If you even think about buying a new tractor I’ll thump ye.’

  ‘We’ve got to build it up for Max.’

  ‘There’s nothing spare, Joe.’

  ‘That’s why I’m going to turn it round, bring in the lambs. Leave
it good for ’im.’

  He has stood up, pushing both hands into the small of his back as he straightens. She looks at him. He is impossible, that man. But he is smiling at her as she heaves herself out of the armchair for her turn at the computer. He comes over and puts an arm around her neck so she’s near deadlocked. He is chuckling and saying ‘A little babby!’

  They hug each other and he says into her hair, ‘We have to help him, Annie. Max is not strong like Bartholomew.’

  She looks at his face up close to hers. It is leathery from a life worked outdoors, his hair grey now. He’s improved with age, like most men do. He was always like this about the boys, used to knock her out of the way to get to them after a day out working. And them at the top of the stairs waiting for him in their pyjamas.

  He kisses her. ‘We always said we’d give them everything we could.’

  ‘Yes, well I’ve changed me mind.’

  ‘You act all bluff but I know you,’ he says. ‘You’re soft over those boys, just like me.’

  ‘Not as much as you, Joe.’

  She looks at his back as he walks out of the room.

  It is her great achievement, this marriage. When they were first wed the slightest disagreement would last a week or more. Grievances harboured until she was sore with it. Children soon knocked that out of you. You never solved a fight, she’d come to realise, you just got good at looking the other way and getting on with the next thing. Letting love have the upper hand. If she could give her boys one piece of advice it would be to let it slide – that sense of outrage that it’s not better. She begins to type the word ‘Bartholomew’ into the recipient field and the computer fills out the rest. Her youngest, especially, seems to be still holding out for the perfect thing – the one where there’ll be no disappointment to swallow down. Well, he’ll have a long wait.

  *

  Bartholomew is lifting the kettle and shaking it to judge its water level when his phone vibrates in the pocket of his jeans. Ruby’s passion for texting is beginning to feel like a persecution.