What time r u picking me up? 5pm? R.
He texts back:
I’ll try. Might be a bit late. Lots to do.
He switches his phone off and puts it back in his pocket, eases out the kettle’s rubber lead. As he carries it to the sink, the landline starts to ring. Will she never stop?
‘Garden Centre,’ he says.
‘Hello garden centre!’ shouts his father. He can hear a thrashing sound and bleating, and immediately can smell those outbuildings – the dry straw mixed with some kind of chemical, like creosote, emanating from their timbers.
‘In the pen are you?’ says Bartholomew. He holds the phone between his cheek and his shoulder while he fills the kettle.
‘We are,’ says Joe.
He turns off the tap and a faucet squeaks somewhere in the warehouse roof. He hears his father shouting ‘No Max, he’s done that one – look at her back,’ and knows that Max must be silently obeying him as usual.
‘How’s tupping?’
‘Marvellous,’ shouts Joe. ‘We’ve had some fine rams this year. We’ve wonderful news, Bartholomew. Max and Primrose are having a bairn.’
‘Ah that’s grand,’ he says. Struggling for life is a genuine excitement on behalf of his brother.
‘Isn’t it?’ Bartholomew can hear pure joy in his father’s voice and feels the stab that he wasn’t the source of it. ‘First Hartle grandchild,’ Joe is saying. ‘You and Ruby had best get a move on!’
‘Can I speak to Max?’
‘I’ll put him on. Hang on.’ He hears Joe saying, ‘He doesn’t seem to like that one, we should let her out. Here, your brother wants a word.’
‘Hello?’ says Max.
‘So, I hear congratulations are in order. When’s it due?’
‘May the twentieth or thereabouts.’
‘There’s lead in your pencil then.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘How’s Primrose?’
‘She’s grand. No sickness or anything. Mum and dad are right pleased.’
‘I’ll bet. Well, sleepless nights ahead then.’
‘No worse than lambing.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘You’ll have to visit when it arrives,’ says Max. ‘If I can prise the baby off mum. She’s that excited.’
‘Yes, I’ll bet,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Right, well, I’d best go. Give my love to Primrose.’
‘Will do. Hang on, dad wants another word.’
‘Bartholomew? One other thing,’ says Joe.
‘Yes?’ says Bartholomew, weary with his father again and making it known in his voice. This has become a habit, his shortness with Joe.
‘Nothing, never mind,’ says Joe. ‘We’ll talk at Christmas. When you come up.’
Bartholomew hangs up.
He looks across the warehouse at the lagoon of tat which is spreading across the floor, growing ever more garish with the approach of Christmas. Leonard is opening some boxes with a Stanley knife. Beside him is a huddle of statues: a boy with a bit of copper piping for a penis, a cherub with one foot missing, a Victorian lady bending with an umbrella. There are buckets of glass globes and butterflies on sticks; tables groaning with plastic toadstools, random painted figurines, pots shaped like handbags. Oh how it sold.
‘Where d’you want these?’ asks Leonard.
‘What are they?’
Leonard lifts one out of the box – a plastercast dog, nut-brown with a white tummy, carrying in its mouth a large Victorian lantern. Its neck is garlanded with red tinsel.
‘Solar-powered apparently,’ Leonard says. He holds it away from his body, as if to avoid contamination.
This was the kind of extraneous guff that Maguires excelled in. Last night, Bartholomew had driven out of town for the champagne evening on the outskirts of Guildford and had wandered, glass in hand, through the vast hangar, its aisles empty of people and smelling of sawn timber. He’d marvelled at the banks of children’s toys, power tools of every make and model, troughs full of bulbs (all the really suburban varieties). The staff were spotty adolescent boys mostly, and for all their corporate orange jackets, they appeared to have even less energy than Leonard. That pleased him, at least.
‘Put them next to the wrought-iron frogs,’ he says to Leonard. ‘With any luck they’ll eat each other. Cup of tea?’
‘Yes thanks. Don’t leave the bag in too long though. I don’t like it stewed. It should just glance the water. Skim it.’
‘Right you are,’ says Bartholomew. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through in the next couple of days. Can you sort through the bare-root trees and roses and make sure the labels are right and they’re priced up?’ He approaches the counter with two mugs. ‘I was thinking, you know, about our winter footfall. How to get people in the door, and I had this idea for a farm collective, well a shop really. We’d clear all that crap from the far corner—’
‘That crap sells,’ says Leonard.
‘Yes, but Maguires is going to do that stuff on a massive scale. I thought we should go in another direction.’ He is hoping he might sweep Leonard along, somehow make of him a ‘we’ until together they took flight. ‘We’d get together a collection of local farmers who’d come in and sell food in a farm shop and maybe people could order veg boxes through us too. It would bring people in during the quieter months.’
‘Actually I have to ask you something,’ Leonard says.
Bartholomew presses on. ‘I’m quite excited about the idea, don’t you think? I mean, early days. Thought I’d try to set up some meetings with some farmers.’
‘Can I have tomorrow off?’
‘Oh god Len, why? There’s masses to do.’
‘I’ve got a pair of No-Iron Comfort-Waist Chinos arriving from the Lands’ End catalogue.’
‘And you have to take a day off?’ Bartholomew can’t bear to look at him.
‘It’s due tomorrow. I’ve tracked my order on the Internet.’
‘People don’t take days off work to wait in for parcels. Why didn’t you just get it sent here?’
‘I was worried it would get lost in the system.’
‘What system? It’s you and me in a shed.’
‘And if I chanced it, it could be sent back to the depot, and I’d have to pick it up from there and that would be another day off.’
‘Well, not really.’ He can hear Ruby’s voice saying, ‘So how much time is it that Leonard’s had off this year? Fifty-two weeks?’ And him saying what he always said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I hate managing people.’
‘I don’t think you’re seeing things from my point of view,’ Leonard is saying.
‘That’s an understatement.’
‘This parcel’s really stressing me out. I’ve been tracking my order twice a day for two weeks. Tomorrow is D-day, the eagle is landing. I have to be there. For the trousers.’
‘Why don’t you shop on the high street, like normal people?’
‘Because Lands’ End does special wrinkle-resistant fabric. And I like the elasticated waist. Can I have the day off?’
‘I was hoping we could get these deliveries unpacked. There’s a hell of a backlog.’
‘I’m getting really stressed about the trousers.’
‘Oh d’you know what? Have the day.’
‘Appreciated.’
Bartholomew makes for the door, frowning. ‘God help us if they don’t fit,’ he says quietly.
*
A week later, Primrose is sitting on her high stool behind the till, one hand on her lower belly, filled with the new idea which is making her body tingle.
The midwife had told her it was only the size of a broad bean, but Primrose thinks of the baby as occupying her whole middle, and wonders, when she stoops to pick up a receipt off the floor, say, whether the baby is folded over. Or stooping too.
When she’d cycled in this morning, down the lane to Sinnington and then up the steep incline for the short stretch across the moor, she’d thought about her middle all
the way. As if her middle were somehow a thing, brand new. Her legs were pumping on the pedals, her ears were rushing inside her hood and the wind on the moor was blowing hard into her face, but her whole mind was on her middle.
It seemed to Primrose that there were two of them cycling across the moor, two of them switching on the strip lights inside the Co-op. Two of them, together, pouring the change from little clear bags into separate compartments in the till. And so when she finally came to sit on the high stool behind the counter, she laid a hand on her little friend, who was her secret, and served a customer one-handed, half hoping the old lady might notice and ask her when it was due.
‘Primrose? Keeping you up are we?’ says Tracy in that hard voice of hers. ‘You can go on your break if you like.’
Primrose steps out into the bright autumn sunshine. Lipton High Street is peppered, as usual, with a handful of pensioners and a couple of young mothers with children in buggies. She walks past A Cut Above, where an elderly lady is sat under a plastic-domed heater; past the chemist, with its bottle-green gloss paintwork unchanged for decades; past the trays of warm sausage rolls in Greggs’ window. She turns down a side road towards Al’s Electrical shop.
A bell rings over the door as she inches into the shop’s dark, crammed interior. Bulging shelves reach to the ceiling, set with trays of rivets and tacks, and rolls of electrical flex hang from hooks in the rafters. Cable clips. Consumer units. Crimp lugs and heat tape.
‘Hello Prim,’ says Al from behind the counter. ‘Beautiful day out there. The trees are in great colour. I haven’t seen them that bright for years. Must be all the rain we’ve been having.’
‘I need another junction box,’ says Primrose.
‘Right you are. Which type?’
‘Thirty-amp. Three-terminal. In brown if you’ve got it.’
‘I’ll have a look.’
She stands at the counter, flicking through Al’s laminated catalogue while he goes out back.
She stops on a page and reads the text more closely. Al comes back carrying a white cardboard box.
‘Have you got any of these in?’ asks Primrose, swivelling the catalogue.
Al stoops, putting his glasses on to read. ‘Arh, no,’ he says. ‘Not much call for video entryphones round here.’
‘But if someone wanted one, you could order it in, couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t see why not. They’re quite fast, this supplier. Would take three to four days to come in, or thereabouts. Shall I order it now?’
‘No.’ Primrose hesitates, her mind is racing. ‘No, not yet. I’ll just take the junction box for now.’
*
Joe’s hand guides the steering wheel, turning his Land Rover right onto Lipton High Street. The low autumn sunshine flashes hard, piercing through the smears on his windscreen like shards (he must get that wiper fixed), so he pulls down the sun visor and lowers his head to look under it. He sees Primrose’s back, turning off the High Street. Going to Al’s no doubt. Sometimes Joe wonders if Primrose should have married Al, but then he remembers that for Al, it’s just a business. For Primrose . . . well, Joe doesn’t pretend to understand it.
He has a feeling of satisfaction – not just because of the baby. Tupping has been fine this year and it’s given him a feeling of looking forward – to lambing and to the kinder weather that comes with it. They’ve let some of the fattening lambs graze on the beet tops, and defecate on them, and now those in-bye fields are taking the plough, turning this goodness over into the dark soil so that it’s brand new again. Wonderful work, ploughing.
The pregnant ewes are staying down-valley, sheltered and fed until their lambs are established inside them. They’ll go up onto the fell next month. That was the beauty of Swaledales. Could withstand all weathers. Yes, he has a sense of the future before him, with the farm at full tilt and the baby coming. And then some sadness behind it. He’d been so quick to offer the farm up to Max, that he hadn’t considered what it’d mean for him to let it go. As soon as he’d said it, even though it was what they’d always taken for granted, as soon as he said it, he’d wanted to take it back. The image of himself as the grey-haired man on the back seat – well, it didn’t fit with how he felt inside, which was still young.
He pushes open the door of Lipton Conservative Club. ‘Club’ is a pompous term for it. There were no button-back leather chairs and suchlike. It was open to most anyone unless you were a newcomer, in which case you’d be greeted with a raised eyebrow and a wall of silence. Mostly it was for barnacles like Joe and Eric Blakely. Conservative? Well, they didn’t like this Labour lot, with their agri-stewardship-whatever schemes. Didn’t like change, mostly.
To the club’s inner door is pinned a yellowing notice. ‘At the last meeting of the Committee,’ it says, ‘it was agreed that “tailored shorts” could be worn in the Club at lunchtimes only, and that tracksuits would not be suitable clothing for members to wear. Signed, K. Simms, Secretary.’ Joe looks down at his muddied corduroys and even muddier boots, and at the royal-blue carpet of the club hallway, freshly vacuumed. He brushes himself ineffectually, then walks into the ‘bar’ – a muffled room with red Formica tables, floral curtains and cream-painted woodchip on the walls. Eric stands with Ron Chappell, their pint glasses full. Ron had been a tenant farmer like Joe – same landlord, the water board, which owned most of the land round here. He’d gone under after foot-and-mouth and now he did odd jobs. Eric always bought Ron’s pints.
‘What are you having, Joe?’ says Eric, one arm resting on his belly where he holds his pint, the other jangling keys in his trouser pocket. Joe thinks Eric resembles one of those life-size fibreglass men, wearing striped aprons, which used to stand outside butcher’s shops.
‘You’re alright Eric, I’ll get them in,’ says Joe.
‘Don’t be silly man, I’m buying.’ Eric smiles, his voice jovial as always. ‘A pint for Joe,’ he calls to Keith Tindall, who is busying himself in the kitchen to the rear of the bar.
‘That was a wet harvest,’ says Ron, whose thinness is accentuated by standing next to Eric.
‘Mudbath,’ says Joe. He takes off his Barbour and hangs it on a wall hook. ‘Total mudbath.’ He notices that Eric’s shoes are new. Smooth brown loafers, unmuddied.
‘Did you lift the beet alright?’ asks Eric.
‘We did, and in a day. The soil was that sticky, but a good harvest it was. Thanks Keith,’ Joe says, taking his pint from Keith, who quickly disappears again.
‘And tupping?’ says Eric, like he’s hungry for news of his old life. ‘Good tups this year?’
‘Very good, yes, very good,’ says Joe.
‘Those lamb prices at Slingsby were shocking, so I’ve heard,’ says Ron. ‘Stores going for under a tenner.’
‘It’s the cheap foreign imports,’ says Eric, shaking his head.
‘What can ye do?’ says Ron.
They look into their pints.
‘Bomb New Zealand?’ says Joe, and they all laugh. ‘It’ll pick up, you watch. Farmers have gone through this type of strife before.’
‘Not as bad as this,’ says Eric.
‘Aye and worse,’ says Joe. ‘You wait till lambing and you’ll both be round mine, rubbernecking over the fence at my prize gimmers and tups.’
‘At least I’ll not be up against ye at the shows, Joe,’ says Eric. ‘I could never beat you.’
‘You nearly killed yourself trying. You and your tweezers.’ And Joe thinks back to the Fadmoor show, must have been eight-odd years ago now. Their rivalry was friendly back then, but with a serious edge. Those rosettes affected the price you got. Joe had walked round behind one of the livestock trailers and caught Eric bent over a Swale with a pair of tweezers.
‘Now that is truly pathetic,’ Joe’d said.
‘Ah now man, don’t say owt,’ said Eric. ‘I’ve seen you do the same. Just a couple of grey hairs –’
Then Eric had stood back, admiring his ewe. ‘She doesn’t need any help, this one
. She’s nigh-on perfect.’
But Joe had won top prize and Eric had taken it with his usual good grace. Perhaps you were dealt the hand you could best cope with, Joe thinks now. Eric had got out of farming not long after – in 2001, after the foot-and-mouth culls, like Ron. But while Ron was driven out, for Eric, it was the assault on his feelings that he couldn’t take. Seeing those pyres had finished him off. ‘I admire you, Joe. Restocking, carrying on,’ he’d said. And Joe had put an arm round him, saying, ‘Could be the stupidest thing I ever do.’ Now Eric was rich as Croesus, the smile all over his face. And with smart new shoes.
‘How are your boys, Joe?’ says Ron, interrupting his thoughts.
‘Not so bad,’ says Joe. ‘Bartholomew’s garden centre’s going great guns by all accounts. And you’ve heard about the baby.’
‘Smashing news,’ says Eric.
‘It’ll be nice to have a little one around the place again,’ says Joe. He sees Eric’s face go slack, the darkness come over it like a shadow. The son Eric and Lauren had lost. Joe kicks himself for bringing Eric’s lost child into the room. Say something, he thinks, but Eric’s face is re-animating already, the sad lines stretching over another tight smile.
‘Have you been down to Bartholomew’s place then?’ asks Ron.
‘Not me, no. Ann’s visited. She’s says it’s a nice place he’s got down there. But the south’s not my thing – too crowded. I’d sooner stay up here and hear about it on the telephone. Anyway, Bartholomew’s none too keen on my advice, no matter how I give it.’
‘Ah, they never are Joe, they never are,’ says Eric. ‘My Sylvie’s marrying the biggest layabout this side of the Pennines, but she’ll not hear a word about it from me. And Lauren shuts me up before I try.’
‘You’re best off without them, Ron,’ says Joe. ‘Nothing but worry.’
There is an awkward silence until Ron says: ‘So Max’ll be taking over the farm then, I hear.’
‘Do you now?’ says Joe. ‘It’s early days.’
Homecoming Page 6