Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  Joe had slapped Eric on the back, saying, ‘Jeez man, you were always work-shy. That’s nothing I can’t handle myself.’

  And he’d struggled up a ladder alone with those squares of plastic and a too-heavy hammer to repair the gaps as he spotted them. And Max, he’d been at the bottom, holding the ladder steady and looking up at Joe.

  His right hand is becoming chapped with the cold and the scratching of hay. The winter light is fading, the barn now dim and eerie. A bairn, he thinks. A bairn will sort out Max, make a man of him. They changed everything, children. Made you who you were supposed to be. He looks out through the vast open mouth of the barn, to where the tractor is parked: dirty, rusted green, with high, wide wheels whose imprint is all over his farm. Quiet now, and silhouetted, it looks like a museum piece, which it soon would be. He’d started the application to the bank for a loan last night, after Ann had gone to bed. It’d take a while – probably come through some time in January. By that time, she’d see how fat the ewes were, how well they were going to do at lambing. And how long could the market stay so bad, with nobody wanting British meat? No, it’d have to change soon.

  He’s fed up of thinking on it. He’s tired of feeling cold and stiff about the fingers. He wants to get warm by the Rayburn and drink his tea.

  ‘You’re about dry,’ he says to his bales, and he whistles to the dogs to follow him in.

  He walks in through the back door into the kitchen and the dogs clatter in behind him and find their padded baskets, which are matted with dog hairs. They each turn around twice on the spot, and lie down in the warmth of the Rayburn.

  Joe hangs his coat on a hook by the back door and prises off his work boots. They are unusually clean because of the dry. He sees the surfaces wiped by Ann, the cloth resting where the sweep of her hand has last left it. Her faint voice drifts in from the hallway, louder now as he opens the kitchen door and approaches her.

  *

  ‘Yes, we have a family of sheep,’ Ann is saying, her finger twisting around the tight coils of the telephone cord. ‘Well, more than a family really – five hundred odd, sometimes more. They keep us and we keep them. Quite biblical, isn’t it?’

  She looks down at her slippers, blinking. Chap at the other end of the line is asking something about sheep breeds but she is distracted by Joe coming down the corridor towards her.

  ‘No, they’re Swaledales. Black faces, with a white nose. Curly horns, yes, that’s it. Make marvellous mothers, Swales. They’ll lamb in all weathers. Thrivers, they are. No, we tried with the Rough Fells, but it didn’t work out. You don’t find Rough Fells up here any more really.’

  Joe walks past her in the hallway, about to climb the stairs when the doorbell goes. He and Ann look at each other. She shrugs, then motions to him to answer the door.

  ‘Lost about two hundred in the culls in 2001. Devastated we were. We’ve restocked now though.’

  Joe opens the door and there is Primrose. Ann waves to her, saying into the phone, ‘Are you sure that’s all you need? Well, call back if there’s anything else.’

  She puts the receiver down, flustered at this collision of events. ‘Hiya love,’ she says. ‘This is unexpected.’

  ‘How’s that grandchild of mine?’ asks Joe, ushering Primrose in with a hand on her back. Ann can see him beaming.

  ‘Nothing wrong is there?’ she asks. ‘Everything alright with the baby?’

  ‘Yes fine, I just wanted to ask you something,’ says Primrose. Not like her, thinks Ann. Perhaps this is the shape of things to come. Mothers together.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ says Ann, and then to Joe, ‘That was the chap from the Dalesman. Asking about sheep breeds.’

  ‘Oh, hark at her,’ says Joe. ‘When’s that out then?’

  ‘I don’t know actually. I forgot to ask ’im,’ says Ann.

  They troop down the narrow hallway to the kitchen, where Joe and Primrose take seats at the table and Ann goes to the kettle.

  ‘Where’s Max?’ she asks, with her back to Primrose.

  ‘At the Fox.’

  ‘Tea alright?’ asks Ann.

  ‘Yes thanks. And some biscuits if you’ve got any. Got to keep me strength up.’

  ‘Course you do. How about a fig roll?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘What did you want to ask?’ says Joe.

  ‘Don’t rush her,’ says Ann, ‘she’ll come to it in her own time.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d mind if I fitted a video entryphone on your cottage.’

  ‘I’m sorry love, a what?’ says Ann.

  ‘A video entryphone. One of them cameras, by the front door. And a monitor. I’d give you a release mechanism for the latch, so you could open the front door from upstairs.’

  ‘Why would we want to do that?’ says Ann.

  ‘I don’t know, you might be in the bath.’

  Joe and Ann look at each other.

  ‘It would mean I could try chasing in the coaxial wire and fitting the camera unit. It’s the next project in my Reader’s Digest book and I can’t fit one at our house because . . . there’s nothing to look out on – only fields – whereas here you could see the village. I could point the camera on the green and you’d have a proper picture on your monitor.’

  ‘Has Max said no?’ asks Ann.

  ‘I haven’t asked him,’ says Primrose. ‘I only thought of it today and I came straight here. I know Max wouldn’t say yes. He’s had enough of me rewiring at ours. He gets right fed up with it.’

  Primrose takes a second fig roll.

  ‘How long would it take?’ asks Joe.

  ‘Only an afternoon. I’d re-plaster wherever I’d had to chisel anything out, and I’d repaint it too.’

  ‘Is that wise, in your condition?’ asks Ann.

  ‘It’s fine. I’d like to get to the end of the basic course before the baby comes.’

  ‘And I’d see the whole of the village, you say, from my landing?’ says Joe.

  Ann narrows her eyes at him. ‘Joe . . .’

  ‘If she wants to do it, let her do it,’ he says.

  ‘Joe,’ says Ann, more insistently. Primrose takes a third fig roll.

  ‘She wants to finish her course,’ says Joe.

  ‘We don’t need a video entryphone,’ hisses Ann.

  ‘You go ahead, love,’ says Joe. ‘Mi casa, es tu casa.’

  ‘What?’ says Primrose.

  December

  — Let them eat cake —

  Primrose lies in the bath, lifting and plunging. Her body is like a relief model of the dale, its valleys and swelling hills more pronounced these days. One hand glides over her pink chest, her nipples dark as mulberry. Her breasts are full and tingling, as if they too are charged with electricity, and the blue veins which eddy down them are like the blue wires she snips and positions with such ease, even with Joe crowding her.

  He had watched every phase, standing inside the doorway as she dismantled the latch and fitted the release mechanism; pretending to tend to the front garden while she was up the ladder with the camera unit.

  ‘How high d’you want it?’ she’d asked. Her words emerged in puffs in the cold air.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Joe. ‘Wherever you think.’

  ‘Well, high up you’ll get the village and the green, lower down you’ll get your own front doorstep.’

  ‘I’d put it high then,’ he’d said.

  She’d set it in on the brick, in between the bare stems of Ann’s cottage rose.

  He’d followed her, too, as she shut off the electricity supply and she’d struggled with him at her back while she chiselled out a channel just above the skirting board in the hallway so she could chase in twenty feet of coaxial wire.

  ‘Cup of tea would be nice,’ she’d said, just to get rid of him, so that she could run the cable inside its chalky trench, up the left hand of the staircase to a point on the upstairs landing. Then Ann had come home and tripped on some of her tools which were lying just inside the f
ront door.

  ‘Flamin’ heck,’ she’d cursed, lifting her feet high. ‘What a bloody mess.’ And then she’d followed the trail of plaster and dust up the stairs and seen Primrose on the landing. ‘Hiya love,’ Ann had sing-songed, cheery like.

  And then she could hear Ann and Joe arguing in the kitchen, but she’d just focused on installing the monitor and telephone handset. It sat beside Ann’s mirror, above a white painted chest of drawers.

  When Joe had stood behind her on the landing, holding her tea, she’d said, ‘Right, shall we give it a try?’

  She’d lifted the handset and they had both watched as a grainy green picture of Marpleton began to form out of disparate particles.

  ‘Ann! Ann! Come and look at this!’ Joe had shouted.

  ‘Give over,’ came Ann’s muffled reply from the kitchen.

  They had grinned at one another, she and Joe. She felt the satisfaction of a job well done. It couldn’t have gone better, in fact.

  Primrose looks at her thighs, lifting and plunging, feeling their buoyancy in the water. She takes her toe out of the faucet and wraps her foot around the tap, turning it. A stream of intense heat travels up her legs, spreading its warmth around her. She closes her eyes.

  *

  A chair has become a permanent feature on the hallway landing ever since the video entryphone was installed and he knows how much it annoys Ann, because she trips over it every time she comes out of the bathroom.

  She’s in the bathroom now, and Joe casts a look at the door as he gingerly pulls the chair out from its sentry position against the wall. He’s anxious for it not to clatter or scrape and he keeps an eye on the bathroom door while he sets it in front of the video entryphone, his knees knocking awkwardly against the chest of drawers. He can hear the water in Ann’s bath and feels a vague heat through the bathroom door as it hits the arctic microclimate of the Hartle landing.

  Initially, the video entryphone had been nothing more than a bit of fun for Joe and Ann. Well, less for Ann, more for Joe, who found it amusing to loiter at the top of the stairs when the doorbell rang and wait for Ann to be within outstretched arms’ reach of the front door. He would then pick up the phone and press the buzzer, releasing the door mechanism. Something in the lie of the land and the looseness of the latch caused the door to swing out in front of Ann’s startled face and her to exclaim ‘For God’s sake Joe, grow up.’

  Ann got some pleasure from it though. That first weekend they’d had it, the winter sun had streamed into their bedroom. She’d sat up in bed with the tea Joe had brought her, the bedroom door flung wide and him on his rickety chair, reporting on the comings and goings of the village.

  ‘Alan Tench has moved his van.’

  ‘At last!’ she’d said, sipping her tea.

  ‘Here comes Daredevil Dawson.’

  ‘Lord help us. Clear the roads!’ Ann said.

  ‘Looks like the Hardakers ’ave gone on holiday. Gate’s shut.’

  ‘Ooh, I wonder where. Must ask Lauren.’

  He hears her now, turning the handle on the bathroom door. He silently dashes to the back bedroom where he pretends to be flicking through some paperwork. He hears Ann cursing as she knocks into the chair – ‘blasted thing’. She is hopping and shivering through the cold, racing to the bedroom where she closes the door to get ready for her pottery class with Lauren. Joe re-emerges from the back bedroom, back to his chair now enveloped in warm, lavender-scented steam from the bathroom.

  Joe had begun to nip upstairs of a lunchtime for a quick peek at the green-glowing miniature picture of Marpleton. And then in the evening, if Ann was at darts or flower-arranging or some such with the WI, he allowed himself a rich, unfettered evening’s closed-circuit observation. Marpleton at 8 p.m., 9 p.m., 10 p.m., lit by the lights of the Fox and Feathers – five of them, which hung over its sign like seasick passengers. (Lights that caused no end of village tutting when Sheryl and Tony Crowther first installed them. ‘So vulgar,’ Ann had said.)

  He was grateful to those lights now – they cast a glow that pooled across half the green and illuminated the footpath. They allowed him to see Eric Blakely walking his dog; the late crowd spilling out of the Fox; Dennis Lunn stumbling past his front door on his way home – always the last.

  Ann emerges from the bedroom. She’s wearing her navy trousers and a blouse with a polo neck underneath, tight-fitting. She is curvy – wide-hipped and a little rotund after the children. Lively and homely at the same time. She has on a streak of lipstick, which is unusual for her. It is a bright red colour and it animates her whole face. Her skin is still glowing from her bath.

  She gives him a suspicious look. ‘Don’t spend all evening on that blasted thing.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I’ve plenty to do.’

  ‘Right, well, I’m not taking the car – Lauren’s giving me a lift. Won’t be late.’

  She kisses him on the cheek.

  ‘You look nice,’ he says, and he’s made jealous by it.

  ‘Well, you have to make an effort for pottery!’

  She’s at the bottom of the stairs now, putting on her coat. ‘I got an email from Bartholomew by the way. He’s booked his ticket. He’s coming on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Not bringing Ruby?’ asks Joe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everything alright between them?’

  ‘How would I know?’ she says, up the stairwell. ‘I did invite her. Maybe she’s got family to go to.’

  ‘Be nice to have him home,’ says Joe.

  ‘Yes. Well, bye then, love.’

  ‘Bye.’

  The door closes behind her. Joe swivels his body around on the chair, now able to scrape and rattle as loudly as he likes. He lifts the handset in time to see Ann close their garden gate and cross the road onto the village green. She finds the footpath that bisects the grass and he watches her walk away from him, getting smaller. Another figure steps into the pool of green light from the left, someone in a long heavy overcoat. Eric and Ann fall into step beside each other on the path. He sees Eric’s dog run into the lighted patch, helter-skelter as if it might overturn with its speed. The dog leaps up on Eric’s legs. He thinks he can see Ann and Eric laughing, though they have their backs to him. He thinks he can see her hunch her shoulders and pull her coat more tightly around her and then he sees Eric place a gloved hand on Ann’s back. He is squinting, following them up the screen. As they reach the far side of the light, Ann stops and removes Eric’s hand from her back, making of his arm a loop so that she can put hers through it. And they step out, arm in arm, into the endless dark. Invisible to him.

  *

  The room is over-warmed by a crackling fire which has dried out the air. Max looks up to see a group of walkers enter the bar, their waterproof trousers tucked into their socks. ‘Ooh lovely, an open fire,’ says one as they rustle and disrobe, talking to each other about which real ale to try. Behind the bar, and half obscured by a pillar which is wound with green tinsel, is Sheryl. Sheryl Crowther, landlady of the Fox and Feathers, forty-five if she’s a day and still considered a newcomer despite five years in Marpleton. Maybe it’s the accent – flat and hard, still full of Billericay. Grim-faced Sheryl, his mother always called her. Max watches her twist a tea towel inside a glass.

  ‘Taken the sheep back up the fell yet?’ asks Tal.

  Max’s focus returns to the table he is sharing with Tal and Jake. He’s known them for ever, from the days they played football on that freezing grass pitch under Hambleton escarpment. Both of them labourers, working farm to farm, wherever the jobs are. Jake – he was bitter, always bitter, whether working or not. But Tal was a softer sort. He had dogs that were skilled at driving flocks down off the fell and he’d often helped with the Hartle Swaledales.

  ‘Not yet,’ Max says to Tal. ‘Got to take the tups off first. Easier when they’re down on the in-bye. They’ll go up next week.’

  ‘Aye, well, give us a call when you want them driving down off ridge for
lambing,’ says Tal, raising his pint to Max. ‘There’s no nicer work, when the trees are in leaf and everywhere’s greened up again.’

  ‘I’ll be spending this week walling,’ says Jake. ‘Bloody awful. Freezing me tits off over at Talbot’s place.’

  Jake has the brightest blue eyes in a face otherwise red with the Yorkshire weather and the drink. He loves a rant and Max knows he can set him off like a rat up a drain. He just has to turn the conversation to the state of North Yorkshire farming and Jake will spit out his loathing for the local Labour MP, Colin Furslake, who’s been giving out leaflets on ‘diversification’ and lecturing them that the future lay in ‘agri-commodities’; that ministers wanted to make hill farmers ‘custodians of the environment’.

  ‘Talbot’s the only one as can afford it,’ says Max. ‘Must be raking it in with the new fuel crops. That’s where the subsidies are heading.’

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fucking park-keeper,’ Jake says.

  Max is glancing at Sheryl, pulling down her pink top so it’s tighter over her breasts. She returns Max’s gaze, and fingers the gold pendant which rests on the swell of her cleavage. ‘They can get themselves bloody gardeners for that,’ Jake continues. ‘I’m not going to tend a flamin’ hedgerow. You can fucking forget it.’

  Max drains his glass. ‘I’ll get another round in.’

  He goes to the bar, leaning both elbows on it and raising one foot on the sturdy rail along the bar’s base. Sheryl has pulled her top down again and when she turns to him, he sees that the low V-neck has exposed some red lace on her bra. Even on the other side of the bar, he can smell her perfume, mixing with the cigarette smoke in the room, sweet and heavy.

  ‘Alright big fella?’ she says. ‘What can I getcha?’

  ‘Two pints of Marston Moor, Sheryl,’ says Max. ‘And a half of Stella for Tal, who’s bein’ a poof.’

  She smiles, tilts her hips as she pulls the lever towards her, the muscles in her arm tensing, one breast swelled upwards. Her collar-bones are protruding. She’s not in bad shape, slim for her age. But then, she’s never had kids.