Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  Eventually, Max returns to their table.

  ‘You want to watch yourself there,’ says Bartholomew.

  Max smiles at him, raises his pint and drinks half of it down without drawing a breath.

  Bartholomew sits down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. He can feel his head swim with the pints he has consumed at the Fox. His mother has her back to him, scooping wet piles of potato peelings into the composting bucket. On the side are several pans and various bowls draped with tea towels. Joe is watching television next door and the muffled sounds of clapping periodically drift in to them.

  A marshy gas hits Bartholomew’s nostrils. ‘Oof, Tess, that’s revolting,’ he says to one of the dogs, who is asleep in her basket.

  ‘She’s getting on a bit,’ says Ann. She is wiping the kitchen surfaces now. ‘Happens to us all.’

  ‘Not the flatulence I hope.’

  They hear Joe turn off the television and the creak of the stairs as he climbs them. They hear the scrape of the landing chair being pulled away from the wall. They are looking at each other. Ann rolls her eyes.

  ‘Has it all been finalised yet?’ asks Bartholomew.

  ‘About Max and the farm?’ says Ann. ‘I don’t know, love. You’ll have to ask your father about that.’

  ‘D’ye think he’s ready to take it over? Why does he even want it? No one’s taking over farms these days.’

  ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ says Ann, ‘that it might be nice for us, that he’s taking it over? Nice for us to have ’im around?’ She is cross again. He always seems to make her cross. ‘No? Well, shurrup then.’

  He is silent, not wanting to irritate her any more than he has already. A coldness seizes his heart. He wants to leave Yorkshire, now, this instant. He wonders if he could catch a train this evening, after his parents have gone to bed. Then remembers it’s Christmas Eve and he must sit it out.

  ‘Do you want me to help you bring down the presents?’ he asks.

  ‘I did it while you were out,’ she says. ‘Right, well I think I’ll turn in. Switch off the lights before you come up.’ She stops in the doorway. ‘Are you going to ring Ruby?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should. Be nice to wish her a happy Christmas.’

  Bartholomew is left alone in the kitchen, where the tired light shines on neat surfaces and washed crockery on the draining board. He can hear the murmuring of his parents on the landing and a door close. In the absence of people, the house begins its amplified ticking – the uneasy creaking as it shifts and settles, the hum of fridge and boiler. Bartholomew sits, unable to begin his slow journey up to bed.

  Poupff.

  Tess lets out another sulphurous wet guff. He notices, as he sits there, how shabby the room is. The paint on the skirting boards is flaking. The armchair next to the Rayburn has frayed fabric on its arms. The yellow walls have a greasy sheen. They haven’t decorated the place in more than fourteen years. But he also notices the precision in all the hooks Joe has put up for Ann – little tacks banged in for spare keys; larger ones for her pans; the short shelf by the sink for her scourer and single hook beneath it for her washing-up brush; the coat rail next to the back door. And the neat square of newspaper on which are lined up various working shoes, hardened and muddy. He is touched by this thrifty DIY orderliness. It speaks to him of collaboration. He and Ruby haven’t built up any systems for living. It doesn’t seem as if they can.

  He switches the lights off and walks down the hallway, stopping at the open door to the living room, which is dark except for the rich multicoloured glow of the Christmas tree lights and the sheen they cast onto the wrapped presents below. He can smell the fresh spruce needles and the generalised wood-smoked air of the house and it brings up a surging childish thrill, except now he knows he can walk past the presents without rattling them, and that he will be able to get to sleep.

  Reaching into his pocket for his mobile phone, he presses ‘Names’ and ‘R’ for Ruby. Looks at the little screen whose illumination gradually fades out. He switches the phone off.

  Bartholomew stands holding his book in one hand, a glass of water in the other, gazing down at the narrow single bed in his parents’ back bedroom. Staring back at him is a superhero dressed as a banana, the faded corners of the duvet tucked in tightly, smoothed by his mother’s house-proud hand. At the end of the bed is a fraying hand towel, folded to a square.

  He pulls back a corner of the duvet and gets in, inching his way down, wondering if single beds were always this narrow. He breathes in the washing-powder smell of the pillowcase, its fabric thin and cold like a compress. The feeling of being back at the farm has brought back his childhood frustrations, especially the teenage ones when he’d have to work with Joe and Max through the interminable school holidays – cutting and baling the grass (smelt like human sick once it started to ferment, if you asked him, which nobody did); returning strays to neighbouring farms (Max did all the heavy lifting. Bartholomew bolted the ramps); checking those on the in-bye for foot rot (Bartholomew seemed mostly to open and shut gates). He’d wanted, those summers, to be left alone to eat cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, think about Claire from Form Three and listen to the Fine Young Cannibals, nursing the way he felt apart from them, his family.

  He remembers sitting on the fence, which looked out on the field where the fattening lambs were grazing, Lily snuffing around the mud and straw behind him in the yard.

  ‘Everything alright, Bartholomew?’ his father had said, coming to lean on the fence.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why’ve you got a face like a wet weekend then?’

  Bartholomew didn’t answer. They had been separating off the weak lambs earlier in the day and he’d watched as Joe pulled the tiller gate towards him to take off the smallest of the lot, had heard the cries from its mother and its healthier twin as they were forced the other way. Panicked bleating. The weak lamb, not fine enough for breeding, would be fattened on the in-bye and sold for meat.

  ‘What you listening to?’ Joe had said at his side.

  ‘Fine Young Cannibals.’

  Joe crouched then to stroke Lily.

  ‘Would you send Lily to the slaughterhouse?’ asked Bartholomew.

  ‘Make a nice Sunday cut that,’ Joe had said, running his hand down the back of Lily’s haunch, then patting her hard.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be so dramatic.’

  ‘Because you know them. You know who they are. What they feel – like when you take the lambs off at weaning and they cry out all night.’

  Joe had stared at the ground. For a moment, he’d seemed bewildered. All Bartholomew had wanted, he thinks now with his arms behind his head on the pillow, was for Joe to say that he felt it. Really felt it – what he was doing to those animals, year in, year out. Tending and killing. Working so hard to keep lambs with their mothers only to tear them away from them come September, when their cries would echo all night across the farm and the family, they’d lie in their beds listening to it.

  *

  Christmas morning and Ann sits in her apron on a dining chair, which has been brought into the living room. She has set it close by the door, so that she’s got easy access to the kitchen. She holds a glass of fizz in one hand, put there by Joe, and the fizz is going straight to her head because she’s not used to drinking at 11 a.m. And she feels woozy, too, from being up so early and so frantic.

  When she’d woken at seven, Joe had rolled over and placed a heavy arm over her body. ‘Give us a cuddle,’ he’d said drowsily but she was up and out of bed like a whippet out of the traps. ‘Give over. I’ve far too much to do.’

  Downstairs in her dressing gown, she’d pulled the bird from the cold store (it was too big for the fridge). Her hands, now, are swollen and chapped with all the washing and forcing them under the cold skin of the bird, peeling it gradually from the flesh so she could push the parsley butter in between.

&nbs
p; She takes a sip and looks at Bartholomew who is sat forward on his armchair, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together; that intense look he often has on his face, watching Max turn the CD in his hand. Bartholomew leans further forward still, saying, ‘It’s a good album. One of my favourites. Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy it.’

  Come on you miserable beggar, she thinks. Give him something back.

  ‘Right,’ says Max. ‘Thanks.’

  And her heart sinks when she sees him set the CD down on the floor by his feet, where it becomes part of the pile of gifts that she has bought him – the pile which is identical to Bartholomew’s (socks, underpants, wash bag, shave foam, nail clippers) because even now – and honestly, they’re grown men – she is anxious not to throw petrol on to that flame.

  ‘Bartholomew,’ she says. ‘This one’s from me and your dad.’ In her peripheral vision she can see Max alert, watching. Calm down, she thinks, for heaven’s sake. It’s only fudge.

  She blows out into her cheeks, gazing at them. It was a myth that fierce motherly love blinded you from seeing your children clearly.

  She remembers the simplicity of her feelings when they were small – how physical her love was then: lifting them out of the cot after a sleep, holding them pressed against her body, their hot bread-loaf legs circling her waist; how she would sink her face into the skin at the nape of their necks and breathe in very deeply and it was as if they were a drug and she could feel this tingling sensation right up into the follicles of her hair. Fierce pockets of protectiveness – a primal thing. Knowing you’d throw yourself in front of a car ahead of them.

  But by god they were annoying.

  She looks at them now, Bartholomew full of these high ideas as if the ordinary stuff of life were beneath him. She watches him take another handful of bacon bites from the bowl on the side table. And Max, visibly doing an audit of Bartholomew’s present pile. Always counting up.

  ‘This is from me,’ says Joe. He is handing her a small parcel. ‘More fizz anyone?’ he says to the room.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ she murmurs and begins absently unwrapping it on her knees but her eyes are still on the general hubbub and the rustling pile of paper which is growing mountainous in the centre of the room. Joe is trying on the cardigan she has bought him and saying, ‘It’s very nice, love, but I’m not sure it’s better than the one I’ve got.’

  ‘You mean the one with holes in it?’ she says.

  Bartholomew has turned away from Max and is saying to Primrose, ‘What did Santa bring you, Prim?’

  ‘Pans,’ says Primrose, pouring peanuts into her mouth. ‘But they’re not from Santa. They’re from Max.’

  ‘Romance not dead then,’ says Bartholomew.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ says Primrose.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Bartholomew. Ann watches him lean back in his armchair and take out his phone from his pocket. Fiddle with it. Then she looks down at the present on her knee.

  ‘My god Joe, we can’t afford this,’ she gasps, holding up a necklace. Beautiful it is, little lilac stones and diamante. Old-fashioned. Glittering.

  ‘Yes we can,’ says Joe, stepping over the paper mountain and raising her up from her chair and taking her, still bewildered, in his arms. ‘Nothing’s too good for the woman I love.’

  And she doesn’t know whether to give in to the feeling she has of being ever so touched or whether to give more to the sense of anger rising, at his being irresponsible with money. And when he was always telling her to tighten her belt. There is a third feeling, that she bats away, about the necklace being not . . . well, totally to her taste (though it’s lovely, she can see that). Just not quite the sort of thing she wears. And if they were going to splash out, she’d rather have halogen down-lighters in the kitchen, like Lauren’s. But marriage has taught her to receive gifts for the meaning. The little things, you had to let go of. She turns while he fastens the necklace around her neck. She pats it and she feels it sit there, the cost.

  *

  The kitchen is all movement as everyone idles in. Ann is removing the bird from the oven and its juices are spitting noisily in the pan. The room seems briefly packed with unusually large adults, though Primrose hangs back, patting the dog in the doorway. Tess’s tail thuds against Primrose’s leg.

  Bartholomew notices the care Ann has taken over the table. There are crackers on each of the plates, red paper napkins and a holly wreath at the centre of the table. Joe is filling the glasses with more wine. He and Ann are growing garrulous with it.

  ‘Sit down everyone,’ Ann shouts, bringing a bowl of roast potatoes to the table. ‘Joe, I need you to carve now.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  ‘Shame Ruby’s not here,’ says Max, and Bartholomew feels himself bristle. ‘Not ashamed of us are you?’ Max is looking at Ann and Joe as he speaks, though they are too busy with the food to notice. ‘Not joining the ranks of old married couples any time soon?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ Bartholomew begins.

  ‘Here girl,’ says Max to the dog, bending under the table to stroke her as she slinks past, ‘where are you going? Dad, I’ve heard of a tractor that’s coming up for sale over Malton way: a good one, apparently. Five years old. I could go up there next week, take a look.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ says Joe.

  ‘If you two think you’re going tractor-shopping any time soon, you’ve got another think coming,’ says Ann, bringing over the carrots and the sprouts. Steam rises up to her face from the bowl. Her complexion is red with the heat and the wine. Knobs of butter slide over the vegetables. ‘There’s no money and you know it.’

  Bartholomew sees Max smile at Joe and Joe return with a wink.

  Bartholomew feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. He takes it out and opens the message from Ruby. It is a photograph of another festive table, groaning with turkey, potatoes, parsnips, sprouts and various other bowls too blurry to identify. Her text says:

  Veg boiled for two hours. No vitamins have survived.

  When he looks up, Primrose is pointing a Christmas cracker in his face. ‘Will you pull mine?’ she says, without smile or frown.

  Lunch is eaten too hastily, he thinks. The Hartles eat with a Neanderthal urgency, as if they might never eat again. Joe and Ann’s faces are flushed and bloated. They all wear paper hats from their crackers and as he looks around the table, Bartholomew thinks it makes them resemble in-patients in a mental institution or a retirement home.

  His phone vibrates again.

  If only there was more lard. Rx

  ‘Ruby at home with her folks?’ says his mother.

  ‘Yes. In Leeds.’

  ‘Might you go and see her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, leaning back in his chair. ‘We see enough of each other at home.’ He is surprised to hear himself call Winstanton home.

  ‘I could never live down south,’ says Max. ‘Too crowded.’

  Joe has his head down, pushing food urgently onto his fork.

  Ann snorts. ‘You could barely leave Marpleton. We thought you were going to stop at home till you were fifty. Terrified we were. Thank god for Primrose is all I can say,’ and she pats Primrose’s knee.

  ‘I think if Max and Primrose are to have a child, then she ought to know about the trike incident,’ says Bartholomew.

  ‘Ooh yes,’ says Ann, rolling with it, taking another slug, ‘we must tell you that one. Chuh, the shame of it. D’ye remember, Joe?’

  Max colours up. ‘Don’t, mum,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, go on,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Tell her.’

  ‘Well, Max was at nursery,’ says Ann, ‘must’ve been three or four at the time, and all the kiddies were fighting over the tricycles. There were only five of them and Max had bagsed one and he were riding around, crowing like. And all the other kiddies were waiting for a turn. Anyway, he needed a poo – this is what the teacher told me. And rather than give up his trike, he just stood up astride it and pooed right there in his
pants.’

  Joe is cackling. Primrose giggles into her napkin. Bartholomew smiles. Max’s face is like thunder.

  Ann is laughing, saying, ‘And I said to him, “You daft apeth, you bought yourself, what, three minutes, tops?” He was that desperate not to give up his place.’

  Max stands up and throws his napkin down onto his chair and walks out of the room. They all look at each other, hearing Max climb the stairs and then bolt the bathroom door.

  ‘Are there seconds?’ asks Primrose.

  ‘Of course, love,’ says Ann. ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Everything,’ says Primrose. She watches Ann fill her plate. ‘And another potato,’ she says quietly.

  ‘How are Eric and Lauren?’ asks Bartholomew. ‘Are they coming over later?’

  ‘Eric’ll be too busy polishing his Nissan Micra,’ says Joe.

  ‘They’re well,’ says Ann. ‘Having their kitchen done. That’s dragging on, driving Lauren nuts. Goodness, it’ll be beautiful though. They’ve got these little spotlights in the ceiling and they give off this sparkly pinkish light, like in a hotel.’

  ‘Not good for your electricity bill, halogens,’ says Primrose, with a full mouth.

  ‘We don’t need spotlights,’ says Joe.

  ‘No,’ says Ann, ‘we probably don’t. But I wouldn’t mind painting this room. It’s looking very tired. Hey ho. Things are just too tight.’

  Joe has got up from the table and is clearing some plates.

  Bartholomew feels his phone vibrate again. Two messages. The first is a picture of a white bowl containing brown sponge submerged in a lake of cream.

  Mum’s yule log. Heart attack in a bowl.

  The second says,

  Have exploded. Just scraping self off ceiling.

  He decides to turn his phone off.

  ‘Right,’ says Ann. ‘Who’s for Christmas pud with brandy butter and rum sauce? Just a slither, Bartholomew?’

  He is used to hearing his mother tell him he needs feeding and pushing food at him but now he notices her adjust the lie of her knife.