Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  ‘How do I look?’ shouts Eric, doing a backwards moonwalk-with-broom across the yard towards her.

  ‘Quite the little worker,’ says Ann. ‘You’ll need feeding after all that graft.’

  ‘Ah, now you’re talking,’ says Eric. ‘Might you have a bacon butty or six for me?’

  ‘I might,’ she says, and Joe sees them smile at each other, Eric’s sheer good humour overcoming his protruding belly and balding head to make him seem quite the catch. He can see her taking in his smart Barbour coat, which gives him the air of landed gentry. And here’s me, Joe thinks, shabby and injured – he looks down at his bandaged hand – relying on charity for help with a burnt-out barn. Can’t even buy her her own house. Why would she want me when there’s men like Eric in the world?

  ‘Have you got through to Bartholomew?’ Joe says to her, as he edges past her into the kitchen.

  ‘No, no reply. I’ve left another message.’

  Then she brightens for the other men. ‘Right, who’s for a bacon butty then?’

  *

  From: ann.hartle@cooperative.coop

  To: b_hartle@hotmail.com

  Subject: Dad

  7 January 2006, 10.43 a.m.

  Just a note to see how you’re getting on son – you must be too busy with the garden centre to return my calls. I hope you’re not upset with us.

  We’ve begun clearing up the hay barn – everyone came to help and I think your dad was quite moved by it, the way they all showed up and took it on without any asking.

  Oh but we still don’t know where the winter feed’s coming from. Joe went to see Granville Harris (odious little man – Granville, not your father) and they had a right set to. Joe says Granville quoted him through the roof and they had a shouting match, with Joe accusing Granville of kicking a man when he’s down and of trying to humiliate him by making him barter and beg. (Joe’s temper is short, but to be fair to him, Granville is a mean beggar.) Any road, Joe came home with nothing. We’ve a few ewe rolls and some roots that were kept in the other outbuildings – but it won’t last past next week and the ewes can’t go without, not with so many carrying twins.

  Bandage’ll come off your dad’s hand in a couple of days. He’s rather quiet, I’ve noticed. Sits on his chair on the landing, looking into the video entryphone (god I wish Primrose had never installed that blasted thing).

  Try to keep in touch son. I know Christmas was, well, a bit of a disaster. I’m sorry for it, but there’s no need to cut yourself off.

  Mum

  *

  Max bounces on the quad bike as it climbs the fell. One of the dogs runs beside him, playing, knowing she doesn’t have to work today. He has loaded the bike with the last of the winter feed. There’s no more. Dad’ll have to do a deal with Granville Harris, like it or not.

  Max’s eyes are sore. It was another heavy one in the Fox last night with Tal and Jake, Max showing his appreciation for their work on the hay barn with round after round of Marston Moor until both Tal and Jake put their palms up to him and he found himself drinking them single-handed.

  His painful eyes are being sandblasted by frozen air, caustic with hail which drives into his skin as he revs the quad bike, up the steep incline of the fell to where the flock could be found grazing. This is their coarsest land – the heathers springy and purple with patches of grass between the grey, craggy rocks. He looks around him. It’s vast – that’s the thing Joe says he loves most about the fell. Like there was no arguing with it. Said it made every human struggle look like a child’s tantrum. But Max can’t see it, can’t feel it. He’s been waiting for some of that wisdom to come: for his purpose to take hold of him as his baby grows in Primrose’s belly. But it hasn’t. Nothing’s taken hold of him except a vague gloom about the hay-barn fire and a sense of wounded disappointment that he’ll not be getting that new tractor after all.

  He parks the bike and drags the sacks of food off it across the grass, into a metal feeding trough. The sheep begin to gather restively, knowing what he’s brought. The sky is flat and white and thankless, like the news of the bairn, which has dulled. All the praise and the announcement he was to be given the farm and the sense that his inheritance was upon him, it had all stalled. He tries to focus on the future, feeling some of the ewes as they feed – checking their swollen bellies. There would be lambing and warmer times ahead. The farm would seem more of a going concern come spring. And everyone would gather round when the baby came, shower them with gifts. They’d not need to buy anything. By next auction time, he’d be a proper farmer – a family man with his own place – and that sense of purpose would come to him, like Joe said it would.

  Out of a corner of his eye he spots a ewe that hasn’t come to feed. She’s out on a limb, lying in the shelter of a rocky crag. He walks over to her.

  ‘Whas up w’ you?’ he says. She is panting. He decides to take her down to the farm for checking over. They’ll be bringing the others down off the fells end of March anyway – to lamb on the milder in-bye early April – so this one’ll just come down early. He lifts her gently and she submits to him, which makes him more certain she’s not right. Sheep should struggle away on scratchy legs. Fight you a bit. He ties her to the front of the quad bike. The dog jumps onto the back of the bike.

  ‘Lazy beggar,’ Max says to the dog behind him.

  He carries them both down the escarpment to the farm.

  *

  From: ann.hartle@cooperative.coop

  To: b_hartle@hotmail.com

  Subject: everything alright????

  15 January 2006, 1.17 p.m.

  I do wish you’d get in touch love, if only to let me know you’re alright. I’ve tried calling the garden centre, but your assistant (is it Leonard?) is rather short with me. Says you’ve not been around half so much lately, which makes me worry.

  There’s been a turn-up for the books on the winter feed. Out of the blue, Granville Harris called and offered us two months’ worth at a knock-down price – quite the lowest price I’ve heard of round here. Joe was suspicious but Granville said he had more of a surplus than he’d first thought and it’d go to waste if we didn’t take it. Joe agreed, thank goodness, but I have my suspicion that Eric Blakely went to see Granville and had a word in his ear. I don’t know if any money changed hands, but Lauren was very strange about it when I saw her at the WI – she seemed to know the story before I told it.

  So I think we might actually get through to lambing in one piece. I must say, Eric is marvellous – so generous. He doesn’t fall out with folk like your father. I daren’t tell Joe my suspicions about the feed – he seems sensitive all of a sudden to charity and Eric’s help in particular, though there was never a better friend. He’s bruised by it all, even though the barn’s been cleared and the replacement feed is in. Just sits on that landing, every minute he gets, watching the village. I hear him in the night, too, picking up the receiver, sitting there – as if he’s going to discover something on Marpleton village green at 2 a.m.

  So that’s the latest Hartle insanity. I’d best sign off – Lauren is on her way over to take me to the WI meeting in Lipton. It’s Geology night, a history of Ribblehead Quarry. The excitement! I can barely contain myself. Irony is of course, your father would have been riveted back in the day (he always loved his rocks). Please call Bartholomew.

  Mum

  *

  Primrose sees Lauren’s watery form behind the mottled glass front door. The door opens and the warm air of Lauren’s immaculate home hits her face – furniture polish and the scent of the new, unmuddied. Lauren’s pearl-stud earrings are bright beneath her short, textured hairdo.

  ‘Primrose!’ says Lauren, full of that generous pleasure that Primrose has always liked so much. ‘What a nice surprise.’

  ‘I wanted to say thank you for the baby gym.’

  ‘Come in, love. Got time for a brew?’

  Primrose steps into the thickly carpeted hallway with its polished dark-wood table with a mirror a
bove. Lauren leads the way into the kitchen, which looks to Primrose as if it has slid off the page of a glossy magazine. Primrose is taking off her coat and Lauren stops making the tea and looks at her belly.

  ‘Oh look at you. Can I touch the bump?’

  Primrose nods, feeling the pleasure of Lauren’s excitement, almost as keen as her own.

  ‘What a miracle it is,’ Lauren is saying, placing a hand on the little swollen roundness of Primrose’s lower belly. Primrose thinks she sees then a flicker of something – a shadow of pain across Lauren’s face. But then she goes back to her tea-making, saying briskly, ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m well,’ says Primrose and she sits on a high stool at the central island.

  ‘Max excited?’

  ‘Ye . . . es,’ says Primrose. ‘I think he were happy that Joe was so happy.’

  ‘Joe always loved bairns, I remember,’ says Lauren. ‘And of course, a farm goes with this one.’

  ‘Yes, Max were right pleased all that’s happening. More pleased about that than about anything. Says he’s arrived.’

  ‘Does he now?’ says Lauren, placing a cup of tea in front of Primrose. ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘Please.’ Primrose is happy to see Lauren bring out a posh packet – the kind of biscuits that are individually wrapped in foil. Thick chocolate, flavoured orange or mint. She feels a seeping pleasure to be here, in this warm, snazzy house with the posh biscuits, talking to Lauren who’s so motherly, and without that faint whiff of disapproval she always gets off Ann.

  ‘Always comes first, the farm,’ Lauren is saying. ‘I remember with Eric, I were last in the pecking order behind a thousand Herdwicks.’

  Primrose laughs.

  ‘How are you in yourself, love?’ Lauren asks.

  Primrose takes another biscuit. Lauren isn’t eating them, she notices.

  ‘OK I s’pose. A bit . . .’ Primrose coughs, puts the biscuit down by her cup. She can feel Lauren’s eyes on her. ‘Maureen Pettiford came into the Co-op the other day. She was being kind, congratulating me on the baby, you know.’ She can hear her voice – the drag on it. She plays with the foil-wrapped biscuit, turning it over. ‘She was being really nice, I know she was. Said being pregnant was the best time in her life, the happiest time.’

  ‘Oh bully for her,’ says Lauren, snorting. ‘Give the woman a medal.’

  ‘Only I don’t feel . . .’

  ‘Bursting with joy at every second of it?’

  ‘No,’ says Primrose.

  ‘Course you don’t. And I’ll bet Maureen Pettiford didn’t either. It’s like anything else in life – it’s got all shades to it. I remember I found it an agony of waiting. Everything’s all up in the air.’

  ‘Yes, p’raps it’s that. I think . . . I think I won’t be much good at it.’

  ‘Yes, ye will,’ Lauren says. ‘You’ll have to learn it, just like you’d learn anything – darts or knitting. And you get good at it, gradual like. By the time you have another one, you’re a pro.’

  Primrose unwraps her waiting biscuit and takes a bite, putting a hand up to catch the crumbs that fall from the side of her mouth.

  ‘Max’ll help,’ says Lauren.

  Primrose looks at her, her mouth full, and raises her eyebrows.

  ‘P’raps not,’ says Lauren. ‘Ann then. Ann’ll help. And you’ll not prise the thing off Joe. He’ll be driving the tractor with the baby in a sling at his chest.’

  ‘Wonder if I’ll get a look in,’ Primrose says.

  *

  From: ann.hartle@cooperative.coop

  To: b_hartle@hotmail.com

  Subject: Hello????

  20 January 2006, 10.51 p.m.

  I’m really worried now Bartholomew. Please drop us a line. I just need to know you’re alright love, that things are going OK, with Ruby and the garden centre. I know you’re a grown man etc. etc., but it doesn’t stop me worrying.

  Things here are ticking along – you know what a dreary time winter is. Feeding and feeding and feeding some more. In between, your dad spends most of his time on the blessed video entryphone. He’s up there when he comes home for his lunch, and again before tea and after it. I talked to Max about it but he said dad was fine, just a bit tired. The ewes are fat, some with twins, so that’s good. Do get in touch, son.

  Mum

  *

  Ruby is in the back kitchen. She looks out through the hatch and makes slow circular motions on the counter with a cloth.

  She is hypnotised by the rain, which slides down the window like dishwater. The light is dusk-like even though it’s just noon, and the café is miserably empty. The early lot have shuffled away after their breakfast toasts or mid-morning pastries.

  She walks out into the aquarium room where the rain is throwing patterns onto the smoky glass. She switches on a standard lamp and it casts a circle of orange in one corner of a blue sea.

  Sunk, she thinks. Her body feels slow, as if her sadness is a physical leaden thing and she can barely carry it. And hollow too. She feels hollow from not eating. ‘Make the most of it!’ her mother had said on the phone. ‘The heartbreak diet. Always works a treat.’

  As she turns back towards the kitchen, a low beam of sunlight breaks through the rain and illuminates Dave Garside’s broad back where he sits on his usual stool at the hatch counter. Most days he sits there, so he can talk to her while she’s working in the back kitchen.

  ‘Seven letters,’ says Dave. ‘Tragic lover married, for example, all for nothing.’

  ‘No idea, Dave,’ she says quietly, coming back into the kitchen.

  She looks at him, head down over his crossword. She notices the mousse in his hair, which has made it stiff, like whipped egg whites. Brave Dave. Well, Gay Dave, as it turns out. Who’d have thought it, after all that macho stuff at school – all the skateboarding and the go-kart racing. (His T-shirts were quite tight, mind.)

  Dave the gay estate agent. He sits in her café to escape the over-gelled, shiny-suited ‘banter’ at his office (Dave always does enlarged quotation marks in the air when he mentions it), which generally centres on his sexuality.

  ‘Gary and Wayne,’ he’d said a week ago, sitting at the counter as usual, eating one of Ruby’s speciality omelettes for his lunch. ‘God, where did they mislay their communal brain cell? You’d think Winstanton would be more evolved, wouldn’t you? I mean, we’re only a couple of hours out of London. But it’s like they’ve never come across a gay man before. They just can’t leave it alone.’

  ‘Maybe Gary and Wayne have a bit of a thing for each other,’ she’d said, getting the teapots down.

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Dave, looking into the middle distance. ‘Friends of Dorothy but so deeply in the closet that even their brain cell doesn’t know.’

  She’d laughed. And then she’d started to cry.

  ‘Oh god Ruby, what’s happened?’

  ‘I think it’s over. With Bartholomew.’ She could feel her face dissolving into tears.

  ‘Oh dear, sweetie. Come on, group hug.’

  Bartholomew hadn’t been in touch at all over Christmas – no replies to her avalanche of texts; to her snapshots of food; no affectionate late-night calls to say goodnight. That scarf should have told her something. Horrible thing, over-fluffy and custard-yellow, like something Big Bird would wear.

  She thought of him in Marpleton – a place she’d visited only once. She pictured him in that warm house where the bedding smelled of starch, where his mother baked bread, where the banisters gave off breaths of polish. She thought of the armchairs – their lovely faded pink and the neat antimacassars. He’d kept her apart from it. He’d guarded it to his chest like a mistress. She thought of him laughing in the pub with his brother.

  After a week of his silence and just before she was due to catch the train back to Winstanton, with her bag packed next to the front door, she’d talked to her mother about it.

  ‘Oh lovey,’ her mother said. ‘I am sorry. I thought you seeme
d quiet.’

  And Ruby knew then why she hadn’t wanted to talk about it earlier. She didn’t want the patient pronounced dead at the scene. If she didn’t talk about it, she could tell herself he was just being a typical rubbish bloke. Uncommunicative. Or that somehow it would all come right.

  ‘I think every person has a temperature,’ her mother had said, after Ruby had told her everything. ‘And you need to find someone who’s the same temperature as you. I know a couple – Alan and Hilary – and they spend most of their time apart. She works away, they take separate holidays. And it works. Don’t ask me how. They’re just both built that way. Kind of chilly, if you ask me. Now me and your father, we could never do that. Would be torture. We’d argue all the time. It’s bad enough when he goes on his golf weekend once a year. We’re just not built for it.’

  Ruby had started to sob, the snot trailing down her upper lip and her mother had walked over and scooped her up, cupping her head into her shoulder and saying, ‘I’m so sorry, love, you were so happy. And he seemed such a nice chap.’

  ‘What if,’ Ruby had juddered between sobs, ‘what if he seemed like my temperature, at the beginning, but now all of a sudden he’s not?’ And she’d juddered again and her mother had kissed the top of her head where it lay.

  ‘Lovey, you can’t make him into something he’s not. You can’t do anything about the way he is. You just have to accept it, and maybe look for someone who is more at your setting.’

  ‘I’ll never find anyone,’ she’d wailed into her mother’s perfumed chest. ‘No one wants me. I’m too full-on.’

  ‘I want you,’ her mother had soothed, and she had taken her face in both her hands, pushing her wet cheeks together, so that she thought she probably resembled a goldfish. Her mother looked at her eyeball to eyeball. ‘And you’re not too full-on. You’re just full of life, my darling. And if he doesn’t want that then he needs his head examined.’