‘What d’ye think about this one?’ Max had said the week before, untying a ewe that he’d brought down off the fell and lifting her off the quad bike.
‘She’s got twins,’ Joe had said, with more confidence than he felt. He always had to take the lead with Max. He was always looking to Joe for the answers. That had begun to exhaust him, too. ‘Twins is always early,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll put her in the old cow shed till it’s her time.’
He is bent forward on his chair. His face is right up against the monitor. He wishes there were people in his picture. The village has bedded down into the valley floor for the night and will remain immobile for another few hours at least. Joe replaces the handset. The screen blinks back to grey. He waits. Closes his eyes. He sees Eric and Ann sat in that car, secret like. Talking about what? About him? They were always full of each other, like that time they went to the Fox to do the new quiz that Tony Crowther had organised (cramping Max’s style) and she was all dolled up in lipstick. She and Eric knew more of the answers than him and Lauren. Showing off all their interests, they were – history, geography, the news – like it made them better people. He’d sat back, gone silent, feeling smaller and meaner next to Eric’s largesse and hating the way Ann tittered like a schoolgirl, saying, ‘Here, isn’t he well read? You should go on Mastermind Eric.’
When they got home, he’d gone straight to the lounge and switched on the telly.
‘Who’s pissed on your chips?’ she’d demanded, following him into the room.
‘You’re full of it aren’t you,’ he’d muttered. ‘And Eric, too.’
‘Full of what?’
‘Full of yourselves – your mutual appreciation society.’
‘Well at least he’s got a flaming sense of humour,’ she shouted and slammed the door and stomped upstairs to bed.
He opens his eyes and lifts the receiver again.
*
‘What are you doing coming with me?’ says Ann irritably the following morning, as the bell rings over the chemist door. Joe is too close. He is bunching up behind her as they shuffle into the shop.
‘I need some Lemsip,’ he says and he is too much, she thinks, in this carpeted, over-shelved room. They bump down the aisle, the two of them. Ann looks over and sees Karen Marshall behind the counter, looking back at them. The Lipton bush telegraph. That’s all I need.
‘Well go on then,’ she hisses to Joe. He’s been fussing around her all morning, worse than a teething toddler. ‘Go and get your Lemsip and leave me alone.’
She is looking at the bubble baths.
‘What are you getting?’ Joe says. He is too close again. He is at her back, looking over her shoulder.
‘Will you please give me some space?’ she whispers. She casts a glance at Karen and meets her eye. Karen hastily looks away. ‘What do you care what I’m getting from the chemist anyway?’
‘Make-up?’ he says. ‘Perfume?’
‘Joe, what is wrong with you?’
‘Something for Eric?’ says Joe. He’s not whispering. Ann casts another anxious glance at Karen. She’s all ears.
‘Shut up, Joe,’ Ann hisses. ‘Stop being ridiculous. Go and get your Lemsip.’
‘You’re full of sparkle for each other,’ says Joe.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oooh, Eric, what a smart coat!’
‘Oh shut up,’ she says, trying to edge past him.
‘You and he . . .’
She interrupts him. ‘I’m not listening to this. I’ve put up with enough from you. I’m not putting up with this Eric rubbish as well. Not after he’s helped you so much.’
‘Bit o’ sweeping,’ Joe snorts. ‘Hardly deserves a medal.’
‘Not just that actually,’ she says, wanting to teach him a lesson. Silence him. ‘Granville Harris. The feed. You don’t think he dropped his price out of the goodness of his heart, do you?’
Joe stops. He looks at her, bewildered, and she feels the slow seep of regret.
‘He did it out of friendship,’ she says. ‘Eric and Lauren, they wanted to help us through a difficult time.’ She glances again at Karen, who is not even making a pretence of not listening. She is gazing at them as if intimately part of the conversation. ‘Just getting some Radox!’ Ann says loudly, waving a box of bath salts as if Karen were deaf or stupid. Chance would be a fine thing.
Joe is stood there, looking down now at the bottle-green cord carpet. Rubbing his face with one hand.
Ann shuffles past him. She edges around the end of the aisle, where nappies and baby wipes are stacked in claustrophobic towers. She approaches the counter and hands Karen the box of Radox ‘Muscle Relax’ salts. Ann smiles at her with a rigid jaw.
‘Just this please, love,’ she says.
‘How’s Primrose?’ says Karen. ‘Baby must be getting big.’
*
Max is parking when he sees them come out of the chemist. His mother is marching ahead with a face like thunder.
Max feels the moments lap away when he could wave to them or hoot his horn or leap out of the car. Instead, he waits for them to drive away. Then he gets out of his Land Rover and crosses the road to the Co-op to pick up something to eat. He is undecided between a Melton Mowbray pork pie and a cheese slice but if it’s to be a cheese slice then he’d be better off going across the way to Greggs, where they’re warm at least. By the time this occurs to him, though, he’s standing in front of the Co-op chiller cabinet, a place to kill off even the mightiest appetite in a man. He is surveying the limp sandwiches spewing anaemic lettuce and the processed meats, when Tracy Hardaker shouts over from the till, ‘Here, Max, what happened to Primrose this morning? She’s left us short-staffed. I can’t go on my break because Claire can’t cover both ends of the shop.’
He looks across at Tracy. Face like a slapped arse. He hadn’t even scanned the room for Primrose, he realises.
‘What?’ he says. ‘She were up when I left. Didn’t she call in?’
‘Nope. Downright inconsiderate if you ask me.’
Claire has walked over from the storeroom and says to him, over-gentle, ‘I tried calling her because I was worried. It’s not like her not to show up. But there’s no answer. She hasn’t rung you at all?’
‘Nope,’ says Max.
He scans the shelves again, stopping at the Ginsters pasties. (But the chiller cabinet makes them stick to the roof of your mouth – the fat gets congealed in the cold.) Claire has put a light hand on his elbow and says, ‘Maybe you should check on her, Max? It could be something to do with the baby.’
He is irritated by Claire’s nearness. Like it’s any of her business. So he leaves the Co-op empty-handed but not before Tracy says to his back, ‘Tell her she owes us a day.’
He crosses the high street again to Greggs where he picks up a cheese slice, warm and stringy, and a bag of crisps, and he sits in his car eating them in peace with the Greggs paper bag surrounded by crumbs on his lap and the crisps open behind the handbrake.
*
The side of the bath is cold against the base of Primrose’s back. We’ve run out of toilet roll, she thinks.
She is sitting on the bathroom floor with her knees up. Under her bottom is one of the peach towels folded into a square. Between Primrose’s legs is a maroon blotch – like ink on blotting paper. It is pooling, imperceptibly. Close to her body is a ball of something black. A kind of sac, like a tea bag. And around it streaks of very dark gloopy snot. She has her head down, almost between her knees, and her elbows propped on them. She is looking at the bobbles on the peach towel. Shouldn’t have used the peach. It would have barely shown up on the navy. But she’ll never get it out now, not with a whole pot of Vanish. She’ll have to scoop it all into a bin liner and put it out back and hope Ann doesn’t ask about them – about the peach towel set she’d bought for them. Bath sheet, hand towel and flannel (that matching flannel, it’s somewhere), tied up like a present with lilac ribbon. It won’t be a set now because she’s gone and
ruined the bath sheet. And Ann might ask about it because she was like that – always chasing up after the things she’d bought them (like the china, that floral set, when she came over and said, ‘You’re not using that floral boxed set I bought you, Primrose?’). She’ll wonder what happened to it and ask why Primrose didn’t take better care of it.
She was getting ready for work when it began. She was stood at the sink when she bowed her head down almost into the bowl and leant both hands on the sides and felt this creaking in her belly. She’d felt these things before, milder – a kind of menstrual shifting about down there. She’d walked back to the bedroom and got back into the bed. She was lying on her back and she pulled the covers back over her. But it wasn’t where she wanted to be. So she got up and went back to the bathroom. She could feel the wetness between her legs by then. That was when she pulled a towel (any towel) from the airing cupboard and positioned herself against the bath, like the ewes she’d seen so often, taking themselves off to a particular place when it was their time.
By the time she hears Max’s key in the door she has showered. She is wearing her dressing gown and slippers and a big brick of a sanitary towel between her legs. She stops on the stairs, one hand on the banister.
‘Why are you not at work? Tracy Hardaker’s got a face on her.’
Primrose says nothing. She shakes her head. She can feel herself about to cry, now that he’s here. She’s unable to speak – to say it.
‘What is it, love?’ he says. He is looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the finial, and she wonders why he can’t tell what’s happened. Surely it’s obvious. ‘What’s happened?’ he says.
‘I lost the baby,’ she says in a great heaving sob and the language of it – the blame that seems to carry in those words – makes her tears come thick. She comes down the last steps. He is bewildered. He puts his arms around her shoulders but they lie, light and bloodless, like damp leaves.
‘When did it happen?’ he says.
‘This morning, as I was getting ready for work.’
‘Where . . . where is it?’ he says. He sounds dazed, like his mind’s occupied taking it in.
‘In the bins outside.’
She feels his chest heave at this – a sharp intake. She’s never seen him cry. She pulls away and looks up at him, almost out of curiosity. His eyes are dry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. And she’s crying again, because it’s like everything about the two of them together has failed. ‘I’m so sorry, Max.’
*
The lantern light swings in the rafters of the small outhouse, no bigger than a stable, where Joe has brought the ewe. She is panting where she lies on her bed of straw. She had stood earlier and cried out, as her waters broke onto the straw, and even her cries were stoic. He will stay with her for as long as it takes.
So Eric had helped him. Why would he do that if not to make himself the giver of riches? Eric was lining them alongside each other before Ann and coming off the bigger man.
She is close, he thinks. He looks at her eye and sees patience – or is it stupidity – which makes her submit, even when he pushes his hand inside her to feel for the first lamb. Warm and slippery, that mammalian smell – sweet and yeasty – hits his nostrils. ‘Nearly there, girl. Nearly there.’
His arm is inside her up to the elbow now, and she shifts in the straw. She bleats loud, meeeh, meeeeh, as if taking umbrage at his intrusion. He is feeling around the unborn lamb, its sliding body hard to his touch. An everyday miracle. He makes sure the hooves are forward then pulls the head, easing it out through flesh which stretches pink like rubber. Slowly, slowly. And then out it comes in a rush. It is yellow and sticky and cellophaned in its sac. Strands of the straw stick to it. He wipes the lamb’s nose and eases open the mouth for it to take its first breath. He lifts it, a slippy fish, and places it onto the straw in front of the ewe’s face where she begins to lick it, doggedly. The lamb is small. Even for twins.
Joe steps back. She knows him, this ewe, and he knows her. He had breathed into her mouth when she was born, to help her take her first breath. Bartholomew was right about that. ‘You know them, dad, each one of them. And they know you. How can you do it?’ And he wonders now, watching the ewe licking her lamb. For a moment, Joe wonders if he can take any more of it.
He pushes a hand back inside her, this time up to his shoulder, to feel for the second. This one doesn’t feel right. It is hard and still. He pulls it towards him and eases it out, head first, the body following quickly. It lies on the straw. Dead. Eyes closed. Legs ahead of it like the galloping horses on a merry-go-round. Its hooves are dainty. Its skin is waxy and yellow like a human cadaver.
He steps back and looks down at it and then over at the ewe still patiently licking her first-born clean. But this one, too, should have raised its head by now. And he knows it won’t last the night.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says to her. He wonders what it is. Chlamydia or vibrio or bad luck. And he knows he was right to isolate this one from the rest of the flock. Ordinary losses. The rest can still come right.
*
Max sits on a high stool at the bar of the Fox and Feathers.
‘You’re quiet, big fella,’ says Sheryl from the other side. She is tilting her hips, pushing out her tits, asking for attention and he can’t be bothered to give it.
‘Am I?’ he says. His focus is hazy, she swims in front of him. He drains his glass and holds it up for her to refill. He deserves it after what has happened to him, the loss he’d suffered. He deserved to lose himself in the drink, because life had dealt him a bitter blow and where was the fairness in that? It was supposed to be his time, supposed to be all coming together for him.
‘Blimey, you’re thirsty,’ she says. ‘Shouldn’t you slow down a bit?’
‘I’ve got the money, ha’nt I?’ he says, hanging his head low between his shoulder blades like a lead weight. There’s only so much a man can take and Primrose, she couldn’t expect more from him. He’d looked after her – made her a tea, put her to bed. But the need for a pint was starting to pull at him hard, so he told her he was popping out.
‘Something on your mind, darlin’?’ Sheryl says. Scraggy old Sheryl, pouting and winking. As if he was interested in that. She’s leaning over the bar and her pendant hangs in the air. He watches it through glassy eyes. ‘Anything you’d like to talk about? No? Well, you just sit there and think things over nice and quiet.’
The bar empties at closing. Sheryl invites him to stay for a lock-in. It’s not so much that he says yes, more that he can’t move for the pints swilling inside him. Through a fog, he hears her tell Tony to get himself off to bed – she’ll close up and if she needs help with the barrels, she’s sure Max will lend a hand.
‘So how’s married life?’ she says to him, still glittering in the face of so little encouragement. Christ, he thinks, she’s desperate.
It’s just the two of them in the semi-darkness.
‘Blissful,’ says Max. The word comes out slowly, like a record player on the wrong setting. He’s hardly spoken all evening.
‘You’ll be a family soon,’ she says.
‘If you say so,’ says Max, staring into his glass. Then he looks up at her. ‘You and Tony, you never had kids.’
Her face darkens. She fingers her pendant. ‘No, well, it doesn’t suit everyone.’
She gathers the dirty glasses from the bar and puts them in the dishwasher. Then she walks round to his side, up close to him.
‘It doesn’t mean the end of your life, you know,’ she whispers in his ear. ‘A baby.’
He stays hunched on the bar but turns his head to her.
‘Everyone’s a free agent,’ she says and she runs a hand across his shoulders. He barely feels it. ‘Marriage doesn’t put a stop to that. What are you supposed to do if you’re not happy? It’s not your fault.’ She kisses the back of his neck and he feels something bubbling up inside him. ‘Sometimes things just happen.’
<
br /> He turns and pushes her backwards against a pillar, where the horse brasses judder behind her head. She is smiling at him but he can’t look at her. He pushes up her skirt, wanting to go at it hard, to lose himself in the dirt of it. If he looks at her, things will go slack. He closes his eyes, willing it all to stay disconnected. So he keeps going, frantic, his eyes shut, trying to disappear in the abyss of the drink and the dark. The hard wooden pillar, the feeling of blood draining down his body, the drink making his head swim, the arousal in the nerve endings of his body so long as he doesn’t open his eyes and see what he’s doing. Yes, this is it, this is it, this is it, this is it.
He steps back and she hoicks her skirt down, straightens her top. She plumps up her hair as she walks back round to the other side of the bar.
‘I’d best be off,’ he says and he makes for the door, still not wanting to see her. He unbolts it and falls out into the freezing January night.
February
— Putting on fresh growth —
Bartholomew opens his eyes. Blinks a few times. Lies there on the pillow. He brings his fists up to his face and rubs the sockets then rolls over, punching the pillow as he goes, to look at his clock radio. 9.37 a.m. Should’ve been in work an hour ago. The alarm went off two hours before, but as is his habit these days, he’d thumped down on the snooze button until it gave up all hope of rousing him.
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