Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  ‘You don’t have to keep saying that,’ says Ann. ‘I’ll let you buy me lunch.’

  They walk together up the steep incline, Ann’s arm looped in Lauren’s, towards the Wooden Spoon café at the top of the high street. To their right, on the opposite side of the road, is the Conservative Club. To their left, the grand old Victorian shop fronts, dark-grey stone, blackened around the edges, cut in big old slabs. Same colour as the pavement, as the dry stone walls out on the fell. Past the newsagents, the bakery, the bicycle shop, Drapers, which sells hiking boots and expensive anoraks to walkers. Ann looks up to where the old clock hangs between the upper windows and there she sees a ‘For Sale’ sign, above the bookshop.

  ‘Look at that,’ she says to Lauren, pulling back on her arm.

  ‘What? Oh yes. Must be a flat. Shall I ring? See if we can see it?’

  They climb the musty stairwell. Dark, it is, the stair carpet maroon, laced with dog hairs and thinning at the treads.

  ‘Doesn’t bode well,’ says Lauren, her face turning back to Ann from a few steps above.

  The agent is up ahead, shoving his shoulder against the door. ‘It’s recently vacated,’ he says – same chap as earlier. Happened to have the keys on him. ‘Not as good nick as the place I just showed you.’

  They walk through to a room which stinks of dog. The walls are the colour of cigarette tar, the old gloss woodwork yellowing too, and the carpet is patched. But it has the highest ceilings Ann has ever seen, lined with a cornice of carved roses – the stately proportions of a Victorian drawing room. Two enormous arched windows stretch up, big as a church’s; impossibly bright and warmed by the sun. A view of the sky, and below them the bustle of the high street. Ann immediately pictures a Christmas tree in the corner.

  ‘It’s on at £75,000,’ says the agent. ‘Not been that much interest because it needs a bit of work. Two bedrooms above and a bathroom.’

  ‘It’s a maisonette?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But no outside space.’

  ‘No.’

  Lauren and Ann look at each other. ‘Baby Lamb,’ they say in unison.

  ‘Oh, but Lauren it’s so beautiful,’ says Ann, feeling excitement bubbling in her chest as if she might lift right off the ground with it. She runs up the stairs, where the bedrooms have the same elegant proportions, with little cast-iron fireplaces, and there is a shabby avocado bathroom. Ann walks slowly back down the stairs in a daze.

  ‘Bit grubby,’ says Lauren from the hallway. She disappears and Ann hears her shoes tap on linoleum. ‘You’ll need a new kitchen.’

  Ann joins her in the small galley room next door to the lounge, with beige units, an exposed old fifty-pence meter and torn-up floor. ‘Yes, but the rooms,’ Ann whispers urgently. ‘Lauren, the feeling of it. Right in the centre of the shops, too. Joe could walk over the road for a pint at the club.’

  ‘That’s all I need,’ says Lauren. ‘Eric at the club more often.’

  Ann’s not listening. ‘Just needs a lick of paint is all. Me and Joe and the boys could do it.’

  ‘Slow down. It’s still a lot,’ says Lauren. ‘God, look at you. We’ve got to see what the auction gets you first. Come on, let’s go for lunch, I’m starving.’

  ‘Five more minutes,’ Ann says. ‘Let me have another look upstairs.’

  Ann stands beside an industrial-sized tea urn, borrowed from the church kitchen. It rumbles and spits. The trestle table before her (also borrowed) is spread with cakes and sandwiches wrapped in cling film; Kit Kats in their box, the cardboard lid folded back and ‘10p’ written in marker pen on the lip; sausage rolls on a white tray. It is a bright day, with a playful wind and delicious unexpected heat to it: a real Indian summer. She feels the dampness under her arms and on her forehead. She can smell her lavender bubble bath rise off her too-warm skin. She glances at Lauren, standing next to her, immaculately turned out as always in a white sleeveless shirt and pearls.

  She looks out across the in-bye, now the auction site. Over in the yard, their vehicles and equipment are lined up: the tractor and its various attachments, quad bike, gates, lamb adopter, sheep bars and metal mangers, sorting pen; each with a lot number. Joe is there, she’s sure, has been all morning. Pacing among the lots with Baby Lamb on a lead. Earlier she’d seen him standing too close to those that were looking around. She watched him frown, as Granville Harris picked over the metal, Granville saying to a man next to him, ‘Bit o’rust on that one,’ and Joe had muscled in, saying, ‘There is not. It’s in perfectly good nick.’ She’d had to pull him away or they’d not sell anything.

  Here in the field, the sheep are penned, also in lots. Lambs just weaned earlier in the month, now ready for sale. Adrian and Eric had brought in around two hundred and fifty mules at lambing, twins and singles. And there’s another two-hundred-odd pure Swales that had lambed on the fell by themselves. And a few tups. They can’t sell the dogs, not yet. That’s more than they can take. The field is thronging with men in jeans and T-shirts and green Hunter boots. There are overweight women, their arms wide in vest tops and cropped trousers, and children climbing on a parked tractor which has been brought in as a plaything. The toddlers are petting the lambs or running in circles.

  They come for the day out, as much as anything, for the chat and the cakes and to see how low the prices have sunk. They did it themselves – her and Joe – when the boys were small. She puts a hand up as a visor over her eyes and squints as the sun burns dry and powerful. Sees Bartholomew standing chatting to Adrian and Tal beside the sheep pens. He has his arm around Ruby’s shoulders – he always seems to have an arm around her these days. Holding on tight. She’s a pretty girl, Ann thinks, in her jeans and that bright-orange flowery shirt. She’s pleased for Bartholomew, to see him settled and happy. She scans the field, sees a small girl, maybe six or seven, in a blue dress running circles around the pen, pursued by a friend. Our field – same field the boys played in – and the one next door which had the perfect pitch for rolling down. Max must’ve been that girl’s age, Bartholomew about four, and they’d clasp onto each other and roll, one over t’other, giggling so hard that Bartholomew wet himself and she’d scolded him for it. No one’ll want to play with you, if you keep pissing your pants. And Max pushed him off, saying ‘Yuk’. She’d never imagined a moment like this would come. Never thought she’d get old. And she has an urge to shout ‘No, I can’t do it, I’m not ready.’ But to whom? And who could make it stop?

  ‘Yes, love,’ she says, sensing a customer in her peripheral vision, waiting in front of her table. ‘What can I get ye?’ And she turns to the man and squints as the sun obscures her view with its shards.

  ‘Tea please,’ says Joe, ‘and a slice of that beautiful sponge. It looks light as air does that.’

  ‘Oh Joe,’ she says, and she walks out from behind the table and puts her arms around his shoulders, burying her face in his neck which is as much home to her as this place. ‘Oh Joe.’

  ‘Come on, now,’ he says, his hands on her hips. ‘We’ll be alright, Annie.’

  To their left is the auctioneer, holding his loudhailer in one hand and stooping to find the face of Brenda Farley, whose debilitating hunch has forced her eyes to the grass. Ann lets go of Joe. She stands beside him and the two of them look out together. Groups of people chat in huddles. They sip their drinks. They wolf down Ann and Lauren’s cakes. She notices a couple of teenagers talking awkwardly to one another. The boy is flushed red all along his jawline, just like Bartholomew when he was that age.

  ‘Where’s Max?’ she says.

  Joe nods to his right. ‘Over there, talking to Talbot.’

  Ann follows his gaze and sees Max, his body angled towards the older, bigger man who is in full countryman uniform despite the heat. Max is listening to Talbot, cocking his head, alert as a sheepdog. He nods and listens again.

  ‘Think you might have to give up your position as font of all wisdom,’ she says to Joe as they both watch Max.


  ‘Gladly,’ says Joe.

  ‘Right,’ Eric says. They turn and he’s standing with an arm around Lauren, on the other side of the trestle. ‘I think we’re about ready to begin.’

  ‘You’ve done a grand job, Eric,’ says Joe. They stand, the four of them, looking out across the field at the cheerful scene. Here she is in her summer dress, serving tea and cakes, thinking how glorious the field looks filled with her community, standing here with her best friends and greeting all the many nice people they know . . .

  She frees herself from Joe’s arm and looks out across the field behind them, where the cars are parked in lines. Hot as August it is. She sees a family sitting at their open boot, eating sandwiches and passing around a flask. How the English love to sit at the boots of their cars. The mother unwraps a foil parcel and hands some food to two children who sit cross-legged on the grass. The father, sitting low in his foldaway chair, reaches into a bag and pulls out a newspaper. Ann thinks she can see the woman frowning. Why is it, she thinks, when they went to events like this – a country show or an auction or a church fair – times when they were younger and the farm was still going and the children were young – why hadn’t she enjoyed it, in the way she was enjoying this one? Tasting it. Noticing. She had so often been angry or tied up with how the boys were misbehaving and not getting enough help from Joe. Oh the mind is perverse, that she should feel pleasure on this funereal day which is trussed up like a garden party and peevish when it had been there for her to enjoy. Why must it take a lifetime to learn to live in the present and to have the knack of it arrive just when the present is running out?

  Behind her, she hears Joe’s gruff voice saying, ‘Eric, I don’t know how to say –’ And she hears Eric stop him, saying, ‘Shurrup man. Buy me a pint later when you’re rich.’

  And then another voice, distorted by the funnel of a loudhailer, saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I shall be opening the bidding on Lot 32 of the Hartle estate.’

  ‘Am I bid fifteen pound, fifteen fifteen. Come on lads, gimme fifteen pound. Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen pound. Fine Swale stores these, come on folks, seventeen pound, seventeen, seventeen, eighteen, let me see eighteen, thank you sir, eighteen pound.’

  Joe and Ann close their eyes against the auctioneer’s rotten song of numbers, a mean reckoning on the animals they’ve cared so much for.

  ‘Not sure I can listen to much more o’ this,’ says Joe.

  ‘It’s the breeding ewes next,’ says Ann. ‘They’ll get more.’

  Lauren crosses two of her fingers in the air.

  Bartholomew and Ruby have wandered over to stand beside them, and Max too, to the other side, and it seems to Ann as if they’re forming some circle of protection around her and Joe. Joe’s gaze is on the ewes and she knows what he’s thinking – that he knew them, from birth many of them, when they followed their mothers up onto the fell; that they were his – his flock, his family. And which stranger would they go to? And would they look after them right? And she thinks people don’t understand it, because sheep are reared for meat, but if you’re not looking after them well, you don’t feel good in yourself.

  ‘Forty pound, forty pound, forty pound. Can I see forty-five? Good ewes these, fine breeding animals, forty-five, forty-five, forty-five, thank you sold!’

  He lowers his face so she can put her forehead against his forehead and they both have their eyes closed as the auctioneer says, ‘Four Swale tups . . .’

  ‘We’ll be alright, Joe. We’ll rent somewhere,’ she says. ‘Get jobs, both of us. I can get some cleaning, you can do odd jobs, shepherding if we keep the dogs, help w’ harvests and what have you. Not the end o’ the world.’

  Against the black of her eyelids she pictures the lovely flat on Lipton High Street. No hope of it now, not with these numbers. That lovely drawing room where a Christmas tree would have looked . . .

  ‘Oh Annie,’ Joe is saying. ‘At the end of our lives, nothing to show for it. What would your father say?’

  ‘Well fortunately, he’s dead, so that’s one less thing to worry about.’

  ‘I feel like someone’s moving my guts around,’ he says.

  ‘Nine thousand, am I bid nine thousand? Nine thousand thank you. A fine ram this, first prize at Leyburn show.’

  Ann and Joe lift their heads up to stare at each other. Eric is rocking fulsomely on his heels, the grin all over his face.

  ‘Nine thousand and fifty am I bid? Nine thousand and twenty five, then, nine thousand and fifty? Thank you, nine thousand and fifty, nine thousand and fifty, nine thousand and fifty. Gone. You’ve done well there, Dugmore.’

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asks Joe.

  ‘A prize tup you had among your fattening stores,’ says Eric, hopping up and down, dancing, giving Lauren a hug. ‘Adrian spotted him back in April, checked the parentage in your log. Took him to the country shows earlier this month and he got more rosettes pinned on ’im than Miss World.’

  People around them are hugging. Eric walks around the table to clap Joe on the shoulder. ‘You were always good, Joe – there were never a better man for breeding sheep. I think I’ll hold you to that pint now, if it’s all the same.’

  Bartholomew and Ruby are hugging, Adrian and Eric are hugging, even Bartholomew and Max clap each other heartily on the shoulders. Ann is standing in a daze, looking across the trestle at Lauren.

  ‘Suppose that flat’s a goer now,’ says Lauren.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ann, ‘suppose it is.’

  Ann is sat on a folding canvas chair behind the trestle table, so low that her bottom almost touches the grass. She shuts her eyes, enjoying the light burn of the sun on her forehead. Four prize tups – three that they’d bought last October and the one found in the flock by Adrian. That’s brought us thirteen thousand pounds alone. And another twenty thousand for the remaining sheep. And ten to fifteen thousand for hardware and vehicles – that’s what the auctioneer’s going through now. Minus the loan they’ve got. Should clear forty thousand give or take. Enough for that flat and a mortgage that won’t cripple us. Max can pay his share. We’ve survived, she thinks.

  She looks at the crowd of backs, which is all she can see from a place so low. All these people, she thinks, I should be more of a host. She makes a move to heave herself out of the canvas chair but feels Lauren’s hand applying pressure on her shoulder.

  ‘No you don’t. Here, drink this.’ Lauren hands Ann a steaming cup of tea in a chipped, rose-covered mug.

  ‘This has seen better days.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’ says Lauren, opening another canvas chair in a blur to the side, and letting out a huge sigh as she heaves down into it. ‘Flamin’ heck,’ she says, ‘might as well ’ave sat on the grass.’

  At the edge of the group of backs, Ann can see Brenda Farley, pushing her face upwards against the lowering force of her hump. Her hair is so white it is almost luminous. She is wearing a navy cardigan over a floral shirt which is buttoned to the neck. Her best for a day out, bless her.

  ‘Farm machinery, implements and sundries now,’ says the auctioneer. ‘Bomford Scimitar pasture topper, Graham Edwards livestock trailer – about twelve foot this one – complete with foldaway sheep decks.’

  Ann watches the strain on Brenda’s face, her creased forehead. She is listening intently, as if the auctioneer is reading out her own will and testament. The strings of her neck are pulled like strands of dough.

  ‘Quad trailer,’ continues the auctioneer, ‘sheep troughs, ring feeders, electric-fence unit. And one for your mutton chops, Granville – Lister sheep shears.’ Ann hears the crowd laugh. She watches the delayed reaction on Brenda Farley’s face: the mouth still slightly open, the laughter drifting towards her; the smile as she looks to the people surrounding her and sees them laughing. It is as if this woman lives on a distant shore and everything laps onto her beach that little bit later than it does everyone else.

  She feels Lauren put a hand on hers.

  ‘I’m going t
o give that woman my chair,’ says Ann, making to get up.

  ‘She’s alright,’ says Lauren, stopping her arm. ‘Any road, if she got in it, she’d never get out again. You rest a bit.’

  ‘Christ Lauren, is that all that’s ahead of us?’

  They both watch as Brenda attempts to lift her head again, her jaw slack with fresh confusion.

  ‘Not such a bad life,’ says Lauren. ‘Gas fire on the full setting. Countdown on the telly. Incontinence pants on, nice and snug up to the armpits. Could do worse.’

  ‘But for time to run out, Lauren,’ Ann whispers. ‘I never expected it. Thought I’d be thirty for ever. It’s like I didn’t see it coming. And now it’s here.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be carrying you out in a box just yet,’ says Lauren. ‘We’ve got that flat to sort out first.’

  Evening the following day and Ann thinks the washing-up will never end. This must be her sixth lot at least. Her hands are dry with it, reptilian when she’d looked at them in bed last night. Must get some of that Vaseline hand cream, she thinks, but that’s another trip into Lipton I haven’t got time for and then her mind goes to the flat, as it does constantly, and she smiles to herself while looking out the window because soon, touch wood, she’ll be able to walk to the shops.

  The evening sun is everywhere, casting the yard in an orange light that seems artificial, and sliding in through the window. It bathes Lauren’s face so that she looks impossibly tanned as she stands next to Ann, drying a cup with a tea towel that’s as good as sodden. Ann is feeling about in the sink, noticing the silky suds as they coat her hands. Pleasing it is, the slide of it as she turns the cup in the water, much as it dries out her skin.

  Their silence is amiable, through all the rounds of washing-up they’ve done together. Lauren has been by her side these last two days, helping with the catering marathon that accompanied the auction – all the cups and plates from the day itself, then the folk that stayed on past the afternoon into sunset, either sat in her kitchen or taking tea out to the yard. And then the smaller group who stayed to dinner – Ruby cooked another of her excellent stews with baked potatoes to feed the five thousand (that girl is really a marvel in the kitchen): Max and Bartholomew of course, Max sullen but she thought that was because he was off the drink and feeling the pull of it, Bartholomew eating as usual like it was his last; Eric and Lauren; Dennis Lunn, who’d helped so much with the penning and moving the sheep about. And on it went, even today – every time another person arrived to pick up some livestock or machinery, they popped in for a brew and a slice of fruit cake or a bacon sandwich.