In the rain, the land lay waterlogged; in the dry, it set like concrete. Hedges had been so neglected that when cut back they let stock through. Calves died, for no discernible reason. Mastitis was rife, no matter how careful he was milking out and washing the bags. There was an endemic cough which wasn’t husk and which the vet couldn’t identify, but which cut milk badly. Machinery broke down, always at the most inconvenient moment — two acres of hay to bale and black-bellied clouds rolling up.
In his third year at Sadacre Farm, he went to a dance — his first night out in months — and there he met Jennifer. She didn’t like cows, but she liked to hear him talk about them. And she liked to look at his rugged, chunky face, expressing practical determination with a dreamy background, to stroke his cheeks, to have him engulf her in his arms and feel the strength of his body. She also liked it when he became passionate and after a while she’d be for forgetting everything but the immediate present: but he was strangely old-fashioned in this respect and thought they ought to wait until they were married. ‘All right,’ she’d said one evening, filled with unladylike frustration, ‘but only if you’ll marry me soon so maybe you’ll learn there’s more to sex than the row a bulling cow makes.’
He wanted to get married just as much as she did, but he didn’t feel justified in marrying her until he could offer her a more secure future.
By now, he knew for fact what he’d always believed — he was a good dairy farmer. He had a way with animals, a feel for the land, and mechanical sympathy. All that held him back was lack of capital. He naively thought that, since he had learned his trade, Uncle Harold might help him.
Uncle Harold was delighted to be asked. He loved delivering sermons. Hadn’t he always said farming was a ridiculous occupation? How many farmers ever became wealthy from farming alone? Now coffee, sugar, cocoa, copper, tin, lead, zinc — provided some underpaid worker grew or mined them and you were the middleman who milked the market (Rather subtle, what?) — made real money. But his advice had been rejected years before and it had always been his strongly held belief that if a man insisted on making his own bed, he should be left to lie on it …
‘Bloody pompous old fool,’ said Jennifer. ‘Hope his cocoa poisons him and his sugar turns sour.’ She put her arms round his neck and stared straight at his strong blue eyes. ‘John, you are an infuriating person because you’re more stubborn than a team of mules. I’ve told you millions of times, I don’t care if life’s tough: I just want to be with you, whether we sleep in silk sheets or old sacks. So now I’m going to be stubborn. I’m going to marry you, whether you like it or not, in six months’ time, because I can’t wait a day longer. But I do ask that you don’t milk the cows that morning because my wedding day is going to be one day when there’s no cow tish around.’
He grinned. ‘So I’ve got my orders?’
‘You’ve got ’em and I expect total obedience. And now kiss me hard, but not for too long or I’ll not be able to wait those six months.’
Five weeks later, she was dead.
*
He was filling the feed barrow with crushed barley and concentrate, just before milking for the last time that day, when a policeman in blue mackintosh, crash helmet, and leather boots, entered the building and stood by the side of the chart on which were listed the dates of cows’ bullings and services. He noticed the expression on the policeman’s face and he became scared.
He dropped the scoop into the mixture and walked very deliberately over to where the policeman stood, identifying him as the man who had called before. ‘Evening. Is something wrong?’
‘I … I’ve some bad news for you, sir.’
‘What?’ he demanded flatly.
The policeman spoke quickly. ‘Miss Payne has unfortunately been in an accident: she was knocked down by a car just off the High Street.’
Tatham said, quite levelly: ‘Is she dead?’
The policeman nodded.
‘Was it an accident? Or did the men behind the bank robbery kill her?’
‘The car didn’t stop and it … it sounds deliberate.’
‘So you were wrong. There was need to worry about her. The police couldn’t look after her.’
The policeman, suffering the other’s bitter contempt, knew a sudden resentment. It hadn’t been his fault.
‘Where is she?’
‘She was taken to the general hospital.’
There was a thud against the sliding door of the collecting yard as the lead cow tried to force the door open. ‘I must start milking,’ Tatham said.
The policeman left, wondering how any man could be so insensitive as to be able to milk cows only minutes after he’d been told his fiancée was dead. He didn’t realize that cows had to be milked no matter what human tragedies exploded, nor had he any idea that Tatham was crying as he let the first cows into the parlour.
*
Felicity Tatham was a delightful woman of 55 who enjoyed having a husband who’d refused to make a lot of money in the City, but who instead painted pictures and made very little. He was happy so she was happy, so that was what life was about. Let the Harolds of the world make fortunes, losing in the process all the fun of living.
She looked across the very small sitting-room of the farmhouse in which she and her husband lived. ‘You should have come back here much sooner, John,’ she said softly. It hurt to see the lines of strain in his face.
‘I thought about it and decided not to,’ he answered. ‘I needed to be on my own until I knew my mind.’
He’d always acted the same way, she thought. When hurt as a boy, either physically or mentally, he’d withdrawn and hugged his hurt to himself. In his case it denoted a strength of character, but she was sorry he was like that because the hurt dug so much deeper. ‘Has it been very bad?’ she asked, trying to make him talk about it and so release some of the pressures inside his mind.
‘Bad enough.’ He stared into space. ‘The funny thing is, I still sometimes find myself believing she’ll drive up in that broken-down Mini of hers. Then I have to remind myself that I went to her funeral.’ He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it to her, so deep in his own sad thoughts he forgot she never smoked. He lit the cigarette. ‘When it was all over, one of the things I had to do was work out my future plans.’ He focused his gaze on her. ‘You know, a thing like this makes one look at life in pretty harsh colours and I suddenly saw Sadacre Farm for what it really was: a place that couldn’t ever respond to modern intensive farming because it just wasn’t up to it.’
He rolled the cigarette round in his fingers. ‘Of course, I’d never imagined it could be a show place, but at the same time I’d gone on kidding myself I could eventually make of it something reasonable that would see us through the first few years until we got something better: rose-tinted spectacles, if you like. Her death made me throw those spectacles away and see the place just exactly as it was. A hopeless proposition.’
‘Don’t you think you may be painting everything a little too grey?’ she asked tentatively. ‘After a terrible tragedy …’
‘No.’
She remembered the pride with which, two years before, he’d told her about his breeding policy, the yields promised by the latest strains of grass especially bred for heavy land, and his other ideas which were all filled with the flush of enthusiastic ambition. Yet now he sounded like someone who’d reached the end of his working career.
‘I’ve packed the farm in,’ he said suddenly. ‘Given up the lease.’
‘Oh no!’ she said automatically, but with deep feeling.
‘It wasn’t only seeing the farm without my spectacles on. It was having to fight all the memories. The chip in the wall where she’d lost control of the feed barrow when she was trying to help me so we could get to the flicks in time for the last performance, the square of land where she planned a greenhouse, the cow with the crumpled horn which she kept saying ought to go up to the moon in the next spacecraft …’
�
�Do you mean you’re giving up all your stock as well?’
‘I’ve got rid of everything.’
She sighed.
‘You think I’ve been stupid?’ he asked. ‘But I couldn’t stay on there, not with all those memories, not when I no longer believed in my own ambitions.’
‘Of course not,’ she agreed, silently wondering whether he was right. If only she’d been with him to help, perhaps things would not have looked so black? He might not have reacted so drastically? ‘So what are you going to do now?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Start again somewhere else — if I can find anywhere else. Or get a job as a tractor-driver or cowman and hope to make farm manager one day.’
‘But not before you’ve had a break from everything and everybody here.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Get out of this country, John. There’s Aunt Elvina who lives somewhere in Mallorca. Go and stay with her. She’s a queer old stick, but it would be a complete change and that’s what you need.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
Typically, she was determined to get things moving as soon as possible. ‘Your father can phone her tonight. She always seemed to have a soft spot for him so I’m sure she’ll agree.’
He looked at his watch and just for a second he thought he must get a move on if he was to milk the cows on time.
CHAPTER III
‘HAROLD,’ said Elvina Woods in a pugnacious tone of voice, ‘is a fool. So’s that ninny of a wife of his.’
The portable gas heater had all three panels alight, yet even so Tatham was only just warm enough, largely because the sitting-room was fifteen feet high. A meeting between Elvina and Harold would be worth watching, he thought. Harold was pedantic and as cheerful as a picnic in the pouring rain. Elvina had all the charm of total unpredictability, was rough of tongue, ate and drank with gusto, and was tremendous fun provided one was not easily embarrassed.
‘He heard I was coming out here to live and then had the neck to give me his unasked-for advice. Don’t come because there’ll be another civil war. He’s the kind of man who sees civil wars under his bed … You can get me another brandy, John, with a little less soda this time.’
It would be difficult to add much less soda, he thought, as he stood up and took the glass from her. He went through to the kitchen and turned right into the larder. Both kitchen and larder were recent additions, built on to the back of the three-hundred-year-old finca. Typically, no damp course had been installed so that rising damp had blotched the walls with a grey-black fungus up to a height of a metre. According to the published statistics, Elvina had told him, it practically never rained on the island — unfortunately, the weather couldn’t read. He poured out a large brandy and added the merest splash of soda.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Elvina, on his return to the sitting-room, ‘we’re invited to the Eastmores’ reception. I said we’d go because I know she doesn’t want me to.’
‘That sounds a very good reason.’
‘When you’ve met her, you’ll realize it is.’
‘She’s the woman you often talk about?’
‘The infuriating thing is, one does often talk about her. She’s got what in my day was called a presence. She undoubtedly kept the natives in their place when she was the governor’s wife, but I can’t think why one of them didn’t cut her throat. God knows how Charles, her husband, puts up with her: after all, he’s human.’
‘But she isn’t?’
‘Emotionally, certainly not. She reminds me of a relative of mine who had an acute attack of appendicitis in church, but wouldn’t do a thing about it until the sermon was over, out of respect to God. I told her, if that’s how God wanted you to behave, He’s got some queer ideas.’
‘And how did she accept that?’
‘She called me a wicked woman and in her will took a whole paragraph explaining why she wasn’t leaving me a penny.’
‘The moral being, you should have praised her fortitude, not called her an ass!’
‘And no doubt Mary Eastmore believes she should be praised for doing her chilly duty when she tries to dictate all our lives by precept. But you know as well as I do, John, most of the trouble in this world is caused by people with a holier-than-thou attitude … Why the hell should I have my hair permed as if I was twenty? If I want it looking like a hayfield, that’s how I want it.’
‘Then it’s become as much an affectation as some you’re complaining about.’
She stared at him for several seconds, then laughed loudly. ‘By God, you’re a different chap from your Uncle Harold and his tribe. Bloody nincompoops, the lot of ’em.’
He wondered how the other English on the island referred to her. Judging by some of the people he’d met, only in tones of outraged incomprehension. She was an eccentric. She had a square face which looked much squarer than it need have done because she never bothered to go to a hairdresser but had Catalina, the maid, cut her hair when it grew long enough to bother her: her body was lumpy, but she wore little or no corseting and her clothes might all have been bought at a church jumble sale: her shoes were usually in a state of disrepair. The conventional response to such an appearance must be to name it slatternly. Yet he knew that she was no slattern. Her appearance reflected her casual disregard for unimportant matters (or what she considered unimportant) and her contempt for those who believed appearances were all that mattered. His mother had told him that she’d always been unusual, but her determination deliberately to flout conventional standards had only come after the relatively early death of her husband.
She lit a small cigar and smoked it with enjoyment. ‘Why did you suddenly go in for farming?’ she suddenly asked. ‘There can’t be a farmer in the family for generations back.’
The question had the unfortunate result of jerking his mind back to England and memories of Jennifer. ‘I’ve no idea why — it’s just what I wanted to do,’ he replied shortly.
‘Are you any good at it?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘So you don’t suffer from false modesty?’
‘Why should I?’
She regarded him shrewdly. She saw the lines of hurt around his strong mouth and knew he was remembering the past, but harsh experience had taught her that to talk about it might offer some relief. ‘Tell me about your farm.’
Initially, he’d intended to give her only the barest description. But as soon as he began to speak the words came in a rush. He’d known the farm was in poor heart, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and he’d thought that if he worked hard enough he’d make a go of it. He described the struggle it had been to get started, the sympathetic but all too realistic farm manager, the second-hand machinery which kept breaking down but was all he could afford, the cows which weren’t of top breeding because these cost so much more, the soil which seemed to possess every known disadvantage … And he described the final disillusionment which followed Jennifer’s death.
‘I can see why you farm and why you’re good,’ she said quietly, with a great depth of compassionate understanding. ‘But what happens now when you return home?’
‘I’ll look for another place to rent, or get a job on one and work up to a farm manager.’
‘Would that suit you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then why not buy a place that would reward you properly for all your work?’
‘Because of the money involved. As Uncle Harold said, only millionaires or fools farm nowadays.’
‘That’s just the kind of pretentious bilge he would mutter. How big a farm would you choose?’
‘As a dairy farm? Between a hundred and fifty and two hundred acres. Some people say that’s too small, but I reckon the future is in small units, just big enough to be economic and which can be run efficiently, rather than very large units which aren’t ever run really efficiently.’
‘And if you had two hundred acres, you’d make a success of things?’
‘Inside five years, I
’d have as good an average milk yield as anyone.’
‘I like a man who can make a sober assessment of his own capabilities,’ she said in mocking tones, but she smiled at him.
*
Upstairs at Ca’n Manin there was the solar — a storeroom in the old days-now a second sitting-room but seldom used, and leading off that two bedrooms. In the solar were two worn easy chairs, a bookcase filled with paperbacks, a Mallorquin inlaid sideboard that had a vaguely Egyptian air about it, and four carpets, two Ispahans, a Gum and a Mir, which were the only things Elvina had brought out from her home in England and which clearly held a special sentimental value for her.
He crossed one carpet — Elvina fussed over them, personally cleaning them and never letting Catalina go near them — opened the french windows and stepped out on to the balcony. It had become a routine for him to spend some time looking at the scene before going to bed: it held so much peace. To the left, across the intervening six kilometres of land, was the moon-streaked bay, ringed by mountains, the nearer clearly visible, the more distant ones ghostlike as they merged into the night. In the foreground, a kilometre away, was a hill on which stood a monastery: a place of pilgrimage, to those who had the energy and the wind to climb the twisting track, because there was a shrine in which was a casket containing the hip bone of a local saint. To the right of that hill was a second one, Puig Llueso, on which, and around which, was the town of Llueso — a village, by local definition, even though over seven thousand people lived there. To the right again was the valley along which ran the road to Creyola and its famous monastery, and this valley was guarded by a mountain which looked like a giant’s head, nose uppermost.
Peace, he thought, as a gentle breeze slid past his face, was something this island had to offer. Away from the beaches, the tourist traps, the frenetic conglomerations of hotels, cafes, bars, tea-rooms, curio shops, discotheques and night-clubs, the island seemed timeless. Elvina, divining his greatest need, had driven him to all her favourite places where the tourists seldom bothered to go: to woods where the air was heavy with the scent of pine and wild herbs, to the mountains where the terrain was moonlike, to the inland lanes where donkey carts rolled along the roads, their drivers snoozing.
Mistakenly in Mallorca (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 2