‘Perhaps I should get Leith up tomorrow,’ said Dadda, leaning over the wall to look at the ram. ‘He said to give it a few days. What do you think?’
‘I think you’re trying to change the subject, Dadda.’
‘I weren’t sure if you were being serious,’ he said.
‘Of course I’m being serious,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to stop us living here.’
‘Apart from your lass trying to get up and down the ladder to the attic when she’s the size of a bloody whale.’
‘We could have the Gaffer’s old room,’ I said.
‘Oh aye,’ said Dadda, a still-drunk smile on his lips. ‘I can just see her agreeing to that.’
‘But unless there’s someone to take on the farm,’ I said, ‘it’ll go when you do. Like Angela said.’
‘And I told you that I’ll be around a while longer yet,’ said Dadda.
‘We have to talk about it, though, don’t we?’ I said. ‘Now that the Gaffer’s gone?’
‘Fuckin’ hell, John,’ he said. ‘The soil hasn’t settled on him yet. There’ll be time enough for all that.’
‘Dadda, you know you can’t put things like that off.’
‘Look, just because I’ve got a bit of a cough doesn’t mean you’re going to find me stiff and cold tomorrow morning.’
‘It’s not about your chest, Dadda,’ I said. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘What then?’
‘Look, me and Kat will have a child soon. Wouldn’t you rather we raised it here?’
‘What is there here for a kiddie, for Christ’s sake?’ he said.
‘It was good enough for me,’ I said.
‘Were it?’ he said.
He looked at me and then back at the ram.
‘You’ve been gone too long, John,’ he said. ‘Coming here twice a year isn’t enough. I don’t care what Angela said, she were wrong. Farming’s not in the blood, it’s in your hands. You’ve forgotten what it’s like day in day out. You can’t just drift back to the valley as if you’ve never been away.’
‘Let me come with you to find the deer tomorrow,’ I said.
‘I’ll be all right on my own,’ he said. ‘It’s not summat you can do just like that.’
‘So, show me,’ I said. ‘Teach me.’
‘Aye, well, I did try once,’ he said.
He turned his attention to the ram again and waited for me to close the door.
∾
I’d timed it badly, that was all. I should have waited until he’d sobered up properly. He wasn’t thinking straight. He wasn’t thinking about anything other than Gathering and his poorly ram and that was understandable. But the future wasn’t going to fade like the past. Quite the opposite. It would edge towards him and one day catch him unaware if he wasn’t careful. He knew as well as everyone else here that a wall built today saves a flood tomorrow.
Fly and Musket came out and sniffed at my fingers. They were restless and pining, unwilling to leave me alone until I got closer to the house. They both stopped at the rectangle of light that came from the kitchen window and sat down, cocking their ears to the sounds coming from inside.
‘It’s only Kat,’ I said, but when she started calling for me, the two dogs turned away and went to find the darkness of their kennels.
‘Oh God,’ she said, as I came into the kitchen. ‘It’s just as bad down here.’
‘What is?’
‘That disgusting smell,’ she said.
‘Kat, we’re on a farm,’ I said. ‘You have to expect there to be smells.’
‘Perhaps you’re used to it,’ she said.
‘What is it, manure?’ I said.
‘No, it’s not manure,’ she said. ‘I can cope with the smell of manure. It’s like something’s died. No, like something that’s been dead a long time. You remember that toilet in Spain?’
A shack with a hole in the back streets of some parched little village on the edge of the Tabernas Desert. San Lucas? San Federico? And down in the pit a drowned dog festered with a half-brick tied to its collar.
‘I think I’d be able to smell it if it was as bad as that,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it’s coming from outside,’ said Kat. ‘Go and see, will you?’
‘I’ve just come across the yard,’ I said. ‘I’d have noticed.’
‘Please, John,’ she said.
I went out with a torch and looked in the coop against the wall of the house, thinking that perhaps something had died in there. But the chickens were all feathers and terror as the light swept across them.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said, when I went back in and closed the door.
‘Don’t say it like that,’ she said. ‘I’m serious. Something’s rotting somewhere.’
She looked under the sink, opened the lid of the rubbish bin, sniffed her palms, pulled open the neck of her dress.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘It’s on my clothes. It’s on my skin.’
After putting her dress into the washing machine, I ran a bath for her and she got in while it was hotter than she would normally have it to try and get rid of the smell. She slid her body under the water to lie chastely beneath a floating blanket of foam.
‘Better?’ I said and she nodded.
‘What was it, do you think?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Doesn’t pregnancy do something to your sense of smell?’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ she said and rubbed the soap against her thigh where the heat had brought out her scars.
‘I think it might just be one of those things you’ll have to get used to,’ I said. ‘Like morning sickness.’
She put her hand on her stomach.
‘How can something so small make me feel so strange?’ she said.
‘It won’t be for ever,’ I said.
‘I’ll pop at some point, will I?’ she said.
‘You’ll have to,’ I said. ‘You’ll want to.’
‘Do you really have to go out tomorrow?’ she said.
‘Dadda can’t manage on his own,’ I said. ‘He needs someone with him.’
‘Does he?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem so.’
‘Don’t expect him to admit to it, Kat,’ I said. ‘He’d rather work himself to death before he asked for help.’
‘You make that sound like a virtue,’ she said, but quickly turned herself in the bath and apologised with a wet, suddy hand on my arm.
‘I’d just feel better if you were here,’ she said. ‘Aren’t there jobs you can do on the farm?’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’ll all be coming over here to make the Ram’s Crown tomorrow. Give them a hand. Get to know them a bit.’
‘The Ram’s Crown?’
‘They’ll show you what to do,’ I said.
‘I don’t think Liz will have the patience to teach me anything,’ said Kat.
‘She does like you, you know.’
‘John, don’t be patronising,’ she said. ‘Liz couldn’t have made it any more obvious at the wake that she thinks I’m an idiot.’
‘She was cross with Grace, not you,’ I said.
Kat put her chin on my forearm.
‘But these deer,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go and shoot them, can you?’
‘It’s a job that needs to be done, Kat,’ I said. ‘Like any other on the farm.’
‘A job?’ she said.
‘What did you expect it was going to be like here?’ I said. ‘Roses round the door and cows in the buttercups?’
She sat up and leaned forward to wash her feet. ‘Of course not,’ she said, even though deep down I think she’d hoped to come to the farm and find Dadda in mustard tweeds like a jolly squire.
‘Then what’s wrong?’ I said.
The soapy water ran down the nubble of her spine as she sponged the back of her neck.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Was it Ken Sturzaker?’ I said. ‘Because you don’t need to worry about him. He won’t bother us up here.’
‘N
o, it’s not him,’ said Kat. ‘It’s Grace.’
‘But she seemed so much better at the wake,’ I said. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘She’d put something in the locket I gave her,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s good,’ I said. ‘At least she’s making use of it.’
‘John, she had hair in there,’ said Kat. ‘The Gaffer’s hair.’
‘Is that all?’ I said. ‘You had me worried.’
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said. ‘You must admit it’s a bit macabre.’
‘She didn’t cut it off post-mortem, Kat,’ I said.
‘He gave it to her while he was alive?’
‘It’s a token of affection,’ I said. ‘It’s not that unusual here.’
People had always exchanged locks of hair in the Endlands. Brothers and sisters; ageing friends; furtive lovers; schoolchildren finalising some truce in the playground.
Back before the Gaffer’s day, when wedding rings were too expensive, folk from the Endlands would often seal the deal before the priest by winding strands of each other’s hair around their fingers instead. Or if someone was getting on in years, as the Gaffer had been, then they might pass on one of their curls while they still had any to give. I told Kat that if she went to Brownlee Hall, she’d be able to see the one Nathaniel Arncliffe presented to his son in his last days. A sprig of white bristles pressed under the glass of a gilt-edged frame, with his dates engraved into a copper plate beneath.
He’d passed away teeming with cancer in 1845 at the age of seventy-two, a life that he insisted had been lengthened beyond all expectation by the clean air of Underclough and God’s approval of his work. By that time, his son, Richard, had been the de facto manager of the mill for some years, and when Nathaniel died he took the opportunity to make the changes that had always been endearingly resisted. The world was not the same now as it had been when his father had arrived in Underclough, and personal sentiment had to be cut with economic truth. The reality was that all over the West Riding there were mills that could process from fleece to cloth and if Arncliffe’s did not expand, if it were not mechanised, then it would close and the heart of the village would stop beating.
Provision would have to be made for three times as many workers. A school would be needed for their children. The lane improved for better access up and down the valley. By this time, Edgar Denning’s son, Enoch, had inherited the estate and the letters that Richard had written to him requesting to buy the land that he needed for his great endeavour were there in a glass cabinet at Brownlee Hall, full of the observations he’d made during his visits to the rookeries in mill towns across the north of England. He described the brimming cesspools, offered lists of diseases and numbers of dead infants. Every correspondence was crammed with the well-turned aphorisms that men like Richard Arncliffe, men with posterity as well as charity on their minds, took great pride in constructing.
It is those who suffer most who profit least from profit.
An industry that makes corpses of its workforce throws water on its own coals.
There is no greater inheritance one can give or receive than education.
And so on.
After several months of discussion, Enoch finally agreed, once the price had been wrangled upwards, naturally, and the tenterhooks in the yard were dismantled and weaving sheds built there instead. The mill race—where Lennie Sturzaker would wash up almost a century and a half later—was constructed to pep the river water with gravity as well as thrust, so that it would turn the bigger wheel required to drive the power-looms and carding machines and slubbing billys. And those men with twisted wrists in the finishing room now operated water-powered shears to snip the tufts from the nap.
As the village had grown during Nathaniel’s time, there had been other enterprising fellows with money to invest in the valley. The abattoir had opened the year Victoria was born and a company from Lancaster had operated a saw-mill by Sullom Wood for a few years before the practicalities of transporting the timber proved too expensive. The Croppers’ Arms had been built in 1830—the year is still etched into the lintel—and sat opposite the church that Richard continued to repair. An organ was installed. The priest’s home, the middlemost of the Nine Cottages, was given a new roof. And within a year of him taking on his father’s mantle proper, Richard had erected a statue of St Michael and the serpent within view of the lounge bar windows, so that on Saturday nights, when the last shift ended for the Sabbath, the weavers and carders and cloth-dressers might be reminded that the Devil came in many forms and go home to the good book instead.
Six days a week, the valley rang with the lucrative clatter of the looms, making the peace of a Sunday morning all the sweeter when it came. A day to consider profit of a different kind, one that could not necessarily be counted in pounds, shillings and pence. The fresh smell of woodland, the discreet, efficient sanitation, the diet of homegrown fruit and vegetables meant that the premature mortality of infants and geriatrics that had plagued every slum from Liverpool to Newcastle was virtually non-existent in Underclough. There was little in the way of sedition either. Not like there was in the towns. Places of brick and smoke brought out the worst in people. We were not bees or worker ants, said Richard, indifferent about living in a crush as the tenement and the workhouse demanded, nor were we mushrooms blindly soaking up darkness and wilting away again. We needed space and we needed light. And here in the valley, after Mass, after a good lunch, the millworkers could walk on the fells and the moors, they could swim in the Briar and forage in the Wood for whatever the season offered. They could live as the English should live: with the soil under their feet, and a river in their ear.
∾
Kat got out of the bath and dried herself and padded her skin with talc. I began to wonder if Angela might be right about her body. Her boyish hips and her soft little span of abdomen didn’t look as though they could possibly cradle a full-term baby.
But she would change, she would swell as the baby swelled. That tummy would balloon, and her little breasts, hanging like apples now as she bent to towel her knees, would grow into gourds.
‘You’ll look good when you get fat,’ I said.
‘Can’t you say maternal?’ she said.
‘When you get maternal, then.’
‘I can’t even imagine what I’ll look like in seven months,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine being weighed down by him.’
‘It’ll happen,’ I said.
‘And then when I’ve got used to him being there,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to push him out.’
‘Are you worried about it?’ I said. ‘The birth?’
‘Only a man could ask that question,’ she said.
‘So, what’s the answer?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think that I’ll be all right but then when I hear what other women have gone through I’m not sure. Twelve hours Liz said it was with Grace.’
‘I’ll be there with you,’ I said.
Not that holding her hand would deliver her from the pain, of course.
‘I take it you were born here in the house?’ she said.
‘I was,’ I said.
‘That was brave of your mum,’ she said.
‘Everyone did it then,’ I said. ‘There were plenty of folk to help.’
‘I think I’d prefer a room full of nurses.’
‘I turned out all right,’ I said.
‘You’re tough as old boots, aren’t you?’ she said and stepped into her pyjama bottoms. ‘It must be all that farming in your blood.’
‘What’s making you laugh?’ I said.
‘The thought of us living here,’ said Kat. ‘Like Angela said.’
‘Would it be so bad?’ I said.
‘Can you imagine it?’
‘Can’t you?’
‘Oh, John, that’s not why you’ve brought me here, is it?’ she said, touching my face. ‘Did you want me to fall in love with the place?’
‘I want you to see that it’s
important to keep the farm going,’ I said.
‘That’s your dad’s job.’
‘I mean when he’s not around any more,’ I said. ‘You’re still laughing.’
‘I’m just trying to picture Mum’s face,’ said Kat, ‘when we tell her that we’re going to raise her grandson on a farm.’
‘It’d be good for him,’ I said.
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Look at Grace. She’s miserable. I don’t want our boy to be like that.’
‘Grace is like that because of Liz and Jeff,’ I said. ‘We’re not the same as them, are we?’
‘Who knows what we’d turn into if we stayed here,’ said Kat.
‘Angela was right, though,’ I said. ‘The farm is ours as much as it’s Dadda’s.’
‘I’m not sure your dad would agree,’ said Kat.
‘Maybe not, but it’s true,’ I said.
‘It will be yours one day,’ she said, combing the wetness out of her hair. ‘But not yet. Can’t we talk about it when it happens?’
When Dadda’s time was up, the farm would pass to me, of course, but who was to say when that might be? Twenty or thirty years might go by and then Kat and I would be middle-aged and our boy might well be off finding his own path. The farm would mean nothing to him and I knew that Kat wouldn’t want to start a new life here as we stumbled towards pension age. No, we would have to move to the Endlands soon, or we’d never come at all.
The Moors
It rained again in the night but by the morning the clouds were high and grey and a hard wind was roaming the Endlands. It broke like water on the fells and spilled in all directions, shivering the puddles in the yard and racing upwards to the rowan trees and the holly bushes. There was a smell of brine to it too; it was twenty miles to the coast but at this time of year storms could lick off the brackish surface and bring it far inland, seasoning the hills and the moors. After the sweet of the summer came the salt of the autumn.
Driving over the Moss, the track was flooded in places and Dadda switched on the wipers to clear the filthy spray off the windscreen. It wouldn’t be long until the door closed on the year and the whole place became inaccessible. But by then we wouldn’t need to go there anyway. All the sheep would be down off the moors and the Devil would be back in his hole.
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