by Ajay Close
It never occurred to her he didn’t want children. It seemed so obvious: giving him a son to carry on the Broderick name was just one more thing Rosie couldn’t do for him. Not that Lili wanted to be tied to a baby, but the business was minting money, he could afford a nanny. (Some whiskery old boot, not a Scandi au pair.) She would never have plotted to ensnare him, but since nature had taken the matter out of her hands, it would have been wasteful not to turn the situation to advantage. And so she broke her news.
How could he be so proud of her one minute, and look so cold the next? Was she sure? ‘Absolutely certain.’ He made an excuse to go outside, said he’d left something in the van. When he came back, his eyes were a thousand miles away. She told him he could stop looking at her as if she were trying to blackmail him up the aisle: he was the one who’d knocked her up. Did he know how many parts there were for pregnant women? Precisely none, so thanks very much. She used to find it sexy when he lost his temper, the way his shouting stirred her bones. He had never laid hands on her in anger, unlike some. Lili has had her share of slaps over the years, but she’d never been really frightened. Until that night.
Afterwards he sent roses, and left her alone. She must have walked into a dozen phone boxes, but she knew better than to dial his number. He had to think he’d lost her. At last he got in touch. They met in the Café Royal. He handed over an envelope and ordered champagne. If she’d stuck to her side of the bargain, perhaps she’d with him now. Perhaps – but probably not. The bottle of Moet, his high spirits, that bundle of ten pound notes: the kiss-off. No sooner has she acknow-ledged it than her mind veers away. All is not lost. Yes, she made a mistake or two, but the path of true love and all that. She always knew she would have to play the long game. It could yet come right, if she holds her nerve and carries on writing her funny, sexy letters. She heard from him the other day. A postcard of the Forth Bridge in an envelope with a second-class stamp. The sight of her name in his handwriting went through her like a thousand volts. Rosie had died! Or he’d walked out! But when she turned the card over, there was no message, just three kisses on the back.
Deep in these thoughts, she doesn’t hear the Land Rover until it brakes alongside her.
‘You’ve been up the top field?’
Jake. He doesn’t cut the engine, preferring to address her at the top of his lungs through the open window.
‘You think that gate’s there for decoration? When you open it, you shut it behind you—’
He has caught her leaving the door of the black barn unlatched a couple of times recently, so she knows why he would blame her. She has no idea whether he is right. She remembers stepping around the S-H-one-T on her way across the field, but the moment she passed through the gate is a blank.
‘There’s stirks all over. Munro’s had them in his tatties. I’ve just had the police on, they’re on the fucking road—’
Even if it is her fault, what gives him the right to shout like this, flecks of spittle flying from his lips? For Lili, anger is an intimate privilege. She could no more lose her temper with a stranger than she could take one into her bed.
‘We’re trying to make a living here, it’s not a holiday camp for us. By the time you’re up I’ve been at it four hours: you think I’ve nothing better to do than follow you round shutting gates after you?’
‘I DIDN’T LEAVE YOUR GATE OPEN!’
He blinks in surprise.
They see each other every day, at least from a distance, but it doesn’t get any easier. Nothing she does escapes his notice. Brushing her hand across a seat as she sits down. Pushing the gristle to the side of her plate before feeding it to the spaniel under the table. She thinks of the rabbits transfixed in the headlight’s beam while he picks them off with the shotgun. Do they, too, detect a sort of homage in his attention? So much animosity, and all for her.
‘If you want me to leave, just tell me.’
He wasn’t expecting this either.
Seeing that she has the advantage, she says, ‘I didn’t deliberately seek you out.’
‘But you stayed.’
It’s true. And her presence will be a constant reminder to him.
‘It must be a hard thing to live with,’ she says, ‘afterwards.’
Such a naked look on his face. Like pulling off a mask. ‘Not when you’ve no choice.’
‘But there’s always a choice,’ she meets his eye, ‘isn’t there?’
‘Maybe for folk like you.’
‘You have no idea of the price I’m paying.’
Now she, too, is exposed, in all her self-pity. She waits for some sardonic remark. He pushes up his sleeve to scratch his arm. Where it has been screened from the sun, his melanous skin is the colour of brambles in milk.
She says, ‘I’ll pack tonight and leave first thing tomorrow—’
His face shows nothing.
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘It’s my mother’s house. It’s up to her who stays here.’
‘But you want me out.’
‘I don’t care.’
She laughs softly. ‘Oh, I think you do.’
She is turning away when he blurts out, ‘She’s got used to having the extra money.’
And who knows, perhaps she has.
The border collie comes around the corner, head down, tail wagging. She crouches to stroke the soft fur under his muzzle. His master watches disapprovingly through the open window. Sam’s a working dog, not a pet. Foreman, herdman, pig man, sheepdog: everyone here has a job to do. Lili feels the sudden lowering of spirits that comes and goes these days. The summer half-over. Kisses on a card. Sam’s doggy ecstasy at every pat and stroke. And the other reason, of course.
‘If I stay,’ she says, ‘it’s on one condition. You don’t tell your mother I’m pregnant.’
Barley
I turned into the farmyard, braking just in time to spare the foxhound that charged under my wheels, barking. A farmhand emerged from the barn and shouted at the dog but did not wait to see me safely out of the car, so I stayed put, sweltering in the glare through the windscreen. I wasn’t sure I could spend six weeks here, even to make Frankie eat his words. When it was this hot in Glasgow I swam a few laps or strolled down the supermarket chilled goods aisle. Here, all I could do was open the window.
The foxhound leapt at the gap, its snapping teeth heart-stoppingly close to my face.
A woman’s voice bellowed, ‘Get down!’
That evening I would turn this scene into a story (leaving out the claws skittering over the BMW’s paintwork), making a punch-line of the moment when I emerged from the car and the dog licked my toes. The woman who’d come out of the farmhouse stood five feet eleven in her wellingtons. Her upper arms suggested white pudding vacuum-packed in its sheep-gut sleeve. Her wrists had the heft of honey-glazed hams. Everything about her was outsize: that meaty face under its greying fringe, the brown plait as thick as my arm, her oddly square front teeth. The wolf dressed up as grandmama, I thought, and had to remind myself I was no Little Red Riding Hood. We both qualified for the label ‘middle-aged’.
‘Can I help you?’
She sounded like Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell. I wondered what she was doing befriending someone like Nikki.
‘You must be Margo.’
‘And you are?’
‘Freya.’ I smiled. ‘Freya Cavalle.’
‘Pleased to meet you Freya,’ she said as if she’d never heard the name before. ‘I suppose you’re wanting a look round.’
Since I knew nothing of farming, most of what she told me over the next thirty minutes was so much wasted breath, but I learned a lot about Margo. Her scorn for supermarket buyers, government paper-pushers and ‘organic fanatics’. Her scepticism about nut allergies and wheat intolerance. Her disgust at the proliferation of play barns and petting sheds. As a visitor, I was helpless in the torrent of her opinions, but I foresaw no problem as a paying guest. I would be civil at the table and spend the rest o
f my time alone, walking leafy lanes, cooling my feet in babbling burns, whatever it was people did in the country. As we crossed the farmyard she pointed out the grain store, the hay barns, the silage clamp (which I’d taken for a tyre dump), the milking parlour, tractor shed and byre. These would be my landmarks. Only the Georgian farmhouse had any appeal. I could see it stripped of its various off-shoots and lean-tos, its stone lintels picked out in Farrow and Ball paint. Beyond the silage clamp was an unfenced patch of grass. We were almost upon it when I noticed the sheep lying on its side. Its fleece recalled those knitted dishcloths, dotted with tea leaves and toast crumbs, found beside the sink in a certain kind of theatrical boarding house. Flies pulsed on the jellied camber of each eye. I wasn’t used to dead things and my oh was tinged with shock.
‘It was perfectly all right last night. I get up this morning, and…’ Margo gestured exasperatedly at the corpse. ‘Wretched animals, more trouble than they’re worth. The first sign of illness is sudden death. And that’s after you’ve vaccinated them, trimmed their hooves, sprayed them for fly strike and three kinds of foot rot. I wouldn’t bother with them, only something’s got to eat the grass.’
I nearly lost my nerve then. It was a farm: a place of blood and excrement and a million strains of bacteria that could harm a growing foetus. But farmers had children, and they seemed to survive.
Margo flapped the hem of her shirt, wafting air towards her breasts. ‘You’ll be from the city, I suppose.’
‘If you mean do I know one end of a sheep from the other, I don’t,’ I admitted.
‘No shame in ignorance, if you know you’re ignorant. It’s the goons who expect the country to be just like the town who get my goat. Turning up with their clipboards and their twenty-page forms. Terrified we’re going to track dirt into the grain store on our wellies. No good telling them it grows in a bloody field. In Canada, they harvest it and keep it in a pile on the side of the road.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘What do you do, Freya?’
Something about her brought out the tease in me. ‘I’m a civil service paper-pusher.’
‘For the Min of Ag?’
It was called Rural Affairs these days but I bit back the impulse to correct her.
‘No, I’m working on a cross-departmental project to make government more transparent.’
‘Transparently incompetent, if you ask me.’
‘Well, that’s a start.’
She didn’t smile.
Over-revving engines were the soundtrack of my daily life, along with taxi horns and the bleep of reversing trucks. At first I hardly noticed the noise. Then it struck me that we were in rural Perthshire and the throaty roar was getting louder. I turned to see an electric-blue sports saloon with pram-handle spoiler and stainless-steel exhausts disappearing around the side of the barn, where the driver cut the engine.
‘So what brings you here?’ Margo asked.
‘Did Nikki not tell you?’
‘She may have mentioned something.’ For the first time those big teeth showed in amusement. ‘I don’t always listen.’
It was obvious Nikki had not warned her to expect me, had not mentioned our meeting at the clinic, for all I knew had not told Margo she was attending the clinic at all. Part of what had made this visit possible was the relief of not having to explain. Nikki would have put her in the picture, she would understand. But she understood nothing.
‘I’m having treatment at the fertility clinic down the road.’
I knew exactly what she would be thinking. I’d had my fun and left it too late. Perhaps too much fun. There were all sorts of streptococcal reprisals for women too generous with their favours. Or else I was one of those spinsters who’d snared someone else’s man, now his children were grown, and was determined to put him through nappies and night feeds all over again. Mostly people squeaked politely, but from time to time I would be told how hard it was on a kid having a mother the age of every other kid’s granny. Frankie said I should tell them to mind their own business, but the continuation of the species was everybody’s business, and from the perspective of the species I was selfish. What could I say? Objectively I agreed with them, but I wasn’t feeling very objective in those days.
There was a hummock on the other side of the patch of grass. It had the look of a Stone Age barrow. On its summit grew seven Scots pines, each with a fat foreshortened shadow at the base of its trunk. I climbed this hill with Margo.
‘My mother had me when she was forty-six,’ she said.
We were barely five metres above the surrounding land. I wasn’t expecting such a view. Blue sky, yellow fields, a bright green combine in a cloud of biscuit-coloured dust. Further off, a tractor was ploughing, trailing a long black-and-white streamer. I guessed there would be some bloodthirsty explanation but, at this distance, the crows and gulls seemed to be braiding in an intricate airborn dance. My eyes returned to the barley, all the millions of seeds brought to this single state of ripeness.
‘Forty-six?’ I said.
‘And I wasn’t the last.’
‘How much for full board?’
‘I usually just do bed and breakfast.’ She wafted her shirt again and I glimpsed her barrel belly, white as lard. ‘Shall we say forty pounds a day?’
Behind me, a voice said, ‘Better make it fifty.’
It was the cocky boy from the clinic, Nikki’s husband. I recognised his tricksy tuft of beard.
He joined us on the hill top. ‘Might as well make a profit out of something this year.’
Margo turned to me. ‘This is Christopher, my son, a position he holds for life. Unlike his tenure as farm manager, which is on a very shaky nail.’
I can’t fully explain what happened next. There were so many reasons for it not to happen. What I knew about the boy, what the boy knew about me, the embarrassing question of money, being caught in the middle of a family spat. Despite all this, he dipped his head and I raised mine and somewhere in the middle our eyes met.
‘And you are?’ he said.
‘Three hundred and fifty quid a week, cash in hand.’
It had been a long time since anyone had grinned at me like that. ‘How soon can you move in?’
Margo looked between us with narrowed eyes. She was no fool. ‘I suppose forty-five’s not unreasonable.’
‘Wendy charges fifty,’ he said, ‘and you can’t swing a cat in her place.’
‘That’ll be why she’s empty nine weeks out of ten.’
‘Fifty’s fine,’ I cut in.
She gave me a severe look. ‘I suppose it’s the taxpayer who’s footing the bill, in the end.’
And that was how I became a lodger at Margo’s farm.
He called himself Kit, I remembered on the drive home. He seemed subtly different from my first sight of him in the clinic, or perhaps it was just the presence of his mother, the way she behaved as if she were the only woman in his life.
Bull
The hall was vast as an aircraft hangar, its acoustics playing havoc with the incantatory gabble of the auctioneer. For a moment I wanted Lilias beside me. She would have loved the spectacle. And I would have found myself hating it, so, on second thoughts, I was glad she wasn’t there. I filed past the stalls, inspecting the sleepy merchandise bedded down in the yellowest straw I had ever seen. Who would have thought a shed full of beef could look so glamorous, pelts back-combed into a blond tousle, a tufted end brushed into each platinum tail? Aisle after aisle of these beauties, their cloven hooves buffed to oyster, the puckered arsehole washed baby-doll pink, a fetching tartan ribbon around the wattled neck, and still the sellers fussed with water spray and curry comb.
We had come to buy a replacement for Virgil, who after ten years’ rutting to order showed more interest in a good scratch. Margo was dressed to kill in a new pair of corduroys, her iron-grey plait brushed loose. Kit had swapped the T-shirt and denims that flattered his lanky grace for a tweed jacket I guessed had belonged to his father. I too had made the effort, with a cream
sweater that rendered me almost as radiant as the bulls. Not that anyone noticed. Any appreciative glances were kept for the Charolais, who did seem almost womanish, with their huge hind quarters and indolent swaying walk, peering at the world with a moistly myopic gaze. Only the weighted sacks between their back legs hinted at another story.