by Kirsty Eyre
‘Sorry.’ I squeeze her to my chest. ‘I promised I’d go back to the farm this weekend. My uncle’s renewing his wedding vows.’
‘Is that a British thing?’
I look at the carpet. ‘It’s an Uncle Pete thing. It normally means he’s slept with someone.’
‘For real?’
‘Honestly, it’s awful, but I’ve promised I’ll go and they’re having a bit of a party, so …’
She kisses me on the lips. ‘I also love parties.’
I feel like I’m in a rollercoaster carriage, which has heaved its way slowly up an impossibly steep slope and is now poised at the top, ready to drop. Suspended somewhere between pleasure and pain, excitement and trepidation, my stomach somersaults backwards and forwards with the thrill and dread of letting go. What’s the matter with me? The goddess that is Joely Chevalier is asking to come home with me and here I am, having one of my psycho-meltdowns.
The rollercoaster plummets. ‘Would you like to join me?’
She smiles. ‘I’d love to.’
I’m like a burst dam, feelings forcing their way out of every tiny crack until my defence mechanism crumbles, and a torrent of emotions I haven’t felt for years gush forth – excitement, apprehension, joy, fear, love, lust. Man, was it worth the wait.
As our taxi winds its way up hill and down dale, I try to see the world through Joely’s eyes: stone-faced buildings morph into stony-faced sheep huddled in fields, their backs to the unrelenting wind, coats blown into rosettes of knotted wool. Fields roll into weather-torn moorland, a horizon of grey, gold and purple. Bracken bows. Heather dances. A grouse squawks like a hooter from a lump of granite rock. The temperature dips. We bounce over potholes, and Kiss FM thankfully goes out of range.
On the final stretch, we get stuck behind a tractor, our journey peaking at the breakneck speed of fifteen miles an hour. A pheasant struts into the road, a flash of red around its eye, the shine of teal feathers blown against its copper breast. It dips into the hedgerow as half a dozen motorbikes roar up the hill towards us.
‘Bikers love it up here,’ I say to Joely.
She stares out of the window, hands clasped tightly over the bag in her lap, and says nothing.
The terrain changes as we climb higher, tufts of grass replaced by spongy blankets of sphagnum moss and sulphur-yellow spikes of bog asphodel. Cotton grass buffets in the strong wind. Swaledale sheep bleat at the roadside. Higher up still, small red dots become rock climbers on Baslow Edge, a vast gritstone escarpment, dramatic in both height and width, upon which Highland cattle rove freely.
‘Ça va?’ I ask, squeezing her hand.
‘Nerveuse.’
‘It’ll be fine.’ I run my thumb over hers, wondering whether it will be. The dynamics of my family are a minefield. Dad should be pretty straightforward, but Grandma probably won’t allow herself to understand a word Joely says on account of her being ‘foreign’. Joely, on the other hand, will probably perceive both of them as quaint Jean de Florette-type characters and read imagined depth into their simplicity, in a way that lightbulbs are regarded as award-winning installations at the Tate gallery.
A heavy stench of manure penetrates the windows as we climb the hill out of Baslow. The little wooden sign welcoming us to ‘Fernbrook Farm’ is caked in bird poo. Our taxi rumbles up the dirt track to the farm, flanked by monochrome masses of muscle grazing on rich green grass. An enormous black face hangs over the stone wall, a single white spot centred on a broad hulk of forehead.
‘Big Dot,’ I say excitedly. ‘No wait! Little Dot.’
‘The cow?’ Joely bites the inside of her cheek and inspects her nails.
I nod, explaining how Dad and I once rescued her from a deep bog, my anecdote a little more sprawling and a lot less humorous than I’d intended.
‘I don’t trust cows,’ Joely says. ‘Their noses are always wet.’
‘That’s because they sweat through their nose,’ I say.
She holds onto her bag even tighter.
The meadow stretches out beyond; a place where we used to picnic on fresh strawberries, baguettes and homemade flapjack with the farm workers and their families back in the day when dairy was a thriving business with a community feel. The old treehouse Lorna and I used to play in has gone, and there’s no trace of the old barn, where we used to do gymnastics, or the pillar outside we used as a third person to hold the elastic in French skipping – that plot of land now belongs to a sheep farmer, who never uses it. Gone are the days when truck after truck came and went and the five-hundred-strong herd took over the entire hillside. We must be down to a third of what we were, the cows scattered over just two fields.
We pull up at the far end of the yard next to Grandpa’s rusty old Cropmaster tractor, which died long before he did; a tangle of metal barely visible through the mass of unruly nettles and thick brambles that have grown over it, into it and around it, the cabin shell now home to a family of robins.
‘This is it?’ Joely looks up at the house, and frowns. ‘The farm is enormous, but the house is tiny.’
I’ve never thought of it like that before. It’s simply home.
Joely’s long, bronzed legs swing out of the taxi, her cork wedge heels crunching on the gravel of the potholed yard. She rocks cut-off denim shorts and a cropped pop-art T-shirt with the print of a black-and-white distorted cow’s face on the front, her red polka-dot Cath Kidston wheelie case bucking and rumbling over brick ends and hen feed.
Sun beats down on the corrugated-iron milking shed, a hive of activity at dawn yet now silent, save for the odd creak of expanding metal and scuffle of hen claws on concrete. Dust dances in shafts of sunlight streaming in through broken roof panels. There’s no sign of Grandma. Instead, a scrap of paper torn off last year’s RSPB British Birds calendar is taped to the porch door of the house, declaring, ‘Back in 5, dinner’s in the oven.’
Speedo barks. I push open the front door and he rushes full pelt towards us, his tail knocking Grandma’s umbrella off the hallway table. Good old Speedo! He must be ten now. I pat him all over and ruffle his ears, which always feel colder and softer than I expect.
Joely ducks behind me. ‘You have a dog?’
‘Don’t worry, he’s friendly.’ I grab his cracked leather collar and pull him back, muddy Rhodesian Ridgeback paw prints stamped all over my jeans.
Speedo squeaks, his tail thwacking against Joely’s bare legs.
‘He jumps?’ she says, pinned to the wall.
‘He’s just excited!’ I tickle his ears. ‘He’ll leave you alone in a bit.’
The smell of roast lamb and rosemary infuses the house. I hang Joely’s coat in the cupboard under the stairs while she locks eyes with the stuffed partridge on the hallway chest.
‘Dégueulasse,’ she mutters, pulling a face akin to having discovered a shit in her shoe, and I feel like I did at primary school when I knew I’d taken Annabel Gallagher’s denim jacket home instead of my own: complicit.
‘It was my great-granddad’s. No idea why they keep it.’
The porch door judders open. ‘Where’s my Billie Goat?’ Grandma hands me a mesh shopping bag of vegetables. She hugs me tightly to her chest, her kind eyes smiling under a tangled brow. Her skin smells of cooking apples and talcum powder.
Joely stands at my side, her long arms dangling redundantly.
‘Grandma, this is Joely. Joely, this is my grandma, Kathleen.’
Grandma smiles and, without a shred of subtlety, assesses Joely’s cropped cow-print T-shirt. The arches of my feet curl.
Joely smiles awkwardly. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘All the way from Paris, hey?’ Grandma chuckles.
‘London,’ I counter. ‘She lives just outside London.’
A new painting catches my eye behind her head, hanging above the radiator in the hallway; a kaleidoscope of terracotta spirals and blue animal footprints. Grandma notes my slightly astonished look – we haven’t had new things in here for as long as
I can remember.
‘Beatrice’s grandson brought it back from Alice Springs.’ Grandma shunts us into the kitchen with the Radio Times. She takes three packets of Safeguard cattle wormer out of her enormous pockets and dumps them on the pine table. ‘Says it’s aboriginal, though I reckon it’s a print.’ She winks, the joke lost on Joely.
‘Beatrice is a good friend of Grandma’s,’ I explain.
Joely nods. ‘I remember you telling me in the sauna.’
Grandma’s eyes widen. She fiddles with the mole behind her ear in the way that she does when she’s anticipating the electricity bill.
‘Fitness First is not that kind of sauna, Grandma,’ I clarify.
Grandma jams two pyramid teabags into her country cottage teapot and waits for the kettle to boil.
Joely’s eyes dart around the kitchen to a row of off-white thermals hanging from the ceiling airer. ‘I’m sorry to be impolite, but do you have WiFi?’
Grandma opens the cutlery drawer and wipes flour off a laminated copy of the passcode with a wet dishcloth and hands it to Joely.
‘Thank you,’ Joely says.
I take Joely’s case and show her upstairs. The house feels the same as ever, its stone floor cold underfoot, its exposed brickwork crumbly and scratchy. The landing wall, unevenly plastered by Dad ten years ago, displays several floor-to-ceiling forked cracks. Money Box blares from a pocket-sized radio in the bathroom and the whole upstairs stinks of lemon, though I’m not sure why.
My bedroom looks just the same as it did twenty years ago. The bed under the window is made up with the Star Wars duvet cover I chose from the Argos catalogue, aged twelve. The guest bed has my Spiderman one. Those were the glory days, when farming was lucrative, and Christmas presents were kick-ass. Now the carpet feels thin and scratchy, and the walls could do with a lick of paint.
Joely settles at the small desk my grandpa built for me when I was little; a desk on which I’ve written letters to Father Christmas and university applications. She takes out her shiny laptop and hmms and mmms until I agree I’ll leave her to it. Really, it should be me putting in the extra work hours, what with my KSG funding meeting on Monday. The approval process has got tighter since Christophe Concordel identified me as risk, based on ‘conflict of interest’, and no longer allows Joely to approve our budget.
I wander back downstairs. Grandma stands in the yard with her yellow Marigolds pulled up to the elbows of her long-sleeved floral dress, a brood of Orpington chickens pecking at her wellies. Instinctively, I open the fridge door. Four tinned pears swim in a bowl of syrup alongside a lonesome sausage in a jacket of fat. I pluck a Babybel from a tangled red net wedged in the egg rack, read the sell-by date and chuck it in the bin. Home, sweet home.
‘Bilberry!’ Dad appears at the kitchen door, his freckled face speckled with mud.
I grab four chocolate digestives out of the Charles and Diana biscuit barrel, two for him, two for me, and plant my face into his chest like I’m seven again. His skin is cold and smells of sunshine. He ruffles my hair and presses me into the wedding band that hangs round his neck until I’m pretty sure it’s left an imprint in my cheek. That’s the thing about Dad’s hugs; they’re that comforting, you’d forgo a limb for them. I come up for air and study his face; his freckles, his tangle of honey-grey blonde curls, the laughter lines around his eyes, crusty with salt from wind-induced tears.
‘Where’s Jolene?’ he says.
‘Joely. She’s upstairs, doing a bit of work.’
Grandma comes back in with a handful of fresh mint. She hands me a stash of reindeer serviettes we didn’t get through at Christmas, and while Dad and I sort out the cutlery, launches into a monologue about the economic ruin of British dairy farming. ‘I blame our sad state of affairs on my grandfather-in-law. If he hadn’t become so obsessed with cows, none of this would have happened.’
Poor Grandma. Becoming a farmer’s wife, a farmer’s widow and then doing it all over again for the next generation is like marrying into the royal family without any of the perks. She’s given up her whole life to dote on men devoted to dairy, and the sick twist is that she’s lactose intolerant.
Dad has disappeared by the time Joely comes downstairs. Who can blame him? He’s probably heard that monologue a hundred times by now.
‘I thought it might be nice to eat outside,’ Grandma says.
I lead Joely out of the back door, across the stepping stones to the small patio, where a wooden table sits in the sun next to a budding clematis. Grandma follows with an intricately engraved, silver condiments tray. I’m not sure why, because it’s empty.
‘I can’t be faffing with spooning sauces into each little pot, but I thought it looked pretty,’ she says, placing it in front of Joely, only to pull great honking plastic bottles of Co-op’s own ketchup, brown sauce and French mustard out of her apron pockets. ‘If you need to wash your hands …’ She waves to a hard, cracked bar of soap on an upside-down bucket next to the outside tap. Joely favours a small bottle of hand sanitizer, which she drags out of the handbag that comes everywhere with her.
‘Billie Goat, call your dad in, won’t you?’ Grandma rearranges the bottles so that the French mustard is directly in front of Joely.
Dad isn’t in the yard or the field. He’s not in the milking shed or the barn. This in itself doesn’t worry me, it’s more the fact that Joely has been left with the one-woman tornado that is my grandma for longer than is healthy. Eventually, I find Dad in his shed asleep on his workbench, his face stuck to May’s edition of Dairy Farmer. The shed door creaks back and forth, fanning a cobweb attached to the loosely fitted window. A pair of hedge cutters dangle above his head, the air an aroma of wet grass and creosote.
‘Dad?’
He lifts his head, confusion spread across his brow. ‘I’m not supposed to be here, am I?’
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s Wednesday. I’m supposed to visit the co-op on Wednesday.’
‘It’s Saturday, Dad. Saturday lunchtime, and I’ve come up with Joely for Uncle Pete’s party tomorrow.’
‘Of course!’ he says, reddening a little. ‘I’m never much good after a power nap.’ He twists the ring on the chain around his neck. Round and round, it goes; thirteen years of marriage, conversations, laughs, dreams and arguments all wrapped up in a small gold band.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
He stands up and stumbles slightly, nudging the shears hanging above him, which swing back and forth on their hook. Steadying himself on the workbench, he reaches into his pocket for a foil wrap of aspirin. ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache, Bilberry,’ he says, emptying a couple of tablets into his hand and knocking them back with a mouthful of cold tea. Then, within seconds he’s standing on a huge sack of topsoil, reaching over lawnmowers, plant pots and paint brushes to find ‘a little something to celebrate’. He drags out a dusty bottle of ginger wine. I have trouble keeping up with him as he strides over to the patio.
‘And this must be Mademoiselle Joely!’ The crow’s feet around his twinkly blue eyes deepen with delight.
‘Nice to meet you,’ she says, her body hardening as he leans in to hug her.
Grandma plonks roast lamb and veg down in front of us and gestures for us to help ourselves to gravy.
‘So. How. Long. Have. You. Lived. In. England. For. Joely?’ Dad picks mud out of his fingernails with the corner of his debit card.
‘Are we pronouncing it right, love?’ Grandma breaks the seal on the dusty bottle of ginger wine. ‘Joely. Joelee.’
‘Perfect.’ Joely’s eyes follow each twist and turn of Grandma’s parsnip as it journeys through gravy. ‘Although I am baptized Joelle, which means “God will be willing”.’
‘Very nice,’ Grandma says, studying Joely as if she’s Renaissance art.
Joely smirks. ‘Not really. God will be willing to do what exactly?’
‘Exactly,’ Grandma interjects at the wrong p
oint.
‘Anything? Nothing?’ Joely pokes at a roast potato. ‘It means nothing, so I prefer Joely. It’s prettier.’
I start to feel a little bit like I did in my German GCSE oral exam, when I wasn’t sure what topic of conversation would be next on the list, and whether I would conclude the hour without fainting.
Dad looks down at his lamb. ‘What do you think of the north of England, Joely?’
‘It’s very nice,’ Joely says, unconvincingly. ‘It’s a great pleasure to see the house of ma petite Anglaise.’
‘Ma what?’ Grandma says.
‘Ma petite Anglaise,’ Joely says. ‘My little English girl.’
‘Are we talking about a painting?’ Grandma says.
Joely coughs into her serviette. ‘Your granddaughter!’
‘What about the Moulin Rouge?’ Grandma volunteers out of nowhere.
‘What about it?’ I say, mortified.
‘I’ve never been, but I imagine it’s terrible,’ Joely says, reading the label on the jar next to her, and making no attempt at concealing her disgust. ‘Is this mustard?’
‘French mustard,’ Grandma says proudly.
‘She’s a firecracker, this one!’ Dad laughs. I haven’t seen him this excited since he won some luxury gardening gloves at my secondary school tombola.
‘Little Dot’s got big!’ I say, trying to keep the conversation normal. ‘We drove past her and I actually thought she was Big Dot for a minute.’
‘Yes.’ Dad chuckles.
‘One of our friendliest cows,’ Grandma explains to Joely.
‘They all have a name?’ Joely says.
‘Of course,’ Dad says. ‘You can’t be born into the family without a name.’
Joely looks at me. ‘You know all of their names?’
‘Most of them.’ I sense that this, in Joely’s eyes, is deeply unattractive, so I try to downplay my involvement without offending Dad.
It takes me two glasses of ginger wine to realize I haven’t been breathing deeply enough and I’ve got a stress headache from shielding Joely from the inevitable parochial chitchat that comes with running a farm. It’s pretty wearing digging us all out of conversational no man’s land. The tense atmosphere only dissipates when Grandma announces she’s going to drop some cheese round to Doreen in the village, and Dad takes this as a cue to muck out the henhouse.