The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016)

by Vaughan, Sarah

  Seven

  Now: 3 July 2014, Cornwall

  Early morning, and while Tom does the milking, Lucy slips from the farm, guilt at not helping adding to her sorrow, anger, fear and shame. She runs briskly and with purpose, driving through the gently rotting vegetation, up along the coast path, out towards the cliffs.

  The tide is high: a mass of deep blue, ebbing and flowing, not yet choppy, for the breeze that will pick up this morning is light at the moment, just pimpling her skin. She drives on, lungs straining as she pounds up the hill. She is working too hard to cry outright, but her face is tense as she concentrates on pushing her body and on forcing away the images of Matt and Suzi – who becomes increasingly seductive. The hedgerows whip her, a stinging nettle smarts, a fly whips into her mouth and is spat out, and yet she doesn’t stop, for if she does she will crumble, and her self-respect – so fragile, now, so vulnerable – will fall away.

  And then she is up at the top of the path with only a gentle incline leading up to the headland. She slows, legs burning, breath ragged, and bends over, her hands on the tops of her knees. The view is stunning – stretching one way to Devon, the other to the end of Britain, for the early morning sea mist has lifted and the pale blue sky becomes more defined with every moment. Dad must have run this way, the very last day he was alive; though it was April, then, the paths not compacted dust, but wet and slippery. A sob catches in her throat, and, finally, she gives in to tears.

  Consumed now, she stumbles to the spot she always thinks of when she cannot sleep: the headland, where the wind blusters and pummels on all but the calmest of days. A trickle of sweat runs to the base of her back, and she tugs her top away, but it turns chill and soon she is shivering. She cradles herself, feeling her ribs rise and fall with each gulp of a cry.

  And now that she is here, she finds that she does not want to stand, arms outstretched, trusting to the wind, pretending to be invincible. For it might drop and trick her into staggering backwards, or change direction and try to drive her from the cliff. She peers at the waves swirling around the rocks, the white spray crashing up and drenching the seagulls, and at the jagged granite that would rip you to shreds if you swam too near and got caught in the current.

  And if you fell? For just the slimmest of moments, she imagines that death. Would it be quick, her skull impaled? Or slow, the blood seeping from her before the sea took pity and dragged her deep into its blackened depths?

  She steps back. The tears have stopped. She has frightened herself. Really frightened herself. She did not contemplate it. Not really, even though she saw not just the rocks but her manager’s face steeped in disappointment – ‘It’s not like you. You’re usually so focused’ – and Matt’s, cloaked with self-pity: ‘I need some time to think’.

  In that split second, she knows that she wants to live. That however shameful Matt’s affair and her mistake, neither is so immense it should cause oblivion. The grief and self-loathing will ease, eventually.

  She wipes her eyes and starts to walk back. The sun beats down now and, as she nears the farm, the dairy herd ambles from the parlour. She sees Tom close the gate and make for the farmhouse. Breakfast. She had better get going.

  She starts to jog and as she reaches the cove, her pace picks up. And she finds, as she pounds along the coast path, that she is almost smiling.

  Her moment on the headland, as she later thinks of it, is what she needs to kick her into action. No more obsessing over her problems, but plenty of hard, physical work to distract her from her guilt and grief.

  She starts with the kitchen: scrubbing the Edwardian floor tiles, worn over a century and engrained with a sheen of dirt that hasn’t been eradicated for years. From this angle, she can get some idea of the kitchen’s grime: the whitewashed walls encrusted with stickiness where they meet the floor; the Aga slick with grease; the ropes of the drying racks yellowed by the cooking odours of the past hundred years.

  She worries away at the particles of black lodged between the tessellated black and terracotta, trying to distract herself from thinking of her relationship: seven years seemingly thrown away. The disinfectant-infused steam stings her eyes, and she tries to focus on the pain. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he had said, as he left. Where did he go then? To Suzi’s? She imagines him in another woman’s home, another woman’s bed. A slip of a woman with long, thick hair and an affected name. A woman who might put him first – for he had said she only thought of work. ‘Well of course I do. When a baby dies.’ She scrubs even harder. His feminist principles – ‘I’m more feminist than many of your friends,’ he had said when one confided she just wanted to get married – didn’t stand for much, in the end.

  She sits back on her heels again and looks at the tiles. She mustn’t obsess. She makes herself focus. Now: were they always this bad? From somewhere in her distant memory, she remembers a photo of her great-grandmother standing by the scrubbed pine table, and she knows – from Maggie’s tales of her ferocious mother – that they wouldn’t have been this grimy then.

  Where are those pictures now? There was a whole set that captured the farm in its heyday – flourishing before, during and just after the war. Photos of cows being hand milked, and of her great-grandfather driving a plough. Of a wagon piled high with straw, an unknown teenage boy tossing it with a pitchfork, and of Maggie, as a young woman, squinting into the sun. Snapshots of a not-too-distant past when the farm could employ three men as well as a maid, and her great-grandfather could boast not just a team of shire horses, but a Fordson tractor.

  Well, those days of relative affluence are long gone. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds in debt. The sum reverberates as she refills buckets of water and scours her way across the floor. She straightens, her eyes level with the top of the oil-clothed table, and then her stomach caves in. Surely not? And yet: of course.

  The end of the kitchen table has always been piled high with papers – seed catalogues, machinery manuals, letters from the feed supplier, business correspondence. It teeters in two-foot-high piles. Lucy had assumed that Tom had been through this when he catalogued the debt. But who’s to say that Judith hasn’t shoved some unopened envelopes in their midst, or in the dresser drawers; that there’s not more debt lurking, brooding, accumulating interest, while they have gone about their day-to-day business?

  The floor finished now, she approaches the piles and begins sifting through the documents. And amid all the ephemera, there are sealed brown and white envelopes from the feed suppliers, the bank and the utility companies, indicating that the farm is a further £14,758 in debt.

  There are payments too. Cheques dating back three or four years: the milk cheque for the month after her dad died, one for a load of cauliflowers, another for silage. Cheques that, if honoured, would bring in over eleven thousand pounds. But can she claim back such sums – or do they have to be discounted? She slumps on to the settle. She is no financial expert, and has no idea how to pull her family out of this mess.

  On autopilot, she throws out the bin bag; moves the catalogues and brochures into the dining room to be filed, and lays the unpaid bills and unclaimed payments on the table where they will have to be seen. And then she turns to the very final pile. Happily, there are no more unpleasant surprises, but stuffed at the very bottom is the photo album she had been thinking of: the evidence that the farm was once a thriving concern.

  She turns one stiffened cardboard page. Her teenage grandmother plays catch in the yard in front of the farm workers’ cottages, with a far younger, clearly excited small girl. Another shot, and there are cows in the milking parlour; her great-grandfather Joe grinning broadly, and a young boy smiling more hesitantly as he crouches on a milking stool, as if the whole experience is new.

  There are further pictures: a shire horse hoeing mangolds; the same horse standing by a corn-heaped wagon; and then some of the dairy. Her grandmother posing as she churned butter; and the smaller girl ladling milk, her tongue poked out in concentration like a c
at contemplating cream.

  One particular photo captures her attention. A meal, perhaps a Harvest Supper, the table heaped with food: pork pies, pasties, a roast chicken, tureens of potatoes, carrots and beans. The family and farm workers are gathered around: faces upturned to the camera, smiles betraying their exhaustion and relief. In the foreground is Evelyn, her face relaxed for once, calm with the certainty that she has provided a generous meal. Opposite her, at the head of the table, Joe beams in appreciation: this is his farm, and it is thanks to his graft and good management that they are enjoying this plenty.

  But it is Lucy’s grandmother, Maggie, who really draws her into the photo. Seated next to her father, she radiates excitement, her dark eyes sparkling, her surprisingly sensuous mouth stretched tight. She must be seventeen or eighteen here: a young woman brimming with happiness, and, more than that, with expectation. She looks as if she is plotting something: humming with anticipation, teetering on the cusp of her adult life.

  More than anything, the photo conveys happiness – ranging from her great-grandmother’s contentment to her grandmother’s elation. This is a profitable, successful farm. And as the memories of an industrious past offer themselves up, the fragile skeleton of an idea begins to emerge.

  Eight

  Lucy takes the photo of the Harvest Supper and lays it in front of her family on the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

  Her grandmother peers at it – then picks it up and holds it close to her face.

  ‘Do you remember it, Granny?’

  Maggie, eyes skimming the picture, nods.

  ‘You look so happy.’

  ‘I was.’ Her voice is dry. She puts the photo down with a shrug, but continues looking at her younger self captured in sepia. ‘That was taken at one of the happiest points of my life.’

  ‘It looks like it was a great occasion,’ Tom says. ‘It’s such a lovely photo and it proves the farm was profitable.’

  ‘Well, it was, once.’

  ‘And not that long ago?’

  ‘1943. A very different time. Farming was valued, then, seen as crucial to feeding a nation during the war. Every spare inch of this place was dug up: new potatoes dug into the tracks. Even the lawn wrecked, eventually, for the caulies. It was a different world.’

  ‘You’re quite right.’ Tom defers to his grandmother’s judgement. ‘Farming’s not valued, now, and we’re not the least bit profitable. But we want to try and return to those more successful years.

  ‘We know Uncle Richard has an idea for getting us out of this – has even talked to property developers, apparently, and to the estate agents about possible prices …’ Judith gives a small click of indignation, ‘but I think we’re clear, aren’t we, that we don’t want to give up yet?’

  ‘We’ve got a few ideas that we think will help,’ Lucy says, her voice quavering as she looks at her family. They have called a meeting to discuss a possible overhaul but she is not convinced they are ready for change. Her grandmother looks defensive, and Flo, Tom’s partner, distinctly bored. Head down, she examines her chipped fingernails and swings her crossed leg as if she is still the teenager of eight years ago. Every inch of her suggests she would rather be in the fish restaurant, where she waitresses four days a week, or with Ava. Anywhere other than discussing the future of a farm she only lives on because she is in a relationship with the farmer, and in which she has little interest at all.

  Only Judith seems the least bit enthusiastic: perched on the edge of her seat, taking notes, trying to atone for the unopened bills and her subsequent shame. Lucy focuses on her. It is for her that they need to resurrect the farm – for its loss would mean not just the loss of her livelihood but of her identity.

  She runs through the need to improve the farm’s website and to spruce up the tired cottages – and offers to contribute her savings to buy new ovens, fresh white linen and Cornish blue crockery.

  ‘Then we can put up the prices,’ she says.

  ‘What’s wrong with the prices?’ Judith looks appalled.

  ‘Mum – you haven’t changed them for ten years. You’re charging the same in August as you are in May, when you could be charging double or, in peak season, even triple.’

  ‘I don’t know … It just seems a bit greedy.’

  ‘At the moment the cottages are so cheap people will wonder what’s wrong with them!’

  After this, it doesn’t take much to persuade Judith that they should increase the prices of the cream teas, and provide more picnic tables for customers.

  ‘We had to turn two sets away yesterday,’ adds Flo, showing some interest. ‘They were proper pissed off at not getting a cup of tea.’

  ‘We should also make more of our heritage,’ Lucy says. ‘So, longer-term we could spruce up the dairy – with photos of Great-Grandpa Joe milking, and perhaps old butter churns and milk churns as decoration – so that we can serve people if it rains, and during Easter and the October half-term: for a longer period of the year.

  ‘Perhaps we could make the most of photos like this,’ she adds, gesturing at the Harvest Supper. ‘People are fascinated by a sense of history and identity. It suggests that we have credibility: that we know what we’re doing, that we are successful – and we should make the most of it.’

  ‘We also wondered about selling ice cream,’ Tom says. ‘We know that customers like knowing the provenance of food: that they’ll pay more for that. If we could sell them something where the ingredients – milk, cream, even strawberries – originated just a few feet from where they sit, I think we’d really be on to something. We’d only need three or four flavours to start with, but, if they take off, perhaps we could try selling them further afield: Tredinnick farm shop – and other delis.’

  ‘It’s a lot of change,’ Lucy tells her mother. But there is no need to tread gently.

  ‘No, no. I can see it’s necessary.’ Judith smiles, and a hint of the old Judith – the one who existed before Fred’s death – shines through. ‘They’re fantastic ideas,’ she says, and her smile broadens. ‘We can do this. Absolutely.’

  The sea is as sleek as satin, and the beach almost empty, when Lucy manages to slip from the farm. The air is cooler, now: within an hour and a half the sun will have set and the sky will have faded to a muted indigo before imperceptibly turning a dark blue.

  She pauses on the stile at the end of the field, and runs her hand over the granite gatepost, etched with the initials of past generations of lovers. She traces the JP and FP of her parents, lingering over a delicate, almost hidden heart. Tom and Flo’s initials are entwined in Flo’s creative flourish. But no one has ever inscribed Lucy’s name.

  She jumps from the stile, and walks through the coarse grass of the sand dunes, then reaches the beach and takes a deep breath of pure salt air. A wave of relief flows over her, and something deeper: the faint promise of happiness, that’s what it is. The sensation takes some getting used to. When did she last feel happy? Not for quite some time.

  It has been a busy day – and an emotional one – in which the magnitude of what she and Tom are trying to do has borne down on her. And yet, on this beach, in front of these fields, she feels, at least briefly, if not happy then content. The anxieties of her London life ease away like marks in the sand swallowed by the tide. They matter, of course they matter, but, just for this moment, they can be held at bay.

  She slips off her Birkenstocks and feels the silvery sand seep between her toes, then stands at the edge of a pool of water. Her feet squelch, the sand sucking her ankles and pressing heavy, cool and wet. She moves on, watching shrimps, surprised by her bright red toenails, scurry away. Splosh, splosh, splosh: the rhythmic splashing prompts a smile, just as it did when she scampered along the beach as a child after Fred. For a second she remembers her father’s size twelve footprints, broad and long compared to hers when she placed them inside them. Feet like pasties, he’d called them. She couldn’t ever imagine being so big.

  She looks up. It’s a good light for
taking pictures or – hopefully – for capturing a sunset. Her digital camera hangs heavy round her neck and she fiddles with the zoom. Snap, snap, snap. She closes in on textures: cockleshells washed up on ridges of sand, bladderwrack unfurling in a rock pool. The everyday captured in black and white.

  It is the sea – empty but for a swimmer streaking towards the horizon – that is the most breathtaking part of this landscape but, somehow, it doesn’t look the least impressive when caught by a lens. Perhaps it just needs to be more dramatic. Like the weather, she has always loved the sea at its most stormy: white horses under charcoal skies; waves that pick you up and carry you along, exhilarating and terrifying – and which always threaten to crash over your head.

  For a moment she is back bodyboarding with her dad: reliving the fear of having a wave tumble over her head and pound her into the sand, and then the whoosh of relief as his broad arms caught her and pushed her high above the next one so that she could ride it; mouth filled with salt, body surging with the thrill of being eight, nine, ten.

  A sudden image of Matt and Suzi intrudes – an imagined clinch in her bed – and she scrubs at her forehead; then tiny, vulnerable Jacob appears. She feels befuddled, as if her ears are blocked with salt water, tilting her off balance. She needs to escape such thoughts by immersing herself in something so exhausting she doesn’t have the energy to think. There is a selfishness to what she proposed to her mother – for herself, as much as for any other reason, she needs to revitalise this farm.

  She turns and walks towards the shore. In the time she has been taking the photos, the swimmer has emerged and is now wading through the shallows. Who swims at this time of year without a wetsuit? A hardy local who swims every day, without fail? Without thinking, she raises her camera, zooms in and captures him in her aperture. He is young – and he looks as if he is fit. No pigeon-chested tourist shivering in baggy swimming trunks, but a younger, sleeker figure emerging from the sea.