She pretends to take a few shots in a different direction, then flits back, though she knows it is voyeuristic. Thick hair, dripping salt water, good cheekbones – a strong, though not classically beautiful, face. There is something familiar about him, as well. As if she has seen his features before, perhaps rearranged on someone else, or spotted, smudged, out of focus, on a younger, more unformed face.
The main thing is to get off the beach before he sees her, standing there with her camera. She reaches the dunes and almost trips in her eagerness to get out of his sight. Of course, she didn’t take any pictures. But the water trickling down the V of his chest, the curve of his buttocks as he waded through the water, the white of his tan line: all this is imprinted on her mind.
Nine
Maggie readjusts her smartest cardigan and eases herself into the garden chair. The afternoon sun caresses her wrinkles. For a moment, she imagines it seeping into her bones. She closes her eyes. She dreads going blind – and yet with eyes tight shut, her other senses are sharper: the seagulls are raucous and there is a particularly pungent smell of thyme.
A voice grates – a Midlands accent: another tourist – and her eyelids flicker, roused by the chatter of a couple making their way across the lawn. She glances at the middle-aged man who is easing his wide thighs beneath the picnic table and sighing with relief as his bottom thumps on the slats of the bench. Could that be him? She asks that of every man who tramps the footpath, who visits the farm, who drops by for a cream tea or to deliver the feed; and who could conceivably be seventy. But he is far too young: too fat and florid and – well – too vulgar. She doesn’t know who will materialise, but she is pretty sure it won’t be someone from Wolverhampton with a sizeable belly straining against his sweat-drenched polo shirt.
His wife is fussing over him now. A small bird-like woman chirruping away, asking if he wants tea, or coffee, or a glass of water. Usually, customers just relax when they reach the tables, relieved to sit down after the climb up the cliff. ‘This is the life,’ they smile at one another as they gaze down at the calm slick of the sea and indulge in their annual fantasy. ‘We could do this, couldn’t we? Escape to Cornwall? Set up a B&B with a smallholding, or run a gift shop? Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we lived here!’
They haven’t a clue. Well, some of them manage it if they’ve made enough before coming down here. They accept there will be a lengthy quiet season, and that their project may not work financially; they may not even break even. But others sell up within a couple of years. Unable to cope with the rain and isolation; unprepared for the sheer hard graft of working on the land or with animals. If you haven’t been brought up with it, it can be a real shock.
She doubts this couple would ever want to make a fist of it. The woman is still bustling around, peering intently at her husband. One thing she never did with her husband was fuss. For a second, she thinks of someone else: a peal of laughter; an arm slipped round her waist. A long-forgotten memory swims up from the depths of her past and emerges with such sudden clarity that it is as if he is in front of her. A pair of blue eyes smiling into hers, in the depths of the sand dunes, as he pulled her down on to him and kissed her with such passion that she hoped, even now, it meant he loved her. This boy – this young man really – who would never age beyond eighteen, who was eternally beautiful, and golden. Snatched in the prime of his life. Seventy years ago.
‘We’ll order a cream tea now,’ the woman, voice bossy as well as concerned, breaks into her reveries. The sound wrenches her back to the present: the memory dispersing like ripples in a pool. She needs to get up, and sharpish. She shifts her weight over her knees, as the GP suggested, and grips the chair’s plastic arms.
‘Two cream teas, is it?’ she asks.
‘If it’s no bother.’ The woman looks perturbed at realising she has forced an elderly lady from her seat. ‘And a glass of water? But perhaps I should get someone else?’
Margaret shakes her head. ‘I’ll tell my granddaughter.’ Head held high, she shuffles into the kitchen, one hand clutching at the gatepost then the doorframe to steady herself.
‘Lu-cy?’ her voice quavers now, in the sanctuary of the kitchen.
‘Granny? What are you doing up?’
‘Don’t fuss, dear. There are customers. Two cream teas and a glass of water. You do the tea, I’ll do the scones.’
She moves to the table, holding on to it for support, and begins putting scones in a basket, spooning jam, shimmering with sugar, into a bowl.
Lucy takes the tray, piled with a pot of steaming English Breakfast tea, out into the sunshine, and she follows. No reason to stay inside on a glorious summer’s day, and Lucy has gently made it clear – with her efficiency; the speed with which she warmed the teapot – that there is no real need to help. Silly really. She can do all this with her eyes closed. She first made cream teas before the war when her mother provided B&B for hikers and members of the Cyclists’ Union. From the age of eight, she’d be spooning jam and making scones. She had a light touch, said Evelyn – one of the few things she ever complimented her on. She pulled her weight, even as a girl.
She shuffles back into the garden. Something is wrong. The man – the florid, fat-faced customer – is hunched forwards, breathing heavily, clutching his arm.
A heart attack. Just like Edward. She is moving back into the kitchen, towards the phone, faster than she would have thought possible. Her fingers stab at the buttons of the handset. Nine nine nine.
By the time she gets outside, the man is lying on the ground; keeled over and apparently unconscious. Lucy is leaning over him, the heels of her hands interlocked and placed over the centre of his chest.
She watches her slight granddaughter perform CPR: arms stiff and pushing rhythmically. ‘One and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight,’ Lucy counts, as his poor wife whimpers by his side. There is a ferocity to her movements as she pumps, then bends to breathe into his mouth, then resumes pumping. For this is about Lucy’s capability as a nurse. About whether she can make things right or, rather, perform miracles. She wonders why she feels dizzy, then realises she is holding her breath.
The air is heavy with expectation seguing into dread. ‘One and two and three and four,’ Lucy counts all the way to thirty, then two more rescue breaths, and back to pumping again.
‘Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the ambulance?’ The man’s wife wails, her face blank with incomprehension.
‘It’s coming,’ Maggie tries to reassure her. ‘But we’re quite a way away.’
‘One and two and three and four,’ Lucy continues: a mantra that she keeps up, unflagging, though now there is a catch to her voice.
‘Keep going, they’re almost here,’ Maggie urges as the woman whimpers in accompaniment. ‘Seven and eight and nine and ten,’ Lucy chants. ‘Eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen.’
And just as Maggie is beginning to lose all hope, the man coughs and splutters into life.
Later, after the ambulance has roared out of the yard taking the couple off to hospital, after the paramedics have praised Lucy, Maggie makes them a cup of sweet tea. Her granddaughter looks shaken.
‘At least I didn’t do anything wrong with him.’ She unfurls from the tense position she has adopted. ‘For a while I thought we had a death on our hands, there. I was starting to wonder if I was jinxed. As if everything I’ve ever learned as a nurse had left me. Not sure how I would have coped if he hadn’t made it.’
Her grandmother tries to imagine the level of anxiety buzzing through her brain.
‘No use thinking about what might have happened. You saved his life; that’s all that matters. He’d be dead if you hadn’t been here.’
‘I suppose he might … You were fantastic, by the way.’
‘Bah!’ Maggie puffs out her cheeks. ‘It was nothing; a quick phone call, that’s all.’
‘You moved so swiftly.’
‘Well.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t like deaths on m
y farm.’
‘Granny!’ Lucy is appalled.
‘Well, do you?’ Maggie raises an eyebrow, then flushes slightly, the answer all too evident. ‘No, I didn’t think so,’ she says.
They sit in silence for a minute, watching the low tide lick the sand. A guillemot wheels upwards. A list of deaths – the collateral damage of a farm – hangs in the air. There was her Great-Uncle Frank, flung to the apex of the barn when a threshing machine caught the back of his coat and tossed him like a rag doll; her Uncle Ned, who blew his hand off when straddling a gate while shooting rabbits and later died of septicaemia.
And there was Fred Petherick: her son-in-law, and Lucy’s father.
Ten
Then: 20 March 1943, Cornwall
Will placed a cauldron of water above the fire in the corner of the yard, then helped Arthur to construct the table with four thick, heavy planks bleached white from being scrubbed clean.
Doris, the pig, watched from her sty, and yet she was willing to be lured underneath the beam: following Aunt Evelyn with her bucket of warm gruel, trotting along, chomping away as if she couldn’t get enough of it. Will’s insides clenched. Any minute now her gentle contentment would tip into rage and fear.
Uncle Joe came forward, scratched the sow behind her ears, rubbed her back, then slipped a noose in her mouth to clamp her nose and upper jaw tight.
Doris squealed. Not just her usual growling but a high-pitched, frantic screeching as she tugged and tried to run in circles, foaming at the mouth. Will rushed to help: corralling the pig, holding her fast, feeling the panic coursing through her body as she strained. Then the farmer flung one end of the rope over the beam and pulled it tight so that the pig was on tiptoes, trotters just touching the floor.
She scrabbled properly then, shitting and pissing as her trotters failed to grip, but he and Arthur held her: faces pressed into her rough, hairy flanks so that they could smell the stench of dung and fear. Uncle Joe took out his sharp, pointed knife and aimed for the jugular: one small cut and then the full knife. Four killings in, it still surprised him how much blood there was. The bright red liquid pumped and spurted into the bucket in a mass of velvet blackness, before Aunt Evelyn swapped the container for a second pail.
Once the pig was dead, they heaved her onto the boards to scald the carcass and scrape off the bristles, until poor Doris’s skin was spotlessly smooth and clean. He and Arthur hung her hind legs far apart, and Uncle Joe took his knife and slit her down the belly, pulling out her innards. Aunt Evelyn, face like a twisted lemon, for she wasn’t born to this, you could just tell, scraped off the fat to be clarified into soft, white lard, and started to clean the intestines, which would later be used for hog’s pudding.
The other men went, for this was largely a woman’s job, but Will worked with her, handling the slippery, greasy intestines; squeezing out the waste – so rank the smell caught the back of your throat; piling them up to be cleaned and rinsed. There was a nip in the air, but Aunt Evelyn wanted to stay in the yard. No point dirtying the kitchen with such waste, and as long as they kept moving they wouldn’t feel the cold. He watched her mouth purse as she grappled with the pig’s guts, her hands smeared with blood and the khaki mulch Doris had been trying to digest.
She wiped a hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, her cheeks flushed, mouth thinned in concentration, and he realised that she must have been beautiful once, with those fine cheekbones and Maggie’s large, almond-shaped eyes. She seemed too slight to be a farmer’s wife: so thin, he feared she might snap when she helped haul Doris up or carried a covered pail after milking. And yet her determination made her strong.
She smiled at him now, and her praise was worth all the more for its rareness. ‘You’re doing well.’
He reddened. Nearly three years he’d been working as a farm apprentice. He’d settled down after that fight with Edward; worked hard, learned all he could about a trade he wasn’t born to but which he loved.
Around him, the world was changing. The war seemed to be going better since the fall of Stalingrad, though each month brought news of neighbours who were missing presumed dead, captured or killed. Here he was protected: tending the land, harvesting the crops, milking the cows. He wondered if he would enlist, despite being exempt if Uncle Joe argued his case as a farm boy. Part of him was intrigued. The Allies were in North Africa, now, pushing through Libya and Tunisia, forcing the Hun back, and it would be a thrill to travel, wouldn’t it? To feel that sun on your back, to see those sights?
But his stronger feeling was that he wanted to stay here, where few bombs had fallen in the past two years – apart from at the airfield at St Eval, where Spitfires roared off daily with their full-throated throttle, and along the coast, at Davidstow, from where the B24s of coastal command droned out to sea. This was his home: the place where his little sister lived, and where he had friends of sorts. Arthur, a couple of years older than him, pig ugly but with a wicked sense of humour; James, the cowman, experienced and kindly; even Joanna, who would slip him the most generous helpings of pie – ‘I swear you’re still growing’ – but then boss him, as if he were one of her many brothers.
And there was Maggie. More distant, now that she boarded in Bodmin, but still warm: her presence enough to remind him of their shared stock of memories. He could see her now: eyes bright as she taught him to milk properly, two fingers and a thumb caressing the milk from a teat when he had wanted to tug, and her delight when he’d got it right. ‘That’s it,’ she’d whispered, crouched by the side of the Guernsey, for he hadn’t wanted to admit to James he was getting it wrong. The dribble and spurt of milk became a steady stream, and she had grinned. ‘You’ll be a farm boy yet.’
She was back for the Easter holidays in two days’ time: Doris was being killed in preparation. His stomach fizzed with excitement but also apprehension, for Maggie was becoming a young woman. Her boyishness swapped for curves: hips, a waist and breasts. He felt himself stir and bent over the bucket, squeezing out Doris’s intestines, reddening at the thought that Evelyn might see. He would have to hope that she still spared him the time of day, that she would still want to be his friend. But what if she didn’t? If she had grown right away from him? The stench of Doris’s guts struck him, and he felt suddenly sick.
As soon as she was back, she mucked in. In that respect, she was still the old Maggie. Always willing to get her hands dirty.
They were still dealing with the pig. Cutting it up and salting it for bacon before it could be bagged in muslin and hung from the rafters. Joanna handled the meat briskly: rubbing salt into the flesh of the sides and forcing it next to the bone so that no flies could lay eggs. Maggie copied: slim fingers probing the cavities, caressing the flesh. She bit her lip as she did so, but there was something dreamlike about her actions. As if she were thinking of something else entirely.
‘You’re stroking it ever so gentle.’ Joanna, sturdy and no-nonsense, noticed. ‘You don’t normally do it so loving.’
‘That better?’
‘A bit. It needs more of a slap than a tickle.’ Joanna, only four years older than Maggie, burst into laughter. ‘Imagine some young man who needs knocking into shape.’
Maggie looked quizzical, her eyes wide open. ‘Don’t think I know one of those,’ she said and paused so that Will wondered if she was going through her classmates.
Joanna caught his eye, gave him a wink. Four younger brothers she had: plenty of practice at picking up on a boy’s weak points. He shot her a look: Don’t say anything else, he willed her. Just don’t. Not, of course, that there was anything to say.
‘Imagine it’s Will.’ Joanna looked at him slyly, getting into her stride.
‘Why would I want to slap Will?’
‘You’re quite right. Far better to tickle. In fact, I might just do that …’ Joanna held up her red palms, glistening with the wet of the pig. She started around the table, skirting the end more quickly than he might have imagined, and he deftly swapped s
ides.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ he warned. ‘I can tickle hard. Just ask Alice.’
‘Well, there’s an invitation!’ Joanna whooped, her eyes glowing with laughter. ‘Fancy taking it up, Maggie?’
‘No, thanks.’ Maggie, the sensible, county schoolgirl, went back to her salting. ‘No offence, Will.’ She gave a quick, friendly smile.
‘None taken.’ His breath eased out in relief.
‘Well, I reckon we’re missing out,’ said Joanna, snorting with laughter, her small, red face aglow now. ‘He could do with the tickle if not the slap! Any time you fancy it, Will …’
What had got into her? She’d never flirted with him before. He kept his tone light though he was burning with humiliation. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said.
They carried on in near silence, bar Joanna’s occasional chuckle. She seemed intent on creating or stoking some kind of atmosphere. For once, he was grateful when Aunt Evelyn joined them and worked away at the fleshy pinkness, fingers jamming the salt, her face particularly grim.
She smiled, though, when a tall, graceful figure knocked at the open back door.
‘May I come in?’ Patrick Trescothick, the local vet, gave her an apologetic smile, as if to say he was sorry to catch her like this, and entered the kitchen, ducking his head.
Will glanced at Maggie, but she was still working. Joanna, flushed and good-tempered, had stopped and was simpering at the vet.
He didn’t like Mr Trescothick. He had last seen him at a livestock market a week ago when he’d been his usual self: courteous to the farmers, but a touch arrogant to those like Will he had no need to impress. ‘Still enjoying the country life?’ he’d asked, and Will had felt a niggle of irritation. Or perhaps he was being prickly: he’d just heard that their mother had left Fulham to visit Robert, now five years old and with a family in Hampshire, and he’d felt a surprise pang of jealousy. She had only come to Cornwall the once.
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