‘Out of the way, boy.’ He lifted the shotgun to take aim, and Will sprang up.
‘Steady on there,’ said Uncle Joe. The cow flared her nostrils. Will stood, heart ricocheting against his chest.
‘Nooooooo!’ Maggie ran from the house as the vet took aim.
The shots rang out across the farmyard. Two blasts to the head. A mass of blood and splintered bone and blasted flesh.
Uncle Joe looked sickened; the colour drained from his cheeks so that Will could guess at the old man he might become. Maggie whimpered, a pitiful noise that sounded as if she was trying to keep it in, but which broke out regardless. Her shoulders trembled, and he wanted to put his arms round her and hold her tightly.
The vet stood, impassive, as smoke wreathed from the end of his gun.
‘Not a bad job,’ he said, surveying the carnage.
Uncle Joe cleared his throat, apparently at a loss as to what to say.
The cow, taken by surprise, was silent as the blood flowed from her. But her calf, kept tight inside her, twitched like a marionette jerking free of its master as her source of life ebbed away. One jerk, two, three, as if she was kicking to get out and gasp fresh air. The kicks, frenetic at first, became weaker. And then, nothing.
‘Best be getting on, then,’ said Patrick Trescothick with his air of false jollity. No one contradicted him. The atmosphere was as leaden as the mass of grey cloud that had obscured the sun and would soon lead to rain.
‘I won’t bother you with a bill for this,’ he added, perhaps sensing the mass disapproval. And, the gun flung in the boot, he sauntered to the car door, wrenched it open and roared away.
Fourteen
Now: 20 July 2014, Cornwall
‘I never see you, we never have any proper time together, you’re always with your frigging cows or I’m with Ava or at the restaurant; I can’t even wake up with you ’cos you’re always up so early, bloody milking.’ Flo’s voice spirals upwards so that it is impossible for Lucy not to overhear the latest argument between her brother and his girlfriend, fought just outside the kitchen where Flo has caught up with Tom.
She moves away. She knows about Flo’s resentment at staying on the farm: the fact she barely sees her partner, with her working in the restaurant at night, and Tom up so early each morning; her frustration that he has given up a job that paid more; her lack of understanding of the tug of the place – the sense that they cannot give up on Skylark; that to do so would betray past generations. But she has never witnessed this level of anger, heard the rawness and the pain behind it, the sense that Flo feels so neglected, before.
She should make it easier for them. Suggest she does alternate mornings milking; offer to babysit so they can get out for a full day together. Those early mornings on top of helping with the harvesting, when it starts, and dealing with the tourists will stretch her days to breaking point – but isn’t that what she craves? Physical exhaustion that means she has no energy for self-analysis: hard work that proves she is doing her very best to help rebuild the farm? Besides, she doesn’t want Tom to experience the gradual erosion and loss of a long-term relationship as she has done. Not if it could be prevented; if something could be done to stop it now.
She thinks of Matt and worries away at an itch: the fear that perhaps she had let their relationship slide, that she should have given him more attention. She had been so wrapped up in her work on the ward, so drained at the end of a twelve-hour shift, and, yes, perhaps a little unsympathetic when he’d told her his news. What had once seemed so glamorous – his work as a copywriter at an ad agency – had felt increasingly superficial compared to the day-to-day struggle being fought by the premature babies in her care. The gulf became insurmountable, six months ago, when a baby had died – and on the same day he had won a lucrative deal to advertise still bottled water.
‘It’s a massive account,’ he had laughed as he’d cracked open the Prosecco and regaled her with his ideas to sell something that you could get free from a tap, but that could be bottled and marketed and sold for a vastly inflated price. And she had watched him, and thought of little Eloise, felled by a bowel infection, and of her parents, distraught and incredulous, though the odds had always been that their daughter wouldn’t survive.
‘I don’t want a drink,’ she had said, her insides twisting like a tangled rope.
‘Oh, go on!’ He had looked appalled, and so, as ever, she had caved in, accepted a glass with an apologetic smile, toasted his creativity, his inevitable success. But the wine had tasted sweet and acidic, and she had hated herself for dissembling. A spurt of bile had filled her throat, and she had left the room.
She had withdrawn from him after that: felt herself watching him more critically, silently deriding his slogans to sell water: ‘Aren’t we all seeking clarity?’ Had become more distant – still affectionate but less responsive when he tried to initiate sex. In truth, she hadn’t felt sexual. All too aware of the frailty of the human body, its inability to counter infections or to work without machinery or antibiotics or surgery, it felt somehow wrong to delight in her own – beyond being profoundly grateful for her health, her strength, when those around her were failing. It was just a phase, she had thought; she was just tired. He would understand, for he was a kind man, never excessively sexually demanding. She felt so ashamed now of her naïvety, for it hadn’t occurred to her that he was taking the lead from her, or that he was hurt by her rejection. That being painfully right-on might be a guise, and he might be being sexual elsewhere.
Suzi – effortlessly sensual in a way that olive-skinned Mediterranean women often seemed to her to be – must have been a joy after months of her clamped-thigh frigidity. At the Christmas party, every man’s eyes had been drawn to her: this woman who commanded attention in her sleek black jumpsuit while everyone else teetered in too many sequins and too-high heels. She imagines them in bed: the sheets damp with the musk of sex; their limbs entwined as his lover cries out unapologetically. Not like Lucy with her quiet whimper. She flushes at the thought of it: starts, and sees that she has shoved a fork into the fleshy part of her palm. Four prong marks forced hard into the red.
And yet it wasn’t always like that. If she thinks of their early days, there were moments of intense sexual excitement: a sultry weekend in Paris where they had teased one another for so long in the Jardins de Luxembourg that she thought she would combust just from his breath on her neck. Another in Brighton where they spent an entire day in bed, and rose, ravenous, to eat fish and chips. Long walks through Soho in the early hours, when they would drag each other into empty doorways, limbs wedged tight as they kissed.
She misses this, she realises with a jolt, and also the long-lost tenderness. His willingness to hold her for hours, when she woke in the night after her father’s death, or just to lie next to her in the darkness, silent, unless she wanted to talk. It is the small acts of kindness she mourns the most: the cups of tea he would bring her on the mornings she didn’t have to get up for work; the meals he would make when she returned exhausted; the scribbled love notes he would leave after a run of late shifts. That everyday gentleness has long since disappeared; but it was once there.
It is so much to give up, to throw away, this shared history of loving. To discard it for excellent sex – for a woman who looks as if she would make him feel like a god – is understandable. But it shouldn’t be. Oh! How it shouldn’t be. Her stomach tightens with its habitual low ache of shame and grief. Don’t start crying again; please don’t start crying. He isn’t worth it. The bastard. But however much she tries to feed off her anger, the suspicion that if he has behaved like a bastard, then she might have inadvertently helped him become one, keeps creeping in.
She moves back into the kitchen. Flo and Tom seem to be talking more amicably: Flo looking up at him, smiling, just the hint of a tease on her lips. They make their way across the yard. Flo’s arm is slung round Tom’s waist, now, and tucked in his jeans pocket; Tom’s is draped casually over her shou
lders until he pulls her into an embrace. He looks exhausted, and yet there is still a spark of passion as he draws his girlfriend towards him and gives her a lingering kiss, then smacks her bottom. She dances away, pretending to be affronted, then pulls him back again.
Lucy turns back to her cooking, ashamed at having witnessed this moment. A baking tray bangs with an angry clatter. She slaps down a rolling pin, gives the table another dent.
She is embarrassed, yes, but also wistful and, well, jealous.
It has been quite a while since Matt made her behave like this.
The car, a six-month-old, dark-navy Audi estate, is blocking the way to the barn when Lucy comes back from negotiating the new milking rota. For a moment, she is thrown by it. She isn’t expecting any guests today and anyone turning up on the off-chance of a B&B room is more likely to be on foot. The track leading to their farm is a no-through road, the farmhouse and cottages the only reason to brave its potholes and blind corners obscured by hedgerows. It isn’t a place you stumble upon.
The car looks as if it has been newly cleaned, though a smear of muck caked with straw now clings to the rear left tyre. She leans to peer through the window and sees her face blur in the bonnet’s gleam. It is the sort of car that is waxed: the pride and joy of a man with too much time on his hands and too big an inferiority complex to let its glossiness fade. A camel cashmere cardigan has been carefully laid on the back shelf of the car, and a road atlas is slotted in the side door of the passenger seat, but otherwise the inside, with its cream leather seats, is as immaculate as the exterior. She bets the owner wields a hand-held vacuum cleaner after each trip.
She moves to the back of the car, intrigued and irritated now in equal measure. Any tourist will need to shift it before the afternoon milking begins. And then she spies the sticker, neatly placed in the corner of the back windscreen, so that the downward strokes of its letters are parallel. Guildford Golf Club. Of course: Uncle Richard and Aunt Carrie. But what are they doing here now?
She leaves the heat of the yard for the cool of the kitchen. Uncle Rich’s voice, all trace of a Cornish accent removed, spools from the room at the front of the house that her grandmother still refers to as the parlour: a deep ribbon of sound punctuated by his own sonorous laugh.
Richard Pascoe is sitting in Fred’s old armchair in the window, his legs spread apart, hands resting expansively on the arms.
‘Lucy!’ He gets up as she enters and goes to hug her. But the fact he is sitting in Dad’s chair riles her.
‘Hello, Uncle Rich.’ She offers him her cheek, then does the same with his wife. ‘Hello, Carrie.’ Her tone towards the slim woman who has had the misfortune to marry her uncle is far warmer.
They settle themselves down. Her grandmother is sitting on a straight-backed chair, since her son has taken the softest one, and is squinting at him, a shaft of sunlight striking her eyes.
‘Are you all right there, Granny?’
‘Quite all right, my dear,’ Maggie starts to reassure her, but her son butts in.
‘You should have said, Mother!’ Richard is all booming bonhomie. He gets up and takes his mother by the arm. ‘You sit here. I insist.’ He guides her into the armchair.
‘Don’t make a fuss.’
‘Nonsense! That better? Quite comfy?’ His voice is a couple of decibels too loud.
‘I’m quite all right, thank you, and there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.’
Lucy turns away, suppressing a smile.
‘So … what brings you here? Not that it’s not lovely to see you,’ she asks, determined to be friendly.
‘Just passing through,’ says Richard with a wink that acknowledges the lunacy of this statement. No one just passes through Trecothan. No one just passes through Cornwall.
‘We’d popped down for a weekend in St Mawes. Old friend of Carrie’s was getting married down there, for the second time. They sail there. Glorious hotel. Tressiney – do you know it?’
Lucy shakes her head. The boutique hotels and yachts of south Cornwall are somewhere she has never ventured, though they are a mere thirty miles away.
‘Impressive refurbishment. Very high spec, though they’ve maintained the period details, the sense of history.’ He pauses. ‘Gave us some ideas for what we could do here.’
The room is suddenly airless, and she is acutely aware of how shabby it is: the furniture threadbare, the walls browned from years of woodsmoke seeping from the hearth. She knows that the farm would be a developer’s dream – all those barns; the old dairy; the cottages – and feels a fierce urge to protect it. She reaches behind to stroke the sloping wall.
‘Oh, really?’ she manages at last, her voice coming out higher than she intended. ‘Should we discuss any new ideas with Mum and Tom here? After all, they’re the ones running the farm.’
‘Oh, we’ll discuss them all with them later.’ He waves his hand airily. ‘I assume we can stay?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She forces herself to sound generous. The bed in the spare room hasn’t been made up since yesterday’s customers and the linen’s still on the line, but they can cope with unironed pillowcases.
‘And I’d like to go through the accounts with the three of you this evening.’ He sounds as if he is chairing a meeting. ‘Mother, you’re let off.’
‘Oh, shouldn’t Granny be involved?’
‘Mother, you don’t want to be bothered with any of this, do you?’
‘Well, I rather think I would if there are things you think we should be concerned about.’ Maggie watches him, her eyes steely.
‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?’ The hint of a threat thrusts through his bluster, and then he gives a bland, non-committal smile.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Richard, his broad shoulders hunched over Lucy’s laptop, is shaking his head as he runs his eyes over her rudimentary spreadsheet.
Maggie, watching, wonders where she went so wrong with her son.
He was a difficult baby, an energetic toddler, and grew to become a boy who always pushed the boundaries. Then a bored and petulant teenager. But, however much she knew he would leave the farm, she never thought he would want to tear it apart.
‘What’s wrong, Richard?’ She is not going to be manipulated by his melodrama; is determined to stay calm and realistic.
‘What’s wrong?’ He gives a mock cough. ‘These figures! It’s all very well stating that you’ll have reduced your overdraft substantially over the summer, but you haven’t accounted for the winter costs. There’s feed, maintenance, the purchase of new seed. Tom, what do those add up to?’
‘Eh?’ Tom rubs his hands together and looks sheepish.
‘Forty thousand?’ asks his uncle.
‘Somewhere in the region of that.’
Richard sucks in his breath, and Maggie knows that, at that moment, she actively dislikes him. It shocks her that she could think that of her child. Where is his sense of affinity with the place, and, more than that, his kindness? For a minute, she remembers him as a small child, needling the bull: reaching through the gate to tickle his testicles with a broom; prompting the most almighty reaction. ‘Why did you do that?’ she had raged, after the bull had charged at him and had had to be put down. ‘Why not?’ he had said, refusing to admit to being ruffled. He had shrugged his shoulders, she remembers. Insouciant, even at eight. Deliberately dispassionate.
Perhaps it is her fault, for she has always been hard on him, she knows that. Well it was inevitable with Judith as a sister: such a good, loyal, caring child. But there were other comparisons she inevitably made too – and he sensed it. ‘Just who do you want me to be?’ he had asked, shortly before heading off to university and effectively leaving the farm for ever. And how could she possibly answer that?
She must focus on what he is saying now, for she will not let the farm be sold off even after her death, if she can help it. Though she cannot tell them why it is so imperative, she needs her family to stay here. Six generations have f
armed at Skylark, stretching right back to the great-grandfather in the late nineteenth century who gave Polblazey its nickname. And yet, as far as Richard is concerned, that connection – the same family tending the same land over one hundred and fifty years – counts for nothing. A hard knot of fury forms in her chest.
Lucy is coming to Tom’s aid now, bless her, arguing that they can reduce the overdraft with her plans for the cottages. Twenty-seven thousand pounds they could bring in, she seems to be suggesting before Richard knocks her predictions down.
‘What if we have a dismal end of the summer, or a freezing winter, and the rents don’t come in for next year? Or you fit new bathrooms and that swallows up another six or seven grand?’
‘Well, we’ve been thinking of improving the dairy to offer cream throughout the year.’
‘Who’s going to be tramping here in November or January? Or even March? They’ve got to have a reason to come here, and a dairy won’t be enough of a lure out of season – however lovely it seems.’
His objections are coming thick and fast; his speech, precise and emphatic. She clenches her skirt into balls with her fists, so angry that she doesn’t trust herself to speak.
Tom clears his throat. ‘What about developing the ice cream?’ He looks diffident: not used to putting himself forward. ‘That’s what I’d like to do. We could use our milk, and some of my more unusual flavours and market it as a taste of Cornwall. We think the mark-up could be good.’
‘Well that might work,’ Richard looks sceptical, but for the first time isn’t openly scornful. ‘And if profitable I’d be willing to invest. But we’d need to get some proper figures for the cost of machinery and the set-up, and your projected turnover in a year’s time. It’s all very well having this idea that you might like to make ice cream, but I’d only want to invest in it – or support any application to the bank manager to do the same – if it was not just viable but likely to make money in the medium to long term.’ He fixes them with a hard stare.
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