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

by Vaughan, Sarah

  ‘Rock-pooling it is then,’ he said. Alice beamed and jumped from the dunes onto the beach before leading the way.

  Despite Maggie’s initial half-heartedness, the rock-pooling proved addictive. Will smashed a mussel for bait and pierced the slippery mollusc with a fish hook. A blenny was netted, then a couple of shrimps.

  The crab line was dangled to the sandy floor of a shallow pool and a spider crab scuttled towards the bait. Alice held the net poised and secured it, then eased her trophy into a pail of water and soapy, lettucy seaweed. More and more fish followed, until the bucket became a heaving mass of crabs and shrimps and fish, swimming or clambering over each other – the largest consuming the smallest in a survival of the fittest.

  ‘Why are they doing that?’ Alice looked perturbed and yet she didn’t fish out the offending crab as Maggie suggested.

  ‘He’s my best catch. He can’t go.’

  ‘Even though he’s eating the little ones?’ Maggie said.

  The younger girl shrugged. Years of seeing her favourite lambs and chicks sold off, of realising that the baby rabbits would be shot and even the excess kittens drowned, had made her less sentimental, it seemed.

  ‘I might just go for a walk,’ Maggie suggested, after they had peered into the pools for a good twenty minutes. The heat licked the back of her neck and the air was so still she felt clammy around her waistband. She wanted to walk to the sea to paddle or, even better, wade in.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Will said, and gave her a quick smile. He glanced at his sister. ‘Are you coming, Alice?’

  Her heart sank, but Alice barely looked at them.

  ‘You go. I just want to net this really tricky crab that’s hiding from me,’ and she jabbed at the wine-red fronds of a sea anemone. The crab scuttled and buried.

  She looked so absorbed that they left her to it.

  The sand was wrinkled with the previous tide’s markings, and the ridges massaged Maggie’s bare feet as she walked over them. Nearer the water, a slight breeze whipped her face. She closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation of it brushing her skin. The beads of perspiration that had formed at the top of her back as the sun refracted off the rocks had dried and disappeared as quickly as they had come. She felt, as she always did by the water, calmed and soothed by it.

  ‘I will if you will?’

  He was smiling at her with a look of broad mischief. The sort of smile she remembered from when he was a young boy.

  ‘If I will what?’

  He made it sound so simple. ‘Swim.’

  ‘I can’t, can I?’

  ‘You’re wearing shorts.’

  And so she was – for the first time ever since she had become a young woman: for Evelyn would not approve if she knew of them.

  ‘You could jump in with them on, or,’ and here he flushed a deep red so that his freckles were subsumed by the colour, ‘I promise I won’t look if you want to take them off and just dive in.’

  She dithered and glanced up the beach towards Alice, straining to see if there was anyone on the footpath or in the fields – Arthur, James, her father – who could spy on her. The paths were empty: just Alice still bent over her net.

  The water lapped and lulled around her ankles.

  ‘Promise you won’t look?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She prevaricated.

  ‘Not chicken, are you?’

  That was it: the challenge she needed. And yet she still wanted reassurance. ‘Promise you won’t look and you won’t tell?’

  ‘Who? Your father? Aunt Evelyn?’

  She flushed. There it was: the admission they were no longer children. That this was behaviour her mother would be appalled by.

  He shrugged and turned his back. ‘Tell me when I can come in.’

  It looked so enticing. The waves glinted with shards of gold, and slid from aquamarine through to a deep turquoise. Days like this, when the sea failed to take your breath away but felt like a cool bath, were rare. Her mind made up, she scrambled out of her shorts and left them with her shoes on a rock, then raced through the water. The waves splashed up against her, drenching her blouse, spraying her hair, and with one ungainly whoosh, she was in.

  ‘It’s glorious! Come on in!’ She rolled onto her back, sculling and kicking as she glanced back at the beach, then did some fierce, quick breaststrokes as she swam deeper. A wave picked her up and carried her, and she ducked her head under, eyes smarting, ears singing, as she swam underneath.

  And suddenly he was there, swimming towards her.

  ‘So you made it at last.’

  He grinned, ducked his head under and ploughed towards her, biceps whirling, body streamlined. He surfaced and flicked the hair out of his eyes, droplets flying from him like an effusive dog or perhaps a seal.

  ‘Race you?’ It was her challenging him now. She turned away and plunged under the water, heart pounding as she fought against a small current, feet kicking ferociously as the old childish competitiveness reared up, once again. She could hear him coming up on the inside of her and it seemed ridiculously important that she beat him at this; that she assert that, though he had become another person physically, she was the better swimmer, all the same.

  It was no good. He had caught her up, and swept in front of her, his face ablaze with laughter.

  ‘Kiss me.’

  Maggie wondered if she was imagining it.

  ‘Go on, I dare you,’ he said.

  They were treading water now, having swum far further than they had intended. Will was so close she could see spots of salt water joining his freckles. She let her body drift towards him so that their chests were almost touching and their limbs knocked against each other, phosphorescent in the water, disembodied in the depths.

  It struck her that this would be a clumsy kiss. Here, out of their depth. And so: ‘No,’ she told him. ‘You’ll have to catch me first.’

  She ducked under a swelling wave, and surged towards the beach, helped by an onshore wind and the incoming tide. Her blouse clung to her breasts, but without her shorts she swam freely. She plunged deeper, and with three quick strokes was away.

  A flurry of bubbles and she emerged to see that he was behind her, his face triumphant and then hesitant.

  ‘You haven’t caught me yet!’ she said.

  She carried on swimming, legs kicking fiercely as she led him in towards the shore. And then he had her: an arm circled her waist and she let herself be pulled towards him.

  ‘You’ve won!’ She laughed, allowing her body to twist and turn; disarmed by a sudden flurry of shivers that ran down her thighs as she glanced against him. With one swift gesture, she was buoyed, contained.

  He could touch the sand, here, and her limbs wrapped round him so that they were entwined far more closely than if this had happened on dry land. His left hand rested on her buttocks, but with his right he wiped a frond of hair from her face.

  ‘Now I can see you more clearly,’ he said, and looked suddenly serious. No longer Will, the evacuee she had known since he was thirteen, but someone else entirely.

  She could feel his chest pressed against her breasts, his thumb stroking the small of her back and then dipping down towards her bottom. A hard thing pushed against her. She put her arms round his neck, and pulled herself up to wriggle away. He held her high, hands below her hips, and, suspended by the water, she wrapped her legs round him so that they couldn’t get much closer. We are held as fast, she thought, as an anemone anchored to a shelf of slate.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he told her, his eyes dark now, his expression open and unwavering. She wondered if he had ever kissed anyone before, and thought that, perhaps, she should lead the way.

  Their lips met and it was sweet and yielding, soft and delicious. She tasted the salt on his lips, the warmth of his tongue. She teased him, planting butterfly kisses on his open mouth, until he pulled away and coated her neck, ears and eyelids with kisses so light it felt as if he, too, was taunting.
/>   ‘Kiss me properly,’ she heard herself plead.

  He stopped and gave her such a fierce kiss – hard and forceful and hot – that she wondered if he was angry. Her shivers intensified as she leaned in closer and tasted the salt on his skin.

  ‘You’re dangerous,’ he whispered, as if he was confiding something.

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Like a sea you can just about swim in – remember?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, and planted another kiss.

  ‘Kiss me like you did a minute ago,’ she said, frustrated with such tender pecking.

  ‘Like this?’ The kiss was so passionate she wanted to melt into him.

  ‘Yes – and again and again.’

  His fingers grazed her left breast.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No – you can.’ She kept her eyes shut tight, in case he judged such wantonness. His fingers stroked her nipple, tentatively at first; then, when she gave a sharp gasp of surprise, again.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she muttered, her lips searching for his. She held him tightly, clinging on to his shoulders, buoyed by the tide and his strength. This is dangerous, she thought. But no one can see us; we are hidden. And if all is secret, we can claim it isn’t happening.

  Under a setting sun, she forgot about Alice and her rock-pooling; forgot about her mother; forgot about Edward. Nothing was important but the here and now. The chill of the water. The soft taste of Will’s lips.

  Soon the cold became too much and they broke off. They left the water and the beach separately – Maggie searching for Alice, Will diving through the molten waves for a swim. But as he left her, with a final, lingering kiss that tasted of excitement and hope, she knew that something had started and that nothing would ever be the same again.

  High up on the cliff, Alice watched Maggie gather her shorts and sandals together, saw her hunch to hide the way her wet blouse clung to her figure, tried to imagine, from the way she scurried, the expression on her face.

  It had been a while before she noticed them swimming – and longer still before she realised what they were doing. She had been quite a way away – far too far to see their expressions – and, at first, she had tried to persuade herself that they were just talking.

  She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. Let them scour the beach, looking for her, late into the night, until they were really panicked. The longer they were out, the less likely they were to see that she had been crying; to understand that she might have seen. She turned her back, furious with herself as much as with them, though she couldn’t explain the resentment that jostled with acute embarrassment at her naïvety and a stronger than ever sense of being left out of something.

  The grasses whipped against her as she carried on up the path, stinging nettles pimpling her ankles, cuckoo spit wetting her legs with thick globules of phlegm. She wiped the stickiness, scrunching a dock leaf against the raging red hives clustering on her calves, and, head down, resumed her trudging, back up the stone track, towards the farm.

  Nineteen

  Now: 28 July 2014, Cornwall

  Lucy watches the rogue rain cloud with trepidation. The gunmetal grey deepens to a charcoal, smudging the darkening sky.

  It is the worst thing that could happen: a sudden squall of rain or, worse, a downpour. For Tom has just finished cutting his precious wheat reed for thatching, and the fields are filled with shocks that need drying. For two to three weeks they must stand there while the wind whistles through them and the sun bleaches them from a pale greeny gold – the grain soft, the straw unripened – to an almost white.

  She can see them now, these sheaves, grouped in eights, all touching: a straw cultivated by Joe, her great-grandfather, and by his father too. Before the war, the fields shimmered with this high-value crop but it’s labour-intensive and has always proved to be a risk. If they get wet, the grains in the ears will germinate and the tops of the sheaves bind together, making thrashing or combing impossible. It will rot and discolour and be good for nothing but spreading as dung.

  A fat raindrop plashes on her outstretched hand and spreads like a wet toad. She swears. This wasn’t forecast. She looks up at the rain cloud, willing it to shift and hang over the sea. Go on move, she begs. The cloud refuses to budge and darkens even as she watches, as if reminding her not to take it for granted. Do remember: the weather will beat the best of farmers, it says.

  Another drop falls, and then another. Her heart clutches as it begins to rain in earnest, hammering on the corrugated iron roof of the outbuilding with a hard, percussive beat. Silver stretches from sky to earth: mercury ricochets off the yard, streaming into puddles that swell, whisky brown and ominous. The downpour is furious and relentless: a freak of a cruel nature that, within moments, transforms an overcast sky into a mass of watery grey.

  Trapped in the barn, Lucy is impotent. The wet sheaves can’t be moved or covered – for then they would be fatally damaged – and all she can do is wait. After a drenching, they could be lain down to dry, butts to the wind, if it is windy and sunny – but the damp will remain deep inside, where each sheaf is bound tightly in the centre, like a festering, dangerous secret.

  The rain is falling thick and fast, still: rivulets running over the cobbles, wetting the pats of dried manure, turning the ground into a coppery slick. In the fields, the cows will be hunched miserably, trying to shelter beside the hedgerows, waiting for it all to be over. In the farmhouse, Flo and Judith will be watching. She can see her mother’s face at the kitchen window: a mirror of hers, or perhaps even bleaker as she contemplates what the loss of this crop will mean.

  She cranes her neck out of the barn, and a torrent of rain soaks her, running straight down the back of her T-shirt. Where is Tom, who has invested so much energy in producing this crop – and so much hope? Through the sheets of rain, she sees a tall figure in the nearest field, fists clenched, body wound tight with exasperation – and more than that, with fury – standing stock-still, railing at the sky. He can do nothing to stop this happening: must feel utterly helpless. And yet, faced with the loss of the entire fifteen thousand pounds they had been relying on, what else can he do?

  She runs through the downpour, the rain striking her shoulders and soaking her clothes within seconds. The stubble scratches her ankles, hair plasters her face.

  ‘Come inside,’ she shouts through the rain.

  He turns to her, mouth twisted and wordless, and she sees utter desperation and disbelief in his eyes, though they both knew that this was possible: that the wheat reed was a gamble precisely because it must be dried outdoors for two to three weeks. The unpredictability of the Cornish weather, the reeds’ vulnerability to the elements, the need to manage it precisely to make it as durable as possible are the very reasons it could have commanded such a high price – if only they had managed to conquer all these things.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ she repeats, and holds her arms out.

  ‘I can’t.’ For a moment, he is a small boy reluctant to be held by his big sister.

  ‘Come on.’ She tries to put her arms around him. ‘You’re getting soaked. You can’t do anything here.’

  He shrugs her off. ‘How could this happen?’ Rage contorts his face. ‘Why the fuck did this have to happen to us? On top of everything?’

  She shakes her head for she can say nothing to make it better. ‘I don’t know,’ is the best she can manage. Rain fills her mouth, making her words indistinct and pitiful. ‘But you can’t do anything. Please. Just come inside.’

  He shakes his head and begins to walk from her, face flushed and ugly, head bowed against the taunting rain. In the centre of the field, he stops stock-still and shouts at the sky: expletives hurled into the impervious grey, which drowns him out with a roll of thunder. The rain continues, merciless, relentless: seeps through her jeans so that they cling, sodden, chilling her right to the bone.

  This has always been a
field packed with happy memories. The field where they made their dens as children. Not a field facing in the direction of where Fred died. But from now on, this will hold the memory of her brother raging at the sky: fists clenched, shoulders raised, all self-control surrendered – and something else: his self-belief.

  Another roll of thunder. It’s getting closer. A flash of sheet lightning illuminates Tom and he looks so like Fred, at that moment, that it chills her. She won’t leave him alone here, she thinks, as she runs towards him to beg him to return indoors. But he turns, the fight gone from him – or the need for self-preservation stronger – and, shoulders hunched, trudges back towards her and their home.

  Much later, drying out in the kitchen, she realises she hasn’t seen Tom look so distressed since their father’s funeral. Flo goes to him, and he lets her hold him tight.

  ‘Shit, isn’t it?’ Flo says, handing him a towel and a mug of tea.

  He nods slowly and loosens his grip on her; then turns away from them as if not trusting himself to speak.

  ‘We’ll try spraying the tops of the sheaves with Roundup, to stop the ears germinating,’ he says, after a while, but Lucy can tell from his voice that he doesn’t believe this will be effective. ‘Teach me to stick to what I’m good at. Not to gamble,’ he adds.

  ‘None of us can beat the weather,’ Judith says. It is one of Fred’s phrases. ‘We couldn’t foresee ’til afterwards.’

  The truisms hang in the air. Fifteen thousand pounds has evaporated in less than an hour, and with it the slim possibility of convincing the bank manager – or Uncle Richard – that they have a realistic chance of tackling their debt. All that work, Lucy thinks: those hours spent cultivating the crop, binding the straw then building the shocks. The £300 cost of the seed and, far more, of Tom’s labour: the physical energy expended and the emotion invested, the hope that it would be the means by which the farm would start to succeed.

  She leans against the Aga, feeling its warmth seep through her legs, and realises, far more clearly than she did as a child, that here, you are always at the mercy of the weather. In London, in the always-warm hospital and her centrally heated home, she had missed it: the changeable, mercurial nature of it all. She had longed for the sudden squalls that chased white horses across the bay; the fierce blasts that almost knocked you sideways; the sharp rays that shone through cerulean skies as tractors trawled through fields of gold and the crops were harvested. But here is the reality: a freak downpour that has ruined months of work within minutes and reduced a grown man to near tears.