‘What?’
She gestured at him to be quiet.
It wasn’t there now. That gentle rustle as if someone had been leaning against a hay bale and had then moved softly away.
‘What was it? A dog?’ As he said it, she knew he didn’t believe it. ‘Arthur went back into the house, so it couldn’t be him.’
Her bowels dissolved inside her, and she knew who had been standing there, with icy clarity.
‘Alice,’ she said.
Twenty-two
Now: 3 August 2014, Cornwall
Six o’clock and Lucy is wishing she had got up a little earlier and made time for that instant coffee as she shepherds the first line of cows into their stalls.
Elsewhere, the farm sleeps, but she has been awake since dawn when the skylarks began their joyful chirruping. Still, she felt bleary, emerging into the cool of the early morning, and a world so fresh the grass was sopping with dew.
As a child, she had loved being up this early, watching her dad doing the milking in the summer months. Often so high-spirited, he was thoughtful with his cows; talking to them gently, patting rather than smacking their ample flanks.
They had some Guernseys then: longhaired, silky beasts that produced the richest milk from which to make the thickest clotted cream. Each had her own name, of course, and each her own personality. Fred would call them his ‘Old Ladies’. ‘I spend more time with them than with my younger ones,’ he would say, glancing at Judith, somewhat ruefully, and bundling Lucy into his arms.
Perhaps that explained why he took their deaths quite so hard. When the Ministry of Agriculture declared there was foot-and-mouth on the farm, he had stormed off for six hours; running along the cliffs, as he often did when stressed, but staying out so long that his wife was frantic. ‘I needed to get my head straight,’ she had heard him tell Judith later. Then: ‘I’m sorry.’
When the cows had been put on the pyres, he had cried. Yes, there was compensation, but the sense of generations of livestock going up in smoke, and the acrid smell of burning flesh, drove reason right away.
Lucy had been at her bolshiest then. Eighteen and desperate to leave Cornwall, the death and destruction wrought all around her just proved that she came from a nightmarish, apocalyptic land. And the sight of her father convulsed in sobs cut through her posturing and perturbed her in a way that she didn’t like to admit. Fred never cried. Men like him didn’t. It destroyed the natural order of things. And if he did, what was going on?
She wonders what he would think of his farm now. What would he be telling them to do: focus on the livestock or branch out into ice cream or tourism? He was never the shrewdest businessman – insufficiently ruthless to send a barren cow for slaughter, grim-faced when he sent the male calves. It was Judith who would phone the abattoir when one cow repeatedly failed to get pregnant or another proved hard to milk. ‘There’s a soft streak to him,’ Uncle Richard would tell his sister – and he wasn’t being complimentary. ‘It’s called compassion,’ Judith had once, uncharacteristically, snapped back.
Lucy sees her father everywhere on the farm, now. The memories flood back as she checks that the teat cups are correctly attached and sprays the udders; when she whitewashes the cottages – for he put the last coat of paint on – when she takes a turn at hay baling or, yes, when she runs along the cliffs. And whereas his death haunted her before her return – the details of the accident she heard about from her mother, after she refused to attend the coroner’s court – now it is the everyday details of his life that nudge at her, repeatedly. The positive memories – of him laughing as he collapsed in his threadbare armchair by the fireplace in the front room, or helping her to clamber to the top of the hay bales – drift up again and again, whispering to her: surely you remember? Don’t make it all about his death. Fred was a father, a husband, a farmer. A hard-working, compassionate man, prone to fits of manic energy and the occasional low patch. Someone who felt things intensely but who always strove to do his best.
A figure stands silhouetted against the bright white light of the doorway and for a moment she thinks it is her father. Then Tom comes and stands beside her.
‘Sorry I’m late. Barely slept, then couldn’t get up.’ He gives a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
‘Thinking about the crop?’
He nods. He has aged in the days since the storm: face cloaked in grey, his blue eyes dulled as if he were a truculent teenager. A heavy dusting of stubble grazes his chin.
There is no need to speak – and for a moment, it is too noisy. A heavy rattle and the feed rains down the hoppers in front of each cow. The vacuum pump begins its quiet drone, and then the cattle are silent, heads down as they chomp on their cake.
Lucy walks the length of them, checking the monitors behind each cow that weigh the milk which drips down the tube: three litres, four, five, six. The electronic figures rise for these most prolific of cows up to twenty – even twenty-two. Then: ‘Home, home, home,’ she calls. Tom releases the gates and they file out back into the farmyard while the next two lines are ushered in.
A rattle of feed, a lowering of their heads, and the next eighteen cows begin the process. It is comforting to do something so familiar and repetitive. The odd one stomps a hoof, but most are content to be milked, twice daily, for up to ten months a year, as long as they are well fed.
Tom joins her for a moment, waiting behind a bank of cows, jumping to avoid the streams of piss that gush towards them with regular frequency. She picks up a hose and aims it at the cowpats, washing them away.
‘Luce—’ He starts to say something that seems important, but there is the loud thud of a cow trying to barge her way through a gate at the front of the line, and he sprints off to quieten it. Her neighbour shuffles, briefly disconcerted, but the rest continue to eat, uninterrupted.
For an hour and a half they milk, until all seventy cows have passed through the parlour. Tom leads them back to the fields while she fills a pail with milk to be fed to the calves held in their pens.
The three-week-old ones are her favourite. Still elegant, with slim legs and soft, liquid eyes, like a doe’s, yet beginning to show their individual characters and strength. She slops the milk into the feeder and watches them drink frantically, eyes rolling back in pleasure, then lets the greediest suck on her milk-dipped fingers. Her tongue is rough and her mouth insistent as she cleanses them.
‘No more. You’ve had your lot,’ she laughs as she pulls her hand away, trailing a thread of milky spittle. The calf tries to barge her siblings from the bucket, buffeting them with her head.
‘Oh, OK then.’ She dips her fingers in the milk once more and the calf resumes sucking until, in her enthusiasm, she nips her with her sharp bottom teeth.
‘You all right?’ Her brother is back with a fresh pail of milk for the four-week-old calves, penned alongside them. He seems uncomfortable, and she remembers that there was something he had wanted to say.
‘Fine. You?’
‘Not really.’ He gives a sigh, a long gush that makes it sound as if he has been holding something tightly inside for far too long. ‘Just wonder what the fuck we’re doing? Why we’re bothering with all of this?’
‘Oh, Tom.’ She looks from him to the calves, their eyes soft and inquisitive. How can he doubt the validity of this?
‘All right … they’re cute. But it’s such a fucking struggle and it just keeps getting harder. The wheat reed makes me wonder if we should bow to the inevitable. Accept Uncle Richard’s new idea – still living here but not farming – or consider it, at least.’
‘Tom!’ A hard knot wedges tightly in her chest. ‘We can’t give up on all this. What would Dad think?’
‘Dad?’ Tom is incredulous. ‘What the hell’s he got to do with this?’
She stares back at her brother. How can he be so stupid? ‘Don’t you remember foot-and-mouth? He never gave up when things were tough. He just picked himself up and carried on. So how could we do this to him?’<
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Tom shakes his head and lets out a low whistle, scuffs his boot against the straw poking from the calves’ pen.
‘I can’t believe you can still think that.’ His voice is low, as if he is trying very hard to control it. ‘He was the last person to lecture anyone on not giving up on anything.’
The accusation jabs through the straw like a rusted blade.
‘And what do you mean by that?’ His anger takes her by surprise.
‘Oh come on!’ He laughs, openly derisive. ‘He left us properly in the lurch.’
‘He had an accident.’ Her words come out staccato and curt. ‘A tragic accident. It could have happened to anyone. It was just his bad luck – and ours – that it happened to him.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Tom gives a bark of a laugh that is utterly unlike him. ‘An accident that saw him just happen to slip from the cliff when he went out running.’
‘The paths were sodden from a storm the night before. And he was running at dusk – when most accidents happen. The coroner said so.’ She recites the facts, hurt and insistent, wondering why he has to dwell on this now, when going over the details won’t change a thing.
‘So, our dad – who’d run those cliffs, man and boy, for forty odd years – just happened to lose his footing and slip down the cliff after choosing to run at dusk, did he?’
Something is wrong. Tom’s voice rings around the barn, dripping with sarcasm. This isn’t the Tom she knows. His cheeks are flushed and he has that hard, trying-not-to-cry look that she remembers from Fred’s funeral, and from many other occasions when he was a little boy.
‘Why are you being like this?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does. What are you trying to tell me?’ A cold streak of certainty works its way from her stomach and up through her chest. She knows what he is about to say, and she knows she could avoid it by fetching another pail, by closing down the conversation. But she has had enough of running away.
‘Tom. Please. Say what you mean.’
He pauses, and when he speaks his voice is soft and sorrowful.
‘He killed himself.’
‘Noooooooo.’ It is more of a bleat than a wail, this involuntary sound that comes from somewhere deep inside her body. She stares at him, frantic.
‘But he couldn’t have. The inquest found it was an accidental death. The coroner never once mentioned suicide, did he?’
‘Well, there was no note, so he couldn’t know for certain. No one ever will. But he gave that ruling so Mum would still get the compensation from the insurance company, and to save her feelings, though she knows: she just doesn’t like to talk about it. Apparently that coroner’s known for doing it with other farm deaths around here.’
He puts an arm round her and pulls her close. ‘Someone like Dad, who’s lived here all his life, who knows those cliffs back to front, who ran them at least twice a week, in most seasons, doesn’t just slip on them. Doesn’t choose to go running at dusk after a huge storm either, when he knows the paths will be thick with mud and impassable in places. You know how slippery they can get. There’s another thing: they never found any sign of a slippage in the mud or a fall through the grass. And no sign of a fall of slate.’
‘Perhaps they weren’t looking for it.’ She battles against his implication that Fred jumped.
Her brother sighs. ‘Well, you believe that if you want, Lucy.’
‘Well, I do, actually!’ She pushes back against him, standing defiant, as she did in childhood arguments. But the possibility that he is telling the truth bubbles up inside her and she finds herself grappling for certainties with which to force it down.
‘He had nothing to feel suicidal about, did he? I mean I know he could get low – but the farm was OK, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like when we had foot-and-mouth. If he was going to kill himself, why didn’t he do it then?’
For a moment, she is back to those terror-filled months in the spring of 2001 when the fields were eerily empty. The livestock killed or indoors, for fear they would catch the virus, blown on the wind. Each farm put bowls of pink disinfectant before each stile and gate, and infected farms had policemen standing outside them, their families effectively under house arrest; isolated, ostracised, unable to go out or receive visitors. When they discovered that one heifer had the disease, and the whole herd would have to be slaughtered, the Pethericks were in this position: bales steeped in disinfectant at the end of their drive, food left by a friendly neighbour in a dustbin and collected by the copper, Lucy and Tom unable to go to school, and the family faced with the certainty that their entire herd – and their flock of sheep as well – would have to be put to death.
Lucy had thought the killing would be the worst thing. These were cattle she had grown up with: some she had fed since they were two days old, others were expecting new calves – and delivered healthy ones, which had to be shot immediately. Even once it was clear a handful had succumbed to the illness – their noses streaming and necks outstretched, a couple beginning to limp – it seemed barbaric to kill the lot. Judith and the children stayed inside, squirrelled away at the top of the house, as the Ministry of Agriculture slaughterman, with his single-bore shotgun, decimated their livestock – and their history.
But what happened next, if anything, was worse. The officials, wearing hoods drawn tightly, white boiler suits, and rubber boots and gloves, dug a trench in which to pile the cows and sheep, then left them for almost a week as they were ordered to kill infected beasts elsewhere. From time to time, an official would clamber over the rotting pile of flesh to spray it with disinfectant, and the bodies would pop with an audible phut. In the mornings, animal limbs would be strewn across the yard where badgers and foxes had worried them in the night. Once, a magpie flew past, an infected sheep’s eyeball in its beak.
It was a relief when the pyres of rotting beasts, legs sticking out like matchsticks at all angles, were lit, and the stench of paraffin began to overwhelm the rottenness. For a moment, the air smelt of roast beef, then acrid, charring flesh. As the pyre continued to smoke, there was news that a neighbouring farmer had hanged himself in his cowshed. He had stood on a milking bucket, then kicked it away. Another farmer, nearer Truro, had rigged up his tractor to kill himself with his shotgun. But Fred had picked himself up, stopped keeping sheep and, with his compensation, rebuilt his dairy herd slowly but steadily.
‘Why didn’t he do it then?’ She breaks off from those pin-sharp memories.
‘He was eight years younger. Fitter, more resilient. Perhaps more optimistic. Perhaps he didn’t have depression – not depression like he had this time – then.
‘The farm had had an inconclusive TB test a couple of days before he died. Another one was lined up, and, if that was inconclusive too, then, that was it: that animal would be killed. Perhaps he was worried that it would spread: that this would be it again? I think he couldn’t face any more deaths on the farm – ironic, really, since his was the most tragic of all.’
He pulls away from her and looks into her blanched face. ‘Did you really not know?’
‘No. Well, perhaps.’ Fragments of conversations and half-known facts tessellate to form a new truth, the edges becoming sharper with everything he says. She remembers Fred’s fury when, aged seventeen and going through her goth stage, she had tried to paint her bedroom walls black. ‘Isn’t there enough darkness in life?’ he had roared – and she had been shaken by the look on his face, and his uncharacteristic rage. Could he have done this to them? Bile rises in her mouth and she gulps it down.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Perhaps I did.’
They feed the remaining calves together: the four-week-olds, the five-week-olds, then the six-month-old bullock they are rearing to sire cows that aren’t closely related. He tries to headbutt Tom – his eyes filled with a promise of menace – and Tom slaps his huge head away.
The barn smells sweet: the straw fresh with only a hint of manure, the early-morning air crisp and salt-tinged.
Everything is as it should be and yet life has irrevocably changed. Her dad killed himself. He found life so bleak that he chose to leave all of this, and he chose to leave them.
A ball of cold hard fury replaces her heavy numbness. His family weren’t enough to deter him, and her dad – the man she thought would protect her for ever – proved more fallible than most. Could not protect himself, let alone others, in the end.
How could he do it? However ashamed she has been of her mistake and of Matt’s infidelity, she has never viewed life as unendurable, or death – especially a horrible, messy death – as an escape. She thinks of her one moment teetering on the headland, watching the spume swirling around the rocks beneath. She had shocked herself then, and in that split second when the wind offered to lift her, stumbled back, choosing life.
But this farm – a refuge for her, a place where she imagines she might eventually find happiness – was the very opposite for Fred. The relentlessness of milking; the financial pressure; the fear it would all come tumbling down: he must have hated it.
‘The fucker,’ she says, more in sorrow than in anger.
‘I know.’ Tom takes the pail from her and puts an arm round her shoulders as they leave the barn and tramp towards the farmhouse. ‘I know – but he wasn’t really.’
‘No. Of course he wasn’t, really,’ she says.
Twenty-three
Then: 5 September 1943, Cornwall
Maggie knew they had been found out, as soon as she arrived home from school on Friday evening. Evelyn and Alice were in the kitchen, preparing dinner. When Maggie entered, both stopped and looked up.
Alice’s eyes were scorched red, as if she had been crying for days. Evelyn looked more implacable than usual. Even Joanna, who entered with a pile of laundry seconds after Maggie, froze in the doorway.
‘What’s wrong? Why are you all looking at me like that?’ Maggie’s voice changed from an attempt at wry amusement to near panic.
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