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

by Vaughan, Sarah

  And then Maggie glances over the wall separating the two of them and into the garden, and in that second, their eyes meet. The look, which shifts from confusion to recognition, and then to something like fear, lasts perhaps three seconds. A chill runs through Alice’s veins and then a bizarre sense of relief.

  ‘Maggie!’ She calls her name without intending to, but the syllables are certain: a call for attention caught on the breeze.

  The other woman is startled.

  ‘Maggie,’ she repeats, emboldened by the fact that she hasn’t moved yet. She stumbles up and starts to cross the garden towards her. Maggie, eyes on her face, starts to back away.

  ‘Keep away from me,’ the older woman says, her body stiff, her voice icy.

  ‘Maggie.’ She tries to pacify her. ‘I’ve got some good news for you. I’ve something for you!’ But her words are tossed by the wind.

  And now Maggie is turning and stumbling, the peg bag abandoned, the washing strewn on the table, as she rushes from the garden at speed.

  Alice stands at a loss, watching the washing fluttering on the line – the clothes of a family: hardwearing trousers, faded shirts, a toddler’s socks and leggings – and the jumble of wet boxers and T-shirts, lying discarded by a woman she harmed.

  In the cool of the kitchen, Maggie finds that she cannot stop shaking. Her teeth chatter as she grips the kitchen table and tries to calm herself. It was her. It was her. No ghost of a young teenage girl, but a woman as solid as her standing there, as unapologetically as you like, calling out. ‘Maggie’ she said; and with that cry, unleashed a stream of memories she has tried so hard to suppress and that now cascade so swiftly that she trembles. Two syllables, no longer uttered in a child’s voice, but still unmistakably Alice’s. Her name, said by someone with the power to devastate her.

  She manages to sit, her knees clattering against the underside of the table. Why has she come back now? And why not earlier, when she would have had the time and the energy to track her baby down?

  She thinks of her own search: that moment with the archivist, and the countless hours she has spent since, wondering where he could be, how she could possibly find him. All those painful, fruitless hours. She slams a palm on the table: the initial shock seguing into something close to rage. How dare she arrive, uninvited and unannounced? If she has something to say, she could have sent a letter, or at least a note requesting that they meet. A letter would have given her time to think, could be read in private: lingered over, reread and maybe treasured. Such a letter could also be burned.

  She must see if she can stand. Perhaps get a glass of water. She walks to the sink below the window, clinging to the worktop as she goes. The garden is empty. Perhaps she’s hovering in the cottage? Damn Alice. Just what does she want from her? For a split second she sees her father raising his shotgun to a cluster of rabbits. Bang, bang, bang: a volley of shots blasting into the corn, smoke spiralling upwards. Run, rabbit; run, rabbit; run, run, run.

  ‘Granny?’ Lucy is standing in the doorway. ‘Are you OK? I heard you talking to someone …’ She comes closer and touches her arm, gently.

  ‘See that woman—’ She points and her finger shakes as she sees her, just visible behind the tamarisk. ‘I don’t want her here.’

  ‘But that’s Mrs Coates. She’s staying in one of the cottages. We can’t ask her to leave.’ She looks perturbed. ‘Why? Has she offended you in some way?’

  Maggie shuffles back to her chair, the strain of carrying her secret weighing heavier than it has done for years. Should she just tell her? Her and Judith? It might be a relief to unburden herself: finally to confess to something that explains who she is today.

  ‘She hasn’t offended me, no,’ she says, deliberately. ‘But something she did – many years ago – caused me some pain.’

  It is an exquisite understatement.

  She reaches for her granddaughter’s hand and gives it an uncharacteristic squeeze.

  ‘Lucy. There’s something I should have told you all,’ she says.

  Thirty-six

  Judith is struggling to take in what she is telling them. Her daughter’s forehead creases and she pulls at her bottom lip, as if she is trying to coax out the most appropriate words.

  It was hard for Maggie to get them right. Or, rather, impossible. For nothing could take away from the brutality of the truth. ‘I had another baby before you. I gave him away. And, each day, I wait, hoping that I’ll see him. The child I’ve never known.’

  Of course, she wouldn’t dream of saying anything as overemotional as that. She managed the other baby bit – and the part about giving him up. But the sorrow, the endless, unrequited longing to meet the child she had never known, her lost baby? That bit she kept to herself.

  ‘You had another baby? And you never told any of us about it? Did Dad know?’

  ‘No.’

  She had never told Edward. When he returned from the war, it was clear that their ‘understanding’ was a childish promise, best forgotten, and it was a decade before they got together again and married. Just the once, he had mentioned their past ‘embarrassments’. She took it to mean that he had visited an Italian brothel, and wondered if he had heard a rumour about the baby – but she couldn’t bear to ask. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ he had said, quoting L. P. Hartley, for he was the most unlikely farmer, her bookish husband. He knew she wasn’t a virgin, and she had taken his comment to refer to that; had just nodded and smiled.

  She clears her throat, dry despite the sips of water she has forced down. She is immensely weary. ‘It was a huge shame in those days; it ruined reputations. The family’s, not just the girl’s.’ She pauses, remembering the intensity of her mother’s anger. ‘My mother, your grandmother, Evelyn, insisted the baby had to go.’

  ‘What about your father? Grandpa Joe?’

  ‘He didn’t know when it happened. I think she said I had women’s trouble. And when he realised and wanted to search for my baby, my mother was formidable and won the argument. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time.’

  She thinks back to the terrible aftermath of giving up her baby: when she’d gone back to the county school to take her Higher School Certificate. Not being able to confide in anyone, having to try to excise all thoughts of her baby from her mind. Her friends had thought her distant, detached, excessively studious, with no interest in the GIs circling the town, geed up in preparation for D-Day little more than a month away, though they didn’t know it, then. She had kept her head down and worked obsessively in the bedroom at Aunt Edith’s as an escape route. She needed to get away from everything she had once loved: to get away from the farm.

  She sniffs. Lucy, a little more detached perhaps than Judith but still visibly shocked, is still grappling with the thought of this baby.

  ‘And this woman, Alice … the guest staying in the cottage … she helped your mother get rid of him?’

  Maggie looks down at her fingers, twisting her wedding ring up towards her lump of a knuckle and back. ‘She was only a child. Thirteen. An evacuee. Terrified, I can see that now, of my mother’s anger. She was supposed to take him to an orphanage in Bodmin – and yet I’ve never found a trace of him there.

  ‘I know it’s illogical, but I’ve never been able to stop blaming her for doing as my mother said. I suppose I thought that somehow she would defy her, side with me, refuse to take the baby – perhaps even tell my father, who might have been able to stop my mother at that point.’

  She sees Alice’s blanched face, streaked with tears, as she backed out of the bedroom. And earlier, her look of guilt when Maggie returned home from school to discover Will had been sent away.

  ‘I blamed her for telling them about Will, too.’

  ‘Will?’ Judith looks bemused.

  ‘Her brother. The baby’s father.’ The words are out: the father’s identity. But the name – meaningless to her daughter and granddaughter – cannot convey what he meant.

  ‘There was no one like him. T
here was never anyone else like him.’ She tries to do him justice. ‘My mother said it was first love – a silly, childish thing – but nothing I felt for Edward ever touched it. Nor any other boyfriend I had after the war.

  ‘He was beautiful, you see.’ And it was true: she had never seen a more beautiful young man, not in all her years of teaching nor among any of the farm workers who stripped off each harvest, their triangular torsos bronzed in the sun. But there was more to him than this. He radiated exuberance that summer: not cockiness, but a quiet awareness that when the war ended, the world could be his for the taking. He might only be a farm boy, but he was lucky: exempt from being called up, safe in Cornwall. A survivor. And he knew she was in love with him. That would give any seventeen-year-old a shot of confidence.

  ‘I can’t take it in. Does Richard know?’ Judith looks shocked. ‘Did you tell him and not me?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘And you said you went looking for him – for the baby?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Her tone softens – for Judith’s hurt is understandable. ‘When you and Richard left home.

  ‘I went to the orphanage – but they had lost all of his records. Short of advertising for him to come forward – something that would have distressed your father and have severely strained our marriage – there was no way of looking at all.’

  ‘It must have been horrific for you.’ Judith’s hands snake across the table towards hers, and her face is filled with compassion.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Always wondering.’

  ‘Yes … yes.’ She is curt now, for she cannot bear this sympathy. No more needs to be said.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Lucy adds. Judith nods. But their words, well-meaning though they are, are inadequate – for how can they not be?

  For a moment they just sit there. It is out there, thinks Maggie. My secret. She feels curiously deflated. Something so feared has occurred, and nothing dramatic has happened, after all. The kitchen clock still ticks with its usual regularity; a batch of scones cools by the Aga; and, in the fields, the cows will no doubt be grazing. The tourists, craving teas and relaxation, will be turning up any minute now.

  ‘So … what would you like us to do now?’ Lucy is being practical.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to tell Richard.’ A knot forms in her stomach.

  ‘Yes. He’s not your only boy.’ Judith gives a small smile, compassion tinged with something else, now: perhaps apprehension at how her brother will view this.

  Her children’s whole perception of her will change. Distorted by this single shift. She wants to reassure Judith that she still loves her just as much as ever, but she does not know quite how to articulate it.

  Her daughter clears her throat. ‘I suppose that’s why you’re so determined not to leave the farm?’

  ‘Well, a little,’ she admits. ‘It’s just one of the reasons. But yes. I wanted to remain here in case he somehow made his way back.’

  ‘I can see that.’ Judith glances at Lucy. ‘Well. That makes me even more determined that we should keep standing up to Richard – and absolutely certain that we should stay here.’

  ‘What do you want to do about Mrs Coates?’ Lucy voices a question Maggie wants to dismiss.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She is weary, and suddenly confounded. ‘I need to know why she’s here. Why now? Does she want to rake over what happened? I’m frightened that, if I approach her, I’ll only hear something worse.’

  ‘She knows you’re here. She knows you’ve seen her.’ Lucy ticks points off on her fingers. ‘What could be worse than what you’ve already gone through?’

  ‘Discovering that she’s been in touch with him – my baby – and that he’s now dead? That it’s too late, after all?’

  The fear slips out before she even acknowledges it. And yet, hearing it articulated makes it sound so pitiful. She had a son she has never known – and, in all likelihood, will never know. But she is so wedded to the idea that she might somehow meet him that she would rather live in ignorance. She is a fool. An old self-pitying fool.

  ‘He needn’t be dead. He can’t be dead.’ Lucy grips her hands as if willing her to be confident. ‘What would he be – seventy?’

  ‘Seventy on April the eighteenth this year.’

  ‘And the men on your side of the family all live a long time.’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie gulps a laugh of gratitude. Joe had been ninety one; his father, Matthew, eighty-nine.

  ‘I think you might need to talk to her … but it doesn’t have to be today, or even tomorrow. And we could go with you – or talk to her on your behalf?’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Judith agrees.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, my dears.’ She smiles at them both, for the thought is appealing. ‘But this is something I need to do myself.’

  She frees her hands from Lucy’s grasp, aware that she is brushing off affection as she so often does when sentiment threatens. Spiky, that’s what Edward said she sometimes was. She never explained that that was what happened if you learned never to trust anyone entirely. If the one person who should support you unconditionally – your mother – took your baby away.

  Lucy is still looking at her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she adds. ‘For offering.’ And, she thinks, for understanding.

  Her daughter puts an arm round her shoulders.

  ‘It will all be all right,’ Judith murmurs as she brushes a kiss, light yet perceptible, on the top of her head.

  How times have changed, Maggie thinks. I used to do that to her: my usual goodnight kiss to Judith and Richard. Did I do it to the other baby? She must have, for she links that sweet, ineffable smell with him. She remembers other things, too: the whorl of his damp, black hair – a shock, for she had thought babies were bald – and the fragility of his fingernails; his tiny heart beating against hers – a light, surprisingly rapid beat. Is it enough? No, of course not. And yet they are the memories that have sustained her, over and over, for seventy years.

  Thirty-seven

  Maggie glances down as she steels herself to knock on the door of Yard Cottage. She has dressed for battle, a neatly ironed blouse, a slash of lipstick, freshly brushed hair. Her age-old anger burns. Emotions she had thought were long since tidied away jab, jagged and insistent. Who would have thought that hatred could be reignited like this? That it hadn’t been extinguished, but has smouldered like a forgotten ember over seventy years.

  Her steeliness falters when Alice opens the door: old age is not treating her kindly.

  ‘Alice,’ she says, and sees apprehension cloud her face.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ the younger woman says, and then the words seem to spill from her. ‘I’m glad you’ve come. There’s so much I have to tell you. About why I’m here and what I’ve been up to. So much that I think you’ll want to hear.’

  She looks nervous and strangely excited, but then starts fussing, pouring a cup of tea that Maggie refuses, for she is not here to exchange pleasantries or to reminisce. They sit opposite one another at the kitchen table, Maggie ramrod straight, the fingers of her right hand striking the table lightly as if playing the piano. Up and down they run over five imaginary keys.

  She watches the other woman now and tries to see in her the frightened thirteen-year-old of her memory. The eyes are the same, though a dulled blue now, with none of that wide-eyed wonder at life on the farm. She has filled out: still slim, but with hips that take her by surprise. I never knew her as a young woman – or even properly as a teenager, she thinks. She has been frozen in time: forever a skinny girl, racing down sand dunes, clambering down from caves, and hiding in the barn. Her slippery shadow. Just the thought of her watching them makes the anger bubble up.

  ‘So. It’s been seventy years.’ She needs to start somewhere. ‘Seventy years in April.’

  ‘I left just after Easter, lambing had finished.’ Alice doesn’t mention the baby at all.

  ‘I still think about him you know. M
y baby.’

  There. It is out there. She fixes Alice with her eyes and her voice comes out almost as a whisper: ‘I think about him every single day.’

  She pauses. The emotion she has kept bottled up for all these years risks rushing out, like the tide swamping a rock pool. ‘I know I should be grateful to you for getting him to safety but I never wanted him to be taken away.’

  Alice opens her mouth as if to protest, but Maggie is determined to have her say. ‘I think it’s been worse because, when I’ve tried to look, there was no means of finding him. The nuns had no trace, no record: no proof that he’d even been there. And so I’ve been in limbo. Much as I’ve tried to hope, I’ve no idea if he even knows my name or if he has anything with which to find me.’

  Her voice escalates now, the pain and panic rearing up as she tries to convey the tragedy of her life: both she and her child may long for one another, and yet, with no paper trail, they can never be linked. There is nothing to tie them: the skeins have been snapped, if they ever existed. Her son may not even know that he was adopted – or that she exists.

  She pauses and looks at Alice, whose expression is darkening. A flush of red spreads from the centre of her cheeks. She seems even more nervous, and when she speaks it is so softly that Maggie wonders if she mishears.

  ‘Everything is going to be OK – but I didn’t take him to the orphanage.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  This time, Alice enunciates more clearly: ‘I didn’t take him to the orphanage.’

  The room constricts and whirls.

  ‘Then what did you do with him?’ Her voice comes out as a dangerous hiss.

  ‘I wanted to take him to Will, but the vet wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘Patrick Trescothick?’ She is bemused.