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

by Vaughan, Sarah

  For the smallest moment Maggie’s mouth contorts and wobbles. It is over as quickly as it happens: this soundless howl. When Lucy next looks, her eyes have hardened into pips that gleam dark against her skin and the white of the pillow, and it is anger Lucy sees as much as loss.

  She waits, wondering if she can ask about the baby. He may be dead as well, for all I know. She finds herself praying that this isn’t so.

  ‘Could she tell you anything about the baby?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Maggie gives an odd, bitter laugh that is quite unlike her. ‘She had quite a lot to tell me about the baby. About someone called Jeremiah.’

  She is shaking, now, with what appears to be a potent mix of anger and grief, and her eyes have a fierceness to them.

  ‘She never took him to the orphanage. She took him to another couple, somewhere on the other side of Rough Tor. She just left him – a tiny baby – with no idea of how he would be looked after, and no means of me tracing him.’

  She pauses for a moment.

  ‘I find it hard to forgive her for that,’ she says. ‘For just abandoning him there, and for not telling me earlier.’ She looks at her granddaughter. ‘If she’d told me then, or back in my twenties or thirties, I’d have scoured the moor for him. I’d have looked for a child his age, and I wouldn’t have given up until I’d found him. I could have done so if she’d told me fifty years ago.’

  ‘Did she say why she is here now? Apart from to tell you this?’

  ‘Oh. She’s here to find him!’

  ‘But that’s wonderful.’

  ‘And what are the odds of that happening?’ Maggie snorts. ‘She has a name, but no correct address. No means of knowing if he’s in Cornwall or anywhere else in the world for that matter. She doesn’t even have any proof that he’s alive. He’s not dead, according to the records in Cornwall. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t elsewhere.’

  ‘We could search together. I could help her.’ Lucy glows with optimism. ‘You told me not to live with regret, don’t you remember? This is your chance not to do so: to make everything OK.’

  ‘My dear Lucy.’ Her grandmother looks at her, sadly. ‘It’s just too late, don’t you see? I’m an old lady. And though I can’t think of anything more wonderful than finding him, I couldn’t cope with the disappointment of not doing so – or of discovering him and finding that he doesn’t want to know me.’

  She pauses and strokes the eiderdown, her eyes welling with tears before she wipes them away, savagely. She is right, thinks Lucy. She is an elderly woman, and has almost run out of time.

  If she thinks her grandmother will accept this quietly, though, she is mistaken.

  ‘I cannot forgive her for telling me the truth so very late,’ Maggie says, her voice starting to tremble. ‘And I cannot forgive her for killing off my hope: the thing that has kept me going all these years.

  ‘I’ve been imagining him walking around the headland, you see, or over the cliff path. But now I know he will never come walking up the track, to find me at my spot under the crab apple. He will never come searching for me.’

  Lucy bends to kiss the top of Maggie’s head, feeling her dry grey hair underneath her lips and the scalp below, as vulnerable as a baby’s. And though she wants to reassure her that there are plenty of other reasons to keep living – not least her family and the farm, which has sustained her, despite all its difficulties – she knows that her grandmother speaks the truth. The possibility of meeting her son is the reason she has clung so tenaciously to life.

  ‘Was there something you wanted from me, anyway, when you came in?’ Maggie looks up as she clasps her hand, makes an effort to talk more brightly.

  Lucy grimaces. ‘I should think it’s the last thing you’ll want to hear at the moment … Uncle Richard has just arrived.’

  ‘I see.’ Maggie lets out her breath.

  ‘Mum phoned him last night. Don’t worry. She didn’t tell him about the baby: she was just furious about him putting in that planning application without telling us.’ She thinks of the laminated notice Tom found, nailed to the gate, yesterday. ‘Just discovering the lay of the land,’ Richard had said when Judith rang, incensed.

  ‘She’s angry about the pressure he’s putting on us too, particularly if this ice cream idea works out, and particularly because of your reasons for wanting to stay here. I think she wanted to have it out with him, face to face.’

  ‘Well, that’s sensible,’ Maggie says.

  ‘They’re talking about it, downstairs.’

  ‘Ah. Then perhaps I should join them.’

  ‘Can you face it?’

  ‘Not particularly. But this is my farm and I will not be sidelined. Besides, I need to tell him about the baby, don’t I?’

  She fixes a smile on her face. ‘Give me a few minutes to think things through and put myself back together. And then I’ll come downstairs.’

  He doesn’t take it well.

  ‘A baby?’ Richard’s face twists in incredulity. ‘Before you had Judith?’ He glances at his sister. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘Not before yesterday,’ Judith says. ‘Don’t look like that, Richard. Poor Mum’s had to keep this to herself all these years. Believe me, no one’s been keeping you in the dark about this.’

  ‘Well she has,’ he says, and for a moment he is a petulant schoolboy: a child who would protest that something wasn’t fair, that she favoured his sister. His face folds in on itself, almost glowering in a bloom of rage. She doesn’t feel threatened, but sad: for his look recalls past injustices, more imagined than real, and all those times she automatically blamed him – the boisterous, accident-prone boy who would rush into things, not his more considered older sister. It pains her: his flushed cheeks and eyes flickering from her to Judith as if he thinks he will get some sense from her.

  She offers her explanation: she was young, she was in love, it was a huge stigma, she never told them because there seemed no need to distress them. It was her only secret, kept tight all these years.

  ‘No wonder you were always so harsh on me.’ He is calming down now – the accusation stated as fact, though it still takes her by surprise.

  ‘Was I?’ She knows the answer.

  ‘Always. I just thought you were hard on me because I was a boy.’

  ‘You could be very difficult,’ says Judith. ‘Do you remember when you let the sheep out and chased them towards Padstow? Or when you camped out in the cave for the night and never told us, and Mum was convinced you’d drowned?’

  But Maggie stops her. ‘No. You’re right. I was too strict with you. Too unforgiving.’ She shrugs: an inadequate gesture of admission. ‘Perhaps this was part of the reason. I’m very sorry if it is.’

  She remembers a frequent feeling of irritation that he couldn’t be more like Judith, and a niggling conviction that her other boy might have been very different from this one. How many times had she imagined how he might have behaved differently from this known, fallible boy? At Richard’s most difficult – his late teenage years when he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the farm or with Cornwall – she would idealise her firstborn and, irrationally, wonder if this was her punishment. She had rejected one son and now the other was rejecting her.

  She moves towards this big, bruised man, who is now leaning forwards, elbows on knees, head in hands as if trying to hide from her. She doesn’t do hugs, but she wants to touch him, now. She lays a hand on his shoulder and gives it a tentative pat, feeling the warmth of his bulk. And then he surprises her, putting an arm round her legs and turning towards her: folding himself into her as he did as a child.

  It is brief, this clutch, five seconds at most, but it is ferocious. She stands there, looking down at his head – a thick mass of hair like her father’s, now sprinkled with grey. And she finds she is reaching out and running her hand over his head, as she did when he was a boy. Her heart swells. How long is it since he has shown affection like this? Not the dutiful hug he gives when he leav
es, but this heartfelt gesture that he needs her. That, for all his bulldozing of her opinion and his bluffness, he does love her after all.

  He draws away, rubs a hand over his face, clears his throat – for it seems this has been a sufficient display of emotion. He smiles, and his voice, a little hoarse, is more reasonable. ‘And is this the reason you want to stay here?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ she says, as she sits next to him. ‘It’s my home and I’m tired. I want to stay here until I die. After that, I know I can’t control what happens, though I’d love it to continue as a working farm.’

  He looks deflated. His shoulders hunch around him, and he fiddles with his wedding ring, twisting it around his marriage finger – just as Evelyn did when she was nervous or at a loss for what to say.

  ‘I’ve no desire to push you into anything. I was just trying to be practical: to look at other options that would allow you to stay here but lift the financial burden from you. Perhaps I got overenthusiastic. Hard not to when you realise how much we could make from a development.’

  ‘I don’t want to live on a sanitised, non-working farm.’ She feels her chest tighten: the words come out taut and cold.

  ‘I can see that – and Judith’s told me about the interest in the ice cream. The order from Kernow’s is impressive. If we can get a commitment to that in writing, I’d like to invest: purchase the ice cream-making equipment; pay for the refurbishment of the old cowshed as a kitchen.’ He smiles, and though she senses a touch of resignation there, a sadness that a lucrative development won’t be in the offing in the immediate future, she can see that he is trying.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘We’d appreciate it.’

  Forty

  Her grandmother’s lost baby worms his way into Lucy’s thoughts as she does the early milking and as she bakes and serves the customers: a solid stream of holidaymakers who climb the cliff and clamour for ice cream. He obsesses her, this Jeremiah: running and crawling from a grimy kitchen, then growing into a muddied schoolboy, all scabbed knees and crumpled socks beneath baggy grey shorts like a Cornish Just William.

  This imaginary boy is there at Ava’s bath time, as she pours streams of water down her niece’s back, puts a wind-up frog in the bath and watches her scrutinise it. Was it a weekly tin bath that he had in his house, high on the moor?

  ‘Ava swim?’ says the little girl and, before she can stop her, plunges her head in.

  ‘Ava – no.’

  The front of her hair is soaked, but the toddler doesn’t care.

  ‘Oh. Well, I don’t suppose it matters.’

  Her niece repeats the process, blowing fat bubbles through the water and laughing in delight.

  Did he do that, this Jeremiah? Or this? She floats two plastic yellow ducks, which her niece picks up automatically, then drops with a flat and satisfying splat. The toddler smacks the water, delighting in the sound that echoes around the bathroom and laughing with that gurgle peculiar to small children. Did Jeremiah laugh like that as a boy? She no longer sees Jacob Wright the whole time – though the guilt is still there: a dull ache, now not a gut-wrenching pain – but this boy of the fifties; this never-known, phantom child.

  Lost love can be so painful. That and wondering what might have been. Never having the chance to discover. Her grandmother’s warning whirls around her head as she mulls over her lost son and dwells on Maggie’s regret. Her grandmother believes she has left it too late to risk not finding him, at eighty-eight. But Lucy has a future ahead of her in which to live life to the full, and to try and glean as much happiness as she can. Hasn’t her father’s suicide taught her that as well? That life is to be grasped, and any possibility of joy recognised and clung on to, not discarded, for there will always be darkness and the threat of too much darkness, here.

  Ava starts to pour water from one cup to another, entranced by the ribbon of liquid, the slosh of the water.

  ‘Oosey!’ Her dark chocolate eyes – her grandfather’s eyes – blaze with curiosity, and the wonder that comes of being not yet two and seeing the world afresh.

  She wants to eat her up. Or at least to share this hope: this pure, uncomplicated excitement at life. Impossible for someone thirty years older, but oh! How she craves a taste of it.

  She is supposed to return to work in three weeks, though the idea seems unreal, something that will happen to a different Lucy. Summer is ending; autumn inching closer, its presence felt in the crispness of the evening air. She needs to talk to Matt, and to speak to him, properly, face to face. To see if there is a hope of happiness, still, in their relationship, so that she never feels the nagging pull of regret that consumes her grandmother.

  Time to make some decisions in her life.

  Almost as soon as he arrives it is clear it is a mistake. He doesn’t turn up until after midnight on the Friday and, despite her best intentions, she has slipped into sleep.

  Her mobile doesn’t work in her bedroom, and it takes a while for her to realise that someone is at the door.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she hears Tom swear as she emerges from her bedroom and scurries along the corridor.

  ‘It’s all right; I’ve got it,’ she says through his door. ‘Sorry.’ As she races along the flagstone hallway, the bell rings again.

  Matt is standing there, managing to look both apologetic and a little indignant.

  ‘Sorry to ring – but I’ve been waiting here fifteen minutes. Didn’t you hear your phone?’

  ‘It doesn’t work in the house. I thought I’d told you?’ She can only get a signal in the top field: something she thought she had mentioned, but he has obviously not taken in. She smiles, trying to be conciliatory, for this is the first time they have met since they parted, in late June, and she doesn’t want his visit to start badly. Still, she is surprised his self-righteousness has emerged this early. Surely he should be the one trying to make amends?

  He evidently realises he should be trying harder. From behind his back, he pulls a bouquet of burgundy peonies tied with grosgrain ribbon: the florist is a designer one in west London, the flowers a sumptuous, glossy red. Her heart aches a little at the gesture, and then at how he could have got her so wrong. This morning, she had filled a jug with cornflowers, knapweed and rosebay willowherb, broken up with fronds of feathery grasses. And she had thought there could be nothing more beautiful than them.

  He reaches for her, and she expects a hug, perhaps a chaste peck on the cheek, but his mouth brushes the edge of hers. She springs away, unsettled.

  ‘Sorry. Bit soon,’ she mutters.

  ‘No, fine. Of course.’ He looks down, awkward, but not before she sees disappointment cloud his eyes.

  ‘I could do with a hug, though.’ She must make some effort, and she finds she wants to hold him, to see if she remembers. His body feels slim and wiry, and his smell is the same – mint, washing powder and warmed skin.

  It is all so familiar, and yet she wants to wriggle free. Someone else has held him more recently: felt these arms round her, breathed in the scent of his neck. It’s over with Suzi, she reminds herself. But had he really wanted that? He had crossed a line with someone other than her. Her limbs, recently soft with sleep, become stiff, almost rigid, and she finds herself pulling away.

  In her bedroom, he tries to kiss her again, his mouth fluttering over hers like a moth beating against a lampshade. But it’s all too much: Suzi – her legs, her mouth, her imagined cry – keeps crowding into her mind.

  ‘I can’t tonight.’ She shifts away, gentle yet emphatically. She had intended that he sleep in the spare room, but somehow he is in bed with her, here.

  ‘There’s so much to talk about. We can’t just rush back in to it,’ she finds herself trying to explain.

  ‘No?’ He props himself up on one elbow, the lines between his eyes furrowing into a deep V.

  ‘No. I’m still confused. I need to believe that it can work: that you won’t do it again.’

  He sighs. ‘Why would I do that?’

&n
bsp; ‘Because you did before.’

  ‘But I’ve learned from that mistake. Besides,’ he risks stroking her cheek, his hand trailing to her shoulder before skirting her breast. ‘It would be different this time. We’d know where we went wrong, what we needed to do to avoid it. Make time for each other. Make sure we don’t bring work home. Have sex—’ He shoots her a different look then. ‘I’ve missed you: far more than I thought I would, to be honest. And I’m not going to do anything to risk losing you again.’

  She is silent, not knowing what to think. Had he missed her? Then why the five-week delay before phoning? She does not know what to say.

  ‘I promise we’ll talk properly, but can it be tomorrow?’ She reaches for a practical reason. ‘It’s just I’ve got to be up in less than five hours’ time to do the milking.’

  ‘Can’t they give you the weekend off?’ He looks disgruntled, the Matt who doesn’t like the farm, or understand farming, all too clear.

  ‘Cows don’t take the weekend off. Tom’ll do it on Sunday.’ She pauses, taking in his evident disappointment. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have tomorrow off?’

  ‘We can do something in the morning, but I’ll have to work in the afternoon. We get most of our customers on a Saturday.Last week I did over thirty cream teas.’ She stifles a yawn, her exhaustion suddenly overwhelming. ‘Perhaps you could help me – or just chill? The weather will be glorious, and there are some lovely walks.’ He looks unconvinced, and she doesn’t know what else she can offer. ‘I know we need to talk and to try and make things better, but I’m sorry, I really do need to get some sleep.’

  He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling, hurt pulsing off him.

  ‘You won’t be working tomorrow evening?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘So we can go out for dinner?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  Contrite, she rolls towards him and offers a smile – but no kiss. Then she turns her back, feeling as if she has been unreasonable, but craving the oblivion of sleep. An arm hangs over her waist, surprisingly heavy, and within stroking distance of her breast. He falls asleep quickly, but she lies, tense and wired, wanting to shrug his hand away, resenting his touch. It is only once his breathing deepens that she can slide away from him and slip into a fitful sleep.