How Was It For You?

by Carmen Reid

  ‘Global warming? You started to ask them about global warming?’ She wanted to double-check.

  ‘Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’ He opened his fist and let her hand slip into his.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘We used to care so much about all that: we didn’t have a car on principle, we had recycled, reclaimed, biodegradable everything, worried about it, tried to make a difference. Where the hell did our ethics go?’

  She didn’t like to answer the question. What was the answer? Oh get real, Dave, no-one has time for that stuff? No-one can be bothered. It won’t happen in our lifetime . . .

  ‘What about my nurseries?’ she asked instead.‘At least I’m trying.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t forget you still do the offices too, the plastic, foam, MDF, whatever.’

  ‘I can’t change all that myself.’

  ‘That’s everyone’s answer though, isn’t it? I can’t change this myself. But if you don’t believe one person can make a difference, what can you believe in?’

  He fixed his eyes on hers. Pale blue, troubled, beyond tired. He looked exhausted. Maybe the company doctor was right: maybe Dave was going to well and truly crack up. She’d always thought she would reach the end of her tether first, but now he was the one signed off work, ranting about global warming, looking like he’d dropped a stone in weight in the five days she’d been gone.

  ‘One child.’ He hit her with now: ‘Just one child. That’s all I want. Just one . . . Is that too much to ask? One child to talk to, to teach, to read stories aloud to, to tuck up in bed at night, to do homework with . . . I want to tell my child about my mum and dad, who would have loved to have been grandparents.’ A reluctant sob broke from him at that.

  ‘Oh darling.’ She put her arms around him, a tide of guilt flooding over her. She shouldn’t have gone away, she definitely shouldn’t have cheated on him . . . Jesus! What would happen if he somehow found out? In this state? The thought was making her feel sick and sweaty. She couldn’t leave him. He was going to have a nervous breakdown. He needed her. He didn’t have anyone else. They were in this mess together. Maybe they would only get out together. No-one else really knew how it was.

  ‘We’ll find a way forward—’ But she broke off. The comforting platitudes didn’t work for them any more. Maybe there was no solution. Maybe they were never going to feel better.

  ‘Do you want to change jobs?’ she asked instead.

  ‘No. I’m leaving. I’m definitely leaving.’ He lifted his head and squeezed at his eyes with his fingertips. She hadn’t seen him cry since his father had died, over a year ago now, just two short years after they had buried his mother.

  He got up and went to make the tea, which had been forgotten about.

  ‘I’m leaving the Trust and I’m leaving NHS management. That’s all I know right now. The rest is a bit vague. I just have this feeling that we have to do the things we’ve been putting on hold.’ He didn’t need to add ‘waiting for the baby that might never come’, because it was there, deadly obvious, between them.

  ‘Have you thought about what you’d like to do next?’ she asked, trying out the positive voice, trying to be open to suggestions. Although she couldn’t yet shake the idea that if only she’d been born Spanish, life would have worked out just fine.

  ‘Yeah, lots of thoughts . . . lots of ideas. But I’m very worried you’re going to think I’m mad.’ He wasn’t so far off the mark there.

  ‘Well . . . I have a pretty good job, you could take a chance on something new for a while if you really wanted to,’ she offered.

  ‘But you don’t want to stay in your job either, do you?’

  ‘Not ideally . . . but Dave, we can’t both just jack it all in for some vague sort of idea! What are you thinking of anyway? D’you want to move out of town? D’you want to freelance? Can you be a freelance manager?’

  Probably. Wasn’t everyone freelance these days? Freelance plumber . . . freelance neurosurgeon – everyone except her and Dave, who kept saying they were going to do it . . . going to take the leap.

  He set the cups on the table but told her to wait, he had something else to give her first.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he instructed.

  ‘Why?!’ It was so unlike him to play any sort of game. Well, came the next thought. It was so unlike him now. He had once been a champion joker, game player, king of surprises. The kind of person who had once arranged secret weekends away, dressed up for Hallowe’en, sent flowers the day after her birthday ‘in case you’re feeling sad it’s over’.

  ‘It’s nothing bad. Close your eyes.’

  She did as he said.

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘You’ll like it, I promise.’

  She opened her mouth and he put something soft and round inside. It was slightly warm. Fruit, she thought, which has been sitting out in the sunny kitchen. It was small and rounded with a slightly rough, gritty surface. She hadn’t bitten down on it yet, but she sensed a flower-sweet scent moving from the back of her mouth up into her nostrils. She squeezed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, squashing the fruit, which she now realized was the most perfect strawberry. It melted, burst, exploded with flavour across her tongue, pips popping between her teeth. It was a taste so delicious and so nostalgic, she felt almost tearful. This was how a strawberry tasted, but she’d been eating those chilly, hard, shrink-wrapped impostors for so long now, she’d forgotten. This was a strawberry: the perfect balance of sweet, full, ripe with an undercurrent of tang. The just right place between soft and firm, between fleshy and gritty. It stirred long-buried memories of shy May sunshine, birthday parties, paddling pools, sponge cake, and a mouth crammed full of the first strawberries of the summer.

  ‘That is amazing,’ she told him, eyes flicking open when she’d tasted every last moment of flavour and let it slip down her throat.‘Regression therapy by fruit. Could be a whole new science. Did you grow it?’ There were herbs and summer tomatoes in his windowboxes, so a strawberry plant wasn’t a leap too far.

  ‘I wish,’ he laughed.

  He held out a half-empty plastic punnet, and as she picked out another one, he said: ‘Naturally grown, 100 per cent organic from Wiltshire.’

  He was impatient to know if the fruit was having just one tiny bit of the effect on her that it had had on him. He’d bought the berries absent-mindedly from the chichi little deli down the street but just one mouthful had spun him surer than time travel to the back of a wooden tractor trailer bumping down dusty tracks, as he hitched a lift with the stacked, dripping crates of fruit to the wholesalers. Summer holidays on his uncle’s farm. He didn’t think any time since then had ever been as happy.

  The strawberries had convinced him his idea wasn’t so mad after all. He’d looked at the box: it was stamped with the name of a farmer, a farm and an address. See, someone had done this. Someone had ploughed up whatever else was growing on the land, planted row upon row of strawberry plants and waited and prayed. Now, the punnets were selling for the best price at his local deli.

  There was a way.

  ‘They’re amazing,’ Pamela was telling him.‘So . . . strawberry-ish! There isn’t a better word.’ She smiled at him and wondered what this was about. Weren’t they supposed to be talking about what to do with the rest of their lives?

  Dave paused. He was about to set his dream for the future in front of her and if she didn’t get it, if she laughed, shrugged it off, told him not to be so stupid, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  ‘Pamela . . . what do you think about moving out of London?’

  ‘I think it’s probably a good idea at some point, but . . .’

  ‘I’ve seen this place,’ he interrupted her, not wanting to hear the ‘buts’ right now. He’d rehearsed them all himself.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘It’s quite big . . . it’s very big. But it would be a business too. Pamm
y, this is what I really, really want to do.’ She heard the earnestness in his voice, the seriousness.

  ‘What?’ she asked. She hadn’t got this yet.‘What business?’

  ‘I want to buy a farm. Well, it’s a very small farm – a smallholding, technically.’

  There, he’d said it and there was nothing else to do now but hold his breath and wait for her reaction.

  ‘A farm?!’ She tried not to sound as surprised as she felt. Afarm?? A farm??! What the hell did Dave know about farming? ‘What kind of farm?’ It was the most neutral thing she could think of saying next.

  ‘An organic fruit and vegetable farm. Very big growth forecast in the sector,’ he added in the hope that a blast of analyst-speak would convince her that they should leave behind the city, their overpriced cubicle of a home, the screamingly frustrating tube journeys, the endless competition of life in London to move to rolling fields, wide open space, sky, a cavernous farmhouse . . .

  ‘Let me show you something.’ Dave went out of the kitchen and returned with a copy of Smallholder’s Weekly.

  ‘Smallholder’s Weekly?’ she couldn’t help asking. She knew he’d had a farmer uncle he’d spent a lot of time working for when he was young, she knew he’d always wanted a big garden, to grow their own vegetables . . . one day . . . when they moved to their place in the countryside . . . but she couldn’t help feeling that they’d missed a stage. How had it jumped to Smallholder’s Weekly and buying a farm?

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a painter, not a farmer?’ she couldn’t help asking.

  He made no reply, just flipped the relevant pages open in front of her.

  The pictures didn’t really help: aerial shots of fields, the roof of a house and steadings, trees which looked like rounded bushes from this height. It was all green, but a uniform businessy green. Rows of things, neat fields, hedges, a straight road from the boundaries up to the farm buildings.

  ‘This is Linden Lee,’ Dave was telling her.‘A 50-acre farm which has been fully organic for three years. It’s owned by Harry Taylor and his wife.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ She wondered why she taking so long to understand what was going on.

  ‘Because I’ve been speaking to his solicitor,’ he said.‘Because I’ve expressed an interest in the place. Because I’ve arranged for us to go and see it on Saturday.’

  ‘For us to see it?’ she repeated.‘You want us to buy this farm?’

  She picked the magazine up and scrutinized the page once more. This time she saw the asking price. Jesus Christ. The company doctor didn’t have it right at all: this wasn’t stress – this was insanity.

  ‘Where is it?’ She thought she should at least know that before she listed all the reasons why they couldn’t do this.

  ‘It’s in Norfolk. North of Norwich.’

  ‘So I wouldn’t be able to commute? How is this even going to begin to work, Dave? What is this about? What are you thinking?’ Pamela’s voice was raised and she was on the very edge of shouting, but something in his face stopped her. He looked so desperate and so sad.

  ‘I don’t want you to commute,’ he said, then picked her hand up and linked fingers with her.‘You hate working for WLI. What happened to the plan to set up on your own? Do projects at your own pace? This is your chance to do it. And anyway, I’ll need you to help me run the farm.’

  Run the farm . . .

  She was pretty good at choosing paint shades, at sectioning a room with colour to make it look bigger, at über-creative shelving systems – but farming? What was that about? Driving tractors, ploughing . . . sowing . . . wellingtons.

  She knew absolutely nothing about farming.

  Chapter Ten

  VERY FEW RELEVANT words passed between them on the long drive up to Linden Lee. Pamela was convinced this was not going to work, could never work, that Dave would see the farm, be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the venture and realize what an idiotic idea this was.

  Dave saw her set and serious face looking out at the landscape from the passenger seat and didn’t want to risk a conversation.

  He hoped she was at least approaching the place with an open mind. As he was trying to. He didn’t want his enthusiasm to run away with him; he wanted to be realistic. Could they really do this? What kind of place would it be? He hadn’t been on a farm since he was 22, for one last sad look around Ingleshaven before it was sold on his uncle’s death. His uncle had left him a hefty chunk of the proceeds, which had been tied up in sensible investments along with the money he had inherited from his parents, but now he was ready to free it all up and jump, take the risk. He glanced over at Pamela again. Her face was giving off nothing beyond a sort of bored exasperation.

  It took over three and a half hours before they were finally past the turn-offs for Norwich and on to the small dual carriageway that would lead them to the farm. They had a road map and a sheet of crinkly fax paper with Harry’s careful, handwritten directions.

  Grudgingly, Pamela admitted to herself how calm, green and empty the landscape had become. Vast mountains of white cloud were pushing up from the horizon into the blue sky and way in the distance, the land dropped off and fell into an endless pale blue of sea.

  They passed the long-disused bodies of windmills looming over them and she played a game with herself: if the farm had one of those, she would consider it. She had a vague memory of wanting to live in a windmill . . . or a lighthouse. If the farm had cats, she’d consider it . . . or a view of the sea . . . if the house was really amazing . . . had ‘potential’. If . . . if . . . if . . . Christ, she had no idea. A farm? What would they do all day? And they wouldn’t know anyone. They’d be so alone, just the two of them, north of Norwich, with all their problems.

  But then, her parents lived near Cambridge. That wasn’t so far away. And commuting to London by train wasn’t an impossibility. What would her parents think of this? Suddenly she longed for their opinion. But she’d decided not to tell anyone until she’d seen the place and she and Dave had reached decisions of their own.

  ‘We head into the town, take the main road out, then the turn-off is the third on the left,’ Dave said. They were approaching a charmless collection of modern houses leading to a small, grey high street and parade of shops. There was a café with a white plastic table and two chairs in the forecourt, a metal Cornetto sign so faded, she’d barely been able to make it out.

  ‘Does that count as a turn-off?’ Dave asked, as they passed an untarred dirt track leading up a small hill.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Pamela answered. She was looking around in a rush, trying to figure this place out. Already trying to give herself reasons to like it or dislike it.

  ‘Well, let’s try up here.’ They turned into a narrow unmarked road, which twisted and wound for several miles.

  They were driving so slowly, she could look out at the dense hedgerow and try to remember the names of the flowers and bushes they were passing. That was hawthorn, the low trees were elders, the cow parsley was in full flower. She was pleased with how much she could recall. It seemed decades since she had looked, really looked, at wild flowers like this. Those were blackberry flowers, berries to pick in the autumn . . . Watch it, she warned herself, we’re not even going to begin to think about autumn.

  Dave pulled the car sharply up onto the verge as a green Land Rover sped past. A woman in the front seat waved cheerfully at them.

  ‘Bloody hell, that was close,’ he complained. But she saw that it wasn’t really, there had been inches to spare between the cars, the driver probably knew every swing and dip in the road, and they were newcomers – visitors, she corrected herself.

  ‘Can this be right? We’ve been on this road for ages.’ His patience was wearing thin now: a long stressed-up drive and only more stress at the end of it. His thoughts flicked between excitement and the growing conviction that this would be the biggest embarrassment of his life with Pamela to date.

  ‘Maybe we can ask someone?’ she sugg
ested, but as they’d only passed one speeding car in fifteen minutes, it didn’t seem very likely.‘After this bend, we should be able to see what’s ahead.’

  They passed the curve, mounted a steep hill and came out from the tightly hedged road into an open view. She saw the working windmill, sails creaking slowly in the breeze just before her eyes caught the ornate metalwork sign, slightly lopsided, which pointed up a long white cement road to Linden Lee.

  ‘This is it!’ she said, not able to keep a hint of excitement out of her voice.

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Dave was hunched over the wheel in an acute whirl of anxiety.

  They turned into the farm road, both aware of the futility of the flashing indicator when there wasn’t another car around for miles, and drove towards the farmhouse and the cluster of big mottled grey stone steadings behind it. Pamela tried to work out what was growing in the fields on either side of the road – grass? Oats? And what was the white stuff? Whole fields of plants seemed to be growing under a white, fleecy blanket.

  Even she could recognize the lusciousness of it. Not just the juicy green fields, even the grass verges were spilling on to the road, strewn with buttercups, scruffy ox-eye daisies and all sorts of wild flowers she couldn’t name.

  The farm was set on a gentle hill, with the farmhouse and outbuildings in the middle. Bright green, golden and fleecy fields sloped away above and below it.

  They turned right into a crunching gravelled drive and pulled up outside the house. Before the car engine had been turned off, the back door opened and two black dogs shot out barking and wagging their tails fiercely. A broad, blond man came out after them calling them both to his side and waving at the car.

  ‘Hello,’ he said as Pamela swung open her door and landed herself with a lap full of dog.

  ‘They’re very friendly, won’t do any harm,’ the man she took to be Harry was telling her.

  It seemed too rude to answer: ‘No, but get them off, they’re drooling all over my skirt,’ so she pushed the two big dog faces off her knees and scrambled out of the car.