The West Country Winery

by Lizzie Lovell

  ‘She’s clever,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you obviously know she has a degree in science?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And a master’s in pedology?’

  I blush. I have no idea what pedology is. Something to do with feet?

  He notes my embarrassment. Sniggers again. ‘Pedology is the study of soil,’ he informs me.

  ‘Right,’ I mumble when I really want to tell him that of course I knew all that, but I’m too ashamed to comment. I thought she was a pig farmer. But there’s no way I’m admitting that to the man sitting next to me. I shuffle over as far as I can go without falling onto the concrete barn floor.

  ‘Like I said, we’re friends.’

  ‘So you know how worried she is about Brexit?’

  ‘Something your lot voted for.’

  ‘My lot?’

  ‘You posh farmers. You’ll lose all your subsidies.’

  ‘I’m actually a Remainer.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Anyway, what I was trying to say was, if she returns to Poland, will you manage without her? Your cleaner? Your friend?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Your mother told me about Rob’s little adventure.’

  ‘You make it sound like a day trip to Paignton Zoo. And Eve had no right telling you about my personal life.’

  ‘Are you ashamed or something?’

  And there it is, that word. Shame. Am I? Am I worried what people will think? Or am I generally devastated that my husband wants to abandon us? To go to Africa. For a year. With his bike.

  ‘If Melanie – sorry, Melina – goes back to Poland then you’ll be stuck, won’t you? Working full-time... two teenage girls... no husband—’

  ‘How dare you.’

  ‘I’m showing concern.’ He shrugs, like he can’t understand my attitude.

  ‘Concern?’

  ‘All right, granted, it’s kind of late in the day,’ he admits. ‘But what I’m trying to say is I’m here for you.’

  ‘You’re here for me?’

  ‘And Ruby.’

  Ruby. And there we have it.

  I grip the hay bale with both hands, trying to steady myself, trying to get my thoughts into some kind of order. Yes. Clutching at straws. It takes all my control not to shout at him but I can’t. I don’t want anyone to hear this conversation. It’s my business only. Mine and Nathan’s. But I will let him know exactly what I think.

  ‘You finally want to play a part in Ruby’s life then, do you? Is that it? After all this time? You’d like a go at playing Daddy? Well, you can bugger right off. Again.’

  ‘I want to make up for... you know. Losing touch.’

  ‘You mean buggering off.’

  ‘Yes, all right, I mean buggering off.’

  ‘Why, Nathan? Why did you bugger off? The job in New Zealand was supposed to be for a year. What happened?’

  Silence. He doesn’t know how to answer. But he needs to. God knows how much energy I’ve wasted on wondering.

  ‘I went off the rails with Charlotte,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Pardon? I can’t hear you.’

  He turns to face me, looks at me. Which is such a weird feeling. It’s been so long since I looked back into those eyes I fell in love with at school. The ones I thought I could trust.

  ‘She wasn’t interested in Ruby,’ he goes on. His face is flushed with embarrassment. ‘I tried to make it work, you know, when I first moved out. I tried to get Charlotte involved with Ruby but it was just so difficult. She’s not an easy woman. And I couldn’t swallow my pride and say I’d made a mistake. It was like I had to push on, to prove that I didn’t break our marriage on a whim. Then we got this chance to go to New Zealand and I thought we’d be back after a year and... well...’

  He stops for a moment, foundering. I’m not going to help him out. I leave the silence well alone and wait for him to carry on.

  He clears his throat, a sort of strangulated useless cough to hide his shame. Oh God, I hope it’s shame.

  ‘I was weak,’ he says.

  I find myself nodding, in agreement for once. ‘And?’

  ‘And by the time we were in New Zealand, Ruby was so far away I could somehow put her to one side. When the year was up, it was easier to carry on and do another year. And then we did some travelling and I heard you’d got together with Rob and I suppose I thought you’d moved on and it was too late for me to try to start being a dad again.’

  ‘You should have tried harder.’

  ‘Yes, I should’ve tried harder but then Charlotte was ill and I was torn between a rock and a hard place.’ He’s staring at his shoes now. Still on the hay bale beside me. I feel sick with anger. The urge to shout and scream is almost overwhelming; the barn is spinning, my head hurting. I want to tell everyone what a useless bastard he’s been. But I take a breath, two breaths, three breaths, place my feet firmly on the floor, try to keep steady.

  ‘Ruby’s ill in bed right now so can’t speak for herself. Nor should she have to. But I can speak for her. She doesn’t need you. She needs me. Her mother. Who has never ever let her down. She doesn’t need you. She doesn’t need Rob. She doesn’t need Melanie. Melina. I’m enough. My family’s enough. I’ll say it again in case you didn’t hear me the first time: we don’t need you.’

  ‘You don’t need me, yeah, I get it.’ He sighs. The lone wolf who huffs and puffs but who will not blow my house down. ‘But have you asked Ruby what she thinks about getting to know me?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because I want to get to know her.’

  I don’t know what to say. I literally don’t know what to say.

  ‘Just let me have a chat with her.’ He takes my silence for hesitation, tries to wear me down. ‘Let me hear it from her.’

  ‘No,’ I say firmly, my voice found. ‘I told you she’s in bed. She has a cold. It’s not appropriate. It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘She’s not in bed. She’s over there with Eve, handing out what looks like very nice home-made cake.’ He points at Ruby, on the other side of the barn with my mother. Young and vulnerable. There’s no way I will let this man hurt her by disappearing again.

  ‘Don’t you dare even think about it,’ I hiss.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, smacking his forehead like a pantomime villain, realization hitting him. ‘You haven’t told Ruby about me, have you?’

  SO THE OFFICIAL meeting between birth father and daughter does not happen until of course my mother decides to invite everyone, including Nathan, for lunch. And Nathan, of course, accepts.

  Wellies and jumpers are left in the steamy boot room, hands are washed and hungry pickers troop in socked feet into the kitchen where we are greeted by a gamey smell. Rabbit stew, baked potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, swede and peas. Plus some kind of vegetable loaf.

  Eve catches me scanning the room. ‘Ruby went for a lie-down,’ she informs me. ‘No need to check on her. I’ve only just been up and administered some tincture.’

  ‘She didn’t mind?’

  ‘Why would she mind when she knows it’ll make her feel better?’

  ‘No reason,’ I reply, thanking my lucky stars I don’t have to deal with the whole Ruby/Nathan scenario right now in front of a full house.

  ‘Please be seated,’ Des commands. ‘Anywhere you like. We don’t stand on ceremony here.’

  They certainly don’t.

  It’s rather cramped but most of us manage to squeeze around the huge farmhouse table, some happy to eat from plates on their laps, sitting at the window seat that overlooks the yard.

  Des ladles out stew into Eve’s hefty hand-thrown bowls. Another fad of hers.

  ‘Tibetan roast,’ she announces somewhat grandiosely, holding up the veggie loaf I’d seen on the side: a green-brown brick-like slab on a platter. ‘For the vegetarians and vegans amongst us.’


  ‘How many Tibetans went into that dish?’ Nathan laughs over-heartily at his pathetic attempt at a joke and Des joins in, stopping abruptly when he catches my thunderous expression and shoving a forkful of the bunny stew into his mouth, concentrating on scooping the potato innards out of the skin.

  I bite my lip, take an overambitious slug of the wine, not caring about the shocking flavour as it hits my taste buds. Surely this year’s will be an improvement?

  There’s some chat about the recipe for the roast: bulgur wheat, mushrooms, spinach, sage, red wine – the latter at least being good for something. When the platter is passed around the table, Nathan pulls a face as if he’s being offered the testicles of a Tibetan monk.

  Eve takes the conversation off at a tangent, tells us all why we must support Free Tibet. Then we have a toast, a little bit of Shakespeare delivered by Des – ‘Give me a bowl of wine. In this I bury all unkindness’ – using lavishly splashed-out red and white, distinguishable by colour if not by taste, though it’s all going down quite quickly. Only Rob abstains, with the handy excuse of being designated driver back to London. We plan to leave early this evening to stand any chance of being home before eleven.

  Des, mental wheels now nicely oiled, makes a speech worthy of a best man. Eventually, after several viticulturist jokes that nobody except Melina finds genuinely funny, another Shakespearean toast – ‘Good company, good wine, good welcome, can make good people’ – and a few firm pokes from Eve, he finishes talking. There is a lull in conversation as food is consumed and I look at Melina and realize that I’ve never witnessed her laugh quite like that, from the belly. I don’t know her at all.

  Before I can berate myself for this, I see Ruby, shuffling across the flagstones in a fluffy dressing gown and rainbow woolly socks: white-faced, dark-eyed, ravenous. She wedges herself between Eve and Melina while Des passes down another of the rough-hewn bowls heaped with food for her.

  ‘Feed a cold,’ Des says, but this is a difficult gap to fill. Because once Ruby has tucked in and chewed for a bit, she finally notices the big man sitting diagonally across the table, staring intently at her: an older, uglier, more brutish version of herself. I see Rob looking from one to the other, before turning to me, holding my gaze tightly with his own, raising a questioning eyebrow.

  I nod. A small, definitive gesture that no one but my husband can see. My husband whose face has visibly paled, whose hand shakes ever so slightly as he lifts his glass of water to his pressed-together lips.

  EARLY EVENING: JOURNEY home, fading light. As we say goodbye in the driveway, the barn in darkening shadow behind us, the vineyard stretching up the hill, somewhat bereft of grapes, a deep, booming voice calls out, bouncing around the yard.

  ‘You off?’

  When I look up, there he is, Nathan, on the roof above my room, with Tomasz, fixing a loose roof tile.

  ‘Give me a sec,’ he orders, ‘and I’ll come down and say goodbye.’

  Ruby, wrapped in a duvet, lumbers into the car, only the briefest of backward glances before slamming the door. Scarlet reluctantly takes her eyes away from Tomasz’s taut backside, sliding in from the other side next to her sister. She winds down her window, which is the perfect height for Luther to poke his head through. Des restrains him from clambering in after her, while Eve imparts words of wisdom and insanity to their granddaughters.

  Nathan and Tomasz are now back on terra firma and, while Tomasz puts away the ladder in the barn, Eve thanks Nathan profusely, keeping one eye on Rob who is fussing around repacking the boot. She doesn’t comment on this. She doesn’t have to. She knows that I know Rob will never be the sort of man to scramble up a ladder to fix a dislodged roof tile. But she has the decency to go and talk to him, to thank him for helping, to wish him well.

  Meanwhile, Nathan touches my shoulder gently and unobtrusively – not his usual brash style at all. ‘I do want to make it up to you, Chrissie,’ he says quietly. ‘I did you and Ruby a bad wrong and I want to put it right. Or at least try to make it up to you both.’

  ‘If only it were that simple,’ I tell him. ‘But I can’t do this now. I won’t.’

  I leave him standing there so I can say goodbye to Eve and Des. I am always happy to be hugged by Des. But I am more reluctant with Eve. I hugged her in the telephone cupboard two days ago. That’s usually enough to be going on with. Not because I don’t want to be hugged by her. I do, despite her inability to warn me about Nathan, a man she has always loved, far more than Rob. I don’t want to be hugged because I don’t want to leave her. She has tears in her eyes. She looks older, frailer, a shock when she’s always been such a warrior goddess.

  ‘This too shall pass,’ she whispers into my ear. ‘This too shall pass.’

  I cling on to those words. Eve’s mantra. And yes, it’s true, this will pass but sometimes you really don’t want to have to wait. And sometimes you want things to carry on just the way they are.

  THE TRAFFIC IS not so bad tonight. No queues across Salisbury Plain. No road closures. No accidents. Rob drives. Non-stop. A frown of concentration. Hostile body language. No words. Only sniffing from the back, courtesy of Ruby, and an unusual silence from Scarlet.

  We pull into our street, trapping a scrawny fox in the car headlights before it slinks by and disappears behind the wheelie bins, on its way to the cemetery. I bat away thoughts of the foxes in Devon, foxes who might be plumper, but who are more likely to be gunned down or torn apart by hounds. Town and country, two parts of my life. A clash of cultures. Different ways of living. And what about Melina with her degree in science and her years in London scrubbing floors? Not that there’s anything wrong with scrubbing floors. It’s just that I don’t want to do it.

  Am I a horrible person?

  We fall into the house, dump the bags in the hall. Scarlet and Ruby trudge up the stairs, already pyjamaed-up, like the two little girls they used to be, travelling to and from Devon. Some things never change. Some things always change.

  I shove on a wash, a hot wash to stand a chance against that red mud. Normally Melina would sort it out on a Tuesday morning. But... She’s decided to stay in Devon. To help with the harvest.

  ‘Your mother and father need me,’ she said yesterday.

  And I’m put out. Put out because Des and Eve are so happy to have her with them. And because yet another person is deserting us.

  Am I a horrible person?

  ‘You go on up to bed,’ Rob says. He’s standing in the kitchen doorway, right where I stood at the beginning of this week on the verge of his life-changing revelation.

  I want to say thank you, yes, I will go on up to bed. I want to manage a smile at least. I definitely want to pour out my grief and anger and frustration all over him, but I can’t. What Rob and I have now, whatever it is, is not the same as before. It’s a different shape. Saggy and slack.

  So I say nothing, fetch a glass from the cupboard, move to the sink, watch the glass fill with water from the tap. London water that they say has gone through seven people before it even gets to your lips. Maybe it’s already been through me.

  And there it is again. That hankering. Fresh spring water that you have to filter to remove any floating bits of sheep poo. Fresh water that tastes of Devon. That tastes of thatched roofs and steep hills. Red cliffs and rolling waves. Not concrete and traffic and deep-friedchicken shops.

  As I pass by Rob at the kitchen table where he’s already unfolding his maps, I sense for the first time some reticence in him. Some reluctance about this proposed trip. A sigh. Or a flicker of worry. Some indescribable feeling. Maybe it’s the sight of that vast continent, that huge land mass spread out before him? Maybe he’s doubting himself? I mean, there’s all sorts going on in Sudan. How’s he going to avoid that? Or maybe he’s doubting me? Leaving me on my own with the girls. Can he trust me, knowing that Nathan is standing, legs astride, just offstage? And if it wasn’t for the fact that Nathan is an utter shit, maybe he would have cause for concern. But no. Never. Not with
Nathan. Never ever. I mean, I might be tempted to live back in the country again – it would be emotional support for the girls. And for me. I could help my mother and Des. Get this wine business running properly.

  I might.

  If there weren’t so many things against it.

  Mainly Nathan.

  But.

  No.

  I have resisted and resisted all these years, ever since leaving on the train with my backpack and fifty quid in my pocket saved from the summer’s work next door. On the farm. The bloody farm next door.

  If only it weren’t for that shadow in the wings.

  LYING IN BED, I can feel Rob’s muscles taut and tense. He should be tired. I’m tired, and I didn’t have to drive. We’re all tired and Ruby is stuffed with cold. No doubt it’ll be Scarlet’s turn next, then Rob’s, but not me, as I never get the chance. Maybe this year I will let myself succumb.

  We’re beyond tired, the two of us lying here, side by side, in the dark. Beyond the reach of sleep. Beyond each other.

  I turn away from him and feel my tears soak into my pillow and hope it’ll all go away. That by morning the tears will have dried up, like residual rain running off the red earth of home.

  MONDAY MORNING IS a rush of gobbling down toast, scrabbling for lost shoes and snapping at each other. Not even the chance to get a sausage casserole, vegan or otherwise, into the oven. I hate this disorder. Mondays should be a good start on which the rest of the week hangs. But it’ll go tits-up at this rate.

  ‘Rob!’ I grab him before he leaves with the girls.

  Ruby’s already in the car while Scarlet is preening herself in front of the hall mirror, furtively applying mascara as if I didn’t know what she was doing. As if I was never fifteen with lads to impress. One in particular who I really don’t want to remember right now, though I haven’t forgotten his tanned face, blond highlights and toned arms – all that work on his parents’ farm, the one he couldn’t wait to escape.

  ‘Chrissie?’ Rob asks.

  ‘Sorry. Miles away.’