‘Been to the football and on the way back now. A break from his study today. It’s hard work, but he is doing well. He’s a good boy. When he passes his exams, he’ll be needing to find articles in a legal practice.’
‘I might know someone who might be able to help. When the time comes, let’s talk again. You must be proud of him, Naresh.’
Amy has never seen Seymour out of the environs of the farm before. She knows he is charming and has a knack for making life exciting. But now she sees another side. A man able to put others at ease. He makes Naresh feel special. Perhaps it’s what makes him a good photographer.
The men discuss the political situation in a part of India with which they both seem familiar. Will she ever have the chance to travel so far afield? She’ll never have the money. Anyway she’s not sure she’ll ever wants to leave Wyld Farm. It’s where she belongs.
How sorry she feels for all the people who live in towns and cities and have boring routine jobs. They might be able to cope with the crowds and bustle. But she can’t; she will not! Her father accuses her of escaping life, of being unrealistic. But he’s just straight. She and her friends are creating another way of being, a better one. They will everyone that life can be different.
When the men dissect the failures of a local football team, she wanders around the shop. In one corner there are joss sticks and scarves and ointments. She picks happily through the stuff on display.
‘Why don’t we get these for Eleanor? It says this salve is good for “tensions of the heart” and the tea “enhances harmony and well-being”.’
‘I’m not sure they’re the sort of things Eleanor likes. Eleanor’s got her drugs from the chemist. But I’ll get them for you if you’d like, Amy. And some of those delicious Indian sweets, Naresh.’
Outside, the thinnest sliver of the moon sits in a velvet sky encrusted with stars. She pauses for a moment and looks up.
‘What a stunning evening. Do we have to go straight back to the farm?’
‘No, I suppose we don’t. Why don’t we drive to Exmoor? I know a pub. A quick drink.’ Taking her elbow, Seymour guides her to the passenger side of the car. ‘I’ll drive now.’ He gallantly opens the door and she dips her head in assent.
It is exhilarating to be pressed back in the leather seat as the car accelerates along pitch-black lanes. Seymour switches on the radio. The liquid tones of a woman, singing of her beloved’s face, fills the car.
‘Roberta has a perfect voice, doesn’t she?’ Seymour says, turning up the volume.
She closes her eyes and loses herself in the music.
After a time, the car slows down. ‘A proper old pub,’ Seymour says, and he swings the car off the road.
The murmur of voices and crackle of burning wood. Seymour indicates for her to sit while he goes to bar, returning with glasses of whisky. They chat for a while, then he asks: ‘Haven’t seen you since Christmas. How did it work out?’
‘It was strange, Seymour. We always used to open our presents sitting on Mum and Dad’s bed. But Mum wasn’t there. We didn’t really know what to do. And the turkey. Dad bought one that was much too big. It sat in the fridge almost untouched, a horrid daily reminder that there are only two of us in the family now.’
She’s aware he’s listening closely. She’s not used to such attention; David would have accused her of being maudlin by now or worse, neurotic.
‘Then I asked Dad if I could meet her…his girlfriend. That was weird. He let me drive his car to her house which he’s never done before. I didn’t like her. I don’t know why, really. She was… too normal.’
The remark makes Seymour laugh.
‘And then it became obvious that Dad had bought us both the same item of clothing for a Christmas present.’ Amy indicates the cardigan she’s wearing.
‘I hope she looks as fabulous in it as you do,’ he says. That makes her laugh. ‘But now you’re back at Wyld Farm.’ He lightly presses her arm.
‘What did you do? I know you went away somewhere sunny after New Year.’
‘Had to get away. I’d describe my Christmas as just a tad fraught. I’ll get us another drink.’
He comes back with another round of whisky. ‘Put it this way, I made some pretty stupid mistakes.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, you see, I had an affair, well no, actually, only the briefest of flings… with Stella.’
He watches for her reaction. She toys momentarily with the idea of appearing surprised, then says: ‘I spotted it right away the night you arrived with her and the decorations. Discretion is not your strong suit, Seymour. But did Julian find out?’
‘He did unfortunately. When she went and revealed everything to him, silly girl. I didn’t mean for them to break up, did I? Anyway, I’d already hightailed it back to London when all hell broke loose. I gatecrashed one of my dearest friend’s Christmas lunches and got so drunk that I fell into the tree and broke a very fine table.’
She couldn’t help finding it all very funny. ‘And now you’re with Eleanor?’
‘Or Eleanor is with me, I’m not sure which. ’
‘One for the road, then.’ At the bar, Amy searches for the pound note she squirrelled away for emergencies. The little leather purse is worn and curled at the edge. It once belonged to Shirley. She can hear her mother whispering in her ear, urging caution, but she ignores it. She buys two whiskies and a packet of peanuts.
‘To us’, she says, and they chink glasses.
She insists on sharing the nuts equally and that means splitting one in half. Is it flirtatious to hold his bit in her palm? Their eyes meet. He lifts her hand to his mouth and, with a languorous lick of his tongue, picks up the nut.
‘Here’s to 1973,’ he says.
18
Amy handles the seedlings with careful fingers. Only days ago she sprinkled tomato seeds onto bare soil. Now slender green plants have appeared as if by magic. Although many greenhouse panes are missing or broken, enough remain for the sun to heat the air beneath; she’s drowsy in the warmth. Idling against the door frame, she is submerged by new foliage and old memories. Of red fruit dangling beyond the reach of her chubby toddler’s arm, of biting into warm flesh, of juice running down her chin like wine. Of her father’s voice, his arms of contentment.
The phone ringing penetrates her reveries. She ignores it; there is no one she wants to speak to. Then into her mind floats an image of her mother. Perhaps it’s Shirley calling her? In a mad moment, Amy wonders if somehow her mother has come alive. Taking no chances, the girl pelts into the house, down the corridor and slams into the office.
‘Hallo, hallo!’ she gasps, her heart leaping with hope.
‘It’s Mr Stratton for you. Hold, please,’ an efficient female replies. Disappointment is replaced by excitement. Amy imagines Seymour’s secretary’s red-nailed fingers pressing buttons. A few minutes later, Seymour’s voice is on the other end.
‘Hallo? Who’s that?’ he asks as though it is she who has called him.
‘It’s Amy.’
‘Amy, how lovely to hear you. Have I dragged the green-fingered goddess from her garden on this glorious day?’
‘Oh, I’m just planting out the tomatoes… How are things in London, how are you?’
‘All the better for hearing your sweet tones and hurrah, this summer we’ll have provender. Now, I was thinking of having a party this weekend. I want to bring some friends down. What are you all up to?’
It is obvious the party will take place: Seymour only ever gives the illusion of choice. It is disappointing that he is bringing London people; she rather hoped to spend some time with him alone.
‘The thing is,’ he continues, ‘I was thinking of quite a big party. So we may need, in fact, we will need the bedrooms in the house for guests.’ He paused, letting the implications sink in. ‘The cottage is almost habitable now, isn’t it? I was thinking…Isn’t it time you lot moved in there, at least for a while? You have a few days to get it ready. What
do you think?’
Seymour had often talked about the farm as a place where friends would escape the ‘wonderful stink of the city’, where artists could replenish themselves. ‘We all need the buzz,’ he’d say, ‘but sometimes it has to be from a distance.’
The cottage was part of this plan, apparently. A place where people could stay or even live for a while. Amy adored it when Seymour talked like this; she hung on every word though she never quite dared ask how she fit into this scheme. She had never envisaged the world where such opportunities might exist and here she was – part of it. A place where people could work and express themselves and… just be.
Seymour continued: ‘Be a darling and have a chat to the others, Amy?’
‘Okay, I will. It sounds fine.’ She does not mention all the work that’s still to be completed.
‘Good girl. You’ll need furniture. Ask Julian to show you the stuff in the barn. Must dash, a call on the other line. See you around teatime on Friday. Do make some of your marvelous bread, Amy, could you? Bye…’
The next day when David and Amy are out doing errands, Julian takes Maggie and Simon to one of the barns. It is full of furniture, much of it draped in sheets or in boxes and crates.
‘Stuff Dad inherited from Granny,’ he says, unlocking a padlock, ‘though I can’t imagine that all of it was hers. I know this was from the Chelsea flat and some of it was from Mum’s house, I think.’
‘Wow. I n-n-ever knew all this w-w-was stored here. It’s an Aladdin’s c-c-cave.’
Julian sits on a white leather sofa while the other two explore the barn. He thinks back to the Chelsea flat where he lived with his parents. A seven-year-old boy kneeling up on the sofa to watch from the window as they went into the drugstore opposite their flat. Girls in purple cat suits slipped in and out of the place that was famous for its famous clientele. The place where his parents would stay there until the small hours of the morning, unaware their son waited and sometimes wept, too frightened to fall asleep alone in the flat. The boy’s dread when he heard them agreeing over supper that it was ‘alright to leave him since it’s only for a quick one’.
‘Look at this, Julian.’ Maggie pulls a dust sheet off a side table and a stack of chairs. ‘Can we take these?’
Julian is brought back from painful memories but the feelings of loneliness remain. ‘Oh that’ll be fine,’ he says quietly.
‘I’ve found a w-w-wardrobe’s but it’s too massive to get up the c-c-cottage s-s-stairs,’ calls Simon from behind a cupboard. ‘But there are iron b-b-bedsteads and bedsprings and m-m-mattresses that will be fine.’
Maggie points to a chest of drawers. ‘I could strip it back to the wood and leave it bare. I can’t believe we’re going to live in our own place!’ She straddles a child’s rocking chair. ‘I mean your Dad is cool, don’t get me wrong Julian, but to be on our own...’
‘You s-s-sound so ungrateful, Maggie,’ Simon says, ‘and after Seymour’s been g-g-generous to us.’
She shrugs: ‘I don’t mean to. It’ll just be nice to think we’ll be on our own, that’s all. Do you think your Dad will let us stay as long as we want to? What about his talk of turning this place into an artist’s retreat?’ Her tone is slightly mocking.
‘Maggie, you’re being a b-b-bit uncool, you know,’ Simon says gently.
‘Piss off.’
‘I don’t think that idea will come to anything. Seymour and his plans…’ Julian replies.
Simon wanders into another part of the barn.
‘I’m just glad you don’t mind with being kicked out of the farmhouse. What a hassle. Where are we all going to sleep, anyway? There aren’t enough rooms. Unless you and Simon share, of course,’ Julian says. He watches her react.
Maggie ignores him. Instead she kneels down to unfurl a carpet. Though its colours are faded, the twisting repeated patterns remain distinctive. ‘This is cool. It would go in the sitting room.’
‘There is something between you and Simon, isn’t there?’ Julian persists.
Maggie glares at the floor. Has her brother been gossiping? It would be impossible to explain her and Simon’s relationship to anyone else. Sometimes they sleep together, sometimes they don’t. They do not talk of love and they don’t own each other. ‘We’re friends,’ she says firmly, ‘and maybe more one day.’
When Amy and David return, a trailer is fetched and everyone helps to load it up with furniture. The white leather sofa, two comfy chairs (later they saw off the legs so the seats are nearer the floor), a squash leather pouf and a glamorous chaise-longue. Plenty of places to stretch out, essential for the laid-back life they plan on. Carpets, two cupboards, a wardrobe and an extraordinary length of embroidered silk to hang on the wall. A kitchen table and chairs. Bedsteads and mattresses for three bedrooms.
When there’s a semblance of order, they light the oil lamps, roll a joint and listen to Mudlark. It saves them having the quibble over who is going to have the single room and the single bed. Everyone knows it will be Maggie.
When she’s taken Daisy back to the field, Amy walks on to a place she has found where the land dips into a gentle bowl. She spreads out her coat and yields to its comfort. Curled up like a comma, her ear to the ground, she listens attentively as though she might hear the earth breathing. Grass presses up to her gaze. Peeking between the blades, she pushes her eyes onwards into the dark places beyond, imagines she has shrunk so small that she can slip effortlessly beneath the towering columns of green to a place of quiet solace. The alarming pulse of blood thumping through her head subsides. As the evening light drops and the world exhales, her anxiety dwindles.
She thinks of Seymour. Since that night in the pub, they have had little contact. Her bruised heart, craving connection, had been wakened by his kindness and attention, her spirits soothed by his support. But she was wrong, it appears, to assume this would continue. Seymour has been tied up in London, busy with friends or work. He has not visited Wyld Farm in weeks. The link, if they had one, is broken; perhaps it was never there?
She drifts back, back to her girlhood when, if she upset by the careless treatment by a friend or a teasing gossip at school, she would seek the solace of her mother’s lap. Soft as grass, her mother’s lap. And Shirley would thread her fingers through her daughter’s hair and run them, rhythmic as breath, to coax away the terrors and the tears.
She must do this for herself now. Rising slowly to her feet, Amy wraps her coat around her and tucks her hair into her hat. She meanders slowly back towards the farmhouse, the place where she must find the ease that she craves.
19
Mrs Morle still charges Seymour for three hours of cleaning a week. Though Julian and his friends live in the cottage, that-girl-Amy still uses the farmhouse kitchen for jam-making and beer-brewing and vegetable-freezing. Needs a thorough tidy-up, for the girl doesn’t seem to notice when the sugar drips or when bottling the beer leaves rings on the table. She drifts around as though she owned the place, her long skirts hemmed in mud from the garden. She’s getting loopier by the day, concludes Mrs Morle as she stirs oatmeal into a bowl of blood; she’s heard her talking to the cabbages.
Now the girl has asked the boys to relieve themselves in a tin can she’s put by in the yard. Whatever next? At least she hasn’t asked me to do it, thinks Mrs Morle, because I would flat refuse. It’s to make a ‘plant feed’, the girl explained, from urine and herbs she’s bought from her hero horticulturalist a man called Henry Doubleday. Load of tosh.
For the past two weeks it’s been overcast. But today a weak sun shines through Mrs Morle’s windows: goodness, they need cleaning. The builder has almost finished painting the outside of Bramble cottage. He’s working with that lad with the stutter. They’re chat while they dip their brushes in pink-tainted orange, the colour most of the cottages round here are painted if they’re bought by outsiders. Ludicrous what these fools will pay for a second home and the locals only too glad to take the money and escape to a new semi near the sho
ps.
Tonight Mr Stratton is having a party. Mrs Morle hopes it won’t be too noisy or go on too late. Lynn has to get up on a Saturday and work until lunchtime even if that lot can sleep in. She adds spice to the blood mixture. Two piglets slaughtered yesterday for spit-roasting over a fire for the party guests. Cream turns the mixture pink. She spoons the congealing slop into a piece of animal intestine, crams her fingers into the flabby membranes and makes it bulge and become stiffened like…Mrs Morle blushes. There’s no one to know what she is thinking.
Blood pudding is one of Mrs Morle’s favourites and even if her apron looks like she’s committed a murder, it’s worth it for the rich aromatic taste; like eating iron.
Yesterday there was a terrible scream. Mrs Morle had assumed it was one of the animals sensing its end was nigh. Turned out to that girl Maggie ‘meditating’ in the barn where the pig man started the killing. He hadn’t seen her sitting cross-legged behind a hay bale and no wonder. What was ‘meditating’ anyway? Mrs Morle knew it involved sitting with eyes closed pretending to ignore life. But it obviously didn’t work for Maggie had spotted the piglet’s demise. Making a knot in the packed intestine, Mrs Morle drops three sausage-shaped puddings into a pan of boiling water and scrubs the potatoes for supper.
Simon teased her that it was her bible, the book on self-sufficiency she carries around with her everywhere. It warned her that carrot seeds were the trickiest to germinate. So Amy must have green fingers! Over the bare brown earth, feathery fronds of green now wave. David won’t be interested but she’ll tell Simon at supper. He’ll be pleased, too.
A pulsing hangover makes her grateful for the excuse to kneel. Soil-stained pages advise the seedlings need space to grow. A whiff of carrot accompanies the careful removal of orange threads from the soil, vegetables fit for a Lilliputian’s table.
Last night it happened again. Amy had gone upstairs for a pee and heard a noise from the bathroom. She found Julian was slumped against the airing cupboard. When he noticed her in the doorway, he became agitated and started to mutter about fairies in the garden stealing her vegetables. She had resisted the temptation to slip away and leave him. It was all a bit tedious and if she was honest, a bit scary.
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