‘Oh yes, but we only really grew what we needed. Kept ourselves to ourselves. I don’t think we were unnaturally antisocial, mind. I think we just had very full lives. It will keep you busy that lifestyle. There’s always something to be done. Sometimes there’s too much to be done. People think it’s a life to envy, but really it’s just a peasant’s life. I often felt like I was living in the Dark Ages.’
‘Oh, I know. It’s hard work for sure. Looking after livestock, dealing with dead stock and the stockpot in between! It’s not a life for the faint-hearted, that’s for certain.’ Olive trailed off as she looked out of the window.
‘We had a lot of land once, but by the end we were only in the arable end of the market. That gave us the richest pickings. We weren’t big enough to be of interest to the supermarkets, and the bureaucracy was beginning to get out of control. But we sold a bit of land off just before Don dropped dead. It was our retirement plan, that windfall. The idea was, we’d sell enough to lighten our load but still keep a good buffer of farmland around us. It was going to pay for our travel and whatnot. A few treats as we got older. That was the idea, anyway.’
‘But it’s still a big spread up here. Plenty of land to keep you worked off your feet, by the looks of it?’ Maddie, too, looked out of the window, assessing the scope of the land not in monetary terms but in physical effort.
‘We’re not big enough these days to be viable is the truth of it. A little under a hundred acres we’ve got now. But we’d have had five times that land once. Still, it’s nice. I like to be able to walk until I’m tired without ever leaving my boundaries. That’s a privilege, I think.’
Maddie agreed, nodding her head eagerly. ‘You’re so right. Ours was a much smaller place, but we used every inch of it, and if you walked round the perimeter, you certainly knew about it. Now my garden out the back is smaller than this kitchen. Barely enough for a bit of veg, but even that is out of the question – it’s all put to stone and decking.’
Doubler, who had been enjoying listening, and had barely spoken a word, chipped in with a laugh, ‘Decking? What have you got there, a garden or a boatyard?’
Maddie laughed a little too. ‘I know. The decking is good for the snails and that’s about it.’
‘And sofas, Maddie. I’ve heard decking is very good for sofas.’
Both women laughed, though Olive cast her eyes down briefly, unsure whether she was supposed to know about the sofa incident.
Maddie Mitchell quickly returned to her former, sober conduct. ‘But the idea was it was low maintenance. My sons thought of everything when they bought the place.’ She considered this further and continued, ‘You know, if they’d been really smart, they’d have bought me something high maintenance. They should have bought me a small, narrow house with lots of steep staircases and a long stretch of lawn that they could have planted with a particularly vigorous grass that needed mowing every day. That would have finished me off much sooner and they’d not have had to worry about me anymore. Without exhaustion or wear and tear to kill me off, I can’t see me popping my clogs anytime soon. Unless I die of boredom, which is a distinct possibility.’
Doubler, finding this rather too close to home, and anxious that the melancholic train of thought might impact on Olive, tried to steer Maddie off the subject of their mortality. ‘Oh come, come. There’s way too much talk of death. I brought you here to take tea and talk of happier things. How’s Percy, Olive?’
But Maddie had made a realization, new entirely or certainly never expressed out loud, and she desperately wanted to air it before it disappeared from her reach. ‘But death is the conversation, isn’t it? It’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s a bloody enormous thing in the corner with huge ears, a trunk, a halo and wings, and it’s looking at its watch and tapping it impatiently. It’s there, death, always hovering nearby. You can ignore it, but it’s not going to go anywhere.’
Both Olive and Doubler laughed, rather pleased with Maddie’s passionate outcry, but she silenced them with a frown and a shake of her head.
‘It’s all right for us, as we face it, particularly if we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to happen. But what about our nearest and dearest? Nobody can plan for anything, can they, if they’ve got elderly folk to take care of? They can’t possibly know when we’re going to succumb, which is pretty inconsiderate of us, all things considered.’
Doubler chuckled. ‘Ha! You’re not wrong there! My son, Julian, is desperate to see the back of me. He’s convinced I’m wasting the financial opportunity that Mirth Farm should afford him and he can barely disguise his impatience. The thing is, he’s well into his thirties now, but I’ve got a reasonable chance of living for another couple of decades, so it’s going to be a long old wait. And he’s not going to want to live in Mirth Farm when he’s an old man! He’s already far too used to the soft life. It’s for that reason and that reason alone I’m absolutely determined to carry on farming up there for as long as possible. I’m going to live a ludicrously long time just to piss him off. I’d like to still be going strong when he’s senile himself. That would really amuse me.’
Olive was watching Doubler intently, storing some of this troubling information away to examine more carefully later on. But for now, she joined in with Doubler’s flippancy. ‘Well, it’s very likely that you’ll keep going for a good while, isn’t it? It’s a healthy lifestyle you’ve got up there. All that oxygen and gin.’ She smiled at her two guests and shook her head slowly. ‘Look at us, three poor old souls and not a second-generation farmer among us to pass our love of the land on to. It’s bad luck, isn’t it? What are the odds, do you think?’
Doubler did a rough calculation in his head, seeing the generations of potatoes spreading out on a root system in his head. ‘Slim odds, I’d say. Seven children between us and not one of them wants what we wanted at their age. Assuming there’s a fifty-fifty chance of each one wanting to follow in our footsteps, then that’s a one in a hundred twenty-eight chance that none would. Poor outcome, I’d say.’
Maddie, unimpressed, asked, ‘Was it something we did? Maybe the farmer’s life just didn’t look very glamorous or appealing to the next generation.’
Olive thought about this intently, a look of fierce concentration etched on her tired face, and a huge wave of disappointment washed over her, bathing her in a sadness born out of an irrefutable understanding. ‘Our children just never really had their toes in the soil. We didn’t raise them on the land; we raised them in a three-bed in West Mead Park. So it’s no wonder that they wanted to spread their wings, don’t you think? It’s easy living, yes – a small, neat house to keep can certainly be appealing when you’re raising a family – but it’s claustrophobic too, isn’t it? They all grew up and wanted to get as far away from here as possible. We were tenant farmers for a few years when the kids were growing up, but we didn’t actually buy the farm until the last one was away at university. It was Don’s dream, always, to return to the land. It’s how he grew up.
‘But it’s not how they grew up. So there’s nothing to bind them to this. They didn’t grow up looking out of the window at these hills, this view. They grew up in front of the telly, looking at that view. And the view on the box is so much bigger; the horizon’s so much further away. They looked at their screens and that was their landscape, the whole of the rest of the world. They grew up staring at that as their vista and they saw that the possibilities were endless, so off they went. In pursuit of something they’d been promised by everyone except for their mother.’
Doubler looked at Olive sympathetically. ‘It’s tough, though, isn’t it, after you spent all your life caring for them.’ But he could have been talking about his own or Maddie’s plight.
‘That’s true, and then almost as soon as the kids left, one by one, to go overseas, I spent the following years caring for my parents, and then Don’s too.’
‘And now you’re on your own,’ said Doubler, again speaking for all
of them.
‘Sometimes it does seem a bit unfair, it’s true,’ Olive concurred. ‘But there was no contract, was there? Caring for my children was always unconditional. I never did it in exchange for things they could do for me later in life. Even if I’d known they’d grow up and desert me for the other side of the planet, I wouldn’t have stopped caring for them. I wouldn’t have changed a thing.’
‘And yet I bet that nothing stopped you caring for your own parents out of a sense of duty.’
‘Like everyone in my generation, I didn’t know any other way. And I wanted to care for them; it made me glad. I loved them very much and I visited often, and one day I went there and they seemed so impossibly frail. Like children themselves, really. They were asking for help, I suppose, but not with words as such – it was the light in their eyes that told me what to do and I followed that instinct without really questioning it.’
‘And now your children can’t see that you need them in a similar way?’ Doubler wanted to help Olive resolve this in her mind, however painful it might be. Within him he was conscious of a nagging kernel of doubt about his own children. Was Julian genuinely trying to help him? he wondered. Perhaps his son actually had his best interests at heart and he’d just assumed the worst.
While Doubler tried to sieve through recent events, Olive still pursued the thought. ‘I’m sure they’d know my pain if they saw me face to face. But they’re not dropping in on me, are they? We have our times to Skype, and I cherish those moments, but if I’m not feeling up to that, if I’m having one of my turns, I simply don’t pick up. Wouldn’t want to anyway. And then when I’m back on my feet, I just tell them I was too busy, which of course they love. All my children really want to hear is that their mother has a rich, fulfilling life that doesn’t require much of them.’
Olive had tears in her eyes, which she didn’t brush away. Instead, she talked through them. ‘And anyway, when they’re looking at me, they’re seeing me on a very small screen. There’s no light for them to see or decipher – I don’t think that is something that can be replicated digitally. And we chat and we share our news. I talk about the shelter – whatever titbits the Colonel might have fed me that week – and I reassure them every time that they are doing the best thing for their own families. And I fully believe that. They are. The opportunities the world can offer them are so rich and so varied, and it’s a wonderful thing that they’re tasting its fruits.’
Doubler was still thinking about Julian, wondering if he had such sentiment built into him or if he were truly devoid of all filial duty. ‘Do you suppose they fear their old age? They must know that their own children aren’t going to be there for them. Their children will run a mile, just like they did.’
Olive snorted in disgust. ‘That generation isn’t remotely worried about their old age. They don’t believe in it. The new church is the Church of Perpetual Youth and they all worship at its altar. Everything they strive for is age-defying, age-defeating, like time is something you can actually wage war against armed only with kale and pomegranate.’
Olive blinked away her tears to study her audience more clearly. ‘You think I’m joking; I’m not. They make themselves these drinks every morning of green leaves and ginger. They build in something called “me-time” into their day and something else called “self-care”, which is the same but they reassure me it is fundamentally different and requires its own allocation of time. They believe firmly that by lavishing attention on themselves, they’ll never get old. So why plan for something that is simply not going to happen to you? And if they’re not worshipping at the Altar of Youth, they’re praying to the God of Cash. Because if you work hard enough and amass enough wealth, you can use that to pay for your care in your old age and once again the next generation are let off the hook.’
‘Sounds to me,’ said Doubler, ‘like they’re keeping themselves so busy that they don’t have time to face up to their responsibilities.’
‘But I’m really not their responsibility, don’t you see that? Caring for me as I get older could only ever be undertaken through choice or it would be hell for us all. Can you imagine! Think of the resentment and pain if they were forced, through guilt, to give up their sun-bleached lives for this.’ Here, Olive waved her hands not just to take in the room and its dusty floorboards and old, tired bookshelves but the ancient fields beyond and the rolling hills behind these, where the English winter refused to quite let go.
‘And careers are so different now, aren’t they? The good jobs are all so competitive. There was probably a time when you worked your whole life for a company and you were expected to slow down towards the end of your career; you’d even be respected for taking a bit of a back seat. But now you move around a lot, moving ever upwards each time. There’s this promotion here and that one there, and you’re on the treadmill set at the fastest possible pace with younger, keener, hungrier people snapping at your heels all the time. Just waiting for you to slip. You don’t give up that chase; you don’t duck your responsibilities to your career to take care of your parents. Nobody keeps your job open for you while you take a bit of time out, and the time could be indefinite, too, couldn’t it? Whether we like it or not, we are all living longer and longer. I could drop dead tomorrow, but equally I could still be alive in twenty years. Maybe even thirty, perish the thought! How do your kids know what they’re signing up to? They can’t put their own lives on hold for mine and then risk not being able to live theirs at all. No, this is progress, and progress doesn’t allow for the modern family to hold themselves back by caring for each other.’
Doubler was torn between giving Olive the freedom to air these strong feelings and lightening the atmosphere for the sake of all of their sanity. He was unsure whether Maddie was equally moved by the subject: she’d been a little detached from the conversation for a few minutes.
‘What do you think, Maddie?’ he ventured.
This stopped Olive in her tracks; she’d been pacing the floor, drinking her tea, looking out of the window as she talked, answering these questions that she hadn’t dared ask herself before. And now she was so certain that she was right, pleased and proud to have made the decisions that liberated her children from her care, she realized there was another woman in the room who could have been quite offended by the stance. She knew from Doubler that she’d had a difficult relationship with her children recently.
Maddie shrugged, looking quite dispassionate. ‘I think you’re right. Completely right.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. I’d have made the same decisions. You’re not being entirely selfless, you know. If you wanted to make your children feel really good, you could sell up here and invest a fraction of the value of this place in a modern condominium near one of them. Then they wouldn’t have to live with those pangs of fear and guilt that they probably deal with from time to time. But you’ve done the right thing by staying put. By choosing a life you know with your dead husband rather than a life you can’t know with your living children. That seems like a thoroughly reasonable decision to make and I applaud it.’
‘Well, thank you, yes. It’s crushingly lonely at times, but you’re right – I wouldn’t leave Don. Not now. Not after all we went through together to be here.’
Maddie nodded knowingly. ‘Take my sons, for example. You see, they can sleep easy at night. They tell their friends that they made completely the right decision. I know they do. I’ve heard them telling the doctors. They sorted our lives right out, got my Thomas into care, got me into a manageable house, something easy to look after. I have to be very careful not to show any sign of deterioration. I take care never to even wince when I stand up in front of them for fear that they’ll have me in a bungalow before I know it. Or worse.’
‘Oh, that would be no good at all. Where would we be without the stairs? Without going up to bed?’ Olive, in contemplation of living in a single-storey building, shuddered, certainly incapable of comprehending the ‘something worse’ that M
addie alluded to.
Doubler, too, imagined life without the slow pace of his morning descent in the half-light, still asleep as he grasped the bannister but fully awake by the time he stepped off the final tread into the cool hall. He couldn’t consider any other awakening.
‘Quite right,’ he said, quietly grateful for his home and his independence.
‘But you see, my sons made these moves without ever stopping to ask me what I wanted. They did it without consulting me and told me they wanted to spare me the pain. The truth is, I hate the house. I hate its wall-to-wall carpets and its wipe-down surfaces; I hate the self-cleaning oven and the decking in the garden. I miss my dirty fingernails and the ache you have when you come into the house at the end of the day. It was only that ache that made me sleep. I slept like a baby up at the farm, but of course I don’t sleep at all now. How could I? I’m never tired.’ Maddie looked to be on the verge of tears as the realization of the dullness of her every day hit her as if for the first time. Though, of course, in reality she was stuck in a dreadful daily cycle of denial, realization, horror and decline.
She continued, ‘I’d so love to feel tired again. I’d love to feel so exhausted that it’s all I can do to crawl upstairs – yes, upstairs – to get into bed. And I’d love to leave the curtains open so that however deep I sleep, however far I travel in my dreams, it’s the dawn that wakes me up.’ She looked at her audience with wide-eyed horror, trying to convey the true awfulness of her life these days. ‘I can’t even leave the curtains open because there’s a street light right outside my bedroom window. And I can’t even keep my windows open for the fresh air because – get this – they’re not designed to open.’
‘What?’ chorused both Olive and Doubler, who were beginning to feel guilty about their relatively untroubled continuation of farm life.
‘It’s true! I have this special double-glazing that traps the warm air in between two panes of glass and cuts down on my heating bill, but you’re not supposed to open the windows. You are only supposed to look out of them. But why you’d bother looking out I have no idea. All I can see is the exact same house staring back at me.’
Mr Doubler Begins Again Page 25
