Taking Stock

by A. L. Lester

  “Hullo, it’s Phil. Did you know they were going after Richard?” He cut straight to the chase.

  “Hullo old chap. Erm.” He paused. “I didn’t want to stir it all up again for you,” he said after a moment. “Did they write?”

  “No. Portnoy came down this morning. Apparently, Peter…” He let his voice drift off.

  “Yes. Peter spoke to me last weekend.” Adrian sighed. “I told him he was a fool. And a bastard. And he shouldn’t consider any of us his friends hereafter.” He paused again, delicately.

  “I know he was probably shagging Richard,” Phil said, to spare him the trouble of thinking of a tactful way to say it.

  Adrian coughed. “Well. Yes. Almost certainly I should think. We haven’t seen much of either of them over the winter. Too busy in bed, Percy thought.”

  Phil sighed. “Percy is an insightful and tactful young man,” he said.

  Adrian stifled a laugh. “How are you?” he asked, cautiously. “Did Portnoy offer you your job back?”

  “As it happens, he did,” Phil said. “But…I don’t know if I want it.”

  Adrian hummed encouragingly. “No?” he said. “Why not?”

  Phil didn’t really know how to answer that. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, puzzling it out as he spoke. “I think…I think I’ve had enough, Ade. Of the City. London generally, perhaps?”

  Adrian made another humming sound. “Have you met someone?” he asked. He was always good at putting his finger on the pulse of the matter. It was what made him such a good solicitor.

  Had he met someone? Yes, Phil thought. He probably had. “He’s called Laurie,” he said. “He’s a farmer. A neighbour, really. I like him a lot.”

  “Worth staying for?” Adrian asked.

  “Early days,” Phil said. “But there’s no need to rush back. Portnoy said they’d hold my job for a while. He’s feeling guilty. And the Board are terrified I’m going to drag their name through the mud and bring it out in to the open, I expect. They won’t want that kind of scandal. Better for the firm if they let it all go quietly away.”

  Adrian made another noise of assent. “I’ve been watering your plants,” he said. “Shall I just bring them round here?”

  “You’d better. If that’s all right.”

  The said goodbye after a few more minutes of catching up with each other’s lives. Phil felt much more grounded afterwards.

  He needed to go and see Laurie.

  Chapter 19: Father

  Saturday morning and Paul and Tommy had taken a few of the ewes with lambs at foot down to the market. Jimmy had the weekend off, Sally was cleaning for Phil, and God knew where Cat was. He’d have to answer the door himself.

  The visitor was a big-looking man. One time he’d been muscled, but now he was starting to run to fat and was a bit soft around the edges. He had blurred tattoos on his arms—ex navy?—and he was balding, with a florid face.

  Laurie took all that in in the moment or two after he answered the front door. It was sticking again, warped by the week’s wet weather. It gave him a moment to assess his visitor as he was tugging at it.

  “Hullo,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” his visitor said. “I heard you had a girl here.”

  Oh.

  He made it sound dirty, somehow.

  Laurie was leaning on his stick in the doorway and he allowed himself to put more weight on it as he tilted his head to one side and assessed the person in front of him.

  “A girl?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “A girl,” the man said. “My girl. She ran away. She’s underage. Seventeen. I want her back.”

  Ouch.

  “What’s she called?” Laurie said.

  “Catherine Small,” he said. He folded his arms. The tattoos on his beefy forearms rippled. “I were told she were here.”

  “Oh yeah? By whom?” Laurie let his vowels become a bit more clipped and arched his eyebrows.

  “Chap down in Taunton. At the market. Said you’d had her here since the winter.” His stance became more aggressive without him moving at all. “It’s not right.” He looked Laurie up and down. “And you a cripple, and all.”

  Laurie was surprised how much that stung. “She’s eighteen, as I understand it,” he said. “And she’s got a job of work, earns her own money, and doesn’t want anything to do with you.”

  He sneered. “And what sort of work is that, then?”

  Laurie swallowed. This was going to turn nasty quickly, he could feel it in the air.

  “Farm work,” he replied. “She wanted to work with the livestock.”

  The man sneered again. “As if,” he said. “Stupid little tart couldn’t even hold down a job in an office. What’s she going to do on a farm? She needs to come home to her family.”

  Laurie suddenly realised Cat was listening from just inside the kitchen doorway, invisible to the visitor. His inadvertent sidelong glance must have alerted her father to someone’s presence.

  “She’s there, isn’t she?” he said, suddenly, raising his voice. “You come out here, girl! Come out here now!” He stepped up on the step and tried to shoulder the door open and push past Laurie.

  The door jammed, as it was wont to do, and Laurie fell to one side, unbalanced on his bloody weak leg. He cried out as he fell on to the terracotta-tiled floor, tumbling in a mess of infirm limbs and his stick, taking the umbrella stand against the wall down with him for good measure.

  Cat screamed. The man bellowed.

  “Come here, you little tart!” His voice was rounded out with Devon vowels. He stumbled forward over Laurie where he lay on the floor, lunging toward Cat where he could now see her through the door in the kitchen.

  She screamed again. “Leave me alone, you bastard! You told me to get out! So I got! Leave me be!”

  He cornered her against the Rayburn and got hold of her arm and tried to pull her toward him. Laurie could see her biting and kicking and lashing out at him with her free arm, screaming and shrieking all the time. “I’m not going back! I’m not going back! I’m eighteen, you can’t make me now! You can’t make me go back! I won’t, I won’t, you old bastard! Do you hear me!”

  It was uncannily reminiscent of a similar discussion Laurie had had in the same kitchen with his father twenty years ago, except he’d only been fifteen and Uncle Matthew had intervened.

  “I’m not a stand-in for our mother! I’m not! And you can’t make me be! Auntie Marge said so! She said you couldn’t make me! That I didn’t have to! And that if I was eighteen, I could do what I wanted! And I’m not coming home with you! I’ve got a place here now! I’ve got a job! I’ve got a place to stay and I’m not coming back!”

  She round-housed him on the side of his head with the frying pan she grabbed from where it was drying on top of the Rayburn.

  There was a silent moment where everything paused. Even time held its breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  Then Laurie managed to untangle his stupid, useless limbs and pulled himself up against the teetering umbrella stand to his feet, to lean against the wall.

  Cat stared at her father, still frozen, aghast as he swayed on his feet and then crumpled to the floor like a puppet with all its string suddenly cut.

  That was the point that Phil walked in through the back door.

  He stopped dead, joining them in their frozen surprise.

  “What…?!” he said.

  Cat started sobbing properly and raised the frying pan again, clearly about to land another blow on the dazed man at her feet. Phil took in the situation at a glance and lunged toward her, gently disarming her.

  “Give it to me, Cat. It’s all right. I’ve got you. Come on. Let me have it. Good girl. There, that’s right. Good girl.” He took it carefully out of her grip.

  She hid her face in both hands and began to have proper hysterics. “I won’t go back! I won’t! I won’t go back! I’ll kill myself, or him, before I go back! I won�
��t! Do you hear me! Do you hear me!”

  “I hear you! I hear you, Cat. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to go with him. You’re eighteen. You can choose!” Laurie limped over from his place by the hall doorway, steadying himself on the table as he made his way around it. Her father was staying on the floor rather than completing his abortive move to get up. Phil was standing over him holding the frying pan, which might have contributed to his decision.

  Awkwardly, Laurie propped his bad side on the table and used his good arm to draw Cat toward him. Her sobbing didn’t decrease in volume, but she did allow the familiarity, burrowing her face into his shoulder and muffling the sounds.

  Phil looked at him.

  “What…?” he said, less panicky, this time.

  “Her father,” Laurie said.

  “Ah.”

  “Up you come, then, Cat’s father.” Phil put the frying pan down and offered the man a hand. “Let’s be having you.”

  He came up off the floor with a groan and collapsed like a deflated football on the kitchen chair Phil pushed him toward. Phil ran a tea-towel under the cold tap and chucked it at him and he pressed it to the egg-sized lump that was already visible on his head.

  “You bitch,” he spat viciously at the still-sobbing girl. “You’re just like your mother, the cow.”

  That prompted another round of sobbing.

  “Shut up,” Phil told him, coldly. “Or I’ll give you another one to match on the other side, myself.”

  “Mr Small,” Laurie said. “You’re not welcome here, Catherine doesn’t want to come with you, and you should leave. Now.”

  He made his voice as firm as he could.

  Cat was calming down on his shoulder and when Phil, ever the practical, pushed a clean, still folded handkerchief in to her hands where they were bunched in Laurie’s cardigan, she took it and stepped back, getting herself under control and wiping her face.

  She looked at her father. “I’m not coming back, Dad. You told me to get out and I did. I’m no concern of yours anymore.”

  Her father growled at her and made to stand, but Phil stepped forward to stand beside her and he thought again. “I didn’t mean it,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” she replied. “You meant it. You told me I was a dirty lezzie and I should fuck off out of it. And that was after I punched you in the bollocks when you tried to get in to bed with me.”

  Laurie put his hand on to her arm and drew her back toward him as Phil took another step closer, looming over him and reaching once again for the frying pan.

  “Mr Small,” Phil said. “I think it’s time you were leaving.” He suddenly didn’t look much like the cheerful, inoffensive, placatory Phil that Laurie had got to know over the last few weeks.

  Small mumbled something and then lurched to his feet. Cat flinched and Laurie stepped further away, drawing her with him.

  “Get out,” Laurie said. “Get out, don’t come back.” He could feel Cat trembling where his hand rested on her arm. “Cat is eighteen. She’s not your business if she doesn’t want to be. And I’ll be getting Constable Powers here first thing tomorrow to take a statement from her about why she left home.”

  Small mumbled again and spat on the floor at Cat’s feet. She stifled a small sound that probably only Laurie heard as she stared at the revolting gob of sputum.

  “Out,” Phil said, voice like iron. “I’ve had enough of people who try and twist other people around to get what they want. Get out. Don’t come back.”

  The man went.

  Chapter 20: Argument

  “It’s none of your business!” Laurie was genuinely angry with him. He’d not seen this side of Laurie yet—the boundless frustrated anger he had for his own physical limitations, yes. But not this anger directed outward toward someone or something else. He had a feeling it wasn’t something that happened all that often.

  Laurie thrust himself up and away from his seat at the kitchen table and turned his back on Phil and Cat as he flung himself across the room to look out of the window over the yard.

  “It’s none of your damned business, Phil. Whether Cat stays or not is up to me, no-one else! Not her father, not you, not anyone!”

  Cat was frozen in her seat at the table, back to the Rayburn. She had gone still and lost colour again the moment Laurie raised his voice in anger. Her hands were splayed either side of the plate in front of her, fingers spread and tense, but she hadn’t yet risen. She was examining the table with a fixed intensity, not meeting anyone’s eye.

  “No.” Phil made his voice as firm and calm as he could, keeping her at the edge of his gaze. “No, it’s not just up to you, Laurie. Cat has a say in this too. You told her she could stay. She’s made a place for herself here. She’s eighteen now. Actually, no-one but her gets to choose what she does with her life.”

  Cat shot him a glance as he continued to speak.

  “And you can’t do this on your own, Laurie.” He paused and gentled his tone. “You can’t. You know that.” He didn’t stand up and approach Laurie as he wanted to. He knew Laurie well enough now to know that he’d push Phil away. Instead he kept his voice reasonable and his tone modulated. This wasn’t the conversation he’d wanted when he walked in here and found Cat standing over a man on the floor brandishing a frying pan, but it was the one he was stuck with.

  “And we’re here. I’m here. Cat’s here. Sally and the men are here. Let us help, Laurie. Let us help you.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cat clench and unclench her fingers on the table beside her plate. She’s going to bolt, he thought. I don’t blame her. So he was surprised when she spoke.

  “Laurie.”

  Phil hadn’t heard her use his name before.

  She swallowed, steeling herself to get the words out.

  “Laurie. I’ll go if you want. I don’t want to bring trouble for you.” She didn’t raise her eyes as she spoke and her voice was low.

  Laurie didn’t respond.

  Phil tried again. “Laurie. You said one of the things you dreaded was being alone, without a family. You said you wanted to keep the farm going. Laurie. Let us be your family and help you do that.”

  He wasn’t expecting Laurie to swing round fiercely at his words. “But I have no family, Phil!” he said, voice shaking. “I have no family. Mum and Dad didn’t want anything to do with me after Dad caught me with Joshua Sayers. I ran away over here to Matty to get away from him. I didn’t know him well—his mother was my mum’s Auntie; he was around in the background, but not really part of the family every day. I didn’t have anyone else though and he offered me a place to stay when it got bad. Dad came and tried to get me to go back—because they wanted my wage, not for any other reason.

  “He told me, they told me, that I could go back and they’d forget all the nonsense with Josh and I could go back and be apprenticed at the garage like I’d been before and no more would be said about it. And I could carry on giving Mum my pay packet and Dad’d carry on drinking half of it on the Friday night, and his own on the Saturday, and that was that.

  “When I said I wouldn’t go back, Matthew gave me a place here.” He looked straight at Cat. “And you have a place here, Cat. You do have a place. But it’s for you to say and for me to say.” He looked straight at Phil. “Not you, Phil. You’re not my family.”

  Phil wasn’t expecting the thump that landed with in the middle of his chest. The visceral pain of it caused him to inhale sharply. “Laurie,” he said.

  Laurie shook his head. “No. You’re not, Phil. You, Cat, Sally, all of you, you’re not my family. There is no-one. Mum and Dad didn’t want me. I haven’t seen them for longer than Cat’s been alive. Matty and Rob are dead. There isn’t anyone else.”

  His voice was bewildered and Phil’s heart ached for him. Phil put his hands in his pockets to stop himself reaching out to him. “From what I understand, Matthew made his own family. With Rob. And with you,” he said it as gently as he could, diffidently, of
fering it instead of the hand he wanted to reach out to Laurie and hoping Laurie would meet him half way.

  There was silence. When he looked up again, Laurie was staring at him with a furious, anguished gaze that Phil couldn’t interpret. “And what am I to do then, Phil?” he said. “There are no more cousins, nieces, nephews. I’m a Henshaw, but I’m the last of the Webbers. This farm has been Webbers’ farm for two hundred years. It’s not mine, Phil. It’s in trust.”

  Phil shook his head, unable to come up with a good answer.

  Cat spoke up quietly though. “Laurie,” she said, from her place still sat at the table. “It’s not about the family name. The point of being entrusted with the land is that it goes to someone who looks after it, who loves it, who respects it. Like you do. Like the people before you did. I’ve only been here a while and I can feel it, already. This place has always been loved. You don’t need a blood relation to that. You just need someone who cares.”

  She stood up. “Thank you, both, for sending Dad on his way.” She fingered her arm absently where the man had grabbed her. “Do I have to go to the police station tomorrow?”

  Laurie nodded and Phil said, “I think it might be best. Just in case he starts to try to stir up trouble. But it’s your choice. We can get the constable to come up here and Laurie and I can give him statements as well. If that’s all right with you, Laurie.” He looked over at Laurie, suddenly realising he was taking control again.

  Laurie swept a hand over his face and nodded, suddenly looking tired. “Yes. I’ll phone him in the morning,” he said. “We need to talk, Cat. About where you’re going to live, whether you need to go back to college, all of those things.” He sank down in the chair at his end of the table. “But not today. Not today.”

  She nodded. “I need to go and check the calves,” she said. “I’ll see you both at tea-time.”

  Phil tipped his chin to her in acknowledgment. It was the first time he’d heard her make a positive statement about coming into the house, make a time to do it. Up ‘til now, at least when he’d been here, she’d always sidled in at mealtimes or just after, as if she wasn’t sure that they’d let her stay.