Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  Marjory caught her breath. It happened every so often, a scare about foot-and-mouth, and even though it regularly proved to be a false alarm a shudder would always run through the farming community. It was a virus that spread like wildfire.

  She was too young to recall the ’67 outbreak in detail but she could remember the terrible newspaper pictures of burning cattle and the disinfectant mats at all the farm road-ends. Farming had taken years to recover from it and bloodlines established over long years had been ruthlessly wiped out. She could only hope that this was the usual alarmist nonsense. Anyway, Essex was a long way off and surely, more than thirty years on, better processes would be in place to contain an isolated pocket of the disease. She decided not to mention it to Bill; he seldom heard the news and there was no point in worrying him unnecessarily.

  But when she parked the car and the children tumbled out, still squabbling, she saw Bill coming across from the stackyard in the rain, his oiled jacket glistening, and from the grimness of his expression it was obvious that the story had reached him.

  ‘You’ve heard the news,’ Marjory said. ‘But even if it’s true, it’s Essex, Bill – that’s not exactly on our doorstep.’

  ‘I wish it was Essex. Hamish Raeburn phoned me,’ he said heavily, mentioning their neighbour who owned a dairy herd on the adjoining farm. ‘He’s on the NFU committee, you know. It’s a farm in Hexham the animal came from.’

  ‘Hexham! Oh no!’ That was seriously alarming; the Farmers’ Union would have reliable information and that was too close for comfort.

  ‘It’s worse than that. They send their beasts to the market at Carlisle as well.’

  That was where they sold their own stock. Marjory swallowed hard. ‘Maybe the tests will prove negative,’ she offered.

  ‘It’s a bad farm. There were complaints months ago and they didn’t take any action. There could have been infection there for weeks without anyone noticing.’

  She felt sick. They were so vulnerable: a small mixed farm, with sheep spread out across a couple of hillsides, some arable land and a herd of stirks bought in to fatten for the beef market. They were only just recovering from the problems of BSE; it would be too cruel . . .

  There was no point in agonising. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she asked, but her husband shook his head.

  ‘I’m just away down to check on the ewes. Another five lambs today – two sets of twins.’

  ‘That’s good. No custom for Cat’s “cuddle-a-lamb” service, then?’

  He shook his head, smiling, but as he turned the smile faded. She watched him head off down the path in the unremitting rain, then went into the house with a heavy heart.

  In the Band Box dress agency, the fair-haired woman had also heard the alarming news. The shop radio, always kept tuned to Classic FM, at a discreet volume, broadcast the item on the four o’clock news bulletin.

  As she heard it, she became very still, listening intently. She barely heard the Litolff Scherzo which followed and a sturdy matron, optimistically holding up a size 10 Frank Usher evening gown with a query as to whether it might fit, was at first gratified by the proprietor’s, ‘Yes, yes of course,’ then later, in the privacy of the changing cubicle, rather indignant.

  In her little office the other woman sat on, a furrow appearing between her finely pencilled brows.

  5

  There were no buskers braving the elements when Laura came down into the courtyard outside the Covent Garden pub; there was a chilly wind driving the rain under the glass roof and she hurried into the dark, fuggy warmth of the bar.

  She was deliberately early, feeling it would give her a chance to scan people as they arrived and see if she could spot Max Mason; he knew what she looked like and somehow she felt that put her at a disadvantage. She’d given some thought to her appearance, gathering her hair into a neat knot and putting on one of the dark trouser-suits she had worn for work. It was a calculated distancing technique: formality as self-protection.

  There was a fair number of people inside already, spread about among the irregular nooks and bays, but the pub wasn’t busy. Laura collected a glass of Rioja, then found a round table in the corner of the window which gave on to the courtyard and commanded a view of the entrance as well.

  Outside, a toddler caught Laura’s eye, descending the steps very carefully hand-in-hand with her mother; a trendy tot wearing a pink coat and a purple hat with a shocking pink flower, and a distinctly yummy mummy. She was watching them with some amusement; the voice that spoke quietly at her ear gave her a shock.

  ‘Laura.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  She turned sharply. A man was standing at her elbow, a man with fairish hair and dark blue eyes, a little over medium height. He had neat features and a full-lipped mouth which somehow suggested petulance or even weakness; he was wearing a beige jacket over a brown polo-neck, stylish but not expensive, in contrast to the heavy gold watch on his wrist. She hadn’t seen him come in; had she been so absorbed in watching the child that she had missed him, or had he – uncomfortable thought – been in the pub already, watching her these last ten minutes?

  She was startled. ‘M-Max Mason?’ Her stammer betrayed her; she was irritated that he should have seen this sign of nervousness, especially since she thought she caught a glint of satisfaction in his smile. He had an expensive-looking smile, with very white and regular teeth, and he was holding out his hand.

  She shook it. He kept hold of her own rather too long as he studied her face. ‘Hey, hey! Di’s kid sister! And you can’t be a lot older than she was, last time I saw her. Swear to me that while I get a drink and the menu you won’t do a runner like she did?’

  Laura snatched her hand back, then was annoyed with herself all over again for making her discomfort apparent. She didn’t reply, giving him only a tight-lipped, unamused smile. He had caught her off-balance again, just as he had done with his message.

  She made her voice chillingly polite when he returned. ‘Thank you for taking the trouble to get in touch with me. Do you work in London?’

  It had no effect. Sitting down, he said as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘It’s kind of weird looking at you.’ He had the irritating mannerism of making a statement sound like a question. ‘It’s like something’s gone out of focus. The eyes, a bit bluer, the nose – yeah, sure. But . . .’

  He was fixing his gaze on the different areas of her face in turn, as if calculating proportions. ‘A tad too much chin, not quite enough cheek—’

  The disregard for social conventions might be entirely innocent – or not. Laura didn’t know whether to feel angry, amused or threatened.

  ‘Talking of cheek . . .’ she said lightly, and saw his face change on the instant. The corners of his mouth turned down in a rueful grimace and he slapped the back of his left hand. ‘Sorry. Rude. Naughty. Let me buy you a nice lunch and I’ll be good and mind my manners. We’ve got lots to talk about.’

  Laura chose a salad more or less at random. While he queued at the bar she stared out into the courtyard, biting her lip, conscious of having been out-manoeuvred. It was unnerving that her attempts to keep him at a safe psychological distance had been so ineffective; she couldn’t read him and it piqued her professional pride. He must have been in his thirties yet his behaviour was almost childlike. Was that calculated, an act put on for his own purposes, or was it really some curious kind of naïvety?

  There was money there, or at least there had been at one time, but somehow Laura suspected he wasn’t making it himself. A spoiled child, perhaps, who had never seen the need to grow up? The manner of his apology, as if his charm could broker forgiveness for any misdemeanour, suggested he’d been accustomed to indulgence.

  But she hadn’t been charmed, had she? He’d left her feeling uneasy, so it hadn’t worked. Perhaps it never did; perhaps he was just a poor little rich kid with hang-ups that condemned him to go on repeating the mistakes of the past. She’d met a lot of those, become almost a connoisseur of the vari
ety of fronts which could be constructed to suggest a non-existent confidence – one of which, of course, was undermining the confidence of the other person.

  That made some sort of sense: after all, she’d been considering how to shield herself too. At least it was a working hypothesis.

  Like a karate expert making use of his opponent’s body weight, she turned his own technique of surprise against him when he returned. ‘The Minotaur,’ she said without preamble as Max sat down again. ‘Tell me about the Minotaur.’

  She could be confident, this time, that his response wasn’t calculated. It was ludicrously transparent: his face darkened, his mouth became a thin line and his hands clenched involuntarily into fists.

  ‘Jake Mason. My father – he’s a bastard.’

  How many times had Laura heard this tone of raw anger – even this phrase – during therapy? It had been her practice to say nothing in response, only to look an enquiry and she did that now.

  As if she had opened a sluice gate, the disjointed story came pouring out. His affectations of speech vanished as he painted an emotional picture of a tyrant, a darkly powerful man with a towering temper, obsessive about the bulls he bred and his own money and importance, indifferent to the feelings of his wife and son.

  ‘He – he drove her away, my mother.’ Max’s voice was thick with rage and hatred. ‘She just vanished one day, when I was seventeen. I’ve never heard from her since. And he did the same to Di too, when I was eighteen. When she left I walked out and I’ve never spoken to him since.’

  Laura drew a shaky breath. ‘How – how did my sister come into all this?’

  The waiter brought the food. Max had ordered a beef stew which he ate absent-mindedly as he talked. Laura toyed with her salad, too tense to eat more than a few mouthfuls as she listened.

  They’d met, apparently, at the Sanfermines Festival in Pamplona the summer before Dizzy vanished, at the famous running of the bulls when the half-dozen selected for bullfights that night are loosed into barricaded streets leading to the bullring; young men historically display their courage by running with the dangerous, volatile creatures.

  Max’s eyes were dreamy as he talked. ‘Di was amazing. Braver than most of the men – braver than me or my father, come to that, for all he always talked big. She actually touched one of the bulls, do you know that? It’s the craziest thing you can do. People die that way. I can still see her – the white shirt with the red scarf and the red sash round her waist, blonde hair flying . . .’

  Laura’s eyes prickled with tears. Dizzy had told her about it when she came home, talked of the strange madness that seized you, the terror, the absolute joy.

  Max was going on. ‘They fire a rocket, you know, when the first bull leaves the corral, then another when the last one goes. If there’s a long gap it’s a danger signal – probably means one’s got left behind the herd and it’ll be panicky, getting spooked by everything. This was on the third morning and there was a long, long break before the second rocket.

  ‘I’d done the run along with the first bulls and reached the barricades at the bullring end. The other five were inside by the time the last one appeared and it was going crazy, pawing the ground, charging everything. You ever seen a fighting bull? No?

  ‘They’re – well, fantastic. Black, wicked creatures, all bunched muscles and power and cunning. Every one thinks differently and you’ve got to get inside their heads to stay alive – that’s what makes a great matador. When he kills the bull – the moment of truth – it’s an act of homage to the most amazing animal in the world.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Laura wasn’t entirely sure the bull would see it that way.

  ‘That day, there was a group of about thirty running around the last one – ahead, alongside. One guy had fallen – there’d been rain that night and the cobbles were slippery – but he’d the sense to lie still and the bull ignored him. He’d got the scent of his mates ahead, probably, and he was heading for the bullring pens.

  ‘Then suddenly this girl appeared out of the group. The rest were all men. She dodged to one side till the bull passed, then darted round behind and touched its flank. Everyone gasped. The bull wheeled on its haunches and charged in one movement, the way they do – so fast you can’t believe it. If she’d lost her footing on the cobbles he’d have gored her to death, but she vaulted over the barricade and the crowd caught her.’ His face was alight with remembered excitement. ‘God, you should have heard the cheers!’

  That hadn’t been when he’d met her, though. That had happened later, when with the rest of Pamplona he’d gone after the evening bullfight to the Plaza del Castillo. Max described it as if it had happened yesterday: the seething crowd inside the famous Café Iruña with its mirrors, its glass chandeliers and its nicotine-darkened walls where Hemingway had got drunk on absinthe along with, Max claimed, his own grandfather.

  ‘They’ve kept it the way it was, you know, very Thirties with the marble bar and the bentwood chairs. I saw Di at a table in the middle with all these guys around, everyone a bit drunk, talking and laughing. My father was at the bar with a lot of old bores he met up with every year – still does, probably. I haven’t been back.

  ‘I sort of drifted to the edge of the group round Di but I couldn’t get near her. I was only a kid and they elbowed me out.’

  It still rankled. ‘How old were you?’ Laura asked gently.

  ‘Seventeen – eighteen, almost.’

  Seventeen, and Dizzy would have been twenty. He had clearly thought himself in love with her, with that first fervour of a boy worshipping at the goddess’s shrine.

  Max barely noticed the waiter taking the plates away. ‘It got a bit late and eventually she left with some of the young men. I followed her out. They were all a bit drunk – she probably was too. The roads out of the square are quite narrow, alleyways really, and by now most people had gone home. She was on her own with about four of them. I followed, a bit behind. They went out of sight round a bend and when I heard her call out I started to run.

  ‘She wasn’t laughing now. They were all very lairy and they’d probably just wanted a kiss to start with, but it was getting out of hand. She was struggling and lashing out at them, but one was behind her pinning her arms and the others were laughing and grabbing at her feet as she tried to kick them.

  ‘I put my head down and charged them like one of the bulls. They were pretty drunk and I must have looked pretty scary coming out of the darkness. I landed a few punches and then they scattered.’

  ‘Pretty impressive!’

  Laura hadn’t meant to betray her scepticism, but he flushed. ‘Well, my father came up just at the end and they probably thought there were more of us coming. She was certainly grateful. We sort of acted as bodyguards for her for the rest of the festival.

  ‘My father said if she ever wanted a job to let him know – we were always needing people after my mother left. None of them lasted long. When he discovered you only got a slave by marrying one he’d lose it with them and then they’d leave.’

  The tables around them had emptied and the waiter had brought them coffee. At last they were getting to the point where he might have useful information for her.

  ‘So when Dizzy – Di – got fed up with living at home, she called your father to ask for a job?’

  ‘That’s right. She came in – oh, October, November, was it? I know she left in January.’

  In her eagerness, Laura leaned forward across the table. ‘Look, I need to know every single tiny detail. There may be something you saw, something you don’t even know you know, but that might give me a lead to follow on what she did next.’

  It was a mistake. She could see his withdrawal immediately. He had been facing her squarely, meeting her eyes as he talked; now he shifted to sit sideways at the table and he looked past her as if his attention had been caught by something in the empty courtyard.

  ‘Well, hey, that’s a pretty tall order. We’re talking fifteen years ago here.’ His voice
was once more rising at the end of the sentence. ‘Glad to be of service, like they say, but total recall’s a bit off the scale.’

  He’d slipped behind the shield again, as uncertain people, too directly challenged, tend to do. Laura tried to regain lost ground.

  ‘Was she a good Girl Friday?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I don’t remember her being very domesticated.’

  ‘OK, I guess. She got across my aunt, though – they’d a couple of up-and-downers. She’s always sticking her nose in.’

  ‘Does your aunt live with your father?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s kind of weird – there’s the farm office and the study and the main kitchen and so on, then the rest of the ground floor is our flat – my father’s, I should say – and my aunt and my meathead cousin live upstairs. Enough to drive anyone to leave home, don’t you reckon?’

  Laura had spent enough time listening to his family problems. ‘If you can’t remember anything, do you think your father would?’

  Max laughed, shortly. ‘You’d better give him a miss. Women seem to have a habit of disappearing around him.’

  But his father, perhaps, might have a different version of the story Max had told her. Laura persisted. ‘Can you give me his phone number?’

  ‘I think it’s changed since I left home. I could try and get it for you, I suppose. Give me yours and I’ll call you.’

  She’d be moving shortly anyway; with only slight misgiving, Laura gave it to him, then got up to go. He was staring at her again. ‘So like Di,’ he murmured. ‘Really takes me back.’

  They climbed the steps from the pub together. He was going back to work; he did something vague as a broker, putting companies and investors together. He went on to the Tube station while Laura walked more slowly along the rows of shops. There was something comforting about the brightly lit windows, the scent of toiletries, the elegant, expensive nothings on display. She felt she had walked long enough with the ghosts of her sister’s past today; she needed to escape that twilight world.