Of Love and Slaughter

by Angela Huth

  ‘It might,’ said George. ‘Let’s hope it does.’

  A couple of summers earlier, Prodge and Nell had been sitting outside at the Elkins’ farm after Sunday lunch looking at photographs taken on a short holiday George and Lily had spent in Wales. A few of these photographs had fallen off the table. Prodge had picked them up. Crouched half under the tablecloth, unseen, he had managed to slip a print of Lily, alone on a mountainside, into his pocket. No one had noticed. He had no idea why he had done this: it was not a premeditated action. The small theft caused him guilt only for a moment or two. It was not a good photograph. There were plenty of others, better. Had he asked for it he was sure it would have been handed over willingly. But he knew he would not have been able to request it in the joking manner that would have looked innocent, so it remained unmentioned in his pocket.

  This photograph was the only manifestation of Prodge’s secret. He liked to carry it with him, always. So with each new shirt it was put in the pocket. If the shirt was too thin to disguise a photograph, he would transfer it to his wallet, which he kept in his trouser pocket. His surreptitious ploys, he knew, were dangerous: Nell, the avid laundrywoman, was inclined to swoop upon a shirt left on his floor in seconds. She seemed to enjoy the peculiar challenge of getting dirty clothes into the machine in record time, so it was essential that Prodge always remembered, as he abandoned a two-day shirt, to take out the photograph and hide it until it was time to lodge it in the next one. God knows what would happen if one day he forgot and Nell found it. There would be some difficult explaining to do. He knew he wouldn’t be up to that – her sharp questions and sarcastic assumptions. Thus a small part of his life was lived in fear of discovery. In some odd way that he failed to understand, he rather enjoyed the danger he had created for himself.

  By now, the photograph was battered and limp. Lily’s face was covered in creases. The blue of her skirt seemed to have run into the green of the mountainside. The lights in her hair had gone: it was nothing but a dull smudge. But Prodge took out the photograph more often now – now the worry of things was weighing on him so heavily. At odd times of day, in the shed or out in a field, when Nell was safely distant, he would slip the snapshot from his pocket, cradle it in his hand, gaze upon the object of his desire – except he knew it was not mere desire, certainly nothing as crude as lust – though perhaps it had been that in the beginning. No, it was love he felt for her. Hopeless, useless love. ‘Lucky bugger, George,’ he would say out loud, and wonder for the thousandth time why his friend was so hopeless about retrieving his wife. Surely if he made the right move, even though that would be going against her wishes, she would return home. Surely it was worth trying – though of course Prodge still had no idea of her reasons for leaving. George had never told anyone those.

  On the night before the Countryside March, Prodge went up to bed early. He was to rise at four in the morning. A bus from the village, one of the many buses leaving from the West Country, was to depart at four-thirty. He took a thick flannel shirt from the drawer, undid the button-down pocket. Before sliding the photograph into its new place he studied it for a while. It seemed to be talking to him. Scared by this feeling, Prodge sat on the bed and continued to stare at it. What was going on? Was he mad? His limbs had felt heavy as boulders, sometimes, of late. His head often spun, so that for moments on end nothing made sense. Nell had to ask him questions several times. Was he ill? And what exactly was Lily saying? He sat without moving for some while, but could not make out any actual words. It was more a feeling of assurance that was coming from the photograph, a feeling – and he hardly dared say this to himself – that he was going to see her again. Possibly before she came home. Possibly before George. Possibly … tomorrow.

  Prodge put the photograph into the pocket and buttoned it up against Nell’s beady eyes. Then he got into bed. He doubted he would have much sleep.

  George, too, was anxious to have an early night. He had arranged to pick up Ben and Saul and one or two others near By and drive them to the meeting place in the village. But as tomorrow would be a busy day on the farm, with no help, he knew there would not be a moment to attend to the rising pile of papers, so he decided to put in a couple of hours before going to bed.

  Halfway through this tedious task he came upon a postcard of Norwich cathedral. He hadn’t opened his post for two days or even looked through the piles, so this latest card from Lily had lain undiscovered. Heart beating faster, as it always did when he saw her handwriting, he turned it over. Another of her brief messages: Wonderful about the Countryside March, isn’t it, so many going to be there – I imagine you’ll be among them. Love L.

  George tossed the card on to the desk to join the brown envelopes and sheaves of forms. Lily’s message could only mean one thing, of that he was absolutely sure. She was going to be at the march. In view of her deep feelings about the country and hunting it was inconceivable that she would not join the protest. Yes: she would be there and he would not. He was going to be here, trying to get through a hundred jobs alone.

  He closed his eyes and struggled for calm. To be rational, even if he had been going, the chances of seeing her among several hundred thousand was minimal, so there was no point grieving too hard. And it was far too late to make alternative arrangements for someone to look after the animals. Everyone in the locality wanted to be in London. No one for miles would be available to take over another man’s job on this most vital of days. George told himself to stop imagining what might have been, and went to bed – far later than he had intended. But not to sleep. Instead, in his mind he wrote her a reply. Darling Lily, I won’t be there. So glad you’re going. Please come home soon. I carry on, but it’s scarcely a life without you. Love and miss you so much. He would choose a card for his message in the morning – Serusier’s Solitude, perhaps, and delete the self-pitying phrase. Then he would probably put it in the drawer and, like the last one, never post it.

  It had been decided that marching through the city, Prodge, Saul and Ben would keep close to the other farmers from their bus. In the vast crowd it would have been easy to lose companions, so they were to form a small body, and Prodge was to carry their banner. The banner had caused some argument. Peter Friel, a middle-aged farmer over the hill from Prodge, wanted it to say ‘Will the PM bury our dead stock?’ The others had suggested that, should it be seen on television, the question would make no sense to the average viewer. It would be a wasted message.

  ‘Bloody well should make sense,’ Friel had snorted. ‘What the anti-hunting brigade should realise is how many thousands of vital jobs would be lost if there was no hunting – most importantly, carting off our dead animals for next to nothing to the kennels.’ He had banged down his mug of beer, his face plumped to an alarming shade of purple – a man both outraged and desperate. As nobody else had come up with a banner slogan that they felt about with equal passion, it was finally agreed that his should be adopted, although it was probably over the heads of the ignorant urban public.

  In the bus on the journey to London Peter Friel took a seat beside Prodge. It was too early in the morning even for him to aim his usual blast of fury towards the government. His complexion had quietened, his eyes were bewildered. As he ate his bacon sandwich he talked in erratic sentences that Prodge could only just hear.

  ‘Take yesterday,’ he said. ‘I’ve a dead sheep. I ring the kennels. The flesh van arrives in under two hours. I pay them a fiver. No problems. Hounds get fed. They give us a bloody marvellous service, always have. Always will, if they’re allowed to, both to farmers who hunt, and farmers who don’t. What those dunderhead anti-hunting politicians who want to ban hunting haven’t worked out, mincing round Westminster, is that if this service goes, what do we do? To call the knackerman, if you can find one, it’ll cost you seventy, even eighty quid. Which one of us these days can afford that? May be the price of lunch for two in Islington, but a bloody fortune to today’s farmer. So what’s the alternative?’

  Grea
se from the bacon fat ran down Peter Friel’s chin. He was hating this bus-breakfast. With a handkerchief he had some difficulty prising from his trouser pocket he dabbed ineffectively at his face.

  ‘Alternative, Prodge, is we bury our own stock. Ha! Imagine that! Pollute the water system, create major health problems. How’s the Minister of Ag. going to like that? How’s the PM going to explain that?’ He paused, heaved, chuckled. ‘Well, I tell you what, I have this plan. If the day comes foxhunting really is abolished, and God forbid that day should ever come, next time I have a dead cow I’m going to bring it up to London. No matter what it costs, I’m going to get it to London, dump it on the front steps of Downing Street. You’d help me, I daresay. I could count on others. Prime Minister, I’d say, you tell me what to do. You tell thousands of us how to dispose of our dead animals with no kennels to carry out the service. We haven’t got £700 a year for the knackerman – we haven’t got £700 a year for ourselves. So we bury them and cause havoc? Pollution? You tell me.’ Friel gave another melancholy laugh. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘that’s my dream.’ Then, very suddenly, he fell asleep.

  Prodge looked at the man beside him. He had been a friend of his own father, but rather than abandon farming life for the easy option of Spain, he had kept at it. More than thirty-five years, Prodge reckoned. Friel had seen good times, some bad – but nothing like this. Prodge wondered if he would survive. He wondered if he himself would survive – but at least he had youth on his side. On the occasions he managed a good night’s sleep, his energy was restored. Friel looked as if his energy was wearing down. Prodge sympathised with him, agreed with every word he said – and feared for him. Unless things improved there was a high chance Peter Friel would be one of the thousands of farmers forced to give up. And then what? Debts hanging over him, farming the only life he knew, what would he do to support his family? Only recently he had said to Prodge he was considering signing on for a course in plumbing – a three-year course, earning nothing while he studied. Friel was in his mid-fifties. Was that the reward for a life of ceaseless hard work producing fine meat and crops? After a while Prodge, too, fell asleep. He dreamt there was a dead cow at the back of the bus which they were to deliver to Downing Street.

  He had been to London once before, as a child, and remembered only the enormity of Buckingham Palace. But it was not the sights they passed that interested him today: it was the hundreds of faces. An alien looking down from Mars could have told they were country folk marching: there was a uniform weatherbeaten sheen on their cheeks; anxiety and anger were shared equally among their eyes. Their clothes, too, were of the uniform market-day kind – waxed jackets dulled with wear and rain, ancient frayed tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows. Some of the older men wore flat caps, greasy round the edges, so closely moulded to their wearers’ heads it was hard to imagine those heads without them. There were middle-aged women with bright faces and head scarves – the backbone of England, Prodge remembered they were sometimes called: the thousands of women in rural areas who could be relied on for help for dozens of different causes. The women the press liked to scorn, they were. Edgy voices, they had, yes: but they were good women and wouldn’t have missed this show of dignified protest for anything.

  Among the muted colours of the vast crowds, hunt servants and masters stood out in their pink coats, boots polished to mirror brightness, whips curled round their stems. They had a witty line in banners, and were the target of the Animal Rights members who in their cowardly balaclavas jeered at the marchers. Prodge was not surprised to see many of the crowd were old, well into retirement. Farmers all their lives, the least they could do was to show support, make their feelings known about the disaster that was now rural life. Coming from the generation who had believed in Sunday best, they had taken out their smart Sunday suits, their wife-pressed shirts and quiet wool ties. Several of them, hobbling, leant on shepherds’ crooks.

  Prodge remembered Lily had once told him that her grandmother had been a land girl in the West Country, and there had been an extraordinary feeling of closeness to people from different lives and backgrounds fighting for the same cause. Well, thought Prodge, there was something like that today. A great many of us fighting for our rights, joining together in the brilliantly organised and decorous protest which the government, if they had any heart at all, would surely find moving. Several times his own eyes filled with tears.

  As they marched past giant buildings and shops filled with bright, unobtainable, unwanted things (Prodge saw a single ugly dress that was the pre-BSE price of two bull calves), a world light years from his normal morning of muck and mud and green fields, his head constantly swivelled in search. His conviction that Lily would be here, somewhere, was still strong within him. Occasionally he touched his shirt pocket and felt the photograph.

  They’d not been walking for an hour when he thought he saw her some way behind. The long tail of the marchers was curving round into Trafalgar Square: she was a fair way from him, too far to be certain. But he was certain.

  Lily, the figure he knew was Lily, was talking to a woman beside her. He caught a momentary sight of her profile. There was a scarf round her neck whose blue he thought he recognised. But it was the bouncing hair that convinced him. Surely, no one else but Lily … When he looked harder, wondering how to leave his group and make a dash for her, she was gone. For the next part of the march he walked half backwards, looking, looking. Peter Friel turned him round with a gentle push on the arm. ‘All of us are in a spin today’ he said.

  On the rest of the march through London Prodge reran the fragmentary image of her, the sighting that lasted for under a second, trying to determine whether he had been right, or whether his fevered imagination had merely supplied him with a taunting doubt.

  By the end of the day Prodge was weary (a very different matter, marching through London streets, from tramping over fields) but still alert for another sighting of Lily. In the crowds jostling to get into the parked buses that were to return all over the country, he saw the blue scarf again. Lily? Surely Lily. Back view: she was being pushed towards a coach parked some yards away Prodge touched. Peter’s arm.

  ‘Back in a moment,’ he said.

  With the kind of maddened urgency to which there are no barriers, Prodge thrashed his way through the dense mass of tired farmers. Somehow, he reached her. She was just a step away from the coach by now – from East Anglia, Prodge noted. He stretched out, tugged at the long tail of her scarf. She turned. Lily.

  ‘Prodge?’ Amazed, she was. Scared eyes.

  ‘Lily—’

  ‘Is George—?’

  ‘No.’

  The crowd was moving her nearer to the steps. Prodge clung to the scarf.

  ‘Lily: please come home. You’ve no idea how much George wants you back.’

  She turned, smiled at him. Someone was pushing her up the steps.

  ‘I can’t, Prodge. Wish I could explain.’ She was pushed through the door, gone.

  Prodge, like a man in shock, stood looking up at the grey glass of the coach windows watching her dim figure move almost to the back. She took a seat by the window, looked for him, waved. Then she blew him a kiss, mouthed something he could not understand. Did she remember the river afternoon? The kitchen afternoon, when he had made his clumsy confession and hopelessly lied to her about his love dissolving? Had she believed him? Probably. In those early days Lily thought only of George.

  Prodge put two fingers to his mouth to blow a returning kiss. He’d done his best, got nowhere, could not return home with news that would cheer George’s heart. As the coach started up and began to roll forwards, he realised he could not move his poised fingers, which stemmed tears from running down his cheek, so Lily never received his return kiss, too heavy to fly. Desolate, he allowed himself to be buffeted by the crowd back to his coach. The West Country crowd, impatient to be off, joshed him for keeping them waiting. He didn’t care. He cared for nothing but Lily. On the journey back he decid
ed that, as he had failed to acquire any hopeful news for George, the kindest thing would be not to mention that he had seen her. Lily! Prodge slept. Dreamt of her.

  For both George and Nell the day was a long one. Feeding the cows who were still in their winter quarters, milking, scraping and washing down the parlours, feeding the sheep and calves besides myriad other jobs was a struggle single-handed. Both were exhausted by the evening. Both, in their separate houses, sat watching the march on the nine o’clock news. When it was over Nell telephoned George. She was waiting up for Prodge, she said, who was due back shortly.

  ‘I’ve bad news for him,’ she said, ‘but it’ll wait till morning. He needs a good night’s sleep.’ She paused. ‘There’s another down with BSE, I reckon – Bracken. I had my suspicions yesterday but I managed to keep Prodge away from her. I was sure he wouldn’t go to London if he knew’

  ‘Oh, Nell…’

  ‘She fell in the yard this morning, had a hard time getting up. I rang the vet at once, but of course he was at the march. So, first thing tomorrow morning she’ll have to go off. Oldest cow in the herd, Bracken. I remember the night she was born. Prodge helped deliver her. He’ll be devastated. I don’t know how to tell him.’ Her voice broke.

  ‘It’s so unfair. Your prize herd. It should have been one of my cows. I’m fond of them, but they don’t mean as much to me as your herd does to Prodge.’

  ‘No. But it’s random, where it strikes, isn’t it? You hear of cases all over the country. They’ve all eaten the same vile foodstuff, as we now know, but it only strikes at some. So odd.’

  ‘Shall I come over?’