Still, Jos felt for all his years that he was standing on the edge of the unknown. It would not be long before he would be alone. The thought frightened him and filled him with a cold terror. Could he even stomach trying to keep the farm going? Would he be, like so many others, heartbroken and shell-shocked at the sudden collapse of a way of life stretching back down centuries? Would he end up where he did not want to be, in a house in North Appleton with his very soul crying out for the sound of the curlews on the moorland, and the rush of the clean wind in the sycamores?
He was a gentle man but there were times he wanted to destroy those who were driving the hill farmer over and beyond the stark edges of reason. And all in the name of progress.
He had always been brought up to be honest and, wherever possible, treat others as he would like to be treated himself, in the sure and certain knowledge that life is hard and nobody owes you a living. But nobody seemed to think like that any more and the past was a dirty word.
And Walter? He watched him disappear with an axe into the tool store. What would become of him? The farm had been his whole life, the very compass of his world. Could he ever look him in the eyes and tell him, ‘It’s finished?’
Could they make a go of it together? He doubted it for, heaven help him, with the passing of Emily, then in more senses than one, the spirit would be gone. It was too late for both of them, for the balance was destroyed and too much of what was happening now was only relevant to a young man’s world with no survivors if you were over the hill. Too late to “diversify” – whatever that was supposed to mean.
Still, life did go on and no point in thinking like this when it was Christmas time, supposedly with glad tidings of great joy. Like all his generation, he had learned the Catechism at his mother’s knee, and attended Sunday School for the strengthening of the spiritual “backbone”. It was neither simply a case of habit nor of tradition, for folks then believed in the strengthening of the soul. The body was mortal and built for toil and consequently could take care of itself.
He was not an overtly religious man in terms of regular church attendance, nor did he make ostentatious expressions of faith. His relationship with his Maker was one of humble respect at the might and mystery of nature, quietly spoken thanks when the harvest was home and an acceptance of Emily’s condition as he would accept the often harsh elements of the natural world. It all seemed to be thrown into starker relief at Christmas.
Christmas! Jos suddenly remembered his missing nephew. He’d hardly spared him a thought.
He hurried across the yard into the house.
Chapter 3
THE SAME DAY
THE SHADOWS moved across the snow from the walls and occasional trees, lengthening as the afternoon stretched on with increasing speed to meet the frost-crackling, star-spangled velvet dusk.
The snow had been blown deep on either side of the track and beaten down on the rough road by the tractor wheels, while the wind moaned around the electricity wires slung from post to post down the fields to eventually disappear from view into the ghyll.
Wires indicated a house.
The tall figure stood outlined against the late afternoon sky. He remained quite still for a moment, taking in the scene before him and noting the name on the gate in the wall.
He smiled, nodded to himself then, adjusting the strap of his holdall, strode on down the track towards Keld House Farm.
Above his head the moon rode out from behind the clouds like a great silver ship, close-hauled on her voyage across the night sky, while the frost, nipping ears and fingers, came down harder than ever.
Chapter 4
LATER THAT SAME DAY
JOS HAD tried the phone again. It was still dead. Laura had spent the afternoon cleaning the house thoroughly and had pushed Emily in her chair over to the table. One thing was certain, she hated to be idle. There was the goose to stuff, more pies to fill with mince and plenty to keep her busy. Jos was worried, pacing around the pair, running his hands through his hair, a sure sign that he was agitated.
‘What’s to be done about nephew? Do you think I ought to go on up to North Appleton and see if he’s pitched up at all?’
‘No point in that. It’s a fair way to go for a wasted journey.’ As ever Emily was the right side of reason. ‘He’s a big lad by now.’
‘Well, no use worryin’, I suppose. Milkin’ time.’
He picked up the milk can and opened the door into the porch, absentmindedly shuffling his stockinged feet into his boots, gazing across the yard to where the familiar wedge of light spilled out onto the snow from the mistel. The low contented murmurings of the cows, the putt-putting of the milking machine mixed with Walter’s whistling and the clang of milk churns on concrete was no different to any other day in the year, but something else was decidedly odd, and it took a few moments to sink in.
A tall figure was standing to one side of the yard, reaching down to Tip and Bess and rubbing their ears. They were the best watchdogs in the world and nobody could do that until they had been thoroughly barked at, suspiciously sniffed at, vetted and subjected to Jos’s approval. Jos walked forward, then came to an abrupt halt, totally forgetting himself. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’
‘I sincerely hope not.’ The voice was humorous, warm and rich, the clipped accent strongly flavoured with Afrikaans. ‘You must be Jos.’
The smile was wide, set in the tanned face. Dark hair fell to the collar and the outstretched hand that gripped Jos’s was firm and strong.
‘That I am,’ he replied, taken completely off his guard. ‘And you must be Winnie’s lad. I can see the resemblance.’
The young man said nothing. Just the enigmatic smile and the two standing regarding one another, caught up in the moment and tongue-tied. Jos came to his senses. ‘Nay, lad, I’m forgettin’ meself. You must be nithered, come on in and welcome to Keld House.’
‘Thank you.’ They crossed the yard, Jos with the sense of awkwardness that comes from a lifetime of rarely seeing people from the outside world. In the porch, kicking off the boots he’d only just put on, he lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Your aunt is not what she used to be, Ambrose. It just gets slowly worse.’
He unsnecked the door and pushed it open. The young man stood in the doorway, blinking in the light. The smell of baking wafted from the oven and the kettle sniffled little puffs of steam on the hob. The newcomer noted the beamed ceiling and the way the lamplight played on the brasses and copper warming pan.
A lady with a round homely face and an apron bearing the legend, “I am the Boss”, was sitting at one end of a laden table polishing a brass candlestick. In another chair at the same table sat someone whose face was so familiar to him. The features were thinned and ravaged by the disease, but the intense blue eyes were very much alive.
‘We have a visitor,’ said Jos with a triumphant flourish of his arm, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat. ‘Ambrose Barnfather in person.’
‘Oh, oh well I never. You got here at last.’ Emily looked up at the young face almost disbelievingly.
‘We’ve been fair mithered about you what with the phones being dead an’ all and the weather so cold.’ The words came spilling out like beans from a sack. ‘And Jos wondering if he ought to go and get you and … and … oh, I just don’t believe it, Winnie’s boy, and my, you’ve grown since then.’
She pointed to a colour photograph on the dresser of a fat, smiling baby playing with a tape measure on a lawn. ‘Winnie sent us that when you were three.’
The young man smiled and walked over to her. Usually Emmy was acutely aware of her condition and felt an undeserved shame when someone other than Jos or Laura came into her world. It was strange that she did not feel like that with this suntanned visitor although he had been in the house just a few moments.
She brushed aside a stray wisp of hair and looked up at him as he bent and kissed her cheek. He was so very tall, she thought, the grey eyes filled with kindness and a certain compassion
but also something unfathomable, something way beyond all that. It was most likely to do with his vocation, the added strength, depth and wisdom that comes of devotion to things of the spirit, and ministering to every kind of need. And all in one so young.
‘Get your coat off lad, and come and sit by t’fire and get those bones of yours warmed through.’
Jos introduced him to Laura, who had recovered her composure from the first shock of the tanned stranger appearing through the door, wiped her hands on her apron and shook his proffered hand firmly.
It was all bustle and fuss. The Robertshaws were modest people who saw very few visitors other than the local folk and there was a sense of awkwardness to overcome.
Winifred had left in the night all those years ago, never to return, her bones in the soil of a far off land. Here was her son, their nephew, newly arrived.
Jos carried his bag to the stair bottom before the question occurred to him. ‘How on earth did you get here?’
‘Well,’ he said seemingly at ease already, ‘finding myself at the other end of the country, I made a few enquiries and one way and another I got myself up to North Appleton.’ He paused to take a sip of his tea, allowing no change of expression to cross his face as he swallowed the scalding liquid, and continued. ‘The journey was not exactly straightforward. The weather was causing all kinds of problems and I didn’t get to North Appleton until after lunch. I tried calling you but just got a strange sound so, thinking that it might be something to do with the snow, I got out your map, figured out my route and set off hitching up the road.’
‘Aye, lad, in this weather an’ all.’ Jos shook his head. ‘It must have been a right shock after South Africa. I’ll bet you near froze to death.’
‘I got very cold waiting for the first lift, in a baker’s van, would you believe, but with the heater on full blast he soon thawed me out. He was a nice fellow who offered me coffee from his flask and pointed things out as we came up into the hill country.’
He paused again as if renewing the recent events of his journey, the unspoken thoughts passing over his face like cloud patterns on a hillside. He continued, ‘I love the way the snow blankets everything and yet you can still see the shape and style of the villages clustered round their churches and pubs. Wonderful. Anyway, my lift had to turn off in Coneystone.I said, ‘goodbye and thank you,’ and was prepared for a long wait when, as luck would have it, a vet picked me up on his way back from a farm and dropped me off in the village. He would even have run me up here because he said he knows you well, but he was already late for surgery. I was quite happy to walk it.’
‘Was it a Land Rover? And did he have a beard?’ Laura had no compunction about asking.
‘Yes he did.’
‘Aye, that would be Jim Slater. Married, two nippers an’ lives in the big house behind Walter and me. Good vet. Likes a pint, mark you, and tells terrible jokes, but never backwards at comin’ forwards when somebody needs him.’
Walter! With the relief flooding through him now that his nephew was safely here Jos had forgotten that Walter was out there in a freezing cow shed on his own. Nothing unusual these days but he hadn’t even told him about the visitor.
Excusing himself, he put on his boots and headed across the yard. Any misgivings he might have had about his nephew landing on them for Christmas had melted away in the few minutes spent together, although he had to admit he could not really make the lad out. He paused in the shadow of the mistel and looked back at the glowing windows of the house. Emily was out of his field of vision but he could make out his nephew, mug of tea still clasped in his hands, standing with his back to the fire.
* * *
Laura had cleared a space among the chaos on the table. Milking finished, Jos had brought Walter in to meet the visitor. After an initial muttered, ‘How d’ya do,’ he wrapped himself around a tankard of “lotion”, adding it was ‘for t’road’. Nobody seemed to mind that he brought a liberal helping of the aromas of the cowshed with him and Jos hadn’t seen Emily so “fired up”, as he put it, in months.
The young visitor missed nothing as he quietly observed the scene before him. He noticed how these people in their way cared one for another. Even Walter, for all his laconic facade, was clearly a man with more under his skin than met the eye.
The subject of milking came up and the young man said he would rather like to see that. Walter couldn’t fathom that at all. ‘Nay, these days there’s nowt to it. Tha’ should have been around a few years ago. We did it all by hand then, none of this sit back and wait for t’machine lark. Them were t’days.’
He finished his beer, reckoned he’d see Jos in the morning as usual, bade the visitor and Emily, ‘G’night,’ and set off with Laura in his little green van, the metallic rattle of snow chains audible long after they had disappeared into a fold of the hills.
* * *
The three of them sat around the table long after the meal was over, for in the old farmhouses that was ever the way of things. Before the power lines brought electricity to the Dales, it was a world of lamps and candles in the evenings and television unknown. The day’s news and doings would be discussed, gossip related and, embellished wherever possible, and clothes mended by lamplight, eggs washed and papers read before retiring early to bed.
They had eaten a simple meal prepared in part by Emily and cooked by Laura before she left. The young man was asked to say Grace, which he did, giving thanks for the meal and the good people who provided it, their heads bowed in the solemnity of the moment. Steak and kidney pie followed with cauliflower, green beans and potatoes and apple and rhubarb under a mouth-watering crust for pudding.
Jos took two pewter tankards from the dresser and wandered off into the stone larder behind the kitchen. It was dimly lit by one small window by day and at night by a naked bulb on the beam above. Flitches of ham twirled slowly on iron hooks above sides of bacon curing in salt on the stone slabs below.
His keg of “lotion” sat on two trestles by the steps, while around the walls the shelves were lined with every kind of fruit and vegetable bottled in screwtop jars. He paused in the doorway as if having forgotten something.
‘Er, nephew, I was going to get you a beer. Never thought to ask, you bein’ a minister an’ all.’
‘If it was good enough for Cana in Galilee, then it is good enough for me,’ the other smiled, sitting in the “comfy” chair opposite Emily.
They sat around the fire, the men with their beer, Emily, arms folded on her lap, and the time skipped on. Jos thought his nephew seemed disinclined to go deep into family matters. Maybe it was the newness of it all, the shock of landing slap in the middle of a place and folks he’d never seen in his life and only knew by reputation. After all, he thought, how would he feel when home was twelve thousand miles away? The old man was too polite to press his nephew for details. Maybe, as Winifred had died so recently, the young man found the subject too painful. There were so many questions. What of life back there in that faraway land? What was it like? Had his mother and George Barnfather been happy? What was his father doing now? At one point Jos asked a direct question about the Mission in Bloemfontein.
‘More of that later,’ the other replied, watching Emily sipping a cup of hot milk. ‘At least I’m here and there is time enough for reminiscing.’
Jos then spoke at length, with interjections from Emily as to the exact times of dates, about the family’s past. Normally a man of few words, he spoke in a slow deep voice, the measured cadences of the words enriched with the warmth of the north country accent.
It was clear that he had always felt quite protective about his sister, and her sudden disappearance with young Barnfather all those years ago was still something that baffled him for it was outside his range of comprehension. His father too, had found Winifred’s’s elopement hard to come to terms with. ‘If only we’d known more then maybe we could have understood it more, but the old lad was very fixed in his opinions. Once his mind was made up that was
it and heaven and earth could not shake him,’ he said.
‘The very Devil himself would have failed,’ said Emily, with a feeling, obviously based on experience.
‘He was as solid as a rock.’
‘On the other hand,’ Jos chewed his lip thoughtfully, ‘though Old Ambrose, who you never knew could be an awkward soul and on occasions downright unreasonable, deep down I think he was impressed that she called you after him. Heaven knows she had no reason to.’
The young man sat listening and Jos thought him either to be quite shy, not in his opinion a great attribute for a minister, or overawed by the relatively strange world of the farm.
For a while, all was silent but for the measured ticking of the grandfather clock and the occasional thud from the fire as, with an accompanying shower of sparks, the spent embers dropped through on to the grate beneath. Jos shuffled his feet and stared at a point on the stone-flagged floor with exaggerated attention. ‘Aye, well,’ he said at last, ‘she’ll be right enough now, lad. Tha’s done as she wished. You’re here.’
Emily was mortally tired, Jos could see. This had been a momentous day for her and maybe too much excitement was a dangerous thing. The eyes were still bright but there were definite signs of weariness as the waves of pain and discomfort were making their inexorable way through her thin frame. It was much later than she would normally have stayed up.
The Visitor Page 3
