‘OK, thanks mum. Can anyone smell burning?’
Bartholomew gets up and pushes his chair out with the backs of his legs. He wanders about the room sniffing – towards the oven, then through the kitchen door to the hallway, the dogs following him to where the air is cool. But the smell recedes in this direction, so he returns to the kitchen. The others have now stood, raised by a vague curiosity.
‘Your mother will have left something on the stove again,’ says Joe, investigating.
‘I have not,’ says Ann. ‘P’raps it’s next door’s dinner.’
Bartholomew walks around the table to the back door and opens it tentatively and the noise hits his ears, even before the smell. Smoke is pouring from the black mouth of the hay barn, on the opposite side of the yard. He takes several broad steps towards it until a wall of heat stops him. The snap and pop of flames on the bales can be heard over the engulfing roar.
‘Dad!’ Bartholomew tries to shout but no sound emerges. Joe is already at his elbow, straining forward. Everything seems to Bartholomew to be in slow motion. Joe is stumbling towards the barn.
Bartholomew runs forward after him, hoping to grab Joe. Needles are pricking the edges of his eyeballs; he squints into the drifts of grey and black smoke. Joe is shouting but he can’t hear what he’s saying, so Bartholomew goes further in. When his hand finally reaches Joe’s back in the darkness, he finds his father beating something, his whole body flailing onto the bales. Bartholomew pulls at him, first his cardigan, then his whole body, dragging him backwards.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouts. ‘Come out, dad!’ He forces Joe towards the doorway. ‘Max! Get some help!’
He and Joe are bent double, coughing. He notices Joe’s hand, where the skin is puckering and bubbling, strange lines appearing as if threads were being pulled taut.
Max has been standing, rooted, but now he runs inside.
‘I can’t look,’ says Joe and he leans his forehead against Bartholomew’s shoulder. Bartholomew holds him, looking at the smoke billowing out of the mouth of the barn and at the white plastic sacks of ewe rolls, leaning against the nearest barn pole, which are now melting onto the floor.
*
Ann stands at the open back door, her arms folded across her chest against the arctic air. The yard is still milling with firemen, though two engines have pulled out of Marpleton and driven away. Four firemen still have their hoses pointed at the barn. The stripes on their enormous rubber coats flash as they move. Two firemen are reeling in their equipment, another is inside the engine, speaking on a radio handset. The eighth, who seems to be in charge, stands beside the engine writing on a clipboard.
She looks at the barn. She can hardly believe it. There it is, in all its inglorious wetness. The black struts and arching roof are presiding over its charred interior like some impervious mother. Smoke is still drifting out from its mouth and she can see the bales – sodden and black – like a smoking dung heap, but worth less money.
The fireman with the clipboard walks towards her.
‘What a mess,’ she says.
‘You’ve been lucky,’ he says. He is a kind-looking man with a doughy, open face and ginger eyebrows.
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, for a start there’s no wind today. If there’d been a wind the surrounding buildings might have gone up – your farmhouse, for example. And second, your livestock are penned away from the barn, so no loss of life. That’s the main thing.’
‘I s’pose. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Commonest thing there is – hay-barn fires.’
‘Oh yes, of course I know that,’ she says. ‘It’s just never happened to us, that’s all. And in December. I mean, you expect it in June or September, after baling, but in the snows? I didn’t think it were possible.’
‘Aye but November were that dry, d’you remember?’ He seems enthusiastic now, the puzzle-solver. ‘And then, two weeks ago, the snows came. I’d put money on there being a leak in that roof. Wetness got in, seeped through to the centre of the bales and set off the decomposition process. That’s what made them heat up. Once they get to 160 degrees – whoosh. Up it goes.’
‘How can it get so hot though, when it’s so flaming cold out?’
‘Well, bales might’ve been too tightly stacked. Don’t forget, once you’re in the centre of a stack, it’s well insulated. Toasty it is, in there. I could be wrong. But that’d be my guess.’ He steps away from her and looks around the corner of the farmhouse, towards the gate to the village. ‘The stack is a bit too hidden from the road to be arson. And it’s not the time of year for it. Kids do that in summer.’
They stand for a minute, watching the firemen.
‘Why are they still hosing? Doesn’t look like the barn could get any wetter.’
‘We have to make sure there’s no heat left. We don’t want to leave and find there’s a patch still smouldering somewhere, which could then catch on to your other buildings.’
‘Would your lads like some tea?’
‘Now you’re talking.’
‘And some Christmas cake? Oh I do feel bad, getting you all out on Christmas Day.’
‘That’s what we’re here for, love. Mind if I come in?’
He steps into the kitchen and removes his yellow hat. He seems impossibly big, stood there next to her sink in his creaking yellow trousers and boots as big as U-boats.
‘Your insurance will cover it,’ he is saying. ‘There’s just some paperwork to fill out.’
She keeps her back to him, gathering plates and knives and taking the foil cover off the cake.
He fills the silence. ‘Still, looks like you’ll have to buy in your winter feed. What was that lot worth? About ten thousand pounds?’
‘About that, yes,’ she says quietly.
The boys have come home from the hospital with Joe, who sits at the kitchen table holding his bandaged hand as if it belongs to another person. His nostrils are black with soot.
The chief fire officer – Ken, as Ann has come to call him – is still in the kitchen, standing with his bottom leaning against the counter. He is drinking his third cup of tea. He sets it down, saying ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’ and she says ‘Of course, up the stairs and it’s straight ahead of you,’ and they can all hear him creaking as he climbs them, two at a time.
Bartholomew, Max and Primrose are sitting at the table with Joe. Primrose is eating a slice of Christmas cake. Bartholomew is reading a leaflet that Ken has handed out. They hear the flush from the landing.
Ken reappears.
‘We have testing kits you can use,’ he says, taking up his tea and his position against the counter. ‘It’s a free service.’
Ann has been looking out of the kitchen window at the firemen clearing up but now she shuts her eyes for a minute, overwhelmed by tiredness, as if her body has been revved up by a strong electric current all afternoon and someone has just shut the power down.
Lauren had called, hours ago, not long after the sirens had blasted through the silence of the village. She’d rushed to the phone, thinking it might be the boys from the hospital. Ann had stood in the hallway, the handset to her ear, looking in through the lounge doorway. The flashing lights from the engines parked in front of the farmhouse did a three-second sweep of her living room, like a blue searchlight picking out the abandoned wine glasses, the scrunched wrapping paper on the floor, and the tottering little towers of presents at the foot of the armchairs and sofa.
‘Oh no, not the hay barn. Oh Ann!’
‘I really can’t talk now, Lauren.’
‘No, of course you can’t. I’ll call round later. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’
A few from the village had gathered to watch, though they were kept back by the crews. Dennis Lunn staggered over from the Fox. A couple of toddlers stood and pointed at the nee-naws, as if they’d been laid on as a festive treat.
Ken is saying: ‘It’s basically a probe
with a thermometer attached. You push it into the centre of the bales and it tells you whether they are heating up or not. 100–140 degrees and you’re getting into the danger zone and the bales need separating and ventilating so they cool down. 160 degrees and she’s likely to go up.’
‘So it’s possible that it happened because the bales weren’t stacked properly,’ Bartholomew says.
Here we go, thinks Ann.
‘We stacked them as we always stack them,’ says Max.
‘I wouldn’t say it was a cause, more a contributing factor,’ says Ken.
He’s been on a communications course, thinks Ann.
‘But if they’d been stacked more loosely . . .’ Bartholomew is saying.
Joe is slumped. He looks tiny, his face furrowed and darkened with the soot. He is in a world of his own.
Bartholomew and Max have their voices raised.
‘You need to take responsibility,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Look at him. He’s taking on too much. He can’t cope.’
‘Boys,’ Ann hisses. ‘Now is not the time.’
A blast of cold air enters the kitchen as one of the firemen pops his head round the back door. ‘All done here, chief,’ he says to Ken.
‘Right you are,’ says Ken. ‘Right, we’re going to leave you to it. Any other problems, give us a call. We’ll come and do a proper site investigation next week and then your report will be complete and you can use it for your insurance claim.’
Everyone is silent, looking at their cups or the table. Ann pushes her fingers into her closed eyes. ‘Well, thanks for everything, Ken,’ she says. ‘It’s been, well, a bit of a shock.’
‘Worst’s over,’ he says. He waves as he steps out of the door. ‘We’ll make sure we close the gate after us.’
The door shuts.
A suspicion is seeping into her. ‘The insurance, Joe,’ she says. ‘There is insurance, isn’t there? You did renew it, didn’t you?’
‘I was saving the pennies,’ he says. ‘I was keeping summat back. Waiting till we were a bit more flush. There’s never fires in December. They happen in summer. I thought it could wait.’
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. She can feel the rage start to pop in her head and the tears prick in her eyes and all this bile rise up in her throat.
‘I could kill you right now,’ she says. ‘That were ten thousand went up in that fire. How are we going to feed the sheep?’
‘I’ll find a way, I’ll sort it,’ he says.
‘You won’t sort it, you stupid man. You’ll make a mess of it, just like you make a mess of everything. Just like you’d never get that roof fixed. You scrimped on it, as usual. And it leaked. This is your fault, you stupid, stupid, stupid man.’
She storms out of the kitchen and down the hallway.
January
— Frozen ground —
‘Joe?’ she calls. ‘Joe, love?’
Ann steps out of the back door into the yard. She zips up her fleece as the frozen air whips about her neck. A fog has rolled down off the moor and is swirling about the farmyard, like more of the smoke that has only stopped rising off the hay barn in the last day or two. She sees Joe over on the other side of the yard, his back to her, looking up at it. He is tiny against the charred mouth of the barn. Its metal pole struts are rigid while the interior is a collapsed carbonised mess.
‘Why do bad things keep happening?’ he says as she approaches his back.
‘Now come on,’ she says, as she fortifies the capable person inside her, like she’d had to, to get over the business of the insurance, because she could have nursed that one. Oh she could. ‘You’re not the first person this has happened to.’
‘I’m probably the first that wasn’t insured. What’ll we do?’
She is caught. She can sense an opportunity, while he is sad and wrung open with it, to direct him gently. Let’s gear it up for selling. Let’s get out of this game, she thinks, though she knows he’s not the only impediment. The economics are against them, now more than ever, and there’s still Max to think of, though she wouldn’t wish this mess on her worst enemy, let alone her son. But she can see now how reduced Joe would be by the failure of it. Joe without a farm. Be careful what you wish for.
‘We’re going to clean the place up, that’s what we’ll do,’ she says, putting an arm through the loop of his. To their right, the bales at the edge have burnt right through and are precarious towers of ash. Ghosts of themselves, she thinks.
‘We’re going to clean it up,’ she says, gathering up the burnt-out fragments of her kindness. ‘And somehow, we’re going to get through to lambing. I don’t know how. But no one got hurt in this, Joe. It’s just hay. And the blessed ewe rolls. I wish we hadn’t stored the sacks in there.’
He puts his arms around her, pushing his cheek next to her cheek and she can feel his gratitude – that she’s not still harbouring a grudge about the insurance – and so she’s encouraged in her kindness. She says into his ear, ‘And lambing always cheers us up.’
She kisses his cheek – papery in the cold.
‘What would I do without you, Annie?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ she says, still with her face against his.
‘There’s something I need to tell ye,’ he says and she pulls away.
‘What?’ she says, her heart starting to beat harder. ‘What, Joe?’
‘It’s nothing that bad.’
‘Can you just tell me?’
‘I’ve bought a tractor.’
‘What?’
‘Well I didn’t know this was going to happen, did I?’
‘Jesus, Joe,’ she shouts and begins pacing the yard, her breath coming out in white puffs. All the care, the delicacy, she’s taken in dealing with the situation and with his feelings, well, that’s all over. ‘Did you not think renewing the insurance should ha’ come first?’
‘We needed a new one. The John Deere was on its last legs.’
‘How much, Joe?’
‘Seven thousand.’
‘How much, Joe?’ she says more forcefully.
‘Eight and a half.’
‘Jesus! What were you thinking? And you bought it on the never-never, I take it. Well, you’ll just have to send it back.’
‘I can’t. I’ve taken out a bank loan. I can’t undo it.’
‘And of course it didn’t occur to you to talk to me before taking out a loan, did it? Christ, Joe. When does the loan come through?’
‘This month.’
‘Right, and you’ve bid for the tractor on farmautotrader?’
‘And won the bidding,’ he says. ‘It’s a beauty, Ann – nearly new. A real bargain I got.’
‘Right, well, you’ll not go through with the purchase,’ she says. ‘And that loan – the eight thou. That’ll buy in our winter feed. You’ll have to go and see Granville Harris. See if you can get a deal on some hay. And the ewe rolls we’ve lost – they’ll need replacing. It’s still not enough, but it’s something. I’m going in for a brew.’
She can’t help treating him like the impossible toddler who’s spilt the paints. Even though it’s a blessing – this loan he’s got. It’s the manner of it she can’t forgive, not so soon after forgiving him for the other thing.
‘You coming?’ she says.
‘In a minute,’ he says.
*
Joe has taken his mug of tea back outside and is standing once more in front of the hay barn. It’s cold out, but not half as frosty as it is in his kitchen. And why should she be so sore when the timing couldn’t be better? He regrets having to duck out of buying that tractor – especially as he’d emailed the chap who owned it over in Tibberthwaite Fell, with such excitement. But Ann was right, they needed the money to buy in the winter feed. Negotiating with Granville Harris, he wasn’t going to enjoy that, but they could still get through to lambing. That was the main thing.
He looks into the barn, as if looking helps him gain some sort of mastery over the mess within. Hell of a job th
at, more than a job for one man and there was no hiring anyone in, not with things as they were. They’d have to store the bought-in feed in the other outbuildings, then repair the pole barn in summer. He hears the tramp of boots on the track and turns to see Eric Blakely entering the yard.
‘What the bloody hell are you wearing?’ Joe says.
‘My overalls,’ says Eric, looking down at his legs, which are billowing with an excess of thick navy cotton. ‘They’re new.’
‘Very smart. Did ye come to show ’em off to me?’
‘Look, I’m ready to work, aren’t I? Where d’ye keep your brooms and such? Ron Chappell’s on his way over.’
Joe then sees Dennis Lunn walking round the corner into the yard, his hands in his pockets. Dennis nods at Joe. Nonchalant. As if he’s at the bar in the Fox and there’s nothing out of the ordinary.
‘Where’s a spare broom then?’ says Dennis. ‘Tal and Jake are on their way over – Max’s gone to fetch ’em.’ Then Dennis turns to Eric. ‘Keith Tindall says he’ll join us in an hour.’
‘Jolly good,’ says Eric.
‘Ah, look lads, I can’t afford . . .’ says Joe.
‘Don’t be daft, man,’ says Eric. ‘Take us no time if we all pitch in.’
Joe watches his friends head to one of his outbuildings, where the tools are kept, cracking a joke to each other. Max, Tal and Jake arrive and they all get to work, shovelling debris into the truck that Max has backed towards the mouth of the barn and parked there. Sweeping, shovelling, laughing together, then shedding their jackets as their bodies warm up with the exertion and the sweat gathering on their foreheads. Only Eric keeps his coat on – one of those country coats from Fairbrothers, with criss-cross padding and a brown corduroy collar. Joe looks at Eric’s broad back. He’s fat, and out of puff with the sweeping. The most generous man Joe has ever met – large with it. Then he remembers Ann’s admiration, the way she twinkles whenever Eric’s near.
Joe sees Ann in the doorway of the house with her arms folded against the cold and against him too, probably. She’s watching them work. He smiles at her, hoping she can see his gratitude. But she looks away. Still frosty.
Homecoming Page 12
