by Amanda Craig
Sally parks her car in the yard where a stream falls into a duck pond. Facing it are two black steel barns, one for hay and one for the sheep. She doesn’t have time to garden, though the walls are fronded with ferns and foxgloves, and on either side of the front door are two granite troughs planted with spring bulbs.
Pete is away with his sheepdog, Jip, but the goose, five red hens and a bantam all rush forwards. She loves this moment.
‘Shoo!’ she says. ‘You wait for your suppers.’
The dog and the cat are curled up together, something people never believe possible until they see it with their own eyes. Of course Baggage will chase other cats, given the chance, but Bouncer is different. They are all one family: husband, wife, dog, cat.
‘As good as it gets,’ Sally says aloud. ‘I’m a lucky woman.’
The Aga chortles to itself. It’s the one luxury the Veritys have, though Sally cooks on her Aga, dries laundry on a clothes-airer suspended from the ceiling and has even warmed half-frozen lambs in the bottom oven. They bake better than any other oven invented but some people never take to them, and they tend to be the ones who can’t live in the country, poor things.
Sally has lived all her life within ten miles of where she is now apart from when she trained as a midwife in London. She’d enjoyed going to exhibitions and parties, but hadn’t enjoyed the noise, the dirt, the way everybody rushed about, and no stars, just the dull red lid of light pollution at night. How can people stand that? She and Peter are both hefted to the land, like their sheep. She’s Devon to the bone, and even crossing the Tamar into Cornwall feels funny.
She goes out to the yard at last.
‘Here Penny-Penny-Penny!’ she calls, and the flock rushes towards her with a gabbling shriek. It’s all rescue hens from Holsworthy, russet Rhode Island crosses rehomed from breeders who would otherwise slaughter them at seventeen months because they have started to produce fewer eggs. They arrive like survivors of a concentration camp: bald, half-crippled, crazed by their tiny cages and not even knowing how to get out of the rain. Yet within weeks of receiving proper care, they perk up, grow new feathers and show their inquisitive natures. They never behave quite as a hen should, needing to be herded out every morning into the light and air denied them for half their lives, but the difference is astounding, not least because all have begun laying again.
Sally checks for eggs: only four, which is part of the inevitable falling-off of winter, or perhaps age. How strange it is, she thinks, that hens lay their eggs every day but human females are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have in their life, only to lose them one by one.
Her two sisters have eight children between them: Tessa, the eldest, has three grown-up children, and Anne, the youngest, has five, ranging from seventeen to six. So it’s not as if the Anstey family is going to die out. But there will be no more Veritys farming this land unless a miracle happens. She’s forty, she knows the statistics. Sally chops up some squash, potatoes, tomatoes and onion from her garden and puts it in a pan to roast with a shin of beef. She and Daphne, her sister Tess’s husband’s sister, swap meat for their freezer, and nobody’s ever the wiser.
The door bangs open.
‘Heard you had a spot of bother with your car,’ Peter calls, taking his boots off in the boot-room.
His face is always ruddy and glowing. He smells of wood and mud, and there’s something caught in his unruly grey-brown hair that is probably a leaf. Sally twitches it out, automatically, and reaches out to give him a hug, though these days she can hardly wrap her arms around him. Baggage has got there before her, and is giving him the usual ear-licking treatment reserved for the alpha male in the pack. Dogs: such snobs, she thinks, smiling.
‘Some Londoner drove me into a ditch near Shipcott. Such a rude man, never even stopped to check I was all right. I met his wife after, though, poor woman, traumatised by having run over a pheasant, and she helped me.’
Peter chortles.
‘She’ll have to get used to ’un.’
‘They’re the ones who’ve rented Home Farm.’
‘Oh, yes?’
Peter always pretends he knows what’s going on, but like most men, rarely does.
‘Remember what happened there?’
‘Do I?’
‘Last Christmas?’
Her husband is less interested in gossip, but his eyes sharpen.
‘Oh! That place!’
They’re both silent a moment, remembering the police going from door to door asking questions.
‘Can’t say as I’d like to live there myself,’ Peter says.
‘Well, it can’t be left to fall down, even if you’re as rich as Tore.’
‘No, it can’t,’ Sally agrees. ‘You know what cob is like when the damp gets in.’
‘Wonder whether they’ll stay.’
‘The little girls are at Shipcott Primary.’
‘Ah.’
Sally and Peter have known each other for most of their lives: they went to the same primary school – in the next village along from the one where her sister Tess is now head teacher. Peter had been a truculent, stubborn boy, and Sally was his sworn enemy because he was always doing awful things like bringing his slow-worm into school and telling everyone it was a poisonous snake. She would fly into a temper with him for making other children nervous or upset, whereas he said,
‘The more you know, the less scary it is. I’m doing people a favour, really.’
That was Pete all over. Had there not been the farm she likes to think that he might have become some kind of scientist, only there hadn’t been enough money to send him to agricultural college, even. It was such bad luck: his father had shot himself when Peter turned eighteen, and there was no choice but to take over the farm and try to make a go of it. He hasn’t read a book since The Hobbit. They watch TV together in the evening; at least, he does while she knits or quilts. But these are the tiring times, and they’re both getting on, with no children growing up to take some of the strain. There’s no rest from looking after livestock, not really, and then there’s the mountains of paperwork for the hated EU when you come in. It’s not like raising crops: these are living creatures that need to be fed, watered, kept clean and healthy, and that is every day including Sunday.
‘We’ll keep going until I run out of strength,’ Pete says. ‘When I’m too old for farming, I’ll sell up.’
Sally agrees, though when push comes to shove she thinks it will break his heart. It’s not only the farm and the land, it’s the flock. Pete has devoted his life to improving his herd, although few breeds beside Whitefaces and Blackfaces can take a Dartmoor winter. He buys the best rams he can at market, raises the lambs to adulthood, frets over their health, and, Sally teases, would sleep with them, if he could. Yet when the time comes, half the herd has to go off to slaughter.
‘It’s them or us,’ he always says, and she agrees. But they never eat lamb.
More and more farmers have sold up, including the one who used to be their nearest neighbour. That house has been done up to the nines, and is hardly ever used except in high summer, but the land has gone to ruin. There are brambles and thistles growing where once there was turf cropped close as velvet.
‘It’s always the trouble when people who aren’t farmers buy land. It needs looking after, or the heart goes out of it.’
‘Still, who knows? People can fall in love with a place, and learn.’
During the last property boom, they had had visits from a couple of estate agents trying to persuade them to sell up. Unmodernised – as they liked to call it, as if the Veritys lived without electricity or plumbing – it would still fetch half a million, because of its views. Pete had roared with laughter, but the agent, a woman with bottle-blonde hair and a string of fat pearls, had gone on and on about the linhay barn, and how easy it would be to convert, being just outside the Dartmoor National Park Area.
‘Why on earth would I want to do that?’ he asked.
Plent
y of farmers had cracked, when offered what seemed like money beyond their wildest dreams. But maybe one of their nephews – or nieces – will be interested in farming, one day. It’s too early to tell. Tess and Annie’s kids all enjoy visiting, helping with the lambing and running around, though Tess’s children are almost grown and gone now. It’s not without its difficulties, but when the weather is fine it’s the best job in the best place in the world. That’s what makes the crime at Home Farm so shocking.
It’s almost a year since it happened, and the police have got no further with what the papers called the Headless Corpse Mystery, but there are ever so many things I’d be wondering if I were investigating it, she thinks. Knowing how to use a maul to chop off the head must mean it was someone used to woodcutting, for instance.
Of course the house had to be re-let. There are too many properties locked up and falling to pieces, and even if the housing crisis is less deep here, they should still be lived in. Tore is a good landlord, unlike old Sir Jerry; he grew up poor himself, and even if he’s rich now, he knows the importance of a home. Without people in them to see when the roof leaks or there’s a flood, a house can go to rot and ruin in months.
Sally looks out of her window, where the skies have darkened from dark orange to plum to deep violet, like heated copper cooling. The feeling of safety is one she takes for granted. She wonders, though, what she would feel if she were Lottie Bredin, and whether she and her husband are the only ones not to know the hideous crime that happened in their new home, less than a year ago.
10
Cabin Fever
With wild, roaring winds, winter arrives: stripping trees, bleaching grass, boosting bills. Lottie has never been so aware of how little stands between her family and the ferocity of nature as she is now. Lying in bed, she thinks of the story of the Three Little Pigs, and how each represents an advance in building technology – from grass to wood to brick. Home Farm, effectively made from wood, clay and hay, doesn’t look strong enough to withstand the assault – yet so far, it does. She finds this slightly surprising.
However, once the rains come, damp is everywhere, bubbling through the paint at the base of all the walls; even some of the skirting looks ominously soft.
‘Yes, this is precisely what estate agents mean when they describe a place as “oozing with character”. Look at the character, rising up from the floor! The landlord should be paying us to live here, not the other way around,’ Quentin says, filthy from digging out the ditch behind the house where the water is pooling. This unpleasant task is one which, to his credit, he has already done once before to stop more damp coming in. Lottie trudges round mopping up puddles with old newspapers and turning on dehumidifiers. Every day, she empties two litres of water from these down the sink.
In the cold and gloom, Lottie feels the loss of London as an ache indistinguishable from the loss of love. It’s not the city itself she misses so much as her mother and her friends, the comforting feeling of other people living all around, and a corner shop at the end of the road so that running out of milk isn’t a major disaster. Above all she misses her home, with its big windows and high ceilings. It’s not only the lack of light that’s so depressing. There’s a smell which no amount of cleaning seems to budge.
‘It could be that something has crawled into a hole and died there,’ Janet says.
‘Your mouth, maybe,’ Quentin mutters, under his breath.
‘Yes, a mouse, maybe. If you’d let the cats in, you wouldn’t have this problem.’
Lottie sighs and says, ‘I’ll put down more poison.’
‘You should tell Mrs Tore. It’s her responsibility, after all.’
Janet’s position as the Tores’ cleaner and housekeeper has, Lottie sees, given her a status and sense of her own authority she might not otherwise possess. She’s not an agreeable person, and her ‘Awful Ex’ seems to be her main preoccupation, even though she has a new man called Rod whose services she periodically presses on them as a handyman. Lottie was tempted, briefly – there was so much to do, and she hated asking Quentin to do it – but luckily, Sally warned her against Rod Ball. They ran into each other in Trelorn, and when Sally heard she was even thinking of employing him her friendly face changed.
‘If you want a word to the wise, I wouldn’t.’
‘Oh? Do tell me. I know nobody here.’
‘Him and his brothers, well, they don’t have a good reputation. Who recommended him?’
‘Janet, the Tores’ housekeeper. Quentin hired her to do a bit of cleaning.’
‘Has he?’ Sally said.
‘Why, is something wrong with her too?’
‘That’s the trouble with incomers. No offence, but you arrive without knowing anything about anyone – who’s honest, and a hard worker, and who’s been trouble from the day they were born.’
‘But Janet is from London too.’
‘Yes,’ said Sally, without expression.
Lottie feels sorry for Janet, not least because she, too, has been abandoned by the father of her daughter. After Lottie made sympathetic noises about Men, their faithlessness and laziness, Janet would talk to Lottie about her Awful Ex with the kind of relish that most angry women seem almost to revel in.
‘When did you divorce?’
‘Divorce? The bastard wouldn’t marry me. There I was, carrying his child, and he wouldn’t do the decent thing.’
‘Oh dear,’ Lottie said. It was such a common story, and a sad one. ‘I had to bring up my son without his father too. Did he help you after?’
‘Only when it suited him. He didn’t want a baby, but he fell for her the minute he clapped eyes.’
The bitterness in her voice was still raw, yet she keeps returning to it like a wasp to meat. Bitter though she feels herself, Lottie can’t help feeling that dwelling on her hurt might not be doing Janet any good.
All in all, Lottie really doesn’t like having Janet around once a week, especially as she often brings her daughter, who slumps on the sofa and often falls asleep, making Lottie feel guilty for resenting her. She tries to compensate by being friendly instead.
‘It’s an endless struggle, being a single mum,’ Janet said.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Then you were lucky to find someone else to take you on,’ Janet remarked. (Lottie could not help bridling at this: she hadn’t wanted to be ‘taken on’ by anyone.) ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ Quentin asked. Lottie can never tell the difference between different kinds of English accent, but Quentin does.
‘No, I’m from the Big Smoke, same as you,’ Janet answered. ‘I was working in a hotel, and one of Mr Tore’s staff was there, and asked if I’d like a job. Only bit of real luck that ever happened to me, with a house and a car thrown in.’
‘And you don’t find it lonely?’
‘No.’ Janet sniffed. ‘Course, the country people keeps themselves to themselves, but what do we care? Dawnie and me both got jobs.’
Ludicrous, Lottie thinks, to be employing her when I’m unemployed myself.
‘I hate being poor, Mutti,’ she says to her mother.
‘Darling, you aren’t poor, you’re broke,’ Marta responds. ‘You aren’t going to food banks, are you?’
Quentin thinks his contribution is growing vegetables.
‘My potatoes are coming on nicely,’ he announces, as if these are going to save them. ‘We’ll be having home-grown sprouts for Christmas lunch.’
She has never felt so irritated by another person in her life. The worst colleague, the sort who picks their nose and downloads pornography during office hours, is less bad than her husband. Every day she has to listen to him, wheedling and cajoling the few contacts he has left for a commission, from book reviews to opinion pieces about current affairs. Sometimes she almost admires him. Whatever else he is, he’s not a coward.
‘I don’t know how you can stand it,’ she says, hearing him being turned down again.
‘I stand it because I don’t ta
ke it personally, like a woman,’ he answers.
‘I’m applying for every job I hear about, but no luck so far.’
‘I thought you could set up on your own, as an architect.’
‘With what capital? With what clients?’
‘This is the most depressing place I’ve ever lived,’ Quentin says, eventually. They look out onto the muddy expanse of grass and a large leafless tree, scratching the sky with its black-tipped nails. ‘That ash should be cut down.’
Lottie found it creepy too, but his dislike made her instantly protective.
‘It is a shame that there isn’t more light in the kitchen. If only the Tores had put a window in the end wall …’
They have not yet met their landlords, which rankles somewhat.
‘Why bother, for tenants?’
‘Well, I would, but I’m cursed to live in an age which chooses ugliness.’
Quentin says, ‘If it’s any consolation, I hate this far more.’
Lottie wills herself not to respond. She’s heard of people in their situation who actually build a wall down the middle of each room to avoid seeing each other. Tempting, she thinks.
At least in Devon she can be wretched in private. Once the news of her marriage spread among her acquaintances, everyone wanted to know the details: how she found out about his treachery, how he had reacted, how she had reacted, the details of their rows, what story he had composed to justify his behaviour. It was clear that what caused her agony was to them a source of entertainment, and even enjoyment.
