The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

‘Sure. Don’t worry.’

  Maybe it’s some weird Catholic thing, though Katya is a lot more experienced than himself. Xan has tried being friendly, in a polite way: it turns out that Arek works with Lottie and Martin on the housing development, and is, according to his mother, a tireless builder who can turn his hand to anything. It doesn’t seem to matter. Arek is fine with the other Poles, but when Xan says hello to him in the kitchen, he just grunts, or glares.

  ‘What’s bugging him?’ he asked Katya, but she only shrugged.

  ‘Bed mood,’ she said. ‘Always, bed mood.’

  The builder’s name is often on the girls’ lips, though Xan hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about. He can tell it makes Katya angry, even contemptuous, for she tosses her tawny hair, and her green eyes gleam like ice. Xan hopes she’s criticising the Pole, and that he’ll go away. He’s so enormous that when he sits in the kitchen, he fills the whole room. Luckily, Arek comes less often after the first month.

  Lottie never visits either – in fact, Xan has been careful not to tell her Katya’s address – but she’s always around in town these days. The development is in its first stage, and there are still thousands of tiny decisions to be made, as well as progressing with designs for the second stage of housing which she and Martin are designing.

  ‘That is your mother?’ Katya says in astonishment, when Xan points her out from across the street.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is important lady,’ Katya says, and she seems to look at Xan with new respect.

  Xan shrugs. To him, his mother is this irritating middle-aged person whom he loves but has come to see as a loser.

  On the other hand, even if a housing development isn’t like some fuck-off office block along the Thames, it’s still interesting: Xan hasn’t grown up with an architect without realising that. For one thing, it isn’t the usual row of bungalows plonked down in a country cul-de-sac, but terraced housing arranged around a series of lanes and courtyards, which he can see will look both modern and as if they have been there for a hundred years. It has quirks and corners and dormer windows; each house will be rendered and painted different colours. Of course, she hasn’t designed the first lot; it’s the work of the man Dud calls Beardy. Years of man-alerts tell Xan that Beardy has a massive crush on his mother of which Lottie, typically, is completely unaware. However, the development is coming with a new extension to the secondary school, a new community centre and a library; and all these, Lottie is designing.

  ‘It’s a beacon of hope for us, that’s what it is,’ Maddy says. ‘There’s nowhere for mothers and babies to go, apart from the church, which is bloody freezing. We need a bigger school. There are three generations of families who’ve grown up in Trelorn who can’t get their kids school places, any more than you can get an appointment with the doctor. You want to know why we want to leave Europe? That’s why.’

  Lottie talks with some passion about how neglected this part of the country is.

  ‘They don’t understand that the government hates the West Country, poor sods.’

  ‘You sound as if you care about them,’ Xan says to his mother.

  ‘You don’t have to be born in a place to care about it, and love it, just things like the sky … Architects are always stealing sky, you know. Only here, it’s so big that you couldn’t begin to do that.’

  ‘So how much longer are we staying?’

  ‘I’ve stopped asking. I just have to take each day as it comes, and thank God we have a roof over our heads. Besides, Hugh isn’t likely to live many more months.’

  ‘As if Quentin cares about his father!’

  ‘Oh, I think he’ll find that he does, you know,’ Lottie says.

  ‘He can’t be nice to him even when he’s practically dead.’

  ‘I’m not making any excuses for how he behaves to Hugh. But he sees a different side to what you do. We all see different things about people. You never know everything about someone, not even me.’

  Xan can’t help resenting this. Now he’s got a job and a girlfriend, he sometimes – just for an instant – sees things from Quentin’s point of view. (When Lottie was going into some faff about nothing the other day, he’d caught Dud’s eye and they’d exchanged one of those looks that said, silently, Women!)

  Much as Xan dislikes his stepfather, he does have his uses. On New Year’s Day, he helped Xan write his Personal Statement again. Xan had been all for sending the old one off, but Quentin was having none of it.

  ‘You need to think about this again. You’re a year older than you were, and this doesn’t do you justice.’

  ‘I know never to say I’m passionate about anything.’

  ‘However, this can be better phrased, and why aren’t you mentioning what you’re reading now?’

  ‘I’m too tired, I do a fucking job.’

  ‘If you swear, we’ll get nowhere. You want to read English Literature. So do thousands of others. How should you distinguish yourself from them? What have you read that isn’t on the curriculum?’

  So they had battled on, and it had taken a whole day, a whole day in which (as he was often informed) his stepfather should have been doing his tax returns. Of course they both knew that Quentin, as a professional writer, could toss off the right words in five minutes. Xan sweated through it, line by line, trying not to lose heart. It was so easy to slide into the same old misery and sense of inadequacy. Little by little, however, it occurred to him that the thing he really loved had nothing to do with architecture. What he loved was no more and no less than his subject. It simply didn’t matter where he studied it. He’s applied to the same universities as before, except that this time he’s put UCL down too. He’d never thought of applying to university in London when he lived there, but now it seemed obvious.

  Even then, Quentin was standing over him saying,

  ‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I’m doing the right thing.’

  ‘Well, you’ll never find out if you don’t press that button, will you?’

  Off it went, and now he feels more hopeful about his future.

  Work, and getting to Trelorn and back, is less bad now that the year is turning. To emerge from the factory into the dripping dawn, to see the grey skies flush gold with the advancing sun, and to hear the birds that have somehow survived the winter rustling, squeaking, cheeping, trilling, gurgling, chuckling, cooing and finally singing up and down the hillsides, is what he loves best about the countryside, perhaps not surprisingly, given that he’s been led to it by Hugh. Poor old man … Xan has gone over to see him when Lottie took the girls over for a visit, partly to tell him that he’s trying again. Hugh had been asleep.

  ‘Write him a note,’ Naomi suggested. ‘I know he’ll be sorry to miss you.’

  Xan did so, awkwardly, because he had become unaccustomed to holding a pen.

  I like the look of UCL, and that’s where I’ve applied, he wrote. It’s always interesting talking to you about books, and I hope we can do so soon.

  It sounded lame, but maybe Hugh would understand that he was trying to thank him. He knows, without asking, that his stepfather’s father has had his own battles with depression and failure, that he’s felt overlooked and undervalued. Even if he’s on the National Curriculum, he’s a minor poet – though to Xan, several of his poems are as good as, say, Ted Hughes’s.

  ‘It’s so much a matter of luck, and being in the right place at the right time. The only thing that matters is the work, in the end. You don’t know, when you write something, who will read it,’ Hugh told him. ‘All art is a defiance of death.’

  Humbles, on the other hand, is the opposite. The immense labour of producing food still astonishes him. The long wait for seeds to sprout, fruit to swell, herds to mature, can only be partially improved by machinery, fleeces, fertilisers, because at the end of that process there still have to be human beings picking and processing it, and these will never ever be paid properly. Then the b
usiness of making meals is another convulsion of effort and will. Fresh or frozen, the potatoes, carrots, turnips, butter, meat, fruit pour in one end of the factory to be cooked, and out the other. It’s a relentless embrace of death.

  ‘What did you think it would be?’ Maddy asks. ‘Lambs skipping to the slaughterhouse?’

  ‘Er – no,’ Xan answers. He glares at Dawn, shuffling past with her trolley. Each day, she seems more withdrawn.

  ‘Poor kid,’ Maddy says.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Her mum’s boyfriend, if you ask me. You’ve met Rod, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Gross.’

  Now that he’s with Katya, the man who had assaulted him while he was working has moved on to easier targets. There are new Eastern Europeans who have come over to replace those who have moved on, and when Rod is around he always assaults them – as long as they’re young. If Dawn is having to live with him, her life must be pretty grim, Xan thinks.

  When Xan thinks of all the advantages he’d taken for granted, he feels ashamed. Maddy doesn’t have any GCSEs, and although she can read, write and add up, she is likely to spend the rest of her life working at the factory, while her health and strength last. She’s honest, kind, hard-working, bright and sharp; only she hated school and school, according to Maddy, hated her.

  ‘All I could think about was how much I wanted to leave home and marry Joe. Only, what would’ve been the harm in getting some qualifications? It wasn’t as if we had to do it right away. Maybe then my Joe wouldn’t have joined the Army, and lost his legs.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Maddy.’

  ‘Sorry for what? I’m fine.’

  I have to get out of this, he thinks. I can get out, thanks to my education – but she doesn’t even know how trapped she is. Then it occurs to him that she probably does, and that this, too, is part of her dignity.

  A letter and a parcel are waiting for him when he gets back to Home Farm. The parcel is addressed by Naomi but contains a note in Hugh’s wavering hand.

  ‘You might like this. H’

  Inside is a slim paperback of poems.

  Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

  How little that which thou deniest me is;

  It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

  And in this flea our two bloods mingled be …

  The other invites him to come for a written examination, and an interview, at University College London.

  19

  Lambing Time

  Sally’s days shrink to blood, shit, milk and sheep. In March, she can be up half the night delivering lambs with Peter. There are just the two of them, and five hundred and seven sheep in labour this year. She takes her holiday now, and it isn’t one.

  The frosty days have passed. Outside, the spring winds are blowing from the south-west again, and small birds are tossing from branch to branch under a sky as blue and cream as a Cornish plate. The duck-shaped weathervane on top of the old farmhouse creaks and spins, as if trying to fly off and join them. Any gate or door left open slams violently against its post, and the cats skitter across the yard like kittens, chasing their own shadows in the sharp sunlight.

  The pens shuffle with ewes, their thick, matted winter coats standing up around their long pale faces like ruffs, so that they look like a gathering of women in an old painting. All winter they’ve carried their lambs under their felted fleeces, through the cold dark months of snow and mud. Now, it’s time to drop their burdens.

  Though the barn is quite full, each needs enough space to be alone; for birth, like death, is always a private experience, even for an animal. Sheep, like all herd creatures, do their best to behave as one, yet even they are solitary as they lamb. How fearful this nakedness is, and how absolute! Sally has talked to women in labour when she worked as a midwife, trying to make a bridge between the place where they must suffer and struggle, and that of ordinary unthinking life. She’s talked about it with her sister Anne, who sees it at the other end.

  ‘It’s like staring at the sun,’ Anne said. ‘If you did think about dying, you’d go mad.’

  There are different kinds of aloneness. She has been married for almost half her life, now, and though she loves her husband Sally can’t imagine what she’d feel like without her sisters and friends. She thinks of the women who fall for bad men like Rod Ball: how much of it is out of sheer loneliness? There are plenty of her sex who feel that unless they have a man in their life, any man, they are somehow not valid. If only they’d have more self-respect! Or at least better judgement. The best and nicest women have been brought low by this, including her eldest sister Tess. She pretended everything in her marriage was perfect, until one day when her husband hit her so badly he broke her arm. She had just enough sense of self-preservation to take her children and run back to their mum.

  She’s remarried, long since, and has made a success of her life as a teacher; her children are grown up, she seems calm and happy. But even Tess would never have stooped as low as Rod.

  He has such a bad reputation, though it never puts women off. None of his ex-partners will tell the police or social services, and the little gang of men who go out drinking with him won’t tell either. To them he’s a daredevil, a bit of a lad, famous for setting fire to a hated speed camera on the A30, for vandalising one of the noisy windmills that a farmer (unable to resist the £60,000 grant for putting one up) had ruined a prominent hill with, and various other stunts. He is a real charmer when he wants to be.

  ‘He fixes his attention on you like you’re the only person there,’ said one of his girlfriends. ‘How many men ever do that? They’d rather talk about their cars than the colour of your eyes.’

  If Rod were a multimillionaire living in Shipcott Manor, would she feel the same about him? Probably: but then Tore, unlike Rod, has always taken care of his children, legitimate and illegitimate. It didn’t stop the women getting hurt, but it did mean the kids suffered less – perhaps.

  It seems so unjust that this kind of man was allowed to get away with treating women like dirt, while poor Oliver Randall lived all alone. A year on, his tragedy is passing into story: the headless pianist might one day become a local legend, to join the many others. It would be different if Randall had had family here, or even friends, but he’d been one of the many solitary types who gravitate towards the country … and life, in any case, always moves on.

  Six lambs are being born every hour, mostly twins, emerging tongue first, followed by the feet and long dark-knuckled legs. Several times, however, Sally or Peter must reach in with their bare hands and feel up to their own elbows for a lamb that has got stuck or needs turning.

  ‘I can’t manage this breech,’ Peter pants.

  Sally dreads events like these. Inside, the ewe is like a volcano. Her contractions are so strong that Sally’s hand is gripped excruciatingly hard. She yells.

  ‘Ow-ow, my hand!’

  ‘Try, m’dear,’ he says, and grips her shoulder. They both know what will happen if the lamb dies inside its mother.

  Sweating, Sally just manages to hook her other fingers under its leg. It’s a long, delicate business and her bruised hand is in agony, but when it’s over and she wipes herself clear of slime she’s relieved to see that it’s not broken.

  ‘Well done!’ Peter pats her.

  A butterfly coming out of its cocoon is no less miraculous than the limp, bedraggled body of a lamb becoming the animal that skips and gambols like a baby cloud. Some farmers hate sheep. They call them ‘vermin’, and treat them as nothing more than meat on legs. Yet sheep know the difference between a friendly face and an angry one, and when Peter walks into their field they all come to him for sheep-nuts. They trust him now.

  Within a day, the new lambs will race about, answering their mothers’ calls in high, milky voices that sound very like the parent-and-child drop-in mornings Sally helps to run in a shabby, run-down room off the main square. It contains three crates of old toys, a few tattered books
and old magazines, a sink and a kettle.

  ‘I know it’s all supposed to get better once the community centre is finished, but I can’t help wishing they’d just give us more money instead,’ one of the mums who comes said.

  Sally is hearing of parents who are denying themselves food so that their children won’t go hungry. If you lose your job, you can’t pay your rent, and once you lose your home you probably can’t get benefits because there’s no way of contacting you even if a new job does come along. The poorest mums turn up with soggy nappies, in order to cadge a free one from the stock.

  Devon looks prosperous, with its houses rising up the rolling hills like flecks of cream rising to the surface, its pastures pocked with cattle and sheep, and its long golden beaches. On days when it’s not sheeting with rain from the Atlantic, you can see why it’s one of the top tourist destinations in Britain. But you can’t live just on tourism, Sally thinks. For Trelorn to stay alive, it has to support real people doing real jobs, like Peter. A music academy won’t be half as useful as an agricultural college, and if Tore’s housing development helps anybody, it won’t be those on the lowest incomes. It’s a rich man’s fantasy, not real country life like this, Sally thinks.

  Still the lambs keep coming, wave after wave of them, day after day. They try to stagger the insemination for this reason, and some ewes can give birth in their field without difficulty – as long as the crows and foxes are kept off. Most, however, are safest in the barn.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  Peter is quietly frantic. A lamb has died inside its mother. Somehow, its legs must be unfolded, then pulled out while the ewe stands trembling, unable to push, with blood leaking out in thick, viscous drops.

  Slowly, carefully, he puts his hand up inside her and ties a piece of string around the dead lamb’s back leg, which is pointing out of the ewe’s cervix. It’s a finicky job, and at last the ewe moans, a deep, sorrowful sound that seems to come from the earth itself.

  ‘Easy does it,’ he murmurs.

  To their horror, the two back legs that emerge are detached from the rest of the body. The lamb is not only dead, but rotting away inside its mother. It takes the better part of half an hour to remove the pieces, and they’re all distressed by the end. Without a lamb to suckle the ewe’s uterus can’t retract, but the look of misery on the ewe’s face is entirely clear.