The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  ‘I hope you will not hate me for keeping this under my head.’

  ‘No, Oma, I could never hate you. You didn’t know how much it’s been eating me up, wanting to know. I think it might help Lottie, too.’

  ‘In that case, I have made an error of judgement. I apologise, most sincerely.’

  Marta bows her head, and he kisses her, lightly.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. Maybe he’s a total tool, and not meeting him before now will turn out to be a good idea.’

  He stretches. Now that the wheezing has passed, his body seethes with the need for movement.

  ‘Would you like some tea, Oma?’

  ‘Go out, my darling. You have better things to do in the evening than stay in with an old woman.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing a couple of friends,’ Xan admits, though really it’s Bron he wants to see. They’d met up soon after Xan had been to see his grandmother, and he gave him the tissue with the blood on it. Will he have found anything in Dawn’s blood, or will he have forgotten in the end-of-year exams? When Xan calls, however, it’s a good time.

  ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’

  Bron sounds exactly as he always does. He hasn’t bothered to call or email during all the months of Xan’s exile, that’s the way he is. They could probably not have any contact for years, yet pick up where they left off. It’s very reassuring, although recently, Xan has begun to wonder why he hasn’t heard from Katya, either, which kind of bugs him. Aren’t they supposed to be in a relationship? Is she waiting for him to call or message her? He hadn’t liked to bother her when she went away to Poland over Christmas, but they’d exchanged a few texts at least. This time, nothing.

  He catches the 24 bus into Camden, then the 29. It’s strange to think that in just a few months he himself may be living here again. He suddenly feels enormously excited. The centre is still strange to him: all he really knows of it is North London, where he’s lived and gone to school. The UCL campus lies over the centre in an invisible web which he can see, like the wizarding world of Harry Potter, but others can’t. There’s the British Library, and the British Museum, and in fact you could live your entire life in this city and never know more than a fraction of it.

  ‘Did you get a chance to look at the blood sample I gave you?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Bron sees the expression on Xan’s face and adds, ‘It would help if it were a proper sample in a tube, you know. It’s probably bacterially contaminated.’

  ‘It was all I could have.’

  ‘The thing is, it’s not easy to get anything tested in a lab. I can’t do that as a medical student in my first year. Blood tests are strictly regulated, and besides, you need to know what you’re looking for.’

  Xan swallows his disappointment.

  ‘I don’t know what it is, but something isn’t right. This girl, Dawn, apparently she used to be really bright, and now she’s dropped out of school and is a sort of blob.’

  ‘You know what it sounds like to me? Weed.’

  Xan shakes his head. ‘No. It’s more like somebody isn’t there. I know what people are like when they’re high, and she’s not. What could make someone change very drastically in one year?’

  He can see Bron thinking.

  ‘It could be anaemia, or the beginnings of MS, or hepatitis, or Vitamin B deficiency or hypothyroidism or cancer. Any other symptoms? What colour is her skin?’

  Xan thinks. ‘Yellowish.’

  ‘So, probably not anaemia then. How does she move?’

  ‘Like an old woman. She’s hardly able to walk at times.’

  ‘It definitely sounds as if she should see a doctor. Are you sure she isn’t?’

  ‘She’s totally under her mother’s thumb, and … I don’t think she can get anywhere if Janet doesn’t drive her there. She lives out in the countryside, like us. I’ve never seen her use a mobile. I think she’s completely cut off, apart from when she’s at the factory, where nobody ever talks to her.’

  Xan has not even known he has thought all this, but now that he has, his disquiet rises. He adds, ‘And she asked me to help her.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe she fancies you.’

  Xan feels himself flush.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think she’s afraid of something, or someone. But I do think that if it’s possible to test her blood, you should.’

  ‘You’re asking someone to risk quite a lot. She’s how old?’

  ‘My age, I think. No, a bit younger. I think she’s seventeen.’

  ‘So too old to contact the Child Protection Agency,’ Bron says.

  ‘You think it’s serious, then?’

  ‘It could be. You can contact the police anonymously, if you are really worried.’

  ‘But what could I say? I’ve never seen any bruises or anything. Although—’ Xan hesitates a moment. ‘I saw a lot of thin white lines, scars, up her arms—’

  ‘Lots of teenagers self-harm. Still, not a good sign I agree.’

  ‘I know you can’t make a diagnosis without seeing someone, even if you were qualified.’

  Bron says, ‘Is she hot, this girl?’

  ‘Not at all. The opposite. She looks awful, to be honest, no eyebrows. All blotchy, and puffy, and her voice is hoarse.’

  He can see that Bron has an idea, but won’t say. He has become very serious about being a medic in a way which perhaps is a surprise even to himself.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Bron says. ‘I’ll find a way to get that sample tested. But I also think you could just try asking her mother if something is wrong. She may think you’re being nosy, which you are, but it’s always possible she hasn’t realised her daughter might be ill.’

  Maybe the simplest thing is to do that. Even if Xan instinctively dislikes Janet, she is Dawn’s mother and might take her to a doctor herself. Then he can stop worrying.

  Unless Janet herself is what her daughter is afraid of.

  27

  The Business of Being a Woman

  Sally is inspecting a sheep’s arse, a broad, lumpy clump of brown wool heavily hung with dark pellets of dung. The pungent smell makes her stomach turn; but it’s got to be clipped, alongside hundreds of others, now the warm weather is here.

  ‘Sometimes I think the whole animal kingdom should go around in nappies,’ she says to Peter. He snorts, obligingly.

  But this is the thing about a marriage: you make the same jokes over and over, and they are the regular beat to which you step. Even if she’s heard Pete’s stories about the goose which fell in love with a bucket or the woman who followed her satnav down their narrow lane thinking she was in Hampshire a dozen times, she still laughs. Her own mother used to say, A marriage isn’t about being happy ever after, it’s about kindness and forgiving. The trouble is that you only realise this after the event, when love becomes a glow not a blaze. She and Pete had thought themselves very wise and mature, and it’s true that compared with some of the other twenty-two-year-olds they knew, they were; you can’t experience death or see birth without some understanding of how mysterious every single human being is to every other.

  Had it been that which had made her so keen, or was it because Pete had just inherited his father’s farm, and to be mistress of her own home was what she wanted above all? He was a catch, Peter Verity, and she had caught him without even trying, at just the point when, having moved back to her parents’, she thought she’d go mad if she stayed a minute longer. All of that must have come into it, but the real reason was that during her absence he’d changed from a scowling, round-faced boy into a big, tall, well-knit man. She’d seen him walking through a field one day, graceful and self-contained as an animal; and that was it.

  Unlike herself, Pete had been a virgin. They’ve never discussed it but she’s not heard of him ever having a girlfriend before she returned from her training in London. There had been a succession of boyfriends for her, one of them an anaesthetist
at the same hospital she worked at. That’s how her sister Anne had met Josh, his younger brother. Tom Viner is married now himself, with a wife and three children … She looks at the sheep and thinks, would I have been happier with that life, or this?

  Recently, she’s felt more and more restive as well as depressed. Partly it’s getting to know Lottie Bredin, and being able to talk to another woman who is bright and switched on. Sally is used, for instance, to reading the national newspapers. She doesn’t think it makes her better or cleverer than anyone else, but the news and ideas and opinions in there are just different. Pete can’t understand it.

  ‘Why do you bother with that stuff? You aren’t going to run off to Totnes are you?’

  It’s always been a joke between them, that town. Most Devonians who do real jobs find Totnes hilarious. Yet recently she’d had a dream in which she was drifting down a long, steep street going down to a river, crammed with little shops all painted different colours, with wind chimes and rainbow flags fluttering, and she suddenly felt happy. Really happy. And it was Totnes.

  ‘I was thinking it might be interesting to go there one day. You know, just to see what it’s like.’

  He was quite upset at the idea. As long as her interests keep her at home it’s fine; but if she does anything outside it, he gets grumpy. She had loved singing in the choir, for instance, and had spent six of the happiest months of her life learning the alto part of many hymns. Pete never said anything to forbid her, just got silent and sullen until she worked out what the matter was, and dropped it.

  ‘I don’t like you being away from home,’ he said.

  ‘It’s only for a couple of hours a week.’

  ‘I keep worrying something bad has happened to you.’

  He wants them to be like Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba in the film, looking up and there she’d be, which is all very nice except that you need to look up and see other people too, sometimes. Of course, he’s the person she most wants to see, but when Pete gets out of bed before her every morning what she feels most is an intense feeling of relief. At last, she has some space to herself, mental and physical. Yet she knows how lucky she is to be married to such a good kind man.

  She thinks again of that story her mother told her, about the doctor’s daughter who’d hanged herself because Tore wasn’t in love with her. If only she’d loved her child instead of its father! More and more women are single mums these days, because they don’t want a husband, or at least not the kind they might plausibly get.

  Men fail us, Sally thinks, because they mostly won’t or can’t communicate. It’s their greatest failing as a sex. Of course, Pete would help anyone who asked, but taking an interest in people’s lives, being sympathetic to their problems, talking things over, putting people in touch or doing a good turn, and above all really saying what they feel – this is what she craves. Pete won’t talk to anyone he doesn’t already know, and on the rare occasions when he does have a chat, he will come away without having discovered a single interesting thing about them, such as the state of their health, the number and ages of their children, whether their business is going well or badly this year and what they think about Strictly and, basically, how they are feeling about life in general. Sally is forever astonished and exasperated by this.

  ‘But I couldn’t ask about that kind of thing!’ he exclaims when she tells him off for his lack of information. ‘It wouldn’t be polite.’

  ‘No, it’s not polite not to be interested,’ Sally says. ‘What is everybody’s favourite subject? Themselves. Not the weather. Not the football. Not cars. You don’t have to talk about yourself, but you have to be interested in them.’

  ‘But why should I pretend to be when I’m not?’

  Of course, she asks questions as part of her job, and often they are intimate ones. Most people never ask each other if their bowels are functioning, or whether they have resumed intercourse and whether it was painful, but Sally does, in order to fill in her forms and make sure all is as it should be. That’s her job. However, among men it’s as if incuriosity is a badge of honour, with the result that they all go stumbling blindly around in a fog of unknowing, and proud of it too. How did men discover anything, ever, when they won’t ask? If all the detectives in the Devon and Cornwall constabulary were women, Sally thinks, I bet we’d have an answer to why Oliver Randall was murdered.

  ‘Now where did I put my glasses?’ Pete mutters, as if echoing her thoughts.

  ‘Breast pocket,’ she says without looking up, and he sighs with relief. His eyesight is going, whereas hers is still the same as it ever was. She doesn’t feel old. But that’s the thing, you grow old without noticing. Inside, she’s still the young woman she was when she came back to Trelorn to work as a community midwife; shiny with the stuff she’d bought in places like Top Shop which in those days even Plymouth didn’t have. Pete had asked her out to the cinema. They’d seen The Shawshank Redemption, and afterwards they’d spent the rest of the evening kissing under the willows, beside his battered Land Rover in the car park, with the river carrying the night along on its dark waters. She’d wanted him so badly that when he pushed against her she gasped and shuddered like a fish out of water, and he’d thought she was sneezing, bless him. She’s never forgotten it, that moment when everything seemed to rush together and resolve itself. That’s what matters, though he would even have forgotten her birthday if she hadn’t marked it in capital letters on the Devon Life calendar for him.

  ‘That’s just like my husband,’ her girlfriends would exclaim, when they saw it.

  Forgetful or not, she’s glad of his presence at night. Sally has been feeling uneasy ever since she’d seen her neighbours’ mare with wounds on its legs. The police, when they eventually turned up, took photographs but could find no clue. It’s not the first time horses have been attacked; some people blame paganists, though this is rubbish – pagans being keen to worship nature rather than harm it. Others say it’s Satanists. She puts it down to sheer nastiness but can’t but wonder whether there is more than one lunatic wandering about. Normally, the only things you have to worry about in the countryside are weather or wind farms, not people, not unless they were incomers.

  Lottie is now officially that. News has gone round that she’s sold her house in London and is buying Home Farm from the Tores.

  ‘So, you’re not worried by its past?’ Sally asks her.

  Lottie pauses, and Sally wonders whether she’s been too inquisitive.

  ‘Not really, no. I expect most old houses have had something bad happen in them at some point. It just seems like a good time to move. Loads of families with young children are leaving London; it’s too expensive for ordinary people to stay. Besides, the Trelorn project is the most wonderful opportunity. I never thought I’d switch to domestic architecture, but it feels like being given a second life.’

  Lottie’s face is animated, though when Sally catches a glimpse of Quentin in Trelorn, he looks drawn and miserable. Her sister says it won’t be long for Hugh Bredin.

  ‘Poor Naomi has battled so hard to keep him out of hospital, and now she needs a knee replacement because of lifting him,’ Anne remarked. ‘Never a word of thanks for it, neither. The way he talks to her, sometimes, it fair makes my blood boil.’

  Of course, Anne wouldn’t dream of discussing a patient like this with anyone else, any more than Tess would discuss a pupil or a parent, but it’s different with sisters. They have no secrets. If I were to die first, she thinks, Pete would go back to being all alone, for ever. He may not talk much, but he still does talk, even if it’s only to her.

  ‘One day, maybe, they’ll be able to grow meat in laboratories,’ Pete says. They are out in the field together, the day’s work done. ‘No more cruelty then; but I don’t think it’d be a better world.’

  ‘Why not, Pete?’ she asks. ‘If you could grow meat in laboratories, wouldn’t that be better than sending lambs to be slaughtered?’

  ‘Just think about it. The land that�
�s pasture now would all get ploughed up for crops, or built on for housing and factories. No, the truth is that our world lives because of death.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, if there could just be less flies.’

  Every year, flies lay their eggs in the sheep’s flesh, the maggots chew their way out, and the whole rump becomes a seething mass of agony unless protected by insecticide at just the right moment. The flies will crawl everywhere, and the first you know about it is when the ewe tries to bite its arse off because the pain is so awful it is driven to eat itself alive. Sheep suffer endlessly: lice, flies and ticks will not quite kill them, but leave the animal looking like a moth-eaten hank of wool on twigs. Those like the hippies along the road fill the Veritys with fury because they think pesticides are evil, and so, inevitably, their herd gets infected. It’s almost as bad as not looking after your children. Pete’s dad had never taken him to a doctor or dentist as a child; he’d had nothing, not even polio drops, until Sally had marched him into Dr Drew’s surgery. Dear old Doc Drew had spent almost an hour with him, going over his medical history, and given him all the jabs he’d missed pretty much on the spot.

  ‘No flies, no swallows, my dear.’

  The return of one particular family which always nests in the corner under the eaves is an annual delight. The thought of the swallows making that tremendous journey to and from North Africa twice a year, just to end up in their particular patch, makes them feel honoured, and even more so once each new family is hatched. Sally can hear their high, excited shrieks as they shoot, like bow and arrow in one body, chasing each other across the sky.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Pete says. ‘Done.’

  Released, the sheep gleam on the green slopes like pearls on velvet. Behind them, the scraggy, twisted oak, hawthorn and ash are billowing with fresh leaf. Dartmoor is a vast tapestry of hills and rock, wood and water, the velvety cropped turf pricked with the yellow flowers of gorse and threaded with silvery trickles of tiny streams glinting in the evening sun. There’s a cuckoo calling in a valley down below.