by Patrick Gale
He was tactful. He allowed people who did not know him well to assume he would be next in line in the tractor seat, but his mind was made up and he pursued his chosen course with the advantage of a boy whose mind was fixed on a goal years before his contemporaries had progressed beyond wanting to play rugger for the Pirates or be the first Cornish astronaut.
He met with no opposition from his father. Mild to a fault, Polglaze Senior had suffered too much at the bullying hands of duty and chapel ever to hold his own children back. He did not make an issue of it because he knew his wife would fret about how they would survive in old age, or some such. His way around the problem was to joke, say things like, ‘Oh well. When you’re qualified, we can get all these injections half-price, can’t we? And there’ll be no call-out fee!’
Undereducated themselves, both parents had bottomless faith in education and homework always had to be finished before either child might volunteer for chores. Whereas his father had thought nothing of hooking the boy out of school mid-term to help plant daffodils or harvest potatoes, Pearce’s father thought money well spent if hiring extra labour would help the children focus on exam revision.
So Pearce had stayed at school into the sixth form while friends of his dropped out to follow fathers into field or fishing boat. He showed willing and enjoyed helping on the farm when his studies allowed. But he also took on holiday jobs as a dogsbody in the Penzance vet’s where the farm held an account, clocking up as much valuable experience as they let him. And in due course, despite all the nay-sayers, he slogged his way onto the veterinary course at Bristol.
He loved it there, for all that he was bitterly homesick, and he worked harder and played harder than he would have thought possible. There were girls but nobody significant. There were new friends but no soulmates, no one outside the family to dissuade or encourage him.
During his second year of preclinical studies, his mother became seriously ill. She had developed angina then had a heart attack. It was agreed that no one was to tell Pearce because he was about to sit crucial second-year exams. Molly worried he ought to know and told him anyway. He respected his mother’s wish not to have a fuss made, so stayed on and sat the exams but he was worrying so much he failed them.
His tutors were understanding, suggested he take a term out to be with his mother then sit the exams again and, if he failed them a second time, repeat his second year with a fresh intake of students.
His mother might have been holding on for his return, or it might have been anger at realising Molly had told him, or dismay at his flunking the exams, but she had a second heart attack the night after he came home. She was dead a week later, at just fifty-six.
With both Pearce and Molly home for the holidays, the family could hole up together in a tight knot of grief. His mother had been a mainstay of the St Just Chapel and the congregation rallied round and were almost unbearably kind. There was no question of either Molly or Pearce taking a holiday job. There was more than enough to keep them busy at home. On farms, as in gardens, there was an implacability to the season’s demands and there could be little observed mourning. The tasks that would not wait were a welcome distraction.
But at the summer’s end Pearce had to admit that he could not leave again to return to Bristol. His widowed father was a lost soul and could not be abandoned. That he had never learnt to cook or run a household was a minor detail – it would have been easy enough to bring someone in to help him – but grief seemed to have sapped his ability to make decisions in his working life. Where once one of his more maddening habits was plunging on in some course without consultation, digging out a new ditch, demolishing a shed, building a hideous lean-to on the first spot to catch his eye, he now consulted Pearce about everything.
‘Should we bale the straw today or not?’
‘Is this barley dry enough to store, do you think?’
‘I can’t make head nor tail of this fungicide label. How much should I put in the sprayer, do you reckon?’
It was as though Pearce’s mother had secretly been advising him all these years, protecting his dignity with feminine discretion in public but privately proving an oracle of agricultural lore. Molly’s marrying Morris and moving away to his farm up by Nancledra was the deciding factor. His father looked so utterly wretched that Pearce concocted a merciful lie. He pretended to have received a letter from the university.
‘Turns out they haven’t room in this year’s intake on the course,’ he said. ‘So I’ll have to wait another year before starting again. Not to worry. We’ve stuff enough to sort out here, haven’t we?’
In fact he had written to the veterinary faculty explaining the situation and they had written back suggesting that he take a year out but warning him they could not hold a place for him indefinitely.
So he moved back into his boyhood room and, when Molly married and moved out, took over her room for a farm office. He broke his father’s lifetime practice of doing all farm business at the kitchen table and stuffing receipts and bills in its crumby drawer with the napkin rings and old birthday candles. He took on the farm’s financial work, bought them a computer for the accounts and the cropping, spray and animal treatment records, acquainted himself with the regulations about correct use of chemicals and fertiliser, even went on a locally-run course or two. Many of these things were now legal requirements his father had been blithely flaunting. Tired of them living off chops and sausages, he taught himself to cook.
At first his father paid lip service to the idea of Pearce still training as a vet but by tactful degrees the subject was dropped and instead, as months turned to years, he began instead to drop hints about children.
‘Something for your boys to be proud of one day,’ he said, when they had rebuilt a hedge the rabbits and cattle had brought down or laid new tin on an outhouse roof. ‘That should last till your lad takes it on.’
It was a harmless enough fantasy but a foolish one because it saddened them both. They rubbed along well enough in their strange, bachelor existence. They had Sunday lunch with Molly and Morris every other week, there was an occasional trip to the cattle market or into Truro. Otherwise labour saw to it that their mornings were too early for conversation and the sociable part of their evenings shortened by the need to sleep.
At the end of an especially grim February day of harvesting broccoli in the driving rain and wind from eight until it was nearly dark, his father made one remark too many about sons. He said something like, ‘’Spect it’ll all be done by machines when your boy’s turn comes.’
‘Dad, I don’t have a boy. I don’t have a wife. How the hell am I going to meet one? Where? I never go anywhere and if I do it’s with people I know, women I’ve known since they were girls, women like sisters. Big-hipped, apple-cheeked sisters. I’m only doing this for you. I never wanted to do this. You know that. And I don’t mind because it’s for you and it’s a beautiful place but no kid of mine will grow up here, even if I have any. I wouldn’t wish that on them.’
‘You’d sell if I died?’ His father looked stricken.
‘No. Probably not. But I’d let it and move away somewhere, or give it to Molly and Morris. They’ll have others besides Lucy. They’ll have a boy soon enough.’
‘But…I thought you liked it here now.’
‘I do, Dad. But…it’s not what I want. It was never what I wanted. You always knew that.’
‘I thought…I thought you’d changed.’
‘No,’ Pearce sighed. ‘I just took a leaf out of Mum’s book and never complained. Sorry. I’m sorry, Dad, that was…sorry. Forget I said anything. I’m tired. We’re both tired. I’m turning in, okay?’
The next day was Saturday, traditionally his father’s day for tinkering about the place, not working precisely but doing the small, niggling tasks it was easy to put off, like oiling padlocks or fixing dripping taps.
It was sunny, windless, a day full of false spring before the March storms arrived and Pearce took the Land Rover into
Penzance to buy food, a weekend paper, a few essentials at Cornwall Farmers. He liked his Saturday mornings in town, liked the holiday atmosphere, the rampaging schoolgirls in inexpert make-up, the optimistic Jelbert’s ice cream trolley by the bank, the mad preacher on the corner of Causewayhead, the olive stall with its Provençal soap, thumb-stuck focaccia – the nearest he would come to the Mediterranean. He took his time as he always did.
When he drove home the first thing he saw was the ladder, because it was blocking his route across the yard. He assumed his father had dropped it there while he ran in to answer the telephone. But the back door was shut and his father always answered the phone leaning in from outside, rain or shine, because he had been trained not to walk mud into the kitchen on his boots.
With the winter rains, springs began to flow all over the farm. One of the more useful sprang up in a bank in the field immediately above the yard then ran across it, past the Dutch barn and into a concrete-lined ditch near the house. When sweeping or scraping needed to be done, this stream could be relied on to carry much of the fertile muck away into the seaward fields. Crossing back to the Land Rover to fetch a second box of food after finding the back door shut and no sign of life inside, Pearce saw blood streaking the flow of water where it entered the ditch.
In seconds he had traced it to where his father lay crumpled over in the mud. He was dead and already turning cold, the front of his head staved in on the concrete. Pearce was always on at him about positioning the big, two-part ladder properly so that the grooved side of the rungs was uppermost and the rubber grips on the ends were firmly hugging the ground. Yet again his father must have set it up the wrong way round, only this time losing his step when too high to jump safely clear. There was a hammer stuck in his loose leather belt, a bag of roofing tacks in his jacket pocket. He was wearing his weekend tie.
Pearce rang Molly first, then the ambulance. He knew the ambulance crew could do nothing and that it was irresponsible to summon them but it was an automatic response, boyhood-bred. It was Molly, trained in womanly practicality, who knew to call the GP to register the death and the village joiner, who was also the undertaker, to take away the body.
Pearce assumed it was an accident, a stupid, avoidable one. Year after year farmers were sent Government or union warnings about the dangers of farm life. The commonest cause of death on farms, discounting suicides by gun or weedkiller, and accidents to children, was falling. Many farmers apparently died in a farcically short but deadly tumble when they stepped, exhausted, out of their tractor cabs, slipped and fell headfirst onto concrete. Many others fell when making cheap, inexpert repairs to gutters or roofing.
The life assurance assessor visited a decorous fortnight after the funeral. He had been at school with Pearce’s father. His brother was the area’s main grain merchant. He had sung in the choir at the funeral. He hated having to look into the death of a man he respected, he said, but needs must. Pearce had no idea there had even been a policy. It was all he could do to persuade his father to shift idling capital from his current account into a building society.
He showed the assessor where he found the body, where the ladder was, described the task he assumed his father was on his way to do. It was dry that day and windless, he said, a safe day for the job, a perfect day, only his father had a tendency to misplace the big ladder and, because it was heavy, could rarely be bothered to take it down and reposition it even if he noticed his mistake.
‘My guess is he had reached the top when he slipped,’ he told the assessor. ‘And he grabbed hold of the edge of the roof to steady himself a second, which was how he came to kick the ladder away.’
‘And if you don’t mind my asking, where were his hands when you found him?’ The assessor was pained, taking notes, but now he looked up and Pearce could tell he needed to read his expression as he answered.
‘Out,’ he said.
‘Spread out?’
‘Not exactly. Er. Out but underneath him.’
This was a lie. The assessor accepted it almost gratefully however and made one last note.
As they walked back to his car, he said, ‘Your solicitor knew of no major debts or money worries.’
‘No. We’re pretty lucky,’ Pearce explained. ‘No rent. Means we can keep the overheads down and pull our horns in when we need to.’
‘I can’t see any problem, Pearce. Even if I could, I wouldn’t, if you see what I mean.’
‘That’s very kind.’
‘You should receive a cheque from us in the next few weeks.’ He paused. ‘I thought you were going to be a vet, young man.’
‘I was. I still might.’ Pearce was touched this near stranger should have remembered such a detail.
The cheque was not life-changing but it was made out to Pearce and it would be enough to pay tuition fees and living expenses for his remaining years at Bristol. Only he never went. Shocked at his duplicity, he sought to cleanse the money of bad associations by sinking it in a very long-term savings bond for Lucy.
For, in turning his father’s body over and then in feeling for a pulse, he had disturbed hands thrust, with unthinkable bravery, deep in trouser pockets. Time and again he replayed in his mind what must have happened minutes after he drove into town. His father kitted himself out for a task he never intended to do, set the ladder up the wrong way, climbed onto the roof, kicked the ladder away, then, hands deep in pockets to ensure nothing broke his fall or delayed his end, dived headfirst off the roof.
He had learnt to dive as a boy, taught how to plunge neatly off a rock in the cove below the seaward fields by an American airman billeted with the family. He had taught both Molly and Pearce in his turn. He would have fallen as straight as an arrow.
The actions intended to set him free to pursue his lifetime’s ambition had prevented Pearce ever doing so. He could not touch the money and had to stay and continue his father’s work. How could he not? He never told Molly what he knew. She took the death very badly, worse than she had their mother’s, and he suspected it was as much to blame as Morris’ hopelessness with money for the eventual breakdown of her marriage. A hefty dose of suicide guilt on top was the last thing she needed as she tried to straighten out her life.
He remembered his father’s secret whenever circumstances forced him to use a ladder. He did not clean the gutters nearly as often as he should.
13
Post clattered through the door, reminding Eliza that she ought to get up, get dressed, get out, buy food and pay for the telephone to be reconnected. The sound of the flimsy metal flap bouncing against cheap woodwork was one she associated only with bills and demands, with the oughts of life. She received few letters – those that came stuck in her mind and were apt to seem as threatening as the reminders to test Dido’s eyes or revisit her dentist.
This was a proper letter, however, with a stamp instead of a franking mark, its address waveringly written by hand in a turquoise shade that spoke to Eliza of schooldays, thank you letters and tentative experimentation.
She left the letter on the edge of the table, showered, dressed and came back to it feeling a little stronger.
It had a Cornwall postmark.
Dear Eliza, she read. I tried ringing you a few times, but there was an unavailable tone and when I checked the lady said you’d been disconnected. Oh dear. I hope this has found you. There were so many addresses for you in your mother’s book, I wasn’t sure which to write to and seriously thought about writing to them all. But then I thought that might cause trouble so plumped for this one.
I won’t beat about the bush. She’s not well, Eliza. Not well at all. She had a nasty fall in Wesley Street. Didn’t break her hip, thank God, but Dr Pengelly suspects a stroke so they’re keeping her in for observation. Treliske Hospital. Trevithick Ward.
Don’t worry about her house and things. I’m near enough, as you know, to keep an eye. But frankly I think you and little Dodie should come back for a bit.
Do come soon, Eliza. She mis
ses you both, I know, and it would go hard on you if she went suddenly.
I don’t know if there’s anyone else I should write to?
If money’s short, let me know. Silly to let a thing like that stop you coming at such a time. If not for your sake then for Dodie’s.
Perhaps you’d better ring me when (if!!) you get this so I can know and stop worrying!
All good wishes,
Auntie Kitty (Mrs Barnicoat)
These two names, the one all playful, bun-baking sweetness, the other as severe as judgement itself, threw Eliza into a panic. There was a cruel sense that one was the woman she had known in childhood, the other the woman she had become, disappointed and dauntless. Eliza hurried from the flat as though Mrs Barnicoat might appear in person at any moment. She pushed the letter back in its envelope, tore it into several pieces and let them fly from her grasp in the dusty wind which always whipped around the skirts of the tower.
She cashed a benefit cheque, paid the phone bill then rang from a call box to have her number reconnected. She made herself buy a bag of fruit instead of cake, and potatoes to bake for supper. Then she hid in the reference library, reading scholarly reviews of books she couldn’t afford and which the library would never stock. Slowly she was soothed by the presence of other lost souls, the slow turning of pages and the sour odour of disappointment which hung about the periodicals section.
She lost track of time and was late home, which meant she was late putting the potatoes in the oven. Patient, Dido volunteered to bathe before supper instead of after. This meant that she did not hear the telephone ring or, if she did, almost certainly could not have made out Eliza’s hastily murmured,
‘I’m sorry. I think you must have the wrong number.’
