by Russell Hill
Robbie was in the kitchen when I came down in dry clothes and he watched me as I ate the hot scones that Maggie set on the table. Finally, he said, “Well, Jack, are you staying on another night? Or have you had enough of Dorset farm life?”
“I don’t want to get in the way of things,” I said. I looked at Robbie. “Do you want me to settle up now?”
“No, that can wait until tea time. I’m off to Southampton to flog off some wool.”
He went to the hallway and took down a jacket. “I’ll be back by tea time, love.”
My wet pants and shirt and socks were, I could see, arranged on a drying rack next to the Rayburn. There was no school, Maggie explained, because of the troubles with the farms. Terry stayed at the table, drawing pictures of army lorries and sheep lying on their backs with X’s for eyes and I went upstairs to my script. I worked for a while, and the words didn’t come as easily as they had in the early hours, but I was satisfied with what I was doing and could hear Richard’s voice saying, “Now this is more like it, Jack.” It was the first time I had thought of Richard and my Los Angeles writing life since I had come to Sheepheaven Farm.
I stared at the laptop and then it went blank as the screen automatically went to sleep. I realized that I had been staring at it for several minutes. I was thinking of Maggie downstairs someplace, and I closed the laptop, went out into the hall and down the stairs. She was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, peeling potatoes. She turned her head as I came into the kitchen.
“What are you up to, Jack Stone? Off for a walk? The great screenplay all finished?”
“No and no.” I put my hands on her shoulders and began to knead the base of her neck.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Right there. I’m full of knots.” She stopped peeling potatoes, put her hands on the edge of the sink. I kept massaging her shoulders, feeling the little ridges of muscle with my thumbs.
“You’ve got strong hands,” she said. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“In another life,” I said. “I was Cleopatra’s masseuse.”
“No adders here,” she said. Then she bent her head forward and said, “Yes, right there. That’s it,” and let out a little yelp. “It’s all right, it’s good pain,” she said. “Keep at it, Jack Stone.”
I worked on her shoulders for a bit, then reached around and unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse so that I could pull it over her shoulders and her bare skin felt good under my hands and I felt myself hardening, and I wanted her more than ever. She didn’t move, stayed bent over the sink and I moved my body closer to hers until I was pressing against her and she said, “No, Jack Stone, not now,” but she was pressing back against me, moving her body, and I slid my hands down over her shoulders until I was cupping her breasts and she said, again, softly, “No, Jack Stone,” but she reached up and brought one of my hands down to her crotch and I pressed against her, pulling her body back against me and her head came back against me, her hair in my face and I kissed the top of her head and slipped my hand down inside her skirt, pressing my finger into her and she said, “You’ll make me come,” and I said, “Yes, come. Now,” and I pressed my finger harder, sliding it in her smooth wetness, pulling her against me while she bent forward over the sink, grabbing the edge with both hands and as I moved my hand faster I could hear her voice, quick sobs and unintelligible words and her body tightening, her fingers clenching the edge of the sink.
It’s hard for me to remember what else happened. I know we sat opposite in the kitchen talking, and she said she didn’t want anybody to get hurt, not Terry or Robbie, and I should go away but when I said, “Do you mean go off for a walk or pack my bag and leave the farm?” she said, “You should probably go away from here. I don’t know what to do about you.”
“When? Do you want me to go now? Tomorrow?”
“Soon.” That was all she said. I remember stroking her face, tracing her cheekbones with my fingers and her eyes were closed, as if she were a half-asleep cat and then she opened her eyes and said, “Out, Jack Stone. Out of my kitchen. Go for a walk until you walk into the sea and bring me back a lobster or a piece of jade as big as your fist. Go!” She rose and pulled her hair back, knotting it, and went to the sink where the potatoes lay, half-peeled, turning brown.
I put on a mac and went out into the gray light of mid-morning and I walked across the field in the direction that Terry had run. But I thought only about Maggie standing at the sink in the kitchen and Maggie bent over the edge of the sink and her quick sobs and I thought, go away from here, Jack Stone, leave her alone, you’ll only do great harm if you stay, but I knew that I would go back to the farmhouse and I would tell Robbie that I wanted to stay on, and I would stay until something happened that forced me to go.
24.
All went well in Southampton, Robbie said. “The bugger knows what I’m up to and he’s right with it, said if I wanted to knacker some of the lambs on the sly he’d take care of it, but I told him no, I drew the line at that.”
It was mid-afternoon, and a weak sun was trying to shine. “I’ll stay on another night or two, Robbie,” I said.
“You’re all right, Jack,” he said. “A bottomless pit of pound notes. Nat West Bank, you are, Los Angeles branch.”
“No, I don’t have all that much. And when I run out, I’ll turn tail and run.”
He laughed. “Stay on here, Jack-o, on the dole with us when the army knackers our sheep.”
He was nervous about Terry being off with Jack, and asked if I knew which direction they had gone. I pointed up toward the rise in the field and he said, shit, I told him not to, and set off determinedly in that direction. I watched him grow smaller as he climbed the field and then was conscious of Maggie at my elbow.
“He’s off to find Terry, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He worries too much. He forgets that he wandered off in these fields at that age. Terry’s a lot like Robbie, but Robbie can’t recognize that.”
She hugged her arms around her chest and said, “Come back inside. Have a cup of tea with me.”
The kitchen was warm, heat radiating from the Rayburn, and Maggie filled the kettle.
“Did you know Robbie when he was a boy here?” I asked.
“No, I met Robbie at Cambridge. He was a medievalist. I came there with a touring company of the Ballet Rambert. I trained at the Royal Ballet School and then got picked by the Rambert and I danced in one of the companies that went out into the counties. We did Ondine in Cambridge. The stage was canted and the curtain opened on the deck of a ship at sea, the backdrop rising and falling, and all of us moving as if the ship were rising and falling and suddenly this handsome man bolted from his seat for the door. Afterwards, in the dressing room, we all laughed about it, but then he showed up. Turned out he was there to see one of the other dancers, and he’d had too much to drink before the performance and when the curtain went up and the backdrop rose and fell and the ship moved and we rose and fell as well, he suddenly felt sick, and he went outside the hall and lost it all in the shrubs.”
She was intent on her story, as if she were back in Cambridge and we weren’t standing in her kitchen anymore.
“It was Robbie, and he came to apologize but she thought he was an idiot for getting drunk before seeing her on stage. She was a principal. I was just a slip of a girl in a crowd of dancers. But I liked the looks of him. I told him if he wouldn’t get sick all over me, I’d go out for a drink with him. He said not to worry, he was pretty much emptied out.”
“You were a bit forward then, too, weren’t you?”
“Not really. I just fancied him and there were all those girls and he was being dumped so he was fair game. If you didn’t strike while the iron was hot, you were out of luck.”
“And you married him?”
“Not that night. He came down to London to see me. I came up to his digs in Cambridge. One thing led to another.”
“And you stopped dancing?”
“Not right away. I stayed w
ith the Rambert and Robbie was at Cambridge but I came up to see him as often as I could. Oh, Jack Stone, we did it in doorways and in his car in car parks and under the stairwell in a lecture hall while some bloke was nattering on about Francis Bacon. We were like rabbits.”
“And then you got married?”
“After a year. I danced for a while longer but I couldn’t keep up the passion for it. Not and be Robbie’s wife.”
She was fingering her hair again, pulling it back so that I could see her cheekbones in sharp relief and I wondered what it would have been like to see her dance. “Do you miss the dance?” I asked.
“At first. You see me in the kitchen peeling potatoes or making tea or mucking out the fridge but you have no idea what I was like when I danced. It was hard work, Jack Stone. Bloody hard work. Tie on those toe shoes and you were in for agony, feet actually bloody at times, but you danced right through the pain, stretched your body until you thought it would break, felt the music in your bones, oh it was, as Robbie would say, fucking brilliant.”
“I wish I had seen you.”
“You might not have liked me, Jack Stone. I didn’t have room for anything else.”
“But you made room for Robbie?”
“He was an alchemist. He could turn lead into silver.”
“Was he teaching at Cambridge?”
“No, he was a student. There I was, shopkeeper’s daughter with the Rambert, and he was a sheep farmer’s son wearing a shiny black gown, but he never got the Oxbridge accent right. And he swore he’d never touch another sheep. I swore I’d never end up like my mum in the kitchen. And here we are.”
“What happened?”
“His Dad had a stroke, we came down to help his mum tend to him and Robbie took over the farm. It was supposed to be temporary, but it didn’t turn out that way. Robbie learned it all over again, the things he saw as a boy, we got Jack and he doubled the flock and his mum was after me to get pregnant. She wanted a grandchild but I was afraid that if I had a baby I would be fixed in stone in her kitchen. His father hung on for another year and then he went and it was as if he pulled her after him. The life went out of her, Jack Stone, and I was terrified.”
“Terrified of what?”
“Of becoming like her. Of having my life defined by my husband.”
“And you had Terry?”
“I didn’t plan on it, but he’s here and I love him dearly. He doesn’t ask me for anything. But maybe that’s part of being ten years old. You haven’t learned yet to make demands. I was thirty when I had him. And this year I turn forty, Jack Stone. I’ll be an old lady.”
“Nonsense.”
“She never saw him.” She began, unconsciously, to braid her hair. “Robbie’s mum. She never saw Terry. She died and we put her in the village cemetery by the church, next to Robbie’s father. There’s a grand view of Eggerton from there. Robbie says it’s as good a spot as any to end up in. And we stayed on. But enough about me. What about you, Jack Stone? Were you always a writer?”
“I think so. When I was a child I made up stories. My father said I was a consummate liar, but I always thought of them as stories about somebody else. I went off to university and ended up teaching for a while, but I grew tired of the pretension, and I wrote a novel that got good reviews and I lived in Los Angeles where it’s all about the movies and somehow I drifted into it.”
“And are you famous in America?”
“No.”
“That’s it? Just, no?”
“That’s it. I made a living and I wrote some things that were, I thought, really good, most of which never saw the light of day, and then everything slowed down. It was as if I were in a movie where the director thought slow motion was a good idea and it suited me, walking slowly, barely conscious of the world around me. Have you ever been to America?”
“No.”
“It’s a strange place, especially where I lived. The sea isn’t anything like it is here. I went down to Chesil Beach the first week I was here. The wind was so strong I could stand on that pile of stones and lean into the wind, spread my arms, almost as if I were flying. It’s much more gentle in California, and the sun shines too much.”
“Oh, god, Jack Stone, if only the sun would shine more here! I would lie naked in the sun until I turned to a crisp!”
She reached across the table, put her hand on my arm, stroking it. Her eyes seemed to look right past me, as if she were talking to someone just beyond my shoulder.
“And you don’t like the sun, do you, Jack Stone?”
“No, I like the sun. But I want it to be an old sun, the kind that fills a sea like the one Odysseus sailed. I spent a week once on the edge of Italy, facing Corsica, and I wrote part of a story on the little terrace that looked out over the Mediterranean that was really good. Nobody took it, but it was good. You would have liked that place, Maggie.”
“You think so, do you? And what do you know about me, Jack Stone?” She looked directly at me.
“Last Spring I went to London,” she said. “One afternoon I put on my coat and took a hundred quid and got on the coach and went to Gillingham and took the train to London. I didn’t leave a note for Robbie or tell anyone, I just left.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. I suddenly felt the kitchen closing in on me and I went outside and the sky was falling and I left. Went away. I went to London and I took a room and I went to the Royal Ballet that night. I wanted to see them dance.”
She stood, rose on her toes as if she were about to dance, then leaned forward to grip the edge of the table. She looked down, talking to the scarred wooden surface.
“They were doing something new, something I didn’t know, and when the lights went down and the dancers came onto the stage I suddenly felt sick. I wanted to throw up. They floated across the stage and I thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to throw up and I tried to rise but my legs wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t fucking work, Jack Stone. I couldn’t stand and I sat there and choked back my vomit and closed my eyes and waited until the end and then, when everyone was gone, an usher helped me to a cab and I got back to the room and the clerk helped me up to the bed and I lay there, my legs numb, and I wanted to die. But I didn’t.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“You don’t know me, Jack Stone!” Her voice was hard and she looked up from the table and she said, “You want to wake up with me at your side in the morning? Is that what you’d like? Well, you’d find another side to me, one you might not like so much!”
She looked back down at the table.
“And then I slept and when I woke my legs worked and I went back to Waterloo and caught a train and came back with my tail between my legs.”
“And Robbie was waiting for you?”
“Robbie never said a word. It was as if I had been here all the time. I came back into this farmhouse and it was as if I had never been gone. Not a word, Jack Stone.”
“Did you tell him where you had gone?”
“He didn’t care where I had gone.”
“Perhaps he knew.”
“No. What he knew was that I would come back. He was sure of that. I could see it in him.”
“You never told him about your legs?”
“I never gave him the satisfaction.”
“So it was the dance that you missed?”
“Do you ever play ‘what if’?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“What if. What if Robbie had shown up sober that night in Cambridge. Would that other girl be living at Sheepheaven Farm and I’d be someone else? Do you ever play that game?”
“Not for a long time.”
“What if the Land Rover turned over and some Dorset copper came to the house and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Barlow, there’s been an accident.’”
“You don’t mean that.”
She stood erect, ran her hands through her hair, stretching it back so that her cheekbones lifted and she turned to me and said, “You’d like to wak
e in the morning with me at your side, wouldn’t you? Turn over and find your arm across me and hear me breathing and feel the warmth from my body?”
“Is this part of your ‘what if’ game?”
“No. It’s idle chatter. Pay no attention to me. Write it down in one of your movies. You could call it ‘The Mad Housewife of Sheepheaven Farm.’ There’s a hundred thousand women in kitchens just like this who would flock to see it.”
She reached out and took my hand.
“It’s time for that cup of tea, Jack Stone.”
She brushed her hair over her shoulders with her fingers, looking down at me. “Where are we going, Jack Stone? I don’t want any broken hearts.”
She had taken me by surprise, and I hesitated. Suddenly she was asking me something that I had been thinking about the whole time, as if she had read my mind.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” I lied.
“It’s time we thought about it. I think about it. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, not you or me or Terry. I like talking with you, and I like being with you and I like it when you touch me. You like being with me, and you like touching me. That’s obvious, isn’t it? What do you expect, Jack Stone?”
“Just a day at a time. I’ll take whatever I can get. I don’t expect anything more than that. I’ve no right to expect more than that, have I?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t seem to help myself. It’s as if a window is open and the rain is coming and I can’t close the window, it’s stuck, and sometimes I think, just leave the window open and wait for the rain, stand there and get soaked, but I still tug at the window. Do you understand?”
“I understand that I love you.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t expect too much from me. You’ll only be disappointed.” She gathered the tea mugs and went to the sink. I followed her, putting my arms around her waist and she took my hands, carefully removed them and turned to face me. “Not now, Jack Stone. I feel too much like my mum in her kitchen. I can’t dance any more. Go break somebody else’s heart.”
