Hate Bale

by Stephanie Dagg

  Martha hesitated. It was tempting, but it wasn’t practical. She couldn’t leave the farm to the mercy of an unsupervised Carol overnight. Heaven knows what she might do. And anyway, she was never easy being away from the animals for more than a few hours at a time.

  She shook her head. “That’s a really kind offer, but I need to be here. I’ll be OK.”

  “This place is a millstone round your neck,” said Lottie sharply. “You should downsize and retire. Well, you could keep your bookkeeping going, but you don’t need all the farmy stuff and the guests from hell on your doorstep every week.”

  “Most of them are fine.” Martha felt duty-bound to defend the people who provided her with a living, even though Lottie’s remark was a lot closer to the truth than she realised. Guests were generally becoming more and more demanding. Just last week they’d wanted wood for the fire, and it had been a hot, sunny week. They’d said that the house felt cold. Martha gently explained that this was the idea of these thick-walled, small-windowed stone cottages: they were meant to be cool in summer and warmth-retaining in winter. It was usual to put a cardigan or jumper on when you went back inside after being out in the French summer heat. If it was warm enough to sunbathe round the pool and eat meals outside, then that really didn’t suggest it was the kind of weather that called for a crackling log fire.

  Lottie snorted in reply to Martha’s loyal comment. “Well, so long as you’re sure. If you change your mind about staying, you can turn up anytime on our doorstep. One or other of us will be up till the early hours, I dare say.”

  That was another major difference between them. Martha was a lark, always up early, but ideally not quite as early as today’s awakening. She was usually out of bed by six or six-thirty, busy all day, and then happy to go to bed by nine most nights. Sometimes as early as eight, after a particularly strenuous day, or when there was absolutely nothing on the TV. Lottie rarely turned in before one or two in the morning, and amazingly, she could still be at her office by ten most days. However, she much preferred afternoon appointments and it was noticeable that her office tended to remain closed before midday.

  Martha saw her friend off with a perfunctory hug with extended arms, and more cheek kisses. Lottie didn’t really do hugs as they tended to introduce creases into elegant outfits. Martha watched her swoosh up the drive then hurried back inside and locked the door before the dreaded Carol could waylay her. She busied herself with mindless jobs round the house for a while, but then gave up, slumped into her favourite chair and stared at the wall until it was time to do the evening feeding rounds. She slunk about, keeping out of sight of her guests as much as possible, although Zack saw her and waved. She then had long messaging sessions on Facebook with both children. Jared offered to travel up the day after tomorrow, Friday, once work was over, to be on hand at the weekend to help with Changeover Saturday so that his mother could take things easy, but she declined. Her son taught English at a boisterous lycée, a job he loved, but which was exhausting. Blandine worked long, erratic hours as a waitress. Her degree from the same university as Jared, where they’d met, was in mathematics and she’d yet to find a job she could actually use her qualification in. She wasn’t cut out for teaching, and other options she’d explored hadn’t produced positive outcomes. Martha wanted the young couple to have precious time together unwinding, rather than chasing about after her. Besides, being busy helped keep her mind from dwelling on distressing thoughts.

  Lily seemed to find the whole thing fascinating. She wasn’t ghoulish about it, just unnervingly pragmatic. Martha put this down to the fact that Lily had known a lot of death during her short life. Her first five years had been corpse-free, more or less apart from a few pet goldfish and gerbils. But since then, all her grandparents had popped off for various reasons, her remaining great-grandmother, two great-uncles, one aunt and a close family friend. The only reason Mark and Martha had ever gone back to the UK was for bedside vigils and funerals.

  Here on the farm animals died quite regularly. In the early days, Mark and Martha had sadly contributed through ignorance – not getting a wobbly lamb warmed up quickly enough, not recognising the early signs of flystrike. They quickly became much better stock-keepers, but some animals seemed to take an active delight in trying to kill themselves. Turkeys would throw themselves into the duck pond, from which it was very easy to get out, given the sloping sides, but they preferred to languish in the cold water waiting for hypothermia to claim them. This was such a normal occurrence that Martha routinely checked the pond twice a day for shivering bundles of feathers. If spotted, she hoiked them out and shoved them under the red lamp which was in permanent position in one of the stables. She still marvelled how a creature so close to death could make a full recovery in a couple of hours under that miraculous device.

  Over the years, and frequently, Lily’s current favourite guinea-pig or chicken or rabbit or budgie had ungratefully given up the ghost, leaving its mistress perplexed but not upset. “Why did it die?” was her response. Every now and again one or other parent could answer, when it was something obvious such as a rare chicken-coop raid by a pine marten, but most were inexplicable. Lily would just shrug and take it in her stride.

  And then, of course, her father had died. This had a reason, but not one any of them could easily accept: that the heart of apparently strong, healthy Mark could just stop. Martha had been so worried about her silent, ashen-faced daughter. She’d been strong for her mother, and done everything she could to help, but her natural exuberance deserted her for a long, long time. The blow had been hard and cruel, but eventually she’d bounced back. So overall Martha was relieved that Lily was being casually callous about poor Daniel’s death.

  Calls over, she was relieved to hear the tired, crabby protests of Sophia being dragged into bed next door. The coast was clear. She whistled to Flossie and the pair of them headed off for a long walk. Despite being elderly, Flossie was still up for a good hour’s gentle trot alongside her mistress. It was a beautiful, late spring evening. Crickets chirped, songbirds sang lullabies to their nestlings, bats flittered in the early dusk and swallows still swooped by, on a quest for supper for their babies before, at long last, folding their weary wings and resting for the night. The sun sank gracefully towards its bed.

  Martha stopped suddenly. Flossie, surprised but accepting, slumped down by her feet for a quick rest, panting. Martha gazed around her, taking all this beauty in. How could someone have died so horribly on such a magnificent day? It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Why had it been allowed to happen?

  Deflated, she was about to sit down and cry next to Flossie but, just in time, noticed a stream of wood ants bustling aggressively to and fro. So, wiping the tears away with an angry hand, she patted Flossie’s head to rouse her dog and headed for home.

  Chapter 6

  Martha guessed she wouldn’t sleep well, but she had hoped for at least a few hours. As it was she tossed and turned all night, images of Daniel’s and Mark’s dead bodies swirling in her brain. She was up and down for such necessary things as hot chocolate, toast and paracetamol, and checking the pig fence was plugged in, since she only remembered at around one o’clock that she’d forgotten all about barricading the door against Carol. Fortunately everything was fully operational. Martha guessed Zack had appointed himself as her guardian angel and kept an eye on things for her.

  After that excitement Martha slept briefly but soon was up again for tea and later a snack of peanuts, and finally, at half past four, decided not to bother going back up to bed. It was then she dozed off at last in her armchair, with one of the cats curled up on her lap. The cats normally weren’t allowed in the house, apart from for treats of milk and titbits. However, Hyacinth, a fluffy calico cat, had been attracted by the kitchen light going on and off so many times during the night, and had been meowing on the windowsill during Martha’s latest cupboard raid. So she’d let her in for some company. Flossie was there, of course, but apart from wagging her
tail at each of Martha’s nocturnal appearances, she refused to move from her warm, comfy basket.

  Martha woke again about half past seven. She could quite happily have gone back to sleep for the rest of the morning, but the sun was streaming through the window and there were a few plaintive bleats coming from the sheep. It was time to get going for the day. Her headache was back with a vengeance, and she felt decidedly tetchy from her largely sleepless night and stressed from the bad memories and troubled dreams that had plagued her. She had a quick shower, gulped down coffee and a croissant and headed outdoors to feed and water the livestock. Cleaning out could wait till later today, or even tomorrow. She wasn’t in the mood.

  However, despite herself, her spirits started to rise. That might have been largely due to the fact that the Cuthbertsons disappeared off in the car shortly after she came back inside. She’d told them about the weekly market in nearby Bousseix. With its huge variety of stalls, that sold everything from chickens to soap to goat’s cheese to organic bread to clothes, shoes, gloves, hats, jewellery, plants and tat, it was enjoyable to browse around. In fact, so enjoyable Martha felt tempted. She hadn’t been for quite a few weeks now. An outing would do her good. There was the chance of bumping into the Cuthbertsons, of course, but it wasn’t big enough to dissuade her from her plan. And she’d cycle. It was an hour’s ride over rolling scenery. By the time she got back home, she’d hopefully be tired enough to have a good nap.

  Martha changed into cycling shorts and a clean t-shirt. She put a purse and emergency banana into her small rucksack, filled up her drinking bottle, velcroed up her cycling shoes, pulled on sunglasses and helmet, and locked the door behind her. The bike was in the barn, a corner of which Hermione had access to through a low doorway. Her field was behind the barn. Mark had constructed the sow an assortment of shelters over the years, made from such things as pallets and old doors, sheets of corrugated iron and bits of leftover laminate flooring, held together with stakes and an ever increasing amount of nails. However, Hermione had destroyed the lot, either through over-energetic back and bottom scratching against the walls, or by pig-headedly insisting on creating a back door rather than turning round and using the front door as an exit. Eventually Mark had put up metre-high, extra-tough and reinforced partitions to section off that corner of the barn for her. She’d struggle to knock those ancient stone walls down. Hermione was comfy in her indestructible shelter, but the downside was that housing her there created inordinate amounts of dust. Hermione would come in from the field, where she’d been happily rooting all day, covered in mud. This would become dry and flake off her, then scatter itself liberally over everything in the barn. Including Martha’s bike. It was mud coloured when she wheeled it out of the barn. A quick once-over with an old tea-towel restored it to shiny blueness, and ensured that the seat and handlebars wouldn’t leave murky stains on Martha’s cycling shorts and gloves.

  She set off, with a few creaks and groans that she would have preferred to have come from the bike rather than her legs. However, after the first kilometre she got her second wind, and her body delivered its version of WD40 to her knees to lubricate them. She was soon rolling along at a pretty impressive pace for a woman in her fifties. The endorphins quickly cut in and the stress of the last five Cuthbertson-bedevilled days, and yesterday in particular with its added awfulness, began to diminish. Martha was about as close to happy as she ever got in this post-Mark era by the time she swooped down the last hill into Bousseix.

  She took the back route in, knowing that the main road would be suffering from the cyclist-unfriendly combination of double parking, despite there being ample parking available in car parks and quiet side-streets, and a plethora of myopic old motorists with very slow reaction times who really shouldn’t still be driving but were. Admittedly, some were in the tiny 50 cc ‘sans permis’ cars for which they didn’t need a driving licence, but those could still do a cyclist serious if not fatal damage if they pulled out in front of one or otherwise mowed one down. Martha just had to shout the one warning to a baguette-laden old boy who was about to step out into the road in front of her without looking, so all in all it was a pleasingly low-hassle arrival today.

  She locked the bike to a lamp post. Out of season she wouldn’t have bothered, but in the summer there were a lot of tourists and some of them might not share the ‘if it’s not yours then you leave well alone’ philosophy prevalent in this quiet corner of rural France. Whilst this might hold in regard to possessions, it was a different matter entirely when it came to goings-on. Other people’s business was fair game for getting well and truly stuck into, as Martha was soon to be reminded.

  Her first port of call was the chicken stall. It was good that she’d come by bike because that meant she couldn’t possibly be tempted into buying something feathery to add to her collection. There were some mulard ducks for sale, attractive things, mainly white with varying amounts of black splotched onto them here and there. The woman next to Martha asked to buy two, but received the reply that she could only buy them in multiples of five. This began a rapid-fire argument with much arm waving on both sides. Martha slunk off before she was dragged in to support either party, as she inevitably would have been had she stayed. Her sympathy lay with the buyer. If you wanted two ducks, then you wanted two ducks, and you didn’t want them to come with an extra unnecessary three. It was all the more bizarre because Martha had bought ducks from there in the past – just the one on the first occasion, and three on another. There’d been no arbitrary ruling on permissible purchase quantities then. But this was France, she reminded herself. Rules changed from day to day and didn’t need to be logical.

  She browsed a spice stall, one she hadn’t seen before. Mark with his taste for Asian and Indian food would have loved this. He’d known the difference between cumin, cardamom and coriander, something Martha never had, and could tell you when only black peppercorns, as opposed to green or pink ones, would do. She smiled thinking about what fun he’d have had picking out some of these spices to try.

  There were several plant stalls. Again, as with the chickens, Martha was tempted but thwarted by having come by bike. Just as well, since she was behind enough with the garden already. More plants would have meant even more of a backlog to be potted on or planted out.

  She turned into the main aisle of market stalls that stretched up one of the streets leading off the central square. From where she was she could smell the soap stall, her favourite, even though it was a good ten stalls up the road. She headed towards it. She loved scented soaps, floral being her preferred type of perfume. Lavender, rose, honeysuckle, peony, carnation, violet, jasmine, lily of the valley, geranium — any, all of them. At a push she tolerated fruity soaps, such as lemon, strawberry or cherry, but flowers were best.

  She walked quickly to her spot of personal paradise, inhaled the beautiful aromas and began the hard task of selecting just three for today. They were €3.50 each, or three for €10 so obviously she needed at least a trio for optimum value for money. Then she saw a sign announcing a special offer of seven soaps for €20. Seven bars of soap would last her till Christmas and beyond, but who cared. A bargain was a bargain.

  The stallholder handed her a small wicker basket and she began to load it with her purchases. She’d made it to five, hyacinth being the latest addition, when she became aware of whispering to her left. She glanced up, and saw a group of four women, a couple of whom she vaguely recognised, staring at her with great interest. Uh oh, they must have heard about poor Daniel and how it was Martha who’d found him. Had the news been on the radio or TV then? Martha had never imagined it would make the national news like that. It hadn’t been in the papers since round here people only bought the local one, and that came out weekly, publication day being today, Thursday. Or was it the simple yet unstoppable power of word of mouth that had spread the tidings far and wide?

  Making eye contact was a mistake. At once the group began to advance determinedly. Martha glanced rig
ht, to plan an escape route. But there, five metres or so away, were the Cuthbertsons. Carol was complaining in loud English to an uncomprehending vendor about the price of something on his stall. Roy was looking embarrassed, Sophia was patting someone’s toy dog that was being dragged through the obstacle course of clumsy feet and crushing buggy wheels, poor little mite, and Zack was absorbed in something on his phone.

  “Another two soaps, madame,” the stallholder coaxed, as he’d seen the twenty euro note she’d already extracted from her rucksack.

  Martha froze like a deer in headlights. She wanted those soaps but she needed to get away. The women were closing in fast, and a quick sidelong look revealed that Carol Cuthbertson had given up on that particular battle and was now on the move in Martha’s direction.

  Martha leant forward slightly and said quietly, “If I give you €20 for these five soaps, can I crawl under your stall please? I need to make a quick getaway.”

  “But of course,” he shrugged good naturedly, and very calmly. Martha could have hugged him for being so accommodating. Maybe this sort of thing happened regularly to soap sellers.

  She thrust the note into his hand and he tipped the soaps from her basket into a paper bag, stepping aside slightly so that she could crouch down and scoot underneath the table. She straightened up, not quite as lithely as she’d have liked, grabbed the bag, thanked him again and shot off down the pavement behind the stalls. She heard sighs of exasperation from her would-be interrogators, and a chuckle from Zack. Head down she scurried along, eager to get away from this busiest part of the market. And now that she was tuned in, she began to hear a lot more whispers going on. What had possessed her to come to town today?