Dancing With the Virgins (8 page)

6

The kitchen was the room the Coopers used most at Bridge End Farm. It had that familiar lived-in look
which was inevitable with six people in the house, two
of them children. Though Ben Cooper still lived at the
farm, he had begun to find himself spending less and
less time in the company of his brother and his family.
He wasn't sure why this was, when his mother was still
upstairs and in need of his support
.

Matt had already been driven indoors by the darkness
that was steadily drawing in now. He sat at the kitchen
table with
Farmers Weekly,
reading articles predicting more gloom for the farming industry. In the sitting
room, Matt's wife Kate and their daughters were watch
ing cartoons on the TV.

‘
We'll be visiting Dad's grave next week,' said
Cooper. 'It's the anniversary.'

‘
As if I would forget,' said Matt
.

Matt turned the page of his magazine, but he
no longer seemed to be focusing on the words. 'Don't say anything to Mum,' he said. 'You know it only up
sets her. Now she's stable, it would be nice if we
could keep it like that for a while, rather than causing
another episode like the last one. It's not fair on the girls.'

‘
We can't just say nothing,' said Cooper. 'She'd be
devastated if she knew we'd been to the cemetery with
out her.'

‘
But if she really hasn't remembered? Do we risk start
ing her off again? She's been doing so well recently. It
could set her back months, going over it all again, just because it's the anniversary. It would be a kindness to
let her forget.'

‘
I don't think it's honest,' said Cooper.

‘
Some things are best not remembered. With luck, her
memory will let her down.'

‘
So schizophrenia can be a blessing. That's nice to know.'

‘
I didn't mean that, and you know it.' Matt put down
the
Farmers Weekly
wearily and rubbed his face. 'I'm
sorry. It's just —' He shrugged. 'There's no end to it, is
there?
’

The brothers didn't need to say any more to each
other. It had all been said before, many times.
Kate looked in from the sitting room, releasing a burst
of cartoon noise as she opened the door. Matt picked
up his magazine again. Cooper had a book on the shelf
that he was halfway through reading —
Captain Corelli's
Mandolin.
He always seemed to be years behind what everybody else was talking about. There was so little
time to read. And often, like now, he couldn't concen
trate on what was in front of him.

‘
Matt, do you know a farmer called Warren Leach?
’

‘
Leach? Leach . . . Where does he farm?'

‘
Ringham Edge.
’

Matt frowned over his pages. 'I've heard of him. I
don't think I've ever met him to speak to. Dark-haired
bloke, miserable sort?'

‘
That sounds like him.'

‘
What's he done?'

‘
Nothing that I know of. I just came across him on an enquiry.'

‘
Ringham Edge. Small dairy herd, is it? And a lot of
marginal land?'

‘
Yes.
’

Matt nodded and went back to his magazine. He
turned a page, but found nothing he liked any better.

‘
You know, some of them are in deep trouble,' he said.

‘
Who?'

‘
Farmers like Leach at Ringham Edge. Small-scale
livestock farmers, with no chance of diversification. But
he's only one of many, of course.'

‘
Things looked pretty depressing up there, I must admit.'

‘
It's all pretty depressing. All of it.'

‘
Come on, Matt. It's not that bad.'

‘
Yes, it is. It's all gone to hell. I can't see the time
when farming will ever be the same again. Not around
here, anyway. All the small farmers are going out of business. It's too much for them. Far too much.'

‘
Have you heard anything specific about Leach?
’

Matt shook his head firmly. 'I said I've seen him, that's all. I don't actually know him.'

‘
But I expect you might know people who do.'

'I expect I might,' said Matt.

‘
There could be rumours about him. Farmers talk to
each other, don't they? Down at the mart.
’

Matt's face set into stubborn lines. 'Are you asking
me to find out things about this bloke Leach?'

‘
Just ... I wondered if you might hear anything, you
know. If you did . . .'

‘
Sorry, Ben.'

‘
What?'

‘
I mean, no, I won't do it. I don't much like being
asked to be some sort of secret policeman. I don't like
being asked to be a policeman at all, come to that. You're
welcome to that job.
’

Kate stood in the doorway. She frowned at Ben and
shook her head, scenting an argument between the
brothers. She said arguments upset the children. And
she was right to be protective — there had been enough
disruption in their young lives
.

So Ben Cooper said nothing, just nursed his thoughts
to himself. He and Matt had never talked about their
father properly. Not ever, in the whole of their lives. And
when he died, it was too late to start. Yet Cooper longed
to know what his brother felt; he wanted to be able to
tell him what his own feelings were, how much he had
come to resent the memory of their father, and how
much that resentment hurt because it was such a con
tradiction to the way he had viewed him when he was
alive. He felt as though he was trampling a fallen idol
.

But he suspected that their father still was an idol, of a kind, for Matt. And it was the police that Matt blamed
for their father's death
.

Matt could have found out about Warren Leach, if he wanted to. He was right, of course — there were
many farmers in trouble. There were farms left standing
empty all around the Peak District now. At first, they
had been snapped up by wealthy incomers, people who
boasted of having 'a country house with a big garden',
and thought it was a huge joke. Worst of all were the
people who played at farming, filling a paddock with
rare breeds of sheep, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, a
donkey and a goat. They drove the real farmers to apoplexy
.

And already buyers were getting choosier. Some of
the older, more run-down farms that were coming on
the market stayed unsold for many months. New owners could no longer rely on selling the land that
went with them to provide the capital for work on the
house. Neighbouring farmers didn't want the land —
they couldn't afford it. And if it was difficult land, the
high hill land, it was useless to them anyway. All they
could keep on it were a few sheep, which themselves
were worth next to nothing
.

Cooper went upstairs and looked in at his mother's
bedroom. She was sleeping, and her face was peaceful.
He could always tell from her face the state of her mind; the turmoil in her brain was reflected in the contortions
of her expression, even in her sleep
.

Satisfied, he got washed and changed and went back
down to the kitchen. The girls, Amy and Josie, had
joined their parents at the table, and the room was full
of noise and life. Cooper waved goodbye and walked down the passage to the back door
.

For a moment, he stood and looked at the farm. The
outline of the buildings became clear as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He could hear the cattle moving quietly, one of the dogs snuffling in the yard,
a pheasant cackling, startled by some predator perhaps.
Beyond the barn, the dark bulk of the hill came slowly
into focus, its crown bare against the sky, but its middle
faintly ragged, where the tree line followed the contours
of the valley
.

Most of the fields down here at Bridge End were
good, rich land. They had inherited the farm from their
maternal grandfather, who had died at some vast age,
still tottering about the place in his ancient shiny black
suit and his army boots, with baling twine tied round
his trouser bottoms. Officially, the farm had passed to
their mother, and still belonged to her. But Matt had
been the one to run it, right from the beginning, when
he was barely a year or two out of agricultural college
and working as a cowman on a big tenanted farm at Rowsley
.

Their father, Joe Cooper, had never been interested
in the farm. He had been happy to let Matt take charge,
though occasionally rolling up his sleeves on his off-duty days to help stack bales of hay or round up the
sheep. Joe had been a big, powerful man. It ought to
have been Ben Cooper's abiding memory of him — tall
and strong, with heavily muscled forearms and his huge
hands wielding a pitchfork, his shirt open at his neck
instead of buttoned up with a service tie at his throat,
maybe laughing and at ease with his sons. But that wasn't Ben's lasting memory. Nothing like it
.

Cooper wondered what the future of the farm would
be. So many farmers were getting out — going bankrupt
or just clearing out of the industry while they could. Pastures had been left to grow weeds and bracken
encroached rapidly on to the higher fields, until some farms were like sores on the Peak. It was the farmers,
after all, who had looked after the landscape of the
national park. Within a generation or two, their absence
would change the appearance of the countryside altogether
.

A family that lost their farm would join the drift away from the Peak District into the soulless housing estates
of the big cities, signing on to the list of unemployed
in Sheffield or Manchester while their old homes were
taken over by affluent city dwellers, their farmland
converted into golf courses or pony trekking centres.
To Ben Cooper, it was a neglected tragedy, a kind of
surreptitious ethnic cleansing that would never trouble
the United Nations
.

He felt a familiar object bump his foot by the door.
This strangely shaped lump of stone had stood by the
back door of the farmhouse for decades, maybe for
centuries. It was roughly rounded, with a broader base
and a hollow in the middle, with a hole hacked through
the bottom
.

Everyone had used the stone as a boot scraper or a
container for loose screws, until Cooper had seen
a photograph in a local history book of an identical
object. It was described in the caption as an Iron Age
quern, used for grinding corn. It was two thousand years old
.

The quern still stood by the back door of Bridge End
Farm, unaltered from the last day it had been used for
grinding corn. It had been emptied of screws and
cleaned up. No boots were scraped on it now. The quern had always stood where it was, as far as anybody knew,
so there was no suggestion of moving it. It was preserved for posterity. But nobody used it any more
.

*

Before Cooper could get out of the house, Kate called
to him from the passageway.

‘
Ben, Helen Milner rang earlier this evening. She
sounded a bit upset. She said you were supposed to be
meeting her. I told her you were probably working.
’

Cooper winced. Helen would have turned up at the
rugby club looking for him — they'd had a date tonight.
They'd been going out together for only two months.
He knew all too well how she would interpret the way
he had stood her up.

‘
I meant to phone her, but I completely forgot.
’

‘
That's what I thought,' said Kate. 'And Helen didn't
sound too surprised, either.
’