Homecoming (2 page)

At any rate, Lauren seemed to have the knack of being happy. She’d had her moments – especially after Jack, when she’d not got out of bed for what seemed like a year – but generally, she put the effort in, never appearing to ask herself the question of whether it’d be alright to give up. Yes, Ann felt she was fortunate in loving Lauren.

Max is tired after three hours lifting the beet. He jumps down from the tractor’s high seat, into the mud.

‘That’s a good job, son.’

Max can hear the satisfaction in Joe’s voice – not just at having lifted the beet, but about setting him right.

‘Bloody miracle, I’d say,’ Max says, his hands in the small of his back. ‘I was sure she’d clog up halfway down.’

‘Good job we didn’t leave it any longer,’ Joe says, and Max thinks to say, ‘How do you know? Weather might be dry tomorrow.’ But he keeps quiet. Easier to let Joe congratulate himself.

‘Have you got the tarpaulin?’ Joe is saying. ‘We’d best cover them up.’

And even though Max is dog-tired, he jumps into his tractor cab and pulls the bright-blue plastic out from behind the seat. He knows better than to keep Joe waiting, not with him so watchful, like he’s always testing and Max always falling short. He begins fixing the tarpaulin over the trailer with rubber spiders.

‘Need to start bringing the ewes down off the fell soon,’ says Joe at his back.

Max stops and rolls his eyes, then pulls down harder on the tarpaulin.

‘Auction’s first,’ he says. ‘Let’s just get through that, shall we, before you bring on next year’s lambs.’

‘Can’t let the grass grow,’ says Joe.

Max feels Joe’s hand on the back of his neck and his father shakes him as if he were an apple tree. Max submits to it.

‘Come on,’ says Joe. ‘Let’s see if your mother will cook us a
bacon
butty.’

‘I knew it’d be bad, with the weather against ye,’ says Ann with her back to them. She has a tea towel over her shoulder and Joe watches her bottom jiggle as she ushers the eggs off the bottom of the pan. He and Max sit at the table with towels around their shoulders and cups of tea before them.

‘It’s not bad,’ says Joe. ‘It’s fine. We’ll be done by end of today.’

‘And then we’ll go to Slingsby and get tuppence-ha’penny for those wonderful lambs and Barry bloody Jordan will drag me over hot coals,’ she says. The room is full of sizzling and steam and the smell of bacon.

‘Arh, Barry Jordan,’ says Joe. ‘It’s no business of his.’

‘It is when he’s balancing our accounts,’ says Ann. ‘Anyway, you’re not the one has to go and see him.’

‘You’ll live,’ says Joe. ‘I’m going to ring Bartholomew. See how he’s getting on.’ He walks out to the hall and comes back holding the entire telephone unit, dragging the long wire behind him. He sets it on the table and sits down.

Bartholomew picks up, just as Ann sets a bacon-and-egg sandwich down in front of him.

‘Bartholomew!’ says Joe, over-loud.

‘Hello,’ says Bartholomew. His small voice seems such a long way away.

‘We’re all here, so we thought we’d ring you!’ bellows Joe.

Bartholomew jerks his head away from the handset.

‘Hello,’ he says, bringing it closer but still not touching his ear. He’s standing at the counter, looking out of the warehouse window to the car park where he can see a van pulling up. The driver, a bald man with a pencil behind his ear, gets out then opens the van’s double doors before going round to the passenger seat. He picks up a clipboard and examines it. Bartholomew casts around the room for Leonard.

‘You’re all there, are you,’ he says into the phone, craning to look down the corridor.

‘We are, son. Here, your mother and Max want to hear you too.’

‘Just don’t put me on spea—’

He can hear the echo already. The line fills up with the sound of clattering plates and frying.

‘There you go, love!’ shouts Ann. ‘You’re on the speakerphone!’

They always did this – called him when they were all together and he wasn’t. As if it was their great gift to him – the sounds of family life speeding down wires the length of the country, north to south, thanks to the technological brilliance of the speakerphone. For them, he supposed, it was a way of having him at the table. And they couldn’t understand why he’d be itching to get off the line.

The delivery-man has approached the counter, ignoring the fact that Bartholomew is on the phone. ‘Where do you want your bare rooters?’ he says. ‘I’ve got fifty cherries, and . . .’ he looks at his clipboard, ‘various apples. Hundred in all.’

Bartholomew scans again for Leonard, puts a hand over the mouthpiece and nods at the corner of the warehouse. ‘Just drop them over there.’

He returns to the phone call and its white noise. He can hear cutlery on plates, chairs scraping, his mother saying, ‘Another slice, Max?’

‘Lift the beet alright did ye?’ he says, hearing his voice repeat down the line.

‘Nearly there,’ says Joe. ‘No thanks to your brother. Says he were waiting for a gap in the wet.’ His father laughs. ‘Had to sort it myself in the end.’

Bartholomew can picture Max reddening.

Joe seems to realise he’s gone too far and quickly says, ‘It were no bother. We’ll finish by end of today, won’t, we son?’

‘If she doesn’t clog,’ says Max. ‘You should see the rust bucket he’s hired off Ted Wilson.’

‘Must be hardgoing,’ says Bartholomew. ‘It’s bad enough driving those things in the dry.’ He pictures Joe, small and hunched, and five hectares of fodder beet in the melting land to lift.

But Joe is snorting. ‘Nah, it lifted those beet like it were hoovering up crumbs.’

There was no helping him when he was bluff like this. There was no helping him at all, not from way down here.

‘How many lambs are you selling at Slingsby?’ Bartholomew asks.

‘More ’an two hundred,’ says Max. ‘Right fine they are too, the girls.’

‘And another two-hundred-odd stores,’ says Joe.

Bartholomew watches the delivery-man bring in the last of the saplings, each about four foot high, their roots wrapped in hessian sacks like Christmas puddings. Bartholomew signs the docket, mouths ‘Thanks’ and watches him leave.

‘Any news about Maguires?’ Ann shouts, from somewhere in the kitchen, probably the stove. ‘Are they still opening up near you?’ He’d only told her about it a week ago and now she’s wanting hourly bulletins. ‘Maybe you could get a little job with them. Something nice and secure.’

Bartholomew doesn’t bother responding. The spattering down the line is giving him a headache.

‘How are the petunias?’ asks Joe.

Max is quick to join in: ‘Has the bottom fallen out of the pansy market yet?’

He hears his mother saying, ‘Shurrup you two.’

‘Fine, can I go now?’ says Bartholomew. He’s always letting this one go. Joe has never visited the garden centre and their conversations about it end badly.

‘OK son,’ says Joe.

‘Bye lovey!’ he hears Ann shouting in the background. ‘And let me know about Maguires.’

He puts the phone down before she’s finished and marches to the back of the warehouse, peering down the dark corridor at the end of which is a door with a mottled glass panel. A light glows dimly from the room and he can make out the outline of Leonard, who is sat with the newspaper open, elbows on knees. He’d seen the headline earlier that morning. ‘Councillor Brands Shopping Trolleys “a Menace” ’. The perfect marriage of man and reading material.

Bartholomew hears a distant flush and Leonard emerges from the corridor, newspaper folded under his arm.

‘These need putting outside,’ he says to Leonard. ‘I don’t know why I got him to bring them in. Would’ve helped if you’d taken the delivery.’

Leonard has returned to his stool behind the counter and his shanty town of order books.

‘God it’s cold,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Have you lit the stove?’

‘And what did your last slave die of?’

‘The burner’s right next to you,’ says Bartholomew.

‘Well it is
now
. Looks like you’ve got a visitor,’ says Leonard, and they both look out of the warehouse window to see Ruby’s pea-green coat at the main gate. Her hair is the colour of marmalade shot through with sunlight. Bartholomew hurries towards her.

She sees him coming round the side of the building, walking towards her energetically in his bottle-green fleece and heavy boots. He looks lovely and outdoorsy, she thinks. Lovely curls. Unbrushed. And immediately she regrets last night. He’d been sat there hunched over his laptop for what seemed like hours while she’d twittered on about this, that and nothing. And she’d got fed up of him not responding, especially when she was treading so carefully, fighting so hard not to mention Christmas and whether they were going to spend it together, tiptoeing around it in her head and forcibly stopping herself from saying, ‘I might go travelling actually. Round Asia.’ Because there was always a risk she’d have to go and she can’t think of anything she wants to do less. She wants to watch
Only Fools and Horses
together and eat his mother’s turkey dinner. Walk across the fell holding hands. It’d been such a gathering strain, not saying all this, that she’d exploded with the words: ‘I’m going back to my flat if you don’t get off that bloody laptop.’

And he’d looked up, bewildered, saying, ‘Sorry, I was just reading an email.’ But he’d been distracted the rest of the evening, like he was somewhere else altogether. In the night, he’d thrashed about, fighting wildly for the duvet, throwing her off when she tried to curl her body around his back.

‘Hello,’ he says, smiling at her.

‘There was a letter for you this morning, so I thought I’d drop it by.’

‘Thanks,’ he says.

‘Who’s it from?’ she asks, peering at it.

‘Dunno, looks official.’

He puts the envelope in the back pocket of his jeans. They stand for a moment and then he points over his shoulder with one thumb.

‘I’ve got a lot on, Rube.’

‘OK,’ she says. But she doesn’t shift. ‘Shall we go to the pub later?’

‘If you want.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asks.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘You seem moody.’

‘I’m not moody. You’re moody.’

‘Alright, calm down.’ The wind blows her hair over her face and lifts her hood, which only adds to a feeling of general discomfort. ‘OK, well, see you later.’ She hunches her shoulders, waves a cramped wave and walks out of the garden-centre gates.

He walks down the central path to the lower boundary and looks out over the rough and the rolling downs that fall away at the bottom of his land. Benign fields, like a sea without surf. He can see the beauty of it, this garden of England, but it doesn’t stir him the way North Yorkshire does.

He takes the letter out of his back pocket and tears at it with his thumb. It is from Maguires suggesting a meeting to discuss its expansion plans.

 Nice, he thinks. Happy to wine and dine me while putting me out of business.

‘Excuse me, do you work here?’ says a voice. Bartholomew looks up to see a woman in a woollen grey coat and brown boots, with sunglasses on her head.

‘I do, yes,’ says Bartholomew. ‘Can I help with something?’

‘Can you advise me what I can plant now? Or do I have to wait until spring?’

‘No, not at all. There’s lots you can put in now – some wonderful hardy perennials.’ He begins to lead her to a trough filled with rows of black plastic pots. ‘Here we’ve got geraniums and pelargoniums. Or there’s columbines or bear’s breeches. Put any of these in now and they’ll get a head start before spring.’

The woman is frowning. ‘But these are just pots of earth.’

‘Well, yes, it looks like that. But they’ll come bursting up in spring.’

‘I’m not paying good money for a pot of earth.’

‘They’re not pots of earth, they’re perennials.’

‘Still. I want something that looks nice. And something that doesn’t need looking after. Something neat.’

Bartholomew sighs. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the skimmias.’

He leaves the woman at the till with Leonard and walks back down the main path, eyeing up the troughs on either side which are filled with bedraggled stems and desiccated leaves or bare earth. Joe wouldn’t reckon much on the place, not if he saw it now, he thinks, taking out a pair of secateurs from his back pocket. He climbs to the back of a bed, towards a tangle of rose stems whipped about by a rampant honeysuckle. He’s allowed himself these pockets of planting around the garden centre – his artistic eye at work.

He squeezes the secateurs in his right hand, pulling at the tangle with his left. Perhaps Joe’ll visit next summer, and by then he can have it looking better. If he’s still in business. He’d known about Maguires of course – had seen the articles in Leonard’s Chronicle about planning rows and the campaign against out-of-town giants by pensioners in socks and sandals. ‘We’ll support you,’ his regular customers said, like it was terminal. It was only a matter of time before some local hack called him ‘plucky’.

He is pulling at vast canopies of growth, when his phone vibrates in his pocket. Three texts from Ruby.

The second says:

What’s the bloody obsession with petunias?

He hurriedly texts back:

He puts his phone back in his pocket and goes at the stems again with the secateurs. He is standing awkwardly, one leg in the midst of the plant, pulling and clipping, when his phone vibrates. He curses and climbs out of the bed.