Homecoming (3 page)

Wearily, he sets his thumbs working.

He puts his phone back in his pocket and looks at the pile of stems he has thrown onto the path. His pocket vibrates. Bloody hell Ruby, he thinks. Two texts.

Then the second one says:

He smiles to himself and begins to text back, just as Leonard walks up the path towards him carrying a mug of tea.

‘Ooof,’ Leonard says, taking a sip. ‘What’s that rose ever done to you?’

A ham is boiling, sending steam into the yellowish light of Max and Primrose’s kitchen.

‘How was the beet?’ she asks, as he walks in from his wet day.

‘Like wading through treacle.’

He takes off his Barbour and hangs it on the back of a chair where it drips onto the lino. She wonders if he’ll do what he usually does – reserve the gloom for her. But the room is warm and filled with the sweet and smoky smell of the ham and she is happy, standing at the stove, stirring the pan. She wants things to stay nice, knows better than to ask why Joe took the beet job off him. Things’ll change now, anyway.

‘Dad hired a right hunk o’rust for the job,’ says Max. ‘You should’ve seen it. Bloody miracle we lifted it.’

‘Well that’s good then, that you lifted it in a day. That’s one less pressure for the month.’

He has sat down on a chair, his legs spread wide and one forearm resting on the table top. If he’d walked into a bank that day, and shot all the people inside it, she’d have the fewest theories as to his state of mind in the run-up to the incident. They functioned on the practicalities, she and Max: things that needed fixing or buying; a family lunch to go to; starting a family because they were two years into marriage and the time was right. This evening, with a ham boiling and the kitchen’s electric light yellow against the grey descending night outside, things are
uncommonly
content between them. She looks at him, her big man sat at the table. He is saying something else about the fodder beet. His black hair – long and curly – is wet from the rain. She never thought she’d have a big man like that of her own. And she suspects he never thought he’d have a woman for himself. And the achievement, for both of them, is a bolster in a world that seemed to have overlooked them. Like they’d planted their flag in the ground, just like other people. And now this news. She is bringing plates to the table and smiling to herself. She is rich with new information. And everything around her seems new, too: the table she’s laying; their kitchen, which only this morning seemed all worn out. She’s cleared away her tools – she knows how it annoys him, her wiring – because she wants nothing to spoil the moment. Ever since she’d found out, she’d been rehearsing how she’d tell him and his lines too, adjusting them until he said just the things she wanted.

‘It’s just a nightmare, is October,’ he says over her thoughts. ‘And this rain’s not making anything easier.’

‘No.’

‘Is that from Alan Tench?’ he says, peering up into the pan on the stove.

He might look at her differently, once he knows. He might touch her differently. With reverence. She’s fizzing with it. Because the tingling was something – not just an idea in her imagination. A real thing had happened. And big things – things that changed the course of your life – well, they hardly ever happened.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He brought it round yesterday.’ She strokes a hand across his shoulder as she turns back towards the stove and he looks up, surprised.

‘Looks nice and pink,’ he says.

‘It’s a good one,’ she says. ‘It were positive. I did a test today and it were positive.’

‘Really?’

She can see his mind whirring. There’s a slight flicker in his eyeballs, left and right. The news is going in.

‘Really?’ he says to her. ‘It were really positive?’

‘It was.’ And she waits for him to get up, like he might have done in a film, dance her round the kitchen, his hands on her hips. Or hold her face in his hands and kiss her with a passion he’s never expressed before.

‘Well then,’ says Max, and he is smiling, she’ll give him that, but he’s still seated. He has sat up straighter and he begins to pat the table top with the flat of his hand. Pat pat pat. Agitated.

‘Well,’ he says again.

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll ring dad and tell ’im. They’ll be cock-a-hoop.’

‘I’m not three months yet,’ she says. ‘You’re not supposed to tell anyone until you’re three months.’

‘Yes, but I’m telling dad.’

‘Wait a little bit, will ye? It’s very early.’

‘When then?’

‘Next month. Tell ’im next month.’

‘Alright then. I’m going for a wash.’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Tea’s ten minutes.’

He stops in the doorway. ‘Prim?’ he says. ‘It’s good in’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

Primrose stands at the counter, sawing slices of bread. The loaf collapses under her hand. He’s pleased, she can see that, and maybe that should be enough – a husband pleased to be having a bairn. She sits down at the kitchen table, her mind readjusting itself. It won’t be quite the together thing, not like she’d thought. And the disappointment soaks in at the base of her, like yard mud. It’ll be a private thing, like all her other private things. This is not us, not really. It’s me. And she closes down, as she has so often before, not in a petulant way, but just practical, so the nerve endings aren’t exposed. Like insulation tape round a wire.

Some intuitive impulse made her take the test. She’d gone to the chemist in her lunch hour. The shop was deserted and Karen Marshall was looking bored, sat on a stool behind the counter, rearranging nail polishes. Primrose’s heart sank when she realised the Clear Blues were right next to Karen, so she’d have to ask. ‘Can I have a test, Karen?’ she’d said.

Karen had made a point of hiding the test in a bag. ‘There you go, Prim,’ she’d said, over-mouthing the words in a low voice. So Primrose doesn’t know why she’s bothered trying to stop Max from telling Joe. Thanks to Karen Marshall, the whole dale would know by morning.

Max walks out of the kitchen and hangs his fleece on the finial at the bottom of the stairs. He takes the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding, to the small bathroom where the door is ajar, its glass panels etched with daisies.

He leans over the sink and looks up at his face, eager to see if it might look different now he’s set to become a father. He is smiling still, stupidly, like the joy might burst out of him. He sees Joe’s beady black eyes crinkle with pleasure. ‘A baby! Ann, Ann! A baby! Did you hear that? Well lad, that’s grand.’ And he’d get out a bottle of fizz from the larder, one they were saving for Christmas, and he’d pop it. Because bairns, that was what the Hartles did well; that was their strength. He’d seen it in the photos and in all the stories Ann and Joe were forever telling, when they looked at each other in that particular way, full of nostalgia. ‘Remember, Ann, that party for Max? You did that smashing picnic in the barn. It was sweltering that day. And we cooled off in Little Beck. Bartholomew went right under, d’you remember?’ ‘Don’t,’ Ann had said, patting her collar-bones, ‘it still makes me go cold.’ But she was smiling at Joe. Now Max is bringing them full circle, he is the first and he will bring it all back for them. He turns off the tap. Joe was always saying that bairns turn things around for a man. Fire up the heart. He could do with some of that. Max scoops up water in his palms, sloshing it over his face and onto the floor. When he looks up again, steam from the hot tap is erasing his reflection, so that only his neck remains.

‘I’ve got to go and see him next week,’ Ann says over the roof of Lauren’s car. They are outside the George in Morpeth-le-Dale. They slam their doors and their feet crunch on gravel in the dark night.

‘Who? Barry Jordan?’ says Lauren.

‘Yes. God I’m dreading it. He always makes me feel guilty that man, as if buying a fruit loaf from Greggs were some cardinal sin. Lord forgive me, I weakened over a peg bag in Coopers!’

‘Hang on,’ says Lauren, stopping Ann with a hand on her arm. ‘You’ve got a new peg bag?’

‘Drawstring. Fully lined.’

‘Be still my beating heart,’ says Lauren, and then she’s pressing forward again and pushing open the pub door. Ann wishes she could delay her, keep the conversation just the two of them a moment longer, so that Lauren could tut, like she does, and say, ‘That Barry Jordan. ’E wouldn’t know a peg bag if he were smothered with one.’

But Lauren has gone in and pushed open the second inner door and Ann is already faced with the warmth and noise of the George and all the team over at the bar. Lauren leads the way, Ann behind her like some cade lamb. Lauren says hello to the team: Elaine Henderson, smart twin-set; Mo Dorkin, short and round, with a gold tooth; Pat Branning, tall, face as open as a hay barn. (You could never dislike a woman who smiled as much as that.) Other ladies, whose names Ann doesn’t know, are gathered behind Elaine. Ann hangs back in a cloud of Lauren’s perfume, with a hand up to any attempted embrace, saying ‘I’ve got a bit of a cold,’ to which a couple of the women say ‘Poor you’.

‘Right,’ says Lauren to the assembled group. ‘What are we playing? Round the clock or double-in, double-out? Has anyone spoken to the George team?’

‘Actually,’ one of the ladies says, but then she stops and there is a general shuffling in the group. ‘Elaine thought . . .’

‘I thought I’d have a bash at captain for the first round,’ says Elaine, with military briskness. You’d not want to find yourself on the wrong side of Elaine. Nor Lauren Blakely, for that matter.

Elaine continues, ‘You won’t mind, will ye, Lauren – letting someone else have a turn?’

‘I thought we were getting a league together,’ says Lauren, squaring up. ‘We’ve some very inexperienced players,’ she says, casting a look at Ann. ‘It’s important the captain knows who to play.’

‘Captaincy’s not been decided yet,’ says Elaine Henderson, with some force. ‘And as you were late . . .’

‘Five minutes,’ snorts Lauren.

Ann hears in her head the whistling music from that Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. What was it now –
High Noon
?
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
? That’d be about right. The ladies shift again, like some restive herd. Pat is smiling with all her face, as if this alone might smooth things.

‘Double-in, double-out then, everyone?’ says Elaine. ‘I need eight ladies who can hit the board.’

‘Might as well sit down,’ Lauren whispers to Ann. ‘She’ll not pick us for this round.’

Ann exhales with relief.

They buy a round of drinks and she, Mo and Pat follow Lauren to a table. They sit in a line along the banquette, watching women gather in front of the dartboard on the opposite side of the room. The floor is a busy swirl of burgundy carpet, the dark wood pillars dripping with horse brasses.

‘Here, Hayley Barnsdale’s up,’ says Mo. They all look across the floor to an attractive woman in a purple mohair sweater. ‘Found love off the Internet, so Karen Marshall says. Madly in love, by all accounts.’

Ann and Lauren shoot a glance at each other.

Mo and Karen from the chemist: the espionage dream team, their periscopes in every bedroom across the dale. There were al-Qaida cells less vigilant than those two.

‘Gone on holiday an’ everything,’ Mo is saying. ‘Greece, Karen said. Happen she left her daughter behind. She stopped with the Richardsons a couple of nights, so I hear.’

‘You’d know all about it, would ye?’ says Lauren.

‘Just what I heard,’ says Mo. ‘Only seven, she is. Well, it’s not right, is it?’

‘That’s it, Mo,’ says Lauren. ‘You suck the lifeblood out of
others
’ happiness.’

Bit harsh, thinks Ann, watching the two of them. Only human, to be interested in folks’ lives. But she can see what it is about Mo that rankles. It’s the glee. The feeling that if you were bleeding to death in the street, she’d have more to say about the price of your shoes.

They get in another two rounds, during which time Ann asks Pat about her children. Her son has motor neurone disease. That ever-present smile seems heroic now. All these braveries, Ann thinks, that are hidden in people’s lives.

Lauren asks Ann about Ivy Dawson’s mobility scooter.

‘Don’t get me started. That woman’s a liability,’ says Ann, but a gasp is rippling round the room and all eyes are on the floor. Lauren is straining up out of her seat. She begins a low incantation, through her teeth.

‘Don’t put Brenda up. Don’t put Brenda up. Don’t put Brenda up.’

They all look across the room.

‘What’s happening?’ Ann asks Mo.

‘It’s getting towards the end of the round is all. Scores are low so it’s harder to hit the points home. Even the best players —’ Mo stops and throws her hands into her lap. ‘Well, that’s in then. Might as well go home.’

Brenda Farley, who is eighty if she’s a day, has taken to the floor. Her toe is on the yellow line, a dart in her hand. She is four foot two and so stooped by a dowager’s hump that she can barely see the board. They all watch as Brenda strains her eyes upwards, her brow furrowing hard into horizontal pencil pleats, and then it’s as if the stoop gets the better of her and her gaze returns to the floor.

‘Oh god, I can’t watch,’ says Lauren. She has her hand up over her eyes, with two fingers parted to peer through.

‘It’s just cruel is that,’ says Pat.

‘There’s no point watching,’ says Lauren angrily. ‘She’ll be all week just trying to lift that neck.’ She turns to Ann. ‘Let’s talk about summat else. Have you brought the ewes down for tupping?’

‘Not yet,’ says Ann. ‘Next week or two.’