Homecoming (5 page)

He’d met Ruby a year ago, at the tea room on Market Street where she works as a waitress. He’d begun to stop there on his way home from the garden centre in a bid to avoid his cold empty flat.

Bartholomew had sat at a table in the darkest corner and watched her as she served the other customers.

Everything about her was rounded: her little belly; the soft slopes of her arms; the milky skin on her chest which rose high with her breath. He was magnetised by the fullness of her. When she came to his table and said – in a gentle Leeds accent which he hadn’t been expecting – ‘What can I get ye?’ he’d said, involuntarily, ‘Can I take you out?’

She had laughed, her apple face creasing up with kindness and delight. ‘Let’s just deal with your lunch order first, shall we?’

‘Where do you live?’ she’d asked later, when she’d joined him at his table.

‘Theobald Road.’

‘Now you’re being creepy.’

‘Why? You asked me where I live!’

‘You can’t live on Theobald Road,’ she said.

‘Erm, I can and I do.’

The sight of his frown appeared to make her laugh and this, in turn, seemed to make him happy.

‘You are talking about Theobald Road, as in off the London Road?’

‘Is there another one?’ he’d said.

‘Oh Lord.’

‘Why, where do you live?’

‘Guess.’

‘Theobald Road?’ he asked.

She nodded and they both burst into laughter, not because it was especially funny – he found it scary – but in part he thought they were laughing because they hadn’t even mentioned their Yorkshire accents, that they were two people from another place, a shared landscape, and here they were in a southern cathedral town and living on the same street, and that their voices were each a homecoming.

‘What number are you?’ she said when they’d stopped laughing.

‘Twenty-two. And you?’

‘Two.’

‘Next to Mr Shah!’

‘My new best friend,’ she’d said.

‘Not just the same street but the same side of the same street.’

‘Are you sure you still want to take me out?’

What had surprised him most about their early courtship was its wholeheartedness. He drank her in, unstintingly, telling her he wanted her all the time and she, to his surprise, was neither terrified nor repulsed. She reciprocated and this reciprocity, together with the ease with which she accepted her appetites, was a revelation to him.

In those early weeks, on days when he didn’t stop at the café because he was working late, he would get off his bicycle at the bottom of Theobald Road and wheel up the street, wondering if her light would be on. He found himself filled with nervous excitement as he looked up at the second-floor window and then he’d see it lit yellow and the excitement in his stomach would bubble up higher, until he laughed at himself and partly at his own happiness because why would seeing a light on in an upstairs window make him feel so overjoyed?

They didn’t spend many nights apart in those days. More often than not, Bartholomew would wheel his bicycle up to his own flat at number 22, prop it in the hallway and go in to get changed, all the while telling himself he was tired: it would be great to read a book or watch some television alone after so much time together. But he’d find himself putting on a clean pair of cords and carefully selecting a shirt and sweater. Then he’d momentarily sit on his sofa, his hands on his knees.

Five minutes later he’d be lolloping down the street. The bell would jangle as he opened the door to Mr Shah’s shop. You had to inch sideways through the excessively packed shelves because Mr Shah stocked everything that human existence had ever required: nail clippers; bake-in-the-oven croissants; Phillips-head screwdrivers; fabric conditioner; dog food; nappies.

‘Something for Ruby?’ Mr Shah would say. The word Ruby sounded even more beautiful when curled around Mr Shah’s rich voice.

‘Yes,’ said Bartholomew.

‘She likes the Turkish Delight,’ said Mr Shah, leaning forward and over the counter and pointing downward at the chocolate section. ‘Fry’s.’

‘Right, thank you.’ Bartholomew grabbed three bars and a bottle of white wine and headed for Ruby’s front door.

He was always welcomed, back then. Her face, when she opened the door, was gentle and quietly amused.

‘Thought you might need sustenance,’ he’d say, or some such other opening gambit. On this occasion, he opened his carrier bag and she’d peered over at what was inside.

‘You’ll be wanting a hand with those,’ she’d said.

‘That’s why I came to you.’

‘You’d best come in.’

She was so unlike his last girlfriend, Maud, who liked to swim in cold rivers in her Speedo suit. ‘Show me a river, even in the dead of winter,’ she’d say, ‘and I want to dive in. So bracing.’ He remembered Maud’s supermarket own-brand face cream and shower gel. ‘It’s all the same stuff,’ she’d lectured. ‘You just pay for the packaging.’

Ruby, though, was all for warmth and pretty packaging. ‘Ooh look,’ she’d cry, pulling him back as they strolled past a department-store window, her happy face reflected among pink and gold lettering and stripes. ‘Lovely! I’m just going to nip in.’

In the heat of his new feelings, when they had been together about three months, he took her out to dinner and over the poppadoms said, ‘Rube, I think we should move in together,’ and she had clapped her hands and stroked his face with her palm.

Meeting Ruby, it had provoked life’s force in him. There were suddenly no limits to his potential. He wanted to see exhibitions, new films, to try new foods. He found himself loving her with every fibre that he had, like he’d been dunked in it and it was like a pulse, or the rolling forward of an ocean wave.

They visited her family in Leeds, and his school friend Alan, who’d moved there with his new wife Bridget. ‘Blimey, you’re a changed man,’ Al had said, lying on the sofa with his arms behind his head. ‘It’s the real thing, in’t it?’ In Winstanton, he and Ruby clung to each other, their social lives embryonic. She had her book group, he joined the squash club at the leisure centre; all of it, at times, a strain. Their intimacy became a lifeboat and even this he came to resent, as if his dependency were some fault of hers.

The moving in had never happened. She’d been so excited, she’d started slowing in front of estate agents’ windows, her arm looped through his. Talking about where they’d put the Christmas tree. Maybe it was her enthusiasm that made him pull back, as if someone had to stop them both. Gradually, it became part of the dynamic between them, flaring up at every turn, when she would say ‘When?’ and ‘I might not wait for ye, ye know’ and ‘Who d’ye think ye are, George Clooney?’ in a mock-teasing way. Or else she’d look really sad and he felt he was failing her. He would say ‘Soon’ and ‘When things are more settled’ or ‘One day’. Occasionally, they really fought about it. He would find himself shouting, ‘Stop pushing. You’re always pushing!’ And he could see he was breaking her heart.

At any rate, after that first forward impulse, something had simply stopped. His caution returned, like the desire to stay in a small room because the big room’s just too big.

She has been snoring for half an hour. He lets himself out of her flat and walks back to his.

That could be me, thinks Max, watching the auction hands hefting sheep into pens. Sweating it for tuppence, or breaking my back on another man’s land. But instead here he is, flat-capped like Joe, stood next to him at the Slingsby fence, with one foot on the lower rung. He can’t stop smiling on the inside. Because everything’s set to change. The prospect of telling Joe his news is all before him, that sweetness undented. He can hardly hold himself back, but he’s also savouring the anticipation of it. He tries to pull the corner of his mouth down, but it seems to make the smile more purposeful. The cap shields him at least.

‘Here, what are you so pleased about?’ Joe asks. ‘These prices aren’t funny.’

‘Not funny at all,’ says Max.

‘Tell us now,’ says Joe. ‘If you’ve won the lottery, I’d like my share.’

‘You’ll know soon enough. I promised Prim.’

Joe rubs Max’s back. ‘You’re a good lad,’ he says, and he doesn’t ask more.

Up and down the pens, men stand talking, looking down at the lots. And beyond them, the fields roll away, the mustard-
yellow
leaves on the trees now starting to shed.

Max and Joe stand together in the circle of men surrounding the auctioneer, and he thinks he can see the other farmers regarding them. Father and son. It was a rare thing to see these days, something to envy. He’s puffed up, standing next to his father, because Joe is admired among farmers. Has the knack for breeding sheep, everyone round these parts said so. Always did well at the shows and he’s had his share of prize tups that could go for thousands – the ones with strong legs and a sweet head. At least, they did when times were better.

Joe has his eyes on the sheep that are being herded into the pen before them, where the auctioneer stands in his white coat. They run, whipped along occasionally by the auctioneer’s assistant.

The auctioneer starts his song of numbers: ‘37, 37, 37 bid, 39, where are you 39? 39 bid, 39, 39. Sign away.’

A ripple goes around the group. Joe shakes his head.

‘Thirty-nine quid. Jesus,’ he says. ‘Beauties they were, too. Did ye see? That’s bad luck, Dugmore.’

‘Never seen it so bad,’ says Dugmore, who farms over in Westerdale. ‘There were store lambs selling last week for eighteen pound. Eighteen pound! Not worth the feed.’

The sold sheep are whipped out through the gate, some jumping three feet in the air as they run.

‘Ours is next,’ says Max. ‘I’ll go round.’

He stands beside the pens of their mule gimmers, ready to usher them in. They will run around the perimeter fence, auctioneer at their centre in his doctor’s coat, while the farmers along the fence judge them, bidding with a tiny nudge of a forefinger, which the auctioneer won’t miss. And Max knows that Joe will feel it in every fibre – the murmuring between his fellow farmers while his animals run the fence.

‘That’s a bad lot,’ says Joe an hour or more later, when the cheques are out and they’re settling themselves in the Land Rover.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t ha’ bought them new tups,’ ventures Max.

‘Arh, but they were beauties, weren’t they? And going for a song. Let’s hope the mule stores do better next week,’ says Joe, lifting himself off the seat and adjusting his trousers. He sighs as he puts the key in the ignition. ‘If we can get thirty pound a lamb for the stores then at least the rent’s covered.’

Max looks out of the passenger window while Joe takes off his cap and turns to throw it on the back seat.

‘In’t it glorious, the day?’ Max says.

‘Are you on the happy pills or summat?’

And the smile bursts out of Max once more, breaking up his face with its unruly joy.

‘Come on, lad. Spill the beans.’

And then he can’t wait. Not a moment longer. Even though he’d promised Prim. This moment, here with Joe, matters more.

‘Prim’s going to have a baby.’

‘Ha ha!’ Joe shouts, leaning over the handbrake to clap him on the shoulder, shaking him. ‘Hee hee! Really? Is it true?’

‘It is, dad.’

Joe pulls Max’s body over roughly for a hug.

‘Well done you, lad. Well done you. Wait till I tell your mother.’

‘It’s early days,’ says Max in a half-hearted attempt to dampen Joe’s cheer when in fact he’s bathing in it. ‘I promised Prim I wouldn’t say owt.’ Joe is beaming at him, and this time, for the first time, it’s for something he’s done, not because the beet got lifted or the weather was in their favour.

‘Ah, that’s grand,’ Joe is saying, leaning back in his seat. ‘A bairn. Best time of your life. It were the best time of my life, when you two were tiddlers.’

He ruffles Max’s hair again, gently this time, and Max thinks to remember this moment. He has never before felt such warmth spread through him, right from his belly. For the first time, he’s won himself an accolade. All those average school reports; and him never breaking out, like Bartholomew did, to get a job elsewhere – Max had begun to feel lost in the smallness and sameness of his life and now, here was his father, the man who mattered more than any on earth, pinning a rosette to his chest like he was the prize tup. This is what I’ve been missing, he thinks: the sun on my face.

‘It’s going to be the best tupping yet,’ he says.

‘It is, it is,’ says Joe. ‘You’re a good lad, Max. I always knew you’d land on your feet. When will it come?’

‘May the twentieth or thereabouts. We’ll know more at the scan.’

‘And Prim? She alright?’

‘She’s grand,’ says Max. ‘Might even pull back on the wiring now there’s something else to occupy her.’

‘Don’t bank on it,’ says Joe, laughing.

Max closes his eyes, lays his head back on the headrest. ‘Might need a pay rise,’ he says, ‘if I’m to have a bairn in the house.’

Joe starts the car.

‘Look at ’im,’ says Max. ‘He’s a look on his face like he’s off to creosote a fence, not sow his wild oats.’

‘Less of the wild,’ says Joe. ‘Good tup is that – I’ve paperwork to prove it.’

They are leaning on a gate, taking a break after a period of hard work. They have driven the ewes down off the fell to the in-bye, dipped them and chosen the right ones for each tup. Joe maintains he has an eye for it – putting himself into the mind of the ram and what he might fancy. Max thinks it’s mostly guesswork but he’d never say as much. They have marshalled the ewes into pens of fifty apiece. Most of them – three-hundred-odd – are being put to the Blue-Faced Leicester rams.

Max watches one now as he mounts a ewe and begins thrusting into her. Something about his blinking eyes, looking out to the side, gives him a dogged expression.

‘Any road,’ Joe is saying, ‘if you had to serve fifty-odd ladies in a fortnight, you might look a bit world-weary an’ all.’

‘I’d be ready for action, me,’ says Max. ‘Prepared to answer me calling.’

‘How very manly of ye.’

‘She doesn’t look like she’s having much fun either,’ says Max.

‘Fun doesn’t come into it. How many’s he done?’

They look at the ewes’ backs. The tup has paint on his chest and his raddle marks are left on the ewes he’s served.

‘About five,’ says Max. ‘He’s not letting up. Look at that – he’s a good tup this one.’

Max looks out across the in-bye. A faint mist swirls around the wintry trees which have only a fluttering of leaves left on them. The bracken is crisp and brown and thick with pheasant. Nowhere in the world, he thinks, more beautiful than this place.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Joe. ‘What you said, about a pay rise.’

‘Arh, I didn’t mean it, dad.’

‘No, no, it’s your time. Anyway, I’ve been thinking on, with you having a bairn an’ all. It’ll be the making of you, son. I think we should look at you taking over the farm – proper like. Build it up for you and for your son to take over.’

Max hangs his head low, between his shoulders.

‘It’s what I’ve always wanted,’ says Joe looking into the field. ‘To feel the place will be passed on – that it won’t come to nothing. All that work – dad sweating his heart out – well, he’d be right pleased.’

Max says what he feels he ought to say: ‘I didn’t mean . . . I know how tight things are.’ His words hang in the air like wet washing.

‘It’s your time,’ says Joe. ‘I’m getting too old for this game. I’ve not got the fight in me. But you – this’ll be the making of you. Children make it all . . . Give you a purpose.’

Max feels the pleasure run through him again – that ahead of him, out of the ether, would come his agency in life. He just has to wait for it to happen. He wonders why he didn’t do this sooner.

‘How d’ye think Bartholomew’ll take it?’ he says to Joe, his concern a show.

‘Ah, Bartholomew expects it,’ says Joe. ‘He’ll have to take it on the chin. He chose to leave. And that’s fine. But you can’t have both. And another thing. I think we should replace the John Deere. I was going to wait till times were better, but a new
tractor
’d set you up, wouldn’t ye say?’

‘It would. If there’s money for it.’

‘We’ll find a way. Beg, borrow an’ steal. Come on, can we tell your mother now? It’s been murder keeping it from her.’ They turn to begin the walk back to the farmhouse, then Joe stops. ‘Let’s keep quiet about the tractor though,’ he says, and he laughs out loud. ‘No need to knock her out, eh.’ And Max laughs.

‘After lambing, too,’ Joe says as they walk towards the farmhouse, ‘well, that’s perfect timing. Perfect.’

Next day, Ann sits on the chair with the wooden arms, her handbag on her knee. Beside her on the floor is a plastic bag, slipping with loose paperwork. Before her is Barry Jordan’s desk, behind it his empty chair and beyond that a mushroom-coloured blind, its slats hanging at broken angles. She leans down and gathers the handles of the plastic bag, tries to marshal it upright but it slides down again onto the floor.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she says, putting a hand up comically as Barry Jordan enters the room. ‘Book that Caribbean cruise Ann! You deserve it.’

‘Not quite,’ says Barry, as he edges behind his desk. ‘I need to go through this change in the subsidies with you. You’re aware, I assume . . .’ He pauses while he rifles through some papers on his desk. ‘Ah yes, here we are. You’re aware that the single farm payment comes into force this year.’

He hands her a sheet of paper. She looks down at it:
The Single Farm Payment Explained
. The rest is a blur.

‘It’s not going to do you any favours,’ says Barry.

‘We still get a payment though – we’ve got plenty of hectares, ha’n’t we?’

‘You have, but you’ll not do as well as under the headage payments. Used to be you could farm the brown envelope – keep more sheep and you got more money. But now, with a per hectare payment you’ll be down by . . . I’ve got the figures somewhere. Hilary’s got them – she’ll give you a breakdown to take away. Trouble is, moorland gets the lowest rate there is, and eighty acres of yours is rough grazing, is it not?’

She gazes at the sheet of paper without reading it. ‘Someone up there doesn’t like farmers. That’s how it feels.’

‘I can get you a couple more environmental subsidies –
stewardships
and such like, but even so,’ says Barry.

‘Even so what?’

‘The best you can hope for is to break even. And you’ll be lucky to do that.’

‘Can we keep going till lambing?’ asks Ann.

‘You can keep going as long as you like. I’m just giving you the full picture. You’re not the first I’ve had to have this conversation with and you won’t be the last. These are very tough times indeed. I suggest you look at getting jobs off the farm. I know a chap over in Farndale, runs the fire station on the side.’

She thinks to mention that they’re soon to be in their sixties, that they’re dog-tired, but she worries it would sound like whingeing.

‘I know it’s hard,’ says Barry. ‘I’ve seen that many farmers go under, even take their own lives.’

‘Jesus Barry, I don’t think we’ve come to that.’ She pauses. ‘Our assets, if we sold – what would it get us?’

‘You’ve five hundred Swaledales is it?’

She nods.

‘You might be best off hanging on to them at the minute – hope prices recover. Housing market is mad. Goes up every month.’

He clasps his hands together on the desk, smiles at her – a pitying sort of smile.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, I’m sure things’ll pick up. Where would we be if farmers gave up every time the going got tough?’

‘Where indeed?’ says Barry, standing and flattening his tie with one hand to prevent it dipping in his coffee as he leans over the desk to shake her hand. ‘I’ll help in any way I can, Ann. As you know, my services are paid for by the NFU and that arrangement will continue for as long as you need it.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ann, rising, realising that she is being ushered out. She turns in the narrow space between her chair and the desk, clutching her handbag and stooping to pick up the carrier bag. ‘Right, yes.’

At the door, she raises the plastic bag. ‘My receipts. What should I do with them?’

‘Leave them with Hilary outside. I’ll go through them later this week.’

‘Righto, well, goodbye then,’ she says.

She sits in the warmth of the car for a minute. The suburban street is littered with curling leaves a foot deep at the gutters. All that build-up and she was out in under ten minutes. She turns on the engine and pulls out from the kerb, towards the myriad of mini-roundabouts which will take her out of Scarborough to the A-road back inland. It’s a billowy autumn day, sharp-lit and dry as dust. She is hungry and she faintly needs the toilet but she’d been too distracted to ask Barry if she could use his.

So, there was no getting out now. Not with Max having a baby and lamb prices bottoming out. They’d have to press on, like Joe said. She feels herself adjusting to this idea. It was always bad news with Barry Jordan. Like going to the dentist – you couldn’t expect any good to come out of it except the satisfaction that it was over for another while. At least she hadn’t had to go through those blessed receipts.

Half an hour out of Scarborough, she pulls into the forecourt of a service station to fill up with petrol. The air has a smoked, woody smell to it; huge clouds skit over the horizon and over the A170 as it dissects the rolling flat countryside. The wind is buffeting her hair and the skirt of her mac as she stands holding the petrol pump’s handle, looking in through the window of an adjacent car where a plump baby is playing with his toes. I wonder if Maureen’s got a car seat we could have, she thinks. She smiles at the baby. A bairn. To have a bairn around the house again. She’ll get some of the boys’ old toys down from the loft to have in their lounge, for when Primrose brings the baby over.

She pays for her petrol and resists a Ginsters pasty, even though she’s ravenous. Better to save the money and make a sandwich back home. She drives back out onto the road, pulling down her visor against the low sun, shifting in her seat to ease the pressure on her bladder, and thinking about Primrose. Would any woman who took her place in her son’s affections disappoint as much as Primrose? Ann had had fantasies, she realises now, that a daughter-in-law would be the girl she never had. But Primrose, she tuts to herself, glancing in the rear-view mirror. She remembers wandering through Lipton market with her, pointing to a floral dinner set and saying ‘Ooh Primrose, isn’t that pretty?’ And Primrose had said, ‘I don’t know,’ in that blank way she had, and ‘I’m not much into household stuff.’ And she’d looked straight at her, in a way Ann half admired because it never evaded anything. Primrose. She seems to be not quite all there. Absent somehow. What had seemed like a salve for Max’s loneliness now seems a rather hasty mistake.

An hour and an interesting episode of
You and Yours
later, and desperate now for a wee, Ann slows the car at the first roundabout on the outskirts of Lipton. She has followed the A170 all the way, its villages strung along it like beads on a broken string. You knew them for what you needed and what they could give: firewood and liquorice at the garage outside Kirbymoorside, pork pies from Hunters in Helmsley. And here in Lipton, their nearest market town, well there was no end to its riches: Greggs for a sausage roll, the hairdressers for a rinse if you were over eighty, scented candles and chopping boards in Coopers, and of course, the Co-op, where Primrose works. Primrose and the baby inside her.

She thinks back to all those years ago, how they worried about Max, and just look at him now. She remembers Joe climbing into bed next to her, saying, ‘We’re never going to be shot of him. He’ll still be here when he’s fifty.’

She’d laughed and said, ‘I suppose we could move out.’

‘He’d find us,’ Joe had said, cuddling up to her under the
covers
.

That’s when she’d started the badgering – she blanches just thinking about it – telling Max he needed to ‘get a life of his own’.

‘Go out and meet some girls,’ she’d say to him, rough like, when he was getting under her feet, which was all the time.

She passes Coopers on her way out the other side of Lipton, onto the Marpleton road. The suburban houses peter out, giving way to vivid fields; hedgerows rustling with the grouse. The countryside up hard against them, especially in Marpleton, which had little in the way of entertainment except the Fox and Feathers. And that’s where it’d all started – for Max and Primrose. It was after Tony and Sheryl Crowther came up from Essex and took it over. She still thinks of them as newcomers, even though it was five years ago now. The village could talk of
nothing
else.

‘That’s a hard-bitten woman is that,’ Ann remembers whispering to Lauren, and Lauren had nodded energetically, looking over at Sheryl behind the bar.

‘Batten down your husbands,’ Lauren had said.

They’d started that quiz, the Crowthers, trying to rev the place up a bit and that was when Max started wearing his best shirt and kicking up a right stink if it wasn’t washed in time. Oof, and that deodorant of his, Lynx something. He’d spray it more freely than Round-up, so that she and Joe would waft their hands in front of their faces and grimace as he walked out of the front door. ‘Ladykiller,’ Joe’d say, winking at her.

She parks outside the farmhouse, slams the car door and races into the house and up the stairs to the bathroom.

When she comes back down the stairs it is slowly, her body relieved. She ambles into the lounge to clear away a couple of mugs she’d spotted there earlier this morning. She opens the curtains and jumps back.

‘Ooh god, you gave me a fright,’ she says. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out watching the tups with Max?’

Joe is sitting, round-shouldered, at the computer in the dark corner of the room.

‘Just doing some research,’ he says without looking round. He is squinting at the screen, then down at the mouse, trying to make a connection between the two. She looks over his shoulder. farmautotrader.co.uk. Joe’s answer to pornography. On the screen is a John Deere 5100m tractor. POA.

‘Price on application,’ she says. ‘Or as I like to call it, OMDB.’

He looks up at her.

‘Over My Dead Body,’ she says.

‘It’s got leather seats, climate control, telescopic mirrors. And power synchron.’

Ann is standing behind him, hands on hips. ‘Oh, well, why didn’t you say? If it’s got power synchron,’ she says. ‘What about bells and whistles – has it got those?’

‘There’s a forage harvester here for fifteen grand,’ says Joe. ‘If we got one of these, Max wouldn’t have to hire one every year. In fact, he might be able to hire it out – make some extra cash.’

Ann has flopped down into one of the armchairs. Strange to be in the lounge with Joe in the daytime. Wrong, somehow.

‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘but do we live on the same farm?’