In the Fold (17 page)

‘Only doesn’t mind?’ he said. ‘I’d have thought she’d be one way or the other, if the women I know are anything to go by. The women I know like to take a definite position. As a military tactic it doesn’t work, that’s what I’m always telling them. If you take a position you’re open to attack. You’re better off keeping on the move. I always wondered whether women liked a beard,’ he said, consideringly. ‘But I could never get mine to grow. Does it increase sensation? Does she tell you that?’

I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious fashion.

‘Oh, I see. That’s how it is. That’s how it is, is it?’ Paul looked around the featureless room impatiently. ‘Well, someone’s got to humour a sick old man – where’s Lisa? Why hasn’t she been in to see me?’

‘She doesn’t want to bring Isobel into the hospital,’ said Adam.

‘Why, does she think it’s catching, cancer of the dong? You see what I mean about protective parents,’ he said, to me again. ‘Have you been to their house? You have to take your shoes off before they’ll let you in. I feel like a horse with nothing on its hooves when I’m there. And my socks are always squiffy. That’s why Audrey won’t go there, you know. Her stiletto heels were soldered to her feet at birth. She’d go up in a puff of smoke if she ever took them off. Have you met Lisa? She’s a good girl really. She’s rather a solid girl. Very house-proud, isn’t she, Adam? Her father sells bathtubs.’

‘Jacuzzis,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never been in a jacuzzi, dad.’

‘The first Mrs Hanbury was fond of that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand it – it was like being boiled alive. And on the subject of hygiene, they’re an absolute breeding ground for germs – all sorts of people pile into them, you know, all together. You try to stretch your legs out and you find you’re playing footsie with the hairy calves of some overweight middle manager. Still, we’ve all got to earn our living, I suppose. Adam says he does rather well out of it. The problem is, you never know when that sort of craze will pass, do you? He might find himself out on his ear in a year or two, when people find some other way to waste their time and money. Do you see what I mean? It’s not like a farm, is it? You can never say, this is my patch of the earth, my place. This is where I have my being. You can’t say that about a bloody bathtub, can you?’

‘They’ve got a perfectly good patch of the earth,’ said Adam. ‘They own an eight-bedroom house in Northumberland with twenty acres of land.’

‘But it’s all in hock to the bathtubs! If the bathtubs go, so does the land!’

‘That’s how life is, dad. That’s how life is for most people. We’re not all as lucky as you.’

‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Paul. ‘The best luck I’ve had is to be given the good sense not to meddle with what I have. I could have ruined it in a million different ways – look at Don Brice! Look at Si Higham, driving around in that big jalopy with the white leather seats, pleased as punch with himself, and for what? For selling all his land to the highest bidder and turning Doniford into suburbia!’

Paul was becoming quite exercised – his wiry neck and chest were dark red where I could see around the collar of the white hospital garment. I picked up Hamish, who had sat beside him on the bed all this while virtually motionless, looking straight ahead with a superior expression on his face. This time Paul let me take him with an exasperated gesture.

‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,’ said Adam. ‘He wasn’t farming the land – he wasn’t using it for anything. Anyway, where are people supposed to live?’

‘If they’ve got nowhere to live then they shouldn’t have been born.’

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ said Adam calmly.

‘You people,’ said Paul, ‘you people don’t understand how to desire what is actually yours – you’re always scheming, the lot of you! Always dissatisfied! Even that layabout Brendon, turning the lodge into a chicken farm when he thinks I’m not looking – a bunch of hangers-on, a pack of vultures is what you are!’

I carried Hamish to the window and together we looked down at the car park, with its symmetrical rows of shiny, unpersoned vehicles.

‘No one’s scheming, dad,’ said Adam behind me. ‘Brendon’s doing the chickens as a way of being more financially independent, that’s all. And Caris is never here – you can hardly call her a vulture.’

‘I’ll call her what I like,’ said Paul morosely. ‘She’s been a great disappointment to me.’

‘As for me, I’m just trying to help you. I’ve taken a week off work to do the lambs – even Michael is here to help you.’

‘Why?’ snapped Paul. ‘Why haven’t you got your own lives to lead? Michael, haven’t you got a family of your own? Parents of your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where are they?’

‘They live in Surrey.’

‘What are they doing there?’ said Paul, as though there were something outlandish about it.

‘They’re doctors,’ I said.

‘Doctors – are they really? Both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose
they
don’t need much help then. I suppose they’re quite able to doctor on their own. Are they busy – out a lot? Don’t have time for you?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘And all they’ll be leaving you is their surgical instruments, I suppose, and the house in Surrey. Mind you, that could be worth something.’

‘I don’t expect them to leave me anything.’

‘Well, they probably will, but you’re a good boy anyway. The problem with my brood,’ he said confidentially, ‘is that they’ve come in to land a bit early. They all think I’m going to pop my clogs before I’m seventy – even Caris shelled out the money for the train fare as soon as she heard I was hospitalised.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam.

‘She wouldn’t miss it for the world! And nor would Brendon, if he could only work out how to get here. As for the eldest son, he hasn’t let me out of his sight in years – the heir presumptive, if you know what I mean. Mind you, there’s always the jacuzzi salesman to consider. They’re bad for the heart, you know, those things. Eight bedrooms and twenty acres in Northumberland, don’t forget. He could be taking his leave any day.’

In spite of myself, I laughed.

‘Tell me what your mother’s got the hump about, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul to Adam, who was putting his coat on.

‘I’d rather she told you herself. I don’t really understand what the problem is.’

‘Well, she can’t tell me if she doesn’t come.’

‘There’s a phone beside the bed, dad.’

‘I can’t talk to her on the telephone. I never could – she uses it as an instrument of torture.’

‘Something to do with money. She says she hasn’t got her allowance. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

Paul was silent. He held his head up in a soldierly fashion, as though bravely contemplating some doom-laden enterprise.

‘Tell Vivian to come in, will you?’ he said presently. ‘Tell the old girl to come in. Tell her I’m not too good. Put her in the car and bring her yourself if you have to. Will you do that for me?’

‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘She said she was coming anyway. She’ll probably be here before I even get a chance to speak to her.’

‘I don’t expect she will. Just do as I ask. Get the old girl in here where I can see her.’

‘It’ll probably be tomorrow rather than today.’

‘Make it as soon as you can, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul.

‘Has the consultant been in yet?’

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was an Asian fellow,’ said Paul. ‘Knew his stuff, though, I’ll say that for him,’ he added. ‘He said he came from Kerala in the south of India – a beautiful place apparently, he told me all about it, white buildings and trees, hot as hell. The Christians colonised it in the fifteenth century. Now he’s living in a suburb of Taunton. I said to him, if you know what beauty is, how can you stand to live without it? And he said, “Beauty is secondary, Mr Hanbury.”’ Paul put on an accent to relay the consultant’s sentiments. ‘I said to him, don’t they need consultants in Kerala? Yes, he said, they do. So I said, well, tell me why you’re here then. He looked a little taken
aback, you know, a little superior. Then he started yakking on about skills and training and equipment, and suddenly I thought, here it is again! Selfishness! Greed! So I said, admit it, you’re here because they pay you more. And he admitted that he was!’

Paul gave a bark of laughter and sat back against his pillows with his arms folded. His expression was morbid.

‘When did he say you could come home?’ said Adam.

‘Monday. Tell Vivian that too. Tell her not to bring out the fatted calf. Tell her I’m on a hospital diet. Have you experienced Vivian’s cooking?’ he asked me. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The first Mrs Hanbury wasn’t bad, but she never ate the things she cooked, which used to make you wonder what she’d put in it.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Adam.

‘Don’t forget, will you? You’ve got to bring Vivian in. Actually in, do you hear?’

‘Goodbye, Paul,’ I said.

I held out my hand and Paul grabbed it and pulled me nearly on to his chest. Hamish, whom I was holding, clung to my neck as we went over and Paul put his arms around my neck too, so that I lay across the bed like a fallen tree being strangulated by vines.

‘Kiss me,’ said Paul gruffly, and I obeyed by kissing his leathery cheek. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. He released my neck and gripped my face between the vice of his hands instead. ‘It’s rather soft, your fur,’ he said. ‘Do you put anything on it?’

‘No,’ I said, with difficulty.

‘I never petted mine enough,’ he said hotly, into my ear. ‘You’ve got to pet them and stroke them every day, then they’ll never give you any trouble. Every day, do you hear? The day you forget is the day they’ll get it in their minds to turn against you!’

He released my head and turned to Hamish, who was regarding him close to with a certain alarmed curiosity. He
ruffled Hamish’s fair hair, before making an unexpected and not inaccurate attempt at Hamish’s bell noise.

‘Goodbye, fellow-me-lad,’ he said, laughing loudly.

In the car on the way back to Doniford I kept turning around and talking nonsense to Hamish and tickling his toes as he liked them tickled, aware as I did so that I was harbouring a feeling of guilt about what suddenly seemed to me to be the unsatisfactory state of his circumstances. As we drew into The Meadows, a mild feeling of oppression settled over me. In the flat, late-afternoon light which cast no shadows, unstirred by wind or rain, there was something actually inhuman about the place. I noticed that several of the houses had caravans parked in their driveways, white and rounded, like the babies of the stolid, red-brick adults, as though the big dwelling had mechanistically spawned the small. The caravans were the only things here that were neither square nor triangular, though I supposed that if they stayed long enough they might become so. The houses stared dumbly out of their windows.

‘What I like about this place,’ said Adam, steering us with conspicuous smoothness around the tarmac, ‘is the fact that it doesn’t remind me of anything.’

‘On the phone you described it as hilarious,’ I observed.

‘Well, it is, in a way,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be a snob about it.’

We passed a group of children in spotless tracksuits and baseball caps, who lifted their white faces to us as we went by.

‘I’m not saying we’re going to stay here for ever,’ said Adam. ‘But for now it actually suits us really well. At least it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.’

I heard the voice of Lisa speaking through this remark.

‘With some of the houses they’re building now, they’re trying to make them look as though they haven’t just slapped them up. I think that’s worse, in a way. Actually, the houses
here have gone up fifteen, twenty per cent since we bought, and that’s partly because you’re not paying for some mock-Georgian porch over your front door, or a carport with a cupola. You’re paying for the location and the outside space. There are houses in Doniford now that are twice the size of ours with half the garden. Lisa gets itchy feet sometimes,’ he added presently.

‘Does she?’

‘She’d like more, you know, grandeur. But we’re just going to have to wait. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. This is a pretty solid investment.’ We both contemplated the house, in whose driveway we were now parked. ‘Tony’s offered me a job,’ Adam disclosed, with his face sideways to mine. ‘Lisa’s father. He’s offered me a share in the business.’

‘Are you going to take it?’ I said, surprised.

‘I don’t know. Lisa’s pretty keen. She’d like to be near her family. I can’t quite see myself up north but in a way it’s a fantastic opportunity. Tony’s thinking of retiring. They’ve got a place in Portugal, you know, and they want to spend more time there. So I’d basically be running the show. It would mean giving up my practice, of course,’ he said, ‘though I don’t feel particularly sentimental about that. It would be a relief, actually. I just did it for something to do until dad needed me to take over the farm. But that’s all changed a bit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well –’ Adam rubbed his face with his hands sheepishly. ‘I’ve been going through some of the accounts this week. I was just being nosy, actually. Dad’s never really said anything specific about what the farm earns – there’s just been, you know, this impression of money, but in fact he’s been running it virtually at a loss. He makes five, six thousand a year, most of it from subsidies. It’s incredible – I don’t know quite how he’s done it. The new barns alone cost a fortune, plus the tractor and all the new fencing. In fact, if he sold his whole herd he wouldn’t begin to cover the cost. I suppose Vivian must have paid for them.’

We sat there in silence for a moment.

‘Anyway, it did start me thinking, you know, about Egypt, about what it actually was. I mean, dad’s always talked about it as a working farm, as something that had to be nurtured and worked at. Pretty much from the minute we could walk we had to be out there helping, with the sheep and the hay harvest and the fencing, and hearing him talking about it all day and night, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a bit of a con. You know, whether he didn’t use it as a way to control us. I mean, if it isn’t a farm then what is it? It’s just a nice house, that’s all. A nice house.’