The Heart of the Country (11 page)

‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said.

‘I have my own contacts,’ said Bernard.

‘I doubt that,’ said Arthur, and drove off.

‘You shouldn’t have said that about him and Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, back in the caravan, taking off the kimono. ‘It was only I saw her go in there one Tuesday.’

‘Hit the nail on the button, if you ask me,’ said Bernard. ‘Good to know the wrinklies are still at it. There’s hope for us yet.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Flora.

The general hopelessness of their lot was Bernard and Flora’s theme song. They sang it happily as the sun rose and the sun set. Even when they were both working, him on a tractor or down the school gate selling smack (only once: he got frightened), she up at the Harrises or doing school dinners (only for a week: she couldn’t stand the grease and heat), they saw themselves as irrevocably and permanently unemployed. They had their little home and it was knee-deep in flowers. It was better than a cottage any day because all you had to do was move it an inch here or an inch there and you didn’t have to pay rates. They got by; they had each other: they got by very nicely.

There was a screech of Citroën brakes. Better to make friends than enemies. Besides, he wanted another glimpse of Flora.

‘Would you like a job?’ Arthur asked Bernard, who appeared naked in the caravan door.

‘Who, me? I’ve got a job. I’m totting.’

‘Totting’s part time. This is a proper job.’

‘What sort of proper job?”

‘Down Avon Farmers. New trading company. A hundred and twenty a week.’

‘What’s the catch?’

‘Hard work,’ said Arthur. ‘Long hours. Holding your tongue and minding your own business.’

‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ said Bernard.

‘A hundred and thirty,’ said Arthur, ‘and I don’t know why I bother.’ But a sharp bright boy was needed up at Avon Farmers and Arthur knew a sharp bright boy when he saw one. Nor did he want too many insinuations, let alone congratulations, floating around the countryside. He had his wife to think about.

‘Perhaps you’ll bring up that chair some time,’ said Arthur. ‘Bit of old rubbish but might be worth something.’

‘I
will,’ said Bernard.

And that’s how Bernard got the job at Avon Farmers – where presently he was to meet up with Natalie – by knowing too much and speaking his mind.

Arthur drove on to meet Angus, who was looking over the new Avon Farmers Trading Estate. This consisted of a corrugated iron barn and a group of Portakabins at the end of a farm track, to the north of Glastonbury Tor. Here Avon Farmers – a nebulous grouping of farmers, farm suppliers and businessmen – were to sell cheap imported agricultural chemicals and foodstuffs. By the time the Ministry inspectors got to hear of the existence of the warehouse, it would have evaporated, or, if it proved very successful, have moved on to the next county. Such subterfuge would not have been necessary had unreasonable EEC regulations not prevented the sale of certain fertilizers, growth promoters, hormones, insecticides and fungicides – used to advantage and without harming a soul in various parts of the world – to the detriment of British farmers. As it was, the home producers deserved the best deal they could get, and Avon Farmers meant to see they got it.

‘Time you got a new car, Arthur,’ said Angus, speaking from his Quattro.

‘I’m fond of the old Citroën,’ said Arthur. ‘They don’t make cars like this any more. I’ve found us a new lad. Lives up at the tip in a caravan with the most beautiful girl in the world.’

‘Who? Not Natalie Harris?’

‘Not Natalie,’ said Arthur, severely.

‘Lucky she’s got you to lean on,’ said Angus. ‘In this the hour of her distress.’

‘Me?’ said Arthur, surprised.

‘So they say,’ said Angus.

‘Not any more,’ said Arthur. ‘She’s gone right off me.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Angus. ‘I wouldn’t want to tread on your toes.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’

‘There’s a rather good piece coming up in Friday’s auction, Arthur. I’d appreciate your holding back.’

‘Say no more. ’Tis done. What?’

‘A davenport. Original Waring and Gillow. Just for a friend. A personal favour. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’

‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Angus, and your sprats are other people’s mackerels. How’s the Quattro?’

‘Fantastic! How’s the Citroën? Really? Sounds a bit clanky, to me.’

‘It’s like the wife,’ said Arthur. ‘Wearing out, but I’m fond of her.’

The wind was chilly. A too wide, bonded lorry crept up a too narrow lane towards them.

‘What’s that?’

‘The stuff from Brazil, with any luck,’ said Angus. ‘Now we can really get going.’

‘I suppose it’s safe,’ said Arthur.

‘Good God,’ said Angus, ‘don’t be such an old woman. DDT did us fine for decades. It doesn’t change overnight. But look at the fuss they make now!’

‘Give my love to Natalie when you see her,’ said Arthur.

‘I certainly will,’ said Angus.

Well, a nod is as good as a wink to a county auctioneer, and so Natalie was sold to Angus against a return unspecified, but one day to be claimed. So the world proceeds, by one good turn, balanced by another. And the local insects bit
the dust and calves and piglets got a load of growth promoters which fed carcinogens into the food chain, but who were they to care? They were too busy balancing their sudden, new, startling weight on the already too flimsy slats in the intensive care unit. And their owners got richer by the good, lean, popular kilo.

Redemption

When I try to write about Flora I keep wandering off into the villainy of men. The point is that pretty young women are expendable. Nobody likes them, except the men who are currently involved with them. Their mothers envy them, their fathers are disturbed by them, their plainer siblings resent them, their teachers dislike them. They have a hard time growing up, and a hard time when grown. A pretty girl driving a Mini will be driven off the road by lorry drivers as a matter of course. What’s she doing on the road? Driving is
work,
not entertainment. Professors refuse to give them degrees, in case they’re accused of prejudice. Their husbands don’t trust them. Everyone knows what a pretty girl is
for,
that’s the trouble. If Flora had been plainer, Bernard might have married her and not treated her like a skivvy and a slave. (Plain girls marry earlier, statistically, than pretty ones.) Look at her now, as I do, cleaning Natalie’s floor long after Natalie had the wherewithal to pay her for so doing. Pretty, and therefore persecuted! Flora’s piled-up, streaked-in, frizzed-out hair has toppled halfway down her creamy cheek. She keeps trying to push it up again with her delicate white fingers, and has put a streak of grime across that selfsame creamy cheek. This is, I admit, beginning to get to me. How sad that these things must pass! The creamy cheek one day will be no longer; as will that female movement of the hands through the hair, to puff and prettify. Sad, I say – yet that part of me given over to jealousy and envy is not sorry, but glad, that all things flesh are mortal, especially the flesh of the prettier members of the great universal sisterhood.

‘I’m not going to work here for nothing,’ said Flora, crossly, putting away the mop, helping Natalie extract Angus’ dead hen, feathers and all, from the freezer. ‘Why should I wash your floors, if not for money? Bernard says if you like he’ll come and take away a couple of chairs in lieu.’

‘Those chairs cost eighty-five pounds each two months ago. I only owe you fifteen pounds.’

‘You should have bought antiques,’ said Flora. ‘Then they’d have had a re-sale value.’

‘Harry liked new things,’ said Natalie. These days she talked about Harry whenever she could. She thought she should. He’d been gone for three weeks. She had told the children he’d gone to Spain on business, and that there was trouble getting money through. That’s why Ben wouldn’t have a new briefcase for his books and Alice six new hair slides. She thought Alice believed her but that Ben did not. She’d told them they were changing schools at half term and Alice had turned white and said nothing and Ben had flushed and thrown a book at her and said he hated her.

‘Always a mistake to do what a man likes,’ said Flora now, as if she knew everything in the world. ‘They get bored, if they have everything their own way.’

‘So it
seems,’ said Natalie. Why was she confiding in the help? She regretted it, now.

‘And he just walked out without a word!’ said Flora. She felt like Natalie’s younger sister, which was why she kept coming up to Dunbarton and working for no money. ‘Aren’t men pigs. But I can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.’

‘If I was someone different I expect I would have,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’m me.’

‘You don’t do much screaming or shouting,’ said Flora.

‘There’s no one to hear me,’ said Natalie, sadly, and apart from Flora, there was indeed no one. Only Angus, who had asked himself to dinner, out of the blue, to eat his chicken. It proved impossible to pluck the feathers from a deep-frozen hen, but Flora offered to at least hack off the head with a chopper before she left.

‘You won’t have the nerve, Mrs Harris,’ she said and Natalie accepted the offer with relief. She had only ever bought oven-ready birds.

The heavy knife whacked down upon the creature’s neck, stretched as it was across the chopping board, head dangling, and a frozen globule of blood flew across the room and landed upon the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

‘I never liked that picture,’ said Natalie. ‘Although I know I’m supposed to. Could I ask you something, Flora?’

‘Ask away.’

‘Did you steal my jewellery?’

‘No.’

‘Then he did it,’ said Natalie. ‘The bastard,’ and she picked up a cup and threw that at the sunflowers. The cup broke and the picture fell off the wall. The return of rage, as I say, marks the beginning of recovery. It was at that point that Natalie stopped walking round like a zombie and thereafter flustered and wept and stormed and went round with red eyes and a haggard face like any other wife left suddenly with no money and the children. It takes years to recover properly, of course, before you can assume that because you woke bright eyed
and calm to the day, you will continue thus until its end, without suffering a fit of melancholy, rage, distress, remorse, jealousy or some other unpleasant emotion. One in every three marriages ends in divorce. It happened to Natalie, it happened to me, it had happened to most of us on the carnival float that night – and all agree, all we have in the end are our friends.

The hen lay divided, gently thawing. Disgusting, really, the way people eat animals. I can never work out what stops them from eating each other. It would save so much trouble and hassle, and would efficiently recycle essential nutrients. Our agricultural land would be allowed to restore itself, and cease being the mere dull base for chemical fertilizers on which our crops are grown. For that is what the English soil has become. This whim – and it is nothing more – which obsesses humankind, that it is morally allowed to mass-produce animals in order to devour them, but morally disallowed to eat its own dead, will be the end of us.

Be all that as it may, saner, nicer and less cannibalistic people than me began to turn their heads to the sun the day Natalie threw a cup at Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

Improvement

Sally went home from work, expecting to open her front door and see, as usual, Val in his armchair staring into space, with an assortment of pills and ointments beside him, the television not even on and the
Guardian
flung into a corner in disgust. But that day she opened her front door and found her husband up a ladder re-pasting wallpaper; the fire was burning, the windows were open and there were no pills in sight. When she came into the room, Val got down off the ladder, crossed to her, pecked her cheek, and relieved her of her shopping and took it into the kitchen. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘The pain went,’ he said. ‘I think my Mars passed out of opposition to my Jupiter.’

‘I don’t understand that,’ she said.

‘We were mad enough to move to the West Country,’ he said, ‘instead of somewhere rational, so what’s the point of fighting. We’ll live as the natives do. We’ll believe in astrology and I’ll join Scientists Against the Bomb and have a CND sticker on the car.’

‘There’s a laser printing firm starting up in Street,’ said Sally. ‘One of the parents told me. You could try there for a job.’

She shouldn’t have pushed her luck; she knew as soon as she’d spoken. (You have to watch your words, if you’re living with a depressive.) But Val didn’t react badly at all.

‘I might well do that,’ was all he said. ‘Find out the address, will you?’

And as for Pauline and Gerard, they had their best day ever in The Tessen and, after closing up, took Jax out for a walk, as had become their custom.

‘I still think bread at 90p the loaf is outrageous,’ said Gerard. ‘But I suppose if people want to buy it one shouldn’t stop them.’

Jax nosed and snuffed amongst spring grasses. Rain had been falling: the sun suddenly slanted from the west, out from under a line of heavy grey clouds onto wet new foliage, and everything was brilliantly, almost unbearably, acid green: the colour quivered all around for five minutes or so, subduing even Jax so that he returned to trot at their heels.

‘Growing old doesn’t matter,’ said Pauline. ‘Not even growing old and childless. All this remains. We’re just part of it: a product of it.’

Her husband tucked his arm in hers, without comment, and presently the colour scale returned to normal, and Jax took off again. Sometimes in the evening he would look melancholy and stare reproachfully at his new owners, and turn his head away even from Good Boy chocolate drops, and then they imagined he was missing the Harris household, but for the most part he was lively, cheerful and rewarding. Pauline fed him with high sausages and ham scraps when Gerard wasn’t looking: and Gerard the same, when Pauline wasn’t. Since Jax tended to be, if anything, underfed in their anxiety for his health, he did very well by these furtive arrangements.