Whirligig (13 page)

Dorcas tapped her lip with a forefinger. ‘When I was a girl there were still tinkers – gypsies, you might call them down south – living in caves up here.'

Claypole's bewilderment was taken by Dorcas to be incredulity.

‘Oh yes! They lived all up and down the peninsula, working on farms in the summer. And caves were the
perfect place. There are lots of them along the coast. You can't be moved on from a cave, and they were otherwise unused. But it was a bleak existence, I'm sure.
They
had beds of bracken and straw. I'm pretty sure they would have dried the bracken out first, though. I expect that's why your back hurts.'

Claypole nodded. She pressed a button on the side of her chair and shot upright again. She stared at Claypole.

‘Are you a bit of a gypsy, Claypole? A bit of a wanderer? Or are you just… as you said, lost?' Claypole's eyes widened. ‘What are you doing this afternoon? Shall we have some fun?'

Claypole now wondered whether he could run faster than Dorcas. He was fat, and she was a pensioner. It might be close.

‘Because,' she continued, ‘if you're just farting about with my oafish brother talking “wind”, then I have better things for you to do. I've got some manly stuff that needs doing around the garden, and it strikes me that you might need to connect a little. Up for it?'

Claypole smiled uncertainly.

Dorcas's garden, as Claypole learned over the following eight hours, was organic. She had developed, over the thirty-five years she had been in the house, her own fusion of the biodynamic method and the principles of permaculture for growing her own food. Claypole had heard of neither. By the time they were sitting down at supper, he had heard all about it and, much to his astonishment, he hadn't been bored for even a moment.

The day had gone by quickly. Claypole had ineptly dug a drain and lugged the pigsty from one corner of the pen to another. He had then been seconded to duties requiring less muscle, and they had worked together. They had picked raspberries, during which she taught him which insects were helpful and which she encouraged away from the raspberries by putting something nearby that was more attractive to the bugs but inedible to humans. The same detail had been given about the vegetables, and the other fruit. The same principles of balance, with none of the destructive artifice of what Claypole thought of as normal gardening, seemed to apply easily to everything in the garden. All he could remember now were a few phrases that stuck in his mind. ‘There's no such thing as a weed. Just a plant in the wrong place'; ‘Nothing in a garden should be wasted. It's all useful for something'; and ‘Don't get between a pig and his supper.' This last after Claypole had been catapulted into the mud, accompanied by Dorcas's throaty laughter.

The dinner itself was his reward, served to the accompaniment of Bach. They sat at her kitchen table in the warm evening light, eating pheasant and ham pie with dauphinoise potatoes, vegetables and two salads (carrot, raisin and pine nut; avocado, lettuce and cheese). The pheasant had been shot by Dorcas, and the pig (a half-sister of Claypole's sparring partner) raised on delicious slops from her kitchen and fruit from her trees. Almost everything else had been grown by her. Even the raisins were from her vines, and the avocados (small and nutty as they were) from her greenhouse. The cheese was from a farm across the loch, swapped for chutney. This was food as Claypole had never experienced. The tastes so fresh and bottomless, the smells so electric.
He was relieved when she had dismissed the idea of going to get the Land Rover with a stern ‘Tomorrow. You take the sofa.' He was delirious with physical tiredness and the purity of the indulgence.

‘Gardening is done all wrong by most people,' said Dorcas, waving her knife about with a fig on the end of it. ‘They priss about with flowers and chemicals, use too much equipment and additives bought from garden centres. And they
worry
. My God. Why would you
worry
about which plants are going to succeed and which will fail? It's all predetermined by the genetics and strength of the plant, the condition of the soil, the weather and the chaotic rules of natural selection. It is not your fault if your spuds have blight. It just happens.'

Claypole was nodding as he savoured a mouthful of powerful creamy cheddar with quince jelly, washed down with warm, dry cider.

‘There's not much point in trying to prevent it or mend it – you'll just do more damage to something else – usually the soil. Just move on, as they say. Have a turnip instead.'

‘Mm,' said Claypole, not doubting that Dorcas's cooking could turn even the tedious turnip into ambrosia.

‘The key to gardening is to do as little as possible. I know we've worked hard today, but really there's no point in growing your own fruit and veg if it's a ghastly slog and a tyranny. Just weave ten minutes of it into your day. It should be like cleaning your teeth. If it's four hours on a Saturday, it's going to wreck your back and ruin your week.'

‘I
am
a little stiff,' Claypole remarked, but he held no grudge.

‘Generally gardening actually saves me time.'

‘Nah. Really?'

‘My word, yes.' She leaned back in her chair. ‘Look, most people do a weekly shop for food, right? They come back from a soul-pilfering supermarket exhausted and irritated, and an awful lot poorer, with fifty plastic bags of over-engineered rubbish in vast amounts of packaging, and the whole thing has taken three hours and however many litres of petrol. I spend not more than two hours a week sorting out my food, and it's twenty yards from my back door. Keeps me fit, it's fun, and it… connects me with my plate.'

Claypole stiffened with doubt.

‘That sounds a bit ripe to you? Well, let me tell you, you have no idea of the joy and fun involved in eating a tomato when you've reared it yourself from a pup.'

‘I wouldn't know,' said Claypole.

‘It's not just food – it's like a cosmic swallow of one's own effort. It's laughing at Time.' She was stabbing the air as Johann Sebastian stuck his spurs into the orchestra to giddy them up a bit. ‘ “Yah!” you say. “I got you back!” For this moment, as I chew on this carrot, I defy the cosmic forces and I laugh at Death. I have ingested my own labour. I haven't exploited or inconvenienced anyone, I haven't had to give any of it away in taxes, or paid any heed to the Man. It's mine.'

Claypole watched as she refilled both of their glasses.

‘I know I'm a mad old goat, but it comes down to this…'

She paused, sipping gently. He watched her lips, as his mind drifted.

‘The environment is complicated. It's complicated, and it's very messy. But if you care, you have to get
involved. Like you're about to do.' She pointed at Claypole's chest. ‘You can't live in a city and hope everything's going to be OK. You have to go to the countryside, get busy and make yourself part of it. There is no such thing as
the
environment. There's just parts of it.'

‘Yeah,' he said. Now Claypole was looking at her hair. She had taken it out of its bun, and it was spilling down her neck, jigging and bobbing – as animated as she was.

‘Is that what you're doing here, Claypole, old bean?'

Once again, he didn't know how to answer.

‘Because if it is, you have chosen an excellent place to do it.'

Mr Bach finished his work wisely and poignantly, and they sat for almost a minute without speaking.

‘What the world needs,' said Dorcas gently, her eyes almost closed with thought, ‘is a heart attack.'

‘Eh?' said Claypole. The sinews of Dorcas's neck were straining back and forth as she spoke, creating valleys of soft flesh.

‘Well, they say that people who have survived heart attacks tend to live longer than they otherwise would because they sit up and pay attention to their lifestyle. The world has had an economic heart attack, and everyone is rushing around trying to solve the problem. If the climate had a heart attack – say, five years of drought in America, or the whole of Antarctica suddenly melting – we'd all sit up and pay attention. But the fact is, few people have really suffered yet from climate change.'

‘Mm,' said Claypole, distracted by the realisation that he had not taken one of Dr De Witt's pills for forty-eight hours now.

‘No one we know, anyway. We all still eat and we pay our mortgages, and life goes on. Some poor farmer drowns in Bangladesh and nobody gives a … Are you unwell?'

‘Yeah. No.' He sat upright and blinked. ‘Just a bit…'

‘Shall I open a window?'

‘Brr. Thanks.'

‘Better still,' she said, picking up her glass and slapping the table. ‘Let's go and watch the snooker.'

In the living room, the cider drum by his side, and surrounded by all the printed wisdom of the polymath Dorcas MacGilp, Claypole kept his eyes fixed on his host. While she was pronouncing at the television about the virtues of some older player's safety play, he wondered what older women think when they come across a younger man. They've seen all the idiocy before. They might find it charming, and they might not. But at least an older woman wouldn't take it personally and would recognise that it is just the way of the world. He looked at Dorcas's profile too as she watched the television intensely. There was more than the remnant of good looks there. She had preserved herself very well, on top of what he suspected were a genetic hand of cards that it would be hard to match. The lairds of Garvach had no doubt picked the prettiest and strongest girls on Loch Garvach for hundreds of years, and the result was Darwin's wet dream.

‘Are you a lesbian?' blurted Claypole. This surprised both of them, and they fixed eyes. There was a pause.

‘I was a late starter,' she said quietly. Then she smiled. ‘My first was at twenty-nine. Harriet Marriott. Stupid name. Lovely woman. Had a slight moustache. I think that's what I first liked about her. The moustache. We rented a cottage near Penrith and read each other
poetry. No sex, of course. We assumed that couldn't be done. This was the sixties, after all, and nice girls didn't know about that sort of thing. We just cuddled, made elderflower champagne and didn't think beyond the weekend.'

The room had taken on an atmosphere of breathless intimacy. Claypole waited a discreet moment, and then asked how the affair had ended. Dorcas gave a sigh before answering.

‘I thought I missed my previous boyfriend. I said I was going shopping in London and didn't come back. I wrote her a letter. Pretty cowardly really. The letters back from her dried up after she married a widowed diplomat called Charles Petty and moved to Corfu.'

The room breathed out. Dorcas continued.

‘Must have been a relief to change her name, I suppose. But Hetty Petty isn't a vast improvement.'

Claypole decided to remain quiet.

‘There were others. And men too… I'm too old now.'

‘Surely not. You're a very…' Claypole's sentence got caught in his throat. She looked back at the snooker. He took a sip of cider and shook his head. ‘What about… May I ask you about Coky?'

Dorcas didn't look at him.

‘Well, she was gay for a while…'

‘Oh, I didn't mean…' But he trailed off. ‘Really?'

‘One or two terms at university, I think. The only thing she could say about it was “women are no better at having honest relationships with women than men are.” I agreed. She's been out with a few men in the past, but… She doesn't seem to be able to get over her natural caution. She was careful only to pick nice ones – but then none of them were very interesting. I suppose lots of girls have that problem these days.'

‘These days?'

‘Well… in my day, girls just fell in with some chap who didn't look like a waiter when he wore a dinner jacket, and if they discovered that they both had a fondness for red setters, that was that. I didn't go that way, obviously, but a lot of my friends did.'

She looked into the fire as she continued.

‘They were all so young when they got married. So young. By the time they realised that there's a big old world out there, they couldn't remember how to be on their own.'

‘Brr.' Claypole too was staring into the fire now, cuddling his cider.

‘With her parents, it doesn't surprise me that she's…' Dorcas trailed off.

‘Yeah,' said Claypole, trying to scoff. Then he asked, ‘Why? What are her parents like?'

‘Her father is a yogi in Los Angeles. Never sees her, and hardly ever has. Too busy imparting the benefits of being unmaterialistic to Californians at 200 dollars an hour. Angus Straughan, Bonnie's husband, died some years ago. He was a thoroughly nice, very dull man, and sweet to Coky. Can't think what he was doing with my sister.'

‘I've met her,' said Claypole, his face registering disgust.