Andrew tamped a bootlace of tobacco into a Rizla paper, working the calloused fingers around the shape. A match flared, and tobacco smoke drifted up to the ceiling. ‘I’d recognize the landmarks he talks about in my sleep.’
‘And you’ve nothing else on Jack?’
‘No.’
Agnes made more notes. ‘Sometimes memory is the only source. We’ll have to ask around. I suppose he might have moved on after the war. Perhaps Mary didn’t come back and he no longer wanted to be here -’
Andrew cut in. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, tapping the table to underscore the point. ‘He would have stayed here. He wouldn’t have abandoned the farm. Never.’
The chair screeched along the floor and Penny got to her feet. With a gesture that Agnes was not sure how to interpret, she dumped her coffee mug in the sink. An awkward silence followed, which Agnes endeavoured to fill. ‘Could I see round the farm, if you’re not too busy?’
She felt the other woman’s eyes fixed on her back as Andrew led her across the yard to the cattle-pens. Penny had lent her a pair of boots, which were too small, and she couldn’t help thinking that Penny would be taking pleasure in the thought of her cramped feet.
To ease the pressure on her toes, she leaned on the railing of the first pen and savoured a pleasing pungency of cattle and warm straw, pulsing hide, muddy hoof and a base note of disinfectant.
Andrew pushed open the gate. ‘They’re raised on strictly traditional methods. That means they can grow at their own pace and without stress. I try to be totally organic. Sometimes I’m forced to use antibiotics when they’re ill, but absolutely no growth hormones.’
Agnes told the animals how lucky they were. Andrew tapped a warm flank. ‘You are, aren’t you, my beauties? I keep ‘em in family groups. Aunts and cousins…’
‘Have you always farmed?’
‘Always. Originally my father had a big place up in Yorkshire, then we came here.’ He caressed the ear of the beast nearest to him. Little feathery strokes. ‘It’s in the blood.’ The phrase was heavy with private meaning. A little puzzled, Agnes nodded. ‘Along with other things,’ he added hastily, and changed the subject. ‘Let me show you the rest of the farm. The weather’s clearing and you have to seize the moment with the moor. I should explain that I never use chemicals. You know that on some of the bigger farms the soil is technically dead? Eco-death. It doesn’t happen here.’
‘I did a piece on it once.’
He sent her a shy half-smile of approbation.
Together, they walked up to the north field and Andrew pointed out a cluster of granite buildings on the moor. ‘That’s one of the oldest farms in the area. Much older than here. Bits of it date back to the thirteenth century.’
Good camera shot. Agnes peered at the solid grey shapes, and the green and duns of the moor into which they were set. A silent, ancient setting.
One eyebrow arched quizzically, he turned to her. ‘I’d recognize it in my sleep.’ He pushed aside a petrified waterfall of brambles to let Agnes pass. ‘Over there…’ Andrew pointed to the road snaking as perimeter around the farm, and Agnes knew that the whole point of the tour had been to lead her to this spot.
He was saying, ‘There’s where Arcadian Villages propose to build stage one of the estate. Stage two is planned for later and will reach up to the garden of the farmhouse. In all, a hundred and fifty houses.’
She felt his bitterness and anger, as sharp as the wind that was blowing away the rain. ‘I know a little of how you feel. I had someone trying to buy up my house. I can’t tell you how angry I felt.’ She remembered the hot rush of words as she had told Julian Knox that her house was not on offer. ‘So what is happening here exactly?’
He shrugged. ‘The council has turned down the initial planning application but we had a letter yesterday to say that it’s gone to a planning appeal, which will be heard in June. If we win, it will then go before the Environment Secretary and we can spin it out.
They were clever, these planners. They had a nose for the right setting. Agnes could see that. Situated where it was, close to the road, Andrew’s farmland was the obvious place to site Exbury’s overspill. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with real distress.
‘They think I’m a pushover,’ Andrew said, more to himself than Agnes. ‘The capitalist pushing aside the small man. They can think again.’
The shyness and taciturnity were deceptive, for this was a man who was preparing to fight. And why not? She sneaked a look at his profile. Under the wind-scoured complexion, a fire obviously burned and people with a mission were, sometimes, magnetic: they had a way of drawing you in. Anyway, why should his carefully built-up farm be under threat? Agnes wanted to shout, ‘I’m with you.’ Then she felt rather stupid.
The wind had swung round and she buttoned up her jacket. The collar scratched damply at her neck. He let the bramble fall back into place, brushed against her and again she caught the faint scent of the farm.
‘What are those?’ she asked, indicating a series of white stands under the hedge.
He barely glanced at them. ‘My bees.’
As she drove past the oaks on her way home, Agnes glanced in the driving mirror. Hands stuffed into his pockets and shirt cuffs flapping, Andrew Kelsey was rooted to the ground in the yard, gazing up to the north field, which rolled out under the moor. Tense and intent, his pose had a monolithic quality.
It was late afternoon when Andrew returned home for tea. Penny did not look up from her magazine, but said, ‘She’s pretty and all that, but I don’t think she could cook for a moment.’
‘Probably not,’ said Andrew.
‘She’d be no good as a farmer’s wife.’
‘That’s lucky, then, as I don’t think there’s any question of it.’ He drank the tea. ‘Pen, if I nip down to the pub could you look in on the calves?’
‘Sure,’ she said.
It was not until he was ordering the beer in the company of his mate, Jim, that it struck Andrew that Penny had been quick to say yes. Usually, requests for pub slots required plea bargaining on a grand scale.
The weather had finally cleared, and the moon dominated the sky when Andrew drove back to Tithings, up the potholed road which, in turn, climbed past the oak clumps towards the moor. The axe he kept in the back of the van rattled against the tool box and he thought, Blast. There was always something that needed doing that he had not got round to, something he had not checked up on or put away.
It was old, old land, and demons raged over it. A fertile crucible, with blood-red soil, bisected by hidden lanes and drenched hedgerows. The wind that had blown all afternoon and evening stirred the oak branches as he passed.
Upstairs in the stuffy main bedroom of the farmhouse, the alarm clock ticked away in the dark. Andrew pulled back the bedcovers and encountered the patchwork quilt, made by Penny’s mother. This was strange. Always, without fail, Penny removed it from the bed and folded it carefully. He put out a hand, felt across the quilt for the warm hump of Penny and found nothing.
He snapped on the light. The bed was empty and so was the room. There was a note on the pillow, which he snatched up. ‘I’ve left you,’ Penny had written, ‘for Bob, who wants me. You don’t and you never have. I’ll fetch my things another time. Good luck with the fight.’
Andrew lurched into the bathroom and was violently sick.
When he finally managed to drop into a twitchy sleep, Andrew dreamed of Jack. He pictured him, tall and short-sighted, ranging the moor and thinking of Mary. He was a man who would have known how to calculate time and distance from the sun and moon, a man whose power and presence were growing as Andrew wrote him into the letters and prepared to deceive as many people as possible to save his farm.
Who sows a field or trains a flower
Or plants a tree, is more than all.
5
