‘Well I’m not.’
‘Not what?’
‘Concerned about tidiness. Nor am I meaning to be rude.’
‘It just sounded that way then.’
‘Well if it did, I’m sorry.’ Amy does not sound sorry.
‘No offence,’ says Vi brightly.
‘What does David’s mother make of it all? That’s your boyfriend isn’t it? Who else is living at the farm?’
‘I don’t think she minds.’ Amy had not given a moment’s thought to what David’s mother thinks about her son being on the farm. ‘Why would she mind? For goodness’ sake, Dad, it’s his life! It’s not her business.’ She does not hide her scorn.
‘Oh isn’t it?’ The young are as self-satisfied as religious zealots, John fumes to himself. ‘You lot, you think you know it all…’
‘We’re living differently to all the…straight people. And we’re going to change the world, Dad; live in spiritual harmony with Nature and…all that.’ She’s tongue-tied, too angry to put her feelings into words and it’s humiliating. Everything she’s says sounds a bit vague.
She stands up. ‘I think we should go, Dad.’ Looking down, she realises with horror that there’s a gap at her bosom where the cardigan has pulled apart.
The day she travels back to Wyld Farm, she resists the temptation to ram the cardigan into the dustbin. Never know when it might come in handy. Anyway, it would be a waste of the world’s resources.
15
Parting the curtain with a finger, Maggie squints from a sleepy eye. It rains a lot in Somerset.
There’s a blissful stillness in the house. Perhaps it’s early? If she’d wound up the wristwatch her mother had given her as a Christmas present, she’d know the time but she refuses to be ruled by the clock. The bed socks David gave her on Christmas morning (their mother bought and wrapped them, she knows for sure, but it’s the thought that counts, David told her with a nudge) keep her cosy from toe to knee. Maggie pulls the duvet a little higher over her head.
It takes her a minute to fix on a New Year’s resolution. To make Simon fall in love with her; that’s too obvious and anyway, it seems to be happening already. Too work less hard. That’s more like it. The cottage would have completely the wrong vibe if it was fixed by people who weren’t totally positive at all times. Resentment would seep from the walls and ooze from the floor; bad karma. Maggie snuggles down into the bed and resolves to ignore all demands on her time today.
Falling in love with a person is one thing, but falling in love with a place, what does that mean? There is no body to moon over, no mouth to crave kisses from, no person to communicate with. The exhilaration and euphoria which invades a person in love is absent from the love of place. But that strong sense that ‘this is right’, that ‘this is as it should be’; this is the feeling when the place that resides within, which lifts and feed the spirit without, is cherished. This is how Amy feels when she gets off the train at Taunton and excitedly board the bus for Exmoor. Yet almost immediately she falls asleep. When she wakes sometime later, the bus is already speeding along what she thinks of as the ‘top road’. It’s not far before she’ll see the beech trees that stand like soldiers atop stone walls, guarding the soggy fields which plunges away behind them. The steep-sided combes where sheep are white slashes against the browning bracken. Yellow gorse flowers wink like sunbursts.
Skeins of mist scud across the landscape.
There is relief to be away, gone from the house where she first raised her head from the cot pillow on a wobbling neck, where her stubby legs became strong enough to bear her weight, where her first tottering steps took her barreling into the table where, a few years later, she sat to first form the letters that spelt her name and later to study for exams. Once a place of familiarity and comfort, her former home offers no future. She had hugged her father, promised to write and hurried away.
Stepping from the bus is like leaving an old world. Around her father’s house there are pavements and pylons. Here she is astonished by celandines and snowdrops which grow in the verge. She falls to her knees to cup their delicate heads in her fingers. The wind blows her hair into dancing fronds. The anxiety that has dogged her for days, clung like a spectre, slips away with the departing bus. She rummages in her bag for an apple.
The occasional vehicle that passes does so at great speed, the driver only glimpsing the girl they fly past. From out of the grey, first the sound, then the sight of a farmer on a tractor whirring by at a more sedate pace. Straw from the trailer, food for his animals, flies out behind him like a hail of golden arrows. Amy waits.
Eventually a motorbike stops on the other side of the road.
David calls her from the throbbing machine.
‘Ames! Come here, I’ve missed you. How was Christmas and your father and how did …?’
She runs over to her boyfriend. Tears prickle but she’s determined not to cry, not now, so instead she hums as she embraces him, a trick she learnt as a child. A tune that was playing at Vi’s house; Bing Crosby singing that terrible saccharine song about Christmas. A car speeds by the embracing couple; there’s the toot of a horn.
‘Your beard, David, you’ve grown a beard. You look, I don’t know, like a pirate! Oh God. I can’t wait to get home.’
She buries her head under his chin, her favourite spot, and whispers into his jumper. ‘David, can we call Wyld Farm ‘home’?’
Draughts no longer whisper through the cottage; the once-ill-fitting windows and doors sit snug in their frames. And while the floors of concrete and stone walls are cold, they are not damp. Bob insists the work
