Maggie ignores him. Instead she kneels down to unfurl a carpet. Though its colours are faded, the twisting repeated patterns remain distinctive. ‘This is cool. It would go in the sitting room.’
‘There is something between you and Simon, isn’t there?’ Julian persists.
Maggie glares at the floor. Has her brother been gossiping? It would be impossible to explain her and Simon’s relationship to anyone else. Sometimes they sleep together, sometimes they don’t. They do not talk of love and they don’t own each other. ‘We’re friends,’ she says firmly, ‘and maybe more one day.’
When Amy and David return, a trailer is fetched and everyone helps to load it up with furniture. The white leather sofa, two comfy chairs (later they saw off the legs so the seats are nearer the floor), a squash leather pouf and a glamorous chaise-longue. Plenty of places to stretch out, essential for the laid-back life they plan on. Carpets, two cupboards, a wardrobe and an extraordinary length of embroidered silk to hang on the wall. A kitchen table and chairs. Bedsteads and mattresses for three bedrooms.
When there’s a semblance of order, they light the oil lamps, roll a joint and listen to Mudlark. It saves them having the quibble over who is going to have the single room and the single bed. Everyone knows it will be Maggie.
When she’s taken Daisy back to the field, Amy walks on to a place she has found where the land dips into a gentle bowl. She spreads out her coat and yields to its comfort. Curled up like a comma, her ear to the ground, she listens attentively as though she might hear the earth breathing. Grass presses up to her gaze. Peeking between the blades, she pushes her eyes onwards into the dark places beyond, imagines she has shrunk so small that she can slip effortlessly beneath the towering columns of green to a place of quiet solace. The alarming pulse of blood thumping through her head subsides. As the evening light drops and the world exhales, her anxiety dwindles.
She thinks of Seymour. Since that night in the pub, they have had little contact. Her bruised heart, craving connection, had been wakened by his kindness and attention, her spirits soothed by his support. But she was wrong, it appears, to assume this would continue. Seymour has been tied up in London, busy with friends or work. He has not visited Wyld Farm in weeks. The link, if they had one, is broken; perhaps it was never there?
She drifts back, back to her girlhood when, if she upset by the careless treatment by a friend or a teasing gossip at school, she would seek the solace of her mother’s lap. Soft as grass, her mother’s lap. And Shirley would thread her fingers through her daughter’s hair and run them, rhythmic as breath, to coax away the terrors and the tears.
She must do this for herself now. Rising slowly to her feet, Amy wraps her coat around her and tucks her hair into her hat. She meanders slowly back towards the farmhouse, the place where she must find the ease that she craves.
19
Mrs Morle still charges Seymour for three hours of cleaning a week. Though Julian and his friends live in the cottage, that-girl-Amy still uses the farmhouse kitchen for jam-making and beer-brewing and vegetable-freezing. Needs a thorough tidy-up, for the girl doesn’t seem to notice when the sugar drips or when bottling the beer leaves rings on the table. She drifts around as though she owned the place, her long skirts hemmed in mud from the garden. She’s getting loopier by the day, concludes Mrs Morle as she stirs oatmeal into a bowl of blood; she’s heard her talking to the cabbages.
Now the girl has asked the boys to relieve themselves in a tin can she’s put by in the yard. Whatever next? At least she hasn’t asked me to do it, thinks Mrs Morle, because I would flat refuse. It’s to make a ‘plant feed’, the girl explained, from urine and herbs she’s bought from her hero horticulturalist a man called Henry Doubleday. Load of tosh.
For the past two weeks it’s been overcast. But today a weak sun shines through Mrs Morle’s windows: goodness, they need cleaning. The builder has almost finished painting the outside of Bramble cottage. He’s working with that lad with the stutter. They’re chat while they dip their brushes in pink-tainted orange, the colour most of the cottages round here are painted if they’re bought by outsiders. Ludicrous what these fools will pay for a second home and the locals only too glad to take the money and escape to a new semi near the shops.
Tonight Mr Stratton is having a party. Mrs Morle hopes it won’t be too noisy or go on too late. Lynn has to get up on a Saturday and work until lunchtime even if that lot can sleep in. She adds spice to the blood mixture. Two piglets slaughtered yesterday for spit-roasting over a fire for the party guests. Cream turns the mixture pink. She spoons the congealing slop into a piece of animal intestine, crams her fingers into the flabby membranes and makes it bulge and become stiffened like…Mrs Morle blushes. There’s no one to know what she is thinking.
Blood pudding is one of Mrs Morle’s favourites and even if her apron looks like she’s committed a murder, it’s worth it for the rich aromatic taste; like eating iron.
Yesterday there was a terrible scream. Mrs Morle had assumed it was one of the animals sensing its end was nigh. Turned out to that girl Maggie ‘meditating’ in the barn where the pig man started the killing. He hadn’t seen her sitting cross-legged behind a hay bale and no wonder. What was ‘meditating’ anyway? Mrs
