Paul went to make himself a drink. In the long, low stone-flagged kitchen, built like a fortress against the weather, the dark was thickening while light still blazed at the deep-recessed windows; an orange sliced on the table scented the air. He tried not to think about how he had neglected Pia: it was pointless, a self-indulgence, no use to her. In his study he poked around in the boxes he had brought from Evelyn’s room. Certain objects as he lifted them out brought back the strong flavour of his childhood: a china biscuit barrel with a wicker handle, a varnished jewellery box that played a tune when the lid was opened. These had been set aside from use in their sitting room at home, almost like religious icons, in a cabinet with glass-fronted doors; packed together in the box, they still seemed to hold faintly the smell of the green felt that had lined the cabinet shelves, though the cabinet had been left behind years before, when Evelyn first moved.
At the bottom of one box were copies of his own books – the one on Hardy’s novels, which had been his PhD thesis; the one on animals in children’s stories; his last one, on zoos. He had given them to his mother as they were published, and she had displayed them proudly on her shelf, assuring him that she read them, although he could only imagine her processing the pages dutifully before her eyes, relieved when she reached the end as if she had completed some prescribed course of improvement, opaque to her.
The land behind Tre Rhiw sloped down to the river: first the garden, then the scrubby bit of meadow where the goats were fenced in and Elise kept her chickens and grew some vegetables. When they had first moved in, their property had bordered three small fields belonging to a couple who had grown too old for farming: they only kept a couple of superannuated horses and a donkey, to eat down the grass. Those old fields were mounded with the ancient hemispherical ant heaps found on land not broken by heavy machinery, their clumps of hazel scrub were cobwebbed with lichen, the tussocky grass blew with toadflax and cranesbill and cornflowers in spring and summer.
When the old man died, and the woman moved to live with her daughter in Pontypool, their house with its land was bought up by Willis, a farmer on the other side of the village, who ripped up whole lengths of ancient hedgerow to make the three fields into one, ploughing up the hazel scrub and the ant heaps. Paul had confronted him, ranting, threatening him with legal action, although there were probably no laws against what had been done. Elise said it was a fait accompli, they might as well let it go, there was no point in getting on the wrong side of Willis, they all had to live together. Nothing anyway could ever restore the hedges that had gone, which had probably been centuries in the growing. Since then, Willis seemed always to be spreading chicken shit on the field, or spraying with weed-killer, whenever they had a summer party out of doors: Elise was sure he only did it because Paul had hassled him. Apparently he wasn’t popular in the village. Willis was English, he had married a local girl.
Elise said Paul should ask Willis’s son whether Pia had been in contact. He put it off for a few days, but when there was still no news of her, reluctantly one morning he walked over to Blackbrook. It had been a mouldering old place among ancient overgrown apple trees, mossy roof slates thick as pavings, the rooms inside unchanged in half a century. Willis had stripped it back to the stone, put in new windows with PVC frames, replastered ceilings tarred nicotine-brown from cigarette smoke, cemented white sculptured horse-heads on the gateposts, fixed his Sky satellite-dish high on the wall. Its blandness and nakedness made it seem unreal to Paul, like a building in a dream or a film. As he crossed the concreted expanse of the yard, he saw that Willis was running the engine of a tractor, down from the air-conditioned cab, absorbed in listening to it: a sandy, stocky, huge-handed man, features almost obliterated under his freckles.
– There’s a snag in the bastard, he said. – It’s catching somewhere.
– Is James around?
– What’s he supposed to have done?
– He hasn’t done anything. I want to ask him a favour.
Willis tipped his head at the interior of the huge corrugated barn. – Hosing down. Don’t spoil your shoes. He doesn’t do me any favours.
Picking his way past dungy water streaming in the concrete runnels, Paul headed for the sound of the pressure hose; the barn was dark, after the brilliance outside, and the animal stink overwhelming. The boy turned off the hose as he came near, his eyes adjusting to the murk; James was sandy and freckled like his father, but taller, and skinny, hunched over his work, stiff with reluctance.
– How was Pia when you last saw her?
– Why?
– We’re worried about her.
He shrugged. – She seemed all right.
– When was this? Have you been to London to see her? Has she been down here?
The boy turned on the hose again, aiming its jet of water into the corners of the pens. – Can’t remember when.
– Did you know she’d dropped out of her university course?
– She may have said something about it. I can’t remember.
He asked if James knew where they could contact her, but he said he only had her mobile number.
Pia had gone to the Willises at first to play on their PlayStation. She had been bored when she came to stay in the country, she didn’t like reading or going for walks: Paul and Elise were pleased that she was making friends, at least. As she got older, Elise thought there must be something going on between her and James, or that Pia had a crush on him, but Pia had denied it flatly, convincingly: she didn’t fancy him, they were just friends, they understood one another. It was true that if you came upon them idling around the lanes together, or sprawled watching television, they appeared at ease as if they were siblings: their loose, rangy bodies companionably slack, not strung on sexual tension. Paul couldn’t imagine what they talked about. James seemed fairly monosyllabic, lost in thickets of resentment. They caught the train together into Cardiff to go clubbing, or Pia spent evenings at Blackbrook. Willis had converted a barn into a sort of annexe where his sons could live independently, with a games room and a kitchen; in the summer their mother organised this for holiday lets, now that the two older sons had left the farm. Willis had apparently wanted them to stay on, to help develop the business (as well as farming, they made ice- cream and sold Christmas trees, employing several people from the village); there were stories going round about the rows these boys used to have with their father. And the boys had gone.
Elise arranged a dinner party. – Is that all right? She massaged hard muscles in his neck and shoulders. – Are you ready to be sociable yet?
He thought he was ready, but when the party came he wasn’t in the mood for it. They were Elise’s friends and not his (she’d said no to Gerald. – I love Gerald, but he’s not quite house-trained, d’you know what I mean? Not good at the social give and take). Ruth and her husband came, and another couple they’d got to know while waiting for the school bus. Most of the people they knew in the village were incomers, but Ruth was born here, her brother had inherited the farm she grew up on. She was small and capable, with neat pretty features and curling dark hair tied back; Paul found her constrained and puritan. He and she had argued viciously once about the Welsh language. He was sure Elise complained to Ruth about his absorption in his books and his writing, and about his failure to do his share of domestic duties, even though Elise’s work contributed more to the family income than his did.
Elise had warned him he mustn’t ‘spoil everything’ at the party, he was supposed to join in and help the conversation along; but he found it boring, a social music running up and down as accompaniment to the food. All of them around the table, men and women, were somewhere in their early forties; Paul couldn’t help seeing on their faces the first signs of their ageing, little lapses of their flesh around the mouth and jaw, puffiness under the eyes, the beginning of the crumpling and crumbling that would turn them into their disintegrated older selves. They discussed costume dramas on television. Someone said that nothing really changes, that wherever you look you find underneath the wigs and dresses the same old patterns playing out, the same human nature. Paul said he thought this was only because the television dramas tried to persuade you of this sameness, that it was a consoling illusion, a sham.
A muscle tightened in Ruth’s cheek, bracing against him, as she prodded at her rice with her fork. – What do you mean?
– Human cultures move forward in time as if through a valve that permits no return. The substance of experience is altered over and over with no possibility of return or recovery. History’s the history of loss.
– But there are gains, Elise insisted.
– Like human rights, and the treatment of women. The abolition of slavery.
– And contraception.
– Does it follow, Paul said, – that the sum necessarily balances out, gains against losses? Who could decide
