The Long Dry Read online

  To buy land at auction you get the catalogue and a lot number and you carry out your searches and surveys. Gareth hadn’t had the land surveyed and had argued with Kate about this, saying ‘I know the land, it’s the same as ours, just a road between them.’ You must have all your finance, surveys and searches complete prior to the auction because at the fall of the gavel you enter into a binding contract to purchase that land. You should seek planning consent in principle first but Gareth has not, because he knows there will be no planning given yet, and he knows how easily ideas get around in this place, and he is hoping no one else will think of this purpose for the land.

  While he waits for the time to come for planning, he will use the land to graze, with the extra room perhaps even increase the sheep, and it will pay for itself that way too. ‘It is a crazy idea,’ says Kate, and thinking of her saying this makes him scratchy again. Perhaps it is just a crazy idea, just a crazy idea, he thinks.

  He should clear this scrub and use this land. He gets determined to do this whenever he’s down here. All the unfulfilled plans he had, like the plans we have with a lover that never come to anything. Take away the thin growth and the struggling plants and let the land dry out. It would be like writing memoirs, he thinks. Choosing what stays, and giving things space to grow again. The willow just comes up so quickly and the roots, which you would think would drink the water, don’t; they dam it in the ground, turning the ground to bog.

  If you take down the trees, the land dries out, and the water starts to drain away. Now would be a good time to do this, with the bog so dry already. He could have four more fields a few years from now. The bog. The stink and dark and the effort of it. And we wouldn’t lose more cows, he thinks. He’s angry he missed the vet. This damn bog makes you lose any sense of where you are. I want Kate to want me, he is thinking, and suddenly, like light breaking the clearing, he knows what it is he must do. He knows it clearly and well. He should just walk. Just walk and keep walking, away from it all, and not stop.

  He swallows his anger and says again to himself ‘this will be just a phase, it’s just a change, and I didn’t mean to wish those things I thought earlier’ and while he’s thinking ‘I didn’t mean what I just thought’ he finds the big comfortable place the cow has made. When the cow is not in there he knows inside he cannot look for her anymore. All I have to do is keep walking. ‘I could go. I could just go,’ he thinks.

  *

  Chapter Nine

  the Tractor

  The tractor had been on the farm almost since Gareth’s family got there. When they bought the tractor, it was brand new.

  Henry Ford had made an unsuccessful attempt to design tractors back in 1907, then went at it again after war broke out, in 1915 – a more concerted effort, backed by Ford mass-production principles. There was a great need for machines on the land, given the men and horses who had gone to war.

  In 1917, production of the Fordson F started, solely to answer the needs of the Great British government. In just over ten years, nearly three-quarters of a million were sold, more than ever before or since of one tractor. The Fordson F was the most influential design in tractor history and only the most solid manufactures survived in rivalry against it.

  At the Smithfield Show in 1951, (the year Gareth’s father left the bank), Fordson unveiled their new Major E1A. With an easy-starting diesel engine, economical and reliable, it demolished demand for petrol-vaporising oil tractors, but there was clearly demand for a smaller machine. So in 1957 Fordson launched the Dexta.

  Bill has it now. They needed a bigger tractor on the farm since and had a new Massey years before. One of the first things it did was take Gareth’s finger, as if it wasn’t tame yet. For a long time, the Fordson sat under the ‘ramp’ – the building Gareth’s brother had built to practise his car mechanics and fix the farm’s engines (that brother had a garage in the north now). In the winter, long icicles that they used to drink and play with hung from the roof of the ramp, but right now this heat made it easier to imagine a unicorn than an icicle.

  The tractor’s bright blue paint faded and flaked and the iron of it rusted; the exhaust corroded so much you could put a finger through it, like it was pastry; but still the tractor had a personality. The children would play on the ripped seat, bouncing up and down as they pretended to drive. Emmy liked to give it a bath. And once in a while, when the mind took him, Gareth would look over the engine and would admit that it was still a good engine, and a strong thing, and it should be working, like a person who is strong.

  So he gave it to Bill, who helped him clean up the tractor again. The Dexta was the last to bear the Fordson name. It would be a shame if it had become another iron skeleton on the land.

  __

  Bill tocked up and down in the tractor, trying to break up the ground with a chain harrow. He had seen the vet come and go and had hoped nothing was wrong and had waved at the vet because he knew him. Though it was very hot, Bill wore the same things as he always wore, and the sweat came off him thickly.

  The cow by now was demented with flies and the weight of the calf in her and the hot relentlessness of the sun and she let out a big, thirsty bellow. Over the hills the day’s haze built up. She was tired of only being able to move in a certain way because of the weight of the calf and wanted to buck and kick as if that would get rid of the heat of the sun. It was nearly evening now but was still hot. The redness of her coat looked golden in the sun.

  She was walking on, trying to find a trough of water, thinking I’ll walk on for a while but I could just lay down and sleep and she didn’t know where she was. She had the droll, shaking head of an idiot. She was thinking about crashing herself into the bank and the fence to be insensible and get out of the heat, and of doing crazy things cow’s shouldn’t and she pushed blindly at a corrugated iron sheet in the hedge that just bent underneath her. She could hear the tractor. She let out another long moo and crashed down the hedge. The iron sheet had been all day in the sun and was hot on her udder, and that’s when she found Bill.

  * * *

  I think where he is. I think what I’d do if he left me. If he didn’t come back. If he decided to just go away.

  I should have looked for the cow. Should have been with him. It might have been nice, in the sun. I look at him and I know I have been lucky because he is a good man and I love him very much but it makes me feel sick what I did. And sometimes when I feel his hands all I can think of is the other thing and how when it was happening it felt good, and it makes me feel sick thinking that. And though I know that chlamydia can come into a man without his knowing it, sometimes I think of the illness he was putting in me every time we made love, and I hate him for the babies I lost. But without him. I cannot think of being without him.

  __

  the Dandelion

  He kneels down by the dog and strokes his hand through the thick hair. The way he lies looks unbearable. He looks at the vicious cut on the foot, which the vet has put a powder on to stop it weeping, and is horrified by the tumour which looks as if it still has life, will still grow on the dog. He can’t bear to touch it. He thinks of it as a great thing which latched onto the dog to draw it down. It is horrible for him that this thing has come from inside the dog. ‘There boy’ he says softly, and he sees Emmy in the sunlight by the doorway.

  He thinks of her as a younger child, dancing on the grass, turning around and around in the sun with the dandelion clock she holds casting its seeds around her.

  He hears her giggle all those years ago – sees the huge, massive quietness of the way she smiles.

  She comes over to him and touches him with a cat’s instinct for paper.

  ‘He was very good,’ she says.

  * * *

  ‘They put Curly down,’ he said to her. He’d just come into the room and stood for a very little while and then said very simply ‘they put Curly down.’ Then he stood a bit more and went out because he didn’t know what to do.

  She sits on th
e side of the bed and accepts that the headache seems to have gone. The scene of her illness is around her. The half-drunk cup of chamomile. Aspirins and water. An abandoned magazine open loosely on the floor by the bed, the dark curtains drawn. The unnecessary hot water bottle kicked out in the afternoon heat. Now the pain is not there, she wonders briefly, lucidly, whether it was real. It’s hard to recall pain when we are not in it. We remember it vaguely, descriptively, by making it live almost, like a creature, giving it some deliberating quality.

  They seem to have two ways of bringing her down, these headaches: the sharp point of today, which makes it as if she can only know the world through it, like looking out of a pin-hole; and a weight. A weight that is heavy like mud: that first brief and dull feel when you hit your head, but staying that way, not developing, just numb, heavy, until it seems to break off like a beach cliff and slide down one side of her body in a slow avalanche of pain. Then they just seem to go.

  __

  the End of the Memories

  Gareth pours himself a glass of water and looks out of the window by the sink over the bird feeders and scattered hay and dust of the small space outside, before the lawn. Their water comes from the spring and comes cool even now.

  In a few days Gareth will come to the end of the memories which end when his father got to the farm. He will wonder if his father knew for some time of the cancer in him, and so put things down, choosing what mattered the most. It will feel odd to him that the memories stop when they moved to the farm, because, really, it is where his own memory begins. The end will say: ‘so in 1951 I left the bank and went into farming. It was seen as a deeply foolish thing to do by many of my peers and today I’d have to admit perhaps there was a good deal of truth in that. But now, in my old days, I have no regrets about the choice – my wife and children would agree. And what else is there to life other than following the path which brings pleasure and interest to you, without counting the cost or loss, but delighting in those things which are desirable, and which bring you happiness.’ And Gareth will wish very much for this happiness.

  ‘These damn things. These damn niggles,’ he thinks.

  __

  the Dunnock

  That year, in that space, that patio, every day a hedge sparrow came to eat the scraps of bread and fallen shreds of nuts and lard that came down from the two bird feeders hanging in the laburnum close by in the hedge. From one side it looked perfect; but on the other you could see a bubbling growth, like a collection of salt, that was on its beak and eye. It was disquieting. Tiny, but still nearly monstrous. It came when the other birds had gone. The next year, it would not be there.

  __

  He turns round with the cool glass in his hand. Kate is there.

  ‘Now you’re up.’ She is in her dressing gown, and is holding the wet flannel she had put to her head.

  She says ‘I’m sorry’ and she says it in a way that doesn’t mean she’s sorry. It was like a question.

  ‘Now you’re up. Emmy had to deal with the dog.’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’ He’d thought she hadn’t registered.

  She waits. ‘My headache.’ She still feels frail, like a glass valve.

  ‘Emmy had to deal with the dog,’ he says again.

  She stood there red-faced and pale. He thought she looked feeble and it made him hate her right then, because he couldn’t believe it. How much I don’t want you just now, he’s thinking.

  ‘You should have called the vet in the morning yesterday.’

  He holds his anger in, but it’s like the far off rattle of a loose wheel. ‘I was in the bank in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, your dream.’ She is cruel, the way she says dream.

  ‘– – I didn’t find the cow.’ They are quiet. He stays by the window and drinks the glass of water. He was so angry that she stayed in bed while the vet killed the dog.

  She starts to clear up, talking under her breath, getting a wind of argument up under her.

  ‘I’m not obsessed, Kate.’ She’d mentioned the land.

  ‘The dog should have died yesterday.’ Already they were distancing the dog by not using its name. ‘You should build on our land.’ He just looks at her.

  ‘It’s our land.’

  ‘Bill uses it.’

  ‘He’s simple, Gareth. He doesn’t do anything.’

  ‘My father gave him that land and I won’t take it from him.’

  ‘We could fit houses there.’

  ‘We could fit houses on the land.’

  ‘Land we can’t afford,’ so full of poison.

  ‘The bank will lend.’

  ‘And what if they won’t give us planning?’

  Christ, I should just go from this, just go, he thinks. To let all my anger out would be like cool water. She sees the change in him, and changes tack, uses weakness.

  ‘I’m just worried,’ she says weakly. ‘I worry that it will go wrong for you. I care about you.’

  __

  the Fight

  ‘You use care like a weapon,’ he says. It’s like a greenhouse breaking.

  __

  After the fight they were quiet. ‘I have to take the bread crates back,’ he said, and he drove off in the van.

  *

  Chapter Ten

  Gareth comes in through the front door and puts the torch on the shelf in the porch.

  ‘Bill brought the cow,’ she says, and they try to talk.

  __

  Bill had seen the cow and stopped the tractor and gone to help the cow. He’d always had a quiet way with animals. He saw she was heavy with calf and helped her down through the hedge where she was stuck on the corrugated iron. She came on her haunch down from the hedge with her big bag, streaked and marred with blood, clopping with her, like a balloon full of water. She hissed and puffed through her nose and even then, being a cow, she reached round and pulled a long tongue-full of grass from the hedge. Bill checked over the cow while she crunched the long grass.

  When she had drunk long and hard from the buckets Bill brought from the water butt she got to her feet and she dashed a short way as the madness of sense came back to her. She shook and bucked but Bill spoke to her gently and soon she lowered her head to the grass and rubbed her nose on the short turf and started to follow his voice. Bill was clucking and speaking and the slow cow came with him. Soon the day would come to an end in a broad and brave sunset, like it was angry at its finish. The evening was beautiful with the glittering sea and the sun specially lighting some of the far hills.

  It was a long walk that day for the cow but she came back to the farm and she and Bill were in the yard when Kate found them and the swallows were flying lower now with the change of pressure in the air. Bill was stroking and patting the roan cow and dust came off her into the evening.

  ‘Hot day,’ says Bill. ‘Hot day.’

  * * *

  the Earth

  He cannot sleep much after the argument. She lies next to him, tense in the way she has now when she sleeps, the corner of the thin sheet held over her mouth in a tight knot and every now and then her arm jumping, or a sharp inhalation of quick breath. It’s like she’s scared now, when she’s asleep. It’s difficult to be by her.

  The sleep he gets is snatched, is not caught safely enough to take him into proper sleep and it is more like opening his eyes momentarily on a violent film: there was a quick nightmare. Rats attacking the dead dog’s face, taking his eyes and his tongue, and opening the big growth so the sick grey cells spill out.

  He gets up and pulls on his shorts and the old jeans and throws the day’s t-shirt back on. His mind is too busy. He can’t bear to think of Curly lying in the straw beside the old tractor wheels and fertiliser sacks and the broken machines. The thought of his old dog beats everything out of his mind and he can’t think about the argument, or shouting at her, or the next day or the unhinged gates. He is horrified by the thought of the dead dog lying there; it feels unfinished like this. He does not want to wake up in the
morning and need to bury the dog. The image of the rats taking him comes back to him.

  __

  The ground is very hard and there’s still warmth in the night. It feels close and oppressive and unfresh. The ground is hard but the hard work soothes him as he brings the caib into the ground. The digging is hard without a finger, and his ankle still hurts when he puts pressure on the spade to move the soil; but all of these things help him work. Gradually, the earth breaks up, scattering dust and small stones in the thin light of the Tilley lamp. The Tilley lamp hisses as it burns and gives out a silver light. Around it, moths and lacewings start to come.

  He’d taken the Tilley from the porch and filled it with sharp pink meths. It’s a smell he’s loved since being a child, when the smell of the Tilley was with them in the lambing shed, or a few times late out in the garden. Some of the meths was on his hands and evaporated quickly, leaving his skin strange and dry but supple like a belt.

  He pumped pressure into the lamp and lit the mantle and the thin silver light spread out.

  He lifts the dog down into the hole he’s made. He looks like a big proud dog in the hole. Covering him up is very difficult but it is right. There’s the slightest change in the air.

  On the flat hard ground by the place he has dug, the raindrop lands and disappears, seems to be drunk up by the dry earth. He holds out his hand and the rain starts to fall. The drops flash in the light of the lamp and spread on the ground.

  And then it really rained. The rain came down on the corrugated tin of the porch roof and fell into the dry, cracked soil and onto the wide fields.