The Lie of the Land Page 16

  15

  A Far Better Place

  Christmas is always a sad time of year for Sally, because as a health visitor without children of her own, she’s often out covering for those with families. Her workload has almost doubled since mid-December, and this year is going to be a cold winter.

  Peter, rising in the dark to check the water troughs for the livestock, has to break the ice not just with a hammer but a blowtorch. In a bad winter, the springs freeze altogether and pregnant ewes can die of thirst. Sally’s hens have stopped laying, and hardly poke their beaks out of the chicken shed. Bouncer curls up by the fire, and refuses to budge. But Peter has to go out every day, without fail, to look after the herd. The snow, which brings joy to ordinary people, is what they are most afraid of. A light sprinkling is one thing, but when more falls on Dartmoor, men and beasts can die.

  ‘What a way to make a living!’ she says, stamping her feet to get some feeling back into them. Together, they have rounded up the flock from the higher field, brought them lower down to safety and left them some precious bales of hay.

  ‘Well done, m’dear.’

  ‘Well done yourself.’

  A man as kind and honest as Peter is a rare being, even before she adds in the fact that he has a shower every night and has most of his teeth. Of course they can get cross with each other on a bad day. He isn’t interested in many of the things with which she fills her life: music, for instance, and reading, not to mention knitting and quilting and cooking and gardening; for him, it’s the herd or the land or tinkering with machinery. He doesn’t need company, whereas she enjoys the company of others, and her friendships, mostly female, are almost as important as her relationship with her sisters. Some people don’t get on with their siblings, but Sally, Tessa and Anne are not like this. Though they are all married, their husbands will never mean as much to them as each other.

  ‘Sisters for ever!’ they’d say to each other as children, and so they are.

  At times, she suspects that it might be a relief to Peter that they do not have children.

  ‘I love you and only you,’ he said to her, when they were still trying and hoping. ‘It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need anyone else.’

  It isn’t the money, or the time. He can’t understand that a heart can expand to accommodate and embrace all kinds of love. Sally has often come across mothers who are fearful they will not love a second or a third child as much as the first, and yet they do because love, though it feels so unique in each instance, is not a finite thing, but is reborn with each new person.

  Sally has so much love to give that, were it not for her work, she feels she might burst with it. It’s always been this way. She looks maternal, with her billowy breasts and round face framed by its soft hazel curls, and she feels maternal, but her dreams of actually ever having a child are ever more remote now she’s middle-aged. All she’s ever wanted is to be a mother, and the sorrow of this is such that sometimes, when alone, she finds herself crying. Of course, she does have Baggage, and her lovely nieces and nephews, and the hens she’s rescued – but none fills the place for her very own. Sometimes she almost feels she will go mad with it.

  What is so frustrating is that, according to the tests, there’s no reason for it. They have sex every few days, mostly the roll-on, roll-off kind which is more about affection and comfort than pleasure. She and Peter are in their early forties, it could still happen, but she knows the statistics. There’s no explanation why she hasn’t become pregnant. They’d been to have fertility tests in hospital, and they’d told each other the same thing: nothing wrong, just luck.

  ‘What about IVF?’ Sally suggested.

  ‘I don’t believe half those doctors know what they’re on about,’ he said. ‘I’d sooner trust a vet. Let’s leave Nature to take her course, m’dear.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally answered, with a cheerfulness she didn’t feel. ‘It’s bound to happen.’

  She always accommodates Pete, because one of the few pieces of advice for a happy marriage her own mother had ever given the three of them was never to deny your husband, even if you don’t feel like it. He’s totally devoted to her, and she doesn’t want to upset him. Yet still she can’t conceive.

  Sally would happily have adopted, but Peter is definitely not keen on this.

  ‘I can’t believe people are very different from animals, and any animal I take on I want to know exactly what its parentage is,’ he says. ‘What kind of people would give their child up, anyway?’

  As far as he’s concerned the farm can pass to Sally’s own flesh and blood if they want it, as if that were the main issue. Anne has even said to Sally that if the problem is Peter, she can see nothing wrong with a sperm donor.

  ‘He needn’t know. After all, you’re the one who wants a family,’ she said. Anne is almost terrifyingly practical, but Sally can’t, not when there’s a chance of having Peter’s child. Trust and honesty must lie at the heart of a good marriage, or what is the point?

  Though having a child does take a lot out of anyone.

  Lying in bed later that night, unable to sleep while Peter and Baggage snore in counterpoint, Sally remembers her latest case, when she had arrived at a straggle of isolated houses to see a new mum she hadn’t met before. The roads were bad, and the air had taken on the peculiar ringing silence of deep midwinter. When she pulled up outside the new mum’s house, the creak of her brakes seemed to echo.

  There had been no response to her first ring. All the curtains were drawn, and the house had a look at once forlorn and chaotic. A washing line jagged with ice sagged in the front garden.

  ‘Hello, um, Julie?’ Sally called, after ringing the bell and flapping on the letterbox. ‘Hello? It’s your HV, Sally. Are you awake?’

  More silence, and then the baby cried, a sound that rang out like an alarm bell. Sally is used to every pitch of cry from a newborn, and what she could hear made her prickle. There was a note in it that in an adult would be called despair. Of course, this is the kind of thing that health visitors never talk about, except perhaps to each other, but when you’ve worked with babies all your life you know at once when they are in real distress.

  Sally gave up on the bell, and started thumping. The need to protect a child is so strong that she’ll break a door down if necessary.

  Suddenly, there was movement behind the wavy glass panel, as if someone were rising up from underwater. Then a woman, presumably Julie, heavy-eyed and barefoot, appeared with a bundle in her arms. Under her pink towelling dressing gown Sally could see the swollen breasts juddering with every motion.

  ‘Here, you take him, and keep him,’ she said, thrusting the bundle away from her, violently. Sally took the baby, automatically wrapping it more tightly, and looked at its mother. They hadn’t met before the birth, but she was another one of those poor deluded souls who’d moved to the country thinking it would be a better place to raise a family.

  ‘How are you feeling, then?’ she asked, as if everything were normal.

  The woman, tense as a vibrating string, gave a sudden gasp and ran out into the snowy front garden. There she stood, wringing her hands, while rooks flapped and cawed in the skeletal trees and the thin ribbon of empty road spooled before her. For a moment Sally believed she was going to run out into it and keep on running.

  ‘Julie,’ Sally called, her heart thudding. ‘You haven’t even got slippers on, and you’ll catch a cold.’

  Julie wasn’t crying, but she was moaning,

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! I can’t do this.’

  ‘Julie, you and your baby need to stay warm indoors.’

  ‘Keep it away from me!’

  Sally fished out her mobile with one hand, trying to call the crisis team, but they were in a mobile black spot. Very gently, she asked if she could use the landline. Julie paced up and down.

  ‘Yes, yes, do what you want, just take it away. It’s destroying everything.’

  That’s the thing about babies that
nobody tells you before, and that everyone tells you after: they send most women crazy. Even the ones who get an easy baby can lose themselves for weeks, months, years. The physical and mental exhaustion of it, the absence of rest, the responsibility, on top of childbirth is too much, and that’s without the crippling expense because you need two salaries now. No wonder the birth rate plummets as soon as women get contraception. Yet even then, standing in the chaos of Julie’s breakdown, Sally craved a baby so strongly that she felt her arms might float off for want of the weight of one.

  ‘I don’t want it, I’m no good at this,’ Julie moaned.

  ‘Don’t worry, help is coming,’ Sally said, with all the calm she could muster.

  She thinks of some of the cases her mother, a health visitor before her, had told her about. She’d been retired by then, and dying of cancer, and maybe the drugs for the pain made her less discreet than she should have been; but there was one case she was haunted by, of a young woman who killed herself after having had a baby.

  ‘There she was, hanging in her father’s kitchen. Such a bright, lovely girl, only not as careful as she should have been.’

  ‘Why is it always the woman’s responsibility? Why not the man’s?’

  ‘Oh, I agree. But the father of her child never bothered to take that kind of precaution.’

  It was Gore Tore, of course.

  ‘What happened to the baby?’

  ‘Somebody adopted it, I think. But if that poor girl had had better support, she probably would be with us still.’

  ‘Who was she? Anyone we know?’

  ‘You didn’t know her, but her dad was a GP in Trelorn. He never got over it either.’

  ‘Was she under age?’

  ‘No! No, he was never like that, I believe, even though plenty of young girls threw themselves at him. So I couldn’t blame Tore, or not too much, though I’ve never forgotten it. I was the one who found her, you see. She knew she was due for a home visit, she’d wrapped her child up ever so carefully first.’

  Sally’s mother’s generation had called it the baby blues, somewhat dismissively. Sally knew that, on the contrary, it could be life-threatening to both mother and child.

  ‘There, there, sweetheart, you’re going to be fine,’ she murmured to the sobbing baby, putting her little finger inside its mouth. It sucked furiously, which let her use her other hand to make the call for immediate support. Rapidly, she checked all the usual things while waiting for the backup. The nappy was bone-dry. There was no fever. She found a clean bottle and filled it with cooled boiled water from the kettle, and mixed in some formula, but after a couple of sucks, it was refused and the cries began again. Even putting the baby over her knee failed to bring up any wind. She knew that the screams were loud, but for the mother a kind of torture, because parents are uniquely attuned to their own child’s cries.

  ‘I can’t cope, I can’t cope,’ Julie kept saying. Her eyes seemed as though they’d start out of their sockets.

  The baby screamed again, a piercing needle of sound, and this time it was clear what the problem was. His upper gums were bright red, and swollen in one place.

  ‘Poor little mite,’ Sally murmured, fishing around in her bag. She washed her hands again, then put a dab of clear gel on the gum. The screams changed to roars, then stopped abruptly. The child drooled and smacked his lips, before falling silent.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ the mother said.

  ‘No, just teething. He’s fine.’ Sally showed her the baby, now calm, and then put the bottle in his mouth. It was drained inside three minutes, the baby gave a huge burp and instantly fell asleep. ‘Nothing is wrong with your baby, but you might want to talk to a GP about your own health.’

  Very gently, she had kept the woman company, and when the GP arrived, she took herself discreetly to the bathroom. She wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but she saw the piles of dirty laundry, and a load sitting in the machine, wet. If it was left there, it would smell rank, so she opened the door very quietly and hung it up, then put in a new load to run. At least the dad wouldn’t have to cope with it, on top of the rest, when he got home.

  She’d been that upset, she and Peter had gone out for a drink on New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t what they normally did, but she’d persuaded him to come out to the White Hart, and there she’d finally met Lottie’s husband Quentin.

  What a piece of work that man was … though she knew he wasn’t to be trusted, either as a man or a journalist, she’d found herself telling him all about Tore’s baby and the suicide. It was old, old news, and why she’d brought it up she couldn’t say except that he had the knack of making you want to tell him things, just to prevent boredom from crossing his face. Poor Lottie, she thought. Somehow, her own work has given her a kind of X-ray moral vision over the years in which she knows whether somebody is a good or bad person – Sally is convinced of this – and Lottie, she has no doubt, is one of the former. But Quentin, well, even if he hadn’t driven her into a ditch, he’s what therapists call a narcissist, and what she calls selfish. Lottie deserves better.

  Sally tucks herself deeper into the duvet. Outside, Jip is barking at something – a rat, or a shadow probably. He gets like that sometimes, now he’s old. When they’d got him, ten years ago, Sally had been thirty, already older than the woman with PND.

  ‘Is your partner helping you?’

  ‘He’s driving his lorry, mostly.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  Julie burst out, with passionate anger,

  ‘It’s different for him, he’s not chained to it like me. I can’t stand it, the worry, the noise, it just goes on and on and on.’

  Sally had been upset both for the mother and her baby. Children don’t suit everyone, but how do you know in advance? If you were rich you could let other people do some of the heavy lifting – or most of it – which might be why the rich have as many kids as the very poor. Tore is said to have fifteen, or is it sixteen, all by various women and most unmarried.

  Driving back past the entrance of Shipcott Manor, she turned her head. She always does this, perhaps in hope of glimpsing the mysterious Tore; but the person she saw was Rod Ball, whose foxy face and insatiable appetite for women keeps all the HVs busy. Sally stiffened in her seat, and pulled over, watching him in her rear mirror. What was he doing there, and how had he got in? Every bad thing that happened in the area seemed to be down to the three Ball brothers, only they never got caught. They’d been interviewed by the police after the murder, but not only had they all given each other alibis but they had witnesses for the day.

  But then Janet appeared, and the couple exchanged a long kiss. She wondered if the Tores knew that he was sleeping with their housekeeper … I wouldn’t be leaving any valuables around if I were in their shoes, Sally thinks, back in her own bed that night. Something else is nagging on the edge of her consciousness, only she’s too tired to remember.

  She sighs and turns over. They’ll be lambing soon. It’s an endless cycle, rearing the new stock, replacing the old, being screwed by the supermarkets to sell at lower and lower prices. Many dairy farmers give up when milk costs less than bottled water; there’s no point. Everyone wants cheap food, even if it’s organic, and people in cities never think that to have bread, milk, meat and fruit, someone has had to go out and work every day of the year, hard, back-breaking labour, and they also need money for electricity and fuel and winter feed. No wonder those who are willing to farm are getting older and older. Peter, under fifty, counts as a young farmer; the farm that was sold to the hippies had gone because their neighbour, like Pete’s father, shot himself.

  ‘What else was he going to do, when things are this bad?’ Peter said bitterly. ‘You know there’s talk of turning what remains of dairy farming into factory farming, with cows spending their entire lives indoors, eating computer-controlled feed rather than grass?’

  ‘I’m sure people wouldn’t stand for it,’ Sally remarked. ‘A landscape doesn’t look right,
does it, without animals. Besides, what else is pasture good for?’

  She has always feared Peter would give way to depression. She hadn’t realised how needy he is until they were married, and sometimes it makes her feel as if she’s his mother as well as his wife, the mother he’d lost as a child, whom his father had never bothered to value. Or maybe the knowledge that he’d hit his wife as well as his son meant the risk was too much for any woman to take on. He’d been related to the Balls, and her own parents had been worried about her marrying into such a family, even though Pete had never done a violent or dishonest thing in his life.

  ‘Drat the dog!’ Sally says, as Jip continues to bark. She stumbles up, knowing Peter won’t stir, then puts on her fleece dressing gown and, at the utility room door, her boots.

  Outside, the cobbles in the yard are rimed with frost.

  ‘What’s wrong, boy?’ she says softly to Jip, who whines. He’s chained up, and after a moment’s hesitation, she releases him.

  Off he goes like a rocket, towards the hen house. Sally hurries after, torch in hand. When she gets there, she sees the door has not been properly shut – in the race to rescue the sheep, she’d forgotten to bolt it, though she’d taken away the hens’ ramp to the rafter where they roost. When she looks up, she thinks at first that they may have escaped the fox, for they are all still huddled there in a line, along the main beam. But then she sees Jip, snuffling around the floor like a mad thing.

  The fox has not just taken a couple of hens. It has jumped along the row of all her flock, her poor rescued hens, and bitten off their legs. Sally stares, her gorge rising and her skin crawling.

  The shed is awash with blood, and the smell of blood.

  16

  Lottie Resurgens

  Lottie and the girls re-enter London like people stumbling into sunlight. The South-East is lighter, brighter and drier than the West: no wonder most people in Britain want to live here, she thinks.