The Heart of the Country Page 9

  ‘Time you got a new car, Arthur,’ said Angus, speaking from his Quattro.

  ‘I’m fond of the old Citroën,’ said Arthur. ‘They don’t make cars like this any more. I’ve found us a new lad. Lives up at the tip in a caravan with the most beautiful girl in the world.’

  ‘Who? Not Natalie Harris?’

  ‘Not Natalie,’ said Arthur, severely.

  ‘Lucky she’s got you to lean on,’ said Angus. ‘In this the hour of her distress.’

  ‘Me?’ said Arthur, surprised.

  ‘So they say,’ said Angus.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Arthur. ‘She’s gone right off me.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Angus. ‘I wouldn’t want to tread on your toes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’

  ‘There’s a rather good piece coming up in Friday’s auction, Arthur. I’d appreciate your holding back.’

  ‘Say no more. ’Tis done. What?’

  ‘A davenport. Original Waring and Gillow. Just for a friend. A personal favour. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’

  ‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Angus, and your sprats are other people’s mackerels. How’s the Quattro?’

  ‘Fantastic! How’s the Citroën? Really? Sounds a bit clanky, to me.’

  ‘It’s like the wife,’ said Arthur. ‘Wearing out, but I’m fond of her.’

  The wind was chilly. A too wide, bonded lorry crept up a too narrow lane towards them.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The stuff from Brazil, with any luck,’ said Angus. ‘Now we can really get going.’

  ‘I suppose it’s safe,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Good God,’ said Angus, ‘don’t be such an old woman. DDT did us fine for decades. It doesn’t change overnight. But look at the fuss they make now!’

  ‘Give my love to Natalie when you see her,’ said Arthur.

  ‘I certainly will,’ said Angus.

  Well, a nod is as good as a wink to a county auctioneer, and so Natalie was sold to Angus against a return unspecified, but one day to be claimed. So the world proceeds, by one good turn, balanced by another. And the local insects bit the dust and calves and piglets got a load of growth promoters which fed carcinogens into the food chain, but who were they to care? They were too busy balancing their sudden, new, startling weight on the already too flimsy slats in the intensive care unit. And their owners got richer by the good, lean, popular kilo.

  Redemption

  When I try to write about Flora I keep wandering off into the villainy of men. The point is that pretty young women are expendable. Nobody likes them, except the men who are currently involved with them. Their mothers envy them, their fathers are disturbed by them, their plainer siblings resent them, their teachers dislike them. They have a hard time growing up, and a hard time when grown. A pretty girl driving a Mini will be driven off the road by lorry drivers as a matter of course. What’s she doing on the road? Driving is work, not entertainment. Professors refuse to give them degrees, in case they’re accused of prejudice. Their husbands don’t trust them. Everyone knows what a pretty girl is for, that’s the trouble. If Flora had been plainer, Bernard might have married her and not treated her like a skivvy and a slave. (Plain girls marry earlier, statistically, than pretty ones.) Look at her now, as I do, cleaning Natalie’s floor long after Natalie had the wherewithal to pay her for so doing. Pretty, and therefore persecuted! Flora’s piled-up, streaked-in, frizzed-out hair has toppled halfway down her creamy cheek. She keeps trying to push it up again with her delicate white fingers, and has put a streak of grime across that selfsame creamy cheek. This is, I admit, beginning to get to me. How sad that these things must pass! The creamy cheek one day will be no longer; as will that female movement of the hands through the hair, to puff and prettify. Sad, I say – yet that part of me given over to jealousy and envy is not sorry, but glad, that all things flesh are mortal, especially the flesh of the prettier members of the great universal sisterhood.

  ‘I’m not going to work here for nothing,’ said Flora, crossly, putting away the mop, helping Natalie extract Angus’ dead hen, feathers and all, from the freezer. ‘Why should I wash your floors, if not for money? Bernard says if you like he’ll come and take away a couple of chairs in lieu.’

  ‘Those chairs cost eighty-five pounds each two months ago. I only owe you fifteen pounds.’

  ‘You should have bought antiques,’ said Flora. ‘Then they’d have had a re-sale value.’

  ‘Harry liked new things,’ said Natalie. These days she talked about Harry whenever she could. She thought she should. He’d been gone for three weeks. She had told the children he’d gone to Spain on business, and that there was trouble getting money through. That’s why Ben wouldn’t have a new briefcase for his books and Alice six new hair slides. She thought Alice believed her but that Ben did not. She’d told them they were changing schools at half term and Alice had turned white and said nothing and Ben had flushed and thrown a book at her and said he hated her.

  ‘Always a mistake to do what a man likes,’ said Flora now, as if she knew everything in the world. ‘They get bored, if they have everything their own way.’

  ‘So it seems,’ said Natalie. Why was she confiding in the help? She regretted it, now.

  ‘And he just walked out without a word!’ said Flora. She felt like Natalie’s younger sister, which was why she kept coming up to Dunbarton and working for no money. ‘Aren’t men pigs. But I can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘If I was someone different I expect I would have,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’m me.’

  ‘You don’t do much screaming or shouting,’ said Flora.

  ‘There’s no one to hear me,’ said Natalie, sadly, and apart from Flora, there was indeed no one. Only Angus, who had asked himself to dinner, out of the blue, to eat his chicken. It proved impossible to pluck the feathers from a deep-frozen hen, but Flora offered to at least hack off the head with a chopper before she left.

  ‘You won’t have the nerve, Mrs Harris,’ she said and Natalie accepted the offer with relief. She had only ever bought oven-ready birds.

  The heavy knife whacked down upon the creature’s neck, stretched as it was across the chopping board, head dangling, and a frozen globule of blood flew across the room and landed upon the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

  ‘I never liked that picture,’ said Natalie. ‘Although I know I’m supposed to. Could I ask you something, Flora?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Did you steal my jewellery?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then he did it,’ said Natalie. ‘The bastard,’ and she picked up a cup and threw that at the sunflowers. The cup broke and the picture fell off the wall. The return of rage, as I say, marks the beginning of recovery. It was at that point that Natalie stopped walking round like a zombie and thereafter flustered and wept and stormed and went round with red eyes and a haggard face like any other wife left suddenly with no money and the children. It takes years to recover properly, of course, before you can assume that because you woke bright eyed and calm to the day, you will continue thus until its end, without suffering a fit of melancholy, rage, distress, remorse, jealousy or some other unpleasant emotion. One in every three marriages ends in divorce. It happened to Natalie, it happened to me, it had happened to most of us on the carnival float that night – and all agree, all we have in the end are our friends.

  The hen lay divided, gently thawing. Disgusting, really, the way people eat animals. I can never work out what stops them from eating each other. It would save so much trouble and hassle, and would efficiently recycle essential nutrients. Our agricultural land would be allowed to restore itself, and cease being the mere dull base for chemical fertilizers on which our crops are grown. For that is what the English soil has become. This whim – and it is nothing more – which obsesses humankind, that it is morally allowed to mass-produce animals in order to devour them, but morally disallowed to eat its own de
ad, will be the end of us.

  Be all that as it may, saner, nicer and less cannibalistic people than me began to turn their heads to the sun the day Natalie threw a cup at Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

  Improvement

  Sally went home from work, expecting to open her front door and see, as usual, Val in his armchair staring into space, with an assortment of pills and ointments beside him, the television not even on and the Guardian flung into a corner in disgust. But that day she opened her front door and found her husband up a ladder re-pasting wallpaper; the fire was burning, the windows were open and there were no pills in sight. When she came into the room, Val got down off the ladder, crossed to her, pecked her cheek, and relieved her of her shopping and took it into the kitchen. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘The pain went,’ he said. ‘I think my Mars passed out of opposition to my Jupiter.’

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ she said.

  ‘We were mad enough to move to the West Country,’ he said, ‘instead of somewhere rational, so what’s the point of fighting. We’ll live as the natives do. We’ll believe in astrology and I’ll join Scientists Against the Bomb and have a CND sticker on the car.’

  ‘There’s a laser printing firm starting up in Street,’ said Sally. ‘One of the parents told me. You could try there for a job.’

  She shouldn’t have pushed her luck; she knew as soon as she’d spoken. (You have to watch your words, if you’re living with a depressive.) But Val didn’t react badly at all.

  ‘I might well do that,’ was all he said. ‘Find out the address, will you?’

  And as for Pauline and Gerard, they had their best day ever in The Tessen and, after closing up, took Jax out for a walk, as had become their custom.

  ‘I still think bread at 90p the loaf is outrageous,’ said Gerard. ‘But I suppose if people want to buy it one shouldn’t stop them.’

  Jax nosed and snuffed amongst spring grasses. Rain had been falling: the sun suddenly slanted from the west, out from under a line of heavy grey clouds onto wet new foliage, and everything was brilliantly, almost unbearably, acid green: the colour quivered all around for five minutes or so, subduing even Jax so that he returned to trot at their heels.

  ‘Growing old doesn’t matter,’ said Pauline. ‘Not even growing old and childless. All this remains. We’re just part of it: a product of it.’

  Her husband tucked his arm in hers, without comment, and presently the colour scale returned to normal, and Jax took off again. Sometimes in the evening he would look melancholy and stare reproachfully at his new owners, and turn his head away even from Good Boy chocolate drops, and then they imagined he was missing the Harris household, but for the most part he was lively, cheerful and rewarding. Pauline fed him with high sausages and ham scraps when Gerard wasn’t looking: and Gerard the same, when Pauline wasn’t. Since Jax tended to be, if anything, underfed in their anxiety for his health, he did very well by these furtive arrangements.

  Bernard and Flora had carved a fireplace into the cliff; Bernard had set up a clean, empty oil drum nearby and spent a morning filling it with water, so now they had a constant water supply. Their privy was the nearby quarry: they heaped leaves to make things decent, but used other people’s water closets in the towns and villages when they could. Birds sang, grass swayed and flowers glowed. It was as near paradise, Bernard and Flora thought, as could be achieved, there on the edge of the council rubbish tip. They were not lonely – there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing in the near distance, as cyclists rode up to deposit single wine bottles, or men on tracks dumped industrial waste (forbidden) – yet still they were private. Mostly those who visited the tip were householders who came with the boots of their cars filled with sacks of kitchen waste, or their roof racks high with discarded consumer durables. Here in the rural depths of the heart of the country, you can put out your trash and wait a week for it to be collected, and in the meantime the dogs, the foxes and the badgers will knock over the bins, rifle the contents, and spread your intimate rubbish over acres. So the communal tips are widely used.

  Flora put two boil-in-the-bag curry dinners into the pan of water which steamed on the little peat fire. (Bernard had recently acquired a couple of sacks of burning peat; it burned with a mild heady scent, and left behind dense grey ashes, which she liked.) She squatted before the pan, the skin stretching tight and smooth over her knees. Bernard watched and pondered over his first day’s work at Avon Farmers.

  ‘The farmers come up and order by numbers,’ he said, ‘from the catalogue. I bring out the sacks, that’s all. Why do they pay me so much? And why me?’

  ‘You’re not straight,’ said Flora, ‘that’s why. It’s as Arthur said. You’ll keep your mouth shut, if it’s in your interest.’

  ‘But about what?’ he asked, as if she knew. ‘What’s in the sacks? This farmer today asked for lactose. Nothing wrong with lactose. It’s a form of sugar.’

  ‘Fancy you!’ said Flora.

  ‘I did A-level chemistry for a term,’ said Bernard. ‘I may be stupid but I’m not daft. But this geezer told me the lactose went in the milk, and brought it up to Marketing Board standards. Can that be right? Every tanker he takes in is worth ninety quid. If it’s low in sugar content it gets rejected. He wasn’t going to throw good milk away, he said. So he just tipped the lactose into the milk and then the results came up fine. If the Milk Board wants sugar, he said, they can have sugar! Why should I be penalized? Why should my cows be insulted? They’re good cows and they give good milk. It makes you wonder!’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘What’s in the other sacks. Why we stay open at night, and why more people come by night than day, and why everyone pays with cash.’

  ‘I thought all that would be up your street, Bernard,’ said Flora, sadly. He was not renowned for his honesty, nor had his father been before him.

  ‘Tell you what,’ was all he said, ‘don’t let’s drink milk any more.’

  With their curry they drank wine, which Flora had acquired from the Harris household over past months. It had been the Harris habit to buy their wine in boxes. Flora would open the packs when Natalie was out shopping, abstract a third of the wine, refill with water, shake well and then re-seal the containers. No one had ever noticed. It had been Bernard’s idea, and seemed to Flora not unreasonable, since she was so underpaid, and recently of course not paid at all.

  Bernard put his arm round Flora and they spent a comfortable and cosy evening in the midst of their wasteland, watching the sun sink behind the Tor. Of such pleasures are domestic happiness made.

  Attempts at Seduction

  Angus went round to dinner at Dunbarton. Natalie had thawed, plucked (badly) and stewed (rather well) the chicken. She’d even remembered to de-gut it, holding her nose. (Her rubber gloves had split: she had no money for new ones. The electricity bill second reminder had arrived, but not yet the red one with threats.) She’d run the tap through the chicken’s poor empty sinewy middle. (The water rates had been unpaid for several months: but the Board seemed reluctant to actually cut off supplies.) She’d taken some of her clothes to the Nearly New shop in Wells and Brenda there, knowing Natalie’s predicament, had given her a good price there and then, on the spot: she had used that money to shop for vegetables and After Eights.

  The children possessed Post Office Savings books, which was just as well. On the day Harry left, Alice had had twenty-three pounds in hers and Ben eighty-five (he would) in his. These sums their mother had persuaded them to part with. She had not returned to the DHSS offices; she was putting that off to the last possible moment, continuing to believe that any minute Harry would ring, or write, or even turn up on the doorstep. If people can go suddenly, they can return suddenly. Inspector Took rang to say Harry had been traced to Marbella but extradition proceedings weren’t likely. The inspector, in other words, was prepared to let sleeping dogs rot. Inland Revenue were putting the house and contents up for auction in three weeks’ time: Angu
s was to be the auctioneer. The bank would claim its overdraft, various building societies their debts. These pieces of news Natalie received calmly, as if they related to her dream and not her waking life.

  In the meantime Natalie went to bed in the same room, dressed in the same clothes, ate – admittedly cheaper but much the same – food, stroked the cat as usual and weeded the garden. She suffered from occasional bursts of one nasty passion or another.

  ‘How do you cope?’ she demanded of Sonia. ‘How do you manage?’

  ‘You have no choice,’ replied Sonia, bleakly.

  Sometimes Natalie would walk to the school with Sonia and her kids, but sometimes she would leave either early or late so as to miss her. She did it on purpose. Alice and Ben were beginning to seem more real and less like marionettes than before, and Natalie now found some comfort in their company. She jumped when the phone rang, half fearing bad news, and half hoping for good. But the telephone bill had gone into the red, and then beyond threats into bold statements of intent and soon would no longer be a source of either fear or hope, but simply of silence.

  Well, well! Tonight Angus was coming to supper and leaving Jean behind, on the grounds that Natalie needed help and advice. She was amazed at how simply and easily she managed to prepare and cook the supper. Onions steeped in hot oil, with rosemary from the garden added, the lanky chicken joints rolled in sesame seed and fried with the onions and rosemary, and then simmered for ever in added white wine. The chicken was tough but the flavour was fine; now Harry was gone she could cook. How strange, she thought. Perhaps her fits of rage, grief and resentment were nothing to do with the loss of Harry, but to do with the loss of years wasted in a half life, as half Harry.