In the Fold

THREE

Vivian said it was a good thing Caris was coming. She said she needed help with the dogs.

Out in the passage, the dogs were scratching at the kitchen door. Their claws pushed it and the wind pushed it back. The wood banged around in the loose frame and the banging sound made them bark, as if to alert themselves to what they had done. Through the door they could be heard rattling away down the passage. Almost as soon as they’d gone they came back again in a hurtling crescendo of tapping sounds and hurled themselves against the door once more.

‘One feels like a stranger in one’s own home,’ said Vivian gloomily. ‘It’s a bit much, when you think that I’m the one who feeds them. Other people always seem to have something more important to do, don’t they? They never used to come into the house,’ she said, to me. ‘Now they go sniffing around like a pair of policemen. I try to keep the door shut but I can hear them panting through the keyhole. It’s quite sinister.’

‘You wouldn’t like being here alone,’ Adam observed.

‘We’re not all as idiotic as Marjory Brice!’ said Vivian. ‘She thinks men are constantly trying to get in through her bedroom window.’

‘Well, don’t expect Caris to handle them,’ said Adam. ‘She hates those dogs. You’d get more help from the Queen Mother.’

‘In Spain, a dog has to know its place,’ Vivian informed me, in a significant tone. ‘A dog has to work. People say the Spanish are cruel to animals because they don’t let them sit on the sofa and lick the dinner plates but at least they know their place.’

Unseen by Vivian, Adam rolled his eyes.

‘I have friends who own a ranch outside Madrid.’ She pronounced the word ‘Madrid’ in an accent of severe authenticity. ‘Alvaro has lurchers. Three of them, all black, terribly elegant. They’re almost like people, though not the sort of people you ever meet. I asked him once how he’d trained them and he said he beat them. Beat them to within an inch of their lives! After that, he showed them nothing but respect. He never laid a finger on them again. I think that’s rather dramatic, don’t you?’

‘Very,’ I said.

‘If you knew him,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t surprise you.’

She approached Adam and I where we sat at the table. In one hand she held a blackened frying pan from which smoke was issuing in a fast, grey, vertical stream. In the other she held a metal implement with which she proceeded to scrape furiously at the bottom of the pan, eventually detaching two ragged fried eggs which she added to what was already on our plates.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Adam and I had been in the barns with the sheep since four o’clock that morning and it was now after nine: I was hungry, but in the gloom of the kitchen the food had a grey, indistinct appearance, as though it were very old. When I thought of the kitchen of Egypt Farm I thought of a place that was all light, yet I could see now that it faced into its own depths like a cave or a cathedral. The black hearth made a wall of darkness at one end. The flagstones on the floor were cold and the colour of discomfort. Daylight came through the small window that faced on to the yard and then stopped in a sort of obstructed oblong, as though we were looking at it from under water. Occasionally, the sun fell behind a bank of cloud outside in the tossing spring sky and the room would tilt and sway a little. Sometimes long shadows raced across the kitchen floor and flew up the far wall into oblivion.

I said: ‘I’m surprised. I’d have had Caris down as an animal lover.’

‘She used to cry on walks because the dogs chased the rabbits,’ said Adam. ‘Which I suppose makes her an animal lover of sorts. She said it was persecution. Something about the way they sniffed the ground.’

‘She might have changed,’ said Vivian, as though she hadn’t seen Caris for years. ‘She’s always changing. The moment you’ve got the hang of what she’s interested in she’s interested in something completely different and can’t stand the first thing. Then she seems to want to argue about it.’

Adam snorted. He had his mouth full. I watched him divide the fatty ribbons of bacon, the rough discs of potato, the blackened, visceral mushrooms, and place the sections one after the other in his mouth. Bang-a-bang-a-bang-a went the door. Around the walls stood the towering shelves holding the same items, pieces of china, ancient things made of copper and brass and iron, antique jelly moulds, jars and weights and scales, and mysterious yellowed cookery books with missing spines that were stacked together like a sorcerer’s almanac. They looked reclusive, recessed into their dark wooden alcoves like strange icons. I wondered if any of them had been taken down and used since the last time I saw them. The dense black range crouched in a haze of grey, fat-smelling smoke. Vivian stood by the sink amidst the detritus of her culinary activities. I noticed how thin and hollow-looking she was. Her skin had a jaundiced appearance. Her eyes looked permanently aghast in their wrinkled beds of shadow. Her attenuated arms twitched lightly at her sides, yet her back and shoulders were so hunched around her concave chest that a great weight seemed to be hanging from them. In her dark clothes she had the look of a bloodless, exoskeletal creature.

‘In fact,’ said Adam, to me, ‘you’ll find Caris hasn’t changed at all.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘She’s still wondering what she wants to be when she grows up. Actually, I haven’t seen her since last year,’ he added bitterly. ‘I haven’t even spoken to her.’

‘Doesn’t she keep in touch?’

He laughed. ‘By horoscope. By looking into her crystal ball.’

‘What’s she doing these days?’

‘She lives in a commune. They call it an “artists’ co-operative”. Women only, of course. They’ve freed themselves from the male oppressor. Though to look at some of them I’d say the feeling was mutual.’

‘In London?’

‘She went off in a fit of pique,’ he said, with his mouth full, ‘about four years ago.’

‘There was the most terrible argument,’ added Vivian. ‘She got very angry with everybody, I can’t remember what about. There’s always something, isn’t there? The problem is that people don’t say anything at the time. They get angry with you later, after you’ve forgotten whatever it is you’re supposed to have done.’

‘She said we were a disease,’ said Adam.

‘A what?’

‘A disease.’

‘The thing is, everybody does the best they can do at the time, don’t they?’ said Vivian. ‘It’s no good saying it wasn’t good enough because it was the best you could do at the time.’

I noticed that Vivian was wearing a pair of sunglasses. She had taken them out of her pocket and put them on, in spite of the fact that it was almost dark in the kitchen. The large brown plastic lenses gave her big, bug-like eyes.

‘Did she say when she was coming back?’ said Adam.

‘She talked about the myth. She said she was coming to inspect the myth.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said that of course she could come and inspect it if that was what she wanted,’ said Vivian gamely, from behind her glasses. ‘Only she mustn’t expect to find it. It’s the expectations that are the problem, do you see?’

Just then the dogs stopped scratching at the door and ran away down the passage. A car door slammed in the distance. Presently their muffled barks could be heard from outside. I laid my knife and fork side by side on my plate. I had managed to eat nearly everything and a feeling of extreme satiation oppressed me. The burnished wood of the table seemed to rise up before my eyes and slowly undulate. I saw little roads and rivers in the grain, and stripes, as though on the pelt of an animal.

‘Who’s that?’ said Adam.

‘I should think it’s Jilly,’ said Vivian darkly, ‘wanting something.’

‘Mum?’ a woman’s voice called from out in the passage. The kitchen door opened. ‘Mum? What’s wrong with the dogs?’

I wasn’t sure that I would recognise Jilly but I did; though my first impression of her was that she was nothing like the poor rash-covered creature I remembered on the lawn at Caris’s party. The impression she gave now was one of striking beauty which, curiously, solidified almost immediately into the certainty that she was not beautiful; at which point the awkward girl became visible once more. She was very tall and narrow, with a long neck and a small, lofty head, like a giraffe. She wore her hair, whose blonde streaks were being overridden by vigorous patches of brown, in an untidy ponytail and her clothes were unkempt too. The hem of her coat hung down and there were white stains on the jersey beneath it.

‘It’s dark in here,’ she said, looking at us. She switched on the lights, which made it seem darker. ‘There. Hello,’ she said straight away, to me. ‘I remember you. You were Adam’s friend from university.’ She spoke in a candid, child-like way that I found faintly disturbing. ‘You didn’t have a beard then, though.’

‘I remember you too. You said you were going to have horses when you grew up.’

‘Doesn’t everybody think that?’ said Jilly, with a costive expression. ‘What’s wrong with the dogs?’ she continued. ‘They went mad at me out on the drive.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ said Vivian, looking innocently at her. ‘They probably didn’t recognise your car.’

‘Well, they see it often enough. They must know that Paul’s away. Animals are clever like that.’

‘There’s nothing for lunch, you know,’ said Vivian.

Jilly looked beaky and offended.

‘I didn’t come to get anything,’ she said. ‘I just came to borrow Paul’s big ladder. I need to put a tarpaulin over the barn.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Anyway, it’s only ten o’clock. I couldn’t possibly eat anything yet.’

‘Where’s Nigel?’ said Vivian.

‘He’s gone over to Clatworthy. To see his mother.’

‘Well, he won’t get much out of her!’

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Jilly.

‘Listen to you!’

Jilly sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands.

‘The roof on the barn’s about to fall in,’ she said in a pinched little voice. ‘What are we supposed to do, just let it go? We haven’t a penny to spend on it. It’s just been one thing after another.’

‘It’s hard to sympathise,’ said Vivian morbidly, ‘when you have to have your kitchen cupboards made by hand and brought from London.’

‘Oh, when will you stop talking about that?’ cried Jilly. ‘I’ve told you, it was Nigel’s cousin who made them! We got them for a fraction of the price!’

‘And the tiles from Italy, and the leather chairs, and that crockery you’re not even allowed to wash —’

‘And why shouldn’t we have them, when she’s never done a day’s work in her life! That great big house,’ sighed Jilly. ‘She’s hardly ever there, you know. She stays in London — she’s got another six empty bedrooms there!’

‘I’m not surprised she stays away,’ said Vivian. ‘I always thought that house was unhappy. And it faces due north, you know. It can’t get any light at all. I never understood why she went to such lengths to get it.’

‘It’s the family seat,’ said Jilly indignantly. ‘Her father built that house.’

‘Wasn’t her father mad?’ said Adam.

‘I remember he bred llamas,’ said Vivian. ‘They always looked very odd, standing there in the rain. He and his wife used to go about in the most extraordinary clothes.’

‘What sort of clothes?’ said Adam.

‘I remember he used to wear a sort of chain mail outfit. And she wore a crown and these great medieval dresses with long sleeves. Everyone in the house did the same. The house was like a castle, a funny little castle there in the valley. They had a lot of servants and people just sort of hanging about and all of them had to wear these costumes too. I think they got a lot of people from London,’ said Vivian, as though that explained everything.

‘Why do you want to talk about all that?’ said Jilly crossly. ‘Nigel doesn’t like people knowing. Anyway, he says it’s all exaggerated. They probably had one fancy dress party.’

‘She drowned in the river at the bottom of the garden,’ said Vivian in a distant voice. ‘He sold the house and no one heard anything from him again. They were using it as a nursing home. It had lifts on all the stairs.’

‘You make it sound awful!’ said Jilly. ‘It’s not awful,’ she added, to me.

‘Then one day Nigel’s mother came and bought it. It turned out that her father had finally died and when she got his money the first thing she did was come back and buy that dreadful house. It’s rather sad, don’t you think?’ said Vivian forlornly. ‘Don’t you think it’s sad?’

‘She probably paid five times what her father sold it for,’ said Adam.

‘She’s got thousands in the bank,’ said Jilly, ‘and she won’t use a first-class stamp. Can you believe it? She won’t pay the money for a first-class stamp.’

‘When you think of the people who must have died there!’ said Vivian, distressed.

‘It would be a drop in the ocean to her,’ said Jilly. ‘What we need for the roof. It’s Nigel’s money, anyway. It’s his inheritance.’

Adam said: ‘She might live till she’s a hundred.’

‘That’d be just like her,’ said Jilly. ‘Can’t you do something about those dogs?’ she added, turning around in her chair to address her mother. The dogs had started scratching at the door again. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Adam. ‘They’ve been like this since dad went.’

‘I can’t imagine Paul in hospital. I can’t even imagine him being ill,’ Jilly said wonderingly.

‘You should go in. He’s desperate for visitors.’

‘I don’t think I could,’ said she, shaking her head. ‘I don’t actually think I could. I’d find it too upsetting, seeing him like that.’

‘He’s bored stiff lying there on his own. He isn’t actually that ill, you know — he’s just waiting for the operation. He looks completely normal. I think they said they were doing it this afternoon.’

‘I can’t imagine what they make of him, the nurses and doctors!’ cried Jilly. ‘Do they all think he’s disgustingly rude? You know,’ she said, to me, ‘all my friends were absolutely terrified of Paul. You’d be sitting there dreading the moment when he singled you out and yet wanting him to, because you felt so invisible if he didn’t. Do you remember the time he threatened to kill Nell because Alice Beasley said she was allergic to dogs?’ She laughed. ‘He even got the gun out. Alice went completely white. I don’t think she ever came back here again!’

‘It isn’t as though he’s actually going to die,’ said Vivian in a strange voice.

‘It’s a routine operation,’ Adam agreed. ‘There’s nothing unusual about it at all.’

‘But sometimes,’ Vivian persisted, ‘people are in the operating theatre having the silliest things done, like plastic surgery, and they just — die.’

There was a pause. Vivian was looking slightly wildly at us through her long black fringe.

‘Why don’t you come in with me later?’ Adam said to her. ‘Then you can see for yourself. There’s no point sitting at home worrying about it.’

‘I don’t like hospitals,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘I always think I’m not going to get out of them.’

‘What’s wrong with you, mummy?’ said Jilly crossly. ‘You’re being silly.’

‘Look, why don’t we go together?’ said Adam again. ‘We can go together in my car.’

‘Have you ever noticed,’ said Vivian, to me, ‘that when you don’t do what people want you to do they start treating you like an imbecile?’

‘I’m only trying to help,’ said Adam imperturbably. He stood up from the table. ‘Let me know if you change your mind. We should be getting back.’

‘I’m going too,’ Jilly said. ‘I’m expected at the Wattses. I’m helping Sarah move house.’

‘Do they pay you?’ said Vivian sharply.

Jilly laughed. ‘Of course not!’

‘It’s just that I wanted to know if she paid you.’

‘Why would she pay me?’ Jilly put her coat on. As well as the loose hem, it had several buttons missing and a tear in the arm. ‘She’s a friend!’

‘Why can’t she move house herself — why does she need you to do it for her?’

‘Friends help each other,’ said Jilly, shrugging, as though she regretted this maxim but couldn’t alter its truthfulness.

‘I don’t suppose she’s anywhere to be seen when you need help. I don’t suppose she’s moving house for you — you probably can’t see her for dust!’

Vivian opened a drawer and removed a chequebook, with which she sat down at the table. She proceeded to write with a shaking hand.

‘At least if she paid you the relationship would be clear.’

‘All you think about is money!’ cried Jilly, even as her mother carefully tore out a cheque and handed it to her. She looked at it and put it in her pocket. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Nigel and I are so grateful for this.’

She bent down and kissed her on the cheek with pursed lips. Vivian stayed sitting at the kitchen table. The rest of us left the house together. When we went out into the passage the dogs threw themselves against our legs. Startled, I half-stumbled over their writhing bodies. The air was full of grey, rank-smelling fur. Outside in the light Jilly gave us a fast smile.

‘It works every time,’ she said, indicating her ragged coat. She gave a little laugh and strode off across the courtyard. ‘See you!’ she called over her shoulder.

The dogs came part of the way with us across the yard. Then they turned together and ran back towards the house.

*

We crossed the sloping courtyard, where clumps of grass came through hillocks in the old cobblestones and numerous grey stone buildings were subsiding, showing their black, vacant interiors through the jagged gaps of missing planks and panes. Sheets of sunlight fell brilliantly on the uneven roofs and shattered. At the front the house was imposing but behind, where no one could see, it lapsed into a succession of flaws and pragmatisms. The side and back were harled and painted white and stained with mud and water. An assortment of doors and windows cluttered the rear wall. Puddles collected in the concavities of the courtyard floor.

We passed through a narrow stone archway out of the courtyard and down the steps to the track. The twin ruts meandered away across the hill. The cold blue vista of the sea stood in the distance. Earlier, at dawn, it had been the colour of mud. Now the light was very clear. The sea was like a staring pair of blue eyes. The hill stood out as though electrified, each tiny spear of grass differentiated from the next, the branches of the trees fretful and naked. I could see the crenellated mud around distant gates and the boundary of the Hanburys’ land as though it had been cut from a pattern, with the two pyramidal hills lying mysteriously at its centre. All around it the brown fences cast little heavy blocks of shadow. It looked miniature, like a scale model. The grey road looped up and over the hill and down the other side. Far below, shiny cars moved noiselessly around the streets of Doniford. Beyond that, towards the harbour, the old town met the sea with a certain ramshackle grandeur. Some of the houses there had been painted bright colours. Earlier, in the rain, the effect was slightly demented, but in the sun it had a cheering radiance. Beyond the town, along the coast, I could see the pale brown frill of sand that edged the great folds of land as they knelt down into the sea.

‘You can see our house,’ said Adam.

He pointed to the right, where the tiny grid of streets fanned out into a big red delta of new housing that had spread east from the compact centre of the town like something slowly being disgorged. I followed the direction of his finger through the ranks of little boxes, each neatly summed up on a square of green. From a distance it looked like a circuit board. I couldn’t distinguish Adam’s house from the others, though I wanted to: I had left Hamish there with Adam’s wife Lisa and their baby. I hadn’t intended to do this. My plans for Hamish had been vaguely incorporeal: I had imagined him following me around, unbodied, free of want, but as soon as we arrived Lisa had placed him implacably under her own jurisdiction, like an empire appropriating a small, suitable colony. It interested me to see how eagerly Hamish surrendered himself to her highly regulated household, giving the unmistakable impression that his was a life criminally devoid of norms.

‘I didn’t know you could see it from up here when I bought it,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t really like the idea. I imagine dad standing here, looking down.’ He paused. ‘It’s very convenient, though. I’m at work in less than five minutes. Actually, sometimes I wish it took a bit longer. Sometimes I’d like a bit more — scale. But it isn’t for ever. That’s what Lisa always says. We’ve given ourselves five years.’

‘For what?’ I said.

‘For this. This phase. Then we’re going to look at it all again. See where we are.’

The wind lifted our coats and tugged them from side to side. It was cold and exposed on the hill. Adam’s nose was red and his eyes were watering. He breathed heavily next to me, as though with exertions that exceeded those of the present moment. The new red flank of the town maintained its unwavering hold on his attention. He looked at it with ambivalent fascination, as though he had built it himself. The fierce, staring blue of the sea reminded me of Rebecca’s eyes.

‘You make it sound like a military campaign,’ I said.

‘It is, in a way,’ Adam replied, plunging his hands in his pockets.

He didn’t seem offended by my remark but he didn’t treat it as a joke either. His humourlessness caused me to feel a mild sensation of alarm, as though I had mislaid something, as though I had reached out for it, certain it was there, and found it wasn’t. Adam looked at his watch.

‘We’d better get back,’ he said. ‘Beverly times our breaks, you know.’

We set off again along the muddy track that led to the barns. Even from a distance you could hear the sound the sheep made in their enclosure, where they were penned up in a moving, baying mass behind metal railings. The disharmonious sound of their plaintive voices, lifted constantly in ululation, was interspersed with the percussive noise of the loose metal bars, which rattled frantically as the body of animals pushed them to and fro. The barns were freezing cold, and full of a sort of steam or vapour that rose off the sheep without warming the air. It was a harsh atmosphere, though not an unpleasant one: the promise of the lambs gave it a rich kind of urgency, a temporary beauty of illumination, as though a single ray of light were trained on this multitudinous place alone on the desolate hillside. Beverly was overseeing the lambing for the whole week. She lived on a nearby farm, but spent the nights in an old camper van she’d driven over and parked in the yard outside the barns. All night she woke every two hours to feed the ill or orphaned lambs. She performed this maternal service with better grace than Rebecca, who when Hamish was a baby used to tut and sigh and emit dramatic groans into the darkness when he cried next door. I did not like to think of those nights: I remembered them as the place in which Rebecca’s unhappiness was conceived and made manifest, where it grew and gathered strength and was inadvertently nourished into autonomy. Sometimes, in those days, I felt angry with Hamish for his cries, though I never believed he was the real cause of Rebecca’s distress; it was, rather, that he had exposed it, and as a consequence exposed me too, finding out my nascent reliability where it lay buried there in the dark.

When we got back to the barns Beverly was cleaning out one of the empty pens with a shovel. She didn’t eat with us at the house; instead she produced a Tupperware box neatly packed with things segmented and wrapped, which she ate sitting on an overturned bucket in the yard. She kept the radio on, tuned to a station from which only the sound of human voices emanated, embedded in endless conversation. There were usually three of them talking, two men and a woman, or sometimes two women and a man, on which occasions I noticed a certain intimate aggression crept into the proceedings, so that the air was filled with the possibility that this verbal ping-pong could at any moment transform itself into something else.

‘I’ll finish that,’ I said. I held out my hand for the shovel.

Beverly was the healthiest human I had ever laid eyes on. She was twenty-five or so, and she looked as I imagined people were meant to look. Her broad, brown body was distinctly female and yet there was nothing slender or shiny about her. She was like a piece of oak. Her hair was light matt brown and curly and her eyes were bright, friendly lozenges of green. I didn’t think she was married. I imagined her associating only with a menagerie of animals, like a girl in a children’s story.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘You can dig a hole for that when you’re done.’

She tapped a big yellow bucket in the straw with her boot. Inside it was a dead lamb. Its eyes were closed. Its woolly muzzle was pursed. Its rigid legs were all crossed like poles.

‘What happened to him?’ said Adam.

‘I expect it was a heart defect,’ said Beverly flatly. ‘He’s one of triplets. The mother’s too ill to take them. I’m going to try fostering the others out.’

She shrugged, having delivered herself of this tale of woe. She wore men’s clothes, big canvas jeans belted at the waist, a checked shirt and an oversized padded waistcoat. I noticed the shirt was ironed. I wondered how she managed to look so neat, spending her nights in the camper van.

‘Well, it wasn’t your fault,’ said Adam. He had his back to her and hence missed the look Beverly gave him, which signified that she found his remark idiotic.

‘Round by the fence at the back is a good place,’ she said to me, tapping the bucket with her boot again.

I started shovelling dirty straw into a mud-spattered wheelbarrow. The straw gave off a deep, rancid smell and sent up yellow clouds of dust and flaky matter that slowly sank back down through the inhospitable, cold air to the concrete floor. After that I stood in the wind at the back of the barn and dug a hole for the dead lamb. The crumpled body had shrunk from its exposure to air and light. It looked embryonic, as though it were reversing out of existence. Beverly said that the lambs were usually born at night: most things were, she said, and they died at night too. I thought of the dawn we had seen hours earlier: the strenuous emergence of light, the reconfiguration, the recalculation of the sum of what there was. I upended the bucket and the body rolled out into the dirt. Closing my eyes I shovelled more dirt on top of it. Presently I went back to the barn, where Adam was filling the big trough for the ewes that were still pregnant. They barged into one another to get to the food, as broad and brainless as sofas.

‘There’s another just been born,’ called Beverly from the far corner. ‘It’s ever so sweet. I’m going to call it Muesli, because it’s all speckled. Come and have a look.’

We went to look at Muesli. It was staggering gamely around in the straw and fixed me with the accusatory eyes of the new-born. In the next pen was a ewe with a black lamb like the one I had just buried. The ewe’s shaggy coat was matted with dried mud. She was butting her head against the wooden door and making the metal bolts and hinges rattle. The lamb was angling at her underside and trying to nip her teats. Every time it got hold of her she threw herself against the door and finally rolled around the pen to shake it off. The tiny animal followed her automatically round and round, pecking her belly with its soft little muzzle. I found its persistence more disturbing even than the mother’s aggression. She bent her head and shoved it away so that it fell against the side of the pen. It levered itself up on its knees and shakily unfolded its rigid sections of leg. It darted for the mother’s belly again. The sound of her big body bruising around the pen and causing the hinges to rattle was deafening.

‘You’ve got a problem here,’ I called to Beverly.

The ewe had packed herself into a corner and was showing her hind quarters to the lamb like a closed door. Beverly didn’t come over. She barely even looked up.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘For some reason the mother doesn’t want to feed it.’

‘She’s not the mother,’ said Beverly. ‘I’m trying to get her to foster. It’s not working, though.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘Not much you can do.’

‘What about feeding it by hand?’

‘Maybe. Then you’ve got to feed them all night too. It’s a lot of work. Sometimes it’s best just to let nature take its course.’

Hamish had a story in which a child looked after an orphaned lamb. The story made it clear that compared with everything else, the nurture of small animals ought to be rudimentary.

‘I probably will, though,’ continued Beverly flatly. ‘Those black ones are sort of cute.’

I took another load in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out into the open yard. Adam was there raking the pile up against the wall in the wind. Little scratchy shreds of matter were whirled up into the air and came barrelling against our faces.

‘We drew the short straw, you know,’ he said in a low voice. ‘All this shovelling and tidying up — the nights are much better. Brendon got them, of course. Him and Beverly light all these candles and sit in the straw drinking beer.’

I was surprised.

‘I didn’t know Brendon was still here.’

‘He never left. He lives in the lodge. They’ll give you hot water at the house, you know,’ he called over to Beverly.

Beverly was sitting in the yard lighting the little gas burner she’d brought with her in her van. It made a hoarse noise of great exertion against the wind. She had a tin kettle she stood on it to make tea.

‘I’m all right here,’ Beverly called back.

‘Brendon,’ Adam continued in a discreet voice, ‘isn’t viable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He isn’t capable of independent life. He’s never even had a job! He just sits there talking to his chickens. And for that,’ Adam concluded grimly, ‘he gets all the perks.’

I found that I felt defensive of Brendon: something in the way Adam spoke about him made me think of Hamish. I remembered the little white face of the forgotten boy I had glimpsed in the chicken house the first time I came to Egypt.

‘I remember he liked chickens.’

Adam laughed and shook his head.

‘Incredible, isn’t it? No one’s ever lifted a finger to help me and Lisa. Everything we’ve got, we’ve got for ourselves. Some people have to be carried through life,’ he added, looking at me significantly, as though to ascertain whether I was one of those people. ‘I’m going over there now, actually. I’ve got to ask him to help Vivian with the dogs. Should be entertaining — he’s got some kind of dog phobia. We’re just going down to the lodge,’ he called to Beverly.

‘See you,’ she said, lightly but with resignation. ‘Tell Brendon I’ll see him at the pub.’

I followed Adam out of the barn. He raised his arm beside me in assent but when we got out on to the track he said:

‘That’s the first I’ve heard of her seeing him at the pub.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘There’s nothing morally wrong with Brendon seeing a woman,’ admitted Adam after a while.

‘Is this where the artist used to live?’

We were going down the track towards the stone gates.

‘Which artist?’

‘The one who painted Caris.’

‘Oh, him. I don’t know what happened to him. He sort of disappeared.’

‘I thought he was going to be the next Frank Auerbach.’

‘Well, he wasn’t.’

A single-storey grey stone building appeared on the side of the hill. A feather of wood smoke came out of the chimney, bent sideways by the wind. As we approached I saw that a big wire structure was attached to the side wall. It was like a tunnel or hangar following the line of the building. There were three large wooden hen houses inside. A number of fat, ruffled birds were pecking the ground around them.

‘You’ve been busy,’ said Adam when his brother opened the door.

A set of bamboo wind chimes hung from the lintel. They made a crazy knocking noise and writhed about in the wind. Brendon wore an expression of astonishment. He regarded us, wild-eyed, for a full ten seconds.

‘You mean the new run,’ he stated.

‘It’s pretty close to the house.’

‘Right by it,’ nodded Brendon, emphatically.

He was taller and more slender than Adam. His pale blue eyes were startled and round. His blond hair stood up in spikes. He looked like a doll that had been too energetically played with. I had last seen him as a child and I could still see that early version of him within the man he had become. It was like seeing someone imprisoned in a very small cell. On his feet he wore big lace-up boots that had been clumsily hand-painted in the colours of the rainbow.

‘This is Michael.’ Adam gestured towards me.

‘H-hi. Welcome.’

‘The birds’ll scratch a trench along the wall,’ Adam said.

Brendon stared at him.

‘Thought of that,’ he gasped, nodding. ‘I l-lined it with bricks. Want to see?’

We followed him round to the side of the house, where the wind desisted a little.

‘They love the s-s-space,’ stammered Brendon, red with pride. ‘My yields have sh-shot up.’

He was wearing a shirt which had on it a pattern of buxom, dark-haired women with garlands around their necks.

‘You should change your cartons,’ said Adam. ‘You’d get more business.’

‘I don’t think I can. I’ve got a new customer that likes them.’

Adam lifted his head suspiciously.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Sh-shelby’s.’

‘You can’t supply someone like Shelby’s from here,’ said Adam. ‘There isn’t the infrastructure.’

Brendon moved his mouth, as though he were ingesting the word.

‘Come inside,’ he said finally. ‘You look a bit stressed out. Beverly says it’s pretty manic up there.’

We followed him through the door of the cottage and into a cramped sitting room. The ceiling sagged perilously in the middle. On one wall a large dark patch of rot was smeared across the plaster. A decrepit-looking sofa and a malformed armchair were the only furniture. The room smelled of damp and wood smoke. It didn’t look like a place where a person could live. I remembered what Adam had said about Brendon receiving perks, and wondered if this was meant to be one of them.

He went through a doorway into a lean-to that housed the kitchen. I watched him pick up a hot-water bottle that lay on the counter and unscrew the plug. With his back to us he emptied the contents into the kettle and switched it on.

‘We should sort this place out,’ said Adam, looking around. ‘People are getting a fortune for this kind of thing. They rent them out as holiday cottages. The Brices say theirs is booked nearly the whole year round.’

‘You can’t do that here,’ said Brendon from the kitchen.

‘Why not?’ Adam demanded.

‘You can’t. Dad w-wanted to. He got someone to come and look at it and they found, you know, asbestos. In the roof. So officially the building’s a, um, health hazard.’ Brendon appeared in the doorway. ‘It isn’t harmful so long as you don’t touch it.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘Asbestos.’

The kitchen was so small that when the kettle boiled it sent a jet of steam out into the sitting room.

‘Bloody typical,’ muttered Adam. He seemed to think Brendon had put the asbestos there himself. ‘How much is that going to cost to sort out, I wonder?’

‘I d-don’t know. A lot. Dad decided it wasn’t worth it. It would have h-halved the price.’

‘What price? We’re talking about renting it out, not selling it.’

‘No.’ Brendon shook his head. ‘No, it was to s-sell.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘He wanted to sell it,’ repeated Brendon. ‘With some land. Half the l-little field down the hill and —’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Adam again.

‘The problem was,’ Brendon continued, tentatively coming further into the room like something being slowly lured out of its burrow, ‘they’d have knocked it down.’

‘Who would?’

‘The new owners. And built something else. An eyesore.’ Brendon tugged at his eye with his middle finger and disappeared into the kitchen again.

‘Brendon doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Adam, to me.

Brendon did not contradict this, although he was now standing right beside his brother with two cups trembling in his hands. Some of the hot, light-brown liquid spilled over the brim of one of them and pattered over the carpet.

‘It’s not as if he needs the money,’ Adam persisted. ‘He’d never let a piece of the farm go, not in a million years.’

He seemed distressed, as much by the fact that he hadn’t been told about it as by the inadmissibility of the idea itself. I felt sorry for him: this was a state into which I was frequently thrown by Rebecca.

‘I was glad,’ Brendon said. ‘I didn’t want them to knock it down. This place stands on a l-ley line, you know. It’s a s-sacred site. Bad luck to harm it. Did you know Caris is coming?’ he added.

I sat down in the armchair. It was covered with a length of cloth, like something in a morgue.

‘I had heard,’ said Adam.

‘She’ll tell you. She’s s-seen things here.’

Adam put a hand to his head, as though he were in pain.

‘What sort of things?’ I asked.

‘E-emanations. Lights. Do you know Caris?’

‘A little.’

‘She’s very porous. She’s always seeing things.’

‘Well, she hasn’t seen Isobel,’ Adam said. Isobel was the name of his baby. ‘She’s had distinct trouble seeing her. She’s never once laid eyes on her.’

Brendon stared at him with his mouth open.

‘I know she got someone to do her solar chart when she was born,’ he said reasonably. ‘She’s bringing it with her from London. It’s, ah, good news apparently.’

The windows of the little room were wet with condensation. A pall of odorous steam was suspended at its centre. There was a dirty, boiled-roots smell.

‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.

‘Hot mash,’ Brendon replied. ‘For the birds. Apparently it stops them pining for a cockerel.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Adam.

‘M-mum.’

‘I thought so. Show Michael your cartons.’

‘Oh. All right.’ Brendon hopped off the sofa and vanished into the kitchen. He returned with a carton and handed it to me. ‘Th-there you go.’

The carton was bright pink. It had a turquoise label which read ‘Funky Chickens’.

‘A friend of mine makes them for me,’ said Brendon proudly. ‘They s-stand out a mile in the shops.’

‘You should have seen dad’s face when he saw them,’ said Adam, to me. ‘He thought he’d never be able to show himself in Doniford again.’

‘He just had to get used to them,’ said Brendon. ‘He likes them now. He saw Lady Higham buying some and she said they were the l-latest thing.’

‘The latest thing,’ Adam repeated, shaking his head. He put his hands on his knees and stood up heavily. ‘The latest thing in eggs. That reconciled him, did it?’

I stood up too. The dank steam was much thicker towards the top and centre of the room so I went and stood by the cast-iron fireplace. On the mantelpiece there was a small brass Buddha, grinning insanely. Next to it was an inlaid incense holder with a little grey worm of ash lying beside it.

‘I came to ask you a favour,’ Adam said.

Brendon looked frightened. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Vivian needs the dogs walking.’

‘All right,’ said Brendon doubtfully. ‘They don’t like me, though.’

‘She can’t see to the end of her arm. They’re spending all day shut in.’

‘I’ll t-try,’ said Brendon.

‘They’re a bit temperamental with dad away.’

Brendon looked aghast.

‘It’s all right,’ Adam said. ‘It’s only for a week.’

‘What am I supposed to do with them?’

‘Just take them to the top of the hill and back.’

‘But what if they run away?’

Adam opened the cottage door and let us out on to the windy hill. A belch of steam was let out with us and was instantly drawn upwards into the sky.

‘If they run away you’ll just have to go and find them,’ he said.

We set off back up the track towards the barns.