In the Fold

FIVE

I knew that Caris had arrived, but I didn’t expect to find her sitting at the table in the kitchen when we came up to the house for breakfast.

‘Hello, Michael,’ she said.

She spoke in a rich voice, and looked me straight in the eyes as though to mesmerise me.

‘Caris. It’s been a long time.’

As I said her name the thought occurred to me that perhaps she wasn’t Caris: her penetrating air, as well as the distinct theatricality of her appearance, seemed to raise the possibility that she was an impersonator, or a passing fortune teller who had mysteriously divined my identity. She was wearing an embroidered peasant blouse with voluminous gathered sleeves and had large gold hoops in her ears. Her hair was a wild bonnet of coarse, springy-looking black curls.

‘It’s been a long time,’ I said again. It was the sight of Caris so changed that made a sort of geological reality of the fact.

‘Not so long,’ she said, still pinioning me with her eyes, into which a quizzical light had stolen. ‘Seeing you, it’s as though it were only a minute. I feel as though I could just walk outside, and find my party still going on.’

Were this the case, the uncharitable thought crossed my mind that Caris would discover she no longer fitted into her dress.

‘But of course,’ she continued, perhaps seeing something disbelieving in my expression, ‘this is the new Michael, the grown-up Michael. I don’t know this Michael at all. I don’t know why he should be here, the week that I decide to go home. All I know is that for some reason he’s come around again.’

The mere mention of coming around turned my innards to stone. Caris continued to fix me with her dark-brown gaze as though to prevent me looking at her in return. I discerned a certain weariness in her, with a compulsion of her own from which she was unable to free herself, to invest everything with significance. Her face had become longer and squarer and a resemblance to her father had emerged, like a second face behind the first. Parentheses were etched deeply into the skin around her mouth: again, they gave an impression of fatigue, almost of disillusion. But her eyebrows were militant, fierce and thick and black, and from where I was sitting I could see a coarse shadow of black hair on her upper lip. She had grown much larger and fleshier in the parts of her that I could see, her shoulders and neck and arms. She had acquired a striking, almost sculptural, solidity. The effect was not unimpressive.

‘It’s so strange being here without dad!’ she observed gaily, looking around her. ‘I can’t remember a single time that I was here without him. Adam, don’t you think it’s strange being here without dad?’

This was her greeting to Adam, who had stopped in the yard on the way up and hence had only just entered the room. I recalled the fact that they had not seen each other for almost a year, and thought that Caris’s opening salvo showed a certain steel.

‘He always sits just there,’ continued Caris, pointing at the high-backed wooden chair next to the vast black hearth, ‘usually in his riding things, swearing like a trooper and drinking port at eight o’clock in the morning.’

This, at least, I did recall of the Caris of old, a certain coquettish habit of asserting universal truths where her father was concerned. It had seemed more charming at eighteen than it did at thirty-four.

‘His port-drinking days are over,’ Adam grimly observed. ‘The doctor put him on a strict diet of white wine and shandy.’

‘Now that I can’t imagine,’ said Caris. ‘Dad drinking — what did he call them? Women’s drinks. Do you remember that about dad, Michael? Women, poofs and Jews. The unholy Trinity.’

‘How did you get here?’ asked Adam.

‘How did I get here? Let me see — I took the bus to the tube station, then I took the tube to the railway station. Then I took two different trains to get to Taunton. Then I took the bus to Doniford, and I was about to walk the rest but Clifford spotted me and gave me a lift in his taxi. I rather liked the idea of arriving on foot, like a pilgrim, but he wasn’t to be put off.’

‘Lisa would have picked you up. She wouldn’t have minded.’

‘I found out the most extraordinary things about Clifford! Did you know he used to live in a castle? He grew up on the west coast, somewhere near Braunton, and apparently there was this big castle on a hill that he always used to look at when he was a child. He decided that when he was older he’d buy it, and one day it came on the market and he did. He was a builder at the time, he said. He raised an enormous mortgage and scraped together every penny of his own, and he and his wife moved in and installed some kitchen units!’ She sat back in her chair and laughed rousingly. ‘I think that was all they could ever afford to do. Then a couple of years later the market crashed and the mortgage company took it away from him. He lost all his money, so he came to Doniford because his brother lived here and they started a taxi company. And do you know what he did as soon as he’d made a thousand pounds? He bought a little field, right in the middle of Doniford. Apparently it’s now worth a million pounds to a developer, but he can’t sell it because there’s a right of way across it, which the council are always on the verge of overturning and then don’t. I got the impression he doesn’t actually want them to. If they did he might have to go and buy another castle. He’s still haunted by his kitchen units. He built them himself, he said.’ She looked for someone to whom to address her next remark and settled on me. ‘This is the sort of thing you find out when you don’t drive a car.’

‘Don’t or can’t?’ I said.

‘Won’t,’ she replied triumphantly. ‘Can, but won’t. I used to drive. I was a very dextrous driver. I especially liked going fast. I used to come right up behind people and flash my lights at them.’

‘At least you admit it,’ I said.

‘Oh, I admit everything,’ said Caris. ‘I’ve made a full confession. I despise my former idolatry. I used to love cars, and now I can hardly bring myself to get in one. They disgust me — the smell disgusts me, the smug moulded seats, the seatbelts, that great big idiotic steering wheel, the whole phallic enterprise. I feel as though I must have had an early traumatic experience in a car but in fact it was only that I liked them. Work that out,’ she said, lifting her palms upwards. ‘In London I tap on people’s windows and wave at them. I can’t help it. When I see them sitting all in a row staring straight ahead I can’t help it. People get so frightened when you touch their cars. It’s as though you’ve put your hands down their trousers.’

‘Do you do that too?’ I joked, nevertheless making it clear that I had forgotten the pale, superior nymph-Caris who lived somewhere in this trenchant Caris.

‘No, Michael.’ She gave me a sour look. ‘No, I don’t do that.’

‘Oh, you’re all here,’ said Vivian from the door. She smiled rather rakishly, with one side of her mouth. The other side remained downturned, as though half of her were perpetually reminding the other half of occasions on which an optimistic approach to things had not paid off. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to come up for another half an hour or so. I don’t know why I wasn’t,’ she said, in a rambling manner, shuffling out of a large brown garment that was half coat, half cape. ‘It’s silly of me in a way to expect you always to come up at the same time. There’s no reason why you should, is there? I don’t know why,’ she continued, so that it was impossible not to form the impression that she was slightly drunk, or in some way afflicted, ‘I always think that everything has to happen according to a sort of timetable. I suppose it’s all the years of following what the men were doing. There is such a timetable, that’s the thing, on a farm — other people simply aren’t flexible, so I suppose in the end you become rather like that yourself.’

Having shed her cape, Vivian retained a hat with a drooping brim that almost obscured her eyes, which were themselves shielded by her large brown sunglasses. She did not look particularly like she had spent her life adhering to a timetable. She looked distinctly cavalier.

‘Beverly needs to go somewhere later,’ said Adam. ‘She asked if we minded breaking a bit earlier so she can get away.’

‘Well, I do think she could have told me,’ said Vivian from beneath her hat. ‘She obviously thinks I just sit here all day waiting for people to go in and out. I know the lambs are important, but other people have lives too.’

‘Oh, the lambs!’ cried Caris. ‘The little lambs! I must come down and say hello to them — do you remember how dad used to take the old record player out to the barn and play music to the ewes? It was the funniest thing — do you remember, Vivian?’

‘He claimed it took their minds off it,’ said Vivian, giving us her rakish smile again. ‘I suppose there was no way of knowing whether it did or not.’

‘Of course,’ continued Caris, ‘it was a different thing altogether when it came to human beings. Dad was notoriously unsympathetic,’ she said, to me. ‘His own capacity for pain is enormous. I once saw him put a pitchfork through his own foot. He went completely white. Then he just pulled it out again —’ she imitated this manoeuvre with her robust arms ‘— and walked back to the house.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ said Adam.

‘You weren’t there,’ said Caris. ‘I was the only one there.’

‘I suppose I never really believed that a sheep had the capacity to know its own suffering,’ said Vivian. ‘I suppose that was it, really.’

‘They make a lot of noise,’ I said. It was a noise my head was still full of. ‘But they don’t seem to suffer much.’

‘I don’t see how you’d know,’ said Caris. ‘Anyway, the noise suggests they do suffer. Why would they make it otherwise?’

‘Yes, it would help to sort of drown it out, wouldn’t it?’ said Vivian. She was holding a frying pan out in front of her as though preparing to hit a tennis ball with it. ‘The music. Perhaps that’s why he did it.’

‘They all make the noise,’ I said, to Caris. ‘Communally. At the same time.’

‘I imagine they’re frightened,’ she replied presently, giving me a wide-eyed look that accused me of some unspecified tyranny.

Adam said, ‘Vivian, is that the dogs upstairs?’

Vivian was now at the stove, breaking eggs into the frying pan. She did this by holding the egg high above the pan and then crushing it amidst her shaking fingers, creating a long, glaucous fall of matter. She did one and then picked up another and held it what seemed to be rather too far to the left. As I watched, the innards of the egg fell not into the frying pan but all the way down to the floor with a flop. Vivian appeared not to notice.

‘Vivian?’ Adam repeated. ‘Are the dogs upstairs?’

‘What did you say?’ said Vivian, apparently startled. She turned her head and I saw that she was still wearing her sunglasses.

‘I think I can hear the dogs upstairs.’

I too could hear scratching sounds travelling in patterns over our heads.

‘They went up there,’ said Vivian. ‘I couldn’t get them down.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Adam.

‘I went out into the hall and they came down the stairs and barked at me.’

‘They barked at me too,’ said Caris. ‘They were lying on my bed.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Adam. ‘They never go upstairs.’

‘I shut them out last night and they went wild,’ said Vivian. ‘Marjory Brice could hear them all the way down the hill. She telephoned to see what the matter was. In the end I let them in and they just ran upstairs into our room and got on to the bed.’

‘So how did you get them out?’ demanded Adam.

‘I didn’t. I locked them in and slept in the spare room. All night I could hear them panting through the keyhole.’

‘What about Brendon? Didn’t Brendon come?’

‘They wouldn’t go with him either. He managed to get their leads on — the problem was that then we couldn’t get them off again. They got all tangled around his legs and then they sort of each ran off in different directions and pulled him over. He hit his head on the chest of drawers. Then Nell bit him on the hand. He was terribly upset.’

‘This is completely ridiculous,’ Adam said.

‘It’s a bit much, really, isn’t it?’ said Vivian, to all of us. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit much?’

We listened to the tapping sounds, running in rapid figures of eight over our heads.

‘It’s as if they know dad isn’t here,’ said Caris.

‘Of course they know dad isn’t here,’ said Adam. ‘They can see he isn’t here.’

‘But it’s as though they’re worried. They know something’s wrong. Dad has an amazing rapport with animals,’ she informed me. I noticed that her early, impressive contralto had now risen by several tones. ‘They speak to him, they really do. They’d defend him to the death.’

The black fumes of Vivian’s breakfast were billowing across the kitchen. With a feeling of submission, almost of defeat, I felt my palate rise in anticipation, not just of food but apparently of repetition itself. It seemed that the quality of Vivian’s breakfasts was insignificant, compared to my willingness to make a habit of them. For some reason this caused me to think of Hamish. It was both sad and relieving to imagine him adjusting to each new latitude, each substitution of day for night, with a physiological routine bent not on understanding things but merely acclimatising to them. Already he seemed perfectly happy living with Lisa at 22 The Meadows, which in terms of time zones was as Sydney to Rebecca and Nimrod Street’s London. Whatever feelings spilled out of him at the transits of his fate the mechanism of his body set about busily mopping up. Caris had risen from her chair and moved to the window, giving me the opportunity to examine the other half of her outfit. Below the peasant blouse she was wearing a very full dark-red skirt with beads sewn around the bottom, a pair of white lacy tights and high-heeled red shoes. She looked as though she were wearing the national dress of a small, high-spirited country. I wondered how she had planned to climb Egypt Hill in this attire. The skirt emphasised the solidity of her hips in a way that was more intimidating than unflattering. She folded her arms and stood with one leg thrown out to the side, contemplating the grey prospect of the courtyard. Vivian put my plate in front of me. I looked down at the steaming, gory spectacle and experienced a return of the previous day’s aversion, along with the feeling that by eating amongst the Hanburys I would in some way implicate myself, confer a solidity upon myself that might make it impossible for me ever to leave; that by this complicated, laborious act of ingestion I would surrender not only something of my impartiality but some of the space, too, in which my loyalty to my own life was housed.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘It’s so strange being back,’ said Caris, from the window.

‘Is it?’ said Vivian vaguely. ‘I expect it is. It’s rather a shame the weather isn’t better. If you’d waited until the summer we could have used the terrace. Not that we ever get the evenings they get in Spain of course. At Las Pitunas they sit out half the night, with people turning up at the most extraordinary hours in just a T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. Nobody seems to mind,’ she said gloomily. ‘They’re all terribly free. There’s none of this calling up and arranging Sunday lunch in three months’ time. By the time you’ve thought about it for that long you don’t actually want to do it, do you? The other day someone rang and invited us to dinner next autumn! She claimed they didn’t have a free weekend until then. I didn’t know whether to accept or not. It seemed a bit presumptuous. I thought, well, who knows, I might be dead. I suppose if I am someone will let them know.’

‘But we were never like that!’ exclaimed Caris. ‘There have always been people at Egypt, always, without anyone arranging it or planning it! Do you remember the time that man stayed, and after he’d gone everyone admitted they hadn’t got a clue who he was?’

‘I think he’d come to fix the boiler,’ said Vivian. She gave a snuffling little laugh.

‘Yes!’ shrieked Caris, delighted. ‘And someone offered him a drink!’

‘Didn’t he end up getting off with Fiona Lacey?’ She pronounced it ‘orf’.

‘No — no! He can’t have!’

‘She was still married to Dan in those days. God!’ she expostulated, gloomy once more. ‘He was the most terrible pig.’

‘I remember their daughter,’ said Caris. ‘She went to our school. The two boys were at some boarding school where you wore black tie and got to have your own horse, but she went to Doniford Middle because she was a girl.’

‘Yes,’ said Vivian vaguely, ‘I think Fiona’s a bit like that.’

‘It’s incredible, isn’t it,’ said Caris. ‘In this day and age — do you remember her? She had red hair. I wonder what happened to her. She might as well have gone around with it branded on her forehead, you know — “I’m not important”.’

‘Maybe they just couldn’t afford it,’ said Adam. ‘It might have been nothing to do with her being a girl.’

‘In that case,’ said Caris, ‘none of them should have gone.’

‘So if everybody can’t have everything, nobody should have anything, is that what you’re saying?’

‘It’s called justice, Adam,’ said Caris sarcastically. ‘You may not have heard of it.’

‘I’d just like you to explain where the justice is in denying two people a decent education.’

‘There was nothing wrong with the education you got at Doniford Middle — in fact, they’d probably have been better off there.’

‘Well, what are you complaining about then?’ said Adam, sitting back in his chair triumphantly. ‘In that case she got the best deal.’

‘I just happen personally to regard being manufactured by a patriarchal institution as a handicap in life. Not everyone agrees with me.’

‘I suppose I should never have sent Jilly and Laura away,’ interposed Vivian. ‘When they came back they were never quite as I remembered them. They seemed very big and sort of frightening. I remember they were always looking in the cupboards. Almost the minute they came home they’d start going around the house opening everything and looking inside. It was like having burglars to stay.’

‘You don’t really regret sending them, do you?’ said Caris.

‘I didn’t at the time,’ said Vivian. ‘But now they say I did something awful to them, although I don’t see how I can have done, when I wasn’t even there. I had quite fond memories of school. The nuns were always terribly nice, although I don’t think they taught us anything.’

‘What did you do that was awful?’ asked Caris reprovingly, as though it were inconceivable that anyone could accuse Vivian of whatever it was.

‘The problem was,’ said Vivian, looking vacantly at something over our heads, ‘that there simply wasn’t room for them here.’

‘Vivian,’ said Caris carefully, ‘that isn’t actually true.’ She smiled. ‘They took my bedroom.’

‘Well, they’d had rooms of their own at Ivybridge, you know —’

‘Yes,’ said Caris, still smiling, ‘but it was my room. The boys kept their rooms, of course,’ she added, speaking to me. ‘The sons and heirs were not to be inconvenienced.’

‘This was the problem, you see?’ said Vivian frantically, also to me. ‘There was all this fighting! In the end Paul just said, you know, bloody well enough!’

Caris had turned to the window and folded her arms tightly across her chest, so that discord radiated from her back.

‘It’s not really surprising that we fought,’ she said, in a cold and faraway voice. ‘When you consider the circumstances.’

‘Bloody well enough, he said, I can’t stand women fighting! If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s women fighting, that’s what he said, you know.’

‘So Jilly and Laura were packed off,’ said Adam, shaking his head and laughing.

‘He said, “I don’t care who it bloody well is, just get them out of here,”’ cried Vivian, who appeared still not to know what to make of it all. A dark animation surged in her face. She gyrated with emotion. ‘“Just get them all out!”’

‘All?’ said Caris in her small, cold voice.

There was the sound of a car horn out on the drive.

‘That’s Jackie,’ said Caris, after a long pause. ‘She’s giving me a lift down to mum’s. I’ll see you later.’

And she picked up her coat and left the room, without once turning to face any of us.

‘I’d better sort out those dogs,’ said Adam, rising and scraping back his chair. His face was red with a mixture of shame and amusement. ‘I’ll put them in the shed for you. My advice is that you don’t let them back in, no matter how much they bark. They’ll take the hint eventually.’

He stamped out of the room in his boots and down the hall, perhaps thinking that if he made enough noise he would erase the uncomfortable atmosphere Caris had left behind her. Her head drooping, Vivian stood forlornly beside the raw egg on the floor, as though it were something that had fallen out of her, like an eye, that would be virtually impossible to put back. Unexpectedly, she looked up and gave me a roguish smile.

She said, ‘My first husband was an awful bore, you know, but Jilly and Laura talk about him as though he were a plaster saint. He lives on the Isle of Wight now. He has a flat.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘When we left Ivybridge,’ she said, ‘he picked up a rock and threw it through one of the windows. Don’t you think that’s awful?’

‘Was Ivybridge the house you lived in before?’

‘He always hated it because it wasn’t his, you see. It belonged to my parents — it was my childhood home. He took me to court to try and get half the money from the sale, but he didn’t get it. Paul fought him tooth and nail. In the end I didn’t really see why he shouldn’t get it since he seemed to have lost everything else, but Paul wasn’t having any of that. He said, you know, that’s your inheritance. That’s your birthright, don’t give it away. It was a lot of money, you see, because it wasn’t just an ordinary sale, a private sale. We’d got permission to develop the barns and the outbuildings, and a Change of Use, which is very difficult to get, but Paul is on the planning committee and that sort of smoothed the way.’

She appeared to expect me to speak.

‘A developer bought it, if you must know,’ she confessed presently. ‘I rather expected my parents to, you know, rise from their graves when it happened.’ She gave a strange little laugh. ‘But in the end the fuss died down and everyone forgot about it. You know, sort of life goes on. I’ve no idea what it looks like now, of course. I never go there, even though it’s only just in the next valley. You can walk there from Egypt in, oh, twenty minutes I suppose.’ She looked at me almost gaily. ‘They call it Ivybridge Holiday Village. What do you think that is, a “holiday village”? Jilly says they’ve put up a big red-brick wall all the way round it with these sort of Victorian street lamps on top. She says they look like policemen’s heads! And she says the most ghastly people go there, you know, all sandals with socks, and men with tattoos and great fat bellies, and there they sit, you know.’

Adam’s footsteps were creaking rapidly overhead. I could hear his voice, rising and falling harshly, and the excited sliding, skittering sounds of the dogs’ paws.

‘I couldn’t bear to see what they’ve done to the garden!’ cried Vivian, grasping my arm suddenly with her bony hand. ‘They must have taken up all mummy’s rose bushes! And the apple orchard, with twenty-six old varieties, some of them virtually extinct! And the tree by the pond where I used to have my swing, and my little vegetable patch that daddy made me!’

‘Vivian,’ I said.

‘All gone,’ she cried, ‘all destroyed! I’ll never see any of it again! And I’m to be punished for it — as if I haven’t been punished enough! Every winter that I’ve sat up here on this hill it’s got worse!’

‘What’s got worse?’

‘They hate me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘They’ve always hated me — you don’t know what it’s like, to be so hated!’

She rose abruptly from the table and moved with the light, disjointed speed of a spider to the kitchen cupboards. She opened a door and removed a half-pint bottle of whisky, from whose neck I was startled to see her take a long, determined swallow.

‘Joan and Alvaro say that I should leave him, you know,’ she gasped, giving me a dramatic look. ‘They say that but then they don’t know, do they? He’s always here, that’s the thing. It’s hard to leave someone if they’re always there. They never let you alone. It all seems very simple to them, in Spain. To them it’s just a matter of staying where you are and missing the flight home. They think that would solve everything, don’t they? The problem is that then there’d be two messes where there was one. You can’t just go around making more and more messes, can you? Mummy and daddy would be horrified if they knew,’ she said, folding her arms and retracting her chin into her bony chest. She looked up at me through her fringe. ‘They’d tell me to pull myself together. “Where’s your backbone?” they used to say. “Where’s your spine?” That’s what they would have said, you know.’

The door opened and Adam came in holding the dogs by their collars. They made high-pitched mewling noises and their feet skated over the cold stone floor. They writhed around their own necks where he held them.

‘They’ve been on all the beds,’ he puffed. ‘They wouldn’t come. I don’t know what’s got into them. It’s a bit of a mess up there, I’m afraid. They’ve been in the sheets and everything. I’ll take them to the shed for you.’

Vivian looked at him mutely with her cheeks puffed out, as though she had her mouth full. I got up and opened the back door for him.

‘We’ll go home after this,’ he said over his shoulder. The dogs were tugging him down the passage. ‘We’re done for the day. Tell Vivian, would you?’

I went back into the kitchen to tell Vivian but she wasn’t there — she had vanished. I felt the presence of something sinister in the empty room, as though it had swallowed her. I went outside again to find Adam.

*

‘You compare Egypt to Don Brice’s land,’ said Adam, ‘and it’s amazing really, the difference.’

We drove out of the track and turned down the empty road to Doniford. I saw the deserted vista of the hillside, with its descending waves of green and the glinting heap of the town at its feet.

‘What is the difference?’

‘He’s farmed all the life out of it. There’s no love.’

I was surprised to hear Adam talk of love.

‘Dad does things the old-fashioned way. People respect him for it. I don’t know whether I’d be able to keep it up.’

‘Keep what up?’

‘He wouldn’t even let the council run electricity cables over his fields. There’s a house beyond the farm that’s still powered by a generator because it’s too circuitous to run it along the road and Dad won’t let them go over his fields. The family tried to bribe him.’ Adam laughed. ‘They offered him a whack of money. It’s depressing the value of their house so much they reckoned it was worth it.’

We had passed the boundary of Egypt: the rudimentary litany of what I now knew to be Don Brice’s fields flowed past my window instead. It was an untidy patchwork of electric fences and half-dug pits and pawed segments of earth. Everywhere, decaying lengths of plastic sheeting anchored by old car tyres waved their tatters in the wind. Adam slowed down to look at the sheep. The pregnant ewes were penned into a muddy square steeped in their own dung. The smell came through the open window like a fist as we drove by. Half a mile down the road, a man was driving a mud-splattered four-wheeled motorbike along the verge with two scrappy dogs twisting around him, one on either side like a pair of apostrophes.

‘That’s Don,’ said Adam. ‘He’s always on that bike. I can’t remember the last time I saw him standing on his own legs.’

The man craned his head around and squinted at us over his shoulder. He was smoking a pipe. He raised his arm. Adam pulled up alongside him and the dogs jumped yapping at the window. One of them had a yellow eye. The other dog was brown and white and ran around barking at its own tail.

‘You done midwifing for the day, then?’ said Don. His lined mouth opened like a wound around his pipe.

‘You don’t look far off yourself,’ said Adam.

‘‘Nother three weeks yet. It’s your dad likes to get them in early, so’s the frost can kill ’em off.’

‘We’re having a good year,’ said Adam. ‘A few twins.’

‘Is that so?’ said Don.

‘We’ve kept them all so far except one.’

Don laughed and folded his arms as he sat astride his bike.

‘He’s saved you the price of the petrol, then,’ he said.

‘Beverly’s running a tight ship.’

‘Surprised that girl can run a tap. Sharrup!’ Don scooped the barking brown and white dog on to his boot and forked it into the verge.

‘Yours aren’t looking too bright for that matter, Don,’ said Adam. ‘You should try rotating them. That way they don’t have to stand in their own leavings.’

‘Oh, those old birds,’ said Don, turning his mean little blue eyes to the muddy horizon. ‘This is their last year. I’m just seeing ’em to market is all.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Adam. He sounded surprised.

‘I only just knew myself. I wouldn’t have bothered with them otherwise.’

‘Are you selling?’

‘My planning’s come through. Call came just yesterday.’

‘What planning?’

‘For my barns. The barns down the hill along the road.’

‘I didn’t know you had any barns there,’ said Adam.

‘Barns as was,’ said Don. ‘I think once they used them for something but I never did. They just sat there. They’re no more’n a couple of old sheds to be honest. They think they can get three four-bed dwellings out of them, though dwellings for what I don’t like to think.’ He laughed around his pipe. ‘Dwarfs, it’d have to be. They’re taking my old beet fields too as acreage. I know your dad was against it and he’ll be none too pleased, but there it is,’ he added. His little eyes were now hovering around Adam like a pair of flies. ‘It went through at the meeting and he weren’t there.’

‘How could he have been there?’ said Adam. ‘He’s in hospital.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Don. ‘I told him before, you’ve got to live and farming ain’t no living any more. He’s all right — he’s got her to keep him, and as far as I can see she made her money the same way I’m making mine. Like I say, there it is. It won’t make no difference to him anyhow,’ he added. ‘It’s just a couple of old sheds. You can hardly see ’em from up there. In his condition things like this don’t matter, do they? It comes down to what’s important, don’t it, family and that, not whether there’s houses or not on some old field. Don’t it, eh, son?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Adam.

‘Niver understood why he was so dead against it in the first place,’ Don continued, wrapping his fingers around his pipe as though in meditation.

‘That’s the way he is.’

A grimace of understanding crossed the farmer’s face.

‘I suppose you’ll be boss up there yourself one of these days,’ he said meaningfully.

‘I’m my own boss already.’

‘Course y’are. Got your own little place. And a wife and kiddies too.’

‘I’ll see you, Don.’

We pulled away with Don holding his pipe at his lips while he opened his mouth to laugh. The lane plummeted downwards in shuttered flashes of brightness. Big black birds hopped on the verge around a smear of blood and fur. Thin lines of wires zigzagged overhead, veered off across the fields like things taking flight, then emerged from their tributaries again and coalesced, swooping upwards in formation to crest the giant grey peaks of pylons that passed along the bottom of the hill in their march down the coast. We passed a new bungalow being built on the side of the road. I glimpsed the raw slash of gravel in front, the military row of dwarfish green conifers, the still-exposed flanks of grey breeze block.

‘Look,’ said Adam, ‘they’re coming up the hill. For ages the first house you saw on the way down was that one.’

We were in the outskirts of Doniford now. He pointed to the end of a plain, white-harled row of old council housing which stood forlornly impacted in a ring of bigger new red-brick houses that bristled with ornamentation. The garden was a small rectangle of green with nothing in it except a bare metal climbing frame in the shape of a beehive.

‘I used to be friends with the boy who lived there,’ said Adam. ‘We were in the same class at school.’

‘Really?’

‘I used to go there to play. I sort of liked going there. It was cosy and his mother was always there, and no one ever asked you to do anything. And compared to Egypt it was so small! I couldn’t believe how small it was. Once when Vivian came to collect me I said to her in front of Ian and his mother that I liked Ian’s house because it was so small.’ He laughed. ‘I think I thought I was being interesting. Vivian went wild afterwards. She said some pretty strong things in the car. I remember thinking, God, she really hates me. Of course, I understand that better now,’ he added stiffly. ‘I understand how difficult it was for her.’

‘Does he still live here?’ I asked. I wanted to hear more of Adam’s feelings for this boy.

‘He manages the petrol station. We always say hello. It’s funny, we were such good friends,’ he said, as though it made no sense to him now. ‘I used to think that one day Ian might come to live with us at Egypt. He’d just appear and we’d save him. I suppose I couldn’t believe he was happy where he was. His mother used to cook this awful food. Everything was white and soft and bland. It was like hospital food. Ian used to eat it up.’

His telephone rang in his lap.

‘We’re just coming down the hill,’ he said into it.

I looked out of the window at Doniford, which had changed so much and yet was still regarded as itself, like a person grown older, thicker, coarser. My memories of it, and of the Hanburys themselves, were in a sense homeless: they could not dwell in reality, so changed. They wandered around the occupied spaces, mournful as ghosts. I had not realised that time would move in this way over my life, would fill its lacunae as brown saltwater filled Doniford harbour until it brimmed.

‘What for?’ said Adam.

We stopped at the traffic lights on the high street, where a woman stood on the pavement waiting to cross. Her hands were folded in front of her and the straps of her leather handbag were looped over her forearm, which she held very still. She had permed, mouse-coloured hair and the round, pallid face of a Delft maiden. We looked at one another blankly before she crossed the road, stepping carefully in front of our car.

‘She can’t be,’ said Adam. ‘I only just bought a pack.’ After a pause he said: ‘I don’t need to come home and see. Either she has or she hasn’t.’ After another pause he said: ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll see what I can do, okay? Sorry,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got to stop and get some you-know-whats.’

Adam parked the car on the pavement outside the Spar. I stayed there while he went inside. I looked at the milling high street, whose grey prospect was occasionally riven by slanting sheets of spring sunlight. I looked at people’s legs and at the wheels of passing cars. A girl of sixteen or seventeen tried to get her pushchair through the space between our car and the shopfront and couldn’t. People waited behind her. Presently a new stream of people forged itself on the other side of the car, in the road. An elderly man tapped on my window and I rolled it down. He said:

‘You can’t park here.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘People can’t get along the pavement,’ he said, indicating it with his hand.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He shook his head and walked away. After a while Adam came out of the Spar and we drove back to the house.