The Spider Truces (10 page)

Bright green grasshoppers appeared in the meadow on Philpotts Lane where Ellis went when he wanted to be alone. He could lay himself and his bike down there and disappear from view. The edge of the meadow was flanked by durmast oak and when he saw the green acorns he knew that it was time to start at his new school.

Ellis knew kids who liked school and kids who didn’t. He and Tim were kids who didn’t. Their cycle ride home was rushed and breathless. It took them twenty minutes to change out of their uniform and meet at the farm.

Only an encounter with Chloe Purcell on Oak Lane was worth delaying for. Chloe Purcell had been at Ellis’s school in Orpington until she was eleven, when her parents put her into the convent school. The bus dropped her in the old high street from where she walked two miles home along Oak Lane, in the deep blue of her convent sweater. She had short, straight black hair and a small brown birthmark beneath her left eye. She was quiet and plain and unextraordinary but in the first weeks of that school year Ellis saw that she was the most beautiful girl in the world and decided he loved her. He felt excited and terrified whenever he saw her up ahead on the lane.

On the day that Ellis and Tim had discovered they would be at the same school they were so ecstatic they invented a dance of celebration, which they called “The Goose” because when they performed it in the farmyard the geese got agitated and attacked them. They celebrated because they loved being together, but when Ellis saw Chloe Purcell on Oak Lane he always wished, just for these few minutes, that Tim wasn’t with him.

However early in the morning Ellis and Tim set out to pick autumn mushrooms, there was always a light coming from the kitchen at Longspring Farm. They found parasol mushrooms on the path leading into Eight Acre Wood. They picked eight large stems and wrapped them in a piece of cloth. The temperature dropped as they walked into a dip in the fields. Emerging from it, they saw the farmhouse caressed by a slow-drifting, head-high mist.

“Ghosts …” Ellis muttered.

He watched the ghosts drag themselves across the farm buildings. He sucked the cold air in and it tasted of dewy pasture. Reardon emerged from the milking shed, crossed the farmyard and headed into the flat fields where his Highland herd were. Today, he would move them on to the high pasture and bring the heifers down alongside the bullpens for mating.

It was best to avoid Reardon first thing. He was notoriously grumpy until noon, even on a good day. It took that long for the night to leave him. It was at night that the pain in his shattered leg returned, darting into his spine and filling his head with worries and the memory of two women who had loved him but whom he hadn’t wanted to marry. He slept under the same heavy bedding he had known as a child, in a single bed tucked into the corner of a cavernous, sloping bedroom. He had been on the farm for forty years and every single night of them he had felt that he was struggling against gravity, crushed under the weight of bedding and solitude. He didn’t know that he could change that. He didn’t know how acceptable it would be to reserve for his own life some of the enthusiasm he showed for other people’s. It would not be selfish. It would not be immodest. It would not be vain or too earthly. It would not offend God. But this kind, inspirational man did not know that. He knew how to farm. He knew how to tell a story in a delightful way. He knew how to inspire other people into action. He knew how to talk gregariously with people and never allow the conversation to centre on himself. He knew that to read the poems of John Clare and look at the paintings of Constable, Piper and the Wyeths brought him profound pleasure and helped to form his faithful image of what heaven might be. But he didn’t know that to buy a double bed and to level the floor around it and to purchase lightweight bedding would be to transform the nature of his nights’ sleep. He didn’t know that it might change the dreams that plagued him and the moods that were their legacy.

This morning, he appeared weary. Ellis felt a short, painless stab of affection for him and decided to leave some mushrooms for his breakfast. The kitchen was warm. A
half-drunk
mug of tea stood lonely on the table. Ellis washed the mug up and put it on top of the Rayburn next to the teapot. He unfolded the cloth rag and took out four of the mushrooms. He washed them and dragged the skin off with a blunt knife. He sliced them and left them on the bread board next to the hotplate.

The sun struggled to burn through. When its first beams perforated the sky, the mist departed, looking over its shoulder at Ellis with a vow to return.

Ellis shrugged nonchalantly. “It doesn’t bother me if you do.”

Denny’s secretary found him sitting with his back to his desk, gazing out at the pedestrians on Jermyn Street. He heard the teacup rattle and said, without turning, “Do you know what I had for breakfast this morning?”

She replied, of course, that she didn’t.

“I had fresh wild mushrooms on buttery toast. They were picked for me by my son and cooked for me by my daughter. Can you imagine a more marvellous breakfast for a man to have?”

And she thought to herself, Yes, I can. One shared with your wife. But she smiled kindly at his back and said, “There couldn’t be one.”

And then she left him and returned to her desk in the entrance hall, moved, because Mr O’Rourke never spoke like that. He was genial but private. He was kind to his staff but they felt they didn’t know him. He could name their children but rarely spoke of his own, fearing that to admit how much he loved them would be to risk losing them too.

On Sunday evenings, Denny would sit with Mafi in her living room. They smoked and talked about the children, the village, the state of things. Occasionally, perhaps two or three times a year, when she was feeling bullish, Mafi would tell her nephew to find himself a girlfriend and he would ignore her. From time to time, in the silences they were happy to share, Denny had said, “I’m so glad you’re here with us, Mafi.” She respected him more than any man she’d known. And she loved him dearly.

“All of this is a bonus,” she would tell her friends in the village. “A life I hardly deserve.”

Ellis would join Denny and Mafi and tell them what was going on at Longspring. It was the only subject he talked about and Denny loved to listen.

“Did you know that you get paid more money for the milk in winter than in summer?”

“No …”

“Well, you do, so that’s why they had the calves last month so that there’s tons of milk now.”

“That’s good …”

“And do you know why we didn’t let any of the herd into the east fields in July?”

“No, I don’t …”

“Because we were letting the grass grow for hay and if the cows had been in there they’d have eaten the grass.”

“I see …”

“You can’t put them in and just ask them not to graze.”

“No, I suppose you can’t.”

“Guess why there’s some ploughed fields at Longspring even though we do milk?”

“Fodder?”

“How did you know that?”

“Just a guess … what are you and Reardon growing for fodder?”

“And Tim and Michael Finsey,” Ellis reminded him. “Turnips and maize for silage. Do you know what silage is?”

“I do, yes.”

“Mafi?”

“I do, too.”

“Oh. Do you have to be born on a farm to run one or can you save up and buy one?” Ellis asked.

“You’d need to go to agricultural college before you do anything,” Denny said. “You could go to Wye or Hadlow. They’re nearby.”

“When could I go?”

“After your A levels.”

“Not after my O levels?”

“They’ll expect good A levels.”

Ellis slumped and sighed. “Even with all the work I’m doing on the farm?”

“Yes,” his dad confirmed, “even with.”

“You might want to try other things out, or see the world first, before you decide,” Mafi said.

Her words hung in the room without finding a comfortable place to sit. Denny O’Rourke stood up. “I’ve things to do,” he said, and left, with an expression which resembled a smile without amounting to one.

“In next to no time you’ll be a teenager,” Mafi said, as if shocked by the fact.

“I’m in love with Chloe Purcell,” Ellis responded.

“And I bet she’s in love with you, too.”

“No way,” Ellis fired back. “Fat chance. Girls don’t go for me.”

“Well,” Mafi sympathised, “you’re only young.”

“But so are they,” Ellis said helplessly.

They brought the dairy herd in at the beginning of November. A sea of breathing Jersey brown flooded the yard and a steam cloud levitated above it. The willow lines were pollarded and Tim and Ellis saw a fox jump from a hiding place inside the rotten middle of one of the trunks. They bundled up the branches and watched Terry Jay split them into three-sided stakes for hedge laying. Terry showed the boys how to set the stakes out an elbow-arm’s length apart through the hedge line. He pleached the hedges through the winter. The game crops were well out of sight of the farm and Tim and Ellis ran amok there amongst the kale and root artichoke, scaring straggling pheasant into flight and throwing stones at them once they were airborne.

The calves were released from their weaning pens into pasture to be fattened as steers. Bullfinches gathered on the phone lines without ever venturing too near to the farm. The boys were allowed into the milking shed for the first time and given the job of hosing down the udders prior to milking. Afterwards, Michael Finsey ordered the boys to wait for him in the yard where three heifers stood in pens. The pens had staggered brick walls on each side, which Tim and Ellis climbed like steps until they were standing on the back wall above the heifers. Michael and Reardon pulled a hired mating bull into the yard using poles hooked to the ring in the bull’s nose. Climbing the staggered walls of the pen, they hauled the bull up on to the first heifer’s back.

“You lucky lady, you lucky little thing!” Michael Finsey cackled.

Steam poured from the bull’s nose as it arched its huge bulk and pumped in and out of the beast beneath it. The expression on the heifer’s face turned from alarm to indifference.

“She looks bored stiff!” Michael shouted. “Better get used to that look, boys!” He roared with laughter.

Ellis was open-mouthed. As the bull was manoeuvred from one heifer to the next, pints of semen poured from its gross member on to the yard.

“Oh my giddy aunt,” Tim muttered, incredulous.

The bull rammed itself into the second heifer.

“Foreplay’s over!” Michael cried out. “We’ll bypass the clit seeing as they charge by the hour!”

Tim and Ellis shrugged at each other inquisitively. Whatever a clit might be, it seemed they were bypassing it. Michael’s lungs collapsed into nicotine-coated laughter. Within ten minutes, Reardon was returning the bull to the oast barn with all three heifers seen to. Michael, Tim and Ellis skated back and forth across the semen-coated yard floor until Tim was physically sick from laughing and he and Ellis decided they should call it a day.

“Sick and semen stew!” Michael Finsey yelled out, as the two boys disappeared across the fields. “The rats will feast tonight!”

A graphic account of the bull’s sexual performance, which Tim Wickham included in his creative writing project the following Wednesday, and its faithful reproduction of Michael Finsey’s vernacular, placed Tim in a two-hour detention on the afternoon of Ellis’s birthday. Ellis cycled home alone and, seeing the blue of Chloe Purcell’s school uniform up ahead, moved down a couple of gears to buy himself some thinking time. He attempted to compose something fascinating to say but arrived alongside her tongue-tied as ever.

“Hello,” he ventured.

“You alone today?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“Want to come home for some tea?” she said casually.

They had to remove their shoes at the front door, which was a new one on Ellis. Chloe’s mum remembered Ellis from the school in Orpington. Ellis didn’t remember Mrs Purcell. He had expected her to be serious and religious and not much fun because she had sent her daughter to a convent school, but she wasn’t like that at all. Maybe, he told himself, he had this convent thing all wrong.

“Is it like St Trinian’s actually?” he asked.

“Is what like St Trinian’s?” Mrs Purcell asked back.

He looked at Chloe. “Your school.”

Chloe smiled. That, Ellis came to discover, was how she laughed, by allowing a delicate smile to trespass on to her face. To Ellis, it was a fireworks display.

Things like smiling and laughing are all relative to what someone’s like the rest of the time, he told himself years later, after finally witnessing Chloe’s silent, compact sexual ecstasy.

“I blooming well hope it’s not like St Trinian’s!” Mrs Purcell said.

Ellis really liked her. She was a proper mum. It would be great if he and Chloe got married.

“Mafi says ‘blooming’ a lot too,” he said. “She’s my
great-aunt
and she lives with us.”

They drank tea round the kitchen table. Ellis said what a nice house they had and asked where Chloe’s two younger sisters were. They were at ballet. It immediately worried Ellis that Chloe might consider it an embarrassment being married to a farmer. Their children were hardly going to want to be picked up from ballet in a muddy truck.

Chloe and her mother watched the ebb and flow of thoughts and expressions criss-cross Ellis’s face.

“What if you don’t like farm smells?” Ellis said, unaware he was thinking aloud.

“What if I do?” Chloe replied.

“Do what?” he asked, bemused.

“I love farm smells,” Chloe announced.

“Why do you ask, Ellis?” Mrs Purcell asked.

Ellis carefully steered his lips away from telling Mrs Purcell he loved her daughter, even though a part of his brain was threatening to blurt the words out.

“I work on a farm and I’m going to be a farmer.”