Torn (16 page)

‘They're Cotswolds. Classed as a rare breed, so there's a premium on the meat. Especially now we're moving into organic production and not treating the grass.'

‘They're sold for meat?' Jess was surprised. ‘I didn't think you'd be involved if they were being raised for meat. I assumed you were rearing them for wool.'

Danny sighed. ‘I get enough hassle from my mates about this. Look, if I want to work with animals I can't pick and choose. We do sell the fleeces, but there's no money in wool. It's hardly worth it. Because they're pedigree we'll hope to sell as many ram lambs as possible for breeding, but some will inevit'bly be sold for meat. And some of the females we'll keep to build up the flock, but the rest will go for slaughter. But I can still rear them humanely, with high farewell … I mean welfare … standards, try to make sure they have a nice life, until …'

‘I'm not getting at you, Danny. I just wondered. When do they go to market?'

‘It depends. When they're finished.'

‘How do you mean … finished?'

‘When they've put on enough weight.' He shrugged. ‘Could be anytime between four and twelve months. But the boss'll be dis'ppointed not to catch the summer market with some of them.'

She slid her hand through the crook of his arm and squeezed. ‘I suppose there's not much for you to do at the moment, until the main flock starts lambing.'

‘No. I just lay around all day with a straw in my mouth.' He laughed ruefully. ‘Directly after the New Year I had to drench them all.'

‘Drench them? Is that like dipping?'

‘We don't dip any more. Drenching is a treatment for worms, you have to spray it directly into their mouths. Then I have to keep the hay racks filled up all the time and increase the concentrates we give them, because at this time of year they're not getting much goodness out of the grass. And we want a good birth weight for the lambs. Then I had to vac'snate them all against parasites. Then I had to get set up for lambing, scrub the lambing barn out with dis'nfectant, and make the pens. I have to check their feet all the time, specially the winter when it's wet and the gap between the clays, the two toes of the foot, gets clogged up with mud and rubbish. So I have to clean them out and pare back the horny bit of the hoof if it's overgrown, and check for infection. That's apart from the chickens and all the general maintenance I do around this place …'

‘But do you like them? Sheep?'

He found the idea amusing. ‘They're all right. It's hard to build a relationship with animals that are so dumb! But horses … I really like working with horses. That would be my idea of heaven, to have my own place … and horses.' He turned his head to look at her. Their faces moved slowly together; cold noses, mouths seductively warm and moist. There was less desperation in the kiss this time. She was just about to move closer, to slide her arms under his jacket and around his waist when the metal gate behind them clunked and feet crunched over the gravely track. Jessica dipped her face away and found a tissue with which she noisily and ostentatiously blew her nose.

‘Hello, Jessica!' James said. ‘Saw your car. You've come to see the lambs after all!' Confident he'd noticed nothing, she wondered what he meant by ‘after all'. Next to her, Danny straightened slowly, then he too turned to face his employer.

‘I was expecting you to bring young Rory.' The man continued to address himself solely to Jessica.

‘He's at nursery.'

‘Of course he is. Of course he is.' James Warwick was smiling, hitting his gloved hands together. The heartiness of his greeting was at odds with all the other contacts she'd so far had with him. He shifted his weight, looked around him then clapped Danny on the shoulder.

‘Well, I'll look after Jessica now. You can go and get on with … whatever it is you should be getting on with.' He concluded with a slight, self-deprecating smirk, as if to say, “I'm a loveable bumbling sort of boss who's not afraid to admit that you know as much about the job as I do, but I'm still the boss and don't you forget it.” Jess looked at Danny. He had now pulled himself up to his full height, a height several inches taller than the older man, she noticed. His mouth twisted to one side, but whether in private amusement or resentment she couldn't tell.

‘I was going to carry on checking the fences. I'd got as far as Pook's Bottom, when J … um …' He stopped and caught her eye. Had he forgotten her name? ‘… arrived. So …?'

‘Yup. Fine. You do that. Check the fences. Don't forget the …'

‘Fence repair kit?'

‘Yup. You got it.' James Warwick gave him a thumbs up, then added, ‘Oh, and don't fall over anything, or knock yourself out with the mallet!'

‘Try not to.' As he began to move away Danny gave Jess a final sidelong glance. An answering throb in some deep, dark region of her body brought to mind the pelvic floor exercises she'd been told to practise after Rory's birth. Then she'd found it hard even to locate the relevant muscles, let alone contract them. Had Danny been around at the time they'd have just got on and done it on their own, she thought. To disguise her smile Jessica turned back towards the sheep.

‘So … you've been chatting to our very own nature boy. He's a dozy bugger!' Then, having seen her smile and misread it, he nodded towards the lambs, ‘Can't deny they're cute.'

She searched for something intelligent to say. ‘Apart from the sheep what else do you rear … grow … um, farm?'

‘The sheep are it, apart from some horses I'm paid to graze for their owners. That's why Sideshow … Dan, is my only full-time employee.'

Jessica wondered if she'd been misinformed about the size of the place. ‘So, how big is the farm?'

‘Near a thousand acres.'

‘Is that large in farming terms?'

‘Not particularly, but it's the biggest in the immediate area.'

‘Do you need so much land for that number of sheep?' The number looked modest even to her untutored eye.

‘I am in the process of building up the flock, but you're right, there's much more land than I need or want. I'm not a farmer born and bred. I never expected to inherit … so soon. My wife's parents were only in their fifties.'

Jessica imagined some ghastly accident which had carried off parents and daughter simultaneously. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘It was a bit of a shock. I'd never seriously considered the possibility of becoming a farmer, the prospect of them dying was too far off into the future.'

‘What happened?'

‘Unforgivable negligence! Serena and I had been married a few years. Lived and worked in London. Her parents owned this place; a manager and half a dozen farm workers ran it for them. Every year they'd go out to Spain for a month or so, had their own apartment near Marbella. The place was being refurbished. That spring it should have been finished but wasn't. They were told by the management company to go anyway, they'd be put up in a complex of brand new apartments, which had just been completed. As it happened it was unseasonably cold. There was a gas heating system which had been incorrectly installed. Basically they were poisoned.'

‘Carbon monoxide!' Jess said.

‘So, out of the blue, my in-laws are dead, my wife is pregnant, and we're the owners of a farm.' He frowned and shook his head as if the inheritance was unwelcome and he still had trouble believing it.

‘Did you not want it? Presumably you could have sold.'

‘At the time, property prices were falling. Anyway, the farm was Serena's and she
did
want it. With a child on the way, the opportunity to get out of London was attractive to her … and of course, she'd grown up here. To me too it seemed like a turning point, a chance to get out of the rat race before I was chucked. A completely new road, if you like.'

‘What was your job?'

‘Advertising. Hang on, why are we talking about me?'

Jessica had been thinking the same thing. The situation was bizarre. She didn't even like the man, yet here she was listening to his life history when all she wanted was to be with Danny.

‘You were talking about the size of the farm … the sheep.'

‘Oh yes.' He said nothing more for a moment. They both looked out at the countryside spread before them; fields, hedgerows, dry stone walls, and beyond the lane the grassy slope up to the line of trees on top of Spine Hill.

‘You must feel so honoured to be the owner and guardian of such a lovely part of the English landscape.'

His sideways glance was interrogative, as if he suspected some barb in her comment.

‘It's a huge responsibility which sometimes weighs rather heavy. I'll admit that. Over the years I've been trying to simplify the farm. I rent off a lot of the land and I got out of cattle and dairy.'

‘Like Danny's father?'

James Warwick looked mildly surprised. ‘You must have been talking to Dan for longer than I realised. I'm planning to sell off a large chunk of land to the north, beyond Spine Hill.'

The view she looked out on from her front windows – the countryside over which she'd rambled so extensively during the last month, belonged to him?

‘And some further to the west, reducing my holding substantially.' An engine rumbled into life. A tractor emerged from behind one of the barns and began to move toward them. They watched as it manoeuvred past them, its trailer piled with stakes, lengths of fencing, a roll of wire netting and tools. The driver was wearing a check jacket, the woollen hat with ear flaps was pulled down over his head, and a black and white Islamic prayer shawl was wrapped around his neck. Jessica tried to compose her face.

‘Daft as a brush,' James Warwick said, with a slight shake of his head.

Jessica watched the tractor as it chugged off down the track; the reel of mesh fencing bounced slightly in the trailer.

‘You don't bother to repair the walls when they fall down?'

‘I'd love to maintain the traditional dry stone walling. Up to a point I've learnt the craft and can repair small sections on my perimeters but there's too much for me to handle. And it's expensive to have it done properly. I have to weigh up competing demands.' He squinted out across the fields as if contemplating the miles of crumbling wall he could never keep up with. Abruptly he changed tack. ‘I was hoping you would still come over to see the lambs, particularly after the row last week. Though I didn't really expect you, and not on your own like this. What happened at the nursery.' There was a long pause. ‘I'm sorry that I lost my rag. That you … and … the others should have been witness to it. It was nothing to do with you.'

Oh yes it was, she thought. He did not look at her but continued to stare across the enclosure with the lambs and their mothers, beyond the caramel coloured caravan, into the distance. Strange, that little caravan, she thought. It was unsightly, marring what otherwise was a perfect scene. Even the dilapidation of some of the dry stone walls had a picturesque quality. The house, with its cluster of stone barns around the courtyard, the mature trees which surrounded it, and the undeniably beautiful setting made up a picture postcard farm. He wasn't the kind of farmer to tolerate ramshackle outbuildings constructed of breeze blocks and corrugated iron, or the piles of used tyres holding down acres of bright blue plastic sheeting; the rusting, redundant machinery, or used fertiliser bags allowed to blow about and litter the landscape. Why did he allow this particular blot on his landscape? He glanced at her as though suddenly recalling she was there. Beneath the jut of his frown she noticed how like his mother's his eyes were. Wealth and privilege were not automatic insulators against life's tribulations. She was almost tempted to review her hostility towards the man when the testiness returned to his voice.

‘But it really winds me up, this obsession with denying or trying to suppress gender difference. Sheila Jordan …!'

‘Was only implementing some of the aims and objectives clearly stated in the school's mission statement and in its prospectus,' Jess retorted.

‘What? Prospectus! Christ! It's a nursery! Most of the children are only three years old, for God's sake! We send Sasha there to have a good time and to mix with other kids. Why the hell do they need prospectuses and mission statements?'

‘Whether or not you think it necessary, it is a legal requirement for all accredited nursery schools these days. Have you never read the prospectus? You should have signed their policy statement agreeing the school's philosophy. I did.'

‘Policy statement? Of course I've never read it or signed anything! All I know is Serena put Sasha's name down, before she, before … All I want for Sash is that she enjoys her childhood.'

‘Which I'm sure she does. It's not the school's policy to suppress difference, but they're not in the business of reinforcing it either! They try to encourage the children to explore the full range of activities without stereotyping. In fact, if you really want to know, the whole thing was my fault!' His frown deepened. ‘Rory was extremely upset when I collected him one day last week. He complained that the girls …' Here Jessica paused; there was no need to rub it in that one of them was Sasha. ‘… were ganging up, preventing him, or any boy, from playing in the Wendy house. It struck me that if some of the boys wanted to, they should be encouraged to play in the house. That's all it was. I'm sure Sheila explained that it was an experiment which had only been tried on one morning.'

He sighed. ‘Yes she did, but she didn't say it was your idea.'

‘Not exactly my idea, but I did raise the subject. But there was never any question of forbidding Sasha's use of the house. We were just trying to be fair to everyone.'

‘Well … as I said, I was angry and when I lose my temper I shoot from the hip. I was throwing undeserved insults around. I'm glad to have this opportunity to apologise.'