“But… I hardly know the woman! I’ve met her only twice! You’re imagining things, Celeste-”
“I am not! And I tell you now, Charles Aubrey, either we go to Morocco and away from this damp and dreary place, or I will go alone with the girls and you will see us no more!”
There was a long, uneasy silence, and Dimity didn’t dare to breathe.
“All right,” Charles said at last, and Dimity went cold. “We’ll all go,” he said.
“What? No…” Celeste protested. “Just us, Charles. We need some time alone…”
“Well, that’s not possible. So we’ll all go.” Dimity couldn’t hold herself still any longer. She crossed the rest of the hallway in steps as loud as she could make them without spilling the tea, to announce her arrival, and smiled frantically as she stepped out into the light.
“Here, Celeste. I fetched your tea,” she said, fighting to keep her voice from shaking.
“Mitzy! How about it-a trip to Morocco! All five of us. Celeste can visit her family, and I can paint you as a harem girl, or perhaps a Berber princess… It’ll be like nowhere you’ve ever seen, trust me. You’ll love it. What do you say?” Charles stood with his hands on his hips, squinting at her with a kind of desperate fixation, as if he could feel Celeste’s baleful eyes upon him and didn’t dare to look.
“You… want me to go to Morocco with you? Truly?” Dimity breathed, glancing from him to Celeste and back. “I… I should love to go…” she said. “You’ll take me with you? You promise?”
“Of course. You’d be a great help to us on the journey, I’m sure. You can help look after the girls, and give Celeste and me some time to rest and be together.” Charles set his smile bravely, and finally found the courage to look across at Celeste. She was watching him, her mouth open in shock, but she did not speak.
“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” said Dimity, scarcely able to believe it was true. Her smile stretched from ear to ear, her face ached from it. They would go, but this time she would stay with them, with him. She would leave Blacknowle, and travel farther than she had ever thought it possible to travel. She did not care if Celeste did not want her there. She cared only that Charles did; and in that moment, she loved him completely.
“There now,” Charles said awkwardly. “Go on inside and tell the girls. And is there any tea for me in the pot?”
“I’ll fetch you some.” Dimity stepped back into the strawberry-scented house, and just before she moved out of earshot, she heard Celeste say, in a voice made frigid with rage:
“Charles. How could you?”
There was straw prickling Zach’s back and the sharp smell of sheep shit in his nostrils, filtering through the thick mass of Hannah’s hair. Her head was resting in the crook where his neck met his shoulder, and for a while he shut his eyes and enjoyed the discomfort of her nose and chin digging into him. Her breath was warm and growing steadily slower, returning to normal. From behind the bale of straw on which he was leaning came the sudden deep, loud bleat of a sheep; Hannah’s head came up in an instant, her eyes fighting into focus.
“Is she all right?” said Zach. Hannah sat up straighter to look and Zach felt their bodies disconnect, the sudden touch of cool air on damp and delicate skin.
“Yes, I think so. Just getting a bit uncomfortable now, poor girl. I should check on her, though.” She climbed off Zach and got to her feet, wrestling her trousers back over her hips and zipping them up. There was sheep shit on one of her knees. She went around the bale and crouched by the laboring ewe, whose quick breathing was flaring her nostrils and making her whole body rock. Hannah peered beneath her tail, put gentle fingers there to feel the shape of what was beginning to protrude. “I can feel feet and nostrils.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes, that’s good. Nostrils means a straightforward, headfirst birth. Breech is trickier.”
“Oh, good. Well… I’ve never done that before. Had sex in a barn full of sheep, I mean,” Zach said, dressing and brushing the sharp bits of chaff from his skin. Hannah looked up with a brief smile.
“It certainly helps liven up the long hours of a lambing vigil. Chuck me that rag, would you?” She caught it deftly and wiped the muck from her hands as she sat back down on the bale beside him. Zach took her hand and meshed their fingers, pressing the pads of their thumbs together and feeling the hard scar running across hers.
The small cappuccino-colored ewes were dotted around all over the barn, some with tiny lambs curled sleepily beside them, others prostrate and panting like the one Hannah had just checked, others eating hay as though none of it was anything to do with them. It was three o’clock in the morning and an immaculate full moon had risen outside, casting silvery shadows over everything. Zach peered out through the door, up the hill to where the low shape of The Watch crouched against the horizon. There was a single light on in the kitchen downstairs, and he wondered if Dimity was still up, or had forgotten to turn it off.
“Don’t you need to put a blob of that green paint on them? Or number them or something, so you know whose is whose?” He gestured to the sheep that already had lambs. All the ewes had large blobs of emerald green paint on their rumps.
“I’m sure the sheep know. And they’ll all get their ear tags, soon enough. That green paint is tenacious stuff-you can’t get it off you, once it’s on. Not ideal for organic fleeces. It goes on the ram’s chest, so we can see who he’s covered.”
“Is lambing always this easy?” he asked. Hannah shrugged.
“This is my first season with this flock, remember. Hopefully they’ll all keep popping out easy-peasy, because I can’t afford to call the vet right now.”
Zach thought about this for a moment. “What about… what about your pictures? I mean, no offense, but you hardly get a lot of foot traffic in that shop of yours. Couldn’t you find some local gallery or gift shop to stock them? They’d sell really well, I’m sure they would.”
“I could, I suppose. I just… I don’t know. The idea doesn’t appeal to me.”
“What idea? The idea of being a talented artist and making some extra income through the sale of your work? What’s not to like?”
“I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be an organic shepherd.”
“The one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other, does it?”
“Sort of. If the pictures sell really well I’ll only have to do more of them… it’s a slippery slope. Soon I’ll be painting daisies on watering cans and running a gift shop rather than farming.” She shuddered, and Zach laughed softly.
“But you draw already. The pictures are there; I’m sure no harm would come of putting them somewhere they’re more likely to sell. I could look into it, if you like?” he said. Hannah gave him a steady look.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll think about it,” she said. “What about you? I bet you wanted to be an artist, right? What made you open a gallery?”
“The fact that nobody bought my art and I had a wife and child to feed. Actually, Ali fed herself, and me and Elise. She’s a lawyer, a very good one.”
“Bet that did wonders for your ego.”
“It was my own stupid fault-the fact that I didn’t make it. I had my chance and I blew it.” Zach smiled ruefully and shook his head at the memory. He’d been so full of himself at the time, so bloody cocksure.
It was the year he graduated from Goldsmiths, and his final show was being showered with praise from staff and classmates alike, and from a journalist who wrote in a piece in her magazine about young artists to keep an eye on. Zach Gilchrist, the article said, combines a classical eye with a challenging, almost surrealist approach to subject and meaning. It was rumored that Simon d’Angelico, one of the most influential collectors of British contemporary art, might be coming to the exhibition to look at his pieces. A real, genuine rumor, not one that Zach had cooked up himself. All that promise, all that potential. Zach entirely lost sight of the fact that it was all just possibility and suggestion, nothing more concrete than that. That he was still just a new graduate, unproven-a maybe, that was all. He felt like he had made it already, so that when a woman called Lauren Holt, who ran a small gallery near Vyner Street in the City and was building up a stable of new artists, came and spoke to him and asked about hanging his final piece and two others, he barely listened to her. He’d never heard of her or her gallery, and that told him everything he thought he needed to know. She had bright scarlet hair, even though she looked over fifty, and it clashed with her green eye shadow. Zach supposed she thought it made her look avant-garde; he wrote her off as an eccentric amateur. Her gallery had been open for only six months, and for all he knew it was the kind of place that sold postcards of the art in a rotating wire rack. So he turned her down flat and thought no more about it, safe in the knowledge that big things were coming his way.