‘All right, Robert.’
She turned to go.
‘Watch your hem!’
In the house, Bess Armstrong went to her bureau. The key turned in the lock only awkwardly. It had been so ever since it was mended. She remembered a day when Robin was eight. She’d come home and found the bureau forced open. Papers were everywhere, money and documents missing, and Robin had taken her by the hand to say, ‘I disturbed the thief, a rough-looking fellow, and look, Mother, here is the open window where I saw him make his escape.’ Her husband had immediately gone out looking for the man, but she had not followed him. Instead she had put her hands to her eye patch, and slid it round so that it covered her good eye and revealed the one that looked sideways and Saw things an ordinary eye didn’t. She took her son by the shoulders, and trained her Seeing eye on him. When Armstrong had come home, having found no trace of the rough-looking thief, she said, ‘No, I don’t suppose you did, for there was no such man. The thief was Robin.’
‘No!’ Armstrong protested.
‘It was Robin. He was too pleased with the story he told. It was Robin.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
They had not been able to reach an agreement, and it was one of the things that had been buried under the weight of the days since. But every time she turned the key of the lock, she remembered.
She folded a piece of paper into the shape of an envelope. She slid all the unreadable bits of the letter into it, then gathered the set of phrases and put them in too. With the final three pieces of paper between her fingers, she hesitated, uncertain, reluctant to let them go. At last she dropped them into the envelope, with a murmur for each one, like a spelclass="underline"
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
She pulled open the bureau drawer, but before she could put the pleat of paper away, an instinct halted her. Not the letter. Not the old story of the bureau and the forced lock. Something else. The sensation of a current rippling transparently through the air.
She tried to catch the tail end of the feeling and name it. Almost too late, yet she did catch it, fleetingly, for she heard the words her tongue pronounced in the empty room:
‘Something is going to happen.’
Outside, Robert Armstrong finished sharpening his knife. He called his second and third sons, and together they hoisted the carcasses on to hooks to bleed them over the gulleys. They rinsed their hands in a pail of rainwater and emptied the water over the floor to wash the worst of the blood away from the slaughter area. When he had set the boys to mopping, he went out to feed the pigs. They usually worked together, but on days when he had something on his mind he preferred to feed the pigs alone.
Effortlessly, Armstrong heaved sacks and spilt the grain into the troughs. He scratched one sow behind her ear, rubbed another on her flank, according to their individual liking. Pigs are remarkable creatures and, though most men are too blind to see it, have intelligence that shows in their eyes. Armstrong was persuaded that every pig had its own character, its own talents, and when he selected a female piglet for breeding he looked not only for physical qualities but for intelligence, foresight, good sense: the qualities that make a good mother. He was in the habit of talking to his pigs as he fed them and today, as usual, he had something to say to each and every one. ‘What have you got to be so grumpy about, Dora?’ and ‘Feeling your age, are you, Poll?’ His gilts, the breeding sows, all had names. The pigs he was growing for the table he did not name, but called them all Piglet. When he chose a new gilt, it was his practice to give her a name starting with the same letter of the alphabet as her mother; it made it easy to trace the breeding line.
He came to Martha in the last sty. She was in pig, would deliver in four days’ time. He filled her trough with grain and her sink with water. She lifted herself from her straw bed and waddled heavily towards the trough at the gate, where she did not immediately eat or drink, but rested her chin on the horizontal bar of the fence and scratched. Armstrong rubbed the top of her head between the ears and she snorted contentedly.
‘Alice,’ he said thoughtfully. The letter had not left his mind the entire time. ‘What do you make of it, Martha?’
The sow looked at him with eyes full of thought.
‘I don’t know what to think, myself,’ he admitted. ‘A first grandchild – is that it? And Robin … What is going on with Robin?’ He sighed heavily.
Martha pondered his boots in the mud for a moment, and when she gazed back up at him it was with a rather pointed look.
He nodded. ‘Quite right. Maud would know. But Maud’s not here, is she?’
Martha’s mother, Maud, had been the best sow he had ever known. She had produced numerous litters of many piglets, never lost one by accident or neglect, but more than that, she had listened to him as no other sow had ever listened. Patient and gentle, she had let him speak his mind; when he shared his joys about the children her eyes lit up with pleasure, and when he told her of his worries – Robin, it was nearly always Robin – her eyes were full of wisdom and sympathy, and he never came away without feeling somehow better about things. Her quiet and kindly listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidante appeared, and Maud had been that confidante. Without her, he might never have known certain things about himself, about his son. On this spot, some years ago, he had shared the disagreement between himself and his wife about Robin and the theft from the bureau. As he retold the sorry tale to Maud, he saw it anew and noticed what he had registered but not paid attention to at the time. I saw a man, Robin had said. I saw his boot disappearing out of the window. It was instinctive in Armstrong to see the best in people, and his faith in the boy was spontaneous. But then, prompted by Maud’s quizzical gaze, he’d remembered the watchful wait that followed the boy’s story, known then in his heart what it meant: that Robin was watching to see whether he’d got away with it. It hurt Armstrong to accept it, but on this occasion Bess was right.
When they had married, Robin was already on the way, put into her womb by another man. Robert had chosen to put this fact aside. This was not difficult, for he loved the boy with all his heart. He had determined to build a family with Bess, not fragmented and splintered, but whole and entire, and he would permit no member of it to be left on the outside. There was love enough for all. Love would hold them together. But when he realized the thief who had left the bureau splintered and its contents ransacked was his own Robin, he wept. Maud had eyed him quizzically. What now? And he had found the answer. Loving the boy even more would put things right. From that day on he had defended Robin even more vigorously than before.
Maud had looked at him again. Oh, really? she’d seemed to say.
The thought of Maud brought tears suddenly to his eyes. One of them fell on to Martha’s thick neck, clung momentarily to the ginger hair that sprouted from it, then rolled into the mud.
Armstrong brought his cuff to his face and wiped the wetness away. ‘This is foolishness,’ he chided himself.
Martha looked steadily at him from between her ginger lashes.
‘But you miss her too, don’t you?’
He thought he saw a mistiness in her eye.
‘How long is it, now?’ He totted up the months in his head. ‘Two years and three months. A long time. Who took her, eh? You were there, Martha. Why didn’t you squeal when they came and stole your mother?’