“Stew’s easy,” she said as she put down the tea. She knew she had to be careful with her son. “Dad sent you these,” she said.
She handed over a carrier bag of Farmers Weeklys, back issues his father had already read. He could see where his father had thumbed and bent the pages. He still subscribed to the magazine and, like most farmers, was more shrewd and politicized than you would think. That the carrier bag was already on the kitchen unit made it clear his mother had already been in the house but he didn’t mind. Even in his head it was still his parents’ farm, though the idea of ownership and of the possession of it occurred to him only obtusely. He had grown up here and belonged to it and it was not like some property external to him. He felt more possessive over his tractor.
He understood how it must have been difficult for his wife to come into the place, but she did so gently, without displacing anything. The bigger changes they seemed to make together, putting the shower in, painting the upstairs rooms. The house took her in just as the family had. She had come to play as a child and then there had been a long ten-year gap, but it was as if the house remembered her and accepted her in the way a dog might recall an old friend of its owner.
“How is it?” asked his mother.
“Steady,” he said. He began to tell her the counts and the small crises and the surprises and they talked for a while, the conversation shifting about like something in the wind being lifted and dropped, left for a while, lifted again.
His mother had a staid, farmhouse traditionalism. You could go abroad to an agricultural place and you would find the same taciturn dependability in the women there. You would be able to sit at their table and there would be the same ironic hospitality, and then they would unload cookery at you and you wouldn’t be able to move. If you were hurt, their responses would be nurse-like and unsympathetic but their remedies would work, and if you were to make one of them angry it would be a great and dangerous thing. They are like this because they have been charged for generations with keeping their men working, by feeding and repairing them, and there is no room for sentimentalism in that. You would not find kinder people, but their kindness would be in essential things and they would pour it on you.
But this sureness of purpose can only come from having a defined role and from not questioning it. It was certain to him that his mother had never questioned the role, but with that same conviction — age being a role in itself — she had adopted oldness when she assumed she should, rather than when her body told her to.
She had seemed to prematurely age, to adopt some strange outwardly witnessed notion of old people in the way teenagers put on some adulthood. There was no adjustment to the fact that eighty was not a rare age anymore, and that sixty was what forty used to be. She started to order elasticated trousers and strange shoes that made her look incongruously aged like teenagers look in grown-up clothes, and seemed to choose a stock phrase book of senior comments which she took to saying with a wistful acceptance; again, like a teenager trying to sound grown up.
He didn’t know exactly what to do about this, but it was wearing. And then suddenly she was old, and the incongruity was not there.
Like a teenager finally growing up and letting the honest little bits of character from childhood come through, now his mother actually was old there was something once again more girlish to her, and he could trace this. It was as if he was coming to know her as the person she was before she even had him. There were all these little signs, and he began to understand how there must have existed a great chemistry between his young parents that had gradually been rhythmically buried by life. The role, he thought, looking at her now, understanding her fearfulness at having to split her care once more between her husband and son, his father half-paralyzed and he bereft. It’s the role, he thought. The role gets you through.
“Ma,” he said. “I’m okay. I don’t want you to come round.”
“It would tire two people to death, this,” she said. He saw in her eyes the flash at the word she’d spilled, saw it catch in the air before her and shifted his head, letting her know she could let it go. She understood that he was not being proud, remembered his childish independence and hoped it would be enough.
“I have to get through this,” he said. “It’s easier if I don’t see anyone. I have to just get through. It doesn’t matter how I am.”
He tried to put it as clearly as he understood it. He could not bear the responsibility of small talk, of reassuring people he was coping. He seemed to know the offer of sympathy would be like a gate he’d go crashing through. He could bear only the huge responsibility to the ewes, to the farm working, which would be tyrannical and which was in process now, and which didn’t care about him.
“After?” asked his mother.
“I don’t know after,” he said. And truly he didn’t. She held him then, and she felt the massive devastation of him.
PART TWO. The Dig
chapter one
THE BOY HAD not slept. He was gawky and awkward and had not grown into himself yet. When his father came to rouse him he found the boy awake with expectation. Warm, remember, said his father.
The boy nodded loosely in the way he had. The way was to have a minute hesitation before doing things. This came from trying to be eager and cautious at the same time around his father.
He was long and thin and he could have looked languid without this nervousness but instead he looked underdeveloped. When he got out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts it emphasized the awkward gangliness of him. He had the selection of muscles teenage boys’ bodies either grow or don’t but the skin on his face was a child’s.
He got dressed and went downstairs. In the kitchen he sat at the table with the kind of extra-awakeness not sleeping can give you and started automatically to spread paste onto the sliced bread. He had a low-level excitement running through him. A day off school. He felt the same illicit closeness to his father as he did when they went lamping and in these times he was capable of forgetting that his father did other things.
His father put the tea on the table and filled the big flask and then they sat and blew on the tea and drank it. Then they went out.
They took the dogs from the run and got them in the car and drove off the estate. The boy found the smell of the sawdust and dog shit in the run hard to bear in the early morning. The smell of it was a strange note against the deodorant he enveloped himself with.
He had not been digging before and was trying to imagine it. He imagined it frenzied and was excited by this. He did not know it would be steady, unexciting procedural work and that it would not be like ratting at all. He had broken his own dog to rats himself and this gave him pride. When they picked on him in school he kept his pride in this. He hung on to it.
The boy’s father parked the car and they sat seeing the dog runs and the broken machinery and the boy was momentarily stupefied by the darkness and emptiness about the place. In the car lights he could see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.