Gentleman's Relish (10 page)

‘Lord, no. It takes more than a bit of blood to kill off a whole field of grass. It was stranger than that. We let the cattle in the field for a few weeks that autumn before the rains started in earnest and I went up there one morning to check they had enough water. And they were nosing at something. You know how inquisitive steers get? They were
nosing and dragging their hooves. So I walked through them to take a look and there was a sort of mound. Like a big molehill. Well we don't get any moles, as you know. Only rabbits. So I thought it was a bit queer and I scraped a bit at the earth with my toe, the way the cattle had started to. And they were all nosing around me and snorting and sneezing.' Maudie mustered a shudder. ‘I remember it so clearly. I crouched to feel and my fingers found a sort of…well
skin
, really. Greyish, where the earth had been on it, but pink inside and quite warm. Well, I dug more aside and realized it was a sort of…a sort of
bag
. Full of liquid and…and something else. I was just going to run and fetch your grandfather or one of the Land Girls – they were only a few fields away – when it kicked. Or something inside it kicked.

‘Prudence, it's no good. You're going to have to finish this matinée jacket for me – I can't make head or tail of this blinking pattern.

‘You know how sometimes you go into a house or into a room and, although you can't say exactly what's wrong, you get a bad feeling?'

Both children nodded although it was certain neither had the slightest psychic ability. Even Prue had fallen quiet. The only sound was Nurse using the rotary iron in the hall, the murmur of sports commentary from the smoking room and subdued, manly conversation from Gary Cooper and a colleague.

‘Well that's how I felt and I sensed that whatever it was, I had to destroy it. I ran to the hedge and fetched the biggest bit of granite I could carry and heaved it back. I thought I'd just shut my eyes and drop it on the thing, the way you would on a rabbit with myxomatosis. I wasn't thinking beyond that, of the mess or having to explain it or anything. I was just about to let go when I heard a strange sucking, whiny sound, a bit like a very new kitten now I think of it. And I opened my eyes, looked down and almost dropped the rock.

‘The skin of the bag, or whatever it was, had sort of split apart and there, all wet and shiny like a little seal was a baby. A perfect, black-haired boy baby. The skin had shrunk up like a burst balloon but the last of it was sticking to his head and, as I bent to scrape it off him, he opened his soft blue eyes, emptied the stuff out of his mouth and claimed me with his cry as surely as if he had called me Mother.'

Maudie glimpsed her daughter-in-law's returning Jeep. ‘And that,' she said, ‘was the baby that grew into your father.'

There was a stunned silence.

‘I don't believe it,' James said at last.

‘
I
don't care,' Maudie told him. ‘He'd deny it, of course, because it's only human to want to be like everyone else. I just thought you ought to know. That's why his middle name is Fielding.'

‘The mark,' Effie said softly, remembering something. ‘There's a red mark on his head where his hair's falling out. Is that…?'

‘Yes, dear. Where the bag was stuck to him. His birthmark, if you like. Now here's your dear mum to take you home.'

They were curiously reluctant to leave but more reluctant still to do as their mother bid them and hurry next door to give Grandpa a fond goodbye kiss. Herbert Boskenna clicked his teeth at Effie while she was waiting her turn and the child truly turned pale with fear.

‘She ought to eat more,' Maudie told her daughter-in-law, ‘and he needs to watch less television – it's giving him nightmares. Bye all. Come back soon.'

‘The trick,' she confided in Prue as Nurse wheeled in the tea things and wheeled out Miss Tregenza, ‘is to spike the narrative with just a seasoning of solid, agricultural fact.'

The clouds had drifted away during the concert and people exclaimed, as they emerged from the church, at the unexpected brightness of the moon and stars. A comet was making a centennial appearance in the western sky that Easter. Gretel wanted to linger with the others to admire the clarity of its tail but Corey was keen to be off. The Requiem had barely begun when he realized each of them had supposed the other had shut the chickens in their coop before leaving. He had been fretting about foxes ever since.

‘Isn't it beautiful?' she said, meaning the comet. Her heart was still brimming with Brahms and she wanted to make the rare sensation last.

‘Yes, come on,' he said. ‘If we get a move on we can get out of there before we get stuck in a queue with this lot.'

She followed him obediently, feeling in her wallet for the key to the van. There was a retiring collection after the concert to assist the fine old church's restoration. Still blissed-out on music, Gretel had reached for her money as they left their pew, generosity welling up within her, only to find he had raided her funds to buy oil for the chainsaw. She could offer nothing to the pretty girl with the begging bowl but twenty pence and a worthless, craven smile.

The concert-goers' cars were crammed into a field across from the church. It had been drizzling all week. She felt cold mud on her toes as she hurried after him and cursed the foolish impulse which had prompted her to wear pretty shoes and her least ancient dress. No one else had dressed up; forewarned, they thought only of warm practicality. The exceptions were the musicians, glimpsed here and there, incongruous in backless dresses or dinner jackets amid the mud and four-wheel-drives.

The van was not a four-wheel-drive but an old, much-patched Commer converted to a mobile home, built for unhurried journeys and long, recuperative rests. When they arrived, she had taken one despairing glance at the mud and pleaded with the young musician waving them in to let her park on the thin island of firmer ground near the entrance. But he was bound by regulations and insisted, smiling, that she park with the other large vehicles,
most of them shamingly new and all of them surely better equipped for such conditions.

‘Well go on, then.'

‘We're skidding.' She felt the sickening lack of grip.

‘Slowly,' Corey said, ‘or you'll make it worse. Ease her out. Steady!'

She drove because he had lost his licence before he met her. Some terrible tale involving a child, a bicycle and worn brake shoes. Told her in the flush of new love, the story had demanded and won her sympathy but increasingly its lack of details came to rankle and her mind framed the questions she could never ask. What was the child's name? How old? Just how badly disabled had the accident left it? And why did Corey only voice indignation, not remorse?

‘Here. Let me. There's a tarp back there. Stick it under the wheels with that old blanket and I'll try.'

While he shifted across to the driving seat, she slipped out, stuffed blanket and tarpaulin between mud and wheel then stood back.

‘Okay,' she called.

‘Push!' he shouted back.

She braced a foot against the stone gatepost behind her and placed both hands squarely on the van's rear. She felt rust beneath her fingers and imagined her fists bursting straight through bodywork that was little more than filler and cheerful paint.

‘Okay,' she called again.

He revved. The wheels churned uselessly, burying the blanket and chewing up the tarpaulin.

‘Stop,' she called. ‘Stop! I can feel her sinking.'

All about them glossy four-wheel-drives were pulling away. She thought of asking for help but she knew what the swinging headlamps revealed; an ageing New Age couple and an even older van. She imagined women taking in the mud caked round her inappropriate shoes and sprayed up her faded Indian cotton, heard their hastily mouthed commands to their husbands to pay no heed and hurry on by. She knew she and Corey presented the very image of fecklessness, of thankless time-wasting.

Corey was losing his temper. He had a child's inability to deal with stress and so had designed his life along lines of dull simplicity. His back-to-basics philosophy masked a fear of confrontation and unexpected challenges. He had made a big effort, she knew, coming out tonight, sitting restlessly through a concert of what he called
her
music but the effort was worthless for being so paraded. An evening of his reluctantly given was small recompense for the tedious hours she had spent driving him back and forth from the lay-by where he peddled the crude wooden mushrooms he ‘carved' with a chainsaw. Even so, he was going to make her pay.

‘Why'd you stop pushing?' he asked.

‘I told you,' she said. ‘It's sinking. You'll only make it worse.'

‘This was a stupid idea, parking in here.'

‘There was nowhere else to park.'

‘You knew we'd get stuck. If those chickens are dead…'

‘I'll buy you some new ones.'

‘Oh yes. Money solves everything. Wave your wand and spend your father's precious money.'

‘Excuse me?' Gretel turned her back to flag down the last four-wheel-drive as it began to pull out. Grinning, actually grinning, the driver wound down his window.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Daren't stop or we'll get stuck too.'

‘Good luck,' the woman beside him called and they purred away.

As Gretel stood aside to let them pass, the mud sucked off one of her inappropriate shoes. She groped in the dark for it but her fingers found only ooze and she nearly lost her balance.

‘Oh. God, I'm so sorry.'

It was the young man in the dinner jacket who had waved them in. She had spotted him later, in the chorus, cheeks pink with effort, eyes shining with emotion. His white shirtfront glowed bluish in the light of the moon. He shone a torch across them then politely dropped its beam.

‘Can I help push?'

‘Better not,' she said. ‘We might sink even further.'

‘I should never have let you park here. Come on. I'll shove too.'

So they pushed again while Corey revved again and the van sank up to its rear axle. Uncomplaining, the young man now wore mud on his shirtfront like a penance.

‘I could ring the AA or something,' he suggested, shining a torch into the liquefied mire.

‘We're not members,' she said and it felt as though she were confessing to not being members of society. ‘I normally fix the van myself.'

‘Oh. Well, I'd offer to pull you out myself but I've only got a 2CV. Erm. Tell you what, the chairwoman's got a Land Rover.'

‘Oh goodie,' Corey said, mimicking his accent. ‘And where's she?'

‘She'll be up at the pub, I expect. I'll drive up there now and see if I can find her. If I do, I'll send her right back with a tow-rope. Or I'll send someone else. It won't be more than half an hour max.'

‘Oh brill,' Corey said and swore.

‘I feel awful about this,' the young man went on. ‘You'll never want to come again.'

‘No no,' Gretel said.

‘Quite right,' said Corey.

‘There'll be two free seats for you on the last night. I'll have them left on the door for you. I'm sorry there's not much more I can do.'

‘It's not your fault. Honestly,' she said. ‘Thanks for everything.'

He found her missing shoe before he left and handed it over with further apologies then he disappeared into the lane. Moments later they heard his 2CV gunning uncertainly and pulling away. There was no one left besides them. The night enveloped them, as did Corey's filthy mood.

Gretel tried turning on the radio to lighten the atmosphere but he told her not to waste the battery. She said she wished she'd known to bring a picnic like everyone else, then they might have had leftover sandwiches to enjoy. Which of course made things worse because now he was hungry as well as stranded.

Suddenly he was getting out.

‘Where are you going?' she asked.

‘Home,' he said.

‘But he said it would only be half an hour.'

‘So? They could all be dead by now. Anyway, what makes you think he was telling the truth? He'll be in the pub with his mates. He'll be drinking. No one'll come. I'm off.'

‘But how…?'

‘I'll hitch,' he said. ‘Your van. Your mess. You wait.'

‘Don't go,' she said. ‘Don't be like that. This is silly. You'll never find a lift.'

But he did, almost immediately. A Beetle stopped,
a new one, and when the light came on inside she saw the young woman driving it, blonde, sporty-looking, a surfing type. She heard him say, quite distinctly as he got in, ‘Oh, she'll be all right,' and he sped away without a backward glance.

Alone at last, unhurried and with no headlamps to spoil the clarity, she found herself in the perfect situation to admire the comet. It was the first she had seen. Until now she had always assumed they were swift blazes in the night sky, like shooting stars. Or perhaps shooting stars were simply other planets' comets? Her grasp of astronomy was vague but she had always wondered how the superstitious, the Three Wise Men, the invaded Saxons on the Bayeux Tapestry, could have built such significance on something one might blink and miss. Instead, she now saw, comets were like frozen things, speeding, maybe, but at such a distance they barely seemed to move.

She'll be all right
. She repeated his words in her head like a mantra. The Brahms had stirred her up, brought her repeatedly close to tears with its grand talk of death, of mourning, of last things and grasslike flesh. It left her exposed and childlike, in need of the kind of hugs Corey only offered when drunk and unhelpfully sentimental but the comet at once belittled and calmed her.
Nothing matters
, it said and
Everything is possible.

Gretel removed her second shoe, so as not to lose
it, then walked barefoot to the back of the van. The squelching mattered less without shoes on. It was only mud. It would wash off. She turned on the light and closed the door behind her. There was water in the flask and gas in the canister. She set the kettle on to boil. There were some Garibaldi biscuits in the tin beside the teabag jar, softened with age but still quite palatable. Munching while she waited for her tea, she checked the cupboards. The tools were there, naturally, and the jack – one drove a van this old nowhere without them – but so were the van's original picnic set, the road atlas, her duffel coat and a good thick jersey she had given up for lost. The mud would not have done anything to the blanket a launderette could not undo. Her wallet was empty of notes but it held the card only she could use,
the Card of Power
as she thought of it. Her driving licence, stowed behind the sun visor, seemed suddenly the official recognition of some much deeper ability than mere self-transport. She dunked her teabag and made a mental list of all she would be leaving behind if she failed to follow Corey. A heap of old clothes, old paperbacks, her clumsy attempts at pottery and an attractive, straggle-haired hitch-hiker she had once rescued from a downpour on Salisbury Plain. Nothing she could not replace, should the need arise.

The festival chairwoman arrived with Land Rover, tow-rope and a tactful lack of expressed surprise
at finding one person where she had been led to expect two. She pulled the van back out to tarmac then paused, after unhitching the rope which, miraculously, had not pulled off its bumper. Her manner was bracing in a good, old-fashioned way that instilled confidence rather than terror.

‘Are you positive you'll be all right?' she asked as though on the verge of offering a warming mustard bath and a serviceable change of clothes.

Gretel felt the mud crack on her cheek so she must have been smiling.

‘I'll be fine,' she said. ‘Honestly.'