Gentleman's Relish (9 page)

They had an extra-early start, before sunrise, to be ready for the lorry. Guiding steers from their shed into a cattle truck was even harder – given their arrangement of buildings – than persuading
them around the yard and into the pens. Cattle lorries were so long they would only fit into the main farmyard one way and had to be parked hard up against the cattleshed's outside wall. The animals had to make a u-turn, out of their shed, in through a smaller one that might once have been a piggery, and out through its other side where a narrow door opened directly opposite the lorry's rear. To steer them from the large shed into the smaller one, the two tractors were parked tightly, nose to tail, with a couple of pallets lashed on either end, blocking off any other route. An old galvanized steel gate was leant against the side of the lorry's tailgate to prevent escapes and help channel the animals up and in and the tailgate was thickly spread with old straw from within the small shed to mask any alien smells like pig which might have lingered from previous loads.

Cattle lorries had barriers which folded out from the walls and subdivided their interiors to stop animals falling and hurting themselves. Six or so steers at a time could be driven in and the barrier folded out and bolted shut behind them. But persuading even six animals to pass through the small door on the other side of the little shed and up into a lorry – something they had only been in once before, when they were far smaller and more biddable – could rarely be accomplished at the first attempt. Steers had a maddening way of bunching up inside the little shed, forming a bottleneck just
inside the door or allowing the inevitable curses and thwacks to panic them. As often as not one, placed just out of range by his brothers, would take one suspicious look at the lorry then turn around to face the wrong way, obstinately blocking the route for his fellows. Once one of them took fright and decided to run back the way they had come it was impossible to stop the others following and the shed was so low and small it would have been crazily dangerous for a man to push in there with them in an effort to head them off. All one could do was try to block the route back to the bigger shed, lashing out and cursing when the steers tried to turn back and cooing desperate encouragement at the least sign of an animal daring to pass on into the lorry. Sometimes just one or two would comply and stagger up the tailgate and in only to be spooked and thunder back down when their brothers failed to join them quickly enough.

Of all the stages of his interaction with a steer, the day of its departure was the one when his determination to treat it humanely was most likely to crumble. If only they would trot peaceably on board the way they entered a new field, it would have been possible to treat them well until the last. But they never went peaceably, or very rarely. His guilt at sending them for slaughter fed his frustration at their wilfulness and stupidity and he would lash out as fiercely as his brother then feel himself diminished for it.

The sun rose on a steady, penetrating drizzle and the lorry arrived so soon afterwards that it might have spent the night in a lay-by in the village and been waiting there for dawn. The driver was new and not local. Masking his nerves in truculence, he complained about the smallness of the yard.

‘Nobody told me,' he said, although his lorry was no longer than usual, and he made a great performance of having to nose up into Home Field then execute a multiple-point turn in order to be able to back up to the position where they needed him.

No one was like this when their father was around, as he had one of those stern countenances that commanded respect, but he had driven up-country for a cousin's funeral the night before.

‘I don't do rounding up,' the driver said flatly, hearing a steer bellow inside the cattleshed as he climbed down. ‘No insurance.'

The farm was insured against third-party claims, it had to be. But no one told him that as it was not a thing one wanted known. The usual driver always helped a bit. He liked to. But he was a farmer's son and knew what he was about; a novice in such a situation offered more risk than assistance. This man was an outsider and an unknown quantity. He was older than most drivers and had a terse bitterness to him that spoke of failures and bad solitude.

‘Just stand and hold the gate firm against the tailgate,' they told him. ‘We'll do the rest.'

They could manage with just the two of them so long as the driver held his ground at least and had the sense not to start shouting and hissing at the animals as they approached.

Watched suspiciously by him, they made the last few arrangements, scattering straw and securing the barrier for him to stand behind. Then they walked in through the small shed and counted out the first six cattle.

These milled around a little at first, mooing mistrustfully and driving him and his brother back into the space between tractors and cattleshed a couple of times. Then their leader showed the way, heading up the tailgate with a few clattering steps. The rest followed him with little resistance until they felt the safety barriers being swung across and bolted behind them, by which time it was too late.

The next seven included an especially strong, wild specimen his brother had nicknamed Shakin Stevens on account of his quiff, that had once actually jumped out of the crush when being wormed, and they proved far less tractable. They surged in and out of the little shed several times, only panicked further by the stinging from the hosepipes. They wedged themselves in there the wrong way round, backs to the exit, blinking as the blows and curses rained down on their faces. They squirted diarrhoea across each other and rained down piss by the gallon. They answered the mooing from their
brothers in the lorry with bellows and snorts. The stupid driver made matters worse by trying to encourage them as if he were on a rugby touchline and their curses at the cattle became as much curses at him, not that he would have noticed above the din and churning back and forth. Then one of them, who had spent several minutes blocking the exit for the others while he stared out at the lorry, finally took a step or two back and the rest began to leave. First two tried to go through at once and threatened to become wedged, then they went out in quick succession.

He and his brother pressed on into the shed hissing, shouting, waving their arms and lashing out so as to be sure the others followed before the leaders changed their minds and doubled back. The driver shouted again, even louder this time, and they cursed the bugger for his stupidity that might cost them another ten minutes of torment. Then there was a bright ding of hoof on metal and the clang of a falling gate and suddenly there was mooing coming from quite the wrong direction.

All at once the other four animals surged out.

Damning the idiot for not having even the nous to hold a leaning barrier in place, his brother stamped out after them and immediately swore and shouted for him to follow and quickly.

The last seven cattle were loose in the farmyard. Two were tasting the willows in the hedge. The rest
were merely standing, nonplussed by their unexpected release.

The driver lay on his back, hands flung up above his head as though he were falling down a pit. The gate he had been holding in place lay across his hips. There were muddy hoof prints up the front of his overalls, as in some cartoon. The kick that had felled him had caused his nose and a part of his forehead to cave in so that his face was now a kind of bowl where vivid blood was pooling.

He ran to the back door to ring for an ambulance, although he was fairly sure the man was dead, and to call the abattoir. Another driver could not be freed up until that afternoon at least, so they had to move the tractors then let out the steers that were already loaded and herd all thirteen animals back into the cattleshed. If one of them had blood on its hoof, it was impossible to tell which by now. He forked up the silage for them and they fell to eating at once, swiftly calmed by food.

It did not seem right to move the body until the ambulance arrived but they lifted the gate off it and laid the man's hands at his sides.

‘We should cover it,' he said. ‘Shouldn't we?' But his brother couldn't answer because he was slumped in the filthy straw on the tailgate and had buried his face in his palms, shoulders heaving.

He was fetching clean potato sacks from the mill shed to make a sort of shroud when a family of
walkers arrived on the footpath from the cliffs, thinking to cross the farmyard, and he felt he had to wave his arms and warn them off as they had children with them. As he shouted instructions that came out more abruptly than he'd intended because of his nerves, and sent them the long way round the farm, down the lane instead of across the fields, he saw fear in the husband's eyes and, in the wife's, something like disgust.

The children burst in full of the pleasure they assumed the young, by their very youth, gave to the old. While they were signing the visitors' book, Maudie exchanged a look with Prue then reached into the baby jacket she had been pretending to knit for some weeks. She took out a crib she kept hidden on a piece of card and scanned it expertly.
Grandchildren
, she read.
James, nine, vehicles, football, bananas. Effie, seven, ponies, death, Jaffa Cakes
. There was a number after every entry on the card, be they friend or relative, to indicate how much she currently loved them. Neither child was scoring highly.

‘Look who's come to see their old granny!' she exclaimed, catching sight of her daughter-in-law's pick-up speeding away.

James and Effie kissed her dutifully. Effie sat in one of the specially high-seated armchairs and bounced self-consciously. James mooched, staring at Maudie's bandage.

‘Wave hello to your grandfather.'

They waved uncertainly. Maudie's husband sat apart with the few male residents. The cramped back sitting room, where smoking was allowed, was the men's territory. They congregated, taciturn, around the sports channel for the long stretches between meals, leaving the ladies the run, so to speak, of the more spacious and sociable day room. Grandpa stared at the children blankly but two of his companions waved back and Herbert Boskenna did that clicky thing with his dentures which was his equivalent.

‘Can I watch too?' James asked. ‘The Grand Prix's on.'

‘No, dear. The men don't like to be disturbed. Maybe when you're older.'

‘How about in here, then?'

‘Miss Tregenza's waiting for Gary Cooper.'

‘She's asleep,' put in Effie and they all looked briefly at Miss Tregenza, a thin, pale thing with little hair and no conversation.

‘No, dear,' Maudie observed. ‘She always looks that way when she's waiting.'

‘Nurse'll be in in a moment,' said Prue, ‘to turn Gary Cooper on, then she'll perk up. You'll see. She likes Gary Cooper. We all do.' Prue gave one
of the coarse chuckles which reminded Maudie why they had never been friends until now.

‘There's a banana in that fruit bowl with your name on it,' she told James but the boy sulked, unused to denial. ‘Do you want a Jaffa Cake, Effie?'

Effie pulled a long face. ‘I'm on a diet,' she said. ‘Mum says I mustn't eat between meals.'

‘Well teatime's a meal.'

Effie pulled the face again. ‘Better not,' she said.

‘How long have you got?' Maudie asked them both.

James sighed with a characteristic want of tact. ‘Quarter of an hour,' he said, as though that were a small eternity. ‘She's gone to Cornwall Farmers to fetch Dad more wrapper for the silage.'

‘Is he doing that this afternoon, then? I wouldn't have thought it was dry enough…'

‘Yup,' James said absently, staring as Nurse clicked in a Gary Cooper DVD. Miss Tregenza's reanimation was nothing startling but she opened her eyes, shut her mouth and assumed a look of complacent serenity. She began to croon the introductory music, slightly in advance of the orchestra.

‘Knows all the tunes,' Prue said as the titles rolled up the screen. ‘Ooh,
The Fountainhead
. I think I like this one. Patricia Neal always had such lovely, crisp-looking hair.'

‘Wouldn't you rather be helping your dad?' Maudie asked, ignoring her.

‘Not really,' James said. ‘It's all tractor work really. Mum won't let me load new rolls of plastic on the bale-wrapper in case I get my hands stuck.'

‘Well that's the trouble with silage, isn't it Prue? All done by machine. Wrapped in plastic. No art to it at all, really.'

‘Lazy, I call it,' Prue said.

‘And it stinks,' said Effie. ‘It's nice enough now but when you cut it open in the autumn it's like sick with mould on.'

‘In our day,' Maudie told them, ‘everyone round here still made hay and that doesn't stink. Good hay smells sweet.'

‘What's hay?' Effie asked.

‘Dried grass, stupid,' James said, watching the film.

‘It's more than that,' Maudie told him. ‘Hay's a craft. It's a mystery. You have to cut it just at the right time. The ears can be forming but leave it too late and there's no goodness left. And it has to be dry. You need four clear, dry days at least. You can't cut it wet ‘cause it won't dry right lying down. It has to be cut dry then tedded – that's turned to you – twice daily. It has to dry fast so the goodness doesn't leach out. If you're slow drying it, respiration carries on and the sugars turn to gas and water.'

‘And heat,' Prue put in. ‘Hay gets hot. Put it in a rick too soon and the whole thing could go up. Every few years someone would have an almighty fire.
When we were younger, the whole family lent a hand, cousins and all. If you were old enough to walk, you were old enough to turn hay. And there were competitions.'

‘There still are, for silage,' James put in. ‘Dad says there's no point.'

‘Nothing wrong with competitions if you've a chance of winning,' Maudie said to shut him up. ‘Your grandfather, in his time, was the most competitive haymaker on this peninsula. He wasn't like the others, though, watching weather vanes and looking how high the birds were feeding; he went out and got the science. Knew all about balancing his herbage dry matter and how he had to get the moisture content down by a third.'

‘A quarter,' Prue put in sharply. ‘They reckon you should aim for a hundred and fifty grams per kilo nowadays.'

‘If you say so,' said Maudie, who maintained a stout disapproval of metrication. ‘He knew about amino-acid leaching and stomata closure and the rest. He was obsessed with raising his yields. He was sure if you prepared the grass in the right way back in the early spring, you could produce a hay that took up the same amount of space in the barn but fed the animals twice as well.'

‘Didn't he have a muck spreader?'

‘Of course he did but that wasn't enough.'

‘What about fertilizer?'

‘We couldn't afford chemicals. We had to make do with what nature gave us.'

‘What, then?'

Maudie edged forward in her chair slightly, aware that she was competing for their attention with Gary Cooper. ‘Blood,' she pronounced.

‘Dried blood?' asked James.

‘No.' She was scornful. ‘That's no use. When Mother Eddy went peculiar and danced off a cliff and they cleared out her cottage, he found an old book which spelled it out for him. You needed fresh blood. There was plenty of blood when we killed a pig but we used all that for puddings. But he got chickens.'

‘Not much blood in a chicken,' Prue sighed.

‘It was quality that mattered. Quality and freshness. And then there were the kittens.'

‘No!' Effie was deeply shocked.

‘Of course. Barn cats have kittens all the time. It's a fact of life. And the mothers'd die of hunger and exhaustion if you let them raise them all. My dad always used to drown them. Put them in a sack, nice and quick, and into that old cattle trough at the top of the yard. Don't be silly, Effie. It was a natural kindness. He had to do it. But then your grandfather there started taking the kittens himself. He thought I didn't know but I'd see him keeping an eye on the litter instead of drowning it straight away.'

‘Wanted them plump and juicy,' Prue said with just the right hint of relish.

‘That's right. One day he'd be out there in the barn, weighing them in his hands and the next night he'd take longer than usual shutting the yard gate and walking the dog. And I'd know what he'd been up to because he'd spend an age washing his hands. I even heard the little click as he slipped the fruit knife back into that rack by the bread crock.'

There was a pause filled only by a startled cough from Miss Tregenza as Gary Cooper's astonishing profile caught the light. Effie breathed through her mouth. The child needed her adenoids out. Maudie briefly summoned up the gratifyingly intense image, glimpsed through a slyly lifted floorboard, of her sister, Bridie, gassed and splayed on the kitchen table, having hers removed by Dr Wadsworth.

‘Did it work?' James asked suddenly and his voice pulled her back from reverie.

She looked at him hard; the image of his father. In that, at least, he did not disappoint. ‘Do you know, it
did
,' she said. ‘At least, he took the Grassland Association's cup two years in a row. But winning wasn't enough. He'd set himself a challenge to beat.

‘The third year it was a horse. I even remember his name. Destry. As in
Destry Rides Again
. He was the last of the horses. We had the first tractor west of Penzance but that wasn't until 1938. Anyway, poor Destry hadn't been put out to pasture for two
months when his heart gave out. The vet said he'd had a murmur but I think it was sorrow. He missed the labour. Anyway, horses were usually shot by the knacker when their time came. He'd come out and finish them off kindly then buy what was left for dog meat. Don't look like that, James. During the war, people ate horse, too.'

‘Tasty,' Prue said nostalgically. ‘Red wine. Bit of juniper to take off the muskiness.'

‘Horse meat, Prudence. Not dog.' Maudie shook her head to the children, as though to explain that Prue wasn't all there.

‘But your grandfather said no. After all Destry had done for the farm and seeing he was the last of the line, he should do the deed himself and call the knacker out afterwards. Well, I thought. We're moving on from kittens now. And sure enough he didn't finish him off until after dark. Told Mum it was because he couldn't bear Destry to see the shotgun but I knew it was the blood. He needed to shed the blood at night so it would have plenty of time to soak into the soil before the sun rose and dried it up. And he must have known a shot to the head wouldn't reach a big enough artery so he wanted to use a knife afterwards and be able to rinse his boots and hands off under cover of darkness.' She sighed. ‘Funny, though. I'd forgotten all about it when they called us all out to get the hay in that summer. But then I breathed it in.'

‘Was it…' James was all attention. ‘Was it disgusting like silage?'

She paused for effect. ‘It was the sweetest hay I had ever smelled. Like fresh baked bread in a ripe orchard. I took one sniff and I caught your grandfather's eye – he was a very handsome man in those days – and he smiled, ever so slightly. So I knew I was right. And it didn't just win him the cup again, it was like miracle food. The cattle were so sleek and muscly on it and the meat, when it came, was so well marbled with fat, someone started a rumour we'd been doctoring them with some chemical. Which we hadn't, of course. Nothing but grass, our own milled barley and our own sweet hay.'

‘Cream and roses,' sighed Miss Tregenza so suddenly even Maudie was startled.

‘What's that?' Prue asked her.

‘How you can tell a good bit of meat.' Miss Tregenza's eyes were momentarily freed to roam as Gary Cooper had left the scene to less principled and therefore less handsome characters. The tip of her tongue crept out to moisten thin lips. ‘Puts you in mind of cream and roses.'

The sad falling off in meat quality with the rise in low-fat cookery was a pet topic of Maudie's but she had a professional eye on the clock and her fifteen minutes were nearly up. ‘Anyway,' she continued, ‘I thought to myself that'll be it now. He can't get another horse. He can't make sweeter
hay than this. He can rest on his laurels. Sure enough he went back to letting my dad drown the barn kittens and our hay was good but no better than anyone else's who knew to watch the weather and judge the season.

‘But then the War came and all the evacuees. Hundreds of grubby, rowdy little town children on the trains from Paddington and Bristol. Some of them had never seen the sea before, never mind a cow. We had six – four boys and two girls –
and
those saucy Land Girls. But one of the six children went missing. A little tyke, he was. Red hair, crusty knees, hated washing. About your size and age,' she said, carefully assessing James. ‘Jacky. Jacky Porter. No one was surprised when he vanished. He was forever wandering, always skiving off when they were walking to school. So we just supposed he'd run off back to London. We did all we could. The sad thing was that he went just too early to find out he'd nowhere to run
to
. Mother and aunt dead in a flattened house. Terrible really. And he had no father who'd claim him.'

‘Shame,' Prue sighed and shook her head at the fecklessness of men. The children only stared. Maudie pretended an interest in the progress of the baby jacket.

‘That summer,' she said, ‘when your grandfather had cut the hay and the girls and I were out tedding it, I came across a Fair Isle cardigan. Well I knew
it had belonged to the Porter boy but I thought nothing of it. He was a tearaway who left clothes all over the place and, as often as not, had a sock missing or couldn't find his tie before church. But I gave it to your granddad to hand in to the police, just in case. And there was something in his face as I passed it to him. A sadness. A kind of…dignified regret.

‘I've often wondered what he did with the body. Down one of the old mineshafts? Or perhaps he ploughed it into a barley field.'

‘What about the hay?' Effie asked impatiently.

‘Hang on a second, dear. Knit two, purl two, cast one onto t'other, knit two, purl two…The hay? The hay had no smell at all. Looked fine enough. Dried quick enough. But it was a dead thing. Characterless. And I swear to God the cattle didn't like it and we actually had to buy in bales from Zack Hosking. And if the story ended there, I'd have said it was divine punishment, plain and simple and that he saw the error of his ways.'

‘Why?' James asked. ‘Did the grass die?'