“Time for you to go home now, Mitzy.” She walked around behind Charles, let her hand rub his shoulder and stay to rest there. Dimity blinked.
“Am… am I not to stay for supper then?” she asked. Charles put up a hand to rub his eyes, as if he, too, were waking from a dream. How perfect it had been, Dimity thought sadly. How perfect.
“Well, we leave for London tomorrow, so I think tonight we shall be just family, the four of us. On our last night.” Celeste’s smile faded as chagrin bloomed across Dimity’s face.
“You’re leaving… tomorrow?” she said. Just family. “But I don’t want you to,” she said, the words coming out louder and wilder than she’d intended. She took a deep breath, and it hurt her chest.
“Well, we must. The girls must go back to school soon. Delphine! Come and say good-bye to Mitzy!” Celeste called to her elder daughter, who stood up, wiped her hands on the seat of her slacks, and came over to them. Stiffly, Dimity struggled to her feet. She was breathing quickly, and for the first time in weeks, she didn’t know how to behave with them. She couldn’t look up; kept her eyes fixed on the grass and saw that it was peppered with rabbit shit.
“Can’t she stay for dinner? It is the last night, after all,” said Delphine, squinting up at her mother.
“Because it is the last night, I’m afraid not. Say good-bye now,” said Celeste. Charles handed Dimity the coins that made up her sitter’s fee for Valentina, and brushed his knuckles lightly against her shoulder.
“Thank you, Mitzy,” he said, smiling softly. Celeste pressed the packet of pie into her hands, and Dimity felt the warmth of it through the paper. She felt like throwing it back at her. Throwing the money at Charles, throwing a curse at Delphine. Something was building up inside her, gathering strength. She didn’t know what it was, except that she didn’t trust it, so even as Delphine was talking, she turned on her heel and fled.
Dimity stayed out very late, sitting in the thick hedgerow that enclosed the track to The Watch as the blackbirds’ resonant song gradually petered out, and the sun buried itself behind the swell of the land. An invisible fist had clenched itself around her throat, and there was a stone in her gut. A stone of dread, at the thought of waking up the next morning and knowing that they were gone. She hadn’t even asked if they would be back the next year; hadn’t dared to ask, in case the answer was no. Having them there, having their company, even petulant Élodie, had made everything else more bearable. She cried for a long time, because being left behind felt a little like being laughed at in the schoolroom; like having stones thrown; like waiting in the dark for someone to notice her. A little like all of those things, but worse. Eventually she got up, walked down to the front door, and let herself in. She had the pie and the plucked pigeons to placate Valentina, not to mention the shillings, and the scolding she got was a routine one. Valentina even took her by the shoulders afterwards, fingers digging in, and ran narrowed eyes over her daughter.
“You’ve feathers in your hair, little dicky bird,” she said, patting Dimity’s cheek in what was as close as she ever came to a display of affection. Somehow this only made things worse, and Dimity went off to find a comb with tears hot and blurry in her eyes once more.
Zach woke up the morning after his boozy lunch to thoughts of Hannah; of her quick, impulsive face and the way it had closed off when he’d asked about the noises upstairs at The Watch. He drank two cups of coffee in quick succession and decided to take her up on the offer of a tour of the farm. On a whim, he picked up his bag of art supplies on his way out. However pleased he’d been to buy them, he’d remained reluctant, as yet, to use them. It had rained hard in the night, hard enough to wake him with the sound of it fretting at the windowpane. Zach’s shoes were soon filthy, as he walked inland for a while instead of heading directly towards Southern Farm. The cool breeze felt good on his face and in his lungs, clearing his head and making his limbs feel lighter.
He climbed a steep hill to the copse at its summit. There he turned, and was welcomed by a wide, sweeping view of the coast as it rolled for miles in either direction. A blurred patchwork of green and yellow and gray, sharply delineated by the contrasting color of the sea. Below him, Blacknowle was toy houses; The Watch a white speck; Southern Farm invisible behind a dip in the land. He perched on the leathery trunk of a fallen beech and took out his sketchpad. Just draw a line. Just start. Drawing had once emptied his mind for him, cleared out all the things clamoring for his attention and let him see a way ahead. Reassured by his own talent, in this thing that he was able to do. At Goldsmiths, his tutors had always urged him to draw and paint more; to be true to his abilities rather than rebel against them. At the time, he’d been too caught up in appearances to heed their advice.
Zach drew a line; the horizon. He stopped. How could he have got it wrong? The horizon was a line-a straight one; bright with light, immobile. The line he had drawn was straight, gentle. And yet it was wrong. He stared at it, trying to work out why, and eventually decided that he had put it too high up the page. The picture would be unbalanced-there should be an even split between land and water and sky; a pleasing trio, layered one after the other with satisfying natural rhythm, and by putting the horizon where he had, he’d cramped the sky, robbed it of all sense of space and volume. With one single pencil line, he had ruined the drawing. Shutting his sketchbook in disgust, Zach set off for Southern Farm.
Hannah was in one of the fields near the lane, climbing out of her jeep and opening up the tailgate. A small flock of cappuccino-colored sheep puttered at her heels, clearly eager for whatever she was bringing them. They all had thin, ridged horns curling back from their heads, which clattered together as they crowded in. Zach waved, and with a high sweep of her arm Hannah beckoned him in, so he climbed the gate and went over to her, dodging piles of fresh sheep shit. She was lifting slices of hay out of the jeep and strewing it into wire mangers. On the backseat of the jeep, a gray-and-white border collie was watching the flock, ears pricked and eyes alight.
“Good morning. Is now a good time for that tour you promised me?” he said, as he reached her.
“Sure. Just let me get this lot fed, and I’m all yours.” Hannah gave him a quick, appraising glance that made him feel slightly conspicuous; an odd, long-absent flutter of nerves. Then she grinned at him.
“How was your head this morning?” she asked.
“Rotten, thanks to you,” he said.
“Not my fault. How could I have forced you to drink if you didn’t want to? I’m just a tiny little woman,” she said archly.
“Somehow I doubt you’ve ever had much trouble getting people to do what you want them to.”
“Well, depends on the person. And on what I want them to do,” she said, shrugging slightly.
There was a pause as she went back to the jeep for more hay.
“I thought sheep only needed hay in the winter?” said Zach.
“Then, too. But there’s not much grass left for them at this time of year, and these ladies will be lambing soon, so they need plenty of sustenance.” There was hay in Hannah’s hair, and all over her sweater. Tight gray jeans, smudged with grime.
“I thought lambs came in spring.”
“They usually do, unless you give the ewes hormones to shift their cycle. But these girls are Portlands. An old, rare breed-they can lamb pretty much whenever you like. That way you can get organic lamb ready for spring, when people bizarrely expect to see brand-new lambs out gamboling in fields full of buttercups and also to have six-month-old lamb ready for their Easter roast at the same time,” she said. Zach helped her right one of the mangers, which had gotten knocked over onto its side. It left mud and sheep manure on his hands.