Family. The kitchen floor would be unwashed and the putty around the windows would be pecked by the chickens. She would be half drunk and offer him one and he would accept and they would drink gin in the afternoon, until she cried at the sight of him, and wept for his loss. She would kiss him with her lemon lips and tell him that she loved him. Loved him. What would he feel? So long since he had been close to her and yet the smell of her would be familiar. Even though he was angry enough to hit her, the smell of her would bring him comfort and he would sit down with her in the living room. He would enjoy her company and watching the way her face flushed when she spoke. He would feel relief to be near her, listening to her lilting Irish voice. It would be baptismal and deliverance would flood him, soak him like the northern rain, and leave him clean before her and ready to accept all that he had done, and all that she had done. He would forgive them both.
He pulled into the service area.
I’ll never forgive you, he had screamed at her once, so long ago.
I’ve never been able to forgive myself, lad. How could I expect you to, she had said, later, years later, over the phone – trying to make him understand. She had called often after he moved down to London, less as the years went by, as if she had lost hope that he could forgive her.
I only wanted to protect you, she would try to explain. But he would never hear of it. He had never allowed her to explain, no matter how hard she tried. Some things could never be forgiven.
Daniel bought a coffee and stretched his legs. He was only twenty miles from Brampton now. The air was cooler and he thought he could already smell the farms. He set his coffee cup on the roof of his car and put his hands into his pockets, pushing his shoulders up to his ears. His eyes were hot from the effort of concentrating on the road. It was nearly lunchtime and the coffee was like mercury in his stomach. He had driven halfway up the country and now that seemed inexplicable. If he had not come so far already, he would have turned back.
He drove the last twenty miles slowly, keeping to the inside lane, listening to the friction of the air against his open window. At the Rosehill roundabout he took the third exit, wincing at the turning signposted Hexham, Newcastle.
After the trout farm he saw Brampton ahead of him, set among the tilled fields like a crude gem. A kestrel hovered by the side of the road and then disappeared from view. The warm smell of manure came as he had expected and was instantly calming. After London, the air tasted so fresh. The red-brick council houses and neat gardens seemed smaller than he remembered. The town felt primitive and quiet as Daniel checked his speed and drove right through it to the farm he had grown up in, high on the Carlisle Road.
He parked outside Minnie’s farm and sat for a few minutes, his hands on the wheel, listening to the sound of his breath. He might have driven away again, but instead he got out of the car.
He walked very slowly towards Minnie’s door. His fingers were trembling and his throat was dry. There was no mongrel barking, no hoarse cockerel or clucking chickens. The farm was locked, although Daniel thought he could still see the impressions of her man-boots in the yard. He looked up at the window which had been his bedroom. His hands made fists in his pockets.
He walked around the back of the house. The chicken run was still there, but empty. The door of the shed swayed in the wind, scant white feathers clinging to the mesh. There was no goat, but Daniel could see the impressions of hooves in the mud. Could it be that the old goats had outlived her? Daniel sighed as he thought of the animals leaving her and being replaced, like the foster children she had raised and then let go, time and again.
Daniel pulled out his house keys. Alongside the key to his London flat, he still had Minnie’s house key. The same brass Yale that she had given him when he was a boy.
The house smelled damp and quiet when he opened the door. From its depths, the cold reached out to him like elderly hands. He slipped inside, pulling the sleeves of his jumper over his hands to warm them. The house still smelled of her. Daniel stood in the kitchen, letting his fingers move from crowded work surface to sewing kit, to the boxes of animal feed and the jars of coins, buttons and spaghetti. The kitchen table was piled high with newspapers. Mindful spiders scuttled from the floorboards.
He opened the fridge. There wasn’t much food but it had not been emptied. The tomatoes were shrunken, wearing furred grey hats. The half-bottle of milk was yellow and sour. Lettuce wilted to seaweed. Daniel closed the door.
He went into the living room, where the last newspaper she had read was lying open on the couch. It had been a Tuesday then, when she had last been in the house. He could picture her with her feet up reading the Guardian. He touched the paper and felt a chill. He felt both close to her and distant, as if she was a reflection he could see in a window or a lake.
Her old piano was open by the window. Daniel pulled out the stool and sat down, listening to the wood strain under his weight. He pumped one of the pedals gently with his foot, letting his fingers fall heavy on the keys, the notes discordant under his touch. He remembered nights as a child when he would creep down and sit on the stairs, the toes of one foot warming the other as he listened to her play. She played slow, sad, classical pieces that he did not recognise at the time but which he had learned to name as he got older: Rachmaninov, Elgar, Beethoven, Ravel, Shostakovich. The drunker she became, the louder she would play and the more notes she would miss.
He remembered standing in the cold of the hall, watching her through the half-open living-room door. She was heavy on the keys, so that the piano itself seemed to protest beneath her. Her calloused, bare feet pumped the pedals as strands of her grey curls fell over her face.
Daniel smiled, sounding single notes on the piano. He could not play. She had tried to teach him once or twice. His forefinger found the notes and then listened to the sound of them: cold, shuddering, lonely. He closed his eyes, remembering; the room was still thick and heavy with the scent of dog. What had happened to the dog when Minnie died, he wondered?
Every year he had known her, on 8 August she drank herself into a stupor listening to one record over and over again. It was a record she wouldn’t let him touch. She kept it tight in its sleeve except for that one day of the year when she would let it spin and allow the fine needle of the stylus to find its fingerprint threads. She would sit in the half-dark, the living room lit only by the fire, and listen to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. Daniel had been in university before he knew the name of the track, although he had memorised every note well before then.
Once, she had let him sit with her. He had been thirteen or fourteen and still trying to understand her. She had made him sit quietly, turned from her and facing the record that scratched its way into the music as she waited, her chin bobbing up and down slightly in expectation of the notes and the pathos that would find her.
When the music started, he had turned to watch her face; surprised at the effect the music had on her. It reminded him of his mother injecting heroin. The same rapture, the same devout attention, the same bewilderment, although she would seek it out again and again.
At first Minnie would seem to follow the notes with her eyes, her breath deepening and her chest rising. Her eyes would water, and from across the room Daniel would see the sheen of them. She was like a painting: a Rembrandt – lucent, rustic, there. Her fingers on the armchair would mime the notes, although he had never heard her play this piece. She would listen but never, not even once, did she play it.