Adam Hanbury had become a surveyor. He had a practice in Doniford. Seeing Ed Reynolds had put me in mind of him, and so without much thinking of what I was doing I found his number and sat one day at the window dialling it, while I looked through the glass at the catastrophe which still lay strewn, untouched, over the front steps. A little bird alighted for an instant on one of the giant broken pieces of stone and flew away again.
‘We were talking about you the other day,’ said Adam, as though it were a matter of months rather than years since we last spoke. I could hear a baby wailing in the background. ‘Dad’s got a boundary dispute going with the council. He’s been driving us all mad with it so in the end I said, “Look, Michael’s a lawyer, let’s just ring him up and ask him.” We had the wrong number, though. We rang this woman and dad kept telling her she was your wife and she kept saying she wasn’t. They talked for about an hour in the end. When dad rings off he says —’ Adam put on a low, comical, inebriated voice ‘— he says, “She wasn’t a bad old thing in the end, Michael’s other half.”’
‘Boundary disputes aren’t really my line.’
‘Oh no?’
‘I gave all that up.’
‘I didn’t know that. What do you do now?’
I laughed. ‘Let’s just say I get paid a lot less for it.’
‘And there was I,’ said Adam, ‘imagining you as an equity partner somewhere.’
He’d taken his mouth away from the receiver and his voice was indistinct.
‘What?’
‘I was asking was it a penance for something. It sounds very virtuous.’ He sounded perplexed. ‘Though I can’t say I’ve never wanted to get off the treadmill. Only I’d have to get paid for doing it.’ He paused. ‘To be honest, I never thought I’d be where I am now. Doing the nine to five in Doniford.’
‘I don’t think anybody does,’ I said.
‘Don’t they? I think that’s what dad would call old bunkam. Not that he’d know what it’s like. He’s never had to sit behind a desk wondering how early he can leave without anybody noticing. What’s annoying is that he appears to think this is the result of his own ingenuity.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘He’s ill,’ he added.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Prostate cancer. It’s all right — it’s a straightforward operation. But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year.’
It was mid-March. Through the window the trees were still bare, except for the branches of the laurel that grew at the bottom of our steps. Its rubbery, imperishable leaves were thickly coated in white dust.
‘Why’s that?’ I said.
‘He’s in hospital all week, and there are a hundred pregnant ewes at Egypt.’
‘My God.’
‘The first ones are due on Friday.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘It’s funny,’ remarked Adam. ‘That’s just what dad wanted to know. I’m having to take half my summer holiday now. Lisa is not pleased,’ he said in a low voice. There was a pause, then he added, more loudly: ‘You don’t feel like doing some lambing, do you?’
I laughed.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course,’ said Adam, with the vague suggestion that he was not asking a favour but conferring a privilege.
His tone sent a strange thrill through me: an impulse, like a light, that travelled all around my limbs, illuminating great tracts of weariness. I felt as though I had been rowing against a hard wind and had just lifted my oars out of the resisting water, in order to succumb with mild terror to the pleasure of being blown wherever it was easiest for me to go.
I said: ‘I’m not sure I can.’
‘Oh, dad’s hired someone to do the really nasty stuff,’ he said, misunderstanding me. ‘It would just be, you know, shepherding. We could put you up here.’
The baby wailed faintly in the background. I heard a woman talking: her voice rose and fell, rose and fell. There was the sound of dishes being scraped against one another.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Can you make it by Wednesday?’
‘I don’t see why not. I’ll have to make some arrangements.’
‘You’re probably owed some holiday,’ he said meaningfully, as though he had been told that I was. As it happened, it was true.
‘A bit,’ I said.
‘You’d be doing me a real favour,’ he conceded.
I said: ‘Can I bring my son?’
‘Of course,’ Adam replied, after a brief hesitation which suggested that in fact he found the request slightly outlandish. ‘How old is he?’
‘Three. I thought he’d enjoy it, that’s all.’
‘Of course, of course. We’re all, um, equipped. For children.’
‘Thanks.’
‘We live in Doniford now. In a sort of executive suburb. Our house is hilarious.’
I looked through the window at the spectacle of the front steps in the grey afternoon.
‘Not as hilarious as mine,’ I said.
‘The girls will be pleased to see you,’ he said.
I had no idea to which girls he was referring. Did he mean Vivian, or perhaps his strange, intimidating mother? Was Caris still there, after all these years? I wondered then whether farmers called their pregnant ewes ‘girls’.
‘And I them,’ I said.
*
Rebecca responded to the proposal in a manner that defied my expectations. Yet I did not know what to expect; I was open to innumerable possibilities, all of them, however, distinguished by the clarity and drama that were the signature even of Rebecca’s misapprehensions, and that either caused or intensified an answering muteness in myself, so that in the very act of escaping her I found it so difficult to ascribe motivations to my own behaviour that I preferred to believe it was she who was escaping me.
She was clearing out the closet in our bedroom and did not desist from this activity while we spoke; I saw her face at different planes and angles as she moved around, bending and straightening, lunging here and there with her arms bared to the elbow and her hands, white at the peaks of the knuckles, betraying like a tide-mark the steady presence of emotional frenzy, as though it moved in a body within her, now rising, now subsiding. I found her task obscurely threatening, for Rebecca was generally untidy and inconsistent in her habits and her fits of domestic purification were often significant and expressive of anger and intolerance, and a desire for change that did not augur well for those other residents of the status quo by which she had become so palpably infuriated.
‘What about Hamish?’ was what she said first of all, when I told her I was thinking of going away; the fact of my own absence having registered itself in an automatic neutrality of expression, as though it were a train passing through a station at which it was not scheduled to stop. It was left to me to feel the regret and anxiety that evidently did not suggest themselves to her, and which I noticed missing only when I spoke my plan out into the room and saw how indelibly rimed it was with controversy, and with the sordid expectation that by threatening to remove myself I would at least attract her attention. She did not feel it was required of her to explain what her question meant. Even so, it pained me as much to hear her ask it as if the plain fact that Rebecca could no longer be left alone with Hamish were new to me. Until now I had retained this knowledge as a form of generosity towards her, but I saw it become in that moment a dark tenet of our family life.