‘I didn’t know you could see it from up here when I bought it,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t really like the idea. I imagine dad standing here, looking down.’ He paused. ‘It’s very convenient, though. I’m at work in less than five minutes. Actually, sometimes I wish it took a bit longer. Sometimes I’d like a bit more — scale. But it isn’t for ever. That’s what Lisa always says. We’ve given ourselves five years.’
‘For what?’ I said.
‘For this. This phase. Then we’re going to look at it all again. See where we are.’
The wind lifted our coats and tugged them from side to side. It was cold and exposed on the hill. Adam’s nose was red and his eyes were watering. He breathed heavily next to me, as though with exertions that exceeded those of the present moment. The new red flank of the town maintained its unwavering hold on his attention. He looked at it with ambivalent fascination, as though he had built it himself. The fierce, staring blue of the sea reminded me of Rebecca’s eyes.
‘You make it sound like a military campaign,’ I said.
‘It is, in a way,’ Adam replied, plunging his hands in his pockets.
He didn’t seem offended by my remark but he didn’t treat it as a joke either. His humourlessness caused me to feel a mild sensation of alarm, as though I had mislaid something, as though I had reached out for it, certain it was there, and found it wasn’t. Adam looked at his watch.
‘We’d better get back,’ he said. ‘Beverly times our breaks, you know.’
We set off again along the muddy track that led to the barns. Even from a distance you could hear the sound the sheep made in their enclosure, where they were penned up in a moving, baying mass behind metal railings. The disharmonious sound of their plaintive voices, lifted constantly in ululation, was interspersed with the percussive noise of the loose metal bars, which rattled frantically as the body of animals pushed them to and fro. The barns were freezing cold, and full of a sort of steam or vapour that rose off the sheep without warming the air. It was a harsh atmosphere, though not an unpleasant one: the promise of the lambs gave it a rich kind of urgency, a temporary beauty of illumination, as though a single ray of light were trained on this multitudinous place alone on the desolate hillside. Beverly was overseeing the lambing for the whole week. She lived on a nearby farm, but spent the nights in an old camper van she’d driven over and parked in the yard outside the barns. All night she woke every two hours to feed the ill or orphaned lambs. She performed this maternal service with better grace than Rebecca, who when Hamish was a baby used to tut and sigh and emit dramatic groans into the darkness when he cried next door. I did not like to think of those nights: I remembered them as the place in which Rebecca’s unhappiness was conceived and made manifest, where it grew and gathered strength and was inadvertently nourished into autonomy. Sometimes, in those days, I felt angry with Hamish for his cries, though I never believed he was the real cause of Rebecca’s distress; it was, rather, that he had exposed it, and as a consequence exposed me too, finding out my nascent reliability where it lay buried there in the dark.
When we got back to the barns Beverly was cleaning out one of the empty pens with a shovel. She didn’t eat with us at the house; instead she produced a Tupperware box neatly packed with things segmented and wrapped, which she ate sitting on an overturned bucket in the yard. She kept the radio on, tuned to a station from which only the sound of human voices emanated, embedded in endless conversation. There were usually three of them talking, two men and a woman, or sometimes two women and a man, on which occasions I noticed a certain intimate aggression crept into the proceedings, so that the air was filled with the possibility that this verbal ping-pong could at any moment transform itself into something else.
‘I’ll finish that,’ I said. I held out my hand for the shovel.
Beverly was the healthiest human I had ever laid eyes on. She was twenty-five or so, and she looked as I imagined people were meant to look. Her broad, brown body was distinctly female and yet there was nothing slender or shiny about her. She was like a piece of oak. Her hair was light matt brown and curly and her eyes were bright, friendly lozenges of green. I didn’t think she was married. I imagined her associating only with a menagerie of animals, like a girl in a children’s story.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘You can dig a hole for that when you’re done.’
She tapped a big yellow bucket in the straw with her boot. Inside it was a dead lamb. Its eyes were closed. Its woolly muzzle was pursed. Its rigid legs were all crossed like poles.
‘What happened to him?’ said Adam.
‘I expect it was a heart defect,’ said Beverly flatly. ‘He’s one of triplets. The mother’s too ill to take them. I’m going to try fostering the others out.’
She shrugged, having delivered herself of this tale of woe. She wore men’s clothes, big canvas jeans belted at the waist, a checked shirt and an oversized padded waistcoat. I noticed the shirt was ironed. I wondered how she managed to look so neat, spending her nights in the camper van.
‘Well, it wasn’t your fault,’ said Adam. He had his back to her and hence missed the look Beverly gave him, which signified that she found his remark idiotic.
‘Round by the fence at the back is a good place,’ she said to me, tapping the bucket with her boot again.
I started shovelling dirty straw into a mud-spattered wheelbarrow. The straw gave off a deep, rancid smell and sent up yellow clouds of dust and flaky matter that slowly sank back down through the inhospitable, cold air to the concrete floor. After that I stood in the wind at the back of the barn and dug a hole for the dead lamb. The crumpled body had shrunk from its exposure to air and light. It looked embryonic, as though it were reversing out of existence. Beverly said that the lambs were usually born at night: most things were, she said, and they died at night too. I thought of the dawn we had seen hours earlier: the strenuous emergence of light, the reconfiguration, the recalculation of the sum of what there was. I upended the bucket and the body rolled out into the dirt. Closing my eyes I shovelled more dirt on top of it. Presently I went back to the barn, where Adam was filling the big trough for the ewes that were still pregnant. They barged into one another to get to the food, as broad and brainless as sofas.
‘There’s another just been born,’ called Beverly from the far corner. ‘It’s ever so sweet. I’m going to call it Muesli, because it’s all speckled. Come and have a look.’
We went to look at Muesli. It was staggering gamely around in the straw and fixed me with the accusatory eyes of the new-born. In the next pen was a ewe with a black lamb like the one I had just buried. The ewe’s shaggy coat was matted with dried mud. She was butting her head against the wooden door and making the metal bolts and hinges rattle. The lamb was angling at her underside and trying to nip her teats. Every time it got hold of her she threw herself against the door and finally rolled around the pen to shake it off. The tiny animal followed her automatically round and round, pecking her belly with its soft little muzzle. I found its persistence more disturbing even than the mother’s aggression. She bent her head and shoved it away so that it fell against the side of the pen. It levered itself up on its knees and shakily unfolded its rigid sections of leg. It darted for the mother’s belly again. The sound of her big body bruising around the pen and causing the hinges to rattle was deafening.