‘What isn’t?’
‘Asbestos.’
The kitchen was so small that when the kettle boiled it sent a jet of steam out into the sitting room.
‘Bloody typical,’ muttered Adam. He seemed to think Brendon had put the asbestos there himself. ‘How much is that going to cost to sort out, I wonder?’
‘I d-don’t know. A lot. Dad decided it wasn’t worth it. It would have h-halved the price.’
‘What price? We’re talking about renting it out, not selling it.’
‘No.’ Brendon shook his head. ‘No, it was to s-sell.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘He wanted to sell it,’ repeated Brendon. ‘With some land. Half the l-little field down the hill and —’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Adam again.
‘The problem was,’ Brendon continued, tentatively coming further into the room like something being slowly lured out of its burrow, ‘they’d have knocked it down.’
‘Who would?’
‘The new owners. And built something else. An eyesore.’ Brendon tugged at his eye with his middle finger and disappeared into the kitchen again.
‘Brendon doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Adam, to me.
Brendon did not contradict this, although he was now standing right beside his brother with two cups trembling in his hands. Some of the hot, light-brown liquid spilled over the brim of one of them and pattered over the carpet.
‘It’s not as if he needs the money,’ Adam persisted. ‘He’d never let a piece of the farm go, not in a million years.’
He seemed distressed, as much by the fact that he hadn’t been told about it as by the inadmissibility of the idea itself. I felt sorry for him: this was a state into which I was frequently thrown by Rebecca.
‘I was glad,’ Brendon said. ‘I didn’t want them to knock it down. This place stands on a l-ley line, you know. It’s a s-sacred site. Bad luck to harm it. Did you know Caris is coming?’ he added.
I sat down in the armchair. It was covered with a length of cloth, like something in a morgue.
‘I had heard,’ said Adam.
‘She’ll tell you. She’s s-seen things here.’
Adam put a hand to his head, as though he were in pain.
‘What sort of things?’ I asked.
‘E-emanations. Lights. Do you know Caris?’
‘A little.’
‘She’s very porous. She’s always seeing things.’
‘Well, she hasn’t seen Isobel,’ Adam said. Isobel was the name of his baby. ‘She’s had distinct trouble seeing her. She’s never once laid eyes on her.’
Brendon stared at him with his mouth open.
‘I know she got someone to do her solar chart when she was born,’ he said reasonably. ‘She’s bringing it with her from London. It’s, ah, good news apparently.’
The windows of the little room were wet with condensation. A pall of odorous steam was suspended at its centre. There was a dirty, boiled-roots smell.
‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.
‘Hot mash,’ Brendon replied. ‘For the birds. Apparently it stops them pining for a cockerel.’
‘Who told you that?’ said Adam.
‘M-mum.’
‘I thought so. Show Michael your cartons.’
‘Oh. All right.’ Brendon hopped off the sofa and vanished into the kitchen. He returned with a carton and handed it to me. ‘Th-there you go.’
The carton was bright pink. It had a turquoise label which read ‘Funky Chickens’.
‘A friend of mine makes them for me,’ said Brendon proudly. ‘They s-stand out a mile in the shops.’
‘You should have seen dad’s face when he saw them,’ said Adam, to me. ‘He thought he’d never be able to show himself in Doniford again.’
‘He just had to get used to them,’ said Brendon. ‘He likes them now. He saw Lady Higham buying some and she said they were the l-latest thing.’
‘The latest thing,’ Adam repeated, shaking his head. He put his hands on his knees and stood up heavily. ‘The latest thing in eggs. That reconciled him, did it?’
I stood up too. The dank steam was much thicker towards the top and centre of the room so I went and stood by the cast-iron fireplace. On the mantelpiece there was a small brass Buddha, grinning insanely. Next to it was an inlaid incense holder with a little grey worm of ash lying beside it.
‘I came to ask you a favour,’ Adam said.
Brendon looked frightened. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Vivian needs the dogs walking.’
‘All right,’ said Brendon doubtfully. ‘They don’t like me, though.’
‘She can’t see to the end of her arm. They’re spending all day shut in.’
‘I’ll t-try,’ said Brendon.
‘They’re a bit temperamental with dad away.’
Brendon looked aghast.
‘It’s all right,’ Adam said. ‘It’s only for a week.’
‘What am I supposed to do with them?’
‘Just take them to the top of the hill and back.’
‘But what if they run away?’
Adam opened the cottage door and let us out on to the windy hill. A belch of steam was let out with us and was instantly drawn upwards into the sky.
‘If they run away you’ll just have to go and find them,’ he said.
We set off back up the track towards the barns.
FOUR
Adam’s house stood in a delta of tarmac, new, black and pristine. It lay at the end of a black, pristine tarmac river that meandered grandly out of the east side of town, beyond the old grid-patterned streets of residential Doniford, which looked infirm by comparison. There, the coast road passed through a fuming, hooting, rattling cascade of metal the narrow, decorous terraces struggled to contain. Great lorries like dinosaurs manoeuvred on the small roundabouts. Dirty trucks freighted with skips and scaffolding roared past, driven by men who gazed blankly through their spattered windscreens. Beside them the pavements and brick walls of front gardens looked miniature: the gardens and the facades of the houses shook like toys as the lorries passed and the daffodils seemed to jolt from side to side in the grass. The houses looked so vulnerable next to the pounding road that it was difficult to believe in the world in which they had been constructed. Some of the terraces were only fifty or sixty years old but they seemed rooted in a past that had become meaningless. Great weights hurtled back and forth at high velocity past the little, unaccustomed rows of houses, four feet from their front gates.
Adam’s road, the new road, branched away from this spectacle towards its fresh green site in the fields between the town and the sea. There were perhaps a hundred houses there, all like Adam’s. In spite of the exertions of the tarmac, which wound and circled graciously amidst the properties as though to give the impression that each was distinct and difficult to find, the development had a somewhat regimental appearance. When you glimpsed it from the town, its roofs and top-floor windows resembled the impassive heads of an invading army coming over the hill. Once there, however, a pleasant, almost dreamlike atmosphere prevailed. It was an atmosphere that arose from the expectation that absolutely nothing untoward was going to occur. This expectation was well founded, in that as far as I could see none of the factors — natural or man-made — that might constitute, or even precipitate, an event were present. There were no shops or strangers or meeting places, no through-traffic or litter or noise. Even the sea, which was less than half a mile away on the other side of a small rise, was soundless, invisible and without odour. There were merely people, curiously motiveless in their identical red-brick houses, each with their fenced rectangle of grass that was indistinguishable from the grass outside the fence. I hadn’t been there long before I noticed the habit they had, of coming out of their houses and standing there beneath the wadded grey sky, looking around. They would look around for a while and then they would go back in again.