‘What is the difference?’
‘He’s farmed all the life out of it. There’s no love.’
I was surprised to hear Adam talk of love.
‘Dad does things the old-fashioned way. People respect him for it. I don’t know whether I’d be able to keep it up.’
‘Keep what up?’
‘He wouldn’t even let the council run electricity cables over his fields. There’s a house beyond the farm that’s still powered by a generator because it’s too circuitous to run it along the road and Dad won’t let them go over his fields. The family tried to bribe him.’ Adam laughed. ‘They offered him a whack of money. It’s depressing the value of their house so much they reckoned it was worth it.’
We had passed the boundary of Egypt: the rudimentary litany of what I now knew to be Don Brice’s fields flowed past my window instead. It was an untidy patchwork of electric fences and half-dug pits and pawed segments of earth. Everywhere, decaying lengths of plastic sheeting anchored by old car tyres waved their tatters in the wind. Adam slowed down to look at the sheep. The pregnant ewes were penned into a muddy square steeped in their own dung. The smell came through the open window like a fist as we drove by. Half a mile down the road, a man was driving a mud-splattered four-wheeled motorbike along the verge with two scrappy dogs twisting around him, one on either side like a pair of apostrophes.
‘That’s Don,’ said Adam. ‘He’s always on that bike. I can’t remember the last time I saw him standing on his own legs.’
The man craned his head around and squinted at us over his shoulder. He was smoking a pipe. He raised his arm. Adam pulled up alongside him and the dogs jumped yapping at the window. One of them had a yellow eye. The other dog was brown and white and ran around barking at its own tail.
‘You done midwifing for the day, then?’ said Don. His lined mouth opened like a wound around his pipe.
‘You don’t look far off yourself,’ said Adam.
‘‘Nother three weeks yet. It’s your dad likes to get them in early, so’s the frost can kill ’em off.’
‘We’re having a good year,’ said Adam. ‘A few twins.’
‘Is that so?’ said Don.
‘We’ve kept them all so far except one.’
Don laughed and folded his arms as he sat astride his bike.
‘He’s saved you the price of the petrol, then,’ he said.
‘Beverly’s running a tight ship.’
‘Surprised that girl can run a tap. Sharrup!’ Don scooped the barking brown and white dog on to his boot and forked it into the verge.
‘Yours aren’t looking too bright for that matter, Don,’ said Adam. ‘You should try rotating them. That way they don’t have to stand in their own leavings.’
‘Oh, those old birds,’ said Don, turning his mean little blue eyes to the muddy horizon. ‘This is their last year. I’m just seeing ’em to market is all.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Adam. He sounded surprised.
‘I only just knew myself. I wouldn’t have bothered with them otherwise.’
‘Are you selling?’
‘My planning’s come through. Call came just yesterday.’
‘What planning?’
‘For my barns. The barns down the hill along the road.’
‘I didn’t know you had any barns there,’ said Adam.
‘Barns as was,’ said Don. ‘I think once they used them for something but I never did. They just sat there. They’re no more’n a couple of old sheds to be honest. They think they can get three four-bed dwellings out of them, though dwellings for what I don’t like to think.’ He laughed around his pipe. ‘Dwarfs, it’d have to be. They’re taking my old beet fields too as acreage. I know your dad was against it and he’ll be none too pleased, but there it is,’ he added. His little eyes were now hovering around Adam like a pair of flies. ‘It went through at the meeting and he weren’t there.’
‘How could he have been there?’ said Adam. ‘He’s in hospital.’
‘Can’t be helped,’ said Don. ‘I told him before, you’ve got to live and farming ain’t no living any more. He’s all right — he’s got her to keep him, and as far as I can see she made her money the same way I’m making mine. Like I say, there it is. It won’t make no difference to him anyhow,’ he added. ‘It’s just a couple of old sheds. You can hardly see ’em from up there. In his condition things like this don’t matter, do they? It comes down to what’s important, don’t it, family and that, not whether there’s houses or not on some old field. Don’t it, eh, son?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Adam.
‘Niver understood why he was so dead against it in the first place,’ Don continued, wrapping his fingers around his pipe as though in meditation.
‘That’s the way he is.’
A grimace of understanding crossed the farmer’s face.
‘I suppose you’ll be boss up there yourself one of these days,’ he said meaningfully.
‘I’m my own boss already.’
‘Course y’are. Got your own little place. And a wife and kiddies too.’
‘I’ll see you, Don.’
We pulled away with Don holding his pipe at his lips while he opened his mouth to laugh. The lane plummeted downwards in shuttered flashes of brightness. Big black birds hopped on the verge around a smear of blood and fur. Thin lines of wires zigzagged overhead, veered off across the fields like things taking flight, then emerged from their tributaries again and coalesced, swooping upwards in formation to crest the giant grey peaks of pylons that passed along the bottom of the hill in their march down the coast. We passed a new bungalow being built on the side of the road. I glimpsed the raw slash of gravel in front, the military row of dwarfish green conifers, the still-exposed flanks of grey breeze block.
‘Look,’ said Adam, ‘they’re coming up the hill. For ages the first house you saw on the way down was that one.’
We were in the outskirts of Doniford now. He pointed to the end of a plain, white-harled row of old council housing which stood forlornly impacted in a ring of bigger new red-brick houses that bristled with ornamentation. The garden was a small rectangle of green with nothing in it except a bare metal climbing frame in the shape of a beehive.
‘I used to be friends with the boy who lived there,’ said Adam. ‘We were in the same class at school.’
‘Really?’
‘I used to go there to play. I sort of liked going there. It was cosy and his mother was always there, and no one ever asked you to do anything. And compared to Egypt it was so small! I couldn’t believe how small it was. Once when Vivian came to collect me I said to her in front of Ian and his mother that I liked Ian’s house because it was so small.’ He laughed. ‘I think I thought I was being interesting. Vivian went wild afterwards. She said some pretty strong things in the car. I remember thinking, God, she really hates me. Of course, I understand that better now,’ he added stiffly. ‘I understand how difficult it was for her.’
‘Does he still live here?’ I asked. I wanted to hear more of Adam’s feelings for this boy.
‘He manages the petrol station. We always say hello. It’s funny, we were such good friends,’ he said, as though it made no sense to him now. ‘I used to think that one day Ian might come to live with us at Egypt. He’d just appear and we’d save him. I suppose I couldn’t believe he was happy where he was. His mother used to cook this awful food. Everything was white and soft and bland. It was like hospital food. Ian used to eat it up.’
His telephone rang in his lap.
‘We’re just coming down the hill,’ he said into it.