Chapter Twenty-Three
No sooner had I turned away from the house with the intention of setting off down the drive than I caught sight of the figure of Toby advancing from a right angle across the gravel. He was striding from between the hedgerows, naked to the waist, his hair unkempt, stray wands of straw clinging to his jeans. I froze in my tracks at this vision, which had aroused in me an immediate feeling of panic.
‘Hal-lo!’ he cried, waving one hand while the other clutched his shirt. He was extremely red from the sun, the burnish of activity rather than the perilous scarlet of sunburn, and a varnish of sweat glinted across the tantalizing geography of his chest. I deduced that he had just come from his work in the top field: the labour, I felt, suited him far better than his customarily sybaritic demeanour. His face wore an almost joyous expression, although it struck me that it was perhaps in the novelty rather than the virtue of manual work that he had found pleasure. He drew close, grinning and panting; at which his physical presence became so overwhelming and pointed that it took on a distinct embodiment, as if a third person were with us whom it would be impolite, or at least strange, not to acknowledge.
‘The sun always makes me horny,’ he said presently, grinning wider still. ‘Doesn’t it you?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said bravely, after a pause. The words, or at least the sentiment with which they concurred, were unsuited to my voice. So clearly did they mark me out as an impostor in the region of sexual banter that I was certain Toby would expel me from it with a scornful laugh; but he merely stretched luxuriantly, showing me the bearded nooks of his armpits.
‘Off for a walk?’ he said, stroking his flat belly. I had a curious sensation as I watched his hands touch his own glandless flesh, the sense of some void or lack.
‘Yes.’
‘Very energetic of you, I must say, I was just going to wallow in the pool for a bit. I’ve been sweating like a pig all morning.’ He surveyed me idly. I wondered if he was going to invite me to wallow with him; but then his attention sauntered away. ‘How do I look?’ he said, flexing one arm and then the other and looking down at himself. ‘I’m turning into a bit of a hunk, don’t you think? It’s the equivalent of spending all day weightlifting. And you get far browner moving around than you do just lying there.’ He ran his fingers over the skin of his arm and peered closely at it, rapt in the science of his own vanity. ‘You’ve gone quite a nice colour,’ he added, extending his investigations to me. He held out his forearm, crooked at the elbow, as if offering to partner me in a dance. ‘Let’s have a look. Yes,’ he concluded, when I placed my arm beside his own, ‘you see, you probably won’t get much darker than that because you’re fair-skinned. I’m lucky, I go really black.’
‘Apparently it ages you terribly,’ I unkindly remarked. ‘It can also give you cancer.’
‘Oh, you don’t believe that, do you? People who say that sort of thing just want to stop everyone else from having fun. I didn’t have you down as a killjoy, Stella,’ he added reproachfully.
‘I’m not,’ I said quickly, wounded by his judgement. ‘Apparently it’s true.’
‘Appawently it’s twoo!’ he mocked. ‘Don’t tell me’ — he opened his eyes wide and looked exaggeratedly over his shoulder — ‘don’t tell me, it’s all a conspiracy.’
‘No, I—’
‘Oh God, they’re all out to get me! They’re following me! Help!’
He stopped and doubled over, incapacitated by laughter. Watching him I had a feeling of despondency which made me want to get away from him. Even his physical beauty seemed all at once remote and unsatisfactory. It was a mere spectacle, and one I was weary of watching.
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
Toby abruptly stopped laughing.
‘Enjoy.’ He shrugged disdainfully. ‘Rather you than me.’
I turned and began to walk away from him down the drive, my posture awkward with the thought that he might be watching me. Before I had got very far, a shout caused my shoulders to stiffen.
‘Cheer up!’ he cried from behind me. ‘It might never happen!’
The walk to the village seemed even more arduous than usual. My irritation with Toby had set my heart pounding, so that it seemed to thump in unison with the angry bang of the sun against the sky. Several times I forgot entirely why it was that I was going to the village at all, and as my motivation wavered my steps frequently slowed to a trudge. My promise to visit the creature was by turns oppressive and insubstantial. I wished that I had not made it; and yet I had a small, worrying consciousness of what it would signify were I to renege. To turn around and return to Franchise Farm would have been a form of submission to the Maddens; although what precisely would have been relinquished by doing so was not clear to me.
‘Hello, dear,’ said the creature, emerging from the back room just as I staggered in from the street, inadvertently slamming the door so that the bell gave a wild shrill. ‘You look all in. You shouldn’t go hiking about in this heat without a hat and water. You wouldn’t catch a rambler gallivanting in that fashion. What’s wrong with your back?’
‘I fell down the stairs,’ I panted, leaning sideways against the post office counter and clutching at my spine.
‘They’re not taking very good care of you, are they? You won’t last the week at this rate.’
‘It’s not their fault.’
‘Touchy on that subject, are we? At any rate you should mind how you go. You’ve got to be a bit more careful in the country than you do in town. Got to watch yourself. Can’t just go running about as you please and then catch the bus home.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Let’s have a look at that back, then.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘That’s as maybe, although I don’t see how you’d know. A back’s a tricky thing. You may have chipped a bone, but it’s unlikely you’d have got here if you had. Probably just a bit of bruising, for which I have the very thing.’
The creature shuffled across to the door to the back room and held it open commandingly. Obediently I headed down the gloomy corridor, its strong and now familiar smell confusingly assailing me like a memory, and waited at the end while the creature switched on the light.
‘Let’s have that shirt up,’ it said matter-of-factly, crossing the room — which was exactly as I had last seen it, although now it looked shabbier and more pitiful somehow — and opening the cupboard. I took the opportunity of looking more closely at the newspaper clipping by the door which had caught my eye during my last visit. There was the blurred picture of Pamela, with the words ‘Lovers’ tiff behind farm attack, say police’ above. Beneath it was written the following:
The apparently motiveless attack on a local farm, which left several farm buildings and expensive machinery badly damaged, and which is thought to have resulted in a serious fire in one of the barns, may not have been the work of hooligans as was previously thought, Sussex police said last night. Franchise Farm, near Hilltop, was vandalized late on Monday night, in a devastating attack not discovered until the following morning when the farm manager, Mr George Trimmer, arrived for work.
‘Them’s snuck in, the b****s,’ Mr Trimmer told the Buckley Enquirer. ‘Must’ve greased their shoes. Never heard a dickey-bird over the big house.’
Police spent several hours at the scene, where damage included extensive graffiti, much of it reportedly obscene, spray-painted on walls, in the hope of finding some trace of the perpetrators, but by Monday night could not even confirm whether the attack had involved more than one person. On Tuesday, however, a telephone call to Buckley police station shed some light on the mystery. The caller, whom police have refused to name, alleged that the attack had been carried out by a spurned lover of the farmer’s wife, Mrs Pamela Madden.