But fear is rarely in context. In his father’s memories it tells how he lost his first wife. The loss had a lot to do with his leaving the bank. He wanted to be on the land and see things live, and grow. His second wife was much younger and he cared for her greatly.
His father, every day, apart from the few months when he broke his leg, would cross the cows across the small road that ran between two pastures. It was when he was an old man, about eighty. He was crossing the cows one day when a police car brought his second wife back. She had been driving through the village and had put the car into the corner of a parked delivery lorry. She did not brake until the lorry came through the windscreen and the bonnet had been opened like a tin. When they checked her eyes they found that she had lost peripheral vision and was living as if she was in a tunnel. They found the tumour on her pituitary gland months later and took her miles away to hospital to die, though they tried to operate. Incredibly, because she’d always seemed so delicate to everyone, she lived. A few months later his father contracted bowel cancer and died in hospital after only three days, which meant he must have been in pain for a very long time. Gareth knew that he had died because he couldn’t bear the thought of out-living the second woman that he loved.
the Car
The car just slumbers, like an old building, being taken over day by day more, by the brambles and grass where it’s parked, which seems like an impossible place for a car to be anyway, as if it was dropped from the sky there.
The car, which has been everything from a spaceship to a tank, to the head of a large animal, still gleams though. Light bouncing, the white sheen of its runners and trim, even off the dusty windows. Because of the way the light comes off it, it seems as if it is moving, sometimes.
For years there were stories as to how the car got there, that far into an empty field. Even with brand new tyres, pumped to bursting, it was a mystery how the car drove past the hedges, over the marshy land. Dylan never remembered the tyres any other way than they were when he played in the car — dry, torn shards of rubber, like the bark that peels off an old tree around the wheel hubs that were rusting, so they looked like they were crumbling to the exotic earth you imagine in a desert.
There was the story of the burglars that had kidnapped Gareth’s mother and driven off wildly pursued, until they were gunned down by his irate father with an old army rifle (leading to the story he’d been an undercover sniper, not a doodlebug spotter in the war).
There was the story of the flood — how the whole family had to climb into the car one day as the heavens came down, to escape a Biblical flood which left the car, as the waters receded, there in the field, and that’s why the ground was still marshy.
There was also the story of the balloon. Which is the one they liked best, because of the photo. Of how Gareth’s father, as he told them himself, had built an enormous balloon and tied it to the car to travel around the countryside, high above the landscape. Whenever this story was told, Gareth’s father would make a big thing of trying to find ‘the photograph’, looking here and there in drawers, until he unearthed an old postcard of a Zeppelin and, pointing to the carriage slung underneath, which was tiny in the photograph, would say: ‘there’s the car, you see’.
It never mattered to the children that the stories changed. They were equally true; they had their own theories anyway. The car was a playground.
Dylan hasn’t been to the car for a long while, but years from now he will remember it as he drives past a convoy of Morris Travellers on their way to a vintage rally somewhere. And like all memories, that sit below us, out of the glare of our awareness, in shadow, the memory of the car will rush up, devastatingly. The red leather interior, in places busted, spilling stuffing; the windscreen wipers, which you turned by hand; the plastic padded sun visors; its perforated roof — like a teabag; the hot smell of the car and the broken floor, the sticky feel of the seats in the sun; the windows, that slid open.
It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.
__
Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a second he sees the car as if it was new — the times they went for picnics in it — rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.
He wants to walk back to Kate, and find her, and tell her very simply he wants her. He wants to love her with the clean love his father had for his wife. He knows she will be angry about the calf, which she will know about by now; and that she does not like her body, the way it has grown at the moment. But they have been through this before. After Dylan, when her body had changed and the pride of carrying was gone. She hated her body then, but to him she had grown more wonderful. Her ability to produce bewildered him, even though all his life he had been used to the processes of breeding. The things she hated most he loved. To him, her stretch marks looked like velvet brushed the wrong way, or wind across the grass. He wants her to be happy and to know that he does not want her to be any other thing but what she is; and she should walk barefoot again.
They should forget about the cow, and the children for a moment, and take off their shoes and go into the warm grass of the garden. He hopes very much that she is not going to be again like she was after the miscarriages, when she cut her hair all short and cut herself and would not speak to him for months. That was very hard. Thinking of it now it scares him that he won’t have the strength this time to live through it with her. He worries about his ability to fight for things, when he is tired like this — from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things — his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievable small heroisms which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.
He pushes this thought out of his mind, this suddenly subversive want for a tragedy to bring them back together, and he thinks of her walking in the fresh grass. He knows she will refuse at first and make ridiculous excuses of responsibilities: ‘I have to do the washing’, ‘what about the cow?’, ‘you did not tell me of the calf’ but he will persuade her, in this lovely sunshine, will pick her up and carry her if he has to so she laughs and he will put her down in the warm green grass without her shoes.
__ the Other Calf
He crosses the yard. In the hay barn sparrows are collecting hayseed and bathing in the dust — like they do in the cow barn, so the dust lifts and catches the sunlight coming through the wooden slats, dancing up in gold spirals. The flies buzz and tick. With the day properly here now, the swallows are high in the sky. As he comes into the yard, the heat seeming to rise off it already, the lost flight of pigeons explode into the air and are gone, hard over the house.
Kate is in the first field. He sees her pacing quickly at the gate, her head down and he can tell she is speaking to herself, to the ground, her hair tied off her face; and she is walking too quickly. He sees the problem as she looks up and meets his eyes, the blood on her arm.
‘Where have you been?’ It bursts out. ‘The bloody cow has thrown its calf. I can’t get it. I can’t get it out.’ She keeps on talking, cursing at him and the cow but he is already going to the cow.