__ the Dandelion
He kneels down by the dog and strokes his hand through the thick hair. The way he lies looks unbearable. He looks at the vicious cut on the foot, which the vet has put a powder on to stop it weeping, and is horrified by the tumour which looks as if it still has life, will still grow on the dog. He can’t bear to touch it. He thinks of it as a great thing which latched onto the dog to draw it down. It is horrible for him that this thing has come from inside the dog. ‘There boy’ he says softly, and he sees Emmy in the sunlight by the doorway.
He thinks of her as a younger child, dancing on the grass, turning around and around in the sun with the dandelion clock she holds casting its seeds around her.
He hears her giggle all those years ago — sees the huge, massive quietness of the way she smiles.
She comes over to him and touches him with a cat’s instinct for paper.
‘He was very good,’ she says.
‘They put Curly down,’ he said to her. He’d just come into the room and stood for a very little while and then said very simply ‘they put Curly down.’ Then he stood a bit more and went out because he didn’t know what to do.
She sits on the side of the bed and accepts that the headache seems to have gone. The scene of her illness is around her. The half-drunk cup of chamomile. Aspirins and water. An abandoned magazine open loosely on the floor by the bed, the dark curtains drawn. The unnecessary hot water bottle kicked out in the afternoon heat. Now the pain is not there, she wonders briefly, lucidly, whether it was real. It’s hard to recall pain when we are not in it. We remember it vaguely, descriptively, by making it live almost, like a creature, giving it some deliberating quality.
They seem to have two ways of bringing her down, these headaches: the sharp point of today, which makes it as if she can only know the world through it, like looking out of a pin-hole; and a weight. A weight that is heavy like mud: that first brief and dull feel when you hit your head, but staying that way, not developing, just numb, heavy, until it seems to break off like a beach cliff and slide down one side of her body in a slow avalanche of pain. Then they just seem to go.
__ the End of the Memories
Gareth pours himself a glass of water and looks out of the window by the sink over the bird feeders and scattered hay and dust of the small space outside, before the lawn. Their water comes from the spring and comes cool even now.
In a few days Gareth will come to the end of the memories which end when his father got to the farm. He will wonder if his father knew for some time of the cancer in him, and so put things down, choosing what mattered the most. It will feel odd to him that the memories stop when they moved to the farm, because, really, it is where his own memory begins. The end will say: ‘so in 1951 I left the bank and went into farming. It was seen as a deeply foolish thing to do by many of my peers and today I’d have to admit perhaps there was a good deal of truth in that. But now, in my old days, I have no regrets about the choice — my wife and children would agree. And what else is there to life other than following the path which brings pleasure and interest to you, without counting the cost or loss, but delighting in those things which are desirable, and which bring you happiness.’ And Gareth will wish very much for this happiness.
‘These damn things. These damn niggles,’ he thinks.
__ the Dunnock
That year, in that space, that patio, every day a hedge sparrow came to eat the scraps of bread and fallen shreds of nuts and lard that came down from the two bird feeders hanging in the laburnum close by in the hedge. From one side it looked perfect; but on the other you could see a bubbling growth, like a collection of salt, that was on its beak and eye. It was disquieting. Tiny, but still nearly monstrous. It came when the other birds had gone. The next year, it would not be there.
__
He turns round with the cool glass in his hand. Kate is there.
‘Now you’re up.’ She is in her dressing gown, and is holding the wet flannel she had put to her head.
She says ‘I’m sorry’ and she says it in a way that doesn’t mean she’s sorry. It was like a question.
‘Now you’re up. Emmy had to deal with the dog.’
‘Yes, you told me.’ He’d thought she hadn’t registered.
She waits. ‘My headache.’ She still feels frail, like a glass valve.
‘Emmy had to deal with the dog,’ he says again.
She stood there red-faced and pale. He thought she looked feeble and it made him hate her right then, because he couldn’t believe it. How much I don’t want you just now, he’s thinking.
‘You should have called the vet in the morning yesterday.’
He holds his anger in, but it’s like the far off rattle of a loose wheel. ‘I was in the bank in the morning.’
‘Yes, your dream.’ She is cruel, the way she says dream.
‘— I didn’t find the cow.’ They are quiet. He stays by the window and drinks the glass of water. He was so angry that she stayed in bed while the vet killed the dog.
She starts to clear up, talking under her breath, getting a wind of argument up under her.
‘I’m not obsessed, Kate.’ She’d mentioned the land.
‘The dog should have died yesterday.’ Already they were distancing the dog by not using its name. ‘You should build on our land.’ He just looks at her.
‘It’s our land.’
‘Bill uses it.’
‘He’s simple, Gareth. He doesn’t do anything.’
‘My father gave him that land and I won’t take it from him.’
‘We could fit houses there.’
‘We could fit houses on the land.’
‘Land we can’t afford,’ so full of poison.
‘The bank will lend.’
‘And what if they won’t give us planning?’
Christ, I should just go from this, just go, he thinks. To let all my anger out would be like cool water. She sees the change in him, and changes tack, uses weakness.
‘I’m just worried,’ she says weakly. ‘I worry that it will go wrong for you. I care about you.’
__ the Fight
‘You use care like a weapon,’ he says. It’s like a greenhouse breaking.
__
After the fight they were quiet. ‘I have to take the bread crates back,’ he said, and he drove off in the van.
Chapter Ten
Gareth comes in through the front door and puts the torch on the shelf in the porch.
‘Bill brought the cow,’ she says, and they try to talk.
__
Bill had seen the cow and stopped the tractor and gone to help the cow. He’d always had a quiet way with animals. He saw she was heavy with calf and helped her down through the hedge where she was stuck on the corrugated iron. She came on her haunch down from the hedge with her big bag, streaked and marred with blood, clopping with her, like a balloon full of water. She hissed and puffed through her nose and even then, being a cow, she reached round and pulled a long tongue-full of grass from the hedge. Bill checked over the cow while she crunched the long grass.
When she had drunk long and hard from the buckets Bill brought from the water butt she got to her feet and she dashed a short way as the madness of sense came back to her. She shook and bucked but Bill spoke to her gently and soon she lowered her head to the grass and rubbed her nose on the short turf and started to follow his voice. Bill was clucking and speaking and the slow cow came with him. Soon the day would come to an end in a broad and brave sunset, like it was angry at its finish. The evening was beautiful with the glittering sea and the sun specially lighting some of the far hills.