Contrary to local rumour, however, George had never had sex with an animal.
Although he probably never rationalized it to himself, it was one of his more deeply rooted beliefs that the life unvisited by physical affection was scarcely worth living. His mother had been a great one for touching, cuddling, swaddling and coddling; for ruffling of hair, patting of bottoms and dandling on the knee. Even his father had not been averse to the occasional firm handshake or manly embrace. George had grown up in the assumption that these delightful collisions, these outbursts of spontaneous, loose-limbed intimacy were the very stuff of loving relationships. Furthermore, the rhythm of life on his father’s farm was dictated, to a large extent, by the reproductive cycles of the animals, and George had proved perhaps more than usually sensitive to these, for he developed a healthy sexual appetite at an early age. In the light of which, he could hardly have found a less suitable partner (not that he was ever given much choice in the matter) than Dorothy Winshaw, to whom he was married in the spring of 1962.
They had spent their honeymoon at a hotel in the Lake District, with a view over Derwent Water: and it was in this same hotel, twenty years later, that George found himself drinking, alone, one clammy evening in June. Clouded as it was by alcohol, his mind still carried an unpleasantly vivid memory of their wedding night. While she had not exactly fought him off, Dorothy’s stolid passivity had itself been resistance enough, and there was also – to add to the humiliation – a discernibly bored and mocking aspect to it. Despite all that George could provide in the way of foreplay, his questioning fingertips had met with nothing but tight dryness. To have proceeded further in these circumstances would have been to commit rape (for which he hadn’t the physical strength, apart from anything else). Three or four more attempts had followed, over the ensuing weeks, and after that the subject – like George’s hopes – was never raised again. Looking back on those days now, through his alcoholic fog, he found it absurd, laughable, that he should ever have expected the marriage to be consummated. There had been, between Dorothy and himself, an absolute physical incompatibility. Sexual union between them would have been as impossible as it had recently become for the misshapen turkeys which his wife was now obliged to propagate through artificial insemination: their meat-yielding breasts so horribly enlarged through years of chemical injections and selective breeding that their sex organs could not even make contact.
Why did George not hate his wife? Was it because she had enriched him (financially) beyond his wildest expectations? Did he even take a certain reluctant pride in the fact that she had built up what used to be a quiet, old-fashioned, modestly run family farm into one of the biggest agrichemical empires in the country? Or had the hate merely been washed away, over the years, by the tides of whisky to which he surrendered daily and with fewer and fewer pretensions to secrecy? He and Dorothy now lived very separate lives, at any rate. Every working day she would drive into town, where a bleak scrub of land in one of the outermost suburbs was dominated by a huge four-storey complex of offices and laboratories: the world headquarters of Brunwin Holdings PLC. George himself had not set foot there for more than fifteen years. With no head for business, no understanding of science and nothing but disdain for the boys’ game of stockmarket snakes and ladders which seemed to preoccupy most of the directors, he chose to retreat, instead, into a fantasy version of happier times. There was a small redbricked cowshed which had somehow managed to survive Dorothy’s expansion programme (she had demolished most of the original buildings and replaced them with row upon row of massive broiler-sheds and controlled environment houses in dull grey steel), and it was here that he spent most of every day, his only companions being his whisky bottle and whichever of the sicker, more enfeebled farm animals he had managed to rescue from their confinement in the hope of restoring them to health: chickens, for instance, whose legs could no longer support their over-developed bodies, or cattle with dipped backs and distorted hips from carelessly prescribed growth hormones. For a long time, the existence of this gloomy haven was unknown to Dorothy, who could rarely be bothered to inspect her own premises: but when, by chance, it was finally discovered, she could not conceal her furious contempt for her husband’s sentimentality.
‘His leg was broken,’ said George, blocking the doorway of the cowshed while Herbert shrank in a corner. ‘I couldn’t bear to see him loaded on to a lorry with the others.’
‘I’ll break your bloody legs if you don’t leave my stock alone,’ shouted Dorothy. ‘I could report you to the bloody police for what I caught you doing.’
‘I was petting him, that’s all.’
‘God Almighty! And have you done what I asked you to do: have you spoken to the cook about dinner on Friday night?’
He stared back blankly. ‘What dinner on Friday night?’
‘The dinner we’re giving for Thomas and Henry and the people from Nutrilite.’ Dorothy habitually carried a riding crop: she now whacked it across her own thighs in exasperation. ‘You don’t even remember, do you? You can’t remember a bloody thing about anything. You’re just a useless, dried-out, washed-up old piss artist. God Almighty!’
She stormed off to the farmhouse; and all at once, as he watched her receding figure, George felt abruptly, overwhelmingly sober.
He asked himself a sudden question: Why did I marry this woman ?
Then he went to the Lake District to think it through.
∗
He had started drinking to combat the loneliness. Not the loneliness he had sometimes felt when he ran the farm by himself, and would often spend whole days in the proud, kingly solitude of the moors, with only sheep and cattle for company. This was the loneliness, rather, of spartan hotel rooms in central London: late in the evening, with the prospect of a sleepless night ahead, and nothing better to occupy the mind than a Gideon bible and the latest issue of Poultry News. George spent many nights like this, shortly after his marriage to Dorothy, because she had persuaded him that it was in his interest to join the council of the National Farmers’ Union. He served on it for little more than a year, and discovered in the process that he had no talent for lobbying or committee work, and that he had nothing in common with the other members, none of whom shared his enthusiasm for the day-to-day running of farms. (He got the impression that most of them had joined the council to get away from it.) And when he gave up this position and Dorothy herself took his place, she made it clear that she didn’t trust him, by this stage, to look after the farm in her absence. Without bothering to consult her husband she advertised for a full-time manager, and George found that he had effectively been made redundant.
Meanwhile, Dorothy got to work. Taking full advantage of her cousin Henry’s parliamentary contacts (on both sides of the House), she soon became a practised winer and diner of all the most influential figures from the Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture. At exclusive restaurants and lavish dinner parties, she would convince civil servants and MPs of the necessity for ever more extravagant subsidies being paid out to farmers who wished to convert to the new intensive methods: it was through her efforts (and the efforts of others like her) that the government began to step up its provision of grants and tax allowances to help with the laying down of concrete, the putting up of buildings, and the purchase of fittings and equipment. Smaller farmers who resisted these incentives soon found themselves unable to match the prices being offered to the consumer by their highly subsidized competitors.
And as soon as they heard the news that large amounts of public money were being channelled into intensive farming, the financial institutions began to move in. Dorothy had a head start on her rivals in this respect, since Thomas Winshaw was by now well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful members of the banking establishment. When he learned of the direction government policy was taking, he began to invest heavily in agricultural land, and was more than happy to offer Dorothy substantial loans – with land as security – for her various expansion programmes (the size of the debt obliging her, every year, to force higher and higher yields out of her soil and stock). From the outset, her aim was to guarantee profits by controlling every stage of production. She began by buying up all the smaller farms in the county and putting them under contract. Then, once she had established her stranglehold on most of the egg, chicken, bacon and vegetable supplies to the North East of England, she started to expand her sphere of operations. A series of specialist divisions was set up: Easilay Eggs (slogan: ‘The Yolk’s on Us, Folks!’), Porkers, the bacon curers (‘If It’s Porker, It Must Be a Corker’), Green Shoots vegetable products (‘Are you getting enough, Missus?’) and Pluckalot Chickens (‘They Keep on Cluckin’ and We Keep on Pluckin’!’). The Brunwin insignia was reserved for what was, in terms of profits, the jewel in the corporate crown: the frozen dinner and instant pudding division, for which the slogan was simply ‘They’re Brunwin Fantastic!’ Each of these companies was served by hundreds of contracted farmers up and down the country, whose task – if they were to stand any chance of making a livelihood – was to use every growth-inducing antibiotic and every yield-increasing pesticide known to man in order to meet the ever more stringent production quotas laid down by Dorothy from her head office at Brunwin Holdings. These farmers were also obliged to place all their orders for feed with a company called Nutrilite (a division of Brunwin Holdings) and to supplement it with chemical additives obtained from another company called Kemmilite (a division of Brunwin Holdings). In this way, internal costs were kept down to an absolute minimum.