She’d said, when he finally told her all this, that she wanted to know it all. How it was done. How it had felt. So now she knew.
He laid the man down beside the hole in the earth and rolled him into it. The man fell face down,
and he felt bad about that, about the man’s face being in the mud. He went back to the place on the road and picked up the pieces of glass. He threw them down on to the man’s back, and then he took the shovel and began to pile the earth back into the hole.
He threw soil over the man until he was gone, until the soil pressed down on him so that he was no longer a man or a body or a victim or anything. Just an absence, hidden under the ground. It was only then that he looked up at the sky, dark and silent over him, the moon hidden by a cloud. He drove past her house in March again, and then back to his father’s house. He put the car-keys away in the kitchen drawer, and the shovel in the barn, and he stood in the shower until the hot-water tank had emptied and he was left standing beneath a trickle of water as cold as stone.
So now she knew.
They were married before either of them had the chance to go to university: his father retired early, after a heart attack, and he had to take over the farm. It only made sense for Joanna to move in and help. George had been there when his father collapsed: he’d heard the dogs barking at the tractor in the yard, and gone outside to see his father clutching at his chest and turning pale. He’d dragged him from the cab into the mud and begun hammering on his chest. I didn’t want to lose him to the land as well. He’d beaten his father’s heart with his fist, and forced air into his lungs, and called out for help. She was there with him. She rang the ambulance, and watched him save his father’s life, and decided she would marry him. She can remember very clearly, standing there and deciding that. And he still thinks he was the one who asked her.
When she remembers it now, it’s always from a height, as if she can see it the way the sky saw it: George kneeling over his father in the mud of the yard, shouting at him to hold on, the dogs circling and barking.
And now this giant of a man sits in an armchair clutching a hot-water bottle and watching the sky change colour outside. He refuses to watch television, listening instead to the radio while he keeps watch on the land and the sky. He claims to take no interest in the running of the farm: he signed everything over to them almost immediately, and has rarely offered an opinion. But she knows that he watches. She has seen him looking at a newly ploughed field from the upstairs window, or running a hand along a piece of machinery in the yard, or lingering by the kitchen table while she does the accounts. She has seen the faint smiles and nods which indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George has noticed; she suspects that he has not. Sometimes, when George takes his father his evening meal, his father will talk about something he’s heard on the radio: a concert recording, a weather forecast, a news report. Often they’ll just sit, and George will listen to his father’s short creaking breaths, thankful to have him there still. She doesn’t sit with them at these times. She reads, or deals with paperwork, or goes back to her writing, waiting for him to reassure himself that his father is well.
They’ve never had children, and this has
They’ve never talked about it, and yet
In this way, their lives together had settled into something like a routine. He was up first, feeding the dogs, bringing her a cup of tea, eating his breakfast and leaving his dishes on the table. She dressed, and ate her breakfast, and cleared the table, and waited until she heard the radio in his father’s bedroom before going to help him dress.
Caring for his father had taken up more and more of their time over the years. His health was poor enough to justify moving him into a nursing home. There was one over in March; she had a friend whose mother was there, and had heard good reports. But it was obvious that his father would refuse to go. And she had been unable to find a way of bringing it up with George. There were so many things she was unable to bring up with him. Sometimes it felt as though they only related to each other through talking about work, about the business. As business partners, they have been close, communicative, collaborative. All those good words.
In the mornings and the afternoons, they worked in the fields. That wasn’t really true. It might have been true once, in the very early days, when they’d had to work hard all the hours of daylight to try and pull the business out of the hole his father had dug it into. There’d been no money to employ extra labour, and they’d had to do everything themselves. There was less land then, but it was still a struggle and they were always exhausted by the time they found their way to bed.
But things had changed, gradually. They’d bought more land, secured more grants and loans. Diversified. And almost without noticing, they’d stopped being farmers and become managers. Most of the field-work was done by labourers hired by sub-contractors, people they never spoke to. George still liked to do some of the work himself – the ploughing, the ditch-digging, the heavy machine-based jobs – but there was no real need. For the most part they spent their days on the phone, or filling out forms, buying supplies, dealing with inspectors, negotiating with the water authorities. Discussions about drainage and flood defences seemed to take more and more of her time now. The floods seemed to be coming more often, covering more land, taking longer to drain. Maybe we should switch to rice, George had started saying, and she wasn’t sure whether or not this was a joke.
All of which meant that when he said he wanted to tell her something, and that they should take the time to walk out along the path beside the canal after lunch, it was no real interruption to the running of the farm. Down in the few fields which weren’t yet flooded, the workers carried on, their backs bent low, and she was able to stop him and put her hand to his chest and ask what it was he wanted to say.
In the evenings he often spent time in the barn, fixing things. She would spend that time walking backwards and forwards from the house to the barn, offering to help, and having that help warmly but firmly rejected. He was unable to admit, even now, that she was better than he was at mechanical jobs: repair, maintenance, improvised alteration and the like. Her father had been a mechanic. It was natural that she would have an ability in that area. But still, he found it difficult to accept.
At the same time, he found it difficult to have sufficient patience with, or tolerance of, the writing she did. She had only ever called it writing: he was the one who used the word ‘poems’. But whenever he said it – ‘poems’ – it was with an affected air, as if the pretension was hers. So, for example, he might come crashing in from the barn late one afternoon, with his boots on, and say Would you just leave your bloody poems alone for one minute and help me get the seed-drill loaded up? There were five other places he could have put the bloody in that sentence, but he chose to put it there, next to ‘poems’. This is an example, she would tell him, if he was interested, of what placement could do.
Once, he says, he saw a man metal-detecting in that field. He was driving past and saw a car parked on the verge, a faint line of footprints leading out across the soil. The light was clear and strong, and the man in the field was no more than a silhouette. He sat in his car, watching. Twice he saw the man stoop to the ground and dig with a small shovel. Twice he saw him stand and kick the earth back into place, and continue his steady sweeping with the metal detector. He wanted to go and tell him to stop, but there was no good reason for doing so. It wasn’t his land. The man would surely have asked permission, and anyway he was doing no damage so soon after harvest.
He wondered what the man thought he was going to find, he says. He had a sudden feeling of inevitability; that this would be the moment when the body was found, the moment when everything could be made right. He thought about going to fetch Joanna, so she could be there to see it as well.
He’d been living like this for years, it would seem, lurching between a trembling silence and a barely withheld confessional urge. When he thought about it later, he realised there was no reason why a man with a metal detector should find a body. But that kind of logical thought seemed to crumble in the face of these moments.
He got out of the car, and waited. The man in the field looked up at George, and George looked down at him. Ready. The man packed his tools into a bag and began hurrying back to his car, stumbling slightly across the low stubble.
Did you find anything? George asked.
No, the man said, nothing. And he got in his car and drove away.
This is the way it happens, in the end. This is the way he describes it, when he tells her:
He was driving, he said. There were bright lights, and men in white overalls standing in the water. There were police officers along the embankment and a white tent on the verge. There were police vans in the road. A policeman was directing the traffic through from either direction. The men in white overalls were doing something with poles and tape. He could hardly breathe, he said. There was something like a rushing sound in his ears.
The policeman waved at him to stop, and walked over to the car, and asked George to wind the window down. He reminded George that they were at school together, and George didn’t know what to say. A funny do this, isn’t it, the policeman said. George thought the policeman was probably waiting for him to ask what had happened but he didn’t say anything. The policeman told him anyway: they’d found a body in the water. The farmer had seen it. They were assuming it had been buried for years, and that the flood water must have disturbed the soil and brought it out. There wasn’t much left of it now. The policeman said he couldn’t imagine they’d find out who it was, and then he asked after the family and said he should let George get on. George said that his wife and his father were both fine and drove slowly into the fog.
Later, he drove into the yard and the dogs came barking out to meet him. He sat in the car for a moment, too weak to open the door. Joanna could see him from the kitchen window. She stood and watched. She wondered what was wrong. The lights of the house were clear and warm, spilling into the foggy night. He go
t out of the car and walked to the house, pushing the dogs away, and she came to meet him in the hallway. He looked at her and said that they needed to talk. She said it would have to wait until she’d finished some more work, and he said there was always something else to do, some other reason to wait and to not talk. He said they couldn’t go on like this, it had gone on for too long, they were young when it happened, they were older now, time had passed, they needed to bring things out into the open and deal with the consequences and stop trying to hide what it was doing to them both. She looked at him. It was the most she had heard him say for a long time. It didn’t fit. All right, she said. Fine. Bring the dogs.
He served the meal she had prepared for his father and took it through to him.
They found a body in the field down the road, his father said.