The Beautiful Indifference (2 page)

And there was her mam’s lot, the foreign cousins who came to the driving trials from Ireland, Scotland or Man, and brought with them piebald cobs, fiddles, rumours about filched electronics, litter and unfettled debts. The town banged on and on about their arrival each year, half of it discrimination, half superstition from a century before. How they were rainmakers and crop-ruiners. How they had curses or the Evil Eye. How they crossed the Border at night to the peal of the Bowness bells, said to ring out from their wath grave in the Solway when robbers were around, blah blah. Manda stepped into their loud circles and blagged cigarettes and gossiped and got invited to their hakes. She put up with nobody saying within earshot they were dirty potters and pikes.

No grand treaty was needed for her to know me. There came a day when I walked with her and a small crowd downtown for a gravy butty at dinnertime. I was standing near them in the cloakroom waiting for Rebecca to meet me, all of us putting on our coats and ratching in our purses for coins. Her face was dark inside the lum-pool of her hood, and she said, Come along on with us if you like, Kathleen.

What have you asked her for? one of the others rasped.

Because I’m fed up with your ugly mugs, Manda replied.

She and I walked together with linked arms from the Agricultural Hotel to the bottom of Little Dockray. Who isn’t looking at us, I thought, and my heart was going at two-time.

The next month I was one room away while she got laid by a friend of the family – a jockey, who was married with kids. She reported back that he had a prick the size of Scafell and his come had run down her leg. Six weeks after that I sat with her in the clinic while she took two pills for her abortion, and I held her shoulders while she was sick. She said the nurse had told her not to look when she went to the toilet, but she had looked down into the bucket by her feet. It wasn’t like period clots, just a ball of tubes. She said no bloody way was her mam ever to hear of it because her mam would’ve wanted the babby kept.

High Setterah was not the house of a rag-and-bone family. The grime of cart-claimed money had been swept back a generation by the Slessors branching out into carpets, property, equestrian prowess. Their travellers’ heritage was easily remembered in a town which never forgot former status, but they’d grafted a fortune which made them untouchable by recession, competition, the bitter regional snobbery. The building was low and sprawling. It was almost a mansion except that it looked more like a Yankee ranch, with wooden interiors and a veranda. It had no business being built in Cumbria, one spit off the National Park boundary, and must have been forced past the council planners in the late seventies when the family was in its ascendancy, for it duffed all the local planning laws. There were paddocks front and back of the house for the horses, and slated stables off one wing of the property. Occasionally you could smell the beefy stench of Wildriggs abattoir wafting over from the industrial estate.

Inside there were too many bathrooms to count – the beautiful indifference I was always scared I’d go in a wrong door – and pungent utility rooms where the Dobermann and the mastiff were kept. There was a sauna and a games room. Everywhere were hung ornately framed pictures of champion breeds, red ribbons indicating the annual royal downfall in the territory, brass reminders of the family sport. There was a long drive up to the house from the Kemplay roundabout and all alongside it were those glistening, hardy ponies, made stout by the gradient of fells, made tame at the Wall by the Romans, and now made fast by the leading reins of the Slessors.

Everybody thought it was Manda’s dad who was the horse expert. And with his mule-neck and muscles straining as he bullied them across the beck at Appleby fair, they had no reason not to think it. Geordie was a master of saddlery. He wasn’t well respected by the rest of the nation’s breeders, the manor-house owners and Range Rover drivers, and that ritted him deeply. But they still came to him for advice and opinion on their steeds; they still bought his stock. He was always interviewed by the regional news stations after the trophies were won, his yellow Rolls-Royce parked prominently behind him. And though he had no right by birth or blood ever to own a car like that, he commanded the cameras in its direction, like it was the golden spoils of a chor shown off by a thief who knew cock to collar he would never get caught.

But it was Vivian Slessor I saw bringing stubborn geldings into the stables with brobs of fennel, in the old way of northern handlers. Her crop was seldom used when she rode. Though her racing and rutting knowledge was the lesser professionally, as a horse-handler she was somehow greater than Geordie – for her intimacy and charm, her hands working the tender spots behind the creatures’ ears to quieten them. Geordie looked to her as his official bonesetter when a horse was damaged, rather than ringing the vet and being billed. He stood back as she bound up a foreleg with sorrel. One windy, mizzling day in April, Vivian Slessor first got me up into the saddle – on a gorgeous chestnut mare too big and blustered for someone of my size and inexperience. She softly talked and tutted as she led us round the paddock in the gale, and I wasn’t sure if she was scolding the horse for cross-stepping or scolding me for bad posture. At the gap-stead of the field she unclipped the horse’s rein.

Gan on, she said, and slapped its rump. Heels down, Kathleen.

She was the one who fed the dogs at night and cured illness in the beings under her care. She was like that with her children too. She tended to them without complaint, with a kind of haughty devotion. The old man shouted at the hooligan lads to fucking grit down when they wrestled too near his showcase. He beat them for their cheek and backchat. But Vivian let them tussle and scrap for as long as it took them to thrash it out, until their raised blood got settled. She cleared up after them, wadded lint for the busted noses, collected the smashed plates strewn about the dining-room floor. From time to time she stood in court, in her tweed tack-suits and silk scarves, defending an accused son with that pure stare of hers. She had a gannan pride that told the judge he could never undo what she had instilled in her brood, that all the laws of the town, the curfews and fines, the borstal and jail time, mattered not.

But when she did light out towards her own in anger she damaged them badly. Not a one of them ever fought back the way the boys challenged Geordie for supremacy, on and off, if the chance came to them. She could turn loose a blue cruelty, and perhaps they all realised she was capable any day of murder. If she backed up her husband, an argument was immediately lost.

Get out and sarra them hosses, he might say to Aaron or Rob, lazy with whisky, from his armchair in the corner.

The lad in question would chunter on about watching the footie, hating Geordie’s cocksure orders. Then Vivian Slessor would brush a hand lightly down the back of her son’s head and he’d rise up and put on his boots and go to the stables. It was a household of managed tension, and she was at its core. Vivian had a liking for modern things; kitchen appliances, music centres, cars; the sauna was built because she wanted scorching coals without having to go to a public gym. But she was a superstitious woman. Once I saw her take a set of metal tongs from the hearth and beat her eldest across his back for fumbling with her glass Luck. There was some old almanac to her world I didn’t understand – belief in plant lore, ritual and sign, maybe some part of it Romany. Come All Hallows she hung dobby stones in the byres to keep the animals safe. She’d put up the roof of her convertible in clear blue skies if there’d been a kessen moon the night before. And she was careful where she’d allow the horse trailers to be parked in a town for the common ridings – never on a gallows hill, which was forbidden, though the horses were allowed to graze there.

I was fascinated to see the parents together. My mother had died when I was eight and my dad never had another woman in his life, so it was an unusual thing, adult intimacy. There was something out of balance in the cottage where I lived, something steeply slanted. My dad had more heaviness to him than in just his arms and legs and the big belly where he rested his glass after dinner. But he was light compared to my mother’s leftovers; her wardrobe of sour-smelling clothes, the elasticated jam-jars and dusty talcums. When I lay in bed at night and heard him grizzling I could feel the building pitch, trying to upend itself, and I’d brace my feet against the bottom of the bed.

The Slessors were even-weighted and indestructible. They’d paired by feral instinct, like wolves among us. If either of them stepped outside the marriage to a different bed – and there were those who gossiped about Geordie’s liking for young stable hands, his chance bairns – then it did not threaten the union. They had produced between them three boys and a girl, all fit, all feisty. And there was a sense there might have been more, they had it in them still, he at almost seventy, she at almost fifty. The children bound them, but the two had bindings before, and bindings after. They belonged in the pairing. Even when you saw them singly in the house or around town you knew there must be another half, a mate. Neither went into it for money, for when they began courting there was none. Vivian had owned one dress that would serve for the wedding. All Geordie had possessed were a few tons of salvaged pipe and lead shingle.

For all his anger and brash, I never saw him raise a hand to his wife. He could have tried to brutalise her, the way he rode roughshod over everything else in life until it obeyed or broke. But he adored her, this rectifying woman. And he would, in any case, have met his match. He knew it. And, moreover, she knew it. If the man feared anything, it was his wife’s genes, her cuntish atoms. I used to watch as she diced up chicken – the knife would slice and slice, clear of her fingertips, but she’d be watching him as he poured his Scotch. Though he’d likely never been near a history book in his life, it was as if Geordie Slessor knew the old region’s legacy of women riding alongside men up to the Border, their babies twined across their backs in sacking. She would have taken those fists into her soft flesh, and even worn his black temper on her face in public for a while. Then in the night she would have slit him wide open, balls to bellybutton. She would’ve stemmed the blood with secret plant medicine, a draught to make the red come slower, and given him the guttings of his prize colt in exchange for his own liver. Or she’d have granted him something from her domestic realm of keeping the big house; a dinner of ground glass, meat frozen and thawed repeatedly, bannock of foxglove.

She was a handsome woman. Her brow was cross-hatched, but lively. Years before she’d had gorgeous tumbling locks, brown and gleaming in their wedding photographs. Perhaps it had thinned or greyed, for she now wore the unwilling bob of a woman proud for most of her life of her hair’s beauty, and she’d still sweep it back, invisibly, off her shoulders. Manda got her full chest from her mam. Vivian was voluptuous, but bone-sculpted at her collar and her jaw. Men opened doors for her. And it was obvious when Geordie wanted her, for he made no game of it, he did not care who witnessed his desire. He’d come at her and grasp her waist. He might even have lifted up her skirts were she not to take it upon herself at these moments to move them both into a private space. Even then their sounds could be heard. After they were done they’d come back into the room easily, unashamed. Everyone knew when they were at it – High Setterah took on a different atmosphere. The smell of the horse sweat grew gamier. The boys became edgy and would take to drinking or baiting the dogs. Manda turned up the stereo.

But it was their tender moments that intrigued me most, the brisk expressions of what I took to be love, that would have been mistaken for ordinary occurrences or arguments by anyone not watching them as hard as I watched. Him pulling a spelk out of her hand, pinning her to the table with an elbow and twisting her arm behind her so she couldn’t pull away while he doctored her. Him shouting at her from the car window for walking behind a reversing trailer.

Blind bloody bint! he spluttered. But it was panic in his voice, not anger.

And I saw her take out her husband’s cock and hold it when he came home so drunk from the rugby club that he started to piss himself in the porch of High Setterah.

Of the two of them I preferred her, and this surprised me because women could make me uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to talk to them about. But I would have eaten out of her hand without much fuss. Geordie, in a good mood, would flirt with me, and that I could take as acceptance of a kind, mortifying though it was.

Look at the lass, she’s full up, is she not, he’d say, when Manda and I dressed to go out on a Friday night. Vivian often said nothing when I was in the room, but she’d sing songs with my name in.

Maybe I’ll go down and see Kathleen,

A swallow comes and tells me of her dreams.

Soon I’m gonna see my sweet Kathleen.

Mostly when we went out it was around town, between the pubs, wherever Manda thought she might catch sight of a lad she was interested in. Sometimes, if one of her brothers didn’t mind us coming with him on a delivery or to a gig, we went to the city of Carlisle. It was always a mad trip up, with stupid steering and breakneck overtaking, because the lads loved speed. They loved it on horseback, motorbikes, skis; any vehicle they could make accelerate to flatten their brains against their skulls.

There were two main roads from town – the old toll road, and the Roman, which was nearly disused and cut past the wither of Lazonby Fell. And there was the M6. It was a deserted piece of motorway – the last run before Scotland, so it felt like everything was petering out.

I’d sit rammed up against the window, my cheek pressed coldly against it, holding the seatbelt tight across my chest. Manda fought for control of the radio dials while one of her brothers drove. Usually it was Aaron, who would shoot the cambers as if he was on a private racetrack. We crossed that hinterland as people still do now, and they always have done, and they likely always will, regardless of police traps and cameras – moving flat out, at reckless speeds, as if being pursued.