What a Carve Up! (28 page)

He turned and looked at her. He seemed pleased.

‘Cor. Very provoking.’

I turned off the television. Kenneth and Shirley dwindled to a pinpoint of light and I went into the kitchen to pour myself another drink.

Every time I went in there, now, and saw my reflection in the window, it reminded me of the night she had first come round, asking for my name on her sponsorship form and having to repeat herself again and again to make me understand.

And here was the reflection again. But if you looked beyond it, what did you see? Nothing much. Dreamer though I was, I did not have the power of Cocteau’s Orpheus, who could pass through liquefying mirrors into unimagined worlds. No, I was more like Kenneth Connor – and always would be – forcing myself not to look in the mirror at a gorgeous, terrifying reality disclosing itself only a few inches behind my back.

Except that last night I had seen a new reflection: only briefly, because I had had to close my eyes to the beauty of it, and yet it had been so vivid, so real, that I looked for traces even now, scarcely believing that the window itself could have no memory.

…
Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir advantage. Trots fois …

Fiona had called round with a small fuchsia cutting which she proposed to add to the ever-expanding forest of greenery which now covered most of the available surfaces in my flat. She was wearing an old jumper and a pair of jeans and she didn’t want to stay for a drink or a chat: she wanted to get to bed, even though it was only about eight o’clock. It had been a long day at work, apparently, and her temperature was up again. In spite of this she seemed to be finding excuses for not leaving right away, making a point of checking up on the condition of all the plants even though I could sense that her mind wasn’t really on it. It felt as though there was something she wanted to say, something important. And then when we got into the kitchen, where the lights were bright, and I was asking her if she was sure she didn’t want a beer or a gin and tonic or a vodka and orange or something, she suddenly leaned back against the fridge and asked if I would do her a favour.

I said yes, of course I would.

She said: ‘Do you think you could feel my throat?’

I said: ‘Your throat?’

She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling and said: ‘Just touch it. Touch it and tell me what you think.’

If this was the beginning, I thought, if this was how the whole business was going to start up again, then it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not at all. Any sense of control over the situation had drained out of me: I felt as though I was plunging to earth, and I walked towards her with the tread of a sleepwalker, my fingertips outstretched until they came into contact with the pale skin at the base of her neck. From there I traced a slow line, sensing a film of fine, downy hair as I touched the soft ridges of her throat. Fiona remained perfectly still, and perfectly quiet.

‘Like that?’ I said.

‘Again. To the left.’

And this time I came upon it almost at once: a small obstruction, a ball of hardness about the size of an olive lodged well beneath her skin. I stroked it, then pinched it gently between forefinger and thumb.

‘Does that hurt?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t seem very interested.’

I took my hand away and stepped back, searching her blue-green eyes for clues. They stared back neutrally.

‘Have you always had it?’

‘No. I noticed it a few weeks ago.’

‘Is it growing?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘You should go back to the doctor.’

‘He didn’t think it was important.’

I had nothing else to say: just stood there, as if rooted to the spot. Fiona watched me for a moment and then folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, withdrawing into herself.

‘I really am tired,’ she said. ‘I must go.’

‘OK.’

But before she went I put my hand against her neck again and we slid into an embrace which was clumsy at first, but it didn’t matter, we persisted, and by the end we were clasping each other tightly: I clung to her silence and, closing my eyes to our reflection in the kitchen window, pictured a knot, made from the threads of her wordless fears and my famished longing, which would hold fast against the very worst that the future might throw at us.

Dorothy

To hug someone, and to be hugged, now and again, in return: this is important. George Brunwin had never been hugged by his wife, and it was many years since he had taken a mistress. None the less, he regularly enjoyed long, rapt, tender embraces, stolen, more often than not, in darkened corners of the farm which he had once been pleased to call his own. The latest willing object of his advances was a veal calf called Herbert.

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.

Dorothy’s empire had taken a long time to build. By the time of George’s trip to the Lake District, however, it was enjoying its heyday. For instance, figures for this period show that Easilay were now supplying the nation with more than 22 million eggs a week, while the annual turnover of Pluckalot was more than 55 million. That’s chickens, of course: not pounds.

∗

One afternoon when I was about twenty, Verity and I had a quarrel at my parents’ house, and when it was over I went out for a walk to calm myself down. She had been having fun, as usual, at the expense of my aspirations as a writer, and I was riddled with righteous self-pity as I stormed off down a lane in the direction of the wood which I used to explore on my Sunday walks as a child. No doubt there was a semi-conscious intention behind this. I wanted to revisit the site of those happy occasions (and, of course, the scene of my first literary endeavours) because I felt that it would somehow restore a sense of myself as a uniquely precious and sentient being, a storehouse of aesthetically charged memories. And so I headed for what used to be Mr Nuttall’s farm, which I hadn’t visited for more than ten years.

At first, when I came to the barbed wire fence and the unfamiliar buildings, I thought that my memory was playing tricks, and had brought me to the wrong place. I seemed to be looking at some sort of factory. All I could see was a row of long, utilitarian wooden sheds, each with a giant metal canister at the end, supported on poles and ranged oppressively against the cloudy afternoon sky. Puzzled, I wriggled my way beneath the fence and went to take a closer look. The sheds had no windows: but by climbing up the side of one of the canisters, I could peer in through a gap between the wooden boards.

For a few seconds my eyes met with nothing but blackness, and I was overwhelmed by an atmosphere of dusty humidity, the air heavy with the smell of ammonia. Then, gradually, some shapes began to emerge from the gloom. But what I saw is difficult to explain, because it made no sense, and continues to make no sense, even now. I felt as though I was looking at a scene in a film, sprung from the fantastic imagination of some surrealist director. I was looking at what I can only describe as a sea of chickens. I was looking down what seemed to be a long, wide, dark tunnel, the floor covered with chickens as far as the eye could see. God knows how many birds were in that shed – thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands. There was no movement at all: they were packed in too tightly to turn or to move around, and I was aware only of a great stillness. This was finally shattered, I don’t know how many minutes later, by the sound of a door opening and the appearance of a little rectangle of light at the far end of the tunnel. Two figures were framed in the doorway, and there was a sudden bustle and flapping of feathers.