Robbie's Wife (11 page)

“I never meant to make you unhappy.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You’re a beautiful woman. There are probably a lot of men who have fallen in love with you.”

“Rubbish, Jack Stone.”

“It’s not rubbish. You carry yourself as if you know you’re beautiful. There’s a grace about you that’s hard to describe. I’ve tried to write it down for days now, but it eludes me. I can’t find the words.”

“Maybe what you need to write down is that you had a quick fuck before breakfast. Maybe that’s what you see, Jack Stone.”

“Don’t make fun of it, Maggie. You know it’s not that.”

I wanted to cross the room and hold her but she rose up on her toes, leaned against the table with her arms crossed and shook her head until her hair tumbled around her shoulders, a gesture that was at once defiant and self-deprecating.

Suddenly Terry was in the kitchen and Maggie swept him into her arms. “How’s my lovely shaggy boy?”

“Mum, are they going to kill all our sheep?”

“No, love. If they come for them, we’ll hide them under the beds.”

“Don’t be silly, Mum. We haven’t got that many beds!”

“Then tomorrow we’ll have to go to Poole and buy a hundred beds. It’s as simple as that.”

Robbie didn’t come home for tea. Terry and I ate bangers and mash, much to his delight. Maggie ate nothing. She stood at the window looking out, and when we heard the Land Rover come into the farmyard she went to the door, opened it, and waited. Robbie came in, brushing past her, and it was obvious that he was drunk. He lurched to the table, sat down heavily, and shucked his wet coat off over the back of the chair into a heap on the floor.

He looked at me and at Terry, then gravely announced, “Withering and keen the winter comes. You know who said that, Jack?”

“No.”

“That was poor mad John Clare. Peasant poet. Poor fucking barely literate farm laborer who wrote poetry. Spent the best years of his life in the insane asylum. You know why, Jack?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Because he couldn’t feed his family and he left what little they had for them to eat and he went off into the fields to work and he only had a potato to eat and that went on for days and he saw things in the air and they thought he was mad and they committed him.”

He bent down, put his elbows on the table and propped his chin on them, looking directly at Terry. “Terry, me lad, round about the cauldron go, in the poison entrails throw.”

“That’s enough, Robbie,” Maggie said. “Go off to bed. You’ve had too much.”

“Not yet, Maggie my love. The tyrannous and bloody act is done. They dug a bloody big pit on Michael Stryker’s farm and they killed half his sheep and they threw them in and they burned them. Threw petrol on them and set fire to them. We must have a hunchback king on the throne.”

“That’s enough,” she said again. “Leave it alone.”

“Oh shit,” he said. “Have I offended anyone?”

Maggie took his arm, and he rose unsteadily. “How’s this one, Jack? Do you know where it comes from? Farewell to the little good you bear me. Farewell! A long farewell to all my greatness. The third day comes a frost, a killing frost! Damn, I forgot a line in there someplace.”

Maggie took his arm and guided him toward the hallway. He stumbled, fell to his knees and shouted, “And then he falls, as I do.”

The next morning when I came down to the kitchen Robbie was there, Terry was finishing his breakfast and Maggie was nowhere to be seen.

“This morning you’ll have a belting good English breakfast,” he said, “fixed by the Lord of the Manor himself.”

“Where’s Maggie?”

“She’s punishing me for my transgression last night. She’s lying about up there reading a bad novel so here I am at the cooker. Feed our guest proper, she says, but you’ve become sort of like family, Jack-o, and if this keeps up we’ll have to give you a weekly rate.”

“You don’t look any the worse for wear.”

“Oh, I was that pissed, was I? Well, the Stryker boys were pissed as a newt, I kept up with them all right and I never lost my wits. This morning I’m going over to Stryker’s and see what the army’s doing with the rest of his flock. The boys said it was a bloody awful sight yesterday.”

“All right if I come along?”

“No reason why not. More grist for the writer’s mill, Jack? You won’t see anything like this on a movie set, I’ll wager.”

He was busy at the Rayburn, the cast-iron cooker that not only served as the stove but also heated water and gave off enough radiance to warm the kitchen. He dished up a plate with fried eggs, several browned bangers, and two grilled tomato halves. I remembered the English breakfast I had been served my first morning in London. This was nothing like it.

“Are you eating?” I asked

“If I could get hold of some nose of turk and tartar’s lips and a cauldron to cook them in, maybe I could make a charm to settle my gut. Don’t let that spoil your appetite, though.”

“Can I go with you, dad?” Terry asked.

“No, it’s no place for boys. You stay here and keep Jack close by. I don’t want him wandering. Your mother will need some company when she comes down.”

I finished my breakfast, Robbie carefully washed the dishes and set them on the counter to dry. The kitchen was spotless by the time we put on wellies and stepped out into the farmyard. There was a high overcast and we set off in the same direction we had gone the morning before, climbing up Robbie’s field, crossing the lane, then swinging around the brow of the hill where the travelers were encamped. We said little to each other. Robbie moved quickly and I had to work at it to keep up. It reminded me that I was sixty and lived a sedentary life. Ahead of us there was now a plume of soft gray smoke that rose beyond the next field. It was punctuated by puffs of oily black that rose like smoke signals.

“They’re at it already,” Robbie said.

We came over the brow of the last hill and paused to look down on Michael Stryker’s farm. The house was large, brick and stone, and there were outbuildings that were solid and walls of stone that stretched into the fields. In one field there was a scattering of lorries, tractors, a skip loader, and a deep trench that had been carved in the center. Black smoke rose from the pit and we could see the small figures of men moving about, a flock of sheep huddled in one corner of the field, their faint cries drifting up.

“We’ll go down through the poplars,” Robbie said, pointing to a line of trees that descended toward the back of the farmhouse. “No point in announcing our arrival. The boys said the farm was shut off with army lads at the gate.”

We came down through the thin stand of trees until we were in the back garden, climbed over the low rock wall, and went around the house into the farmyard. A heavyset man was standing next to another beat-up Land Rover, a dog at his heels.

“Michael,” Robbie said.

The man turned.

“What the hell are you doing here, Robbie? They say my farm is infected and you’ll traipse it back to yours and they’ll murder your flock as well.”

“Terry and Jack have been all over your fields, Michael. They look for rabbits up along the rise. They’ve done all but kiss your sheep. We came across the poplar field. Nobody saw us.”

“Still, these arseholes don’t give a flying fuck whether or not your sheep are sick. Kill ‘em all, that’s what Colonel Blimp over there says.” He gestured toward a squat army vehicle parked nearby. “Look at ‘em!” He pointed toward the pit where soldiers were dressed in white suits covering their boots and heads, white masks across their mouths. Two of them were pulling a dead sheep toward a skip loader. Already a half dozen sheep carcasses were piled in the scoop.

“It’s not the goddam anthrax or the fucking black plague, is it now? You’d think they was from Mars in their fucking costumes.”

“They’re only doing what they’re told, Michael.”

“Well, whoever’s telling them has his head up his arse, that’s for sure.”

The door of the army vehicle opened and an officer in battle fatigues stepped out. He came toward us and Stryker said, “Who’s your friend, Robbie? The nazi coming at us will want to know what you’re doing here.”

“Jack Stone. He’s a Yank who’s been staying with us for a few days. He wanted to see the lamb cookers up close.”

The officer stopped in front of us. The legs of his fatigues were bloused above the boot tops with precision and his black boots shone like glass.

“Who are these two, Stryker? I don’t remember seeing them before.”

“Why don’t you ask them yourself, you pansy killer?”

The officer’s stoic expression did not change. “And who might you be?” he asked Robbie.

“I’m Michael’s nephew,” Robbie lied. “This is an American friend. We live in the village and we came out to see Michael’s troubles.”

“Well, Michael’s nephew, you made a serious mistake. This is a quarantined farm and you have no business here whether you’re related to Mr. Stryker or not. You’ll leave and at the farm gate you’ll find two of my men who will disinfect your boots and you’ll stay on the hard road when you walk back to the village and stay off the verge and you won’t take any shortcut through a field or you’ll deal with me again and I won’t be civil the next time.”

He stood watching us, then spoke again. “Now. This moment. Leave.” He turned to Stryker. “You knew better than this, Stryker.”

There was a whoosh! as the skip loader dropped the petrol-soaked carcasses into the pit. An orange flame filled with oily black streaks shot up, drowning out the bleating of sheep in the corner of the field.

“I’m not my nephew’s keeper, Colonel Poufter.”

“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr. Stryker.”

“What I keep in my head is none of your bloody damned business!” Stryker spat, missing the shiny boot by inches. “You need to get out of the weather before you get your boots wet.”

It was beginning to mist again. The sky dark, our faces lit with the orange glow of the burning carcasses; it could have been a scene out of a Brueghel painting, soldiers outlined against the fire, the skip loader poised to drop more sheep, flames boiling up and everywhere the stench of the burning flesh.

Stryker turned to Robbie. “Thanks for coming out, nephew. You be going back to the village now and tell them the nazis will be in later to loot and burn. Tell them to hide the women.”

The officer stood silently, arms folded across his chest and Robbie and I went to the front gate, pausing to step into a pan of green liquid while two young soldiers watched us. As we stepped out of the disinfectant, Robbie said, “There’s a man who wouldn’t be missed if somebody stove his head in.”

“The Colonel?”

He turned to the two soldiers. “If they gave you two real bullets, I’ll bet you’d slag that son of a bitch with the shiny boots. Right?”

“Sir?”

“Fucking puppets,” Robbie muttered.

We went back to the farm by way of the village, Robbie silent most of the way and he disappeared into the cow shed when we got to the farm, leaving me at the kitchen steps. Inside, Maggie was at the table with Terry. They were playing some sort of card game and Maggie looked up, asked, “What was it like?”

“Not good. They’re killing all of Stryker’s sheep. It looked like a Brueghel painting. The old Brueghel, the one who painted obscenities.”

Then I noticed Terry looking intently at me and I thought, the boy doesn’t need to know the details and I said, “They’re only doing their job. Apparently it can’t be helped.”

Maggie reached for another card, asked Terry, “Do you have any threes?”

“No,” he said, “go fish.”

“It’s all right Jack Stone,” she said. “You don’t need to sugar-coat it.”

After tea that evening, Robbie turned on the telly, listening to the clipped accents of the BBC news readers, cursing softly as they described how thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs were being destroyed, followed by a brief statement from the Prime Minister, who appeared on the doorstep of Ten Downing Street. Robbie’s voice rose in anger.

“Fucking Blair, fucking arsehole prick, you wouldn’t know a sick sheep if you were buggering it. Maggie, he’s right out of Monty Python, oh Christ, this parrot’s dead, you thick twit!”

Maggie asked him to turn it off but he ignored her and she and Terry went upstairs. I, too, went upstairs and sat at the little table in my room and tried to write out the afternoon’s events. There was an oily smell in the room and I knew some of the dense petrol smoke from the fire at Stryker’s and probably other farms as well had drifted over Sheepheaven Farm. Downstairs the voice from the television droned absently.

I slept fitfully and woke in darkness. When I looked at my watch it was three o’clock and I lay there until I could stand it no more, got up and dressed and sat at the laptop. The screenplay was easy to start. The fires at Stryker’s farm were so perfectly suited to film, the outlined men and the animal carcasses dropping into the pit, flames billowing up. I wrote that first scene as if I were copying something from a page, and I backed up, began another scene.

INT. MORNING, UPSTAIRS HALLWAY DOOR.

JACK’S POV: Maggie stands in the doorway holding two mugs of tea.

MAGGIE:

Time for a break, Jack Stone.

(she holds out a mug of tea)

After that the scene fell into place. It was like writing in a journal and the dialog came spilling out of my memory word for word. By four-thirty I had written a dozen pages. I looked back over them and it was like reliving those moments, Maggie stepping out of the tub, Robbie standing with me next to Michael Stryker, the British officer coming at us; and I could see other scenes: the Stryker boys in the pub; Mary, the barmaid; Jack the dog scrabbling over the backs of the sheep.

It was still dark out, just past five, and the house was quiet. Unable to contain my exhilaration, I went quietly downstairs, put on a pair of wellies in the back hallway, pulled on a mac that hung on the hook with the others, and slipped out the kitchen door into the farmyard. It was damp and the air smelled of manure and straw. I could dimly see the shed and could hear the hoofs of the cow shifting inside. I crossed the farmyard in near blackness. Behind the shed was a pile of old timber and I felt in the dark, trying to find something I could use as a walking stick. I found a stick that would serve and went along the wall to the gate. I started up the slope in the direction that Robbie and I had gone when we went to the Stryker Farm, and was glad that I had the stick, using it to keep my balance on the slick grass. It had been close-cropped by the sheep, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could see the sheep clumped together off to my right, occasionally bleating at me as I climbed.