Second Hand Jane (12 page)

Owen’s scowl
deepened. “None, actually. I’m a pig farmer.”

Crap! She’d got
it wrong again. She was silent for a moment—she’d never actually
met a pig farmer before. It wasn’t a glamorous sounding profession
but then, hey, she liked a nice bit of bacon as much as the next
girl. She was saved from having to make any further embarrassing
small talk by Owen announcing, “We’re here.”

He swung the
jeep to the right and as it veered round into an entranceway, she
hit her shoulder against the door.

“Sorry. I’m not
used to carrying a passenger.”

The jeep bumped
its way down a long gravel driveway, at the bottom of which sat a
scene straight from the pages of a Beatrix Potter book.

“Welcome to
Glenariff Farm,” Owen grunted, wrenching the handbrake up and
sending her lurching forward.

Jess sat
momentarily speechless as she gazed at the stone, lime-washed
cottage, complete with Jemima Puddleduck and her offspring swimming
contentedly in a pond out the front of it. “It’s like something out
of a picture book! This is where you live?” It definitely did not
fit with the hardened exterior of the man she was sitting next to.
She’d envisaged him in a tumbledown shack, eating only wild foods
he’d caught or foraged for himself.

In a burst of
chattiness, he informed her, “Aye, the farm’s been in our family
for four generations but I renovated it fully before I moved back
in. When I was a lad, my room could have been used for storing
meat. I used to sleep with a woolly hat on.”

Jess couldn’t
imagine Owen as anything other than the somewhat moody man he
obviously had grown into and try as she might, she could not
conjure up an image of the little boy he’d once been with a beanie
on his head at bedtime. Following him up the path to the front
door, she paused to say hello to Jemima and received a hiss in
return. It seemed she was not a duck after all but rather a goose.
She nearly trod on Owen’s heels in her hurry to get inside. She’d
once seen a show on when animals attack featuring a rabid goose and
she had no intention of being pecked to death in the wilds of
County Down.

Once the door
was safely shut behind them, she took a moment to survey her
surrounds. The front door led straight into the living room, where
the ceiling was held up by low timber beams bowed with the weight
of a century or so past. She watched Owen duck his head, obviously
an automatic reaction, as he walked through to the open door at the
far end of the room. A fireplace full of kindling waiting to be
lit, above which a heavy timber mantel housed a clustered group of
framed photos, took centre stage in the room. Jess would have liked
to have been a nosy rosy but she resisted the urge to wander over
for a closer look at the pictures and instead soaked up the
ambience of the rest of the room. The overall feeling it gave off
was masculine, emphasised by the worn but inviting leather couch
and its matching armchair. A Persian rug covered the bare timber
boards, giving the room a sense of quality and cosiness. He was
obviously a man of understated but good taste.

“You must be
parched. I’ll put the kettle on.”

Jess trailed
behind him through to the farmhouse kitchen. Oh wow! she thought,
her eyes widening as she entered the light, airy room because
there, in pride of place, warming the room, stood a majestic old
Aga. It was the oven of her dreams.

Owen caught her
admiring gaze and shrugged. “Me Ma had her put in way back when she
and Da were first married. She always insisted she couldn’t cook on
anything else. Have a seat.” He gestured awkwardly to the chunky
pine table upon which she could see the outline of what she hoped
was a dish of food covered by a cloth—she was starving. She
reckoned all that bouncing around on the bus must have been the
equivalent of at least an hour at the gym.

Setting her
laptop down on the table’s scrubbed wooden surface, she pulled a
chair out and sat down. If she closed her eyes for a moment, she
knew she’d conjure up images of all the hearty meals this table had
played host to and the stories that would have been swapped back
and forth over it. Then, she remembered why she was here. Perhaps
not so many stories being swapped jovially. Perhaps Owen and his
parents had eaten in silence, all too aware of the empty chair at
the table for all those years after Amy died.

“Would you like
a tae or coffee?”

Shaking away
the reverie, she smiled at his pronunciation of tea. “Coffee, white
and one please.”

While Owen set
about banging mugs and opening the fridge, she cast her gaze around
the kitchen. It was homely and inviting. All it needed to complete
the scene was a rotund middle-aged woman with apple cheeks in a
white pinny as she baked scones for the farm workers’ afternoon
tea. There was a set of French doors at the end of the room, which
flooded the space with natural light, even on a day like this when
gloom pervaded the air outside. The doors opened out onto the back
garden and she peered out into it. It looked like Owen was green
fingered, judging by the sturdy looking cabbages and gosh, was that
broccoli? Yes, she was fairly sure that’s what the tall spindly
green stuff was. It had been a long time since she had seen
vegetables in their natural state and not in the bins at her local
Tesco. There was a gate tucked away in the hedgerow at the bottom
of the garden and Jess hazarded a guess that behind that there
would be fields. She was just wondering whether that was where Babe
and her mates hung out when Owen set her drink and a plate down in
front of her.

“Oh
thanks.”

“You’re
welcome.” His face turned ruddy as he added, “I made us a spot of
lunch before I picked you up because I figured you wouldn’t get a
chance to grab a bite on your way up.”

“I didn’t and
I’m starving actually—my goodness, I didn’t expect you to go to so
much trouble. That looks delicious!”

Magician-like,
Owen had whisked the cloth off to reveal a delicatessen spread that
made Jess’s tummy grumble embarrassingly. There was a selection of
thinly sliced cooked meats, fat black olives, and sundried tomatoes
nestled alongside a decent wedge of cheddar cheese, all to be eaten
with rustic slabs of soda bread. This man really was an enigma, she
thought; one minute he was gruff, the next the host with the most.
She definitely preferred the latter.

“Aye, it was no
trouble; tuck in.”

She didn’t need
to be asked twice.

“Did I tell you
my editor liked my idea so much that he wants to run Amy’s story as
a full-page article instead of just in the weekly column I
write?”

“No, you didn’t
say.”

Whatever
enthusiastic response she had expected, she obviously wasn’t going
to get it and perhaps she was being insensitive, so she moved
on.

“So tell me,”
she asked between bites, the food making her feel brave, “and I
know you said you didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, but
I can’t figure it out. How did a lawyer living in London come to be
running his family’s farm?”

“Ah.” He waved
his hand. “It’s not that interesting a story, that’s all.”

She raised an
eyebrow and his mouth twitched at the corner. When his brow wasn’t
furrowed, those uncannily shaded eyes of his softened and they were
really rather kind, she decided.

“Why do you
want to know?”

Sawing off a
chunk of bread, she explained, “It’s the writer in me. I can’t help
being nosy.”

“Fair enough, I
suppose, but there’s not much to tell except that when my marriage
broke up, I decided I didn’t want to stay on in London. I’d had
enough of life in the city. It was time to come back.”

“London can be
an awfully lonely place.” Jess remembered her own aborted attempt
to set up camp there before hot-footing it over to the smaller,
friendlier city of Dublin.

“Aye, well, it
was time for a change. I needed a fresh start. Ma passed away eight
years ago and me Da struggled on here but his heart wasn’t really
in it once she died. He got old all of a sudden and it was too much
trying to run the farm himself. So I made a deal with myself: I’d
come back and give it a go for a year. See if it was a lifestyle I
could stick with.”

“You grew up
here, though; you’d have known what it was like.”

“Aye, true, but
I hated the farm when I was younger.” He stated this as a matter of
fact. “Now, I don’t know if it was the farm I hated or the
atmosphere in it after our Amy died.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you
have to leave a place for a while to appreciate what it is you
had.”

His words
sounded prophetic to Jess’s ears. “I’ve been away ten years and I
have no intention of going home for anything other than a
holiday.”

“Fair play to
you; it’s five years since I came back and I couldn’t imagine
living anywhere else. It’s a much simpler life and I like it.”

“Apart from the
goldfish bowl syndrome.” She raised an eyebrow.

His mouth
twitched again. “Aye, apart from that.”

“Does your dad
still live here too then?” Jess cast her eyes about, as though
expecting the senior Aherne to suddenly appear.

“No, he showed
me the ropes then handed me the reins. He went into a home near
Dundrum a couple of years ago. He’s made some good pals there and
he knows the farm’s being taken care of, so he’s right enough.”

“Oh, right, so
the other listing I saw in the phone book belongs to your dad then.
I passed through Dundrum on the bus on my way here. It’s very
pretty.” She carved off a greedy girl’s slice of cheese and began
arranging it on top of a slice of prosciutto. “Gosh, this is so
good,” she mumbled, spraying crumbs over the table. “How much land
do you have here?”

“Twenty
questions,” he mumbled, chomping into the sandwich he had put
together. He sat there chewing silently and she didn’t think he was
going to answer her but unlike herself, he obviously didn’t speak
with his mouth full because once he’d swallowed, he told her, “The
farm’s thirty acres, which works out at ten acres for every two
hundred pigs I run. It’s boutique by comparison to the commercial
piggeries but we’re totally organic and there’s a good living in it
now that people are demanding a better quality meat.”

“I always try
to buy free-range.” It sounded self-righteous even to her own ears
and she guessed it was easy for her on her own to buy top quality
meat but she’d seen how Brianna had to budget her shop and it
didn’t leave room for free-range meats seven nights a week.

“Good for
you.”

She couldn’t
decide whether he was being smart or not.

Amy sat between
them, a silent third party at the table, as they finished eating.
Jess didn’t want to bring her up until she knew that Owen was
relaxed and comfortable with her, though from what she had seen so
far, she didn’t think relaxed and comfortable were part of his
genetic makeup. He hadn’t alluded to the reason behind her visit
yet so she decided to leave it for the moment. He was definitely
more at ease when he was talking about the farm, so perhaps she
should ask him to give her a guided tour of Glenariff and see
whether that loosened his tongue.

“Right-ho,” was
all he said to her request and getting up, he began to clear the
table.

***

“
Oh, he’s adorable. You have to call him
Wilbur—you know, like in
Charlotte’s Web
?”

“Aye, so long
as you are not comparing me to John Arable.”

Hmm, the
comparison had crossed her mind but she’d kept that to herself,
impressed that he knew the name of the farmer who’d wanted to off
poor Wilbur initially in the famous children’s story and she told
him so.

“
Ah, well now, you couldn’t be a pig farmer
and not know the story of
Charlotte’s Web
. It was one of Amy’s favourites.”

“It was one of
mine too.” She felt pleased to have found something she shared in
common with Amy and that Owen had been the one to bring her into
the conversation.

A moment later,
her maternal instinct had thrown off its heavy overcoat, sunning
itself as she sat cross-legged in the old barn on a pile of straw,
feeding the newly christened Wilbur. The tiny, hairless pink bundle
was slurping feebly at the bottle Owen had handed her.

“I feed him
every two to three hours.”

“What? Even
through the night?” Her eyes were wide at his dedication and she
felt her tummy do a little flip at the thought of this large and
gruff man caring so tenderly for the tiny piglet trembling in her
arms.

“I put a drip
bottle up at night. His last feed is at nine thirty; then he is on
his own until the morning.”

That shattered
the picture she had invoked of Owen trooping across the darkened
fields in the wee hours with his heated bottle of milk, as did the
frantic squealing of Wilbur’s healthy, hungry brothers and sisters
as they vied for space, butting into their patient mother in the
stall next to them. Owen had explained to her that Wilbur had to be
taken away from his mother and siblings if he was to have any
chance of survival. Overhead, a long heat lamp not unlike the old
school classroom fluorescent lights warmed the wooden box stuffed
with straw in which the tiny piglet slept.

“I try not to
name the girls. I did it once when I was a kid, even though me Da
told me not to. Broke my heart the day Florence was taken
away.”

“Florence?”
Jess looked up at Owen and saw that twinkle in his eyes again; she
wasn’t sure whether he was having her on or not. “I didn’t think
farmers could afford to be sentimental about their animals?”

“Hard not to be
but I like to think I give them a good life before I pack them off
to meet their maker or Sean O’Flaherty—the local butcher I
use.”