The Spider Truces Part 10

Ellis shrugged nonchalantly. "It doesn't bother me if you do."

Denny's secretary found him sitting with his back to his desk, gazing out at the pedestrians on Jermyn Street. He heard the teacup rattle and said, without turning, "Do you know what I had for breakfast this morning?"

She replied, of course, that she didn't.

"I had fresh wild mushrooms on b.u.t.tery toast. They were picked for me by my son and cooked for me by my daughter. Can you imagine a more marvellous breakfast for a man to have?"

And she thought to herself, Yes, I can. One shared with your wife. But she smiled kindly at his back and said, "There couldn't be one."

And then she left him and returned to her desk in the entrance hall, moved, because Mr O'Rourke never spoke like that. He was genial but private. He was kind to his staff but they felt they didn't know him. He could name their children but rarely spoke of his own, fearing that to admit how much he loved them would be to risk losing them too.

On Sunday evenings, Denny would sit with Mafi in her living room. They smoked and talked about the children, the village, the state of things. Occasionally, perhaps two or three times a year, when she was feeling bullish, Mafi would tell her nephew to find himself a girlfriend and he would ignore her. From time to time, in the silences they were happy to share, Denny had said, "I'm so glad you're here with us, Mafi." She respected him more than any man she'd known. And she loved him dearly.

"All of this is a bonus," she would tell her friends in the village. "A life I hardly deserve."

Ellis would join Denny and Mafi and tell them what was going on at Longspring. It was the only subject he talked about and Denny loved to listen.

"Did you know that you get paid more money for the milk in winter than in summer?"

"No ..."

"Well, you do, so that's why they had the calves last month so that there's tons of milk now."

"That's good ..."

"And do you know why we didn't let any of the herd into the east fields in July?"

"No, I don't ..."

"Because we were letting the gra.s.s grow for hay and if the cows had been in there they'd have eaten the gra.s.s."

"I see ..."

"You can't put them in and just ask them not to graze."

"No, I suppose you can't."

"Guess why there's some ploughed fields at Longspring even though we do milk?"

"Fodder?"

"How did you know that?"

"Just a guess ... what are you and Reardon growing for fodder?"

"And Tim and Michael Finsey," Ellis reminded him. "Turnips and maize for silage. Do you know what silage is?"

"I do, yes."

"Mafi?"

"I do, too."

"Oh. Do you have to be born on a farm to run one or can you save up and buy one?" Ellis asked.

"You'd need to go to agricultural college before you do anything," Denny said. "You could go to Wye or Hadlow. They're nearby."

"When could I go?"

"After your A levels."

"Not after my O levels?"

"They'll expect good A levels."

Ellis slumped and sighed. "Even with all the work I'm doing on the farm?"

"Yes," his dad confirmed, "even with."

"You might want to try other things out, or see the world first, before you decide," Mafi said.

Her words hung in the room without finding a comfortable place to sit. Denny O'Rourke stood up. "I've things to do," he said, and left, with an expression which resembled a smile without amounting to one.

"In next to no time you'll be a teenager," Mafi said, as if shocked by the fact.

"I'm in love with Chloe Purcell," Ellis responded.

"And I bet she's in love with you, too."

"No way," Ellis fired back. "Fat chance. Girls don't go for me."

"Well," Mafi sympathised, "you're only young."

"But so are they," Ellis said helplessly.

They brought the dairy herd in at the beginning of November. A sea of breathing Jersey brown flooded the yard and a steam cloud levitated above it. The willow lines were pollarded and Tim and Ellis saw a fox jump from a hiding place inside the rotten middle of one of the trunks. They bundled up the branches and watched Terry Jay split them into three-sided stakes for hedge laying. Terry showed the boys how to set the stakes out an elbow-arm's length apart through the hedge line. He pleached the hedges through the winter. The game crops were well out of sight of the farm and Tim and Ellis ran amok there amongst the kale and root artichoke, scaring straggling pheasant into flight and throwing stones at them once they were airborne.

The calves were released from their weaning pens into pasture to be fattened as steers. Bullfinches gathered on the phone lines without ever venturing too near to the farm. The boys were allowed into the milking shed for the first time and given the job of hosing down the udders prior to milking. Afterwards, Michael Finsey ordered the boys to wait for him in the yard where three heifers stood in pens. The pens had staggered brick walls on each side, which Tim and Ellis climbed like steps until they were standing on the back wall above the heifers. Michael and Reardon pulled a hired mating bull into the yard using poles hooked to the ring in the bull's nose. Climbing the staggered walls of the pen, they hauled the bull up on to the first heifer's back.

"You lucky lady, you lucky little thing!" Michael Finsey cackled.

Steam poured from the bull's nose as it arched its huge bulk and pumped in and out of the beast beneath it. The expression on the heifer's face turned from alarm to indifference.

"She looks bored stiff!" Michael shouted. "Better get used to that look, boys!" He roared with laughter.

Ellis was open-mouthed. As the bull was manoeuvred from one heifer to the next, pints of s.e.m.e.n poured from its gross member on to the yard.

"Oh my giddy aunt," Tim muttered, incredulous.

The bull rammed itself into the second heifer.

"Foreplay's over!" Michael cried out. "We'll bypa.s.s the c.l.i.t seeing as they charge by the hour!"

Tim and Ellis shrugged at each other inquisitively. Whatever a c.l.i.t might be, it seemed they were bypa.s.sing it. Michael's lungs collapsed into nicotine-coated laughter. Within ten minutes, Reardon was returning the bull to the oast barn with all three heifers seen to. Michael, Tim and Ellis skated back and forth across the s.e.m.e.n-coated yard floor until Tim was physically sick from laughing and he and Ellis decided they should call it a day.

"Sick and s.e.m.e.n stew!" Michael Finsey yelled out, as the two boys disappeared across the fields. "The rats will feast tonight!"

A graphic account of the bull's s.e.xual performance, which Tim Wickham included in his creative writing project the following Wednesday, and its faithful reproduction of Michael Finsey's vernacular, placed Tim in a two-hour detention on the afternoon of Ellis's birthday. Ellis cycled home alone and, seeing the blue of Chloe Purcell's school uniform up ahead, moved down a couple of gears to buy himself some thinking time. He attempted to compose something fascinating to say but arrived alongside her tongue-tied as ever.

"h.e.l.lo," he ventured.

"You alone today?" she asked.

"Yup."

"Want to come home for some tea?" she said casually.

They had to remove their shoes at the front door, which was a new one on Ellis. Chloe's mum remembered Ellis from the school in Orpington. Ellis didn't remember Mrs Purcell. He had expected her to be serious and religious and not much fun because she had sent her daughter to a convent school, but she wasn't like that at all. Maybe, he told himself, he had this convent thing all wrong.

"Is it like St Trinian's actually?" he asked.

"Is what like St Trinian's?" Mrs Purcell asked back.

He looked at Chloe. "Your school."

Chloe smiled. That, Ellis came to discover, was how she laughed, by allowing a delicate smile to trespa.s.s on to her face. To Ellis, it was a fireworks display.

Things like smiling and laughing are all relative to what someone's like the rest of the time, he told himself years later, after finally witnessing Chloe's silent, compact s.e.xual ecstasy.

"I blooming well hope it's not like St Trinian's!" Mrs Purcell said.

Ellis really liked her. She was a proper mum. It would be great if he and Chloe got married.

"Mafi says 'blooming' a lot too," he said. "She's my great-aunt and she lives with us."

They drank tea round the kitchen table. Ellis said what a nice house they had and asked where Chloe's two younger sisters were. They were at ballet. It immediately worried Ellis that Chloe might consider it an embarra.s.sment being married to a farmer. Their children were hardly going to want to be picked up from ballet in a muddy truck.

Chloe and her mother watched the ebb and flow of thoughts and expressions criss-cross Ellis's face.

"What if you don't like farm smells?" Ellis said, unaware he was thinking aloud.

"What if I do?" Chloe replied.

"Do what?" he asked, bemused.

"I love farm smells," Chloe announced.

"Why do you ask, Ellis?" Mrs Purcell asked.

Ellis carefully steered his lips away from telling Mrs Purcell he loved her daughter, even though a part of his brain was threatening to blurt the words out.

"I work on a farm and I'm going to be a farmer."

"You're lucky," Chloe told him.

"Yeah ..." He adored her.

"What sort of thing do you get up to there?" Mrs Purcell asked.

"All sorts, bringing the cows in for milking mainly, throwing out bales into the fields from the flat-bed, mending fences ..." Ellis chose randomly.

"Sounds very exciting," Mrs Purcell said.

"It's brilliant," Ellis beamed, and encouraged by the blissfulness of being in Chloe Purcell's kitchen on his birthday, he forgot to disengage his mouth from the free-fall of pictures in his mind.

"We just recently rented a bull to make the heifers pregnant and its thing was the length of a broom handle, but thicker, much thicker. And once it started to, you know ..."

They shook their heads in unison.

"... once it started to ... once the s.p.u.n.k started pouring out, it didn't stop. It just went from heifer to heifer gushing out this stuff."

Mrs Purcell's mouth had dropped open.

"Poor cows," she muttered.

Chloe sat back and flashed Ellis an adoring smile and replayed in her head the sound of the words "gushing s.p.u.n.k" being said in front of her mother. Ellis interpreted her smile as a signal to continue.

"When Reardon had gone we went skating on the concrete in the farmyard 'cos it was so slippy with all the stuff."

Mrs Purcell slid the biscuit tin firmly towards Ellis. "Shall we talk about something else now?"

Chloe stepped in. "Let's talk about the barn dance. Would you like to come to it with us?" she asked.

"Yes, please," Ellis said immediately.

And in the living room, filled by the fragrance of Lent lilies in a vase, Ellis felt the foreign softness of a deep carpet beneath his every step as Mrs Purcell played the piano and Chloe taught him how to dance for a barn dance. Ellis said nothing. Now that Chloe was taking hold of his hand, now that she was putting her hands on his shoulders to position him, now that he was so close to her that he could smell the fragrance of her sweater, now that all these things had happened, he could not speak. He was a mute in paradise. The afternoon became a succession of smiles and nods and piano notes and his voice failed him.

It was dark outside when they stopped so Mrs Purcell told Ellis she would drive him home.

"We can put your bike in the back."

Ellis looked at her as if she were daft. "Put a bike in a car?"

"It's no trouble."

"No thank you, Mrs Purcell. I cycle home, always."

"Isn't it a bit dark?"