Грэм Мастертон: Famine

‘Season—’ he said.

She looked up at last. She was a tall girl of thirty, with a thin oval face and alarmingly wide blue eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back on her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb. In her silk Japanese pants suit, all pastel colours and loose pleats, she looked as if she was all wrists and ankles. She was pretty, and sharp, and Ed had loved her from only about three minutes after meeting her.

Some men found Season intimidating, both physically and conversationally. But Ed was a good four inches taller, and he had a slow dark masculine assurance about him – thick black hair, dense black eyebrows, deepset eyes of refreshing green – and the warm seriousness of whatever he said had always seemed to be able to enfold itself around her prickliest comments and render them harmless.

‘I’ve asked Dilys to make you an omelette,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

‘I don’t feel hungry any more. The act of cooking was enough to satisfy me.’

‘What about the act of throwing it all away?’

‘That satisfied me too.’

‘So I’ve come home to a satisfied wife?’

‘If you like.’

‘We’ve got a serious problem out there in the fields.’

‘Oh, yes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me the computers are striking for more off-time. Or is it a human problem?’

‘It’s a crop problem. There’s a kind of blight. The wheat’s rotting right in front of our eyes. So far it’s spread over fifteen or twenty acres, and it’s still spreading.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m not sure yet. I don’t even know what kind of a blight it is.’

‘It’s probably a curse from your father.’

‘Season – we’ve got twenty acres of rotten wheat out there and that isn’t funny.’

Season uncurled herself from the sofa, stood up and walked across to the inlaid French drinks cabinet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve drunk enough yet to be funny. Do you want one?’

‘Scotch,’ said Ed. He pulled off his boots and laid them down beside his chair. Season glanced at them as if she was expecting them to start tap-dancing on their own. She mixed herself a strong daiquiri and pineapple juice and poured out a Chivas Regal on the rocks for Ed.

‘There you are, my lord and master,’ she said, handing him his glass.

‘Sally in bed?’ asked Ed, drinking, and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘She went up about a half-hour ago. She despaired of her father, just like I did.’

Ed let out a short, testy breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry about the soufflé. Willard came down like a bat out of hell and wanted me to go take a look at this blight. It’s very serious. Jack’s doing some tests on it tonight and tomorrow we’re going to send some samples across to Wichita. I had to go. I didn’t have any choice.’

Season sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said, more softly. ‘Abject apology accepted. I just don’t think I’m ever going to get used to the way I went through a wedding ceremony with an actuary in New York City and wound up married to a wheat farmer in Kansas. What do they call it? Not culture shock. Maybe horticulture shock.’

‘I’m just hoping this blight doesn’t spread in a compound ratio,’ said Ed.

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Season, trying to look interested.

‘Compound growth means that the wider it spreads, the wider it spreads. It starts off by blighting two acres, then six, then ten, and so on. If it goes on like that, we won’t have a farm by the middle of next week.’

‘I hope you really don’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Season, wearily. She stirred her cocktail with her finger, and then licked it.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve seen samples of rust, and the rot you get when you don’t dress your seeds with fungicide, but America has fewer wheat-disease problems than almost any other country in the world. What America spends on crop fungicides in any one year wouldn’t keep the town of Emporia in hotdogs. The only real problem we get is drought.’

‘Well, Farmer Hardesty, you should know,’ said Season, sipping her drink and looking at the television.

Ed stood up. ‘I guess I’ll go say good night to Sally. Do you want to tell Dilys to start my omelette?’

‘What did you say?’ asked Season, her attention momentarily distracted by a television picture of running camels.

‘I said I’m going up to say good night to Sally.’

‘Well, don’t. She’ll be asleep by now.’

He ignored her and went all the same. When he was halfway up the curving staircase, he heard her call, ‘Your seven-league boots are squealing because you left them behind.’

He paused, and said, ‘Tell them I’ll send my magic socks down to pick them up later.’

Season appeared in the doorway, holding his boots in her hand. ‘Take the goddamned things now!’ she snapped, and hurled them after him, one at a time. ‘Every time you come home you make the living-room look like a goddamned thrift store!’

The boots clumped on the stairs and then rolled back down again. Season kicked them across the hallway and then stalked back into the living-room. Ed slowly descended the staircase, collected them up, and went up to see Sally with an expression that Season had once described as his ‘Grant Wood face’.

Sally was lying curled up in her old-fashioned carved oak bed, under the early-American patchwork comforter that Season had bought for her at a fashionable store on Lexington Avenue in the eighties. She was almost asleep, but not quite, and when Ed looked in at the door, she stirred and raised her head from the pillow and smiled at him.

‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, sleepily.

‘Hi yourself.’

‘I waited for you but you didn’t come home. Mommy threw your supper down the sink-disposal.’

‘I know,’ said Ed, sitting on the edge of the bed and running his hand through his daughter’s long blonde curls. ‘Dilys is going to fix me an omelette.’

‘You’ll have indigestion if you don’t eat regular. My teacher told me.’

‘Your teacher’s quite right. I was busy on the farm, that’s all. Some of the wheat went bad.’

Sally looked up at him. Although she was only six years old, she looked exactly like her mother. Fair-haired and leggy, with those wide blue eyes like some startled character out of a Disney cartoon. Ed leaned over her and kissed her, and she had that childish smell of soap and cookies and clean clothes.

‘I love you,’ he said, with a grin.

‘I love you, too,’ she told him.

They were silent for a moment. Then Sally said, ‘Is this a darned farm?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t know. Mommy was talking on the telephone to Auntie Vee today and she kept saying “this darned farm”.’ Ed touched the tip of her nose with his finger. ‘Darned is one of those words that grown-ups use when they mean pesky.’

‘What does pesky mean?’

‘It means something that irritates you. Something that gets on your nerves.’

‘Does the farm get on Mommy’s nerves?’

‘Sure it does. It gets on my nerves sometimes. But it’s important. It’s what people call a heritage. It’s something that’s been handed down from father to son, something that belongs to one family, and stands for everything that family is. You’re a Hardesty, see, and this is the Hardesty farm. When people meet you, they think – aha, that’s the little girl who lives on the big wheat farm in Kingman County, Kansas.’

Sally thought about that and then she said, ‘Will you come with us?’

Ed frowned. ‘Will I come with you where?’

‘To Los Angeles. To visit Auntie Vee.’