Elizabeth Buchan - Secrets of the Heart

He raised his head. ‘What are you up to?’

Her gaze dropped and she placed a saucepan on the stove with extra emphasis. ‘That’s not answering the question.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he said, his secret settling like a dog in a basket.

‘Just don’t lose sight of the fact,’ Penny was saying, ‘that we’ve got to save this farm. You’ve got to fight, Andrew, so you can’t get all distracted.’

Andrew heard the car drive into the yard, and went to greet Agnes at the back door. As she scrambled out of the car, his eyes widened in appreciation. ‘The photo in the paper didn’t do you justice,’ he said awkwardly, and led her into the kitchen to introduce her to Penny.

The kitchen was basic, but blissfully warm and clean, with immaculate touches. A dresser with blue china, a pair of old carver chairs, and a huge, burnished mirror on one wall that did not belong in a kitchen but actually suited it. In contrast to her rangy husband, Penny was small and plump, with badly permed hair and sharp-looking eyes, which were fretworked with fine lines a lighter colour than the rest of her complexion. While Penny was making coffee, Agnes inquired as to the date of the house, which she had expected to be much older.

‘This house? It was built in the sixties.’ Obviously Penny took the speaking role in this marriage. She heaved the tray of coffee over to the table. ‘The old house collapsed so Charlie Stone, our landlord’s father, built this one and leased it to Andrew’s father. When he died, Andrew took over. Now Jonas, his son, is trying to chuck us out.’

‘So Andrew has lived here all his life?’

‘Yes.’ Penny seemed tired and unfriendly. Agnes gained the impression of a woman who, over the years, had been disappointed, not drastically, but cumulatively.

‘And you say you’re being chucked out?’

Husband and wife exchanged a look, and Andrew shrugged. ‘As I told your colleague, the landlord has got into debt and wants to sell the land to a developer for a housing estate.’

‘Aren’t you protected by the law?’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Andrew. ‘The lease was reissued in the sixties and the landlord wrote in a water-tight clause that says he can chuck us out precisely when he wants to.’ White-knuckled, he rubbed at his broken fingers. ‘The solicitor has gone over it with a fine-tooth comb.’

She heard the underlying note of tension.

Andrew continued, ‘We farm organic beef here. No pesticides, hormones or stress. The cattle graze on untreated grass and live in family groups. We sell the meat all over the south. There’s a growing market out there.’

This fidelity to the old ways and old knowledge fascinated Agnes and she was warming to this slow-speaking farmer, who had taken to heart the responsibility for his land.

‘You say you’ve lent the letters to the local librarian,’ she said. ‘Is it possible I could look at them? If I felt there was something to work with, there is a television series which runs in the autumn called Hidden Lives. Do you know it? It occupies ten-minute slots and its brief is to explore the lives of ordinary people. As it happens, they’re looking for a couple of historical ones. But I’ll need your help on the research.’

‘Oh,’ said Penny, and stiffened. ‘What sort of research?’

Agnes noticed the body language. ‘Authentication. It’s usually done with wills, electoral rolls, constituency maps, that sort of thing. Don’t worry. Bel, my co-director, specializes in it. Usually it’s not a problem.’

Andrew produced an unremarkable grey file with a clip to keep the papers in place. Written on the spine in faded ink were the words: ‘Cattle Feed’.

‘The letters were mixed up with old bills for cattle-cake and that sort of thing.’ He slid the empty file across the table. ‘They were all jumbled up date-wise,’ he said. He reached for a leather tobacco pouch on the table, and his unfastened shirt cuffs fell back over wrists as warm and brown as walnut wood.

He made Agnes think of summer and the outdoors, of fields and sun, of blackberries and hips and autumn mist burned away by the sun. Her eyes slid past him to the mirror on the wall in which was reflected the trio at the kitchen table. Penny, cross and hostile; Andrew, intent, absorbed in the drama of the letters. Herself? Listening hard with the calm, professional expression she had perfected. The winter sun had shifted and light bounced off the mirror, directing a dazzling, exuberant beam at her.

‘Are you sure the writer, this Jack, lived here at Tithings?’

Andrew tamped a bootlace of tobacco into a Rizla paper, working the calloused fingers around the shape. A match flared, and tobacco smoke drifted up to the ceiling. ‘I’d recognize the landmarks he talks about in my sleep.’

‘And you’ve nothing else on Jack?’

‘No.’

Agnes made more notes. ‘Sometimes memory is the only source. We’ll have to ask around. I suppose he might have moved on after the war. Perhaps Mary didn’t come back and he no longer wanted to be here -’

Andrew cut in. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, tapping the table to underscore the point. ‘He would have stayed here. He wouldn’t have abandoned the farm. Never.’

The chair screeched along the floor and Penny got to her feet. With a gesture that Agnes was not sure how to interpret, she dumped her coffee mug in the sink. An awkward silence followed, which Agnes endeavoured to fill. ‘Could I see round the farm, if you’re not too busy?’

She felt the other woman’s eyes fixed on her back as Andrew led her across the yard to the cattle-pens. Penny had lent her a pair of boots, which were too small, and she couldn’t help thinking that Penny would be taking pleasure in the thought of her cramped feet.

To ease the pressure on her toes, she leaned on the railing of the first pen and savoured a pleasing pungency of cattle and warm straw, pulsing hide, muddy hoof and a base note of disinfectant.

Andrew pushed open the gate. ‘They’re raised on strictly traditional methods. That means they can grow at their own pace and without stress. I try to be totally organic. Sometimes I’m forced to use antibiotics when they’re ill, but absolutely no growth hormones.’

Agnes told the animals how lucky they were. Andrew tapped a warm flank. ‘You are, aren’t you, my beauties? I keep ‘em in family groups. Aunts and cousins…’

‘Have you always farmed?’

‘Always. Originally my father had a big place up in Yorkshire, then we came here.’ He caressed the ear of the beast nearest to him. Little feathery strokes. ‘It’s in the blood.’ The phrase was heavy with private meaning. A little puzzled, Agnes nodded. ‘Along with other things,’ he added hastily, and changed the subject. ‘Let me show you the rest of the farm. The weather’s clearing and you have to seize the moment with the moor. I should explain that I never use chemicals. You know that on some of the bigger farms the soil is technically dead? Eco-death. It doesn’t happen here.’

‘I did a piece on it once.’

He sent her a shy half-smile of approbation.

Together, they walked up to the north field and Andrew pointed out a cluster of granite buildings on the moor. ‘That’s one of the oldest farms in the area. Much older than here. Bits of it date back to the thirteenth century.’

Good camera shot. Agnes peered at the solid grey shapes, and the green and duns of the moor into which they were set. A silent, ancient setting.

One eyebrow arched quizzically, he turned to her. ‘I’d recognize it in my sleep.’ He pushed aside a petrified waterfall of brambles to let Agnes pass. ‘Over there…’ Andrew pointed to the road snaking as perimeter around the farm, and Agnes knew that the whole point of the tour had been to lead her to this spot.